Star status for Herwitz's Icon book

Daniel Herwitz's book, The Star as Icon, has been selected as one of Choice magazine's outstanding academic titles for 2011. This prestigious list reflects the best in scholarly titles and brings with it the extraordinary recognition of the academic library community.

In his book, subtitled 'Celebrity in the Age of Mass Consumption', Herwitz explores the phenomenon of the star icon as the most talked about yet least understood persona. 'With skill and humor, [he] pokes at the gears of the celebrity-making machine, recruiting a philosopher's interest in the media, an eye for society, and a love of popular culture to divine our yearning for these iconic figures and the role they play in our lives,' reads a précisof the book by its publishers, Columbia University Press.

An Honorary Research Fellow with the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative, Herwitz is also director of the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan. He has written extensively on the aesthetics of film, music, and visual art, and his monograph on the Indian painter MF Husain won a National Book Award in that country. A philosopher by training, he is the author of Race and Reconciliation, a book based on his experiences in South Africa, and short stories that have appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review.

'Herwitz portrays the star icon as caught between transcendence and trauma. An effervescent being living on a distant, exalted planet, the star icon is also a melodramatic heroine desperate to escape her life and the ever-watchful eye of the media. The public buoys her up and then eagerly watches her fall, her collapse providing a satisfying conclusion to a story sensationally told