Martin Lund's Blog, page 5
January 21, 2015
Book Review: David Hajdu’s “The Ten-Cent Plague”
Journalist David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America
was first published in 2008, but despite its age and the rapid and constant growth of comics scholarship and popular history, it remains one of my go-to books for oral history of the comics industry in the 1950s. Written in an engaging way, it remains one of the better meetings between journalism and history in the library of comics writing and makes for a good read while at the same time touch...
January 14, 2015
Book Review: George J. Lankevich’s “American Metropolis”
Historian George J. Lankevich’s 1998 book, American Metropolis: A History of New York City
, is one of surprisingly few books that deal with New York City’s history from the arrival of Europeans until, more or less, the time of its publication. The pieces are all there (except for proper annotation and a comprehensive bibliography) and, unlike Edward Robb Ellis’ The Epic of New York City, it was penned by an academic historian, and published by a university press (New York University Press). I...
January 7, 2015
No words today…
Today was going to be the day I returned to this blog, with a brief review and a few words of explanation about the past month’s silence. Instead, I have been unable to do much besides looking on in stunned silence as the horrible attack in France inspired both the best and worst in people. I really can’t do much besides posting my shock. Regular posting will resume next week. For now, I’ll leave you with two pictures.
Still mortified about our fallen cartoonist colleagues, but free speech w...
November 19, 2014
Comics Note: “Haunted City”
Haunted City is a brief and, it seems, aborted 2011 horror series written by Chap Taylor and Peter Johnson and illustrated by Michael Ryan. The central conceit as it is set up in issue #0 of the series is very interesting. Throughout the centuries, New York has grown steadily, in part because of a continuous influx of immigrants. People came from all over the world and brought their hopes and dreams with them. These same people also brought with them their fears, the realities behind the mons...
November 5, 2014
Book Review: Raymond Chandler’s “The Simple Art of Murder”
Raymond Chandler was one of the most well-known authors of hard-boiled detective fiction and one of the primary links between that genre of pulp fiction and “classic” film noir, owing to the facts that some of his work was adapted to the silver screen and that he worked for a time as a screenwriter in Hollywood.
His book The Simple Art of Murder
is an interesting creature. The work takes its name from the first chapter, an essay that Chandler wrote in 1944 to muse on the detective story in it...
October 27, 2014
Review: Capital of the World: A Portrait of New York City in the Roaring Twenties
Capital of the World: A Portrait of New York City in the Roaring Twenties by David Wallace
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Capital of the World
has an attention-grabbing subtitle – A Portrait of New York City in the Roaring Twenties. Sadly, the book does not really deliver what it promises: on balance, it isn’t really about New York nor about the 1920s. Collecting a number of capsule biographies about people who were active in New York in that decade, it all too often dedicates more attention to yea...
