The Best Books We Read This Week

Carter, a former editor of Spy, the New York Observer, and Vanity Fair, has been held up over the years as a force of style, both in his personal taste and in his expansive vision of creative work, which grew from his editorial experiences during a prosperous and thrilling era in American magazines. This winsome memoir is a recounting of that period, brisk, bright, and full of well-told anecdotes about celebrities, artists, and other power players in Carter’s orbit. The book trades in a familiar New York style of information-sharing by which outsiders are allowed to feel like insiders, and sometimes—because Carter’s career has been one of turning tables endlessly—the other way around. “Somehow, in my case, with a lot of mishaps and a dollop of good luck along the way, things just worked out,” Carter writes: the voice of a man who tasted the best of the American century and still left the party early, with his dignity intact.