To every thing there is a season. This season it’s Graydon Carter, books by or about whom are suddenly thick on the ground, the ground in this case being Amazon’s Web site, increasingly glutted with illegal rip-offs of real books—essentially slim, cheap, A.I.-generated summaries with deepfake covers. Still, one wants to keep an open mind and not prejudge literature in any form. So let’s wade through nine of the Carter canon together, in roughly descending order of quality:
Graydon Carter: The Untold Story of the Man Who Defined Modern Media, by Tristan Harcourt (independently published, 121 pages, $16.99), grabs the reader from the very first sentence—“Media landscapes transform with glacial slowness until they don’t shifting suddenly under the influence of singular individuals whose vision reshapes what we read”—and doesn’t let go, despite one’s feverish efforts.
