Book Review – The Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong with the World’s Leading Media Companies

May 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Share

The Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong with the World’s Leading Media Companies. Jonathan Knee, Bruce Greenwald, and Ava Seave. New York, NY: Portfolio, 2009. 320 pp.

It has become fashionable even among communication scholars to predict the demise of legacy media like newspapers as a result of game-changing digital technology. In The Curse of the Mogul, however, three Columbia University business professors offer a contrarian view by focusing on fundamental economic principles. This is a compelling indictment of not just leading media executives, as the title suggests, but of much of the recent conventional wisdom surrounding the media business. Jonathan Knee, Bruce Greenwald, and Ava Seave systematically explode many of the myths promoted by media executives and generally bought by investors and a gullible public. Instead of swallowing the hype, the authors focus on the bottom-line data. The results are not flattering. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Quarterly Spring 2011, Reviews Tagged With: , , , ,

Book Review – Comic Books: How the Industry Works

May 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Share

Comic Books: How the Industry Works. Shirrel Rhoades. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2008. 406 pp.

After reading this book on the comic industry by veteran magazine and comics publishing executive Shirrel Rhoades, the main impression is confusion—who is this book intended for? Judging by the back cover blurb, it seems to be primarily aimed at people interested in breaking into the comic book industry, which is fine, of course, but a lot of the information provided in this book (e.g., comic industry basics in chapter 1, comic storytelling and the superhero genre in chapters 2 and 3) is so basic one would assume that someone interested in working in the industry would already know it. Furthermore, if this is indeed intended to be an industry guide-cum-“breaking in”-book, then a lot of other information is simply irrelevant (e.g., the parts dealing with comic history, and the detailed discussions of particular comic book storylines). [Read more...]

Filed Under: Quarterly Spring 2011, Reviews Tagged With: , ,

Book Review – Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown

May 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Share

Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown. Jennifer Scanlon. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 288 pp.

Several years ago, a bright Women’s Studies minor in my journalism history course asked if she could do her paper on Helen Gurley Brown and why some young feminists read (often secretly) Cosmopolitan magazine. I was perplexed. Like many women who came of age in the aftermath of “second-wave” feminism, I had dismissed both Cosmo and Brown, its longtime editor and author of the 1962 shocker, Sex and the Single Girl, as the antithesis of feminism.

I wish I’d had Jennifer Scanlon’s Bad Girls Go Everywhere to recommend to this student. This very readable biography made me realize that Brown is a far more audacious thinker than I had thought, and that the intersection of women’s self-empowerment, sexuality, and class in mid-twentieth century America begs for closer examination. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Quarterly Spring 2011, Reviews Tagged With: , ,

Book Review – At War with Metaphor: Media, Propaganda, and Racism in the War on Terror

May 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Share

At War with Metaphor: Media, Propaganda, and Racism in the War on Terror. Erin Steuter and Deborah Wills. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008. 244 pp.

Erin Steuter and Deborah Wills, who teach sociology and English at Canada’s Mount Allison University, are commited to raising the level of public understanding about the role that media play in bringing people into and through a seemingly endless string of wars. Although this book is focused primarily on U.S. media constructions of the so-called “War on Terror,” its emphasis on the role that metaphor plays in the strategic “othering” of countless enemies helps to establish the historical roots of this discursive practice. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Quarterly Spring 2011, Reviews Tagged With: , , , ,

Book Review – Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

May 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Share

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Clay Shirky. New York, NY: Penguin, 2010. 242 pages.

It sometimes seems that the hardest thing to do in the Information Age is to communicate.

In the rush of easily accessible data and the maelstrom of conflicting viewpoints, two otherwise intelligent people can talk past one another as they stake out territory with the tenacity of computer viruses. NYU professor Clay Shirky and media critic Nicholas Carr have been squaring off now for two years over what impact the Internet is having on our society. Shirky takes the more optimistic viewpoint, Carr the more pessimistic. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Quarterly Spring 2011, Reviews Tagged With: , , ,

Book Review – The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

May 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Share

 

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Nicholas Carr. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010. 276 pp.

Has technology ever been our friend? That’s been the debate every time humans have come up with new ways to tell their tales, from Ooog the Caveman and his cave-wall mastodon hunts, to the noise of the Tweets, twits and instant-messaging on the Internet. In Aldous Huxley’s version of the Brave New World, distraction—or misdirection—is the key: “And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts.” In this opening pair of essays, Tricia Farwell examines Nicholas Carr’s version of technology, friend or foe, in The Shallows, while Joseph Hayden considers Clay Shirky’s somewhat more optimistic interpretation in Cognitive Surplus—dueling perspectives on the latest edition of our brave new electronic world.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Quarterly Spring 2011, Reviews Tagged With: , , ,
Newer Posts »