The best books to use as pop culture primers

Writer William Goldman, most popular for penning The Princess Bride, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and All the President’s Men, embeds himself in the Broadway world, seeing every show in the 1967-1968 season; to quote the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast, this book is the autopsy. It’s an enormously accessible book about American theatre, with a murderers’ row of interview subjects at Goldman’s disposal and the author’s ability to translate gossip into hard journalistic data. Even the more economics-based chapters, such as a fascinating one on how most plays live or die on presales to well-connected women’s social groups (a.k.a. “Theatre-Party Ladies”), are as breezy as Goldman’s Oscar-winning screenplays. (Content Warning: The book contains some unfortunate and dated language.)

To quote New York Times critic Sam Anderson, “the sitcom is arguably the defining commercial art form of the American 20th century,” and this book gives that hypothesis weight. Over 24 chapters (starting in 1951 with I Love Lucy, the Rosetta Stone of the genre, and ending in 2014 with Dan Harmon’s cult hit Community), Austerlitz uses the television comedy format to discuss joke structure, technological advancements in the arts, and the evolution of American social and political consciousness over the previous half-century. Sitcoms are by their nature the tension between two opposing forces, centering on characters who strive to change their lot in life only to have everything reset by episode’s end, just in time to do it all again next week. There’s something both beautiful and menacing about that.

Published in 2005, this deep dive into one of the few truly U.S.-created art forms is a truly wild and fabulous primer on the origins of hip-hop. Chang is a delightful historian, taking his sweet time getting to know the New York citizens (especially in the Bronx) who gathered in apartments and converted warehouses and birthed a new kind of music. The commercialization of the form only comes later in the book, so this non-fiction tome is more of a social examination of the people and the nationwide events that led us to the relative present. On a personal note, the chapters that mention Bay Area rap stations of my formative years hit me right in the feelings.

Journalist and former executive editor for Entertainment Weekly Mark Harris is three for three with his full-length books. His first, Pictures at a Revolution, examined the rise of New Hollywood through the five 1967 Best Picture nominees. His second, Five Came Back, chronicled five film directors who assisted in World War II. But his strongest work to date is a birth-to-earth, warts-and-all biography of one of the most influential personalities in American film and theatre, Mike Nichols. From his genre-altering comedy work with Elaine May to his Broadway collaborations with the likes of Simon and Hellman to helming landmark film work such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, and The Birdcage, it’s somehow a breeze even at almost 700 pages. We should all strive for a life worthy of such a loving and well-researched biography.

Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s oral history Live From New York (published in 2002, updated and expanded a decade later) is probably the most popular book on sketch comedy giant Saturday Night Live, but I’m more partial to Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s 1986 record of the show’s historic but tumultuous first ten years on the air. Unlike Live From New York, the vibe is less “hanging out with comedy giants” and more “I can’t believe these coked-out maniacs were able to stay alive, let alone create something that’s still going strong.” As SNL approaches its 50th anniversary, see the near-impossible alchemy that changed network television forever.