When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines
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.
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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
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Witty people doing anecdotal things ... A snort of fine-grade nostalgia ... Does indeed conjure a bygone world.
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