As you might expect, Time Inc alumni are prolific writers. They just keep on writing, some even into their 90s. Here is a sample of reports on some of the books TLAS has received recently: —Reviews are below this slide show.
Celebrity Nation:
How America Evolved Into
A Culture Of Fans And Followers.
By Landon Y. Jones
Beacon Press. $26.95 ($15.99 on Kindle)
Lanny Jones established his credentials as a gifted social observer with his first book, Great Expectations, which put Baby Boomers into our vocabulary (and was followed by a whole string of catchwords for succeeding generations leading to the current Generation Z}. Lanny was in an ideal position as managing editor of People to watch and record the rise of celebrity culture—in fact it might not be too much of a stretch to say that People helped to create it.
There was a time when celebrity usually, but not always, required some serious achievement. You had to be the first to fly solo across the Atlantic for example. Today if you can get yourself talked about without doing anything else you can become a celebrity. Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton became serious celebrities where their sex tapes became public.
Lanny develops the sharp contrast the heroism of John McCain and the emptiness of Donald Trump. Unlike Trump, McCain went to war, got shot down and spent years in a ghastly North Vietnamese prison. Trump had nothing more to show than a fraught business record and performance on a second-rate TV show (and he mocked McCain for being captured). But Trump the celebrity became President. McCain the hero did not.
The computer followed by the Internet followed by Instagram, Twitter, podcasts and so forth cave celebrities new means of amassing followers. In a society where church, PTA and other traditional gathering places lost their power, Lanny writes, their place can be taken by communities of celebrities’ fans.
Lanny writes “today’s celebrity state has morphed into a vast profit generating enterprise we can think of as the celebrity industrial complex.” Top celebrities can make seven-figure incomes from the unscripted podcasts they create. When they talk about the products they use, their ads are especially compelling. One of the new celebrities on the scene is Miquela Sousa, a 19-year-old singer, model and activist. She doesn’t exist. She is a CGI or computer-generated image, but she has 3 million followers on Instagram.
What is the celebrity nation doing to us? For the celebrities themselves a happy life is not assured. Lanny reports that among rock stars the death rate is 1.7 more than that of a matched demographic group. Celebrity hood can make life miserable. Paparazzi Ron Galella made Jackie Onassis’ life “intolerable, almost unlivable.” What about the rest of us? It’s difficult to be positive about the celebrity culture. Like everything on the Internet, it spreads misinformation. It diverts our attention on things that matter things like Johnny Depp’s latest caper. Social media are pulling us apart fanning hatreds, not creating common understanding and values.
Lanny sees some hope, perhaps rather faint, that celebrities “could approach the public naturally and honestly, unmediated by intense media coverage.” Some celebrities such as Michael J Fox and Roger Federer minimized their celebrity in order to promote good works.” —JM
How America Evolved Into
A Culture Of Fans And Followers.
By Landon Y. Jones
Beacon Press. $26.95 ($15.99 on Kindle)
Lanny Jones established his credentials as a gifted social observer with his first book, Great Expectations, which put Baby Boomers into our vocabulary (and was followed by a whole string of catchwords for succeeding generations leading to the current Generation Z}. Lanny was in an ideal position as managing editor of People to watch and record the rise of celebrity culture—in fact it might not be too much of a stretch to say that People helped to create it.
There was a time when celebrity usually, but not always, required some serious achievement. You had to be the first to fly solo across the Atlantic for example. Today if you can get yourself talked about without doing anything else you can become a celebrity. Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton became serious celebrities where their sex tapes became public.
Lanny develops the sharp contrast the heroism of John McCain and the emptiness of Donald Trump. Unlike Trump, McCain went to war, got shot down and spent years in a ghastly North Vietnamese prison. Trump had nothing more to show than a fraught business record and performance on a second-rate TV show (and he mocked McCain for being captured). But Trump the celebrity became President. McCain the hero did not.
The computer followed by the Internet followed by Instagram, Twitter, podcasts and so forth cave celebrities new means of amassing followers. In a society where church, PTA and other traditional gathering places lost their power, Lanny writes, their place can be taken by communities of celebrities’ fans.
Lanny writes “today’s celebrity state has morphed into a vast profit generating enterprise we can think of as the celebrity industrial complex.” Top celebrities can make seven-figure incomes from the unscripted podcasts they create. When they talk about the products they use, their ads are especially compelling. One of the new celebrities on the scene is Miquela Sousa, a 19-year-old singer, model and activist. She doesn’t exist. She is a CGI or computer-generated image, but she has 3 million followers on Instagram.
What is the celebrity nation doing to us? For the celebrities themselves a happy life is not assured. Lanny reports that among rock stars the death rate is 1.7 more than that of a matched demographic group. Celebrity hood can make life miserable. Paparazzi Ron Galella made Jackie Onassis’ life “intolerable, almost unlivable.” What about the rest of us? It’s difficult to be positive about the celebrity culture. Like everything on the Internet, it spreads misinformation. It diverts our attention on things that matter things like Johnny Depp’s latest caper. Social media are pulling us apart fanning hatreds, not creating common understanding and values.
Lanny sees some hope, perhaps rather faint, that celebrities “could approach the public naturally and honestly, unmediated by intense media coverage.” Some celebrities such as Michael J Fox and Roger Federer minimized their celebrity in order to promote good works.” —JM
American Urbanist:
How William H. Whyte’s Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life.
By Richard K Rein (Island Press $35)
Richard Hollingsworth Whyte III (to give him his full name, which was usually reduced to Holly Whyte) arrived at Fortune at a time when the magazine was influential, successful and intellectually adventurous. During the 1940s and 1950s Fortune harbored Archibald MacLeish, Daniel Bell, James Agee, John Kenneth Galbraith and others who created an intellectual ferment unusual for a business magazine. Sometimes they were described as “public intellectuals.” Whyte was the best of them and probably the most influential. Whyte found his life’s work at Fortune. It arose out of his reporting on business and led to the publication of The Organization Man, a phenomenal bestseller in 1956. It was one of the most influential books of the 20th century.
Whyte did not despise the organization man. In fact he admitted that he himself was one, as a Time Inc. employee. Rather he thought the modern corporation enveloped its executives in such benevolent conformity that they lost the will to think originally. He believed that important changes were achieved by individuals who were willing to break molds. He had little use for human relations offices or personality tests.
Holly Whyte’s story is told by Richard Rein, who like Whyte went to Princeton and worked for Time Inc.—at People and Time rather than Fortune. Rein followed in Whyte’s footsteps by founding a regional newspaper, U.S. 1, which is concerned with planning and development along the Route 1 corridor near Princeton.
Whyte grew up in Chester, Pennsylvania, was a mediocre student at a small private school but managed to get into Princeton, where he developed his skill for creative writing. He wrote a play for Princeton’s Theatre Intime, which won a prize the best student written play of the year. He graduated with honors as an English major. He went to work briefly as a salesman for Vicks VaporRub, there he saw glimmers of his future work about business.
With war in Europe looming, Whyte decided to enlist and by the time Japan attacked Pearl Harbor he was a brand-new second lieutenant in the Marine Corps in charge of a platoon of both World War I veterans and green young men like himself. They were shipped out to Guadalcanal where the US had decided to stop the Japanese advance down the Pacific islands towards Australia and New Zealand. Whyte led his men successfully in one of the most vicious land battles of the war. But after four months in the jungle Whyte was invalided out with malaria. He was assigned to training duty in Australia alongside another young Marine officer, George Hunt, who was to become managing editor of Life.
A recurrence of malaria got him sent home for the remaining two years of his service. Whyte, by now a captain, was assigned to Marine intelligence school and he started to write for the Marine Corps Gazette laying down principles that he had learned on Guadalcanal and which were to be at the basis of much of his later work. He stressed that careful, detailed observation was essential.
Armed with clippings from the Gazette and with the help of George Hunt, by now at Life, Whyte got a job at Fortune, then an outstanding success with its sumptuous pages and its irreverent attitude towards business, which was unusual in a business magazine. He had a rocky start after he was hired in 1947 writing short pieces that usually did not run, but he soon found his stride. By 1951 he was assistant managing editor.
His work at Fortune laid the foundation for his life’s work. An article about “groupthink” (a term he coined in 1951) was the beginning of his study of the organization man. He argued that only the individual could break into new ground. The result was The Organization Man in 1956. Academics tended to sniff at his work because he was not “prepared,” in other words he didn’t have a PhD in the subject. Whyte always believed in detailed observations about what people did rather than theories developed inside offices. He was famous for spending hours and days simply watching people on the sidewalk or in parks to see what they actually did.
He continued writing for Fortune for a time. Indeed he started on a whole new subject, urban planning. But his career at Fortune came to an end when Hedley Donovan moved upstairs to take Henry Luce’s place as editor-in-chief. Whyte and Duncan Norton-Taylor, were the candidates for the top job at Fortune, and Norton-Taylor got it. Whyte took a leave of absence and looked at the many opportunities that his work at Fortune had opened.
At the age of 47, Whyte finally got married to a woman who was as celebrated as he was. She was Mary Bell Bechtel, a former model and a successful fashion designer. She specialized in vivid African textiles. They had one daughter, Alexandra.
Whyte now focused on urban planning and the environment. He was distressed by the massive development of the suburbs after World War II with little regard for creating human friendly surroundings. He got to know Jane Jacobs and helped her with her successful battle to defeat Robert Moses’ plan to put a superhighway right across Manhattan. It would have gutted Greenwich Village. Whyte was responsible for the successful renovation of Bryant Park behind the New York public library. Instead of rows of fixed benches, which is what park designers would usually install, Whyte decided that movable chairs would be a better fit with what people actually want. If a group of people want to sit together they can gather the chairs, or if two people want to sit together they can just move two. Bryant Park has been a success.
Whyte was in demand for years as a speaker and consultant and he continued his writing and his observations of how people in public places. When he died in 1999 there was still a lot of work to be done. Rein, whose life’s work has been much influenced by Whyte, has written an engaging and perceptive book about his hero. For our alumni, the book has special interest because it says much about Time Inc.’s history and personalities. --Jeremy Main—posted 2/21/22
How William H. Whyte’s Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life.
By Richard K Rein (Island Press $35)
Richard Hollingsworth Whyte III (to give him his full name, which was usually reduced to Holly Whyte) arrived at Fortune at a time when the magazine was influential, successful and intellectually adventurous. During the 1940s and 1950s Fortune harbored Archibald MacLeish, Daniel Bell, James Agee, John Kenneth Galbraith and others who created an intellectual ferment unusual for a business magazine. Sometimes they were described as “public intellectuals.” Whyte was the best of them and probably the most influential. Whyte found his life’s work at Fortune. It arose out of his reporting on business and led to the publication of The Organization Man, a phenomenal bestseller in 1956. It was one of the most influential books of the 20th century.
Whyte did not despise the organization man. In fact he admitted that he himself was one, as a Time Inc. employee. Rather he thought the modern corporation enveloped its executives in such benevolent conformity that they lost the will to think originally. He believed that important changes were achieved by individuals who were willing to break molds. He had little use for human relations offices or personality tests.
Holly Whyte’s story is told by Richard Rein, who like Whyte went to Princeton and worked for Time Inc.—at People and Time rather than Fortune. Rein followed in Whyte’s footsteps by founding a regional newspaper, U.S. 1, which is concerned with planning and development along the Route 1 corridor near Princeton.
Whyte grew up in Chester, Pennsylvania, was a mediocre student at a small private school but managed to get into Princeton, where he developed his skill for creative writing. He wrote a play for Princeton’s Theatre Intime, which won a prize the best student written play of the year. He graduated with honors as an English major. He went to work briefly as a salesman for Vicks VaporRub, there he saw glimmers of his future work about business.
With war in Europe looming, Whyte decided to enlist and by the time Japan attacked Pearl Harbor he was a brand-new second lieutenant in the Marine Corps in charge of a platoon of both World War I veterans and green young men like himself. They were shipped out to Guadalcanal where the US had decided to stop the Japanese advance down the Pacific islands towards Australia and New Zealand. Whyte led his men successfully in one of the most vicious land battles of the war. But after four months in the jungle Whyte was invalided out with malaria. He was assigned to training duty in Australia alongside another young Marine officer, George Hunt, who was to become managing editor of Life.
A recurrence of malaria got him sent home for the remaining two years of his service. Whyte, by now a captain, was assigned to Marine intelligence school and he started to write for the Marine Corps Gazette laying down principles that he had learned on Guadalcanal and which were to be at the basis of much of his later work. He stressed that careful, detailed observation was essential.
Armed with clippings from the Gazette and with the help of George Hunt, by now at Life, Whyte got a job at Fortune, then an outstanding success with its sumptuous pages and its irreverent attitude towards business, which was unusual in a business magazine. He had a rocky start after he was hired in 1947 writing short pieces that usually did not run, but he soon found his stride. By 1951 he was assistant managing editor.
His work at Fortune laid the foundation for his life’s work. An article about “groupthink” (a term he coined in 1951) was the beginning of his study of the organization man. He argued that only the individual could break into new ground. The result was The Organization Man in 1956. Academics tended to sniff at his work because he was not “prepared,” in other words he didn’t have a PhD in the subject. Whyte always believed in detailed observations about what people did rather than theories developed inside offices. He was famous for spending hours and days simply watching people on the sidewalk or in parks to see what they actually did.
He continued writing for Fortune for a time. Indeed he started on a whole new subject, urban planning. But his career at Fortune came to an end when Hedley Donovan moved upstairs to take Henry Luce’s place as editor-in-chief. Whyte and Duncan Norton-Taylor, were the candidates for the top job at Fortune, and Norton-Taylor got it. Whyte took a leave of absence and looked at the many opportunities that his work at Fortune had opened.
At the age of 47, Whyte finally got married to a woman who was as celebrated as he was. She was Mary Bell Bechtel, a former model and a successful fashion designer. She specialized in vivid African textiles. They had one daughter, Alexandra.
Whyte now focused on urban planning and the environment. He was distressed by the massive development of the suburbs after World War II with little regard for creating human friendly surroundings. He got to know Jane Jacobs and helped her with her successful battle to defeat Robert Moses’ plan to put a superhighway right across Manhattan. It would have gutted Greenwich Village. Whyte was responsible for the successful renovation of Bryant Park behind the New York public library. Instead of rows of fixed benches, which is what park designers would usually install, Whyte decided that movable chairs would be a better fit with what people actually want. If a group of people want to sit together they can gather the chairs, or if two people want to sit together they can just move two. Bryant Park has been a success.
Whyte was in demand for years as a speaker and consultant and he continued his writing and his observations of how people in public places. When he died in 1999 there was still a lot of work to be done. Rein, whose life’s work has been much influenced by Whyte, has written an engaging and perceptive book about his hero. For our alumni, the book has special interest because it says much about Time Inc.’s history and personalities. --Jeremy Main—posted 2/21/22
While The Music Played A Remarkable Story of Courage and Friendship in WWII.
By Nathaniel Lande. (Blackstone Publishing, $29.99 on Amazon, publication date May 12)
Nathaniel Lande has written and produced movies and documentaries, taught at universities, and holds degrees from Oxford and Trinity College in Dublin. He spent years at Time Inc., as head of the Time-Life News Service, as creative director of the magazine group and as director of Time-Life Films. He writes books, many books, about modern history, cigars, health and well-being, “The 10 Best of Everything,” as well as fiction.
Now comes his twelfth book, a novel about a preadolescent boy in Prague in 1938. Max is musical, has perfect pitch, makes money tuning pianos and idolizes his father, “The Great Viktor Mueller,” a renowned German conductor. He has a happy life and is only vaguely troubled by the signs that the Nazis are coming. A journalist friend and a newsstand vendor are aware of the Nazi threat.
He has a pen pal, Sophie, a Jewish girl in Vienna who is also musical. They have never met but their correspondence is warm and intimate. After Hitler takes over Austria she is shipped off to Terezin, a concentration camp near Prague where talented Jews are confined. The Nazis want to make the world see it as a happy place. They spruce it up and invite the International Red Cross to inspect the camp (while forbidding the inmates to talk to the inspectors). The Red Cross people are fooled and write and favorable report, but after they have gone the Nazis resume sending Jews from Terezin to the death camps.
Max learns that Sophie is there. In the meantime Viktor has become the favorite conductor of the Nazis, Heydrich and Hitler admire him and he puts on the uniform of a German army captain. Although Max is beginning to have doubts about his father, he uses his father’s influence to arrange to move to Terezin, to live on the outskirts of the camp. He is able to move in and out of the camp and he finally meets Sophie, who is undernourished and worn. They work together to help the inmates. Max puts out an underground news sheet.
Their greatest achievement is to help stage performances of Brundibar, a children’s opera which had in real life been created in Prague in 1938 by Hans Krása, who was also confined to Terezin. The opera is a success and performed repeatedly—with cast changes as child cast members are shipped off to the death camps.
As Max’s activities start drawing suspicion, he realizes he will soon be on one of the death trains, so he gets a carpenter friend (from the Brundibar set) to build him a raft. The Ohre River conveniently runs through Terezin and connects with the Vtlava that flows by Prague. He makes his escape, on the way killing a Gestapo agent who has been tailing him, and floats into Prague. I won’t spoil the ending by telling you what happened to Sophie and the Great Viktor, but it is not really a happy ending.
Much of Lande’s book is real history, and he puts it in a fictional framework that is dramatic, full of tension and ominous detail, offset by the courage and generosity of Max, Sophie and their friends. —JM —Posted 5/1/2020
[In 2011 an English translation was performed by children in Cape Town and is worth the search on youtube to see.]
A “Must-Read” for Alumni
The Perfect Assignment, A Memoir of Journalism in the Golden Age.
By Jonathan Z. Larsen (TidePool Press $28.00)
Jon Larsen could hardly have been in a better position to write a revealing book about Time Inc. He has succeeded with an elegance that not only tells much about Time Inc., but also tells more than most people would be willing to tell about his own family, marriages, and affairs. He was a Time writer and correspondent (in Vietnam). He is also the son of Roy Larsen, who was hired by Henry Luce before even the first issue of Time came out in 1922 and was the phenomenally successful circulation promoter of the magazine and eventually president of Time Inc.
Larsen hits the reader right away with the story of the disastrous invasion of Laos in 1971, an unsuccessful attempt to shut the Ho Chi Minh trail. He jumped into one of the helicopters taking journalists to a base of operations in Laos (which the U.S and Vietnamese officials maintained was really in Vietnam). Two of the choppers were shot down. Larry Burrows, Life’s great photographer, was one of four photographers killed. Larsen was in a surviving helicopter.
The war in Vietnam was a troubled period for Time’s correspondents in Saigon. While some of them reported (correctly) that we were failing, management in New York, still in the thrall of Luce’s unshakable hostility to Communist China, swallowed the Pentagon line that the war was going well for us. Just after arriving in Saigon Larsen came up against the clash between his bureau and New York. Robert Sam Anson, a young correspondent taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese, was unexpectedly released. The magazine told him, he could write what he liked about his captivity and New York wouldn’t change a word. It turned out that New York wanted to change quite a few words, including references to the bombing of Laos, which was hardly a secret. Anson quit (but he did spend a short spell as a Time writer in New York)
Larsen writes about the “near total disintegration” of the U.S. armed forces, the widespread drug addiction and the deaths by “friendly fire” so that “an external enemy” was hardly required. His reporting and attitude earned him the title “The Volcanic Jon Larsen” in New York. His term in Saigon ended with months of severe hepatitis and then the war was over.
Larsen grew up in an affluent household on a large farm in Fairfield, Connecticut, but home was a “frostbitten place,” he writes. He never saw Wind in the Willows or any other children’s books until he had his own child. Roy was an absent, “distant father,” the model for Sloan Simpson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the best-selling novel about the ultimate organization man. Simpson was Roy’s advance man and speech writer. Roy’s wife was a cold, sharp-tongued mother. Larsen preferred the companionship and laughter of the ”downstairs.”
After four years of boarding school at Hotchkiss, where he discovered he was dyslexic, Larsen went on to Harvard, where he developed his literary tastes and enjoyed an affair with a beautiful Radcliffe girl. On graduating it was natural he should take up journalism. Not only was his Dad a titan in the magazine business, several forebears were journalists and his uncle, Jerry Zerbe was the well-connected society editor of Town & Country. He went to work for the West Hartford News, but soon quit when he received a notice from his draft board to stand by for a call. When the call came, he was deemed 4-F and released. His Radcliffe girl had dumped him. He had no job., He was miserable. Uncle Jerry came to the rescue.
Uncle Jerry had the pleasant task of organizing a selection of celebrities to help publicize a cruise on the Leonardo da Vinci and he invited Larsen along. The group included Joan Fontaine and her boyfriend, the cartoonist Charles Addams, Zachary Scott and among others Gloria Swanson, who at 63 was the life of the party. She brought along her Charlie Chaplin outfit and made Larsen play the role of Jackie Coogan, The Kid.
On the return to New York, his father helped him get a job at Time. He followed the usual path for new writers, beginning with a stint at f.y.i., the in-house newsletter. The next step took him to Milestones where he had the challenging task of encapsulating in one graceful sentence the life of people who had just died or otherwise deserved Milestone attention that week.
Larsen moved on to writing at the Modern Living section. He learned about the peculiar ways Time worked, which sometimes meant an obsession to get the tiny details right while sometimes getting the story wrong. He recalls one editor dealing with a story about a coup in Bolivia which involved the altitude of the La Paz airport. The editor was obsessed with getting the right figure down to the exact foot. After working most of the night the researcher got a figure from a Pan Am pilot that satisfied the editor. On the other hand, Bobby Baker, editor of Modern Living then, could with a few deft strokes of a pencil make improvements that were “transformative.”
Larsen got to know Edie Sedgwick, the model and “it” girl of the mid-1960s. He found her an “irresistible wreck” and introduced her to New York’s nightlife when she moved to the city. She became Andy Warhol’s muse and when Larsen invited her to a party at his place, Warhol showed up with an escort of half a dozen “ashen faced apparitions who seemed to have no names or conversation.” His longest article at Modern Living was “Edie and Andy”, a “frothy” sociological piece.
After writing for Modern Living and moving on to Chicago to be the bureau chief, Larsen took on the Vietnam assignment. When he had recovered from hepatitis and he returned to New York to write for the Nation section, and grew further disillusioned with Time. The people who succeeded at Time, he writes, “have been ground down to a fine white powder. They are shells.” After ten years at the magazine, in 1973, he quit and walked out of the building “with an enormous sense of relief.”
An unsatisfying spell as a freelancer ended when Larsen was offered the job of editing New Times, a fortnightly which during its brief life (1973-1979) ran some investigative pieces, pushed by Larsen, that got attention. He fired a shot across the bow of another new magazine, People, which he calls “an instant success that was changing the face of journalism.” To mock People, he ran a cover of Farah Fawcett with the words “Absolutely nothing about Farah Fawcett-Majors.” But the ads were never enough, New Times folded and Larsen took refuge in a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard.
Time Inc.—or was it then Time-Warner, or AOL-Time-Warner by then?—beckoned once again, This time he went to Life, by then a monthly, as news editor. He became uneasy when he learned Life was using “so-called newsstand consultants” to see what might sell best. It got worse when Dick Stolley, the founding editor of People, took over Life. Larsen writes “Stolley had taken the schlock formula that had worked so well at People and grafted it onto Life to ill effect. The grace, elegance and breadth that Phil Kunhardt, Eleanor Graves (and others) . . . had brought to Life were gone.” Once again Larsen was out of a job.
This time The Village Voice, a pioneer of the new journalism, beckoned. He found that “a general aura of subversion and dysfunction overlaid the paper like a penumbra.” Opinion was valued more than objectivity. The paper had been through cuts in the staff and circulation. During Larsen’s reign the paper produced a singular expose—the five young men tried and jailed for a horrendous rape in Central Park in 1989 were innocent, the paper discovered, convicted by twisted police work. (They were compensated with a settlement of $40 million in 2014.) In spite of that investigative success and others, the paper’s declined continued and Larsen resigned after five years on the job.
His ever-gloomier view of the press leads to an assessment of Trump’s success. He used the media and the media used him. Larsen writes, “Harry Luce had worried about a time when news organizations, by pandering to the baser tastes of readers would end up publishing “twaddle. . . square miles of journalistic tripe.’ Luce’s nightmare had come true.” The golden age of journalism had ended.
--H.R. oddity: Larsen’s father Roy had had the unusual if not peculiar foresight at the age of 23, when Time Inc. was being created, to get himself exempted from the mandatory retirement age of 65, which was enforced on all other executives. So he stayed on as vice chairman of the board and finally retired at the age of 80, when he had been with the company for 57 years.—As the ad copywriter might say, this is a “must read” for anyone interested in the history of Time Inc. —JM posted 3/9/2020
The Birds of Wisconsin, A Field Guide, By Charles Hagner
(Scott & Nix, paperback $24.55)
Chuck Hagner, a veteran editor and writer at Time-Life Books in Alexandria, has produced his third book about birds: the American Birding Association Field Guide to Birds of Wisconsin. His other books were an ID guide to ducks and geese and a coffee-table volume entitled Wings of Spring: Courtship, Nesting and Fledging, illustrated by the late nature photographer Tom Vezo.
Chuck copyedited, wrote, and edited a number of books at Books from 1988 to 2001. The series he contributed to include the Third Reich, the one on Home Repair, and several others. He writes that he loved working at Books: “I learned so much—from the work itself but mostly from the talented people I worked with.” After leaving Books, Chuck became editor-in-chief of BirdWatching magazine.
His Wisconsin book tells readers how to identify and where to find the 262 birds that regularly inhabit Wisconsin as well as species that appear only casually or rarely, including the endangered Kirtland’s Warbler. Brian Small, a professional bird and nature photographer who worked closely with Chuck at BirdWatching, provided 470 pictures for the book.
Hagner is director of Bird City Wisconsin, a non-profit that has publicly recognized 109 communities that have made themselves greener and more bird friendly. He also chairs the board of the Western Great Lakes Bird and Bat Observatory, and he serves on the board of the Wisconsin Bird Conservation Initiative.
He goes birding pretty much every weekend, sometimes twice. Chuck likes going out in the winter particularly because that’s when species from further north, such as the Snowy Owl, make their appearance. Nights in December are “especially good” because that’s when the Great Horned Owl can be heard hooting. Posted December 14, 2019
Vanity Fair’s Women on Women, edited by Rhadika Jones with David Friend.(Penguin, $30)
David Friend, former director of photography at Life and now Vanity Fair’s director of creativity, and Rhadika Jones, the magazine’s new editor-in-chief, have collaborated to put together 28 profiles of famous women written by women for the magazine. The subjects of these mini biographies include Hilary Clinton, Audrey Hepburn, Gloria Steinem, Whoopi Goldberg, Tina Turner and Michelle Obama. The contributors include Gail Sheehy, Maureen Dowd, Tina Brown, and Bethany McLean, formerly of Fortune. Kirkus Review calls the book, “A vigorous selection of essays spanning the magazine’s modern era that underscore the combative resilience of notable accomplished women who never gave in to what was expected of them” and “This is an ideal collection for those who enjoy celebrity profiles with a bit more substance.”
Upcoming: We have two books coming up later this year from Time Inc. authors. One will be of particular interest to design and art people who have worked at Time Inc. and the other to retirees well along in years. We will publish reports on both these books when they appear.
Milton Glaser and Walter Bernard, who revolutionized magazine design over the last half century, have written Mag Men about their experiences in creating and redesigning magazines. Bernard was the art director of Time, Fortune, The Atlantic and other magazines and newspapers. Glaser designed New York magazine and created the famous “I Love New York” logo. They write about their personal experiences with many authors, writers and publishers. Gloria Steinem has written an introduction to the book, which will be published by the Columbia University Press.
Below is a review of Steve Blacker's first book which we never reviewed since we didn't know it had been published.
You Can't Fall Off The Floor! How To Reinvent Yourself & Your Career
By Steve Blacker (Paperback $19.73, Kindle $9.99 Amazon.com )
Having worked for 27+ companies including Time, Money, SI, Playboy, CUE, TV Cable Week, Medical Economics, Ski View, American Heritage Magazines, The Village Voice, New York Post, among others Steve Blacker followed his personal mantra: “I’m going to learn something in this job, and I’m going to have some fun while I’m doing it. And what I learn will make me more valuable to the next place I go.” He just told us that his 2014 book with co-author Charles Salzberg:You Can't Fall Off The Floor! How To Reinvent Yourself & Your Career is still selling at Amazon.
“This book is a journey through the ups and downs of media and publishing. If you’re thinking about being in the publishing business, this is your primer. If you’re viewing the business from a distance, hop on for the ride—you won't be disappointed, great stories and a bunch of laughs.” Henry Gellis.
“As a young, mid-thirties professional, I find so often that prior generations talk of very linear careers, spending 30+ years inside one organization. Today's generation can't relate to that. This book is exactly the opposite. The author did not take that kind of path and came out on top. He clearly has had a wonderful life, full of adventure. It helps you see the dots that connect all life experiences. It demonstrates the importance of combining interest, curiosity and opportunity...the value in chartering unfamiliar paths”—J.
Steve tells us that he blogs, pool walks and just stays busy including finishing his second book: I Should Have Been Dead By Now! A Guide To Growing Old Happily & Staying Ageless. He says: “I look back fondly on my days at Time Inc. when being in media was fun and there was editorial integrity. —BE with an assist from Amazon.com/books
Arthur Curtiss James: Unsung Titan of the Gilded Age
By Roger Vaughan (Story Arts Media, paperback at Amazon $17.99)
Roger Vaughan (Life edit) has written 18 books about a variety of subjects. But when he writes about yachting, it’s in his blood. A veteran sailor, Vaughan has crossed the Atlantic under canvas and survived the deadly Fastnet race of 1979 which killed 15 yachtsmen.
Roger has written a biography of one of the richest men in America at the turn of the 20th century, a mastermind of the expansion of the railroads to the West Coast, but it is Arthur James as a yachtsman that grabs the attention. An heir to the Phelps Dodge copper fortune, he had been fascinated by sailing since he was a boy and to introduce him to serious yachting, his father gave him the shapely Coronet, a 121-foot, two-masted schooner. It had no auxiliary engine, which would test James‘s seamanship, as it did on its first voyage. He sailed her out of New York one day in October, 1893, in a blizzard with a strong following wind that sent Coronet flying out of the harbor. Heavy seas and high winds that night made James’s non-seagoing guests wonder if they would survive. After that they enjoyed a pleasant sail into the Caribbean.
In 1896 James sent the Coronet under its captain from New York to San Francisco via Cape Horn, a daunting 117-day journey. James himself and friends took the new transcontinental train to San Francisco to meet up the Coronet and sail to Japan. The voyage was uneventful except that they caught the tail end of a typhoon just before reaching Yokohama. One of James’s friends was an astronomer who wanted to photograph a total eclipse best viewed from Japan. After all that, the eclipse was obscured by clouds.
Yachtsmen are never satisfied and James now ordered a 160-foot steel-hulled brigantine with an auxiliary engine. The Aloha was a luxurious vessel with comfortable, ample quarters and hot running water. She was delivered in 1899 and after a difficult battle over control of the Burlington railway with E.H. Harriman, James took her out to sea and down to the Caribbean. In 1921, with the usual collection of friends as guests, James set out to go around the world. They passed through the relatively new Panama Canal, crossed the Pacific with a stop in Hawaii, called at various ports in Japan, China, Malaya, and India. They took ample time to visit sites on land. Then it was Suez, the Mediterranean and back home across the Atlantic. They had covered 28,827 miles in 160 days.
On land, James also accumulated trophies. He built a splendid “cottage” in Newport, a vast mansion on half a block of East 39th Street in Manhattan, and a winter place in Coconut Grove, Florida. He and his wife supported many charities and foundations generously. He was commodore of the New York Yacht Club and had many other prominent responsibilities. With all these absences and preoccupations he also managed his huge business interests expertly. By now he controlled 40,000 miles of railroad track, more than James J. Hill, James Gould, or Harriman had ever controlled. By 1931 his railroad investments were worth $6.36 billion in today’s dollars and he had just scored a coup by connecting the northern lines that ran to Portland and Seattle down to San Francisco. Through all of these activities he may have had a romance outside his marriage, but he lived so discretely that little is known of it.
In a reversal of the usual order of things, Roger started by making a documentary about James and then saw he had enough material for this biography, his 18th book. The resulting book is thoroughly researched. Roger was the founding editor of The Yacht magazine and sailing has been the continuing interest in his life, but he has also written biographies (Ted Turner, Herbert Von Karajan) and about sports (baseball, golf, hockey). At Life in the late l960s, Roger covered the Woodstock Festival, the Beatles, and the advent of LSD. He lives and sails in Oxford, Maryland. --Jeremy Main Posted 4/29/2019
Leonidas Polk: Warrior Bishop of the Confederacy
by Huston Horn, University Press of Kansas $39.95 Hardcover/37.95 Kindle
Leonidas Polk was a graduate of West Point who resigned his commission to enter the Episcopal priesthood as a young man. At first combining parish ministry with cotton farming in Tennessee, Polk subsequently was elected the first bishop of the Louisiana Diocese, whereupon he bought a sugarcane plantation and worked it with several hundred slaves owned by his wife. Then, in the 1850s he was instrumental in the founding of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. When secession led to war he pulled his diocese out of the national church and with other Southern bishops established what they styled the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America. Polk then offered his military services to his friend and former West Point classmate Jefferson Davis and became a major general in the Confederate Army.
Polk was one of the more notable, yet controversial, generals of the war. Recognizing his indispensable familiarity with the Mississippi Valley, Confederate president Jefferson Davis commissioned his elevation to a high military position regardless of his lack of prior combat experience. Polk commanded troops in the Battles of Belmont, Shiloh, Perryville, Stones River, Chickamauga, and Meridian as well as several smaller engagements in Georgia leading up to Atlanta. Polk is remembered for his bitter disagreements with his immediate superior, the likewise-controversial General Braxton Bragg of the Army of Tennessee. In 1864, while serving under the command of General Joseph E. Johnston, Polk was killed by Union cannon fire as he observed General Sherman’s emplacements on the hills outside Atlanta. Thanks to Amazon/Publishers Review
This is a sweeping, admirably-written biography that restores some measure of sanity upon the subject of Leonidas Polk, much needed given the near-hysterical antipathy in recent historians’ accounts of the Bishop-General. However, this is a measured treatment—not adulatory by any means—but rather a thorough exploration of the man: his motives, passions, family, fortune, deep faith, and the vicissitudes of fate that befell him. One senses that the author has spent decades delving into the heart and soul of his subject, seasoning his writing with innate wisdom and evolving insight. We see Polk’s core qualities in play throughout his life: cheerfulness in the face of adversity, frankness, abundant energy, curiosity and inventiveness, and bravery. Horn makes no allowance, however, for Polk’s place in history. A sardonic tone runs subtly throughout the book concerning 19th Century viewpoints, the South’s struggle for independence, the Episcopal Church, the privileged classes, and especially slavery. Nonetheless, the author also vividly conveys the hardships of the time for the benefit of sanitized 21st Century readers, including the devastation of epidemic diseases and catastrophic financial hardships that could suddenly wipe out even the most affluent. Amanda Warren from Amazon
Becoming Barbra
Bill Eppridge's exclusive photographs of her rise to stardom
Rizzoli ($39.95)
When Life sent Bill Eppridge in 1963 to take pictures of Barbra Streisand, he encountered the 21-year-old ingénue in a small apartment on Third Avenue. She asked him what he wanted her to do. He told her to pretend he wasn’t there and so he shot a series of pictures of her washing her clothes in a bathtub (which was in her kitchen), trying on clothes at a thrift shop and greeting her mother. The pictures weren’t particularly important at the time and Life printed only one of them.
But she was about to appear on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show and David Merrick gave her the leading role in Funny Girl. As Shana Alexander wrote in Life, “The American public has worked itself into a perfect star-is-born swivet.” Three years later, with many awards and hits on her record, Life sent Bill back to follow Barbra on a trip to New York, Paris and Rome. She made a recording in French, bought couturier clothing for a CBS special, posed for a fashion shoot with Richard Avedon. Bill had unlimited access to it all.
Most of the pictures in this book have never been published before. Bill died at 75 in 2013, but now his widow, Adrienne Aurichio, has edited this coffee table book with 140 pages of page-sized black and white photos that Bill took during those two long sessions with Barbra.
Bill didn’t like posed pictures (unless they were for a cover) and he didn’t like set-up pictures. In a piece he wrote in 1994, Bill said of that first assignment in 1963 there was no PR person present. He wrote, “It was as pure a situation as one could hope for—reporter, Barbra and myself. She took my words to heart, pretended that I was not there, and we proceeded to have a lovely session.”
Bill wrote, “Now, we realize that in many cases, especially hers, extraordinary people have ordinary beginnings. And, what appears to be magic and fairy tales is often accomplished with a lot of pain and effort. Barbra is a perfectionist and it was apparent even then. I was able to appreciate that because I approach my own work in the same way.”
The Naughty Nineties:
The Triumph of the American Libido
by David Friend (Twelve, Amazon $21.95, Kindle $15.99)
David Friend, once Life’s director of photography and now editor for creative development at Vanity Fair, has won an unusually impressive collection of blurbs including this one from the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin: “How I loved this book! The Naughty Nineties is a raucous ride through the 20th century’s closing decade—an impressive sweep of social and cultural history in an era dominated by instant communication and gratification that presages our turbulent times.”
A Kirkus review says Friend “meticulously captures the libidinous 1990s through the milestones that made the time period so indelible – and sometimes cringeworthy.” He writes about Viagra, medically enhanced fertility, gay marriage, the fascination with breast augmentation and he has a particularly entertaining chapter on “the Brazilian bikini wax.” The Brazilian sisters who brought this depilatory system to New York were a sensational success in the 1990s until driven out of business by competition and big hikes in their 57th Street rent.
While the book is entertaining, its message is depressing. In an assessment of the book’s meaning, the writer and editor John Meacham agrees with Friend’s argument that the O.J.Simpson and Bill Clinton scandals, “the rise of the 24-hour news cycle (really a news treadmill), the cultural centrality of character-driven drama and the mainstreaming of inappropriate sexual behavior helped pave Trump’s path to the presidency.”
“Perhaps Friend’s most troubling insight,” Meacham writes, “is that Americans are, at the moment at least, the problem, not the solution.” As Friend himself writes, “Trump, unlike the typical public servant, was selfish (and committed to self-preservation)—just like the voters.” There would be no Trump show, Meacham says, “if there weren’t such a large audience for it. . . the same audience that leered, with Kenneth Starr, at Monica Lewinsky’s dress. . .that made Viagra sales soar. . .that now endures a reality-TV presidency that is, alas, our reality.”
Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes
of an Improbable Life by Sally Bedell Smith
(Random House, $32, 596 pp)
Sally Bedell Smith, a former Time reporter, has made a name for herself as an acute and knowledgeable biographer of members of the British royal family. At one of our luncheons in 2012 she spoke about her best-selling biography of Queen Elizabeth. She also wrote a book about Princess Diana. Now she has come out with another royal biography, about Charles—the oldest heir to the British throne in 300 years. Sally covers the well-known details of Charles’ public life “in diligent and exemplary fashion,” according to a review in The New York Times, but goes beyond them to make “many shrewd and telling points in pursuit of realigning the popular image of Prince Charles.”
Although she has never interviewed the Queen (Her Majesty doesn’t give interviews), Sally has interviewed just about everyone else in or connected with the royal family. “It’s a real compliment to Smith,” writes the British reviewer in The Times, “that she understands the British upper classes and aristocracy (including the royals) very well indeed.” Sally is also well plugged in to the Washington scene and wrote a book about the Clintons.
Her portrait of Charles is sympathetic. Pushed by the Duke of Edinburgh, a “domineering and wrongheaded presence”, he dutifully married Diana when he was 32 and she 19. The marriage never worked, although Charles did his best. She proved to be bulimic, suicidal, paranoid and alarmingly contrary and he went back to his earlier love, Camilla Shand. Eventually, after Diana’s horrifying death, Charles married Camilla and achieved some level of happiness. Unlike most royals, Charles is an “intellectual striver,” Sally writes. He has a serious and passionate interest in the environment, painting, gardening and architecture. He is an accomplished watercolorist, loves the opera, and enjoys a powerful cocktail.
Draft No. 4 by John McPhee
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux $25, 192 pp.)
Like other new writers at Time, John McPhee got his start writing the popular Miscellany column. Miscellany, which disappeared years ago, consisted of a single column of one-sentence items about oddities in the news. The brief introduction to the item had to be a pun, a very short pun. The Miscellany writer would normally move on to more substantial writing after a few months, but just when John came aboard, Time declared a hiring freeze, so John was stuck with the job for 18 months. “That came to roughly a thousand one-sentence stories, a thousand puns,” he writes.
When John was liberated from Miscellany, he soon proved to be a fine writer, producing cover stories for Time and then going on to become a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of many books (as did another contemporary colleague at Time, Calvin Trillin). Draft No. 4 is full of good insights about writing and interesting stories about his research. He seems to have spent much of his reporting in wild places and on quirky subjects (oranges? The Pine Barrens?)
As his title, Draft No. 4, indicates writing does not come easily. The first draft tends to be messy and he is not happy until he gets to the fourth. Then it reads easily. He has spent as much as two desperate weeks prostrated by writer’s bloc. When he wrote his first Time cover, on the comedian Mort Sahl, he found himself “sprawled on the floor at home surrounded by drifts of undifferentiated paper, and near tears in a catatonic swivet. As hour followed hour toward an absolute writing deadline. . .” he had produced just one sentence. He recalled that his high school English teacher had required her students to produce three pieces of writing every week and insisted that each piece be accompanied by a structural outline. So he sorted all that paper into stacks connected by theme or chronology. That gave him structure. He met the deadline and in the popular courses on writing he has taught for four decades at Princeton, he always stresses structure.
He also teaches the practice of “greening” that he had learned at Time. When a piece was written, checked and edited, it might come back from the makeup room with the notation “green 5”. That meant the article was five lines too long to fit and the writer had to find five lines to mark with a green pencil. It didn’t mean to lop off the last five lines, John writes, but “to remove words in such a manner that no one would notice that anything had been removed.” Although The New Yorker always seems to have space to spare (and doesn’t impose deadlines) John still believes in greening. He gets his students to do it on such tightly worded classics such as the Gettysburg Address (it can be done). John writes his colleague Trillin never bothered with word games but “found greening a thoroughly enjoyable puzzle.”
Free as Gods: How the Jazz Age Reinvented Modernism
By Charles A. Riley II (University of New England Press
$29.92, Amazon $16.99, 272 pp.)
Since leaving Fortune, where he was a reporter in the late 1980s, Charles has published 32 books, held a tenured professorship at Baruch College, edited art and antiques magazines, curated art exhibits in Amsterdam, Berlin, Lausanne, and New York, written many articles, given many lectures. He is prolific. Now he has been appointed director of the Nassau County Museum of Art. He also teaches part-time at Clarkson University.
His latest book, Free as Gods, picks up some of his favorite subjects: modern art, jazz, writers, painters. They all came together in one glorious feast in Paris stretching from the end of World War I to the Great Depression, from 1918 to 1929. Writers and artists from America fleeing prohibition and Russian emigrés fleeing the revolution joined the feast. They came to the Paris of Picasso and Joyce and their talents drew from each other an extraordinary outpouring of art, writing and music.
Charles examines the collaborations between the most famous—Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gershwin, Diaghilev—but also folds in the works of African Americans such as Sidney Bechet and Langston Hughes and of women such as Gertrude Stein and Nancy Cunard. He has a chapter on Archibald MacLeish, the poet and writer, who returned from Paris to become a writer for Fortune—and later Librarian of Congress.
The Lives of Dillon Ripley: Natural Scientist, Wartime Spy and Pioneering Leader of the Smithsonian Institution
By Roger D. Stone (University Press of New England, $27.95)
This Roger D. Stone (never to be confused with the political Roger J. Stone) was a Time bureau chief in San Francisco and Rio de Janeiro and also served as assistant to the publisher of Time and assistant to the president of Time Inc. Since then he has lived in Washington writing books about nature and the environment, serving as president of the Sustainable Development Institute and working with various non-profits. He got to know Dillon Ripley when both sat on the board of the World Wildlife Fund and that led to this, his seventh book.
As a boy in an affluent family (slightly diminished by the Great Depression,) Ripley was fascinated by the ducks in the pond at the family castle in Litchfield, Connecticut. That interest grew, after St. Paul’s and Yale, into a lifelong interest in ornithology. Soon after graduating he accepted an invitation from a friend to sail in a dilapidated schooner to New Guinea, where he collected thousands of bird skins and 87 live birds.
World War II interrupted his graduate studies in ornithology. Colonel William Donovan recruited him in 1943 to join the OSS, predecessor of the CIA, which was then virtually a Yale club. Back in Southeast Asia, Ripley infiltrated agents into Thailand and when Japan surrendered he flew into Bangkok, still occupied by unfriendly Japanese soldiers, and arranged for the liberation of Allied prisoners of war—while enjoying lavish hospitality from his Thai hosts.
In 1946 he joined the Yale faculty, where he spent 18 happy years as a professor, field scientist and eventually director of the Peabody Museum, which he revived from a long slumber. In 1964 he was named director of the Smithsonian Institution. He wanted to transform this “dusty archive” into a vibrant cultural institution. During his 20 years at the head of the Institution he added eight new museums.
When Ripley decided he also needed a magazine to give the Smithsonian a bigger voice, he turned to Time Inc. Life’s brilliant managing editor, Edward K. Thompson, a rumpled, blunt North Dakotan couldn’t have been more unlike Ripley but the two got along splendidly during a weekend at the Ripley estate in Litchfield. After many discussions, Thompson, who had just been turned loose by Time Inc., got the go-ahead to start a magazine even though magazines were beginning to suffer from TV competition. It was to be a slick, Time-sized monthly devoted to whatever interested the Smithsonian, but not a house organ. With no serious money up front, The Smithsonian was launched in 1969 as a benefit of membership for Smithsonian associates. The magazine quickly found 160,000 member-subscribers and by 1975 had a million.
Thompson ran The Smithsonian for 10 years and was succeeded by another Life veteran, Don Moser, who stayed in the job for 20 years and was succeeded by Carey Winfrey, who came from People. All three managing editors, writes Roger, remained faithful to the idea of producing thoughtful journalism about history, nature, science and the arts for educated readers. In addition to knowing Ripley well, Roger had access to all the family files and photos as well as the National Archives. He spent three years on the book and has told the story well.
The Medal Maker: A Biography of Victor Kovalenko
By Roger Vaughan (Cardinal Publishers Group, $35)
Roger Vaughan, a former Life writer, has written many books about sports and other subjects, but when he writes about sailing, yachtsmen pay attention. He has had a long relationship with yachting. His first book was about the U.S. America’s Cup syndicate. He was the founding editor of The Yacht Magazine and he has crewed in several off-shore races, including the lethal 1979 Fastnet race.
The “medal maker” of his new book is the Ukrainian-born coach of many Olympic sailing winners in the 470 class (the 470 is a lively sailing dingy for a crew of two that measures 4.7 meters and is fast enough to plane in a good breeze). Kovalenko was already an established sports figure in the Ukraine when he became coach of the 470 men’s and women’s crews that won gold and bronze medals, respectively, for the Ukraine at the 1996 Olympics. He had taken his teams to Australia in 1991 and fallen in love with the country. When the Australian Yachting Federation invited him to coach their weak 470 male and female teams in 1997 he accepted happily and emigrated with his wife and son. His teams won golds, silvers and bronzes and within six years he was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame.
Vaughan wrote for Life from 1965 to 1970, in New York and Chicago. As education editor he covered the Woodstock Festival and other cultural upheavals of the 1960s. He quit city life to go to Rhode Island and became a commercial fisherman before focusing on freelance writing. This book was published in Australia but can be obtained from Cardinal Publishers in the U.S.
Chardonnay Moms: Jane and Bobbi’s Greatest Hits
By Bobbi Eggers and Jane Condon
(BookBaby, paperback $15.99)
Jane Condon, a standup comedian and former Life reporter, and her friend, Bobbi Eggers, a former design director at J. Walter Thompson, have collaborated for years creating cartoons for calendars and newspapers about life in the burbs—in their case Greenwich, Connecticut. The Associated Press has described Jane as “an upper-crust Roseanne.” Bobbi draws the cartoons and Jane provides the words.
Now they have put their best cartoons into a book which focuses on surviving adventures in the burbs with husband and children with the frequent help of Chardonnay. Jane’s best memory of her career before comedy is a cover story on microsurgery she reported for Life in 1979. Since then she has built up a successful career as a standup comedian. She performs around the country, has appeared on several TV shows, and was the “audience favorite” on NBC’s “Last Comic Standing.” She gave the commencement speech in 2011 at Wellesley, her alma mater.
By Nathaniel Lande. (Blackstone Publishing, $29.99 on Amazon, publication date May 12)
Nathaniel Lande has written and produced movies and documentaries, taught at universities, and holds degrees from Oxford and Trinity College in Dublin. He spent years at Time Inc., as head of the Time-Life News Service, as creative director of the magazine group and as director of Time-Life Films. He writes books, many books, about modern history, cigars, health and well-being, “The 10 Best of Everything,” as well as fiction.
Now comes his twelfth book, a novel about a preadolescent boy in Prague in 1938. Max is musical, has perfect pitch, makes money tuning pianos and idolizes his father, “The Great Viktor Mueller,” a renowned German conductor. He has a happy life and is only vaguely troubled by the signs that the Nazis are coming. A journalist friend and a newsstand vendor are aware of the Nazi threat.
He has a pen pal, Sophie, a Jewish girl in Vienna who is also musical. They have never met but their correspondence is warm and intimate. After Hitler takes over Austria she is shipped off to Terezin, a concentration camp near Prague where talented Jews are confined. The Nazis want to make the world see it as a happy place. They spruce it up and invite the International Red Cross to inspect the camp (while forbidding the inmates to talk to the inspectors). The Red Cross people are fooled and write and favorable report, but after they have gone the Nazis resume sending Jews from Terezin to the death camps.
Max learns that Sophie is there. In the meantime Viktor has become the favorite conductor of the Nazis, Heydrich and Hitler admire him and he puts on the uniform of a German army captain. Although Max is beginning to have doubts about his father, he uses his father’s influence to arrange to move to Terezin, to live on the outskirts of the camp. He is able to move in and out of the camp and he finally meets Sophie, who is undernourished and worn. They work together to help the inmates. Max puts out an underground news sheet.
Their greatest achievement is to help stage performances of Brundibar, a children’s opera which had in real life been created in Prague in 1938 by Hans Krása, who was also confined to Terezin. The opera is a success and performed repeatedly—with cast changes as child cast members are shipped off to the death camps.
As Max’s activities start drawing suspicion, he realizes he will soon be on one of the death trains, so he gets a carpenter friend (from the Brundibar set) to build him a raft. The Ohre River conveniently runs through Terezin and connects with the Vtlava that flows by Prague. He makes his escape, on the way killing a Gestapo agent who has been tailing him, and floats into Prague. I won’t spoil the ending by telling you what happened to Sophie and the Great Viktor, but it is not really a happy ending.
Much of Lande’s book is real history, and he puts it in a fictional framework that is dramatic, full of tension and ominous detail, offset by the courage and generosity of Max, Sophie and their friends. —JM —Posted 5/1/2020
[In 2011 an English translation was performed by children in Cape Town and is worth the search on youtube to see.]
A “Must-Read” for Alumni
The Perfect Assignment, A Memoir of Journalism in the Golden Age.
By Jonathan Z. Larsen (TidePool Press $28.00)
Jon Larsen could hardly have been in a better position to write a revealing book about Time Inc. He has succeeded with an elegance that not only tells much about Time Inc., but also tells more than most people would be willing to tell about his own family, marriages, and affairs. He was a Time writer and correspondent (in Vietnam). He is also the son of Roy Larsen, who was hired by Henry Luce before even the first issue of Time came out in 1922 and was the phenomenally successful circulation promoter of the magazine and eventually president of Time Inc.
Larsen hits the reader right away with the story of the disastrous invasion of Laos in 1971, an unsuccessful attempt to shut the Ho Chi Minh trail. He jumped into one of the helicopters taking journalists to a base of operations in Laos (which the U.S and Vietnamese officials maintained was really in Vietnam). Two of the choppers were shot down. Larry Burrows, Life’s great photographer, was one of four photographers killed. Larsen was in a surviving helicopter.
The war in Vietnam was a troubled period for Time’s correspondents in Saigon. While some of them reported (correctly) that we were failing, management in New York, still in the thrall of Luce’s unshakable hostility to Communist China, swallowed the Pentagon line that the war was going well for us. Just after arriving in Saigon Larsen came up against the clash between his bureau and New York. Robert Sam Anson, a young correspondent taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese, was unexpectedly released. The magazine told him, he could write what he liked about his captivity and New York wouldn’t change a word. It turned out that New York wanted to change quite a few words, including references to the bombing of Laos, which was hardly a secret. Anson quit (but he did spend a short spell as a Time writer in New York)
Larsen writes about the “near total disintegration” of the U.S. armed forces, the widespread drug addiction and the deaths by “friendly fire” so that “an external enemy” was hardly required. His reporting and attitude earned him the title “The Volcanic Jon Larsen” in New York. His term in Saigon ended with months of severe hepatitis and then the war was over.
Larsen grew up in an affluent household on a large farm in Fairfield, Connecticut, but home was a “frostbitten place,” he writes. He never saw Wind in the Willows or any other children’s books until he had his own child. Roy was an absent, “distant father,” the model for Sloan Simpson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the best-selling novel about the ultimate organization man. Simpson was Roy’s advance man and speech writer. Roy’s wife was a cold, sharp-tongued mother. Larsen preferred the companionship and laughter of the ”downstairs.”
After four years of boarding school at Hotchkiss, where he discovered he was dyslexic, Larsen went on to Harvard, where he developed his literary tastes and enjoyed an affair with a beautiful Radcliffe girl. On graduating it was natural he should take up journalism. Not only was his Dad a titan in the magazine business, several forebears were journalists and his uncle, Jerry Zerbe was the well-connected society editor of Town & Country. He went to work for the West Hartford News, but soon quit when he received a notice from his draft board to stand by for a call. When the call came, he was deemed 4-F and released. His Radcliffe girl had dumped him. He had no job., He was miserable. Uncle Jerry came to the rescue.
Uncle Jerry had the pleasant task of organizing a selection of celebrities to help publicize a cruise on the Leonardo da Vinci and he invited Larsen along. The group included Joan Fontaine and her boyfriend, the cartoonist Charles Addams, Zachary Scott and among others Gloria Swanson, who at 63 was the life of the party. She brought along her Charlie Chaplin outfit and made Larsen play the role of Jackie Coogan, The Kid.
On the return to New York, his father helped him get a job at Time. He followed the usual path for new writers, beginning with a stint at f.y.i., the in-house newsletter. The next step took him to Milestones where he had the challenging task of encapsulating in one graceful sentence the life of people who had just died or otherwise deserved Milestone attention that week.
Larsen moved on to writing at the Modern Living section. He learned about the peculiar ways Time worked, which sometimes meant an obsession to get the tiny details right while sometimes getting the story wrong. He recalls one editor dealing with a story about a coup in Bolivia which involved the altitude of the La Paz airport. The editor was obsessed with getting the right figure down to the exact foot. After working most of the night the researcher got a figure from a Pan Am pilot that satisfied the editor. On the other hand, Bobby Baker, editor of Modern Living then, could with a few deft strokes of a pencil make improvements that were “transformative.”
Larsen got to know Edie Sedgwick, the model and “it” girl of the mid-1960s. He found her an “irresistible wreck” and introduced her to New York’s nightlife when she moved to the city. She became Andy Warhol’s muse and when Larsen invited her to a party at his place, Warhol showed up with an escort of half a dozen “ashen faced apparitions who seemed to have no names or conversation.” His longest article at Modern Living was “Edie and Andy”, a “frothy” sociological piece.
After writing for Modern Living and moving on to Chicago to be the bureau chief, Larsen took on the Vietnam assignment. When he had recovered from hepatitis and he returned to New York to write for the Nation section, and grew further disillusioned with Time. The people who succeeded at Time, he writes, “have been ground down to a fine white powder. They are shells.” After ten years at the magazine, in 1973, he quit and walked out of the building “with an enormous sense of relief.”
An unsatisfying spell as a freelancer ended when Larsen was offered the job of editing New Times, a fortnightly which during its brief life (1973-1979) ran some investigative pieces, pushed by Larsen, that got attention. He fired a shot across the bow of another new magazine, People, which he calls “an instant success that was changing the face of journalism.” To mock People, he ran a cover of Farah Fawcett with the words “Absolutely nothing about Farah Fawcett-Majors.” But the ads were never enough, New Times folded and Larsen took refuge in a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard.
Time Inc.—or was it then Time-Warner, or AOL-Time-Warner by then?—beckoned once again, This time he went to Life, by then a monthly, as news editor. He became uneasy when he learned Life was using “so-called newsstand consultants” to see what might sell best. It got worse when Dick Stolley, the founding editor of People, took over Life. Larsen writes “Stolley had taken the schlock formula that had worked so well at People and grafted it onto Life to ill effect. The grace, elegance and breadth that Phil Kunhardt, Eleanor Graves (and others) . . . had brought to Life were gone.” Once again Larsen was out of a job.
This time The Village Voice, a pioneer of the new journalism, beckoned. He found that “a general aura of subversion and dysfunction overlaid the paper like a penumbra.” Opinion was valued more than objectivity. The paper had been through cuts in the staff and circulation. During Larsen’s reign the paper produced a singular expose—the five young men tried and jailed for a horrendous rape in Central Park in 1989 were innocent, the paper discovered, convicted by twisted police work. (They were compensated with a settlement of $40 million in 2014.) In spite of that investigative success and others, the paper’s declined continued and Larsen resigned after five years on the job.
His ever-gloomier view of the press leads to an assessment of Trump’s success. He used the media and the media used him. Larsen writes, “Harry Luce had worried about a time when news organizations, by pandering to the baser tastes of readers would end up publishing “twaddle. . . square miles of journalistic tripe.’ Luce’s nightmare had come true.” The golden age of journalism had ended.
--H.R. oddity: Larsen’s father Roy had had the unusual if not peculiar foresight at the age of 23, when Time Inc. was being created, to get himself exempted from the mandatory retirement age of 65, which was enforced on all other executives. So he stayed on as vice chairman of the board and finally retired at the age of 80, when he had been with the company for 57 years.—As the ad copywriter might say, this is a “must read” for anyone interested in the history of Time Inc. —JM posted 3/9/2020
The Birds of Wisconsin, A Field Guide, By Charles Hagner
(Scott & Nix, paperback $24.55)
Chuck Hagner, a veteran editor and writer at Time-Life Books in Alexandria, has produced his third book about birds: the American Birding Association Field Guide to Birds of Wisconsin. His other books were an ID guide to ducks and geese and a coffee-table volume entitled Wings of Spring: Courtship, Nesting and Fledging, illustrated by the late nature photographer Tom Vezo.
Chuck copyedited, wrote, and edited a number of books at Books from 1988 to 2001. The series he contributed to include the Third Reich, the one on Home Repair, and several others. He writes that he loved working at Books: “I learned so much—from the work itself but mostly from the talented people I worked with.” After leaving Books, Chuck became editor-in-chief of BirdWatching magazine.
His Wisconsin book tells readers how to identify and where to find the 262 birds that regularly inhabit Wisconsin as well as species that appear only casually or rarely, including the endangered Kirtland’s Warbler. Brian Small, a professional bird and nature photographer who worked closely with Chuck at BirdWatching, provided 470 pictures for the book.
Hagner is director of Bird City Wisconsin, a non-profit that has publicly recognized 109 communities that have made themselves greener and more bird friendly. He also chairs the board of the Western Great Lakes Bird and Bat Observatory, and he serves on the board of the Wisconsin Bird Conservation Initiative.
He goes birding pretty much every weekend, sometimes twice. Chuck likes going out in the winter particularly because that’s when species from further north, such as the Snowy Owl, make their appearance. Nights in December are “especially good” because that’s when the Great Horned Owl can be heard hooting. Posted December 14, 2019
Vanity Fair’s Women on Women, edited by Rhadika Jones with David Friend.(Penguin, $30)
David Friend, former director of photography at Life and now Vanity Fair’s director of creativity, and Rhadika Jones, the magazine’s new editor-in-chief, have collaborated to put together 28 profiles of famous women written by women for the magazine. The subjects of these mini biographies include Hilary Clinton, Audrey Hepburn, Gloria Steinem, Whoopi Goldberg, Tina Turner and Michelle Obama. The contributors include Gail Sheehy, Maureen Dowd, Tina Brown, and Bethany McLean, formerly of Fortune. Kirkus Review calls the book, “A vigorous selection of essays spanning the magazine’s modern era that underscore the combative resilience of notable accomplished women who never gave in to what was expected of them” and “This is an ideal collection for those who enjoy celebrity profiles with a bit more substance.”
Upcoming: We have two books coming up later this year from Time Inc. authors. One will be of particular interest to design and art people who have worked at Time Inc. and the other to retirees well along in years. We will publish reports on both these books when they appear.
Milton Glaser and Walter Bernard, who revolutionized magazine design over the last half century, have written Mag Men about their experiences in creating and redesigning magazines. Bernard was the art director of Time, Fortune, The Atlantic and other magazines and newspapers. Glaser designed New York magazine and created the famous “I Love New York” logo. They write about their personal experiences with many authors, writers and publishers. Gloria Steinem has written an introduction to the book, which will be published by the Columbia University Press.
Below is a review of Steve Blacker's first book which we never reviewed since we didn't know it had been published.
You Can't Fall Off The Floor! How To Reinvent Yourself & Your Career
By Steve Blacker (Paperback $19.73, Kindle $9.99 Amazon.com )
Having worked for 27+ companies including Time, Money, SI, Playboy, CUE, TV Cable Week, Medical Economics, Ski View, American Heritage Magazines, The Village Voice, New York Post, among others Steve Blacker followed his personal mantra: “I’m going to learn something in this job, and I’m going to have some fun while I’m doing it. And what I learn will make me more valuable to the next place I go.” He just told us that his 2014 book with co-author Charles Salzberg:You Can't Fall Off The Floor! How To Reinvent Yourself & Your Career is still selling at Amazon.
“This book is a journey through the ups and downs of media and publishing. If you’re thinking about being in the publishing business, this is your primer. If you’re viewing the business from a distance, hop on for the ride—you won't be disappointed, great stories and a bunch of laughs.” Henry Gellis.
“As a young, mid-thirties professional, I find so often that prior generations talk of very linear careers, spending 30+ years inside one organization. Today's generation can't relate to that. This book is exactly the opposite. The author did not take that kind of path and came out on top. He clearly has had a wonderful life, full of adventure. It helps you see the dots that connect all life experiences. It demonstrates the importance of combining interest, curiosity and opportunity...the value in chartering unfamiliar paths”—J.
Steve tells us that he blogs, pool walks and just stays busy including finishing his second book: I Should Have Been Dead By Now! A Guide To Growing Old Happily & Staying Ageless. He says: “I look back fondly on my days at Time Inc. when being in media was fun and there was editorial integrity. —BE with an assist from Amazon.com/books
Arthur Curtiss James: Unsung Titan of the Gilded Age
By Roger Vaughan (Story Arts Media, paperback at Amazon $17.99)
Roger Vaughan (Life edit) has written 18 books about a variety of subjects. But when he writes about yachting, it’s in his blood. A veteran sailor, Vaughan has crossed the Atlantic under canvas and survived the deadly Fastnet race of 1979 which killed 15 yachtsmen.
Roger has written a biography of one of the richest men in America at the turn of the 20th century, a mastermind of the expansion of the railroads to the West Coast, but it is Arthur James as a yachtsman that grabs the attention. An heir to the Phelps Dodge copper fortune, he had been fascinated by sailing since he was a boy and to introduce him to serious yachting, his father gave him the shapely Coronet, a 121-foot, two-masted schooner. It had no auxiliary engine, which would test James‘s seamanship, as it did on its first voyage. He sailed her out of New York one day in October, 1893, in a blizzard with a strong following wind that sent Coronet flying out of the harbor. Heavy seas and high winds that night made James’s non-seagoing guests wonder if they would survive. After that they enjoyed a pleasant sail into the Caribbean.
In 1896 James sent the Coronet under its captain from New York to San Francisco via Cape Horn, a daunting 117-day journey. James himself and friends took the new transcontinental train to San Francisco to meet up the Coronet and sail to Japan. The voyage was uneventful except that they caught the tail end of a typhoon just before reaching Yokohama. One of James’s friends was an astronomer who wanted to photograph a total eclipse best viewed from Japan. After all that, the eclipse was obscured by clouds.
Yachtsmen are never satisfied and James now ordered a 160-foot steel-hulled brigantine with an auxiliary engine. The Aloha was a luxurious vessel with comfortable, ample quarters and hot running water. She was delivered in 1899 and after a difficult battle over control of the Burlington railway with E.H. Harriman, James took her out to sea and down to the Caribbean. In 1921, with the usual collection of friends as guests, James set out to go around the world. They passed through the relatively new Panama Canal, crossed the Pacific with a stop in Hawaii, called at various ports in Japan, China, Malaya, and India. They took ample time to visit sites on land. Then it was Suez, the Mediterranean and back home across the Atlantic. They had covered 28,827 miles in 160 days.
On land, James also accumulated trophies. He built a splendid “cottage” in Newport, a vast mansion on half a block of East 39th Street in Manhattan, and a winter place in Coconut Grove, Florida. He and his wife supported many charities and foundations generously. He was commodore of the New York Yacht Club and had many other prominent responsibilities. With all these absences and preoccupations he also managed his huge business interests expertly. By now he controlled 40,000 miles of railroad track, more than James J. Hill, James Gould, or Harriman had ever controlled. By 1931 his railroad investments were worth $6.36 billion in today’s dollars and he had just scored a coup by connecting the northern lines that ran to Portland and Seattle down to San Francisco. Through all of these activities he may have had a romance outside his marriage, but he lived so discretely that little is known of it.
In a reversal of the usual order of things, Roger started by making a documentary about James and then saw he had enough material for this biography, his 18th book. The resulting book is thoroughly researched. Roger was the founding editor of The Yacht magazine and sailing has been the continuing interest in his life, but he has also written biographies (Ted Turner, Herbert Von Karajan) and about sports (baseball, golf, hockey). At Life in the late l960s, Roger covered the Woodstock Festival, the Beatles, and the advent of LSD. He lives and sails in Oxford, Maryland. --Jeremy Main Posted 4/29/2019
Leonidas Polk: Warrior Bishop of the Confederacy
by Huston Horn, University Press of Kansas $39.95 Hardcover/37.95 Kindle
Leonidas Polk was a graduate of West Point who resigned his commission to enter the Episcopal priesthood as a young man. At first combining parish ministry with cotton farming in Tennessee, Polk subsequently was elected the first bishop of the Louisiana Diocese, whereupon he bought a sugarcane plantation and worked it with several hundred slaves owned by his wife. Then, in the 1850s he was instrumental in the founding of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. When secession led to war he pulled his diocese out of the national church and with other Southern bishops established what they styled the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America. Polk then offered his military services to his friend and former West Point classmate Jefferson Davis and became a major general in the Confederate Army.
Polk was one of the more notable, yet controversial, generals of the war. Recognizing his indispensable familiarity with the Mississippi Valley, Confederate president Jefferson Davis commissioned his elevation to a high military position regardless of his lack of prior combat experience. Polk commanded troops in the Battles of Belmont, Shiloh, Perryville, Stones River, Chickamauga, and Meridian as well as several smaller engagements in Georgia leading up to Atlanta. Polk is remembered for his bitter disagreements with his immediate superior, the likewise-controversial General Braxton Bragg of the Army of Tennessee. In 1864, while serving under the command of General Joseph E. Johnston, Polk was killed by Union cannon fire as he observed General Sherman’s emplacements on the hills outside Atlanta. Thanks to Amazon/Publishers Review
This is a sweeping, admirably-written biography that restores some measure of sanity upon the subject of Leonidas Polk, much needed given the near-hysterical antipathy in recent historians’ accounts of the Bishop-General. However, this is a measured treatment—not adulatory by any means—but rather a thorough exploration of the man: his motives, passions, family, fortune, deep faith, and the vicissitudes of fate that befell him. One senses that the author has spent decades delving into the heart and soul of his subject, seasoning his writing with innate wisdom and evolving insight. We see Polk’s core qualities in play throughout his life: cheerfulness in the face of adversity, frankness, abundant energy, curiosity and inventiveness, and bravery. Horn makes no allowance, however, for Polk’s place in history. A sardonic tone runs subtly throughout the book concerning 19th Century viewpoints, the South’s struggle for independence, the Episcopal Church, the privileged classes, and especially slavery. Nonetheless, the author also vividly conveys the hardships of the time for the benefit of sanitized 21st Century readers, including the devastation of epidemic diseases and catastrophic financial hardships that could suddenly wipe out even the most affluent. Amanda Warren from Amazon
Becoming Barbra
Bill Eppridge's exclusive photographs of her rise to stardom
Rizzoli ($39.95)
When Life sent Bill Eppridge in 1963 to take pictures of Barbra Streisand, he encountered the 21-year-old ingénue in a small apartment on Third Avenue. She asked him what he wanted her to do. He told her to pretend he wasn’t there and so he shot a series of pictures of her washing her clothes in a bathtub (which was in her kitchen), trying on clothes at a thrift shop and greeting her mother. The pictures weren’t particularly important at the time and Life printed only one of them.
But she was about to appear on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show and David Merrick gave her the leading role in Funny Girl. As Shana Alexander wrote in Life, “The American public has worked itself into a perfect star-is-born swivet.” Three years later, with many awards and hits on her record, Life sent Bill back to follow Barbra on a trip to New York, Paris and Rome. She made a recording in French, bought couturier clothing for a CBS special, posed for a fashion shoot with Richard Avedon. Bill had unlimited access to it all.
Most of the pictures in this book have never been published before. Bill died at 75 in 2013, but now his widow, Adrienne Aurichio, has edited this coffee table book with 140 pages of page-sized black and white photos that Bill took during those two long sessions with Barbra.
Bill didn’t like posed pictures (unless they were for a cover) and he didn’t like set-up pictures. In a piece he wrote in 1994, Bill said of that first assignment in 1963 there was no PR person present. He wrote, “It was as pure a situation as one could hope for—reporter, Barbra and myself. She took my words to heart, pretended that I was not there, and we proceeded to have a lovely session.”
Bill wrote, “Now, we realize that in many cases, especially hers, extraordinary people have ordinary beginnings. And, what appears to be magic and fairy tales is often accomplished with a lot of pain and effort. Barbra is a perfectionist and it was apparent even then. I was able to appreciate that because I approach my own work in the same way.”
The Naughty Nineties:
The Triumph of the American Libido
by David Friend (Twelve, Amazon $21.95, Kindle $15.99)
David Friend, once Life’s director of photography and now editor for creative development at Vanity Fair, has won an unusually impressive collection of blurbs including this one from the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin: “How I loved this book! The Naughty Nineties is a raucous ride through the 20th century’s closing decade—an impressive sweep of social and cultural history in an era dominated by instant communication and gratification that presages our turbulent times.”
A Kirkus review says Friend “meticulously captures the libidinous 1990s through the milestones that made the time period so indelible – and sometimes cringeworthy.” He writes about Viagra, medically enhanced fertility, gay marriage, the fascination with breast augmentation and he has a particularly entertaining chapter on “the Brazilian bikini wax.” The Brazilian sisters who brought this depilatory system to New York were a sensational success in the 1990s until driven out of business by competition and big hikes in their 57th Street rent.
While the book is entertaining, its message is depressing. In an assessment of the book’s meaning, the writer and editor John Meacham agrees with Friend’s argument that the O.J.Simpson and Bill Clinton scandals, “the rise of the 24-hour news cycle (really a news treadmill), the cultural centrality of character-driven drama and the mainstreaming of inappropriate sexual behavior helped pave Trump’s path to the presidency.”
“Perhaps Friend’s most troubling insight,” Meacham writes, “is that Americans are, at the moment at least, the problem, not the solution.” As Friend himself writes, “Trump, unlike the typical public servant, was selfish (and committed to self-preservation)—just like the voters.” There would be no Trump show, Meacham says, “if there weren’t such a large audience for it. . . the same audience that leered, with Kenneth Starr, at Monica Lewinsky’s dress. . .that made Viagra sales soar. . .that now endures a reality-TV presidency that is, alas, our reality.”
Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes
of an Improbable Life by Sally Bedell Smith
(Random House, $32, 596 pp)
Sally Bedell Smith, a former Time reporter, has made a name for herself as an acute and knowledgeable biographer of members of the British royal family. At one of our luncheons in 2012 she spoke about her best-selling biography of Queen Elizabeth. She also wrote a book about Princess Diana. Now she has come out with another royal biography, about Charles—the oldest heir to the British throne in 300 years. Sally covers the well-known details of Charles’ public life “in diligent and exemplary fashion,” according to a review in The New York Times, but goes beyond them to make “many shrewd and telling points in pursuit of realigning the popular image of Prince Charles.”
Although she has never interviewed the Queen (Her Majesty doesn’t give interviews), Sally has interviewed just about everyone else in or connected with the royal family. “It’s a real compliment to Smith,” writes the British reviewer in The Times, “that she understands the British upper classes and aristocracy (including the royals) very well indeed.” Sally is also well plugged in to the Washington scene and wrote a book about the Clintons.
Her portrait of Charles is sympathetic. Pushed by the Duke of Edinburgh, a “domineering and wrongheaded presence”, he dutifully married Diana when he was 32 and she 19. The marriage never worked, although Charles did his best. She proved to be bulimic, suicidal, paranoid and alarmingly contrary and he went back to his earlier love, Camilla Shand. Eventually, after Diana’s horrifying death, Charles married Camilla and achieved some level of happiness. Unlike most royals, Charles is an “intellectual striver,” Sally writes. He has a serious and passionate interest in the environment, painting, gardening and architecture. He is an accomplished watercolorist, loves the opera, and enjoys a powerful cocktail.
Draft No. 4 by John McPhee
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux $25, 192 pp.)
Like other new writers at Time, John McPhee got his start writing the popular Miscellany column. Miscellany, which disappeared years ago, consisted of a single column of one-sentence items about oddities in the news. The brief introduction to the item had to be a pun, a very short pun. The Miscellany writer would normally move on to more substantial writing after a few months, but just when John came aboard, Time declared a hiring freeze, so John was stuck with the job for 18 months. “That came to roughly a thousand one-sentence stories, a thousand puns,” he writes.
When John was liberated from Miscellany, he soon proved to be a fine writer, producing cover stories for Time and then going on to become a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of many books (as did another contemporary colleague at Time, Calvin Trillin). Draft No. 4 is full of good insights about writing and interesting stories about his research. He seems to have spent much of his reporting in wild places and on quirky subjects (oranges? The Pine Barrens?)
As his title, Draft No. 4, indicates writing does not come easily. The first draft tends to be messy and he is not happy until he gets to the fourth. Then it reads easily. He has spent as much as two desperate weeks prostrated by writer’s bloc. When he wrote his first Time cover, on the comedian Mort Sahl, he found himself “sprawled on the floor at home surrounded by drifts of undifferentiated paper, and near tears in a catatonic swivet. As hour followed hour toward an absolute writing deadline. . .” he had produced just one sentence. He recalled that his high school English teacher had required her students to produce three pieces of writing every week and insisted that each piece be accompanied by a structural outline. So he sorted all that paper into stacks connected by theme or chronology. That gave him structure. He met the deadline and in the popular courses on writing he has taught for four decades at Princeton, he always stresses structure.
He also teaches the practice of “greening” that he had learned at Time. When a piece was written, checked and edited, it might come back from the makeup room with the notation “green 5”. That meant the article was five lines too long to fit and the writer had to find five lines to mark with a green pencil. It didn’t mean to lop off the last five lines, John writes, but “to remove words in such a manner that no one would notice that anything had been removed.” Although The New Yorker always seems to have space to spare (and doesn’t impose deadlines) John still believes in greening. He gets his students to do it on such tightly worded classics such as the Gettysburg Address (it can be done). John writes his colleague Trillin never bothered with word games but “found greening a thoroughly enjoyable puzzle.”
Free as Gods: How the Jazz Age Reinvented Modernism
By Charles A. Riley II (University of New England Press
$29.92, Amazon $16.99, 272 pp.)
Since leaving Fortune, where he was a reporter in the late 1980s, Charles has published 32 books, held a tenured professorship at Baruch College, edited art and antiques magazines, curated art exhibits in Amsterdam, Berlin, Lausanne, and New York, written many articles, given many lectures. He is prolific. Now he has been appointed director of the Nassau County Museum of Art. He also teaches part-time at Clarkson University.
His latest book, Free as Gods, picks up some of his favorite subjects: modern art, jazz, writers, painters. They all came together in one glorious feast in Paris stretching from the end of World War I to the Great Depression, from 1918 to 1929. Writers and artists from America fleeing prohibition and Russian emigrés fleeing the revolution joined the feast. They came to the Paris of Picasso and Joyce and their talents drew from each other an extraordinary outpouring of art, writing and music.
Charles examines the collaborations between the most famous—Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gershwin, Diaghilev—but also folds in the works of African Americans such as Sidney Bechet and Langston Hughes and of women such as Gertrude Stein and Nancy Cunard. He has a chapter on Archibald MacLeish, the poet and writer, who returned from Paris to become a writer for Fortune—and later Librarian of Congress.
The Lives of Dillon Ripley: Natural Scientist, Wartime Spy and Pioneering Leader of the Smithsonian Institution
By Roger D. Stone (University Press of New England, $27.95)
This Roger D. Stone (never to be confused with the political Roger J. Stone) was a Time bureau chief in San Francisco and Rio de Janeiro and also served as assistant to the publisher of Time and assistant to the president of Time Inc. Since then he has lived in Washington writing books about nature and the environment, serving as president of the Sustainable Development Institute and working with various non-profits. He got to know Dillon Ripley when both sat on the board of the World Wildlife Fund and that led to this, his seventh book.
As a boy in an affluent family (slightly diminished by the Great Depression,) Ripley was fascinated by the ducks in the pond at the family castle in Litchfield, Connecticut. That interest grew, after St. Paul’s and Yale, into a lifelong interest in ornithology. Soon after graduating he accepted an invitation from a friend to sail in a dilapidated schooner to New Guinea, where he collected thousands of bird skins and 87 live birds.
World War II interrupted his graduate studies in ornithology. Colonel William Donovan recruited him in 1943 to join the OSS, predecessor of the CIA, which was then virtually a Yale club. Back in Southeast Asia, Ripley infiltrated agents into Thailand and when Japan surrendered he flew into Bangkok, still occupied by unfriendly Japanese soldiers, and arranged for the liberation of Allied prisoners of war—while enjoying lavish hospitality from his Thai hosts.
In 1946 he joined the Yale faculty, where he spent 18 happy years as a professor, field scientist and eventually director of the Peabody Museum, which he revived from a long slumber. In 1964 he was named director of the Smithsonian Institution. He wanted to transform this “dusty archive” into a vibrant cultural institution. During his 20 years at the head of the Institution he added eight new museums.
When Ripley decided he also needed a magazine to give the Smithsonian a bigger voice, he turned to Time Inc. Life’s brilliant managing editor, Edward K. Thompson, a rumpled, blunt North Dakotan couldn’t have been more unlike Ripley but the two got along splendidly during a weekend at the Ripley estate in Litchfield. After many discussions, Thompson, who had just been turned loose by Time Inc., got the go-ahead to start a magazine even though magazines were beginning to suffer from TV competition. It was to be a slick, Time-sized monthly devoted to whatever interested the Smithsonian, but not a house organ. With no serious money up front, The Smithsonian was launched in 1969 as a benefit of membership for Smithsonian associates. The magazine quickly found 160,000 member-subscribers and by 1975 had a million.
Thompson ran The Smithsonian for 10 years and was succeeded by another Life veteran, Don Moser, who stayed in the job for 20 years and was succeeded by Carey Winfrey, who came from People. All three managing editors, writes Roger, remained faithful to the idea of producing thoughtful journalism about history, nature, science and the arts for educated readers. In addition to knowing Ripley well, Roger had access to all the family files and photos as well as the National Archives. He spent three years on the book and has told the story well.
The Medal Maker: A Biography of Victor Kovalenko
By Roger Vaughan (Cardinal Publishers Group, $35)
Roger Vaughan, a former Life writer, has written many books about sports and other subjects, but when he writes about sailing, yachtsmen pay attention. He has had a long relationship with yachting. His first book was about the U.S. America’s Cup syndicate. He was the founding editor of The Yacht Magazine and he has crewed in several off-shore races, including the lethal 1979 Fastnet race.
The “medal maker” of his new book is the Ukrainian-born coach of many Olympic sailing winners in the 470 class (the 470 is a lively sailing dingy for a crew of two that measures 4.7 meters and is fast enough to plane in a good breeze). Kovalenko was already an established sports figure in the Ukraine when he became coach of the 470 men’s and women’s crews that won gold and bronze medals, respectively, for the Ukraine at the 1996 Olympics. He had taken his teams to Australia in 1991 and fallen in love with the country. When the Australian Yachting Federation invited him to coach their weak 470 male and female teams in 1997 he accepted happily and emigrated with his wife and son. His teams won golds, silvers and bronzes and within six years he was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame.
Vaughan wrote for Life from 1965 to 1970, in New York and Chicago. As education editor he covered the Woodstock Festival and other cultural upheavals of the 1960s. He quit city life to go to Rhode Island and became a commercial fisherman before focusing on freelance writing. This book was published in Australia but can be obtained from Cardinal Publishers in the U.S.
Chardonnay Moms: Jane and Bobbi’s Greatest Hits
By Bobbi Eggers and Jane Condon
(BookBaby, paperback $15.99)
Jane Condon, a standup comedian and former Life reporter, and her friend, Bobbi Eggers, a former design director at J. Walter Thompson, have collaborated for years creating cartoons for calendars and newspapers about life in the burbs—in their case Greenwich, Connecticut. The Associated Press has described Jane as “an upper-crust Roseanne.” Bobbi draws the cartoons and Jane provides the words.
Now they have put their best cartoons into a book which focuses on surviving adventures in the burbs with husband and children with the frequent help of Chardonnay. Jane’s best memory of her career before comedy is a cover story on microsurgery she reported for Life in 1979. Since then she has built up a successful career as a standup comedian. She performs around the country, has appeared on several TV shows, and was the “audience favorite” on NBC’s “Last Comic Standing.” She gave the commencement speech in 2011 at Wellesley, her alma mater.