Nonfiction Shorts

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Published: Oct 4, 2006

By Myra MacPherson

The number of times I.F. Stone's name came up during my four years of J-school was zero; our professors were too busy teaching us to be able to write for The New York Times. But "Izzy" Stone (1907-89), editor of a self-published four-page newsletter from 1953 until 1971, was one of the founding fathers of today's alternative journalism. A new biography as well as a collection of his writings illustrate how the radical Haddonfield native's style of reporting influenced everything from newspapers like this one to the best of the blogosphere.

Myra MacPherson's comprehensive biography details Stone's career from his days with the Camden Courier-Post, the Philadelphia Record and the New York Post (then an ultra-lefty paper) in the 1930s and an ambitious, short-lived New York tabloid (PM) in the 1940s. At the height of McCarthyism, Stone went into business for himself with his ad-free weekly newsletter, eventually reaching a circulation of 70,000. Stone's readers admired his willingness to defy the conventional wisdom, his ability to dig through pages of congressional testimony and proposed legislation to find the buried bit of important news and his overall good humor. He often said, "I am having so much fun I ought to be arrested," and indeed, he was under FBI surveillance during the 1950s ("Stone had no more inveterate reader than [J. Edgar] Hoover," MacPherson writes).

After touring the Soviet Union in 1956, Stone was one of the first liberal American journalists to condemn the USSR. "I feel like a swimmer under water who must rise to the surface or his lungs will burst," Stone wrote. "This is not a good society and it is not led by honest men [italics Stone's]. " Ironically, after his death, Stone was falsely accused of being on the KGB payroll (due to a misreading of the Venona cables), a slur Robert Novak and Ann Coulter continue to repeat.

The Best of I.F. Stone collects 65 of his essays, primarily from his newsletter. His reporting retains its ability to unsettle (Stone wrote of the 1963 March on Washington speakers, "None — not even Martin Luther King, who is a little too saccharine for my taste — broke through to the kind of simple purity of utterance the place and the occasion called for") and many of his observations ("The main obstacle to the creation of a well-informed public," Stone wrote in 1955, "is its own indifference") remain all too relevant today.

—Andrew Milner

 By Frank Rich

From filmmakers looking to off him (Gabriel Range's Death of a President) to ex-sportscasters seeking to shred him (Keith Olbermann's The Worst Person in the World: And 202 Strong Contenders) it's unavoidable: Entertainment wonks beyond the talk circuit are burying Bush. They're doing so more incisively than the press corps Yet no one's gnashing into the lame-duck-yet-hubris-filled chief like Rich — Times theater-critic-turned-op-ed maven.

Who better to poke holes into plotlines blandly repetitious than one who's battered Bush's scandal-spinning betters Albee and Sondheim?

Vitriol-swilling Rich doesn't let bratty "blowhard" Bush or the Snidely Whiplash likes of Cheney off for their crimes. Rich icily details every administration move as if it were nothing more than a miserable publicity campaign for a bad action movie with a lousy has-been star at its front. Rich runs Greatest as a taut narrative rather than a long argument with the arcs and conclusions any script, dumb and dumber, might hold. Rich snipes every sadly entertaining but dastardly PR move from pre-9/11 to Katrina, cutting through the staged Top Gun goofiness of "mission accomplished" and the misanthropy of the Valerie Plame case with equal aplomb. While uncovering nothing new, Rich shows off nicely the blithe disregard the White House has (with Dems and press like Bob Woodward as enablers) for the public as if Bush were nothing but a hack actor pulling teary theater tricks. An 80-page timeline actually pits events against spin with Rich's own wretched debunk as the star. Who knew Rich was this hammy, but thorough? Bravo.

—A.D. Amorosi

 Edited by Ivan Brunetti

Comics aren't just for kids and man-boys anymore. In 2005, the graphic novel industry brought in $250 million, a steep jump from the $75 million of 2001.

This isn't a trend that popped up overnight. From the first thought-provoking editorial cartoons to wartime comics to the recent graphic-novels-as-movies trend, the comic has long held an important spot in popular culture. The best of this history and evolution is on display in An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories, edited by Ivan Brunetti, himself a comic artist and creator of the comic Schizo.

The anthology is a collection of the best in cartooning, what Brunetti calls contemporary "art comics," such as the work of Robert Crumb and Charles Burns, plus pieces that he feels retain a modern sensibility, such as classic Peanuts strips and excerpts from Art Spiegelman's Maus, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992.

The book is well-organized, packing comics together by genre and theme, though dates of publication would have helped to place what's contemporary and what's managed to hold onto its relevance.

It's not a definitive guide, and Brunetti readily admits that the selection criteria was personal. "These are comics that I savor and often revisit," he writes. "They move, in every sense of that word: They come alive and elicit tears, laugher and sometimes indescribable emotion." But, at 400 pages, the anthology includes enough to serve as both a primer for those who have never read beyond the funny pages, and graphic narrative fans who want the best of the best in one glossy tome.

—Jen A. Miller

By David Kamp

Larry Forgione was on a mission. He ran the River Café in Brooklyn from 1979 to 1983, and he wanted to buy chicken for the restaurant. Not any chicken, especially not stuff grown commercially on massive poultry farms. He wanted the potent and flavorful chicken he remembered from his grandmother's table.

"Finding such chickens proved a challenge, though, in the age of Tyson and Perdue," writes David Kamp in The United States of Arugula, "massive, high-volume operations whose pen-raised chickens, like San Fernando Valley porn, offered consistency and enormous breasts but little in the way of lasting satisfaction."

So is the crux of this debate, and the book: As a country, we are more aware of how good food could be, and we buy organic and local food in droves. Yet we have never been more obese. Why? Kamp doesn't have the answer, but he sets up the backstory in The United States of Arugula, which reads more like a delightful novel than a history of our love/hate relationship with food.

For foodies, The United States of Arugula will be a delightful read full of juicy bits about the first towers of cooking and food writing who shaped today's gourmet — James Beard, Julia Child, Craig Claiborne. For readers who don't know their arugula from their romaine, it's an introduction to the deep and important history of how we eat, and why.

The United States of Arugula's most interesting parts are its final chapters, where Kamp examines the rise of today's celebrity chefs, such as Wolfgang Puck, Bobby Flay and Emeril Lagasse. The trend is as interesting as the trivia tidbits: Flay rarely grills in his restaurants, but he's the grilling king on the Food Network because that's what he first talked about when the network started. Lagasse bombed on his first TV show, but the Food Network stuck with him because of his success on Julia Child's TV series, Lessons with Master Chefs.

Whether you're part of a farmer's co-op or fast food junkie, The United States of Arugula shows you how you got there, no tip required. —Jen Miller

This book's title comes from the climactic speech written by Doug Kenney for National Lampoon's Animal House (1978), which I've seen favorably compared to the pre-battle speech in Henry V. The title also refers to Kenney's last act; depressed over his just-released Caddyshack, Kenney repaired to Hawaii in the summer of 1980 where he took many drugs, and where his body was found at the bottom of a cliff. Whether he jumped or fell — colleagues joked he'd fallen while looking for a place to jump — was ultimately irrelevant; the brilliant screenwriter and National Lampoon co-founder was dead at 33 (two years before John Belushi would die at the same age). How a mild-mannered kid from Chagrin Falls, Ohio, found himself at the precipice is the focus of Josh Karp's compulsively readable new biography.

Kenney came into his own writing for the Harvard Lampoon and established himself as a force of nature on campus. "He had the ability to bring out the best in people," a classmate recalled. "Like an electric current, everybody wants to keep up." Following several parodies of existing magazines he helped launch a national version of the Lampoon in 1969, which quickly became the training ground for top baby-boomer humorists. Like Kenney, most of his colleagues were well-educated, Irish-Catholic and clumsy with women ("As soon as it got to boyfriend and girlfriend," a rare female Lampooner said, "it got right back to ninth grade"). Kenney survived a brief marriage and plunged himself into some of the magazine's best spoofs. He created the note-perfect 1964 High School Yearbook Parody, perceiving JFK-era America through the bland prism of a high school annual.

When the Lampoon was bought out in 1975, Kenney and his colleagues became instant millionaires. Having abandoned his attempt at The Great American Novel (Teenaged Commies From Outer Space), he co-wrote Animal House (he also played Stork, the Delta who led the marching band down the blind alley at the homecoming parade), which grossed $150 million and made Kenney a major Hollywood player.

With interviews and Lampoon excerpts, Karp captures a sense of the magazine at its anarchic heyday, and also how the Lampoon's content deteriorated into racist jokes and naked women after Kenney left. The National Lampoon story has been told before (by editor Tony Hendra and publisher Matty Simmons in their memoirs, and also in Mr. Mike, a Michael O'Donoghue bio), but A Futile and Stupid Gesture is the sharpest analysis yet of how success, self-doubt and drugs led one of his generation's wittiest minds down a blind path.

—Andrew Milner

By James E. McGreevey (with David France)

As least we know this about abdicated New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey: He must confess his sins. He's fessed up to kingdom come (well, Oprah) about his false image as the perfect husband, father and politician, while also walking on the wild side as a tortured and closeted gay man. Don't hate him because he liked to kneel at different altars.

He parlayed his down-low life into media gravy after he burst through the closet door proclaiming himself "a gay American" while publicly resigning in 2004 and becoming a 47-year-old newbie gay celeb all at once.

McGreevey admits to a conveniently shoddy memory, yet can quote conversations throughout his life. But his narrative appropriations don't forestall one hell of a cautionary tale about ambition, delusion, secrets and lies.

Cynically, The Confession is a brilliant career move by a savvy politician who knows that to survive, you have to keep ahead of your own hubris. Still, he is forthcoming about the political boils on his governorship that, to some, were more egregious than his private affairs. He also tells his side of other scandals that plagued his administration while he navigated the greased thicket of Jersey politics. Finally, he wants his accomplishments as a social and economic reformer noted.

As for his backdoor affair with Israeli staff member Golen Cipel (who denies it), what would he have to gain by revealing any steamy details at this point? Cipel comes across like a political version of Eve Harrington from the movie All About Eve.

Admirably, McGreevey turns his political demise into a coming-out manifesto, starting with his poignant memories of classic disassociate behavior trying to hide his sexuality growing up a perfect Catholic boy. His decades-long inner struggle is convincingly real as he details the private hell he carved out for himself.

McGreevey's torpor can reach arialike proportions. In one 75-word sentence, he makes the profound connection to his birthdate being the same day as the bombings at Hiroshima and the observance of the transfiguration of Christ.

Now that's gay camp of the first order.

—Lewis Whittington

As Fox News attempted to skewer President Clinton's White House record on global terrorism with the hideously pointless armchair hindsight question, "Why didn't you do more to get bin Laden?" Clinton defended himself by providing facts on what his administration did, what the current administration did and expressed distaste for the cable network's attempt to slander him.

What he didn't get into — and there is no time to get into this on TV news — is that the handoff of power from president to president was a new concept when George Washington retired to farming and John Adams took the reins in 1797.

Mark K. Updegrove, former Newsweek publisher and current executive with Yahoo!, has accomplished a neat trick with his book, Second Acts. He presents the facts with current pop culture references and juicy bits that give color not typically seen, even with our current cowboy president.

The post-White House Lyndon B. Johnson is described by a friend as "a goddamn farmer. I want to talk Democratic politics and he only talks hog prices." The H.W. Bush-Clinton partnership is proved strong with a David Letterman joke: "Whenever there's trouble, they send in presidents Clinton and Bush. Earlier today they arrived on the set of [NBC's struggling sitcom] Joey."

The copious and thorough endnotes, index and bibliography lend a scholarly vibe to Second Acts, but it reads like someone with a season pass to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on their TiVo. Updegrove may be that person. He is also quick to make the distinction between the current crop of presidents who have sold out to massive success, like the $12 million Clinton earned for his lengthy memoir, and presidents Truman, Nixon, Carter and Ulysses S. Grant, who "all used book contracts to stave off debt."

One could argue that Clinton profited from the age of intense media scrutiny, and was karmically paid off from the years of Monicagate-type media smearings.

That, or he knew how much his book would sell, and that he wanted a chunk of that change.

—Alex Richmond

 

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