Smoke and Mirrors

Description

John Leonard, who has spent half his professional life reading and reviewing books, has spent the other half watching television for "Life", "Newsweek", the "New York Times", "New York" magazine and "CBS Sunday Morning". This book is a passionate work on TV as a circus, a wishing well and a cure for loneliness - from Ed Sullivan to cyberspace, from kid shows to cable, from the cheap thrills of "action-adventure", to the solemn drag of PBS pledge week. For Leonard, the sitcom is a socializing agency, the talk show a legitimizing agency, the made-for-TV movie is the last redoubt of social conscience, and television criticism itself is the last refuge of time-serving thugs and post modernists. Instead of scapegoating television as the cause of crime in our streets, stupidity in our schools, and spectacle rather than sustance in our government, John Leonard sees something else inside the box: an echo chamber and a feedback loop, neither wholly innocent of nor entirely responsible for the frantic disorder it brings into our homes.

John Leonard (1939-2008) is the author of The Last Innocent White Man in America and Smoke and Mirrors (both published by The New Press). He was editor of the New York Times Book Review, literary co-editor of The Nation, and now appeared weekly on CBS Sunday Morning and in New York.