5 comments about Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity.

1. This book would be most interesting to people familiar with New York and Broadway. I found it fascinating when I knew the people the author was talking about, but in many cases there were pages and pages and pages detailing intricate relationships that were difficult to keep track of discussing people I really didn't know or care about. It is not a read for the faint hearted. Even the paperback book weighs a couple of pounds.



2. Next time you see an item about Brangelina, Brittany or the Gosselins, you might take a minute to remember Walter Winchell, who all but invented the modern culture of celebrity. Though he is virtually forgotten today, Winchell's column was once syndicated in more than 2000 newspapers daily, and 20 million listeners tuned in every Sunday night for the high-pitched, staccato delivery of his trademark opening: "Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea. Let's go to press!"
   
   Mr. Gabler deftly traces Winchell's rise from a second-rate vaudeville performer to one of the most famous and powerful men in the country, and his decline which paralleled that of his chosen media, newspapers and radio. By the time of his death in 1972, this man who once had the ear of Presidents was an obscure anachronism: poetic justice perhaps for a man ruthlessly obsessed with his own fame. The book is exhaustive in its coverage of Winchell's long career and tragedy-marred personal life; yet, even at 681 pages, it seldom flags. Mr. Winchell led a very interesting life.



3. It is fascinating to learn about that time in our history. It's a bit wordy, perhaps, and is taking me a little longer to get through it, than it usually does.



4. This book is an interesting study of a inordinately power driven and self-destructive person in the world of celebrities, suggesting valid psychological insights in the process. I found the parallels and actual connections with J. Edgar Hoover particularly interesting. The material also sheds a thorough and engrossing light on a unigue era of American social history, weaving in many other interesting "characters" in addition to WW - overall, a satisfying and worthwhile read.



5. Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity is an historical biography of Walter Winchell, a lower class Russian-American Jewish boy who morphed himself from a teenaged vaudeville performer into a nationally famous gossip columnist and radio personality that helped shape Depression-era and World War II America.
   
   Walter Winchell was born in Harlem on April 7, 1897. As an adult, Winchell recalled an unhappy childhood of poverty, deprivation and neglect, surrounded by people who insulted and reviled him because he was poor. Author Neal Gabler says Winchell's childhood made him antagonistic, suspicious and resentful throughout his life. As an adolescent, he found the attention he craved and the skills he would use later in his career on the vaudeville stage. From vaudeville, Gabler says Winchell learned the values of mass culture and how to appear to be incautiously independent, unselfconscious and liberated. In reality, he was none of these. Gabler maintains "vaudeville made Walter Winchell an entertainer for life and in life."
   
   When he was 12, Winchell taught himself to dance and was hired as a "song plugger" at a decrepit movie theater across from his apartment building. Song pluggers sang new tunes before the movie began, often leading the audience in group singing designed to sell them sheet music. When he was 13, Winchell won an audition with six other boys to fill parts in a show called the "Song Revue" that toured the country for a year on the Orpheum vaudeville circuit. Winchell performed with vaudeville companies and in a two-person act with his first wife, Rita Greene, until he was 23 when he escaped the stage to the poorly paid world of trade journalism as an assistant editor of "The Vaudeville News." Gabler says there is no evidence Winchell ever thought about becoming a reporter. He had little formal education and certainly no training in journalism. Nonetheless, he was driven to find a way to earn a living more secure than that of a vaudevillian. Attracted by the power of publicity that was indispensable to a vaudeville show, he leveraged his stage training, distinctive voice and theatrical personality into a character that looked like a traditional journalist. Rather than report, analyze and interpret legitimate news, however, Winchell became a big-name media gossip with enormous impact in a crucial period of 20th century American life.
   
   Winchell worked incredibly hard for his fame. By 1933, he was internationally famous for his Jergens Lotion-sponsored ABC radio program, his movie roles and newsreel narrations, personal appearances and his daily "The Column" in the New York Mirror, syndicated nationally by Hearst's King Features. Alexander Woolcott wrote, "I have never been able to get far enough into the North woods not to find some trapper there who would quote Winchell's latest observation." Winchell's power did not derive from his accuracy; he was often very wrong. He never admitted mistakes as his fault, never issued retractions. Gabler says "The Column" was so sacrosanct and café society's faith in publicity so devout that Winchell spoke and wrote with an oracular authority. "If Winchell says so, it's gotta be true," said Lucille Ball about a Winchell report she was expecting a child (she was). Journalist-turned-film-producer David Brown was shocked to read in Winchell one day that his wife was divorcing him, then heard from her lawyer the next morning.
   
   Winchell built his huge radio and newspaper following with a quirky blend of serious news seasoned with trivial theatrical gossip, topped off with stinging personal comment. He wrapped it all in a pop entertainment package that imitated journalistic form. He would give the same urgency and drama to a story of 10,000 people killed in an Ethiopian earthquake as to one about a cross-eyed man whose eyes were uncrossed when he was hit by a truck. Winchell's loyalists patronized him for his vicious attacks on famous people and his implied promise to tell them what was going to happen before it actually occurred. His shtick irritated traditional journalism and disgusted intellectuals who stumbled into listening or reading him. Gabler says Winchell was successful in the 1930s because Americans in the Depression distrusted traditional authority. And he nails the main reason for Winchell's success: for most folks, Walter Winchell was fun.
   
   His radio audience lived primarily in eastern states and in urban areas with populations over 50,000. New York Herald Tribune radio critic John Crosby explained Winchell as an anxiety-monger who brilliantly captured the national mood in times of uncertainty. He added, "There's a definite feeling of guilt connected with listening to Walter Winchell." Gabler reports Winchell was at the top of national radio ratings just after Pearl Harbor and for several months in 1947-48 as Americans faced the threat of another war, this time with the Soviet Union. At times, his radio audience was larger than those of Bob Hope and Jack Benny.
   
   Walter Winchell enjoyed a deep insider relationship with Franklin Roosevelt's White House and considered FDR a father figure and his benefactor. Just like Winchell's back-scratching friendship with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, the Roosevelt-Winchell association was a quid pro quo arrangement. Roosevelt guided Winchell politically for years, elevating him from the mud of gossip to occasionally credible political commentary. In return, Winchell flacked for FDR - and for Hoover - delivering the President's spin to Walter's massive radio and newspaper audiences. Roosevelt was also Winchell's apologist, lending him the power of the Oval Office when Walter needed protection. FDR's death marked the beginning of the end of Winchell's career.
   
   Gabler compares Winchell to FDR's successor, Harry Truman and in the process, helps readers understand the real Winchell. He says Truman was the "quintessence of nineteenth century rural Midwestern America, Walter of twentieth-century eastern urban America. Truman was self-effacing, Walter self-aggrandizing. Truman was dispassionate, Walter the very model of hot unreason. Truman was a moderator by instinct, Walter a crusader. Truman was a private man thrust into a public role, Walter was a man without any private life at all, a man always on stage."
   
   After bowing at Roosevelt's throne, Winchell found no majesty in Truman. He lacked the theatricality Roosevelt had in abundance that was so important to Winchell. What's more, Truman would never court Winchell as Roosevelt had and Walter resented it.
   
   One of Winchell's sharpest critics was Time magazine. The magazine infuriated Winchell with steel fisted jabs wrapped in velvet gloves, asking him to show "a greater sense of responsibility in deciding what is legitimate public news and what is mere trouble-making gossip." Winchell was always happy to return the disrespect. As he became a strident, scare-mongering critic of Russian communism, he lashed out at Time. "Whittaker Chambers, Russian spy, started as top editor at Time mag in 1939 and not long after that (sic) mag could find nothing good about anything this American reporter wrote or said."
   
   Because he'd been on the air, in print and in the national public eye so long, Winchell's audience had come to know what it could expect and developed a familiar, simple trust in him. Roosevelt's insider tips and interpretation of nuance had been extraordinarily important to Winchell in this regard. However after FDR's death, Winchell's naiveté and questionable judgment appeared with increasing frequency and America's trust in him declined. Two examples are telling. Shortly after Churchill's 1946 anti-Russian "Iron Curtain" speech at Westminster College in Missouri, Winchell wrote a piece praising Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, commending his "stern realism." Even though Winchell had always detested communism, it was hard for him to muster the same antagonism toward it as he had against Nazi fascism. Despite evolving into a staunch anti-Soviet, scaring America by calling for preparation for war against Russia, the Stalin piece weakened the Winchell mystique.
   
   He pushed his own popularity over a cliff with strong support for Senator Joseph McCarthy. In fact, he was McCarthy's loudest cheerleader during the Army-McCarthy hearings. Winchell was later subpoenaed by the Watkins bipartisan congressional committee investigating McCarthy's communist witch hunt, interrogating him about sources for his "reporting." Winchell never revealed them, but word on the street made him a stooge for McCarthy and his committee's counsel, Roy Conn. While McCarthy faded from public consciousness, Winchell continued to defend him. As he did, Gabler says people came to see Winchell as a "crazy reactionary who destroyed careers, exacted revenge, baited alleged Reds, flung lies and half-truths and generally engaged in the worst excesses of this shameful period. And it was all true ... he had become a right-wing fanatic himself."
   
   Toward the end of his career, Winchell confessed the fear that drove him constantly to self-promotion. "Who else will write about me?" he asked. Perhaps more revealing was Winchell's reaction to criticism that he'd talked too fast on one of his broadcasts. "If I slowed up," he said, "listeners would understand what I'm saying. Then they'd realize how unimportant it is and turn me off." Gabler says Winchell was always sensitive to the thin thread of celebrity, fearing it eventually would snap and banish him to the unknown. Rather than snap, though, Winchell's celebrity simply stretched into irrelevancy. Lonely and far removed from the center of public attention at the end of his frenetic professional and turbulent personal life, he died in California on February 20, 1972, a few months before his 75th birthday.
   
   Walter Winchell entertained millions of Americans for decades by appealing to base human instincts. He was a far cry from a critical thinking, reflective journalist. On the contrary, he was a simplistic, opportunistic gossip who knew how to grab the public's attention. As a journalist, he lurked in the intellectual shadows of contemporaries Walter Lippmann, H.L. Mencken, Dorothy Thompson, Boake Carter and David Lawrence, each of whom overpowered Winchell with their insight.
   
   Gabler's excellent book encourages a reflection on Winchell's legacy. He is the only American columnist / commentator ever to hold simultaneous top national broadcast ratings and print circulations in unrelated media properties and he did it for almost 20 years. His generation-long dominance of the American media-consuming audience of the day makes Walter Winchell arguably the most powerful individual voice in American journalistic history. In addition, he was one of the major characters who helped build U.S. radio. He was one of the first practitioners of tabloid journalism. Some would consider him the father of today's chatty, siren-chasing television content that masquerades as news.
   
   There is no question Walter Winchell left an extraordinarily large footprint on 20th century America from the Great Depression through the years immediately after World War II. Tens of millions of Americans formed opinions reading and listening to him gossip, speculate and ridicule famous people. This legacy is why Winchell by Neal Gabler is important: the book helps us understand how a great deal of American public opinion was formed in a crucial time of U.S. history. Much of that opinion came from the typewriter and voice of Walter Winchell.

2 comments about The Time of Their Lives: The Golden Age of Great American Book Publishers, Their Editors and Authors.

1. An excellent look at the snotty, talentless little prigs who fasten onto writers like leeches, getting their ego rocks off by screwing with their work. Writers hate them, but mostly won't say so because these little lightweights are the gatekeepers. So they butter them up, but between each other refer to them as "idiotors."
   
   I didn't see any mention of the fact that 85% of their books fall dead off the presses. That's only a 15% success rate. In any other business, that would be a formula for failure.
   
   Good bits on Ken McCormick, the genius who brought Doubleday back from bankruptcy, and who generously subsidized countless writers, and never tampered with their work. Consequently he had more bestsellers than anyone else. His story of meeting Pat Nixon in the kitchen was just like him. Ken's career alone could make a book, but mostly publishing has forgotten him. When Publishers Weekly made a list of the leading editors of the 20th century, he didn't even get a mention. If the world can forget him, you know what the rest of them are worth. If a writer's got anything, his name lives on at least a little while, but who remembers editors? And they change jobs and leave the business even more rapidly now than they used to.



2. The author has had a long and distinguished career in American publishing, including being president of the Book-of-the-Month Club and an editor, and seems to know personally about everybody engaged in American publishing between 1946 and the early 1980's. It is his contention that the post-war period until the early 1980's was at least as much a golden age of publishing as were the 1920's and 1930's with figures such as the legendary Max Perkins. Whether or not one agrees entirely with this assertion, the book does focus upon an extremely fascinating period and group of folks. The author simply went out and interviewed 120 "eyewitnesses" who had been engaged in publishing during this period at a variety of publishers: Knopf, Atheneum, Viking, Doubleday, Harper, and Little Brown to name just a few are discussed in individual chapters. The major paperback houses also are included. Because the author was interviewing his "own", he is just wonderful at filling out his pictures of what publishing was and how it operated during this period with insiders' perspectives. My only problem with the book, which despite its nearly 500 page length moves quickly, is that it is hard to keep all the large cast of characters and companies straight as you pass through the chapters. I also longed for a bit more of an explanation of exactly how editors "edit." His portraits of some key players, such as Alfred A. Knopf, Robert Gottlieb, and George Braziller, add enormously to the richness of the narrative. A small bibliography and some interesting photographs are included, as well as a solid index. A valuable book that is also quite interesting to read.

5 comments about Blindsided: Lifting a Life Above Illness: A Reluctant Memoir.

1. A very moving memoir of a man who has lived with MS since the age of 25. Cohen is 60 now and still "coping" - a term and a life strategy which gets much ink here. In a discussion of this book with a friend who had already read it, he characterized it as a kind of literate good-news-bad-news-joke. God told Cohen, "The bad news is I've given you MS; the good news is I'm also giving you Meredith Vieira." Point taken, I suppose. But this is a story of a very difficult life lived with courage coupled with a very important and quirky sense of humor. When Cohen discovered later in life that he also had colon cancer - not once, but twice - it was nearly too much to bear. But bear it he does, and he tells you the whole messy business too, leaving very little to the imagination. He admits it was nearly a breaking point in his marriage, and also admits he was not a very nice person to be around. But his wife and kids stuck with him. This is, to put it in a nutshell, just one hell of a good book. I admire Cohen tremendously for all he has endured. But hey, he did have Meredith, so ... Great read; I recommend it highly. - Tim Bazzett, author of PINHEAD: A LOVE STORY



2. I am glad to see that this book helped MS sufferers, so that it perhaps will do some good to persons who don't mind the quality of the prose. I was quite surprised and disappointed in the writing given Mr. Cohen's journalistic background: I found the sentences abrupt and the use of cliched phrasing abundant. Nor does Mr. Cohen himself seem particularly contemplative about what he has undergone. It may be that journalistic style simply does not lend itself to describing the understanding of an experience; it is useful to report what happens, but the nuances of an evolved response get lost. Many of the sentences and paragraphs read like bullets in a memo describing an atrocity (no argument about the diseases both being that). At the very least the book needed a sympathetic editor who could smooth out the jagged prose, but perhaps also draw more emotional processing out of him--or have postponed the book.



3. Richard Cohen is a newscaster and journalist with the big networks. In this memoir he ponders his life - the professional challenges he incurs and the Multiple Sclerosis he has had since he was 23 years old.
   
   What is resilience, courage, self-esteem? What makes him feel like a diminished person in his own view and that of others? Mr. Cohen reflects on these questions and the challenges he faces as he tries to understand his life as a person with chronic illness.
   
   I wondered about his alcohol use. Was he self-medicating? Was his drinking an act of self-destruction?
   
   I was also left with a distinct question. What are the genetic components of Multiple Sclerosis? Mr. Cohen's father and aunt both were afflicted with the disease.
   
   I recommend this book for anyone who has struggled with a serious illness or knows someone they care for who has a serious illness.



4. This book was so helpful. His descriptions of the MS symptoms and the struggles with who to tell and not tell about the disease really hit home. It is so good to know others with MS have the same problem. Thank you for your insight and courage to "tell the world".



5. Everything was fine, I ordered the book, I received it in a timely manner. That's what I expect from Amazon...........Karolyn

4 comments about In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950 (Collected Essays Journalism and Letters of George Orwell).

1. Do you know what a time capsule is?
   
   I saw one pictured in an old Life magazine back issue about the 1983 World's Fair in New York. 1938, the brink of war's abyss. The time capsule was featured at the Fair, filled with Depression era technology and pop culture. An ominous looking black tank... a dark looking torpedo thing... metallic, shiny and heavily lowered by chain into a cement crypt to sleep for decades...observed by people who would never live to see it opened. The metallic time traveller contained hopeful letters to the future from a world on the brink of war and beset by economic decline.
   
   The old world of sentiment was dying... to be replaced by a new streamlined world that promised utopia to some and endless darkness to others.
   
   The last book in this great series...perhaps the saddest and most ominous. The begining of the atomic age (1945)is mentioned in this last part of the series... a bright atomic flash succeded by a long proceeding dark shadow...pointing towards 1984? Devolution, decay and death not evolution, utopian progress or hope shadows this last book.
   
   The Penguin Books edition is simply a reprint of the earlier edition by Sonia Orwell made two years earlier in 1968. It is better bound as the earlier editions tend to crack because of their great age. This book is unique for two reasons: it is loaded with letters and tends to reveal more about the inner thought life of Orwell. This collection of writings shows the Orwell of the Cold War, far removed from the Edwardian England of his youth as was his character George Bowling from his childhood; Bowling looking at the crumbling churchyard of his youth from a street leading to the streamlined future Orwell and Bowling seemed to fear more than embrace.
   
   The technology of mass death has also the power to end dictatorships while paradoxically threatening life on earth. The threat of total war would make slave states stable enough to survive without any credible threat. In other words, Eastasia, Eurasia, and Oceania would be forever locked into the static war of "1984" much like 1948 was locked into the seemingly permanent Cold War.
   
   The problem of England's birth dearth reappears in yet another essay as an unavoidable fate...a fact "In Front of Your Nose."
   
   The "Red Duchess" wrote back to Orwell after he had long written about her. The Duchess of Atholl had long been a subject of interest to Orwell who commented often on the "Blimps" who seemed to plague english society with various hues of functionlessness. Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists seemed to echo the Duchess' radicalism on the right wing.
   
   The letters in many of the Orwell collections never seem to have answers. It is interesting to ponder why so few answers were ever published or if they ever existed. Was this an issue of deliberate omission?
   
   Another curious unanswered fact: was why Orwell never seemed to write detailed letters about his personal life. There are no details about the adoption of Richard, the death of his first wife, or his second marriage...critical time points. When Orwell writes about hospital visits near his death bed, there is nothing about Sonia's involvement. Personal illness letters would have revealed much integrity and compassion, yet they are conspicuously abscent. Did Sonia want to leave out embarassing details such as why Orwell was so often alone with his TB or why she insisted on using his pen name as her married name? The last selection in the book is a poignant diary and note book, Orwell's last writings laced with gloomy thoughts about children dying, an outline for a long short story and notes about Evelyn Waugh.
   
   It is ironic that Waugh wrote the "Loved One" about the funeral industry in America and Waugh was the last writer Orwell wrote about. Was Orwell thinking about death, but felt a need to intellectualize it rather than confront it honestly? There is no introspection involving Christ or eternity (despite Orwell's traditional values and previous essays on religion)...only a pointed remark about how appropriate a symbol (seen in a picture) was a crucifix hiding a stiletto "for the Christian religion."Interestingly,Orwell pointed out the contradiction in Matthew about the geneology of Jesus without citing the commonly known answer to it. Orwell also quoted a wrong verse for the whale in the book of Jonah when talking about Henry Miller's book "Inside the Whale." It is strange that a mind as sharp as Orwell's would find death a non-issue as he lay dying and would apply little intellectual accuracy towards the Bible even though he lamented the collective lost of the belief in immortality in several writings, claimed, in one letter, to have seen a ghost, and was upset that hell was often lampooned by comic strips. Orwell and death... quite an enigma.
   
   Orwell was one of those men cursed with integrity and conscience who have no beliefs to sustain their integrity. Men like Winston in "1984" are forced to eventually pay homage to the idols they fight..."I love you Big Brother"... then die obedient under the System; like the show trials of Communists under Stalin with its numerous self-confessions followed by executions or banishments.
   
   The man who died in 1950, midway in the twentieth century, was embraced with its begining and cursed with its future. Orwell longed for the Edwardian society of his childhood, yet had to live with the dawn of nuclear armed super states. Orwell was the
   policeman shooting an elephant in Burma, and later performing a hanging for an empire he detested, yet had the integrity to serve. Orwell was Dorthy Hare dutifully accepting the role of a church spinster and a life of forgotten service. Orwell was George Bowling looking with longing recollection at the church of his youth and seeking the inner freedom of the long lost fish pond.
   
   Orwell was frequently at odds with left culture: abortion, homosexuality, trendiness (vegetarianism), yet he was part of the Left. The man who died in 1950 had an Edwardian soul, yet was damned to live in a totalitarian-threatened world created by the failure of Capitalism in 1929.
   
   Orwell's intergrity of vision may have kept that totalitarism from ever being justified.



2. This fourth volume concludes the excellent essay collection from a man who died much too young and with whom I do by far not always agree, but who provided me a very satisfying and instructive reading experience.
   I chose the headline from one of the essays in this volume because it gives Orwell in a nutshell, including my own ambiguities about him. He argues against the Soviet apologists, in the early post war time, who say that one must break eggs to make an omelette. (Is that a Lenin quote, btw?) His question: so where is the omelette? strikes me as witty and appropriate, but at second glance as callous and cruel. After all he seems to imply that yes, you may kill a few million people for a 'good' purpose, but the purpose must be met.
   In such moments Orwell is deserted by his own devotion to clarity and he gets caught in his own puns. That does happen to him. As much as he lambasts against bad language, he will write e.g. 'I could multiply these examples endlessly' (talking about bad stories from the Soviet Union), when he actually means, he could add to these examples for some time.
   Reading the man for 4 volumes gives me the conviction, that this suspicious interpretation of mine is unfair. No, he would not have intended to mean that.
   The title 'In Front of Your Nose' refers to our ability to harbor contradictory notions without suffering too much from it: the English intelligencia in the 30s was able to oppose Hitler as well as disarmament and conscription. Another example: the gospel of Matthew tells us that Jesus descended from Abraham and David through his father Josef, and then proceeds to tell us that Josef was in fact not the father. (I am sure theologists are perfectly able to talk this contradiction away.)
   Vol. 4 has plenty of worth while literary criticism as well, like the previous 3. The essay on good bad books predicts that Uncle Tom will outlive the complete works of Virginia Woolf. (Frankly speaking for me that has already happened.) Jack London could tell his stories well, but they are not well written.
   Let us close our Orwellian peregrination with a timeless reminder: political language is designed to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. Right, my AFs in the much afflicted US?



3. The late James J. Martin stated that one could learn great prose from reading George Orwell. Orwell's anthology titled IN FRONT OF YOUR NOSE is a good book to learn political insight and excellent writing. Orwell was not only knowledgeable, but he expressed some of the political tragedies and problems of the 20 th. century in this book. Readers should note this book is the fourth volume of essays of Orwell's essays literary criticism, political protest, etc.
   
   Orwell was one of the very few who realized what a disaster W.W. II was for both Europeans and Asians. His essays on the forced repatriation of millions to the Soviet Union to miserable die in concentration camps were among the first to publicize this tragedy. Orwell's essays were blunt in stating that the only real winner from W.W. II was Big Communism especially in lieu of the rapid disintegration of the British Empire.
   
   Orwell gave a good description of the inconsistent thinking of the British people. The British wanted total victory at any cost, and found themselves in bad economic shape. Many British complained about the immigration of Polish refugees to mine coal in Great Britain. Yet, the British public also complained (whined) about coal shortages. Orwell indicated the inconsistency of these remarks and commented that the British failed to see the logic between acts and consequences. Orwell Presented a clear picture of what was to occur with the British Empire which disintegrated rapidly after "victory" during W.W. II.
   
   Orwell's essay on Gandhi is an interesting case study of Orwell's honest assessment of political leaders. Orwell is clear that he could not live like Gandhi, and Orwell admitted that he probably could be friends with the Hindu leader. Yet,Orwell highly praised Gandhi's courage, policy of nonviolent resistence to the British rules, and Gandhi's honesty. Orwell gave Gandhi praise for being honest and a decent man among political rogues, hypocrites, and cowards. Whether one agrees with Gandhi, he was indeed a brave, honest man. Among poltical figures these are rare traits indeed.
   
   This reviewer disagrees with part of Orwell's criticism of James Burnham. Orwell correctly shows Burnham's errors in predicting the outcome of W.W.II. However, Orwell should have recognized Burnham's book THE MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION was a solid account that political and economic affairs were to be controlled by managers and "experts" rather than a market economy and by traditional political processes.
   
   Orwell's anthology has interesting essays of literary criticism and correspondence. Orwell was suprisingly well versed with continental European poltical leaders and literary figures. There is an interesting letter that Orwell wrote to Arther Koestler, author of DARKNESS AT NOON,in which Orwell favorably compares this book with Orwell's own 1984.
   
   Orwell also has some disturbing remarks regarding "allied" abuse and torture of defeated German prisoners of war. Orwell reflected that he remembered British and U.S. propaganda against the Germans before and during W.W. II. Yet, right in front of his nose, the "allies" were acting in the same beastial manner against those caught on the wrong side of the war. This was quite disturbing to Orwell, or any thoughtful person.
   
   This reviewer has always been very impressed with Orwell's work. Any thoughtful individual who is not afraid of clear writing, honesty, and truth would enjoy Orwell. Unfortunately, the number of such people is small. As Orwell wrote one time, propaganda and lying do not decieve people. Propaganda and lying only help people who want to be deceived.



4. Essays and journalism and very good footnotes deal with starvation in Europe, prevention of literature, Gandhi, an attempt to form an organization which would deal with issues like expelling people from their homes, people forced back to Soviet Russia, and much more including civil liberities for anarchists.

5 comments about Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories.

1. I received this book gratis for sending a contribution to a non tradtional organization in Vermont. It was a nice gift since Ms Pollett is an interesting lady who writes wonderfully well and has gotten over the feminist's need to shock her reader. At least 60 years old, she has settled in as a devoted mother (perhaps a grand mother by now), seems happily married though, puzzingly, her husbands are pretty much the invisible people in this work...she admits to two, both of whom she speaks fondly if briefly about, an early one long since divorced (the father of her beloved daughter) and her current one (or at least current to the publication of the paperback issue). She spends pages recounting her live in experience with "G", a seemingly successful author and roue who ditched Ms. Pollett for a younger woman (with whom he had been carrying on an afair all the time he lived with Ms. P, the cad!)I guess the intense flame tha burnt out is always more memorable than the traditional fire that endures.
   Buy a copy and spend an nice night with a quirky New York lady who will keep you interested.
   JDP, East Hampton, New York



2. I went into Learning to Drive as a fan of KP's essays in The Nation and remain so. The author's keen wit in there front and center. Some of the reviews tried to put across that she was some kind of a loon for cyberstalking the ex-boyfriend. But it wasn't just that he walked out--he seems to have been living a bizarre double life, which included intimacy with women they both knew. I think KP's post-breakup "research" was just her way of trying to process a deeply weird scenario. Yes, we'd all like to think we'd be above it but miles & mocassins, &c. Anyway, the bad breakup is only a small part of this book, and it's always a delight to read KP holding forth on politics, culture, and the infinite number of ways Americans can be hypocritical on the subject of women's roles from daughters to wives to mothers.



3. It's hard to know in whom I am more disappointed, in Random House for publishing "Learning to Drive," Ms. Pollitt for writing it, or me for buying it. I bought this book with the expectation that I would learn something about women, a class of persons, as a heterosexual male, I have dealt with extensively and seem to have lacked a great deal of understanding of for many years.
   
   Instead what I encountered was superficiality, vindictiveness, incoherence and hypocrisy.
   
   The book starts out with a promising metaphor. ppp, portrayed as a well-meaning but rather bumbling person, is being taught to drive by a patient, knowledgeable soul. In a parallel way, the reader might think, ppp in writing this book is going to teach us in a patient, knowledgeable way, about the soul of women.
   
   But no. Instead we are treated to the most banal of stories, the forsaken lover who hurls the venom of her disappointment hither and thither, strangely much more so at a woman friend she calls Judas, pardon, I mean Judith, than at the man she believes betrayed her, whom she labels "G" (given that G is the only person in the book who gets a capital letter instead of a name, one must wonder what other capital G entity she may have been thinking of when she so designated him).
   
   The book then proceeds to wander all over the map, the opening metaphor and original romantic betrayal seemingly forgotten. Meanwhile we get sparkling insights into male-female relationships such as this: when G left her he told her he was going to live alone. But a friend of hers told her that was a lie because men can't stand to live alone for more than 10 minutes. And in fact it turned out he had left her for a younger woman! So there you are. The friend said it and her prediction turned out to be correct. What more proof could you want that men are just that way.
   
   Beyond her superficial observations, ppp oozes hypocrisy. As noted here is a putative feminist who blames the woman in the quadrangle she describes but not the man who betrayed her. At one point, she even in effect forgives G for leaving her for a younger woman because after all if it's available why not take it. But her claws are out razor sharp for Judith who did just that with G.
   
   Here's another strange thing: in the opening pages of this book, Ms. Pollitt per the title is, in the present tense, learning to drive. But about 150 pages later she is blithely discussing how she used to drive to her home in Connecticut apparently from New York - no mean trick for someone who later has to learn to drive. Thus the whole premise of the book seems to built on a fiction or a distortion. Very inspirational.
   
   Here's my recommendation: Don't buy the book. Better to spend your time and money on As the World Turns re-runs. At least dumb there is the expectation.



4. Katha Pollitt is perceptive and funny, and describes some of the issues women have these days. I like her humor, and good writing, and highly recommend the essays in Learning to Drive.



5. As a general rule I have found that books that consist of previously published columns and suchlike material bundled together to make a book usually aren't all that good; that they tend to be a "greatest hits" compendium of the author's (supposedly) best work in the opinion of some publishing house book editor. Pollitt's book Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories is the rare exception to my rule.
   
   Learning to Drive is a coherent and tenderly personal progress report of Pollitt's private life and growth as culled from assorted columns published in the Nation and the New Yorker magazines. As someone or other once famously said: "The personal is the political." And Pollitt goes on to show exactly how true that observation really is.
   The "personal is political" meme therefore says that our personal lives are in considerable part politically delimited and determined so that improving our personal lives means we must collectively address our lives and relationships in political terms.
   
   The choices we make personally have political implications. Obviously the choice to be an activist or not or to support this or that political project has political implications even though it is personally undertaken. But as Pollitt shows, so do our most personal relationships. All the choices we make, even the ones that seem totally apolitical and personal, have political implications. The choice to wear make-up or not, to watch TV or not, to eat this or that or not, to wear this or that item of clothing, to use a bank or not, or as in Pollitt's case, whether to put up with an obviously unfaithful boyfriend, is a personal choice, but it is also a political one.
   
   Pollitt's mini-memoir is also replete with refreshing and honest insights about the limits of ideological purity when one's chosen ideology founders in real life practice. One of the best ongoing themes in this work is the story of her parents and especially Pollitt's father, who although a dedicated card-carrying member of the Communist Party, gives up the famous line from Stalin about having to `break eggs to make an omelet', that (paraphrasing from memory here), "I saw a lot of broken eggs, but never any omelets." Pollitt observes that her father never gave up his Marxist ideology, but he could honestly admit to its failures and shortcomings. That observation is quite Orwellian and in the most positive and affirming of ways, too. As in the way that Orwell, as a man of the Left, had no compunctions about saying what he really thought or saw, regardless of his chosen ideological leanings.
   
   Katha Pollitt's book succeeds in much the same way; she never renounces her political views, but she isn't blindly trying to superimpose ideology in place of reality by trying to call a circle a square, either.

5 comments about The Hemingway Patrols: Ernest Hemingway and His Hunt for U-Boats.

1. Terry Mort, in "the Hemingway Patrols" gives us the historical background as why Hemingway, and other private boat owners, put to sea in a desperate attempt to hunt for, and even possibly engage, German U-boats.
   
   However, there was simply too little drama about the "hunt" itself for the author to fill an entire book. To fill this void, Terry Mort does a good job of describing the military situation Hemingway found himself, but even with this background information, there was not enough material to fill a book.
   
   To merit an entire book, Mort, by necessity, gives us Hemingway the man, his failed marriages, his adventures in the Spanish Civil War, and of course, Hemingway, the author.
   
   If enjoy reading Hemingway, you will appreiciate Mort's literary references. However, this reviewer's experience with Hemingway consists of having read The Old Man and the Sea in high school. The author's literary references and quotes from Hemingway's writings, and especially his references to Hemingway's contemporaries in the literary world, were, to this reviewer, so much wasted effort. Former English majors might find such literary comparasions enjoyable reading, but this former Political Science major, like in high school years before, was left with the feeling of, "so what?"
   
   Mort's reporting of Hemingway's failed marriages was interesting, if "gossipy." The recounting of the adventures in the Civil War was moderately interesting, but only tangentially related to the hunt for U-boats.
   
   Mort deserves five stars for trying to get this reviewer to "appreciate literature" and Hemingway the man, but for this student of history, we are still left with a three star book.
   



2. Terry Mort's research into German U-Boats, the Nazi spy situation in Cuba, the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War, and the life and career of Ernest Hemingway's third wife Martha Gellhorn, all make this book incredibly fascinating. He really fills in the background on so many fascinating issues Hemingway only briefly touches on in his writing.
   
   The only problem is that the research Mort does really works against his hero. Once the real U-Boat menace is described, both the deadly attacks and the dangers faced by the U-Boats themselves, Papa and his drinking buddies on the little fishing boat just look like amateurs playing at war. Terry Mort takes just about everything Hemingway ever did and said at face value -- even when the man was plainly drunk and making up excuses not to write. Make no mistake, however. When he did write to the best of his abilities, Hemingway was as good as the best. Just read a five page story like "A Clean Well Lighted Place" and you'll see what I mean.
   
   But by the time this story begins, Hemingway had already begun the long, slow slide into alcoholism and suicidal despair. There's a rot, a softness in later books like FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS that Terry Mort either misses or chooses to ignore. He writes so well about subjects like navigation, the sea, and sailing basics, but when the subject is Hemingway's writing he sees nothing but good, better, best.
   
   The real tragedy of Hemingway's life is that he became an alcoholic. And the truth Terry Mort avoids throughout the book is that in the end an alcoholic's first loyalty is to his disease. Hemingway had the raw materials of greatness in many fields. Early in his life he made successful gestures as a husband, a father, a literary man, and a military man, but by the time of this book his gestures were secondary to his main occupation, drinking.
   
   My personal theory is that Hemingway was making semi-conscious attempts to commit suicide going back at least as far as the Twenties. And that his U-Boat patrols were a sort of half-hearted attempt to opt out of life by getting wiped out in "heroic" fashion. Mort admits his attack plan was "suicidal" but doesn't see the real meaning of that description. I'm not saying any of this to bring anybody down, and certainly not to demean Hemingway's greatest work. And I'm very well aware that it was only after all this was over that he wrote his final masterpiece, THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, a book I really love. That book could certainly not have been written without the thousands of hours Hemingway spent in the Gulf. But the tragic side of his life, which only makes his literary achievements more admirable, is rigorously excluded from this book.



3. If I hadn't just finished reading Mark Ott's so-called "eco-biography," A Sea of Change: Ernest Hemingway and the Gulf Stream--a Contextual Biography, then possibly I would have given Terry Mort's very similar book a higher review.
   
   It actually has more biographical juice in it than the literary criticism of Ott, but both writers point to a Hemingway strangely similar to the John Steinbeck who was so fascinated with Doc Ricketts and the Sea of Cortez. That two of the great US novelists cared so much about the oceans and about undersea life is an odd coincidence, or maybe not a coincidence, for both men studied Thoreau and the proto-ecological movements of the previous century. Ott makes better use of the log Hemingway kept for the Pilar, showing how their formal qualities--the fragmentary denotation of nouns and adjectives as the watchers spotted a dolphin, for example, or encountered heavy rain--led to later changes in Hemingway's style--not all of them for the better. But here Mort is much mor knowledgeable about German U Boats and the dangers they posed to the Atlantic seaboard and to US naval efforts in general.
   
   Almost as a subplot we have Martha Gellhorn and her bemused attitude towards Hemingway's defense action. She wrote, "Loving is a habit like another and requires something nearby for daily practice." Hemingway would have loved it if Martha had accompanied him on his U Boat expeditions, and maybe their marriage would have lasted longer if she wasn't so skeptical, but as Mort points out, Hemingway expected his disciples to toe the line 100 percent on all points or face his wrath, and Martha Gellhorn just wasn't built that way. Was she a careerist as some have charged? Certainly her alliance with Hemingway raised her profile no end, and she knew it.
   
   Finally, Mort does expand our sense of Hemingway's quarrel with "honor." On the one hand he saw it as an antiquated concept responsible for the worst carnages of World War I; on the other, says Mort, he believed in T E Lawrence's line about "there could be no honor in a sure success, but much might be wrested from a sure defeat."



4. As much WWII history - some with new information such as the 2002 discovery of the sunken U166 German submarine - as the weaving of literary criticism, the contexts of Hemingway's life and his hunt for U-boats. Was impressed that Scribner is the publisher - and could see why after reading it. As an amateur student of WW II's "Pacific War" and the air wars of Europe, I started to grasp a new understanding of WWII's merchant marine strategy and Atlantic submarine battle. The author's naval and Caribbean narratives were fresh, most readable and understandable. As a reader of Hemingway's novels with modest short story experience, I was fascinated how the author moved through Hemingway's early years, Paris and Spain to the Gulf Stream, Fifth Columns and the author's own takes on Hemingway. Most enjoyable - and informative.



5. The Hemingway Patrols: Ernest Hemingway and His Hunt for U-Boats
   
   
   This is a fascinating book--no need to have a particular interest in either Hemingway or the U-Boat patrols that were conducted off of our shores during WWII to enjoy it. Terry Mort has a way of transporting the reader into the center of the story. I was immediately immersed in Hemingway's huge multi-faceted world from the beginning. I felt as if I were on board the Pilar anticipating a surprise confrontation with the enemy at any moment, or relaxing with "Papa" and friends in his favorite watering holes in Key West and Havana sharing lots of drinks and enjoying his colorful and often grandiose stories, or at home(s) with him and his family. By the end of the book, which came much too quickly, I felt as if I had been given the rarest of intimate and really true glimpses into this brilliant and complex man and his thoughts, feelings, relationships and adventures. I will probably pick this book up again soon as I am already missing my time with him and the huge life that he led.

5 comments about Sports Illustrated: Hate Mail from Cheerleaders and Other Adventures from the Life of Reilly.

1. If you liked the back page of SI, you will love this book and read it again and again. It is funny, heartwarming, and imformative. Great book, a must read for any sports fan.



2. A compliation of articles, if you're a fan of Rick Reilly or sports in general, you'll definitely appreciate this gift.



3. I feel a sports columnist's job is to evoke emotion in the reader. Make him/her laugh, cry, get angry, just don't bore them. Riley does that better than anyone. He's an amazingly gifted writer and I loved nearly every bit of this book. I'd already read most of these columns being a subscriber to Sports Illustrated, but they were definitely worth a re-read.
   
   He's great at tugging the heartstrings: The story on the cross country runner with cerebral palsey, the Middlebury fan who is confined to a wheelchair because of CP, the father who nominates his son -- killed in a motorcycle accident -- for Faces in the Crowd. All tear jerkers.
   
   He makes me laugh throughout the book, and get angry with all those arrogant/self-entitled athletes such as the steroid users.
   
   He's not just a sportswriter, he's a great writer. I can't recommend this book enough.
   
   * I wish Riley would've stayed with Sports Illustrated. I've heard he's dabbling in TV or ESPN, somewhere. Bad move. I've seen his TV commercials, he's not good on TV. He's a superstar in print, he should stay there. Nevertheless, this is one heckuva book.



4. As a recent Journalism grad this book was amazing. I would love to get into the sports writing field (although I have a feeling I'll never reach Reilly status). This was a great set of stories and life experiences. Very humorous and very touching.



5. I read a few chapters each night.
   
   One night I had tears on my pillow from laughter.
   
   The next night I had tears on my pillow from the inspirational story.
   
   It's likely that many of my friends will get this book for Christmas or their birthday. Just a great book!

5 comments about Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir.

1. I am so glad this book is still in print! I still have my 1966 hardbound copy and love rereading it every five years or so before delving back into Hemingway's works! If you are a Hemingway fan, you MUST read this memoir -- it is a sheer delight, and Hotchner makes you feel as if you knew Hemingway personally. Quite simply, a gem of a book!



2. A.E. Hotchner, a gifted writer in his own right, provides a fascinating memoir of the last 13 years of Ernest Hemingway's life. As a close friend during the time period between 1948 and 1961, Hotchner provides an insider's glimpse of Hemingway's travels, friends, writing, and troubled personality. Hotchner manages to fill in most of Hemingway's personal and literary history before they met through a variety of stories told to him by the great writer and master story teller. Thus, the reader is transported to Spain and its bullfights and bullfighters, Paris, where Hemingway spent his twenties making his name in literature, and Hemingway's home near Havana where he lived, wrote, and fished on his boat, the Pilar. His last years are particularly tragic, as it seems pre-ordained that Hemingway will kill himself despite the best efforts of those who loved him. Hemingway, whose brilliant career was cut short by mental illness, left a legacy of magnificent short stories and novels written in his sparse, gritty style that still ring true fifty years after his death.



3. For the longest time Hemingway's grinning, bearded face stared up at me from A.E. Hotchner's Hemingway memoir, "Papa Hemingway", so after what seemed like an eternity, I started reading my grandfather's copy of this book, a paperback edition from 1966.
   
   I was immediately hooked.
   
   The book has an impressive conversational tone and pace. Hotchner's been accused of quoting letters and making them into conversations, but who cares? This is captivating reading! When Hotchner first meets "Papa" in 1948 we are there to witness Hemingway downing vase-sized daiquiris, and we see Hemingway robustly swimming ashore with his shorts and shirt tied in a bundle with the German "Gott Mit Uns" belt, hand held over his head while swimming using only one arm. These vignettes captured my imagination and were about as ideal a Hemingway image as one could imagine! Hotchner captures Hemingway the wise philosopher, the hurt, angry writer whose 1950 novel, "Across the River and Into the Trees" is roundly rejected by the critics, and we ride high alongside Papa when he storms back to the top of the heap with "The Old Man and the Sea." Hotchner vividly recalls Cuba, Italy, and Spain as he accompanies Hemingway on his adventures.
   
   After reading "Papa Hemingway", my enthusiasm took off and by the next year I had read and collected most of Hemingway's works as well as the numerous biographies about him. Hemingway was my portal to the first half of the 20th Century. Through "Papa Hemingway" I discovered many of the writers, artists, and political figures of his time and became fascinated with the 1920s and '30s. "Papa Hemingway" might not be the ideal first book to discover Hemingway the writer, but it serves as a magnificent first book to anyone wanting to learn about Hemingway the raconteur, adventurer, and friend.



4. I am sure it is a great book, however it is not the book I received. I did not get the book I ordered, instead i received two copies of "Papa Hemingway, A Personal Memoir"



5. The reader is treated to a feast of biographical detail and insight. A rare and able biographer gives us a close-up and personal glimpse of a great man and character. What more can one ask for? In a league of its own!

5 comments about Are You Somebody?: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman.

1. Nuala O'Faolain's book is elegantly written, but sometimes it got so depressing that I wondered if I wanted to keep reading.
   
   Her emotional life seems to be a never-ending train wreck, as she hopelessly pursues one man after another.
   
   I wondered if she was any better off than the mother she so pitied, neglected by her husband, looking after ten kids, and sitting at home all day reading and drinking.



2. After being completely charmed by 'Are you Somebody?" I was expecting at least a well-written decent read. Instead this book was disjointed, rambling, went into highly irrelevant personal details, and didn't seem to have much of a point.



3. Nuala O'Faulain writes of her life in an uncompromising, hard look at a time spent very differently from many of her countrywomen, and gives vast amounts of insight into the roles prevalent in Irish culture, and how they effect every day life. She has lived a full,wandering life and while she hasn't been endlessly happy, she has learned to value what she has and who she has become. There is much here of value for any woman to take away.



4. I did not like this book. It is a memoir that is more like a catharsis and 'atta girl in order to make excuses for a fairly valueless and vapid life.
   
   Fueled by the Womens' Movement, Ms. O'Faolain justifies her short-lived, alcohol-entrenched or extra-marital liaisons with no remorse. She claims that if her lovers are married, it's their wives' problem (and this from a soon-to-be feminist!?). She is also a name dropper of all manner of literati with some anti-semitic descriptions thrown in.
   
   Finally, we look at the terrible neglect and abuse from her childhood with narrow-visioned denial. She demonstrates this same denial when she minimizes the domestic violence in her relationships.
   
   I have to wonder if she's ever done deep reflection or if she has any capacity to put herself in someone else's shoes.
   
   Not recommended.



5. I'm as surprised at all the bad reviews, as some of you are surprised by the good ones. I would call this book one of the best i've ever read. I love books for different reasons... the quality of writing, the "story" itself, the development of the story, and/or how the book itself makes me feel - ie. how much i'm moved or entertained by it. I sobbed thru about the last 60 pages of this one. This book made me wish i knew this woman. It's incredible to me - her life, her dreams, her intelligence, her inner beauty and turmoil...everything about her. I will read this again...i will be 50 next month, and maybe this book means more to me than most - as i live alone (divorced), and never had children.
   
   We love things for different reasons. I love this book for all the right ones. Enjoy.

No comments about LEGO: A Love Story.