Martin Levin is a writer and book reviewer who contributed to The Weekly Standard between 2000 and 2016. His pieces for the magazine spanned a wide range of cultural and historical subjects, including book reviews on topics from Hollywood history to wartime fashion to media figures like Roone Arledge.
In the fall of 1999, a musical called Wise Guys ran for three weeks at the New York Theater Workshop. It had music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a starring role for Nathan Lane, but it never made it to Broadway. The title referred to the brothers Addison and Wilson Mizner, luminaries of the…
Doing Our Own Thing
Roone
Good Morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip
Uniforms Why We Are What We Wear by Paul Fussell Houghton Mifflin, 204 pp., $22 "All my life I have had a thing about uniforms," writes Paul Fussell. He agrees with Thomas Carlyle that appearances matter ("Society, which the more I think of it astonishes me all the more, is founded upon cloth").…
When Men Were The Only Models We Had My Teachers Barzun, Fadiman, Trilling by Carolyn G. Heilbrun University of Pennsylvania Press, 159 pp., $24.95 THE ARCHIVIST Otto Bettman once published a book entitled "The Good Old Days, They Were Terrible." You could call this a subtext in Carolyn Heilbrun's…
Lost Hollywood
ACCORDING TO a news report, the Unabomber has a 548-page book on the list of a small publisher, who's quoted as saying that parts of the book are "disarming, even funny."