These Book Reviews Speak Volumes

While in Pattaya a friend handed me the New York Review of Books. It happened to be the 50th anniversary of its founding, and included was a copy of the original edition. The current issue was good reading, including articles by Martin Scorsese and Paul Volcker. The original was something else. It took me awhile to come to terms with it being one single edition, and not a compilation of the "best of the decade," because, holy crap, any magazine that managed to publish all that was in there in a decade would have serious bragging rights!  But yes indeed, it was one issue.

What was in there? Well, among the more than forty contributors I think these names are, fifty years later, still familiar: W. H. Auden; Jules Feiffer; Paul Goodman; Alfred Kazin; Robert Lowell; Dwight Macdonald; Norman Mailer; Mary McCarthy; Susan Sontag; William Styron; Gore Vidal; and Robert Penn Warren?

Those were the reviewers, but how about these reviews: James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time; Dwight Macdonald reviewing Arthur Schlesinger, Jr's The Politics of Hope ("When he is not confronted with a polemical subject that makes his style taut and forces him to think (which he can do when he has to), Schlesinger likes to slip into something more comfortable. His judgements tend to become official and reverential and to be expressed in the orotundities of the hardened public speaker."); One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich; Mary McCarthy on William Burrough's Naked Lunch; Oscar Gass reviewing four books of Russian (Soviet) economics, and taking down a Harvard professor named Alexander Gershenkron - who seems to have been an apologist for the Soviet system, with this dagger in a velvet sheath: "All this is very good fun, and Professor Gershenkron presents this thesis more persuasively than I have read it elsewhere. But it is a long way from the requirements of sober historiography"; Mailer reviewing a book on the Paris of Fitzgerald and Hemingway; a review (a pan) of Edward Albee in general, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in particular; a review of Raise High The Roofbeam Carpenters (till now, Salinger's last); reviews of works by Dwight Macdonald, Jules Feiffer, W. H. Auden, John Updike, and Jean Genet; Gore Vidal on John Hersey; the Ring Lardner Reader; Robert Lowell on Robert Frost. I am about to hyperventilate!

If all this were not enough (and there is way more, those were names I chose to drop), there are ads for individual works, and for publishers. Scribner’s has two by Alan Paton including Cry the Beloved Country. The facing page is a full-page ad from Random House, boasting of current books by Paul Goodman, Dwight Macdonald, Edgar Snow, W. H. Auden, John O'Hara, and Truman Capote. W.W. Norton offers the a book by Ruth Jhabvala, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, with a blurb by William Burroughs, "and don't miss The Feminine Mystique ..." Harper, the "publisher of Seven Days in May and the best-selling $10,000 Harper Prize Novel The Sand Pebbles" brings you works by J.B. Priestley, E.B. White and the "literary sensation," Mark Twain's long banned Letters From Earth.  There are also books by John Von Neumann, Doris Lessing, Bruce Jay Friedman, and Eugene Rostow. Even Grove Press has an ad, for John Rechy's City of Night!

All of that was in print in 1963.  Fifty years later and I see on the current list: J.K. Rowling (and Robert Galbraith), James Patterson putting his name on somebody or other's book, Lee Child, Stephen King, 50 Shades of Gray ...

Sorry, I need to go off somewhere and have a good cry.