THE FIRST ANTHOLOGY: 30 Years of the...

THE FIRST ANTHOLOGY: 30 Years of the New York Review of Books edited by Robert B. Silvers, Barabra, Epstein & Rea S. Hederman, illustrated by David Levine (New York Review Books/Hendra: $12.95; 345 pp.). The list of authors in this collection reads like a Who’s Who of contemporary literature. Oliver Stone describes a hiking accident that taught him the knife edge that separates fitness and disability; Dwight Macdonald offers a sardonic memoir of Lyndon Johnson’s controversial White House arts festival; Robert Hughes wittily dismisses Andy Warhol’s later work. Not every piece is wonderful: Joan Didion makes political repression in El Salvador sound like a bad hair day. But the general level of writing is so high that the reader can only hope the editors won’t wait another 30 years to issue volume two.