Current Books

sonality disordered), and so on. But the list means nothing, he quickly sees, so he creates his own: "The Travelers and the Wanderers, Guided by Voices, Vietnam Vets, Waylaid Tourists, . . . ‘No English’ and No Pap e r s , . . . Manic in America, . . . The Truly Weird, for Whom We Can Find No Category That Fits." Barber forms a special attachment to one of his clients, a brilliant Czech émigré, but one day the man jumps into the East River and never comes out.

Barber, who’s now an associate at Yale Medical School’s Program for Recovery and Community Health, is too reflective to offer any pat answers, but he does come to understand that life’s sensitive souls need help in every form, whether pharmaceutical, therapeutic, or familial, to get them through dark nights. Beyond that, who knows why some people make it and some don’t?

"You have to decide whether you are going to breathe or not," Barber writes. He remembers an atypical conversation with his ordinarily reserved mother, soon after he’d dropped out of Harvard. "My mother and I were talking, in our roundabout way, about the difficulties that people have in the w o r l d . . . . ‘Look, living is hard,’ my mother said. ‘Breathing is hard. Just listen to the m u s i c .’"

Barber decided to breathe. He listened. He wrote a fine book about it, too.

—A. J. Loftin

SPECIAL EFFECTS: An Oral History.

By Pascal Pinteau. Translated from French by Laurel Hirsch. Abrams. 566 pp. $37.50

The rarest of all special effects in a Hollywood movie these days is a good script. But though oral intelligence is in short supply on the screen, there’s an abundance of technological intelligence, sights to distract you from the dialogue, sounds to drown it out. If you’ve ever left a theater—or theme park or Céline Dion show (see p. 21)—wondering "How’d they do that?" here’s the book for you. Pinteau interviewed more than three dozen special-effects wizards, who shared with him the secrets of the illusions they’ve worked over the years. Be warned, though.

After lots of the explanations, you’re likely to have a follow-up question: "Huh?"

Pinteau honors the antic genius of individuals who’ve been largely anonymous to the public, though they’ve shaped our dreams and nightmares, and that recognition is overdue. How many otherwise awful movies have been redeemed by a good explosion? Or a wayward asteroid? Or an oversized reptile? Or a gaggle of flesh-eating ghouls? As you might expect of a journalist and screenwriter who’s done special-effects work himself, Pinteau takes a spacious view of the subject, exploring not just "film and manipulated reality," but animation "from paintbrush to pixel," the art of makeup, TV illusions, and theme parks. (The last no longer feature pop-out skeletons in a downscale haunted house. Visitors to these stupendous sites are now prey to fire and flood and the false hope of extras in a disaster movie, or they’re pinned by twice the force of gravity while blasting off in a space shuttle—and they expect nothing less.)

But to call this book an "oral history" is misleading on two counts: the oral part and the history part. The featured interviews have no consistent pattern, and, in any case, they’re by no means the whole of the book. They’re dropped at random into Pinteau’s own narrative, which suffers from a kind of journalistic ADD and is much too jumpy to qualify as disciplined history. (From the early special effect of an eightlegged horse in a Paleolithic Spanish cave painting, it’s a two-page gallop to the 19th century.) What’s more—or, rather, less— the book has only a skeletal table of contents, which makes no mention of the interviews, and it has no index at all. The publisher of this oral history must be headquartered in Babel.

Why, then, is Special Effects such a guilty pleasure? For the pictures, of course: 1,136 of them—982 in full color—and twice that many would not have been excessive. Without turning a page, you’re hooked by the photo on the laminated front cover: a mechanized head of the current governor of California, looking green and ravaged, with half his steely skull exposed. (A good day terminating, or a bad day in Sacramento?) Recall your favorite screen illusion, and you’re like

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ly to find it, if only by accident, somewhere in Pinteau’s lavish compendium.

When movies were new, a century ago, the mere motion of people and objects was special effect enough. Now we want whole new worlds to turn and tumble. And they do, ingeniously, interchangeably. But though all the commotion in those artificial worlds may tickle the mind, does it touch the heart, or supplant the memory of movie moments that needed no technological goosing? It’s 66 years since Rhett swept Scarlett off her feet and up that dusky staircase, with no help from a computer. Yet the thrill of that moment persists, wicked and authentic still, even as the recollection of last weekend’s digitized apocalypse already fades.

—James M. Morris

MAGAZINES THAT
MAKE HISTORY:
Their Origins, Development,
and Influence.

By Norberto Angeletti and Alberto Oliva. Univ. Press of Florida. 407 pp. $45

The Internet is the Shirley Temple of modern media, the hugely talented new prodigy that’s conquering the world. It sings! It dances! It lets you watch Icelandic TV! Suddenly, the popular media of the last century seem passé. Magazines in particular have taken on a Norma Desmond air. There they sit on the newsstands, crying out for at

tention and love, but they’re printed on paper, the poor dears, and static as stones. Though traditional magazines are still thriving as businesses— indeed, making a lot more money than their Internet counterparts— they no longer seem fresh or exciting.

Luckily, there are still some who recall the glories of the magazine past and believe in the medium’s power. Norberto Angeletti and Alberto Oliva, longtime magazine journalists based, respectively, in Buenos Aires and New York, spent five years putting together this vibrant chronicle of eight great magazines of the 20th century: Time, Der Spiegel, Life, Paris Match, National Geographic, Reader’s Digest, ¡Hola!, and P e o p l e.

At first, the lineup looks startlingly disparate—what could National Geographic and the Spanish celebrity fanzine ¡ H o l a ! possibly have in common?—but as you move through the artfully reconstructed stories of their origins and growth, it becomes clear that the magazines share a great deal. Many of them were born of a very personal vision, a fever dream that seized the imaginations of one or two tenacious individuals. DeWitt Wallace, the founder of Reader’s Dig e s t, was so taken with the notion of condensing other publications that, while recovering from serious combat injuries suffered in World War I, he pored over old articles and practiced boiling down their contents. Those magazines that didn’t begin as obsessive personal quests effectively became just that under driven, visionary editors. Rudolf Augstein, Der Spiegel’s legendary guiding spirit, occasionally rewrote articles a f t e r they had been published, just to demonstrate to his staff how they should have read.

Another motif here is the role played by serendipity and pure accident. When Charles Lindbergh made his solo transatlantic flight in May 1927, T i m e didn’t see that he’d instantly become a popular hero,

and left him off the cover. Seven months later, as the year ended and the editors faced the usual holiday dearth of news, somebody had a neat idea: Why not fix the oversight by giving Lindbergh the cover and touting him as "The Man of the Year"?

National Geographic debuted in 1888 as a scholarly magazine of exploration, mostly made up of dense text. One day in 1904, editor Gilbert Grosvenor was faced with a printer’s

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