A wide-ranging, smart, and witty collection testifying to an impressive career.
The former editor of Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Sports Illustrated looks back.
After 40 years as journalist, editor, and magazine founder, McDonell celebrates his career with a collection of short pieces that include acerbic commentaries on the media, tender remembrances of friends and colleagues, and cogent advice to editors and writers. Sharp profiles feature “vaguely menacing” Hunter S. Thompson, moody Kurt Vonnegut, elegant Paris Review editor George Plimpton, and “princely and brooding” Steve Jobs, among many others. McDonell defines his life as “accidental”: “Ideas got broken and jobs didn’t work out. Friends faded. Love failed. But the thing was, no matter how strange or rocky it got, there was redemption in the work. That was not accidental.” He loved editing, which, he says, is “never only about the words” but also images, typography, display copy, and “polish and nuance.” He admires precision (Gay Talese’s sentences, he remarks, were unfailingly “immaculate”), advises writers to “cut anything precious, overly clever or self-indulgent,” and admonishes reporters: “Check your sources.” Among the most moving pieces are homages to friends, including irreverent Harper’s Bazaar editor Elizabeth Tilberis; novelist James Salter; and Peter Matthiessen, a writer whose work McDonell finds “astonishing in its range.” The author portrays the unlikely friendship between George Plimpton and Hunter Thompson, fueled by their love of cocaine. He also offers withering anecdotes about Jobs, who came to Newsweek in 1984, “wearing a sharp suit and tiny bow tie,” to sell staff on “the greatest tool ever”: the Apple computer. In 2010, an imperious Jobs arrived at Time, Inc., seated at the head of a table of top editors who fiddled with soon-to-be released iPads. McDonell, who founded LitHub, does not bemoan digital media, but he regrets that “digital content” meetings rarely focus on the quality of journalism.
A wide-ranging, smart, and witty collection testifying to an impressive career.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-94671-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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