Reviews for A yacht voyage

The average rating for A yacht voyage based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-11-06 00:00:00 M Yode Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker, Renata Adler's account of the decline of the magazine, is one of those books that, it seems to me, very few people are qualified to review. It has come under attack for being factually inaccurate, for attributing conversations to people who never had them, even for fabricating situations that never occurred. The problem is that most of the people who have made these accusations of inaccuracy or falsification are targets of Adler's ire or scorn in the book, so that they have a vested interest in denying any heinous or embarrassing things they may have said or done. Robert Gottlieb, for example, New Yorker editor from 1987 to 1992, receives some of Adler's harshest criticism: instead of listening to the magazine's staff, he prefers to talk about himself and how wonderful he is; he has a complete lack of curiosity; he may have been a wonderful book editor at Knopf, but magazine editing is an entirely different business, at which he sucks; he presided through the years of the magazine's most precipitous decline. Yet Gottlieb is one of the people who has reviewed Gone. Should we believe his version of events, or Adler's? There is at least one glaring factual error in the book, where Adler states that Nixon resigned in August 1976 (of course, it was August 1974). Beyond that, I have no idea whether Adler, who wrote for the magazine from the 1960's through the 1980's, is being entirely truthful, partially truthful, or merely vindictive. But she is a good writer, and I thoroughly enjoyed her dish. "Adler was the young writer everybody talked about," writes Michael Wolff in New York magazine. "She was The New Yorker's "It" girl. A sort of brainy Candace Bushnell, a bohemian Mia Farrow-ish Platonic ideal. Richard Avedon photographed her. She was a wildly sought-after dinner party guest." She had been educated at Bryn Mawr, Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Yale Law School, and had been the New York Times' film critic. Most of the book covers the New Yorker under legendary editor William Shawn (1951 - 1987). Shawn was almost universally loved and respected by his editors and writers, who were given extraordinary freedom. Adler, for example, was allowed to take the position as the Times' film critic for 14 months and maintain her office at the New Yorker. On the downside, Shawn was a fickle taskmaster who might delay publication of a writer's work again and again, even as the writer continued to submit pieces for publication and have them accepted, for months or even years at a time. This sounds unbelievably frustrating, the writer's equivalent of becoming pregnant and bringing a fetus to term over and over, without being allowed to ever actually give birth. Even as Adler reveres Shawn, his reign does not escape criticism. Under him, the magazine began to lean strongly left (e.g., Jonathan Schell's and Charles Reich's pieces) and began to publish photographs. It was the beginning of the end. After the 80-year old Shawn was fired by new owner S.I. Newhouse and replaced by Gottlieb, Adler writes, Shawn continued to edit pieces that writers would bring to him as he sat across the street at the Algonquin. Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown was brought in after Gottlieb to resurrect lagging sales. Brown's effect on the magazine was to amplify the Conde Nast vulgarization that had already begun: more ad pages, more photographs, sleazy Vanity Fair style celebrity journalism. Adler's greatest scorn, after she skewers Shawn paramour Lillian Ross and Gottlieb, is reserved for Gottlieb protégé Adam Gopnik, now the magazine's "Paris correspondent." Gopnik is portrayed as a loathsome toady and sycophant from whom Adler receives phone calls in which he "would present, as criticism and in tones of concern, some extravagant compliment to himself." Gopnik has a habit of "letting it be known, shyly and modestly, or otherwise, that he was responsible, behind the scenes, for events in other people's professional lives." In a published review of a Picasso biography, he takes credit for discovering a small symbol in Picasso's work that was actually the discovery of a Ph.D candidate at Columbia. Adler describes a conversation shortly after Gottlieb has been hired, in which Gopnik asks to hear her impressions of the "new" New Yorker. "It's already a Conde Nast publication", Adler says, "but with typos, cartoons missing their captions, hideous ads. A friend of mine received an issue missing several pages. Then the prior pages were repeated. The price per issue has been raised. There's a new section, in New Yorker type, advertising real estate. And the pieces are not good. It's something that in all one's fears, hopes, and analyses, one could not have predicted, even a short time ago." "Five years ago?" Mr. Gopnik asked. "Two weeks ago," I said. "It's not even a first-rate Conde Nast publication. Whatever else it is, it is irremediably not the same." Mr. Gopnik sighed. "Yes," he said, as though he were agreeing with every word and nuance of what I had just said. "It has become a better magazine. But not as nice a place to work in. And that's sad."

Review # 2 was written on 2020-01-06 00:00:00 Robert Blume I heard an interview with Adler on the Longform podcast, and immediately ran to get this book from the library. I raced through it.