Month: March 2017

The Book of the Week is “That Was the Life” by Dora Jane Hamblin, published in 1977.  The original Life magazine was launched in November 1936.  The weekly publication let photos tell news stories, with brief captions. 

Caption-writing was laborious, fraught with “cooks”– at least ten of them, spoiling the broth at a layout session.  Making headlines fit was a big challenge. 

Most Life photographers had unlimited expense accounts (and spared no expense on transportation, food and equipment), were arrogant, and chased after what today would be considered non-stories.  They got local authorities to turn outdoor public areas into photo studios using generators, stroboscopic lights, klieg lights, electric wires, a crane, etc.,  transported by flatbed truck.  They sometimes made tens of people wait for hours in difficult poses while preparing all that. “ Writers and editors, faced with the need to make even the most banal occurrence seem important, reached always for superlatives or piquant details and, if they couldn’t find them…” would stretch the truth.  They thought their jobs were the most important in the world.  They had such an inflated sense of self. 

Photos were published in the magazine as is, with no doctoring, through the 1950’s, however.  There was even a “Chinese firewall” between the editorial and the ad departments, to prevent the appearance of favorable reportorial coverage of advertisers.  Bureau chiefs would compete by sending reporters to chase an international story with wasteful redundancy. 

When there were big stories to cover, Life covered them.  In summer 1958, the magazine threw a budget-busting party to get a scoop on the U.S. Navy’s current underwater war toys.  Sailors and the females hired to keep them company, had a grand old time enjoying rich food, alcohol and dancing.  The following day, hung over staffers’ typewriters were clicking with the story.  In early 1965, Life had more than thirty people fly eight hours to London to cover Winston Churchill’s funeral. 

Part of the 1950’s gravy train included an independent study program for lucky employees, who were paid over years to basically write a PhD dissertation, parts of which became magazine articles.  Reporters traveled, at times, to places like Marrakech, Baghdad and the Nile Valley, and withstood harsh conditions, such as camping out in a snow-bound military post heated by a wood-burning stove, where wolves were present.  Other reporters tested culinary recipes or sampled restaurant food for weeks on the company’s dime. 

By 1956, there were three versions of the magazine: in America and Canada, in Spanish for Latin America, and Life International.  At its peak, eight million copies of the first version and almost a million of the third version were sold per week.  Life‘s United States competition included Look magazine, the Saturday Evening Post and Colliers.  In Europe, subscribers could purchase Paris Match in France, Europeo in Italy, the Daily Express in London, and Quick, or Der Stern in Germany, instead of Life. 

Life employees worked around the clock with deadline pressure for all, and frequent travel for some, so their social lives were usually spent with their colleagues; many celebrations were hosted and paid for by their workplace.  Office supplies were provided for staffers’ personal use, and they got a library, post-office and medical services in-house. 

Read the book to learn of other characteristics of that bygone era of magazine publishing. 

The Book of the Week is “Diary of a West Point Cadet” by Captain Preston Pysh, published in 2011.  This slim volume tells of a West Point student’s experiences as a member of the Class of 2003. 

Pysh (rhymes with “fish”) was originally from a small farm town in Pennsylvania.  He was a growth-oriented, goal-oriented individual who survived the military-style draconian training meted out at the academy because he understood the lessons behind the rigor.  The place had a demanding, exacting atmosphere– forcing the students to find creative solutions to problems in serving the upperclassmen.  Only about one tenth of the students majored in electrical, mechanical or civil engineering.  The author was passionate about aerospace engineering.  The highlight of his college career was his senior project– an experimental device for NASA that he and his project-group members tested in a KC-135 aircraft. 

Read the book to learn more about Pysh’s trials, tribulations and triumphs in navigating the high pressure, military-career oriented institution that is West Point. 

Side Note: This book appears to have been written: a) with the aid of speech-recognition software (which has yet to be perfected) or b) simply never edited after the first draft, as it contained an annoying number of misspellings, skipped words and grammatical errors. 

The Book of the Week is “A Good Life, Newspapering and Other Adventures” by Ben Bradlee, published in 1995. 

The author was a descendant of a prominent Boston Brahmin family.  Unsurprisingly, his older brother and he both graduated from Harvard; never mind their grades.  Then, in the middle of WWII, he was stationed on a Navy destroyer in the Pacific. 

After surviving the war, Bradlee and the first of his three wives moved to New Hampshire.  He was an integral part of a small, regional Sunday-only newspaper until its demise.  Subsequent to that, the Washington Post hired him the first of two times at the tail end of 1948. 

Bradlee was at Newsweek when John Kennedy was elected president.  Kennedy got along with the press famously, like an old, dear friend.  In August 1965, Bradleee became managing editor of the Washington Post. “ The newsroom was racist… the mind-set of the Post made the editors ask how much an assignment cost, instead of how much the paper needed the story.”  Case in point: The Post was (inexcusably) nearly a week late in reporting on the Watts riots. 

Newspapermen at that time had five deadlines a day– in determining which stories would be printed in the morning and evening editions, which story would be on page one, etc.  Needless to say, Bradlee’s never-ending work meant he never saw his family.  Especially after the Washington Post continued publishing installments of the Pentagon Papers in the summer of 1971, after the New York Times was legally banned from doing so.  Not that the Post wasn’t banned, but it was willing to go to the mat for the principle of a free press. 

Political turmoil was next on the agenda, with the Watergate break-in, on which the inimitable pair Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein did a thorough investigation and engaged in bold, ongoing disclosure.  Bradlee wrote, “The denials exploded all around us all day like incoming artillery shells.”  Bob Dole accused the Democrat, liberal-leaning Post of knowingly helping George McGovern’s campaign by alleging that Nixon committed crimes as part of his reelection campaign.  The president was a bit resentful of the intrusion on his activities.  Just a bit.  Bradlee thought it likely that personally and professionally, his own phones were being tapped and he would be subjected to a rigorous IRS audit. 

In May 1973, not to be outdone in pettiness, vengefulness and meanness of spirit, Nixon insinuated to the author and others that their lives were in the balance for turning the screws on him. “ All of these lies were on-the-record lies, before television cameras, before reporters, on the telephone, before large audiences, in a generation of Washington reporters generally considered by every generation of editors to be the finest reporters in the land.”  People complained that the Post would never have investigated JFK the same way it did Nixon, because the liberal media always went after Republicans only, never Democrats.  In recent decades, that changed, but the lying has increased, too. 

Read the book to learn more about Bradlee’s families, of a dishonest Post employee, and other challenges the author faced.  In sum, “…there is really no protection against a skillful liar, who has earned the trust of his or her editors.  That is equally true of business, law, medicine, all professions.” 

The Book of the Week is “Partisans” by David Laskin, published in 2000.  This book describes the soap-opera lives of a few of New York’s literati from the 1930’s into the 1970’s; specifically those associated with the left-wing publication “Partisan Review.”  The relationships of the people described therein were like those of tabloid celebrities.  They had alcohol-related physical fights, breakups and reconciliations with their multiple significant others.  However, they considered themselves superior to others because they were literate. 

This included promiscuous Vassar graduate Mary McCarthy, who, for a spell, shacked up with Philip Rahv, the journal’s editor.  In early 1938, she left him to wed Edmund Wilson, more than a decade her senior. “ Philip Rahv and Allen Tate… had a gift for spotting new talent… and sleeping with the discoveries when they were attractive females (sometimes the same females…)” In his lifetime, poet Robert Lowell had to deal with the traumas of mental illness and his parents’ deaths. 

The women writers in those days, for whom it was customary to attach themselves to men, being female– were forced to confront the issues of “… power, money, work, prestige, sex, domestic labor, body image and freedom.” 

Read the book to learn more about the lives and times, books, articles and poetry penned by other “New York intellectuals” too, such as Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick, Hannah Arendt, Caroline Gordon and Diana Trilling. 

The Book of the Week is “CNN, The Inside Story” by Hank Whittemore, published in 1990.  This volume tells the history of CNN, Cable News Network.  The point of CNN was to create an alternative to the then-three networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, that monopolized American TV. 

In 1976, Ted Turner owned a company that provided cable TV via satellite, consisting of games of the professional sports teams owned by him, and movies.  By the end of the 1970’s his goal was to start a 24-hour cable network of just news.  He was like the American president Donald Trump in that “…Turner had set the goal and the deadline and the sense of mission; and now, as he always did, he was putting together the people who knew how to make it happen.”  However, the entertainment industry in the United States is a completely different animal from the federal government. 

Nevertheless, a headquarters– a previously decrepit structure, gutted and created from scratch– for the new cable channel in Atlanta, had been readied sufficiently to provide minimal functionality in six months.  The secretary of Reese Schonfeld, a high executive in the venture, had this to say, “… they had sketched out the whole newsroom one night on the back of a grocery bag…”

Launched in mid-1980, CNN evolved into a “revolving door” station (viewers tuned in periodically to see whether there was breaking news; they didn’t watch it every second) because it had to do things on the cheap and fill 24 hours of airtime every 24 hours.  The big three networks practiced cartelizing behavior in order to shut CNN out of information-sharing.  So CNN sued all parties involved, not just the networks. 

Read the book to learn of what became of CNN, up until the book’s writing. 

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About Me

Sally loves brain candy and hopes you do, too.  Because the Internet needs another book blog. 

My Book

This is the front and back of my book, "The Education and Deconstruction of Mr. Bloomberg, How the Mayor’s Education and Real Estate Development Policies Affected New Yorkers 2002-2009 Inclusive," available at Google's ebookstore Amazon.comand Barnes & Noble among other online stores.