From the pages of Vanity Fair to the red carpets of Hollywood, editor Graydon Carter's memoir revives the glamorous heyday of print magazines when they were at the vanguard of American culture.
At its best when Carter is the underdog biting at ankles, or a Don Quixote who learns to tilt at the right windmills ... Catnip for those of us still addicted to magazines, who still harbor the delusion that we’ll get to that pile on the table as soon as we can. Carter seems to know how fortunate he was to ride the wave and thrive as a shot-caller back when that meant something more than it does today. The going was indeed good.
Carter’s book will make some readers itchy. I quickly and (mostly) happily consumed it anyway. The journalism stories and the character analysis, as Elizabeth Hardwick liked to call gossip, are first-rate ... The prose is basic ... Carter is not one for introspection ... There is not a great deal about Carter’s marriages (three) or children (five) in this memoir. He is proud that he reserved his evenings for them, he says. He does not attempt to reconcile this comment with the fact that, being a varsity socializer, he appears to be out every night. Such are the contradictions of being Graydon Carter, homme du monde
Fox, known to be a great ordering force, has helped turn Carter’s extremely un-Richardsian life into a winsome book—brisk, bright, and full of well-told anecdotes about bold- and semi-boldface names—without straying from Carter’s aloof and sometimes chilly sybaritism.
