Ethical Culture Fieldston School

Review of Amanda Ripley's "The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way"

by Jim Cullen

A lesson of worldly hope -- if we could only work up the will to believe it.

Review of Brett Martin's "Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad"

by Jim Cullen

How TV supplanted the movies as the auteur medium of choice -- and why that may be changing.

Jim Cullen: Review of Alex Sayf Cummings's "Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century" (Oxford, 2013)

Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. His latest book, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions, was recently published by Oxford University Press. Cullen blogs at American History Now.

Jim Cullen: Review of James M. Banner Jr.'s "Being a Historian: An Introduction to the Professional World of History" (Cambridge, 2012)

Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. His new book, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions, was published last month by Oxford University Press. Cullen blogs at American History Now.

Jim Cullen: Review of Lawrence R. Samuel's "The American Dream: A Cultural History" (Syracuse, 2012)

Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. His new book, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions, was published last month by Oxford University Press. Cullen blogs at American History Now.This is a useful book, a troubling book, and a book tells us something about the strange state of contemporary publishing. I’ll try and deal with each of these in turn.