Bill Henderson is the founder and editor of the Pushcart Prize. He received the 2006 National Book Critic Circle's Lifetime Achievement Award and the Poets & Writers / Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award. He is also the author of several memoirs, including All My Dogs: A Life. The founder of the Lead Pencil Club, Henderson lives on Long Island and In Maine where he runs the Pushcart bookstore - "the world's smallest bookstore."
Publisher-editor Henderson named his whimsically conceived Lead Pencil Club after the trade of Thoreau's father, a pencil maker. The club quickly won a following for its outspoken antitechnology stance. The members, mostly in a spirit of desperate fun, rebel against much modern gadgetry designed for speed and comfort, but which, they say, is actually depersonalizing human life: voice mail, e-mail, the proliferation of worthless TV, word processors, computer "education"‘and, most especially, anything to do with the Internet. The book is a collection of articles, columns, snippets, quotes, Lead Pencil member letters, even a smattering of cartoons. Some of it is, expectably, smug and self-satisfied, but much, particularly by the likes of Neil Postman, Clifford Stoll, David Gelernter and Mark Slouka, is both thoughtful and thought-provoking. There is indeed a quasi-religious mania about some of the claims for the Web, and it's true that this goes ill with what is, after all, an enormous marketing bonanza for software and hardware manufacturers (was Windows 95 really the Second Coming?). For technology skeptics, it's good to have so much informed dissent gathered between covers. (May)
Pushcart publisher Henderson founded the Lead Pencil Club in 1993 to "yank the plug on the international electronics industry that is fattening its purse while brain-draining this civilization." He has collected here the short essays, letters, news clips, poems, testimonials, and even a few cartoons by such contributors as Neil Postman, Clifford Stoll, Russell Baker, Wendell Berry, Doris Grumbach, John Updike, Alvin Toffler, and Ted Koppel. There is fun and humor here, as in the clip from the New York Times Magazine that proposes the Video Baby for consumers who say they value the family but don't have time to start one. But there is also true concern about harm from the modern barrage of hype and advertising. While some contributors won't throw away their computers and others won't buy them in the first place, all agree that real life is better than virtual. The collection is both practical and philosophical. Parents and teachers might want to take it to the next PTA discussion on computer labs for the school, and librarians might do well to read it before delving into conference proceedings. Of interest to public and academic libraries.‘Nancy Shires, East Carolina Univ., Greenville, N.C.
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