February 2013 Acquisitions

Books:
Mike W. Barr, Batman: Reign of Terror, 1999.
Jose Cadona, Mulan, 2013.
Suzan Colón, Catwoman: The Life and Times of a Feline Fatale, 2003.
J. M. DeMatteis et al, Batman: Going Sane, 2008.
Albert B. Feldstein (ed.), Three Ring MAD, 1964.
David Finch et al, Batman: Dark Knight--Golden Dawn, 2013.
Gregg Hurwitz et al, Penguin: Pain and Prejudice, 2012.
Bruce Jones and Sam Kieth, Batman: Through the Looking Glass, 2013.
J. H. Lee, Boo: The Life of the World’s Cutest Dog, 2011.
Stan Lee and Joe Kubert, Just Imagine Stan Lee's Batman, 2001.
Gavin Menzies, 1434, 2009
Dr. Seuss, Hop on Pop, 1963.
Michael Uslan et al, Batman: Detective No. 27, 2004.

DVDs:
The Master, 2012.
Max Fleischer's Superman, 1941-1942, 2009.

"Her Life Story Is a Eulogy for an America Long Since Past"

"Like internships, adjunct positions are often necessary to advance professionally - but only the well-off can afford to work them without living in poverty or debt. The result is a professoriate of an increasingly uniform class background, much like the policy, finance and journalism circles McArdle describes. Mobility is but a memory. 'The life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in almost any other advanced country for which there is data,' writes economist Joseph E Stiglitz in an editorial aptly titled 'Equal Opportunity, Our National Myth'."

Sarah Kendzior at Al Jazeera looks to Drew Gilpin Faust's experiences to see changes in class mobility during the past forty years.

"Not the Kind of Change Friedan Hoped Her Book Would Inspire"

"Sandberg also seems primarily concerned with the economics of gender. But there's a key difference: Friedan didn’t share a view from the corporate boardroom. Her first political home was the labor movement, and she found her way back to it in the mid-1990s. Then in her 70s, Friedan participated with gusto in campus teach-ins to promote the new, reform-minded leadership of the AFL-CIO. 'I have a pretty good historic Geiger counter,' she told a packed audience at Columbia University. 'It clicked thirty years ago' when The Feminine Mystique helped create the modern women’s movement. 'And that counter is clicking again, because I think we are on the verge of something new: a movement for social justice' which might 'transcend the separate interests, the special interests, even the very good interests of identity politics that have been at the cutting edge of democratic progress.' Friedan wasn't able to realize her vision of justice—such is the fate of American leftists. But it was always a far cry from the individualized notion of justice proferred by Sandberg."

Michael Kazin in The New Republic considers Betty Friedan's legacy upon the fiftieth anniversary of The Feminine Mystique.


"Competent female executives run better companies than incompetent male executives, but they’re no more likely to make universal day care the law of the land. If Davos Woman had dominated feminist discourse when the Triangle Shirtwaist fire killed nearly 130 female sweatshop laborers in 1911, would she have pushed for the legislation that came out of that tragedy—the fire codes and occupancy limits that made workplaces safer for women, and men, for generations to come?"

And Judith Shulevitz reviews Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In.

"On Some Level You, not Metallica, Are the Asshole"

"The same point is at the heart of Freeloading, which--like the TMT piece--provides the backstory that Ruen himself was an unapologetic music pirate until he began working at a Brooklyn cafe, saw that some of the indie-rock musicians who came in--members of the Hold Steady, Yeasayer, Vampire Weekend, musicians he considered 'success stories'--were virtually broke due to, he believed, digital piracy killing album sales ('Even I had an apartment as nice or nicer than those of some of these "rock stars,"' Ruen writes), understood that at some point the lack of financial support could compel many of them to stop pursuing a career in music, and had the epiphany that 'behind free content's superficial illusion of more lies a long-term reality of less. Sooner or later, it is something we all have to pay for.'"

Michael Alan Goldberg at The Village Voice talks with Chris Ruen about Ruen's book Freeloading: How Our Insatiable Hunger for Free Content Starves Creativity.

"When Everyone Is DIY-ing, the Act of Putting Out Your Own Music or Magazine Loses Much of Its Ethical and Political Charge"

"Digiculture is the Anti-Spectacle: now we're all doing it for ourselves, incessantly.  The passing of the Analogue System makes it possible to see the benefits of the Mono-Mainstream (TV networks, major labels, government-run public broadcasting).  This apparatus created mass experiences, mobilizations of energy and desire.  But it also brought into being undergrounds, subcultures that grew in the darkness, outside mediation.  In time, these would break through into the mainstream, via certain libidinally charged thresholds (in UK terms, the weekly music press, Top of the Pops, Radio One).  They would change pop and be changed by it.  It was hard to break through, but if those barricades could be surmounted, things would then get propelled into mainstream consciousness and couldn't be ignored.  This antagonistic symbiosis of underground and overground resulted in a dialectical process of renewal and recuperation that kept music moving."

In a 2011 The Wire article, Simon Reynolds assesses the impact of the internet on pop music.

"100 Percent of Them Would Be Wrong"

"The book took her 10 years to write, which is about how long it takes to read, albeit for the best possible reason: it is rigorously, at times obsessively, well researched. More appealingly, Banner’s academic orientation did not preclude her from going native. In the course of her work, she joined a Marilyn fan club, became a major collector of the star’s artifacts, contributed to a fund that paid for a new bench outside the Westwood crypt, and published a coffee-table book devoted to items from Marilyn’s personal archive. For those of us who love Marilyn, The Passion and the Paradox constitutes an invaluable resource, a compendium of the latest discoveries, a settling of long-festering questions, and a thoughtful and thorough revisiting of the subjects we love most. For the general reader, however, the book will be overwhelming and impossible. How can a civilian be expected to care about the details of a real-estate deal that led to the 1910s development of the Whitley Heights tract in the Hollywood Hills? An introductory note is addressed, casually, to those 'familiar with the biographical tradition on Monroe'; indeed, it is this tradition itself, more than any freshly excavated facts about the life, that demands a reckoning. Serious books about Marilyn number in the high hundreds, possibly the thousands; together they describe not just the transformation of a poor California girl into an international sex symbol but also the posthumous transformation of that sex symbol into something shockingly urgent, completely contemporary, and forever bankable."

Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic reviews Lois Banner's Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox.

Black Bonnie Showtime

The Los Angeles Times reports the deaths of musician Donald Byrd, screenwriter Richard Collins, jurist Ronald Dworkin, singer Mindy McCready, basketball-team owner Jerry Buss, and singer Tony Sheridan.

"Contrary to What Is Often Said, the 'Original Sin' of the South Is Not Slavery, or Even Racism. It Is Cheap, Powerless Labor"

"Northernomics is the high-road strategy of building a flourishing national economy by means of government-business cooperation and government investment in R&D, infrastructure and education. Although this program of Hamiltonianism (named after Washington’s first Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton) has been championed by maverick Southerners as prominent as George Washington, Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln (born in Kentucky to a Southern family), the building of a modern, high-tech, high-wage economy has been supported chiefly by political parties based in New England and the Midwest, from the Federalists and the Whigs through the Lincoln Republicans and today’s Northern Democrats.
"Southernomics is radically different. The purpose of the age-old economic development strategy of the Southern states has never been to allow them to compete with other states or countries on the basis of superior innovation or living standards. Instead, for generations Southern economic policymakers have sought to secure a lucrative second-tier role for the South in the national and world economies, as a supplier of commodities like cotton and oil and gas and a source of cheap labor for footloose corporations. This strategy of specializing in commodities and cheap labor is intended to enrich the Southern oligarchy. It doesn’t enrich the majority of Southerners, white, black or brown, but it is not intended to."

Michael Lind in Salon contrasts regional economics.

The Age of Eisenhower and Nixon?

"Frank does a splendid job of showing why Eisenhower and Nixon are still compelling characters, but neglects the political dimension that framed their relationship. My guess is that even general readers will want to know the significance of the political stories they’re told, no matter how beautifully those tales unfold."

Geoffrey Kabaservice in The New Republic reviews Jeffrey Frank's Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage.

Replaceable

"Nobody but nobody (and/or Keyshia Cole) competes with Blige as queen of 'organic,' in-the-trenches R&B. But what that quote reveals, mostly, is the gap between the Gen-Xers running nineties music and pop’s modern age, driven by millennials like Beyoncé. The nineties grew skeptical of the formal craft of show business, delighted in dressed-down rawness, quirk, and grit. Pop today seems to share much in common with the generation listening to it: It’s driven, hypercompetent, sensitive to public scrutiny. (Maybe it was overscheduled and helicopter-parented as a child.)"

Nitsuh Abebe in New York discusses the "Winter of Beyoncé."

Coming of Age in Anthropology

Alice Dreger at The Atlantic and Emily Eakin in The New York Times Magazine discuss the controversial reputations of anthropologists Margaret Mead and Napoleon Chagnon.

Posh-ification

"It turns out that the old complaint against gentrification, that it drives out minorities, is far too simplistic. Instead, we should be worrying about a different concern: It hasn’t built the diversity that Jacobsian urbanists envisioned, and that cities need. Diversity, in all its forms, is the urban advantage; it’s what lured a suburb-raised generation to 19^th century rowhouses in the first place. After all these years of trying to revive their old neighborhoods, what a shame if it turns out that American cities have birthed a new kind of monotony."





Inga Saffron in The New Republic ponders urban neighborhood changes.

"We Have Been Scared, Misled or Bamboozled"

"While we know intellectually that we need to save and invest for our future, our ability to do so varies enormously, Ms. Olen points out.
"'Between 1979 and 2007, the average after-tax income for the top 1 percent of earners in the economy soared by 281 percent,' she writes. 'The top 20 percent would see their incomes increase by 95 percent. The middle fifth? A mere 25 percent.'       

"THE solutions offered by the personal finance world have been unrealistic, she says, contending that 'the increasing problem Americans were having keeping up financially was not viewed as a social justice problem, but as a knowledge and smarts problem that could be solved on an individual basis, one investor at a time.'"

 

Caitlin Kelly in The New York Times reviews Helaine Olen's Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry.

Null Hypothesis

"But the key thing is that the Republican Party has now rejected its Southern Strategy and is embracing Calhounism instead. The high period of the Republican Party’s most explicit racial appeals was also the time when it had the least use for Calhounian methods of minority rule. The Southern Strategy, as a political method, was not based on Calhounism. It was closer to the opposite of Calhounism.

"Why? Because Republicans were winning."

Jonathan Chait at New York reacts to Sam Tenenhaus's article in The New Republic about the influence of John C. Calhoun on today's Republican Party.

Jobs and Freedom

"Freed approached the march as a day in its entirety, from early morning preparations on the periphery, to stacks of picket signs, to wide angles of the National Mall evolving into swelling masses framing the reflecting pool anchored by the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. He embedded himself in the crowd, zooming in on children clapping and marchers straining to hear the speeches. He then shot the aftermath with stragglers lingering among discarded fliers strewn about the grounds."

Liesl Bradner in the Los Angeles Times discusses This Is the Day: The March on Washington, a new book of photographs by Leonard Freed.

"Can’t Ignore It for Long"

"A whopping 73 percent of Asians supported Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election, up 11 percent from four years ago. When you disaggregate by nationality, the difference between Asian support for Obama and Romney is even more stark and begins to approach African American-levels of support for the president."

Jamelle Bouie at The American Prospect argues that "the Republican Party has an 'Asian problem' that rivals their 'Latino problem' in size and scope."

This Is My Body

"While quite intriguing to contemplate, Wills’s suggestion will never be seriously considered, either by Catholic priests or many parishioners. It is likely to be dismissed, therefore, as unrealistic, impractical and possibly unkind. This is a shame. Whatever one thinks of his proposal, Wills’s demolition of the many myths surrounding the origins of priestly status and function is in itself crucially informative and enlightening, especially for practitioners of Catholicism."

Kevin Madigan in The New Republic reviews Garry Wills's Why Priests? The Real Meaning of the Eucharist.

"That’s Just the Way We’re Made"

"But we gather here knowing that there are millions of Americans whose hard work and dedication have not yet been rewarded. Our economy is adding jobs–but too many people still can’t find full-time employment. Corporate profits have rocketed to all-time highs–but for more than a decade, wages and incomes have barely budged.

"It is our generation’s task, then, to reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth–a rising, thriving middle class."

 

The New York Times prints President Obama's 2013 State of the Union Address.

"Resigning Pope No Longer Has Strength To Lead Church Backward"

"'It is with sadness, but steadfast conviction, that I announce I am no longer capable of impeding social progress with the energy and endurance that is required of the highest ministry in the Roman Catholic Church,' Benedict reportedly said in Latin to the Vatican’s highest cardinals. 'While I’m proud of the strides the Church has made over the past eight years, from thwarting AIDS-prevention efforts in Africa to failing to punish or even admit to decades of sexual abuse of children at the hands of clergy, it has become evident to me that, in this rapidly evolving world, I now lack the capacity to continue guiding this faith back centuries.'"

From The Onion.

1993's Company

Carl Swanson, Jerry Saltz, David Edelstein, and Nitsuh Abebe in New York argue that our current era began twenty years ago.

"Less Ayn Rand, More Flannery O’Connor"

"Conversely, conservatives are wary of concentrated power in whatever form. The evil effects of Original Sin are nowhere more evident than in Washington, on Wall Street, or in the executive suites of major institutions, sadly including churches and universities. So conservatives reject the argument that correlates centralization with efficiency and effectiveness. In whatever realm, they favor the local over the distant. Furthermore, although conservatives are not levelers, they believe that a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth—property held in private hands—offers the surest safeguard against Leviathan. A conservative’s America is a nation consisting of freeholders, not of plutocrats and proletarians."

Andrew J. Bacevich in The American Conservative offers suggestions for conservative renewal.

Not O(k)

"The 401(k) experiment has been a disaster, a disaster which threatens to doom millions to economic misery during the later years of their lives. Proposals to improve our system of private retirement savings--even good ones--will offer little to no help for the baby boomers who are currently nearing retirement, and are also unlikely to be of sufficient help for current younger workers. We need to increase Social Security benefits, now and in the future. It's the only realistic way to provide people with guaranteed economic security and comfort post-retirement."

Duncan Black at USA Today warns of impending poverty for the soon-to-be retired.

The Winter of His Disinterment

"The injury appears to confirm contemporary accounts that he died in close combat in the thick of the battle and unhorsed – as in the great despairing cry Shakespeare gives him: 'A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!'"

Maev Kennedy in The Guardian reports the confirmation of the discovery of Richard III's remains in Leicester, England.

"Something That Is Fast"

"Sometimes B-movies featured talent on their way down, but more often they were a testing ground for up-and-comers such as Wise, Richard Fleischer, Edward Dmytryk, Fred Zinnemann, Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher. But some directors were content to stay in B-pictures because there was little interference from the front office."

Susan King in the Los Angeles Times gives a brief history of B-movies.

Unlearned

"Although the book by Stone and Kuznick is heavily footnoted, the sourcing, as the example of Wallace’s 1952 article suggests, recalls nothing so much as Dick Cheney’s cherry-picking of intelligence, particularly about the origins and early years of the cold war. The authors also devote many thousands of words to criticism of such destructive American policies as Ronald Reagan’s in Central America and George W. Bush’s in Iraq, but much of this will be familiar to readers of these pages, as will their objections to Barack Obama’s use of predator drones. This book is less a work of history than a skewed political document, restating and updating a view of the world that the independent radical Dwight Macdonald once likened to a fog, 'caused by the warm winds of the liberal Gulf Stream coming in contact with the Soviet glacier'—but now more than twenty years after the dissolution of the Soviet empire."

Sean Wilentz in The New York Review of Books reviews Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick's The Untold History of the United States.

Hush that Fuss

"She spent nearly two decades before the bus incident struggling, organizing and agitating for civil rights, mostly as the secretary of the Montgomery, Ala., branch of the N.A.A.C.P. But it wasn’t until Parks was in her 40s and attended an integrated workshop that she found 'for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society.' This didn’t mean that she was eager for integration, though. She was later quoted as saying that what people sought 'was not a matter of close physical contact with whites, but equal opportunity.'"

Charles M. Blow in The New York Times discusses a new biography of Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis.

"The Black and White Ball of the Critical Elite"

"The tale has often been told of how the publisher Jason Epstein, his wife, the editor Barbara Epstein, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick and her husband, Robert Lowell, convened in an apartment on West 67thStreet in the midst of an extended newspaper strike in New York, then in its second vexing week. The absence of the New York Times and its book review constituted a grievous problem for publishers, who felt they had nowhere to advertise their books or get them effectively reviewed; the very existence of the book review constituted a grievous problem for those four people, who viewed it with disdain. In his memoir 'Book Business,' Epstein says, 'Its reviews were ill-informed, bland, occasionally spiteful, usually slapdash.' Hardwick had recently written a brutal takedown in Harper’s, decrying 'the lack of literary tone itself' and dismissing it as 'a provincial journal.' So they seized the day: Lowell borrowed $4,000 to float the enterprise, and the brilliant young Harper’s editor Robert Silvers was hired on for what very well could have been a one-off job, if the new review could not have been made financially self-sustaining. The whole thing had the air of an Andy Hardy let’s-put-on-a-show exercise, except the cast of this movie all went to Columbia, Kenyon and the University of Chicago and came equipped with killer rolodexes and deadly serious intent."

In Salon, Gerald Howard marks the fiftieth anniversar of The New York Review of Books.

Alabama Death Wish Boogie Woogie

The Los Angeles Times publishes obituaries for civil-rights activist James A. Hood, baseball manager Earl Weaver, baseball player Stan "The Man" Musial, director Michael Winner, journalist Hans Massaquoi, journalist Stanley Karnow, singer Leroy "Sugarfoot" Bonner, singer Patty Andrews, and former NYC mayor Ed Koch.