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Publishing, Women and Violence

© Robert Powers

Warren Buffett, the investment guru, said once there's no better way to make money than owning a monopoly newspaper. S.I. "Si" Newhouse may not have read that comment, but he certainly followed its precepts. The billionaire publisher runs the empire consisting of monopoly dailies and a group of high-level magazines, including the once-distinguished good gray presence, The New Yorker.

The reclusive publisher runs the empire with his brother Donald. Writer Carol Felsenthal spent four years and conducted more than 400 interviews to complete her biography, Citizen Newhouse (Seven Stories, $29.95). It's a major botch of a book.

Newhouse is great material for an exhaustive biography, but this book isn't it. It's more of a gossip indulgence, with no apparent hand of an editor to stem Ms. Felsenthal's unerring tendency to focus on the mundane, inconsequential, and personal accounts of facts we'd rather not know. For instance, the book deals in suggestion, inference, and guessing. One wonders how a writer could have spent four years on a project and produced an account that is almost totally insubstantial.

Roy Cohn, the lawyer who became famous in the McCarthy hearings decades ago, once said, "It's a phenomenon of American life that no one knows who Si Newhouse is." After reading Citizen Newhouse, the comment continues to be valid.

If Carol Felsenthal needs a job, she might knock on the doors at The New York Post, the gossip-loaded paper owned by Rupert Murdoch. She would be right at home writing the "Page Six" column.

WOMEN ON THE DEFENSIVE

Those were the good old days for women. When? The 1960s and 1970s, when social movements had power and captured the interest of the American public. Author Sylvia Bashevkin asks, "Were [those days] swallowed up in the greedy good times of the 1980s? Did the lean, mean 1990s spell final disaster, as more and more people adopted a 'me first' approach to life?"

Her answers are contained in the provocative new book, Women on the Defensive (University of Chicago Press, $47.50 cloth, $18 paperback). Her book is being described as the first comparative analysis of the intersection of government policies and the women's movement. She concludes that the so-called backlash has been overstated. Reports of feminism's death are greatly exaggerated.

In the years ruled by Ronald Reagan, Great Britain's Margaret Thatcher and Canada's Brian Mulroney, conservatism was on the rise. Alternative points of view dimmed across national boundaries, argues Bashevkin. "Trade unions, moderate and left political parties, environmental groups, and civil rights organizations all found themselves on the defensive along with women's groups, marginalized by a dominant belief system that ceded little room to competing outlooks."