Word: yorkerism
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...what? Has the Chicago Bulls' star been traded to the host New York Knickerbockers? Nice dream, if you're a New Yorker; nightmare, if a Chicagoan. Is he retiring and, like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, making his farewell appearances? Maybe he'll hang up the Air Jordans in a decade or two, but certainly not now. So what's all the fuss about? Simply that this is the first time during the 1988-89 season that the world's most exciting basketball player is visiting New York. A JORDAN FOR PRESIDENT sign even appears in the stands, a semiserious calling...
...infinitely more prudent alternative appeared to be the 1989 New Yorker Diary. The ad promises that its "50 all-time classic" cartoons will "start each day with a smile." But such an enforced daily dose of risibility struck me as being a little like wearing a lampshade at a party while completely sober. Esquire is another competitor in this smile-button sweepstakes. Its diary boasts cartoons and ads drawn from the magazine's issues of 1939. Not, however, exactly the world's most fun year. Somehow the memory of Nazi troops pouring into Poland might mar my enjoyment of next...
...into plastics, was the advice given to ambitious young men after World War II. The New Yorker editor Robert A. Gottlieb and Manhattan art dealer Frank Maresca eventually did. A Certain Style: The Art of the Plastic Handbag, 1949-59 (Knopf; 117 pages; $35) is a campy offering of selected photographs of the authors' unusual collections of period pocketbooks. Articles that once seemed the height of kitschy fashion in New York City and Miami Beach now glow, isolated by smart lighting and technically perfect camera work, like the artifacts of a vanished civilization...
Throughout most of his career, John Cheever labored amid the general impression that he was, at best, a minor writer. After all, his specialty was short stories. Never mind that they were clear, sparkling and frequently unforgettable; most of them appeared in The New Yorker and could be dismissed by the grim custodians of literary reputations as well-bred entertainments for the well-to-do. Doubts about his importance dwindled only toward the end of his life. His fourth novel, Falconer (1977), won extensive critical and popular acclaim, and the publication of The Stories of John Cheever (1978) $ prompted general...
African Madness is a terse testament to wanderlust. The book recounts four trips that Alex Shoumatoff, a staff writer for The New Yorker, made to that continent in 1986 and '87. As he notes in his preface, "My vision of the tropics was, and still is, largely romantic." This mood seems to represent a triumph of hope over experience. Three of the visits recorded here were prompted by somber, decidedly unromantic events. Shoumatoff went to Rwanda shortly after naturalist Dian Fossey was hacked to death with a machete in her remote mountainside camp. The trial of former emperor Jean-Bedel...