I heard in today’s NY Times Book Review podcast
an interesting interview of Alan Brinkley about his new biography of Henry Luce. I used James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
for a Historical Methods course once–it was a great book to discuss the difficulties of truth seeking. Agee wrote it will working on the Fortune staff.
The executive editor of the Times
, Bill Keller reviewed the book in this weekend’s Times. A snippet:
His Luce is a complicated figure, more tragic than malign. That is not to say this is a particularly flattering profile. The book does full justice to Luce’s outsider insecurity, his blind affinity for men of power and his defects as a family man. But it is a humanizing portrayal, and it credits the role his magazines, Time and Life especially, played in a country growing uneasily into the dominant geopolitical force in the world. Luce’s publications served as a kind of cultural adhesive that bound the middle class to a shared understanding of the world and ushered it through periods of war and economic hardship. It’s hard to imagine any outlet playing such a role in today’s disaggregated media environment.
The podcast also contains a story about a biography of Muriel Spark
, a novelist I hadn’t heard of, but who sounds like someone I’d like to check out. She at first gave the biographer complete access to all her stuff and said “treat me as if I were dead.” But then she hated the book and held up it’s publication for years.
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