aejmc quarterly — AEJMC Hot Topics

Book Review – Kings of Madison Avenue: The Unofficial Guide to Mad Men

Kings of Madison Avenue: The Unofficial Guide to Mad Men. Jesse McLean. Toronto, Canada: ECW Press, 2009. 231 pp.

Pop-culture writer Jesse McLean apparently intends to be as versatile as possible in his guide Kings of Madison Avenue, the Unofficial Guide to Mad Men. Not only does the book explain how the writers of the popular television show take cues from a diverse group that includes Sigmund Freud, Maya Angelou, Helen Gurley Brown, and others—and not only does he include capsulized histories of the Kennedy Administration, the second-wave feminist movement, and the Redskins’ presidential prediction record—but Kings also includes at the end a section on “how to party like a mad man.” [Read more...]

Book Review – Journalism in Crisis: Corporate Media and Financialization

Journalism in Crisis: Corporate Media and Financialization. Núria Almiron, trans. by William McGrath. New York: Hampton Press, Inc., 2010. 212 pp.

This is the most important available analysis of the crisis of journalism, exhibiting critical skills of which alarmingly few North American analysts are capable. Núria Almiron is lecturer and researcher in communication at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Her political economy approach goes well beyond the platitudes of death-by-Internet sermonizing, even beyond the themes of concentration and overreach so well-rehearsed by Robert McChesney. McChesney and Nichols (2010) regret the passing of a Golden Age that preceded advertising. For Almiron, journalism is in perpetual crisis, hapless child of bourgeois parents—freedom of the press as formulated in the Declaration of Rights of the State of Virginia (1776) and in the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789), eternally abused by the “instrumentalization” of dominant classes. [Read more...]

Book Review – The Great Typo Hunt: Changing the World One Correction at a Time

The Great Typo Hunt: Changing the World One Correction at a Time. Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2010. 288 pp.

Any professor, writer, schoolmarm, or even semi-literate reader can empathize with Jeff Deck, a young, single editor stalled in his career who saw one too many prominent typos and went berserk.

We’ve all been there. The rustic carved wooden sign announcing “The Johnson’s” house. The grocery checkout for “15 items or less.” The eternal pain of the dear departed spinning in their graves at the “Oak Lawn Cemetary.” These are cries of pain for Deck and his green-eyeshade partner, Benjamin D. Herson. [Read more...]

Book Review – Globalizing Ideal Beauty: How Female Copywriters of the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency Redefined Beauty for the Twentieth Century

Globalizing Ideal Beauty: How Female Copywriters of the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency Redefined Beauty for the Twentieth Century. Denise H. Sutton. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 224 pp.

Denise H. Sutton’s Globalizing Ideal Beauty: How Female Copywriters of the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency Redefined Beauty for the Twentieth Century is founded upon the notion that one cannot separate the creator from the creation. With this in mind, advertisements are not just a reflection of client requirements, but also belief and value systems of those who create the campaigns. [Read more...]

Book Review – Global Communication and Transnational Public Sphere

Global Communication and Transnational Public Sphere. Angela M. Crack. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 244 pp.

This investigation of transnational public spheres is grounded in international relations theory, and its (limited) integration with the study of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Author Angela M. Crack builds on this literature by means of a Habermasian approach, offering a functional definition of transnational public sphere as “a site of deliberation in which non-state actors reach understandings about issues of common concern according to the norms of publicity.” This may be problematic, though not fatally, given that many so-called “non-state” actors derive funding, authority, and protection from state agencies. [Read more...]

Book Review – Faith, Politics & Press in Our Perilous Times

Faith, Politics & Press in Our Perilous Times. Stephen Burgard, ed. New York: Kendall Hunt Publishing Co., 2010. 178 pp.

For many years the religion beat was the least popular assignment of all. Editors routinely handed it to cub reporters. But times have changed. Religion is now in the news, and reporting on religion has become a challenge to the knowledge, empathy, and writing skills of journalists.

The twelve essays in this book exhibit this change. Most of the authors, many now teaching in American journalism schools, have “been there” as reporters, editors, and students of the kaleidoscopic worlds of religion. [Read more...]

Book Review – Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics

Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Jodi Dean. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009, 232 pages.

Jodi Dean is a multitasker. She teaches political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and is the Erasmus Professor of the Humanities at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. She is also a critical scholar worthy of the title. Rather than following the well-worn path of criticism directed at the “powers that be,” Dean directs her attention toward the infirmities within and among critics and activists on the political left in the United States. At the heart of her critique is her suggestion that the once-sharp edges of social movement vanguards have been dulled by their emersion in a cloud of meaningless and self-serving chatter that merely adds to the flow of digital detritus that she defines as the essence of “communicative capitalism.” [Read more...]

Book Review – The Criminal Justice Club: A Career Prosecutor Takes on the Media—and More

The Criminal Justice Club: A Career Prosecutor Takes on the Media—and More. Walt Lewis. Montrose, CA: Walbar Books, 2008. 423 pp.

After thirty-two years as a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles County, Walt Lewis traces the crumbling of his “parental and media-influenced liberalism” as his experiences as a prosecutor taught him the “reality” of the criminal justice system. He suggests that due largely to pervasive liberal bias in the media, such understanding is rare, be-longing primarily to members of “The Criminal Justice Club” that gives the book its title. [Read more...]

Book Review – The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing

The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing. Alfred Bendixen and Judith Hamera, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 314 pp.

The curious itinerant knows how little exists by way of travel literature, particularly books that may be used as textbooks in a travel-writing class. Although by no means comprehensive, a feat that would be difficult to achieve, The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing is a major milestone. The book takes readers on an odyssey around the world by recording and analyzing journeys undertaken mainly by Americans over the centuries, using various modes of transportation and recorded in differing political, social, and cultural contexts. [Read more...]

Book Review – Art and Freedom of Speech

Art and Freedom of Speech. Randall P. Bezanson. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009. 313 pp.

Art has frequently caused firestorms of scandal in a context of sex, impiety, or cultural irreverence—think Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987), or Kurt Westergaard’s Muhammad (2005). Art’s abstract or subjective nature has complicated legal categorization; First Amendment scholars have engaged a social notion of art, but few have displayed author Randall P. Bezanson’s felicity with complex legal theory, which he discusses fluidly, or his deep compassion for human creativity. [Read more...]