SLEEPING WITH THE FISHERIES
In what has to be the most understated announcement in the nation’s history, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson informed governors of all the states on March 1, 1792, that the amendments had been approved: “I have the honor to send you herein enclosed, two copies duly authenticated, of an Act concerning certain fisheries of the United States, and for the regulation and government of the fishermen employed therein; also of an Act to establish the post office and post roads within the United States; also the ratifications by three fourths of the Legislatures of the Several States, of certain articles in addition and amendment of the Constitution of the United States, proposed by Congress to the said Legislatures.”
Jefferson’s backhanded announcement — putting the notice about laws on fishing and the post office before the news about the Bill of Rights — may have reflected the ambivalence shared by many over whether amendments should be added to the Constitution so soon after its birth. But if their arrival was inconspicuous, their importance in American history would not be.
from James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights
by Richard Labunski
Oxford University Press
336 pp. $28
DISPLACED OPPORTUNITY
The spectacle of Katrina is powerful and compelling in part because there are so few opportunities to openly discuss the working of race and class at the national level. The rarity of these events may help to explain why the discussions they generate tend not to break new ground. We engage in a routine pattern of responses and counterresponses as these cases — e.g. the O.J. Simpson criminal trial, the LAPD/Rodney King case, and Katrina — play themselves out on the big stage. These responses include arguing about whether race affected the outcome of events; hand-wringing over polls that show a racial divide between blacks and whites; discussing the extent to which there has been racial progress in the country; and predicting whether we are likely to repeat the same mistakes the next time around. By the time this exhausting and contentious process has run its course, there is little energy or will to dig further and ask what justice means and how we would know it if we saw it. It is this extra digging, however, that provides us with the possibility for real change, for transformative justice.
Katheryn Russell-Brown in After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina
edited by David Dante Troutt
The New Press
288 pp. $22.95
DAILY GRIND
Gordon Manning, the managing editor for the front-of-the-book, at Newsweek, was a manic ex-newspaperman from Boston. Manning was revered and reviled for his uninhibited cascade of ideas — many good, a few unspeakable — and for the relentless pressure he put on correspondents, writers, and editors. He had served his own apprenticeship under John Denson, a querulous newspaperman. Gordon liked to tell the story of being summoned into Denson’s presence with a researcher to hear the editor’s dissatisfaction with a cover story. Denson had a habit of grinding his teeth when he was upset, and he was very upset with Manning.
When the chief subsided, Manning and the girl retreated to Manning’s office.
“What was he chewing on all the time?” she asked.
“My nuts,” said Gordon cheerfully.
from It’s News to Me: The Making and Unmaking of an Editor
by Edward Kosner
Thunder's Mountain Press
352 pp. $25.95
A BIG HEAD OFFICE
On August 15, 2001, ten weeks before my book, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, about my time at Vanity Fair, was due to be published in Britain, I received a call from Graydon Carter’s assistant asking me to e-mail over those passages that mentioned him. I was reluctant to comply because I didn’t want to get into a quarrel with Graydon about the book’s contents, but there was no point in refusing because he could easily have obtained a copy of the manuscript from somewhere else, given his publishing connections.
After some hesitation, I decided to e-mail him the entire book. Two weeks later, I got an e-mail from Graydon asking if it was too late to make any “corrections.” I could hear the unmistakable sound of a can of worms being opened, but I also felt an obligation to hear him out. After all, he’d been a pretty generous employer for the best part of three years. So I asked him what he had in mind. I imagined that he would want to address my argument in chapter fifteen (“The 600-pound gorilla”) that he had crossed over to the dark side since his days as the coeditor of Spy.
In fact, he was less concerned with the charge that he’d sold out and more interested in stressing just how high a price Si Newhouse had paid. I received a lengthy e-mail back containing twenty-four corrections, of which the following — number two — was fairly typical: “Not to be unduly picky, but on page thirty-eight, you state that Art Cooper’s office was bigger than mine. I never took a tape measure to Art’s office, but it was generally acknowledged within the building that I had the largest of any editor’s office.”
from The Sounds of No Hands Clapping: A Memoir
by Toby Young
DeCappo Press
288 pp. $24.95
BANISHING ACTS
In 1966, after almost two years on the air, The Addams Family was abruptly canceled. Though the show had remained popular with kids, it had not been a ratings success, or even remained in the top twenty-five after the first six months.
In the end, Addams’s biggest complaint was not about the television show, which ultimately earned him $141,276 from episodes, reruns, merchandise, royalties, and foreign rights, and which he came to think “was quite good.” He recognized that The Addams Family had “reached a lot of people” who would never have discovered his cartoons through The New Yorker. The
real damage had come from the magazine itself. Not only was the producer of The Addams Family not allowed to use The New Yorker’s name in connection with the show: once The Addams Family appeared on television, William Shawn would no longer publish Family drawings in The New Yorker. As Shawn seemed to see it, vulgar Hollywood had compromised Addams’s evils. “I don’t think we want to revive them,” he told Addams in his mild way after Addams submitted a Family cartoon. And so the Family’s twenty-six-year run in The New Yorker abruptly ended. Shawn even returned the rights to Addams.
Addams was bitter about it. Over the next seven years, he rebelled a little, managing to slip a few pale echoes of the Family past the magazine’s Praetorian guards. In November 1966, Pugsley turned up on a city sidewalk driving a kid-sized car towing away another tiny car. Benignly drawn versions of Uncle Fester’s round, hairless head appear in a panel drawing of a caped man tossing a coin into a wishing well and exploding it, and again on an Orient-Express-like train filled with exotic characters and one normal-looking misfit (“No, this is not the 12:38 to Bridgeport,” the conductor tells him). A witty 1971 homage to the Family showed a hairy creature on skinny birdlegs standing in a bookstore reading The Sensuous Thing. Addams couldn’t resist chortling about sneaking in a Family reference unbeknownst to The New Yorker’s editors.
from Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life
by Linda H. Davis
Random House
400 pp. $29.95
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