Word: lowdownness
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...Lowdown: Davis, a veteran journalist at publications like TV Guide, culls insights from the show's creators and cast to serve up this painstakingly detailed history of television's most famous address. He writes as an unabashed fan of the show's charms rather than as a dispassionate historian, and the approach yields mixed results. His interviews are revealing, but the portraits of Sesame Street's creators can be hagiographic and the language breathless: at one point, he describes the observation that television could be harnessed for educational purposes as a "flash of brilliance that struck like a bolt from...
...Lowdown: Not only persuasive in its argument that Victor Fleming was one of the unsung titans of his era, An American Movie Master also makes for a fascinating case study in how power was acquired, wielded and lost during the 1930s and '40s. Fleming knew the score as few did, working his way up the ladder to take control of some of the most ambitious, unwieldy and risky epics in movie history. For readers with a limited knowledge of the movie industry, its transition from silents to talkies, and the rise of the big studio picture, Sragow's thorough scene...
...Lowdown: Burger's replication of Milgram's famous demonstration was watered down somewhat; a review of his findings by University of California-Davis professor Alan Elms terms the study "Obedience Lite." The electric charges were purposefully subtler and the conditions less stressful. But the takeaway is no less disturbing: humanity's threshold for cruelty is, like everything else, situational. We seem wired to follow orders, even when they're harmful to others. In her chilling portrayal of Nazi middle-manager Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt famously excoriated this impulse as "the banality of evil." Evil is way too strong a word...
...Lowdown: The phenomenon Ritchin explains - the democratization and manipulation of photography via digital cameras and computers - is compelling. It's true that flat photographs in newspapers and magazines used to be the tools with which we viewed the world around us. As each day passes, our view gets richer and more sophisticated thanks to digital technologies. Ritchin, a photography professor at New York University, does not see digitization as demonization; he does not think that the risks of photographic deception made possible by computers outweigh the infinite possibilities new technologies open up. His message is modern. After Photography, however...
...Lowdown...