Skip to main content
by Mary Wells Lawrence
(Knopf, 307 pages, $26)
Plop Plop, Fizz Fizz, Oh What a Relief It Is. I Love New York. Nobody Beats Midas. Quality Is Job One.
These are just a few highlights of Mary Wells Lawrence's legendary career on Madison Avenue from the 1950s to the '80s.
Wells Lawrence came of age just as advertising was being transformed from a ho-hum business science to an ostentatious art form attracting top talents. After her first job writing print-ad copy at Macy's, she eventually moved on to legendary firm Doyle Dane Bernbach before founding her own firm, and later became the first female CEO to take a company public. Wells Rich Green was among the advertising industry's biggest players for more than two decades, and the author recalls an extensive series of campaigns for clients like IBM, Proctor & Gamble and TWA. Most famously, she convinced Braniff Airways to paint its jetliners wild colors and dress its stewardesses in sexy outfits--after which passengers stampeded Braniff ticket counters.
Wells Lawrence's book offers a pull-your-bootstraps recipe for success that, in classic autobiographical fashion, focuses more on good times than bad. Yet her passion makes up for the rose-colored glasses, and you can't argue with her success. Or can you? Gloria Steinem once called her an Uncle Tom of women in business, but Wells Lawrence deserves better treatment.
Both a pioneer and a consummate insider, she made gender issues secondary to her undeniable talents, trampling every man (and woman) in her path. Brian Libby
shamanspace
by Steve Aylett
(Codex, 121 pages, $12.99)
www.shamanspace.com.
The problem with reviewing a Steve Aylett book is that all you want to do is quote him. Every sentence is a soundbite: "He stared and it was hell that blinked"; "All of us are the subconscious thought impulses of a shabby god"; "Originality irritates so obscurely that people may have to evolve to scratch it." His subways have "paracetamol walls"; his characters smile "winterly." "To be young and full of poison in streets raining strychnine," he muses, "moving through tilted shadows past all-night chemists and locked launderettes."
Shamanspace, Aylett's latest novel, is clever as ever, but not as funny as the neo-hardboiled pulp of Atom or The Crime Studio. He's making a serious statement here, and he doesn't want it masked in a layer of jokes.
Nietzsche, it turns out, was wrong: God is still kicking. But not for long. In Shamanspace, God is the enemy. Two rival groups of assassins are out to destroy It, but nobody's sure what will happen when they do. One group, the Internecine, believes "the assassination of God would lead to the certain obliteration of everything--a small price to pay." But the opposition, the Prevail, believes God and Its works are separate, so the godless universe will continue.
Aylett never spells out the "obvious" stuff. Some readers may be confused, but that's OK; the book is so full of ideas and poetry that multiple readings pay handsome dividends. "Into every word I weave thorns," one would-be assassin warns a disciple early on in the book. The same could be said of Aylett himself. Becky Ohlsen
WWeek 2015