1954 HC Charles Wertenbaker DEATH OF KINGS Journalism News Magazines Socialism

Description: Title: The Death of Kings Author: Charles Wertenbaker Publisher: Random House (1954) Description:A story about the men who control (what used to be) the most powerful media...the news magazine. Great lines which could speak about current world conditions abound, such as, “There are no good things in the world any more. There’s only a choice of evils.” The book deals with three major themes: the intellectual and political ideas that influenced public opinion and public events from 1938 to 1950; the personalities and private feuds of the leading editorial executives of an important news magazine; and the game of musical chairs that passed for love and marriage among those same executives. The original January 17 1954 New York Herald Tribune book review:THE DEATH OF KINGS.By Charles Wertenbaker. 478 pp.New York: Random House. $3.95. Reviewed byJAMES HILTON THE climate of today, with its faith and unfaith, its adherences and apostasies, its cantings and recantings, has given the first-class novelist much material to explore, if “explore” can be used of territory already old and mapped before the novel as an art-form came into existence. Charles Wertenbaker is such a novelist. In “The Death of Kings” he has charted this modern battlefield not only with precision but with the controlled emotion of one who has not been merely an observer. The result is something that might well have baffled our immediate forebears far more than it would a sixteenth-century theologian. There were six kings—‘kings of the revolution”; one of them, Louis Baron, their destined leader, had coined the phrase on a certain night in 1938. That New York night was memorable because it drew the six together in a common cause (‘the revolution to put man in a position to realize his dignity”), and because the project then embarked on, a new kind of national news-magazine called “Beacon,” was—in essence—the distillation of a dream. None could have guessed that it would later achieve such astounding material success and that world events would both shape and be shaped by it so momentously: but to Louis Baron, at least, the desire for both the dream and the power was there from the beginning. And from the beginning there was also the seed of corruption. This is Mr. Wertenbaker’s story, which he tells in a series of flash-backs interrupting the final interview between Baron and Bob Berkeley, who was one of the original half dozen and perhaps in sheer human quality the most likable. Twelve years had elapsed by then: the world had broken ranks and re-formed differently: “Beacon” had become a coefficient of American influence, its foreign correspondents could live like satraps and function like ambassadors; while at home the average Beacon-reader found its weekly news summaries, with their built-in opinions, stimulating to the palate and never too hard to digest. But for Berkeley by 1950 there had come the moment when power, functioning ruthlessly, revealed itself as unworthy of any fraction of his further allegiance. Into this outcome. bringing Berkeley's relations with Baron to their rupture, Mr. Wertenbaker weaves the lives of the other four, and the particular “case” of the youngest of them, Dick Elgin, cited for perjury before a Senate committee, but actually caught in a far subtler mishap of our times— that of having once been “a sort of socialist,” but never sufficiently a Communist to become a Satisfactory ex-Communist. By contrast, one of the others had admittedly joined and left the party and in even greater contrast there loomed the curious figure of Angus Griswold, an ex-Communist who worked for another Baron magazine—'‘a brilliant mind, but everything he writes reads like it’s been translated from the German.” Griswold, with whom Mr. Wertenbaker never brings us face to face, pervades the story more like a chimera than a character: but we are given to know that after Berkeley’s final goodbye in Baron’s Fifth Avenue penthouse, Griswold‘s name is the next one on Baron's appointment list that evening. Behind the twists of an intricate plot the architecture of Mr. Wertenbaker’s novel emerges into perspective; he has written a fictional elegy on the fate of twentieth-century liberalism, its splendors and miseries, and (in rueful hindsight) its mistakes. Through the mind of Louis Baron, that editor-publisher of genius and “inspired driver of men,” and of Bob Berkeley, who had once been called “Baron’s conscience,” the case-history of a faith is debated back and forth. “Bob, when the Communist Russians made their deal with the Fascist Germans in August, 1939, it ended a decade of radicalism in this country as surely as the Wall Street crash ended the spree of the 1920s.” To Baron the realization had come early and by divination; but in Berkeley the old dream lingered and languished as a nostalgia of the soul. “If a civilization was about to die, it would be an adventure to participate in, if it died with courage. The values that had been lived by did not disappear with death. He suspected that no liberating principle ever vanished entirely from the earth.” How cold can comfort get? In the most literal sense “The Death of Kings” is a controversial novel—j.e., a novel about controversy. Its people breathe a political air that makes them seem half dedicated, half polluted; their homes are -battle casualties, and their sex life, whether frustrated or uninhibited, is for moments when, having put the magazine to bed, they can find time to put themselves. It is, as Mr. Wertenbaker portrays it, a pulsating. metallic, fluorescent world, in which olympian judgments are dispensed by worried word-fanciers from their thirty-ninth floor cubicles—not high enough to bring heaven much closer, but far enough above earth-level for man to look small, and to extort from Baron the final credo of despair: “There are no good things in the world any more. There’s only a choice of evils.” (Which isn’t comfort at all.) Some readers may find Mr. Wertenbaker’s general picture distorted; few will fail to find it disturbing, or will deny its intellectual brilliance. Condition:Book is very good with age wear. See all photos. No Dustjacket. See photos. Details:hardcover 1954 no statement of edition, no other printings stated beyond 1954 copyright date.Random House Terms (payment, shipping, tax, returns, feedback, etc.) Please read before buying U.S. bidders only Payment Please pay within 48 hours of winning. eBay managed payments Shipping Shipping will be $6.50 and will be shipped USPS media mail with tracking. We may upgrade your package at our discretion to USPS Ground Advantage. Package will be shipped within 4 business days after payment - usually faster. The USPS can be notoriously slow, it could take 2-3 weeks for delivery. Please take that into account when leaving feedback, that we will ship quickly, but the USPS can take a long time to deliver, and we have no control over delivery time. Why Shipping Costs Are What They Are: eBay users may note that postal rates increased AGAIN on July 14, 2024. That's EIGHT price hikes in 4 years. This was the largest single price increase ever: 10% on media mail. 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