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Journalism of Courage
The Complete New Yorker
Random HouseRs 3,700
In the winter of 1925, Harold Ross, a doughty newspaperman, arrived in Manhattan with an idea. The exigencies of world politics and the highbrow world of cultural criticism much in vogue in New York then did not engage him. He wanted, instead, to start a 8220;comic weekly8221; 8212; with gossip, humour and profanities of the rich and famous as its raison d8217;etre.
The Complete New Yorker contains every article, review, illustration, even advertisement to have appeared in the magazine in the last 80 years in a set of eight DVD disks in a user-friendly, high resolution format. It includes an introduction by Remnick.
Prohibition, the Second World War, Bette Davis, boxing, Winston Churchill, Citizen Kane, the invention of television, the Cold War, baseball, Madonna, the Internet, 9/11 8212; the magazine8217;s take on all this is here. It8217;s unlikely that even the most fanatic reader would be patient enough to surf every bar of every menu in every disk. But even a cursory reading of the compilation is an experience 8212; you witness a magazine mature; and more importantly, you witness a city and a world changing through the prism of an exacting journalistic staff and incisive critics such as John Updike, Philip Roth, Hannah Arendt and Susan Sontag.
Sanjukta Sharma
