The Movie-Based Legends of Journalism

Movies are the through line for Lance Morrow’s The Noise of Typewriters (Encounter Books), a journalist’s memoir recalling that profession before it rotted. Because I grew up reading Morrow, a Time magazine essayist, during “the golden era of magazines,” I am fascinated by his recall of that phenomenon. But his book is also full of surprising movie references. That’s how Morrow organizes his thoughts on Time’s founder Henry Luce, examining Luce’s ethics, the profession’s ideals, its actual history — and its misleading mythology.