Cullen Murphy – författare

It is from the discards of former civilizations that archaeologists have reconstructed most of what we know about the past, and it is through their examination of today’s garbage that William Rathje and Cullen Murphy inform us of our present. Rubbish! is their witty and erudite investigation into all aspects of the phenomenon of garbage. Rathje and Murphy show what the study of garbage tells us about a population’s demographics and buying habits. Along the way, they dispel the common myths about our “garbage crisis”—about fast-food packaging and disposable diapers, about biodegradable garbage and the acceleration of the average family’s garbage output. They also suggest methods for dealing with the garbage that we do have.

“I’m just passing through,” Milton Gendel liked to say whenever anybody asked him what he was doing in Rome. Even after seven decades in the Eternal City, he refused to be pigeonholed. He was always an American - never an “expat,” never an émigré - but he couldn’t leave, so deep were his ties, and this dual bond left an indelible imprint on his life and art.Though he was born in New York City, it was Rome that earned Gendel’s enduring fascination - the city supplied him with endless outlets for his curiosity, a series of dazzling apartments in palazzi, the great loves of his life, and the scores of friendships that made his story inextricably part of the city’s own. His diaries and photographs are a casement window thrown open onto a who’s who of artists, writers, and socialites sojourning in the city: Mark Rothko, Princess Margaret, Alexander Calder, Anaïs Nin, Gore Vidal, Martha Gellhorn, Muriel Spark. His longtime home on the Isola Tiberina was the nerve center of the dolce vita generation, whose comings and goings and doings he immortalised in both words and images.Here, for the first time in print, are Gendel’s diaries, together with his photographs, selected and edited by Cullen Murphy. Just Passing Through brings together the most striking artifacts of one of the past century’s richest and most expansive lives, salted with wit and insight into the figures who defined an era.