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George Trow, My Pilgrim's Progress; Media Studies, 1950-1998 (Pantheon, 1999) Reissued by Vintage in paperback in 2000. Reading George W. S. Trow's My Pilgrim's Progress is kind of like watching television with someone who's constantly channel-flipping. If you have control of the remote, channel-changing can be tolerable, but if someone else is doing the clicking it's usually irritating. The subjects and references are scattered, but ultimately Trow makes his point soundly. Trow's examines how U.S. culture has fragmented in the period between 1950 and 1998, and he illustrates how it has broken apart through his own experiences, opinions, and a broad array of cultural and political happenings. "...the story I am trying to tell," Trow writes, "...is the simultaneous death of Eisenhower's America and Franklin Roosevelt's Effort." Trow chooses 1950 as a marker for the post-World War period and the beginning of the television era (and the simultaneous rise of marketing). Examining the Feb. 1, 1950 front page of the New York Times and reading it with personal digressions into a tape recorder, Trow produced a portion of the book's material (hence, a frequent stream-of-consciousness style). Trow frequently returns to the Times as a reflection of the differences in society from yesterday and today (or 1998, as it is). Trow claims that reading the Times in 1950 required more discipline than the 1998 Times demands. As Trow writes: "And that's the nature of the New York Times reading mind of February 1, 1950; the natural visceral drift of the eye was acknowledged, but a little bit of discipline was assumed as well. A certain amount of insider's information about how the New York Times was edited was assumed; well, that's not assumed by the editors of the New York Times today. In fact, the New York Times today is seeking to know its reader's mind. Its reader's mind is now a mystery, and the New York Times is terrified that the mind of the generation growing up now—the generation that will someday replace its current readers—is a complete mystery." Trow separates himself from his reader with his occasionally condescending tone: "I never invest myself in a news story. In that I will be different from you." The book is also irony-laden, and often very funny. As a founding editor of the National Lampoon and a staff writer for The New Yorker from 1966 to 1994, Trow is primarily known as a social critic. In a review of My Pilgrim's Progress, Richard Bernstein of the New York Times wrote: "As he slices transgressively through the decades, Trow gives himself away. He is an old-fashioned curmudgeon who writes with hip, new-fashioned flair." MORE: Salon Review Austin Chronicle Review (scroll down) Sven Birkert's Review from The Atlantic |
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