cover image When the Kissing Had to Stop: Cult Studs, Khmer Newts, Langley Spooks, Techno-Geeks, Video Drones, Author Gods, Serial Killers, Vampire Media, Alien

When the Kissing Had to Stop: Cult Studs, Khmer Newts, Langley Spooks, Techno-Geeks, Video Drones, Author Gods, Serial Killers, Vampire Media, Alien

John Leonard. New Press, $25 (362pp) ISBN 978-1-56584-533-6

A weekly commentator on CBS Sunday Morning and a former editor of the New York Times Book Review, Leonard (Smoke and Mirrors) has distinguished himself as a cultural critic over the past two decades with his unabashedly liberal, even leftist, views. His eighth book is a collection of 30 essays, many of them expanded since their original publications in such journals as the Nation and the New York Review of Books. Part of Leonard's ongoing critique of contemporary U.S. electronic and print media, the pieces range from ""Lolita Lights Our Fire,"" a review of Adrian Lyne's film of Nabokov's most notorious novel, to an evaluation of government funding and the arts in ""Whose Television, for Which Public?"" Leonard is terrific at describing and explaining everything from The X-Files to the current politics of smoking. As a materialist, he locates the roots of current culture in political and economic realities, not any vague millennialism. While his ruminations cut a wide swath, he never strays from his basic theme that post-Cold War America has been overwhelmed and undercut by deeply ingrained paranoia, as well as by a sense of incipient doom. He offers no concrete or radical solutions but hints that a better world beckons in the writings of such artists as Grace Paley, Doris Lessing and Toni Morrison. Often ecstatically urgent, these pieces are highly informed and cogently argued. (June)