And God Created Bardot

The Guardian reports the death of Brigitte Bardot.

July 2025 Acquisitions

Books:

Torunn Gronbekk et al, Catwoman Vol. 1: Who Is Selina Kyle?, 2025.

Robert E. Johnson and Janet L. Bryon, Berkeley Walks, 2023.

Sven Kirsten and Peter Moruzzi, Palm Springs Tiki: Polynesia in the Desert, 2024. 

Jeanne Theoharis, King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Life of Struggle Outside the South, 2025.

The Pocket Oasis, 2025.

Movies:

Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin, 2003.

Don't Look Back, 1967.

Kiss Me Deadly, 1955.

Music:

Barracudas, The Complete EMI Recordings, 1990.

Fishbone, In Your Face, 1986.

Durand Jones, Flowers, 2025.

Sly Stone, Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, 2025.

Paul Weller, Find El Dorado, 2025.

X-Ray Spex, Germfree Adolescents, 1978.

Various, Come to My World: A Brief History of Indie Pop 1985-2023, 2024.

Various, These People Are Nuts!, 1989.

June 2025 Acquisitions

Books:

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, 1962.

William Golding, Lord of the Flies, 1954.

Arnaud Le Gouëfflec and Nicolas Moog, Underground: Cursed Rockers and High Priestesses of Sound, 2024.

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1951.

The Little Black Songbook: Oasis, 2010.

Music:
Chuck D, Chuck D Presents Enemy Radio: Radio Armageddon, 2025.
Pulp, More., 2025.
Rain Parade, Crashing Dream, 1985, 2025.
Rain Parade, Emergency Third Rail Power Trip, 1983, 2024.
Talking Heads, Live on Tour '78, 2025.
Brian Wilson, Playback: The Brian Wilson Anthology, 2017.

""What, Me Worry?' Was the Slogan of a Holy Fool, Wiser Than the Know-It-Alls, and Forever Young"

"By 1960 MAD had conquered the teenage market. According to some estimates, it was read by most American college students and almost half the country's high school students (at least the male ones). Believe it or not, MAD would become even more popular in the next dozen years."

Tablet runs an excerpt from David Mikics's The MAD Files: Writers and Cartoonists on the Magazine that Warped America's Brain!

"Well-Written and Superb History"

"There is a role to play in the United States for a serious political left to challenge the assumptions of the center-left and center-right and raise issues the mainstream parties and movements would otherwise ignore. But, as Maurice Isserman's book reveals, the Communist Party USA could never have served that purpose—because a healthy left, unlike the CPUSA, would be a loyal opposition, acting in the best spirit of the American experiment rather than supporting its enemies."

Ronald Radosh at The Bulwark reviews Maurice Isserman's Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism.

"A Stain on the Constitution"

"In response, the California Real Estate Assn., the forerunner of today's California Assn. of Realtors, put forward a ballot initiative to amend the Constitution to require a public vote before such housing could be built. The campaign argued that voters should get a say because public housing creates taxpayer debts. The effort also relied heavily on anti-communist and segregationist messaging."

Liam Dillon at the Los Angeles Times reports on efforts Article 34 of the California Constitution.

"The Cold War Was Perceived as a Kind of Moral Crusade"

"One man, Frank Kameny, was fired from his role in the Army Map Service in 1957 because of his sexuality. He decided to fight the decision, framing the discrimination against him as a civil rights issue rather than an alleged national security issue. By 1965, Kameny and other gay men and lesbians were picketing outside the White House and helping other fired employees with their court cases. And although in 1975 the Civil Service Commission announced new rules that meant gay people could no longer be barred or fired from federal employment because of their sexuality, discrimination continued in other agencies where employees had security clearance, like the NSA, where Shoemaker worked."

In a 2020 Time article, Suyin Haynes discusses the history of the Lavender Scare.

"In the End, She Had Fallen in Love with Her Own Martyrdom"

"Sebba argues that Ethel was the victim of a combination of Cold War hysteria and bad relatives, and that she went to her death with 'dignity, confidence and courage'. Her Ethel is a 'profoundly moral woman' who 'believed she was dying to make sure that she left her sons with not simply the memory of a mother they loved but a human role model of how to live a good life'. Of course 'she could not confess to something which she had not done.' But that wouldn't have been necessary. If she had agreed to tell the government that Julius was a spy, then even after he was already dead her execution would have been called off."

At the London Review of Books, Deborah Friedell reviews Anne Sebba's Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy.

"The First Goth"

"When Niemi learned of her aunt's death in 2008, she hurried to Los Angeles on 'limited funds' and signed the death certificate. Then she discovered dozens of pages of an unfinished autobiography stashed around Nurmi's apartment—crumpled in the pockets of old shirts, taped to the backs of pictures and calendars. Slowly, she pieced the story together, even though she had never written anything before and felt 'riddled with self-doubt.' But she persisted—and for this, lovers of bad movies, macabre jokes and old Hollywood should be grateful."

Scott Bradfield at the Los Angeles Times reviews Sandra Niemi's Glamour Ghoul: The Passions and Pain of the Real Vampira, Maila Nurmi.

The First Tycoon of Teen

"Spector cracked the top 20 in 1962 with the Crystals' 'There's No Other (Like My Baby)' and 'Uptown' but vaulted to No. 1 with the ode to teen outlawry 'He's a Rebel'—recorded with a then-background singer, Darlene Love of the Blossoms, on lead vocals, but released under the Crystals' name. By the time 'He's a Rebel' hit the apex, Spector had bought out Sill's interest in Philles and established his signature production sound—immense, percussive, densely orchestrated (usually by arranger Jack Nitzsche) and over-the-top." 

Chris Morris at Variety writes an obituary of Phil Spector.

And Chris Willman wrestles with Spector's legacy.

"The Fact That One Singer Possessed Such Versatility Is, in No Small Degree, the Crux of His Significance"

"But it also speaks to a long-standing tendency to consider Black music in reductive terms of racial authenticity and obligation, the idea that certain types of artistic and commercial ambition equate to 'selling out' in any number of senses. (Ironically, many of the most vocal proponents of this view have been white.) It's a syllogistic and subtly reactionary view that views Black artistry solely in terms of a narrowly prescribed binary of purity vs. dilution."

Jack Hamilton at Slate criticizes some critics of Sam Cooke.

And Andrew Loog Oldham at Variety remembers Cooke on Cooke's ninetieth birthday.

"He Transformed Science Fiction's Position in American Literature During the 1950s"

"If you look at a similar list today, all but three of the top films—Titanic and two Fast and Furious sequels—are science fiction or fantasy. That is 94 percent of the hits. That means in a 70-year period, American popular culture (and to a great degree world popular culture) went from 'realism' to fantasy and science fiction. The kids' stuff became everybody's stuff. How did that happen? There were many significant factors, but there is no doubt that Ray Bradbury was the most influential writer involved." 

At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Sam Weller and Dana Gioia discuss the centennial of Ray Bradbury.

"Less for What It Reveals About the President Than for What It Says About the Rest of Us"

"The problem, as diagnosed by The New York Times' Bosley Crowther, was that audiences found Rhodes unbelievable. The public, he wrote, would never be snowed that easily—they would be 'finished with him' before a real-life Rhodes could do nearly so much damage.                    "Time, of course, would prove Crowther wrong and the filmmakers right. Though the film arrived just as television was saturating the country—in 1950, fewer than 10 percent of American households had a set; by the end of the decade, nearly 90 percent did—the two men intuited how susceptible the American public would be to this form of mass communication and the ways it could be used to corrupt the nation's politics." 

Jake Tapper at The Atlantic connects A Face in the Crowd to Donald Trump.

"The Michael Young Pathway"

"If you want to have social equality--a country where everyone is considered an equal, by themselves and others--what Young describes is a doomsday machine. (Young himself famously didn't like it much, which is why at the end of the book the 'merit'-promoting bureaucrat gets killed by a populist mob.) The more you provide 'equal opportunity' for those at the bottom, the more you perfect a system in which those at the top can believe they are smarter and better (i.e. more meritorious) than those who can't or don't climb up the pyramid. After all, they had equal opportunity. What's their excuse?" 

Mickey Kaus at Kausfiles wonders what comes after meritocracy.

"Encouragement to Irrational Optimism"

"These are the problem-solving strategies that Donald Trump brought to his marriages, six corporate bankruptcies, presidential campaign, and now, what increasingly appears to be a failed presidency. The consistent element in each of these has been to deny negative realities and keep moving. The casinos, the airline, the football league, Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, Trump University. . . all bear the same markings of hyper optimism and overpromise/underdeliver salesmanship."

Brent Orrell at The Bulwark discusses Norman Vincent Peale's influence on Donald Trump.

And at The Conversation, Kristin Kobes Du Mez explores why white Evangelical Protestants support Trump.

"A Politico-Cultural Counterpart to the Marshall Plan"

"Despite the genuine threat to attendees' physical safety (the Soviets had kidnapped and 'disappeared' several critics from Berlin's Western sector), the event attracted such luminaries as A. J. Ayer, James Burnham, Herbert Read, H. R. Trevor-Roper, Sidney Hook, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Carlo Schmid, as well as five honorary presidents–the eminent philosophers Bertrand Russell, Karl Jaspers, John Dewey, Benedetto Croce, and Jacques Maritain. Delegates also included 'the cream of the anti-Stalinist left,' such as Arthur Koestler and Ignazio Silone, some of whom had been imprisoned in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy, or Falangist Spain. Indeed, one of the forum's organizers, Margarete Buber-Neumann, had been incarcerated by both Hitler and Stalin."

At The American Interest, Michael Allen and David E. Lowe look back to the 1950 creation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

"He Worked at It Not Like an Intellectual but Like a Worker"

"In the days when New York was a suburb of Moscow, he was one of the dissidents, defending freedom and democracy against Stalinist repression and its local apologists. But when Joe McCarthy and other right-wingers turned anti-communism into a repressive politics, he defended the civil rights of the men and women he had spent years attacking. He understood that the struggle for democracy and equality required him and his friends to fight always against opponents on the right and often, too, against opponents on the left."

Michael Walzer and other writers at Dissent remember Irving Howe.

"We Were Lucky to Have Him, and He Knew It"

"Of course, Richard Penniman's sonic impact was only part of his outrageous long-term cultural impact. An erotic wild man, a drag queen, with a pencil moustache and pancake makeup, he had no predecessors; no one was about to confuse him with Dickie Valentine. Think how far beyond description Prince and Bowie seemed at their point of breakthrough, then think how Richard Penniman was doing much the same–and with greater extravagance–two to three decades earlier."

Upon Little Richard's death, Bob Stanley writes an appreciation at The Guardian.

December 2019 Acquisitions

Books:
Charles L. Black, Jr., and Philip Bobbitt, Impeachment: A Handbook, New Edition, 2018.
Howard Chaykin and Daniel Brereton, Batman: Thrillkiller, 2018.
Nathalia Holt, The Queens of Animation: The Untold Story of the Women Who Transformed the World of Disney and Made Cinematic History, 2019.
Jonathan Kauffman, Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat, 2018.
Robert Kirkman et al, Battle Pope, Vol. 1: Genesis, 2009.
Grant Morrison et al, Secret Origins Featuring the JLA, 1999.
Matteo Pizzolo et al, Calexit, 2018.
Isha Sesay, Beneath the Tamarind Tree: A Story of Courage, Family, and the Lost Schoolgirls of Boko Haram, 2019.
Steve Turner, A Hard Day's Write: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Song, 2009.
Marc Scott Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 2018.
How to Tie a Scarf: 33 Styles, 2013.

Movies:
Elevator to the Gallows, 1958.
Los Angeles Plays Itself, 2003.
My Generation, 2017.

Music:
Billy Bragg, Best of Billy Bragg at the BBC 1983-2019, 2019.
Leonard Cohen, Thanks for the Dance, 2019.
Coldplay, X&Y, 2005.
Echo and the Bunnymen, The John Peel Sessions 1979-1983, 2019.
Electric Light Orchestra, Discovery, 1979.
Allison Moorer, Blood, 2019.
R.E.M., New Adventures in Hi-Fi, 1996.
Tyler the Creator, Igor, 2019.
Various, The Beat Generation, 1992.
Various, Hipsters' Holiday: Vocal Jazz & R&B Classics, 1989.

"The Sad Genius of American Photography"

"Yet we do remember–and revere–what he saw and what he achieved with The Americans. Through his deep looking, he taught us how to see the world anew, without sentiment or illusion. His alert and unforgiving gaze showed many Americans what was right under their noses yet invisible to them. It was, in retrospect, a wake-up call but, more than that, a beautiful, if bleakly poetic, vision of modern America, as evocative and unrelenting in its way as any novel or poem by Philip Roth or Saul Bellow."

Sean O'Hagan at The Guardian writes an appreciation of Robert Frank.