Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik's 3 favorite reads in 2025

• 2024
• 2025

Will Eisner is recognized as one of the most influential and respected artists in comics. (The medium’s most prestigious award is named after him.) Eisner essentially gave graphic novels their name and 20th-century respectability, demonstrating how atmospheric art and design could bring close-to-the-bone storytelling to life. Appropriately, this biography is itself a graphic novel showing Eisner’s life and career, from the dynamic 1940 Sunday newspaper strip “The Spirit” leading into the 1978 groundbreaking tenement tales of A Contract with God. In the hands of the authors, Eisner becomes the character star in his own medium.
(Podrazik/Castleman)

Jill Lepore, a professor of both history and law at Harvard, a regular contributor to the New Yorker and the author of fifteen books, is both prolific and proficient. She pulls off the difficult task of writing in-depth sweeping histories that are both impressively researched while also eminently lively and approachable.

Her latest publication traces the history of the U.S. constitution. Its real focus, though, is on how the document was designed to be amended, the myriad ways it has been amended and the many failed efforts along the way to amend it even more. The end result is a solid rebuff of the theory of “originalism” that tends to interpret the constitution as something basically locked into place in 1789.

Lepore never fails to view topics from unexpected angles. Even if at first you balk at her thrust, her documentary back-up and her lively writing style will, at least, make you weigh her arguments carefully. If any historian can make the past “come to life,” it is Jill Lepore.
(Castleman/Podrazik)

When Americans think of Desi Arnaz, they think of him and Lucille Ball, his real-life wife, and their fictional creations, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo of I Love Lucy. That ground-breaking filmed TV sitcom from the early 1950s set the model that TV sitcoms largely follow to this day.

Much praise has been heaped, deservedly, on Ball over the years, but Arnaz seems to have faded into the background. This biography aims at balancing that equation. While he didn’t actually “invent” television, Arnaz did, in many ways, invent the American TV landscape that ruled the airways through the broadcast era of TV and much of the cable era (only, perhaps, being replaced with the modern streaming landscape).

Purdum, a former bureau chief of the New York Times and current national editor of Vanity Fair, digs deep to follow the life and career of Arnaz. The path starts in his upper-class origins in Cuba, to Latin band leader in the U.S. and his marriage to minor Hollywood star Ball. Then comes their bold business venture in creating and retaining ownership of the breakout sitcom of the early TV days. Beyond that, however, Purdum traces how Desi and Lucy parlayed that success to the creation of an independent TV studio (Desilu) that was the source of current franchises such as Mission: Impossible and Star Trek that remain vibrant to this day.
(Castleman/Podrazik)