Entertaining if sometimes mean-spirited and full of valuable lessons in how—and sometimes how not—to run a magazine.
Princess Diana, Donald Trump, Nancy Reagan, and other newsy icons come in for critical assessment by a sharp-tongued London transplant who remade two leading magazines.
Brown (The Diana Chronicles, 2007) arrived in New York in 1983, in the thick of the Reagan era, and set about revamping a magazine that was off just about anyone’s radar. Recruited by Si Newhouse, a tycoon of a literary bent (“Si doesn’t know what the fuck is going on on the VF floor,” she writes, a tad unappreciatively), she did just that, filling the magazine with serious journalism while chasing after the pop-culture evanescent. This diary is a blend of high and low and in between, especially on the high gossip front, as with her fixation on a certain cluster of royals: “No one is more dismayed about this apparently than Diana, who signed up to marry the royal James Bond.” Amid the fluff and the constant fretting about money—possessed of a healthy sense of self-regard, Brown is also keenly attuned to matters of dollars and pence—readers learn a lot about how a high-toned magazine is put together, work involving schmoozing, partying, and ego-stroking as much as blue-penciling, all of which Brown is clearly very good at. A typical day, she reveals, might involving talking a recalcitrant author into a piece he or she might not really have wanted to do, dealing with one’s handlers (“How does two million dollars sound to you?” says superagent Swifty Lazar, shopping a novel by Brown that exists only in the ether), and slotting the David Nivens and the Ahmet Erteguns in for supper. The narrative ends with an upward move to another Newhouse property, the New Yorker, where, as at VF, Brown upset dozens of boats (“I replaced seventy-one of the 120 New Yorker staff with fifty outstanding new talents”) while casting a cultural institution in her own image.
Entertaining if sometimes mean-spirited and full of valuable lessons in how—and sometimes how not—to run a magazine.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62779-136-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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