Author Archive

Articles by Julia M. Klein | Email the Author

 

1. Review

   Deconstruction boom

   August 6, 2012 11:00 AM

   Meet Barbara Joy Whitehouse, known as Joy, whose life story seems to constitute a catalogue of misfortune. The widow of a long-haul truck driver killed in a highway accident, she is a cancer survivor whose lung... Continue reading

2. Review

   What a Country

   September 29, 2011 11:56 AM

   In the midst of a cross-country pilgrimage, Iraq war veteran Colby Buzzell finds himself transfixed by an “old dusty American flag” in the hallway of a shabby residential hotel in Cheyenne, Wyoming. “As I approached, it kind of... Continue reading

3. Review

   Home and Away

   December 1, 2010 04:37 PM

   A Rope and a Prayer: A Kidnapping From Two Sides | By David Rohde and Kristen Mulvihill | Viking | 362 pages, $25.95 Two years ago, David Rohde, a foreign correspondent and investigative reporter for The New York Times,... Continue reading

4. Critical Eye

   Texas Tornado

   March 26, 2010 12:40 PM

   One-person shows are tricky things, demanding for both actor and audience. The playwright’s almost insurmountable challenge is to create a full-fledged drama with an elemental palette. If we’re lucky, we may end up with an astute character study or a... Continue reading

5. Review

   Poverty’s Poet Laureate

   December 7, 2009 05:57 PM

   Dorothea Lange was an elite portrait photographer, a government-funded propagandist, an artist, and, most famously, a photojournalist who helped invent documentary photography. Like a poet laureate of poverty, she created some of her most enduring images while on the... Continue reading

6. Essay

   Pushback

   November 16, 2008 10:41 AM

   When her Contra Costa Times colleagues compared her union organizing efforts to those of Norma Rae, Sara Steffens rented the 1979 Martin Ritt film—and was disconcerted to discover that the feisty textile worker immortalized by Sally Field lost her job.... Continue reading

7. Review

   Best Face Forward

   May 15, 2008 09:00 AM

   And we think today’s reporters have it tough. Picture this: To land a job, the journalistic aspirant known to history as Nellie Bly agrees to feign mental illness in order to uncover abuses at the notorious asylum for... Continue reading

8. Feature

   If You Build It…

   November 15, 2007 09:00 AM

   John C. Mellott, the affable publisher of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is moving his forearm up and down like a lever. “This,” he explains, “is the skillful management of a toggle.” Where is a photographer when you really need one?... Continue reading

9. Feature

   Brian Tierney’s Grand Experiment

   August 17, 2007 08:31 AM

   Pigs weren’t flying around The Philadelphia Inquirer’s historic white deco tower on North Broad Street—not yet anyway. But this was a gleeful day for Brian P. Tierney, even if he’d forfeited the element of surprise. For months, the chief... Continue reading

10. On the Job

    Dark Days

    March 1, 2007 08:30 AM

    A week before Christmas, the mosaics and stained glass in the sanctuary of Congregation Rodeph Shalom framed a somber scene. About two hundred members of The Newspaper Guild of Greater Philadelphia, representing white-collar workers at The Philadelphia Inquirer and... Continue reading