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Title: Within the Context of No Context by George W. S. Trow ISBN: 0-87113-674-0 Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.91 (11 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Splendidly disjointed
Comment: I will go out on a limb, John Irving notwithstanding, to say this book tends toward the silliness it seeks to describe. WTCONC is an almost gratifying read. The author's cut-up method is sometimes annoying. The last two pages are the strongest. I only wish the estimable Mr. Trow would elaborate on the sense of loss of his childhood days. This is a frame I wish I could revisit more often in the book. He certainly does not fit well, like many bohemians on the margins outside the grid of two million, with the temprament of this sorry age. The blurbs on the back cover of this edition are very embarrassing. Much like a beat-up fedora hat. Hardly vintage clothing. Hardly a watershed
Rating: 5
Summary: Terrific, strange, beautifully acute essay on mass culture
Comment: I was thrilled to hear that this strange, brilliant book is being reissued. It's one of those books people press on their friends saying, "You should read this -- *really.*" My own copy has long been gone, pocketed by an acquaintance whom I pressed it on in an excess of generosity. The book itself is hard to describe. It's an elegant personal meditation on (among other things) the decline of WASP society, the effects of television and celebrity on American culture, and the author's inability to wear a fedora without crushing embarrassment. If memory serves, there's also a second essay about producer Ahmet Ertegun and his assistant David Geffen -- this was long before David Geffen was *David Geffen* -- that didn't seem as good at the time but may now seem prescient. Trow's elliptical, lapidary style gives you some of the dizzying feeling you get from David Foster Wallace, though his work is a lot shorter and more terse. Terrific stuff
Rating: 5
Summary: Apocalypse now
Comment: The New Yorker has turned the entirety of its magazine over to a single work four times. John Hersey's Hiroshima, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth, cautionary and apocalyptic all, were three. The fourth is this book.
Within the Context of No Context went out of print almost instantly after it was published in 1980. Nobody got this book in 1980. It's a difficult read, in a voice that is diffuse, associative, and allusive, and at the same time makes direct assertions about the way things are, which few of us are comfortable reading. It's not a book that people were quite ready to read in 1980.
Except for newsmen. People who made their living by drinking out of the firehose and transforming the experience into column inches understood this book right away. (These are the same people who don't need anyone to explain the first sentence of The White Album to them.)
Trow put their unease into words. And for 15 years Within the Context of No Context existed in a kind of samizdat, a thick sheaf of photocopied pages handed from one reporter or columnist or editor to another.
You shouldn't buy this book, ideally. Someone should give you a copy of it, Xeroxed from The New Yorker, saying "Read this. This makes sense. This makes everything make sense."
22 years later, it's much easier to read and understand, to criticize and quibble with. It's no longer prophecy. Unlike the apocalypses that John Hersey and Rachel Carson and Jonathan Schell were warning us about, the one Trow outlined has already happened. We've even gotten used to it.
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Title: My Pilgrim's Progress: Media Studies, 1950-1998 by George W. S. Trow ISBN: 0375701389 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 02 May, 2000 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Harvard Black Rock Forest by George W. S. Trow ISBN: 0877458952 Publisher: University of Iowa Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 2004 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Chromophobia (FOCI) by David Batchelor ISBN: 1861890745 Publisher: Reaktion Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things by Barry Glassner ISBN: 0465014909 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: May, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Against Love: A Polemic by Laura Kipnis ISBN: 0375421890 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 26 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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