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Article: About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made.(Review)
- Article from:
- National Review
- Article date:
- March 6, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 National Review, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made, by Ben Yagoda (Scribner, 480 pp., $27.50)
SINCE the 79-year-old William Shawn was forcibly retired in 1987 and The New Yorker magazine began to hemorrhage prestige and then cash (more than $150 million to date), there has been a furious debate among the New York cognoscenti about what went wrong. It's the same bitter disappointment we faced with poverty in this country and guerrilla insurgencies abroad: We don't understand what money can't buy.
And yet Ben Yagoda and Renata Adler--two writers as different as it is possible for one culture to produce--both seem to know the secret. Reading their books back ...