Latest 'Do Not Read' List from Jimmy Fallon and The Tonight Show

During the episode first broadcast on November 29, with guests John Boyega (in advance of the premiere of Star Wars: The Last Jedi and promoting the re-release of Detroit) and Kevin Nealon (SNL veteran, Weeds, and more), Jimmy Fallon featured a few more books from his now-lengthy "Do Not Read List."

The list was eclectic, to say the least.

Fallon's first listed item was the 1981 cookbook, Microwave Cooking - On a Diet, written by Barbara Methven with photographs by ‎ Michael Jensen,‎ Steven Smith,‎ and Ken Greer, described as "a collection of recipes for people on a diet and cooking with a microwave from Litton." The Tonight Show host pointed out that the cover photo -- rich chocolate pudding, it appears to be -- is one of the least likely things someone "on a diet" is likely to cook.

The second book on Fallon's newest list was somewhat more provocative: How to be a Drug Dealer, published in 2014 and written by 673126 (probably a pseudonym) and J. M.R. Rice. According to the Amazon description, "Are you tired of working all day and night without having anything to show for it? Would you like to be able to afford a vacation, or just be your own boss? This book will do just that by teaching you How to be a Drug Dealer! Are you already a drug dealer, but want to expand your business? Look no further than this book to help you increase your profits and grow your empire!"

Next on the "Do Not Read" list was an academic volume, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Teaching College, published in 2007 by Anthony D. Fredericks. As Jimmy Fallon noted, if he saw that book on his college professor's book shelf, he would probably return to How to Be a Drug Dealer as a backup plan for a post-college career. The note on Amazon, however, seems to suggest a serious purpose: "Perfect for teaching assistants, graduate students, adjuncts, and anyone who might need a brush-up, this guide teaches everything from designing the best possible course and choosing a textbook to grading. It's also loaded with advice on giving effective lectures, leading discussions, and communicating well with students. Includes sample syllabi and lesson plans."

The fourth volume on Fallon's list was a book of prophecy by Edgar Whisenant, 88 Reasons Why The Rapture Will Be In 1988, published in a Kindle edition in 2016. (Fallon had a hard copy of the book to display on TV.) According to its publisher on Amazon, "In this highly influential book, the date for the Rapture is predicted to be 1988. Read inside to find 88 reasons why this was once thought to be the case!" (Who did it influence? It doesn't say. But as a predictive book, it left something to be desired.) Whisenant is also the author of the 2017 book with a similar theme, On Borrowed Time: The Bible Dates of the 70th Week of Daniel, Armageddon, the Millennium, which is also touted as "highly influential."

A romance novel set in Australia was next on the list. Written by Demelza Carlton, the title is How To Catch Crabs. The description is compelling: "Love and babies: two things Lucy doesn't have time for in her life. It's 1926 and this young West Australian woman is happy as an accountant. And she intends to stay that way."  Then, "along comes Giorgio, an Italian migrant fisherman sent to Australia in disgrace. The moment their eyes meet across the fish market, he knows Lucy's the girl for him. If it weren't for those damn crabs and his reputation as a rake, he's certain he could catch more than just her eye – perhaps even her heart, too."

Fallon was taken by the tag line: "A tale of crabs, cricket bats and catching your heart's desire in Jazz Age Western Australia."

Notably, Demelza Carlton is the author of dozens of books, including the provocatively titled The Rock Star's Virginity and Melody Angel's Guide to Heaven and Hell.

Oddly, the last book Fallon displayed as part of his latest "Do Not Read" list is not available on Amazon.com.  (They have always been easily found through an Amazon search in the past.)  He had a hard copy, so it must exist somewhere.  The title was "What If You Are a Horse in Human Form," allegedly written by Jason the Horse. If any reader can find this unusual book for sale anywhere on the Internet, please note it in the comments below.

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Here's the "Do Not Read" video from The Tonight Show:

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Jimmy Fallon's 'Do Not Read' List of Strange Summer Books - July 9, 2014

Every once in a while, The Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon presents his audience with books that he does not recommend.  In fact, he calls it the "Tonight Show 'Do Not Read'" list.

Fallon showcased several odd books in the episode that aired on the evening of July 9, noting that during the summer, people are looking for "hot beaches, hot bods, and hot books."

The books Fallon found were not hot; instead, they were:

-- A "how-to" book for children, Playing with Puppets, by Lis Paludan (1974), which Fallon described as "definitely not creepy at all."

-- A reference book, List of Persons Whose Names Have Been Changed in Massachusetts:  1780-1883 (published in 2012).  Out of 420 pages, he found two people to highlight --Nellie E. Freeman, who changed her name to Nellie Booby, and Louisa Andrews, who changed her name in 1879 to Lotta Hardon.

-- Another "how-to" book, this one about adultery:  How to Cheat and Not Get Caught, by Elizabeth Sylvince (2007).

-- A memoir, Granny's Old Hands:  What Has She Been Doing With Them?  Granny's Coming Out of the Closet, by Celestine Starks (2006).

-- A 1976 cookbook called Entertaining With Insects, Or: The Original Guide to Insect Cookery by Ronald L. Taylor, Barbara J. Carter and John Gregory Tweed, which includes recipes for Cricket Ramaki, Tillamook Tarts, Salted Garlic Mealworms, Cricket Crisps, and Sauteed Bacon-Pepper Bees.

-- The last book on Fallon's list was a history book, Bald Knobbers:  Vigilantes on the Ozarks Frontier, by Mary Hartmann and Elmo Ingenthron (1988).  I'm sure the term "bald knobbers" meant something different in 19th century Arkansas than it would today in, for instance, the adult cinema industry.

For another snippet from Jimmy Fallon's list of forbidden books, check out this post from May 2014.

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Odd Books: Alaska, Huge Ships, and DADT?

On The Tonight Show last night, host Jimmy Fallon did a comedy bit involving books with odd titles or subjects.

One of the books he featured was John B. Thompson's Alaska as It Used to Was, which was chosen, no doubt, for its grammatically-challenged title.

Out of curiosity, I looked up Alaska as It Used to Was on Amazon.com. Nothing stood out until I scrolled down to "Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed." That caught my eye because there were only two items listed, neither of which seems to have any connection to Alaska as It Used to Was, nor to each other.

See?

The two books are How to Avoid Huge Ships by John W. Trimmer and Soldier of Change: From the Closet to the Forefront of the Gay Rights Movement by Stephen Snyder-Hill.

Big boats?  Gay soldiers?  Alaska's past?  Two of these things are not like the others.

In the comments section below, I will entertain suggestions about what the relationship among these three books might be.  There must be some connection, but it escapes me.

Cross-posted from Rick Sincere News & Thoughts.



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Author Interview: UVA's Paul A. Cantor on zombies and liberty in popular culture

Professor Paul A. Cantor

Speaking at the Mercatus Center on the Arlington campus of George Mason University last November about the topic, “The Economics of Apocalypse: Flying Saucers, Alien Invasions, and the Walking Dead,” University of Virginia English professor Paul A. Cantor drew upon his research on popular culture to discuss opposing visions of individualism and collectivism in contemporary catastrophe narratives in film and television.

Cantor, a Shakespeare scholar, is author of a recent book, The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV, a follow-up to Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization, published in 2001.

Cantor is also co-editor, with San Diego State University professor Stephen Cox, of the 2010 volume, Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture. He and Cox (who is also editor of Liberty magazine, now an on-line publication) are perhaps the most prominent libertarian thinkers working in the field of English literature today.

After his lecture and a discussion moderated by Reason magazine's Jesse Walker, Cantor explained to me why he was looking into the presence of zombie themes in pop culture today.

“These zombie stories are a very interesting way of exploring questions that Americans are interested in,” he said.

What he has noticed in zombie stories, he explained, is that “almost the first thing that results from the zombie apocalypse is the collapse of the federal government. These stories explore what life would be like in a world that was more like the American western, more like the frontier, in which people are forced to rely on their own resources.”

Sometimes, he said, those situations are “frightening but for many of the characters, particularly in The Walking Dead, the experience is empowering. They develop a sense of self-reliance, they face a a challenge, and they meet it.”

In his book, Cantor traces recurring themes in film and TV since the 1950s, a time when there were just three television channels available to most viewers, compared with the hundreds available through cable and satellite services today.

The proliferation of channels, he said, “has really opened up the creativity in television.”

Citing The Simpsons and The X-Files as pertinent examples, Cantor explained that “a lot of shows almost certainly wouldn't have made it onto television in the era of the three networks. It was the Fox Network, the fourth network, that really opened things up.”

Despite the increase in the number of networks and shows, he said, “there's a lot of continuity. Again, what I'm seeing in these contemporary zombie narratives is in many ways a reconstitution of what westerns were like in the Fifties. What we certainly have now is greater variety and, frankly, greater quality because people are able to take more creative chances.”

Cantor's new book, The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture, he said, “carries on some of the same issues” addressed in Gilligan Unbound.

One section of the more recent work “is devoted to globalization,” the primary theme of Gilligan Unbound, which was published the same week as the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

“This book has given me a chance to see how things have played out in popular culture” over the past decade, Cantor said.

Writing the book gave him an opportunity to ask “how shows like Fringe, V, Invasion, [and] Falling Skies have reacted to developments since 9/11 and [a] world with a threat of terrorism but also the problems created by the war on terrorism.”

He was also able to compare and contrast pop culture during the Cold War and during the post-9/11 era.

“I look at flying saucer movies in the 1950s,” he noted.

In those days, Cantor said, “the invaders are an image of real foreigners. It's Soviet Communism that's showing up in the flying saucers.”

By contrast, he pointed out, “when you look at shows like V, The Event, Invasion, [and] especially Fringe, the people invading us are us. 'We've met the enemy and he is us.' These shows explore a disturbing image of the American government as having moved in totalitarian directions.”

With so many choices of movies and TV shows to watch, Cantor sometimes relies on serendipity to find what he's looking for.

“It's chancy,” he said.

“Sometimes I just like a show, often because I like the characters or the actors in it. Sometimes I force myself to watch a show because it's obvious it's raising the kind of questions I'm interested in. For example, The Walking Dead, I really just like. It's really well-made, well-done.”

On the other hand, he watches Revolution on NBC “even though I don't think it's such a good show because it fits into my thesis and I've got to consider the evidence” as he continues exploration of libertarian and apocalyptic themes in popular culture.

(An earlier version of this interview appeared on Examiner.com.)

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'A Century of Christmas Memories' - A Book Review

A Century of Christmas Memories, 1900-1999, by the Editors of Peter Pauper Press. White Plains, N.Y.:  Peter Pauper Press, 2009. Hardcover $12.95, 120 pages.

One hundred years ago today, President Woodrow Wilson lit the first national Christmas tree on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol.  Ten years later, Calvin Coolidge presided over a tree-lighting ceremony on the Ellipse south of the White House, beginning a tradition that endures today.

These are two of the historical tidbits included in A Century of Christmas Memories, 1900-1999, a stocking stuffer book attributed to "nameless" editors working for the Peter Pauper Press.

While it contains more than 100 pages spanning ten decades, the book itself can be read cover to cover in less than an hour.  Each item consists of just one or two sentences, and the pages are dominated by photographs and other illustrations.

Designed more to entertain and to evoke nostalgia than to be a serious reference tool, A Century of Christmas Memories has the capacity to send readers scrambling to the encyclopedia or to the Internet to learn more about the events, trends, and commercial products it mentions.

To get a flavor of the book, check out some of the items reported every ten years ending in "3".

One might be surprised to learn, for instance, in one of the entries for 1903 that that was the year that Advent calendars were first introduced:

they are attributed to printer Gerhard Lang.  Legend has it that Lang's mother gave her son a piece of cake or biscuit on each day in December, giving him something to look forward to as he counted down to Christmas.  This inspired his creation of the calendars that offer children treats or favors for each day leading up to December 25.

Besides the debut of the first national Christmas tree, 1913 also saw the birth of the Kewpie doll and the Erector Set, as well as the Goo Goo Cluster candy, the crossword puzzle, and

On December 1, the first "drive-in" gas station opens in Pittsburgh, current home of the Gulf Oil Company.  The price for a gallon of gas?  Eight cents!

Ten years later, when Coolidge lit the Christmas tree outside the White House ("illuminated by 2,500 lights"), Paul Whiteman's orchestra had a hit with the holiday-themed "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers" and the Hasbro company, eventually known for producing popular toys left under the Christmas tree, was founded.

In the midst of the Depression, 1933 saw the erection of the first Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and the first Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular (featuring the Rockettes).

During the Second World War, the U.S. government suggested giving war bonds as Christmas presents.  In 1943, Bing Crosby had a hit record with "I'll Be Home for Christmas" and -- despite otherwise suspending the expansion of the TV industry -- there was an experimental broadcast of Dickens' A Christmas Carol.  (How many -- or how few -- viewers saw it is not noted.)  Overseas that year, American GIs decorated Christmas trees in Italy with the leftover foil from their C-rations and sailors on the U.S.S. North Carolina sent a large check to Macy's with instructions to provide gifts to their families across the country.

In the peace and prosperity of 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower produced the first White House Christmas cards, featuring his own artwork.   Classic holiday recordings introduced that year included Eartha Kitt's sultry "Santa Baby" and Louis Armstrong's novelty number, "Zat You, Santa Claus?"  That was also the year that Matchbox cars were first found under the tree on Christmas morning.

In the wake of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, Christmas 1963 was somewhat subdued, as suggested by Roy Orbison's recording of Willie Nelson's song, "Pretty Paper," but that year in England, the Beatles sent their fans the first of several special recordings of holiday greetings and Andy Williams first recorded the now-seemingly ubiquitous "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year."  Toy manufacturer Hasbro introduced the Easy-Bake Oven in 1963, selling half a million units that first year.

The OPEC oil embargo dimmed some lights for Christmas 1973, but that year saw the debut of Dungeons & Dragons and the first Hallmark collectible ornaments.  Songwriters Johnny Marks ("Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer") and Irving Berlin ("White Christmas") received the 1973 Spirit of Christmas Award from the International Society of Santa Claus.

Today we think a 24-hour cable-TV marathon of A Christmas Story is a tradition whose origins are lost in the mists of history.  It turns out that movie premiered in 1983, as did the Eddie Murphy-Dan Aykroyd vehicle Trading Places and ABC-TV's annual Mickey Mouse Christmas parade broadcast from Disney World.

The fourth year of the last decade of the twentieth century, 1993, featured the release of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, a hybrid holiday film.  Big toys that year were action figures based on the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers TV series and the biggest bubble commodity since tulips and before Bitcoin, the Beanie Babies:

this is the year the first Beanie Babies are unleashed on an unsuspecting public, creating a craze that would last for years.  The Original Nine?  Spot the Dog, Squealer the Pig, Patti the Platypus, Cubbie the Bear, Chocolate the Moose, Pinchers the Lobster, Splash the Orca, Legs the Frog, and Flash the Dolphin.

The twenty-first century is beyond the scope of A Century of Christmas Memories, but let's take a look back at what happened on December 25, 2003, just ten years ago, to continue the nostalgia,  The top three films that day (per box office receipts) were The Lord of the Rings:  Return of the King, Cheaper by the Dozen, and Paycheck.  Billboard's top single for that week was "Change Clothes" by Jay-Z.  The AP headlined a story: "‘Secret Santa’ spreads $40K worth of cheer" about a man in a Santa suit passing out $100 bills to strangers.

What will a future edition of A Century of Christmas Memories have to say about the holiday season of 2013? Perhaps we'll be remembering Pajama Boy, but only the editors of the Peter Pauper Press know for sure.

TV Review of 'Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film' by Richard Dyer

For a few years in the 1990s, I was roving correspondent, sometime co-anchor, and book reviewer for Gay Fairfax, a weekly television magazine series telecast over Channel 10 in Fairfax County, Virginia, and bicycled to other cable-access TV channels in the Washington, D.C., area and elsewhere around the United States.

On episode 35 of Gay Fairfax, I reviewed Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film by Richard Dyer for the regular "gay book beat" segment. What follows is a transcript of that review, delivered orally on a program that first aired on Fairfax Channel 10 on October 7, 1991.

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I'm Rick Sincere with gay book beat.

We'll be looking at exciting and unusual books by, for, and about gay men and lesbians.

Today's book: Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film by British film scholar Richard Dyer.

About ten years ago, Vito Russo wrote a book called The Celluloid Closet, which examined the portrayals of gay men and lesbians in mainstream films from America and elsewhere.

Russo really did not look behind the scenes, however. This is what Dyer does.

Dyer looks at films made by and for gay men and lesbians, that is, gay filmmakers making films for specifically gay audiences.

This is something that wasn't really easy for Russo to look at when he wrote his book ten years ago but with archival material becoming available, Dyer has been able to unearth a number of films that are very significant in historical perspective.

Dyer starts by looking at the films of Weimar Germany right after the First World War.

One very famous film of that period was called Different from the Others ("Anders als die Andern"), which starred Conrad Veidt, a matinee idol who became famous in our country as the wicked Nazi major in Casablanca.


Veidt portrayed a gay man who is being blackmailed and that film was not only very popular in Weimar Germany, it eventually became banned.

At the end of the Weimar period was a film made for lesbians which also has become quite famous, Mȁdchen in Uniform.

Between these two films of 1920 and 1933, Weimar Germany produced the bulk of films for gay audiences. They set the trend for the rest of the world – England, France, Sweden, America – and set standards for film making from then on.

The lesbian and gay films that Dyer examines include Genet's classics Un chant d'amour and Possession, which revolutionized gay cinema with their exciting, vibrant imagery and dramatic style.

Dyer's book is an important contribution to film studies and gay literature. I recommended very highly.

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TV Review of 'Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America' by Paul Nathanson

For a few years in the 1990s, I was roving correspondent, sometime co-anchor, and book reviewer for Gay Fairfax, a weekly television magazine series telecast over Channel 10 in Fairfax County, Virginia, and bicycled to other cable-access TV channels in the Washington, D.C., area and elsewhere around the United States.

On episode 47 of Gay Fairfax, I reviewed Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America by Paul Nathanson for the regular "gay book beat" segment. What follows is a transcript of that review, delivered orally on a program that first aired on Fairfax Channel 10 on December 30, 1991.

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I'm Rick Sincere with the gay book beat.

Today will be looking at a book about culture, Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America by Professor Paul Nathanson.

There are many famous movies. There are many movies that are considered great by critics and by film scholars. There are many movies that are popular but there are few movies that have inserted themselves into the collective consciousness of America.

One movie like that is The Wizard of Oz, Victor Fleming's 1939 classic version of L. Frank Baum's turn-of-the-century novel.

Who's not familiar with the characters like Dorothy Gale of Kansas, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, Glinda the Good Witch of the North, the Wicked Witch of the West, and, of course, the Wizard himself.

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”

There: Didn't you recognize that line automatically?

Nathanson is a Canadian scholar who's written a multi-disciplinary analysis of The Wizard of Oz -- the movie, the book, the music, the lyrics, the actors, and the way the movie has inserted itself into American culture.

Americans have been fascinated by The Wizard of Oz for more than fifty years and this is a fascinating book in its own way but it has one serious shortcoming.

For the gay community, especially for gay men, The Wizard of Oz is a defining myth that helps us come to terms with our identity. It's a coming-of-age myth in its own way.

For many years the question, “Are you a friend of Dorothy?” was a coded way of asking if someone was gay

“Over the Rainbow” has become a gay anthem of love and desire and Judy Garland is a gay icon.

So the Wizard is important for for much of gay America, yet Professor Nathanson in this book only mentions the gay community – gay subculture – once, in a single footnote on page 354.

Can he be serious?

Even with this unfortunate missing link, Over the Rainbow it is a fascinating book and anyone who has loved Dorothy Gale or liked the music of The Wizard of Oz should take a look at it

Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth in America from State University of New York Press -- it's just been published. It's by Professor Paul Nathanson.

On the gay book beat, I'm Rick Sincere.

'Titanic Legacy: Disaster as Media Event and Myth'

Nearly 13 years ago, keyed to the 85th anniversary of the Titanic disaster, I wrote a review of a book called Titanic Legacy: Disaster as Media Event and Myth, by Paul Heyer. It appeared in The Metro Herald in April 1997. (Note that this was published before the Space Shuttle Columbia was destroyed.)

The Titanic's Enduring Legacy
Richard Sincere
Exclusive to The Metro Herald

This week marks the 85th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. Last Sunday, cable's Discovery Channel debuted a documentary about the event, putting forth the theory that the famous ship had not been slit open by an iceberg, but rather buckled upon collision, creating small holes placed evenly along the hull that allowed water to flow into the ship. Two days earlier on MSNBC, Time & Again dug into NBC News archives to commemorate the anniversary with a 30-minute look at previous reports on various Titanic remembrances and efforts to find her wreckage.

The Discovery Channel's report, which focuses on how extremely cold water weakened the Titanic's "impenetrable" hull, reminds us of how cold air was a factor in the 1986 Challenger disaster, another gripping tragedy. Remarkably, the Challenger explosion parallels -- in sometimes eerie detail -- the sinking of the Titanic.

What are some parallels? Both voyages were preceded by enormous public attention, the Titanic because it was the world's largest cruise ship, embarking on its maiden voyage, while the space shuttle Challenger would carry the first average citizen into space, schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Both ships sank into the North Atlantic. Both accidents involved ice -- the Titanic sideswiping an iceberg, the Challenger breaking up because ice weakened its "O"-rings. Both disasters were quickly followed by official -- and controversial -- government inquiries, which were in turn followed by legislation and regulations meant to address the cause of the tragedy. And, since the Titanic went down, no passenger's life has been lost at sea due to icebergs; since the Challenger, no lives have been lost in space travel.

Both disasters had something else in common: both caught the imagination of the American people (and people across the globe) in an unprecedented fashion.

In the case of the Titanic, however, there was a new element -- the emerging technology of radio communications. Radio imparted news of the disaster much faster than any previous, similar event. (When the liner Pacific vanished without a trace in 1856, it was many months before a message in a bottle landed in Scotland, declaring that the ship had gone down in an icefield. By that time, of course, no rescue or salvage was possible.)

Paul Heyer, professor of communications at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, demonstrates, in a new book-length examination of media treatments of the Titanic disaster, that "everything old is new again" (Titanic Legacy: Disaster as Media Event and Myth, by Paul Heyer. Praeger Publishers, 200 pages, $39.95). Many of the news media's practices that are currently under attack -- for instance, paying witnesses for exclusive first-hand accounts of events -- were similarly criticized in the aftermath of the Titanic's sinking. Sensationalism, luridness, manufactured stories designed to sell newspapers -- these were worries in 1912 as much as in 1997. Who needs A Current Affair or Jenny Jones when you have the New York World and the New York Herald?

In Titanic Legacy, Heyer traces how the New York Times, in particular, emerged from the pack of more than a dozen New York dailies, and how its coverage of the Titanic sparked its ascendancy as the country's premiere newspaper. He goes on to look at how both news and entertainment media treated the disaster in subsequent decades, with special emphasis on the 1953 film Titanic (starring Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck) and the 1958 British docudrama based on Walter Lord's non-fiction book, A Night to Remember. He also traces more obscure works, such as Thomas Hardy's poem "The Convergence of the Twain," which he composed for a fundraising event for Titanic survivors, and blues singer Leadbelly's ballad, "De Titanic." He pays particular attention to "Titanic Toast," described as part of the African-American oral tradition and performed in the 1910s and ‘20s much as a rap number is today.

Several dynamic characters emerge from the story. Time has faded our memories, and most of us have forgotten that Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of wireless communications, was scheduled to be a passenger on the Titanic, but pressing business in New York forced him to depart Britain several days earlier. Few people remember, too, that the ultimate owner of the Titanic was tycoon J.P. Morgan, whose international shipping trust included White Star Lines. In addition, several famous people went down with the ship, including millionaire John Jacob Astor and Isidor and Ida Straus (owners of Macy's), who insisted on remaining together, hand-in-hand, as the Titanic descended into its watery grave.

In many ways, the story of the Titanic is as much a story of modern communications as it is about shipbuilding or sailing or weather conditions. The U.S. Senate investigation into the disaster led shortly thereafter to the first comprehensive regulation of (what later became known as) broadcasting. Marconi's corporate policies came under particular attack for being monopolistic. Heyer seems to accept this charge at face value, although he acknowledges that Marconi's company had several competitors both in Europe and America. Heyer is also insistent that regulation of the wireless industry was necessary and proper, though he fails to back up these assertions with hard evidence.

Titanic Legacy is a fascinating book. Professor Heyer is sure to find a ready audience for his book among the many amateur Titanic historians. For anyone interested in the history of the news and entertainment media, however, Titanic Legacy is recommended reading.As a side note, I also highly recommend another book on the Titanic, which I have not had the pleasure of reviewing: The Titanic Story: Hard Choices, Dangerous Decisions by Stephen D. Cox, who is now editor of Liberty magazine.

Crossposted from Rick Sincere News & Thoughts of June 5, 2009.