From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor by Jerry Della Femina

Book Review by Rachel Bowles | 22 Jul 2010
Book title: From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor
Author: Jerry Della Femina

 

Jerry Della Femina’s memoirs centre on his rise to fame in the lucrative advertising business in the 60s. It became an instant cult classic in its native America upon initial release in 1970, and helped to solidify the image of the womanising, chain smoking, borderline alcoholic ad men. The book was the inspiration behind the television series Mad Men, critically acclaimed for its amoral investigation of sleazy exec, Don Draper. However, it’s not as slick or cohesive as the series, often clumsily digressing into half-explained, quasi-interesting anecdotes, with Femina regularly switching between reinforcing and downplaying the stories of debauched antics on Madison Avenue. Femina uses clunky and often offensive anachronisms which can prove a strain after a while (expect the phrase “faggot killer”) and contemporary references to American advertising culture have similarly aged badly, necessitating absent references for an international audience. However, there is some salvageable material here: stories such as that of a replica machinegun ad depicting a boy gleefully killing Nazis and Vietcong, which managed to upset censors for all the wrong reasons, provide some fascinating, if not disturbing, insights into the unbalanced world of advertising. If you can stomach the political incorrectness, it’s worth a browse. [Rachel Bowles]

 

Out now. Published by Canongate Books. Cover price £8.99 paperback