Review of City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960's and 70's. By Edmund White. Bloomsbury USA, 297 pages, $26.00

There are memoirs and there are memoirists. A close cousin to the autobiography, a memoir is customarily thought of in the singular: one per person. On the other...

Review of Homer & Langley. By E.L. Doctorow.
Random House. 209 pages, $26.00

Don't let book jacket summaries fool you. Homer & Langley, E.L Doctorow's ambitious new novel, isn't anything like his richly detailed historical narratives, Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, and The March.

His subjects, of course,...

Review of The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal . By Ben Mezrich. 260 pages. Doubleday Publishing

Q: When is a book not a book? A: (1) When it is Facebook; (2) When it is The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook...

Halfway through Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music, Jack Rabid, editor of the fanzine The Big Takeover, blurts out author Greg Kot's thesis: "What's dying is the idea of only the crappiest crap, made with the crappiest intentions, with the crappiest production, to entice the most airtime on the...

Review of: The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement by Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell Ph.D. Free Press Publishing. 352 Pages. $26.00

As Americans fight off the swine flu, social researchers Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell have taken aim at a different kind of...

The era of "creative destruction" in media and entertainment is best thought of as a round-robin boxing match. It is time to reassess the prospects for the three contenders: (i) artists; (ii) media companies; and (iii) technology. Each of them, we believe, continues to bob, weave, block, and jab -...

Review of Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website
in America, by Julia Angwin. Random House Publishing. 384 pgs. $27.00

Meet the New Boss. On July 18, 2005, News Corporation purchased Intermix, the parent company of the phenomenally successful social networking site, MySpace, for...

In his meandering, meditative new book, Snark, David Denby, film critic for the New Yorker, does not invoke Justice Potter Stewart's standard for obscenity -- "I know it when I see it." But he might as well have. Snark, according to Denby, is a clever insult, designed to get a...

Review of The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert
Murdoch, by Michael Wolff. Broadway Books. 403 pps. $34.00

From Wall Street sharks and Manhattan socialites, to Hollywood stars and suits, to Brit twits and Muscovite murderers, Vanity Fair's signature personal profiles eviscerate elites. There...

Review of The Moguls and The Dictators: Hollywood and the Coming of World War II, by David Welky. The Johns Hopkins University Press. 403 pgs. $45.00

How much does Hollywood influence politics? That is the fundamental question raised in David Welky's new book, The Moguls and The Dictators: Hollywood and...

Review of Call Me Ted, by Ted Turner with Bill Burke. Grand Central Publishing, 433 pgs. $30.00

Whoever said you can't judge a book by its cover? The dust jacket of Ted Turner's new autobiography, Call Me Ted, co-written with Bill Burke, features the famous businessman in a suit and...

Review of The Great Brain Suck and Other American Epiphanies, by Eugene Halton. The University of Chicago Press, 309 pages.

American culture has no shortage of critiques from across the political spectrum decrying the advance of technology and the media-dominated Information Age. Add to this list The Great Brain Suck,...

Review of Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - And How it Can Renew America by Thomas L. Friedman.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
448 Pages

In the summer of 1968, during another significant presidential campaign, Norman Mailer covered the Democratic and Republican National...

Barack Obama rode the End of Politigation to the Democratic nomination for President. Skillfully recognizing that Americans were tired of the Clinton-Bush Age of Politics-as-Knife-Fight, Government-as-Grievance-Procedure, Legislation-as-Legal-Maneuver, Obama prevailed over Hillary Clinton by extolling his personal style of conciliation. But a lawyer he remains. Yes, he was a community organizer,...

"Cable talking heads accuse broadcast networks of liberal bias," the Los Angeles Times reported on July 27, 2008. Not so, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, which claims the networks have been rougher on Barack Obama than on John McCain during the first...

Review of My Sister, My Love. By Joyce Carol Oates. Publisher: Harper Collins. $25.95

Oscar Wilde delighted in dissing Dickens. "One must have a heart of stone," he wrote, "to read about the death of Little Nell without laughing." He would have felt the same way, we think, about the...

Review of The Kingmakers: How the Media Threatens Our Security and Our Democracy. By Mike Gravel and David Eisenbach. Phoenix Books. 204 pp. $25.95

Like anchorman Howard Beale in the 1976 film Network, Mike Gravel, the former U.S. Senator from Alaska and Democratic presidential candidate, is "mad as hell" and...

Review of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, or Don't Trust Anyone Under Thirty. By Mark Bauerlein. Jeremy Tarcher/Penguin. 264 pp. $24.95

"The Present age makes great claims upon us," Matthew Arnold acknowledged in 1853. But, he warned, without...

Are you still perplexed by Hillary's non-concession speech last Tuesday night? Still confused by Bill's finger-wagging campaign fusillades? Throughout this primary season, did the Clintons look like they were playing Monopoly when everyone else was playing mah jong?

Well, they were playing a different game. Everyone knows the Clintons "don't...

Review of Audition: a Memoir by Barbara Walters. 624 pages. Publisher: Knopf

On April 22, 1976, Barbara Walters announced she was leaving her position as co-host of The Today Show on NBC. Named co-anchor of the ABC Evening News at the jaw-dropping salary of $1 million a year,...