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pierceinverarity's review against another edition
3.0
I stumbled across this just as the debut season of the HBO David Simon series, The Deuce, which chronicles the culture of NYC's Times Square and the birth of modern pornography in the early 1970s.
Beaver Street is essentially a personal memoir -- with multiple idiosyncracies, such as irregular footnotes indulging the author's emphatic pet peeves. Nonetheless, Rosen's narrative shows considerable respect for historical detail. I was particularly fascinated by the way modern pornography largely emerged from other 20th century cultural products such as "men's adventure" magazines [e.g. Argosy], which I very vaguely remember from my youth. The weird and crooked path that constitutes the history of late-20th and 21st-century pornography tells us, in a sideways fashion, a lot about political history, and the relationship between media, content, and culture.
Beaver Street is essentially a personal memoir -- with multiple idiosyncracies, such as irregular footnotes indulging the author's emphatic pet peeves. Nonetheless, Rosen's narrative shows considerable respect for historical detail. I was particularly fascinated by the way modern pornography largely emerged from other 20th century cultural products such as "men's adventure" magazines [e.g. Argosy], which I very vaguely remember from my youth. The weird and crooked path that constitutes the history of late-20th and 21st-century pornography tells us, in a sideways fashion, a lot about political history, and the relationship between media, content, and culture.
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