Last week, we asked readers to recommend a book to members of the journalistic community. Below, we present an alphabetized list of the recommendations we received, with a link to more information for each book. If you’ve left your shopping until the last minute like we have, you could do worse than to give one or more of these books.
The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism – Andrew J. Bacevich
Supermedia: Saving Journalism So It Can Save the World – Charlie Beckett
The Wealth of Networks – Yochai Benchler
Friday Night Lights – H.G. Bissinger
Our Constitution: The Myth That Binds Us – Eric Black
Alphabet Juice – Roy Blount Jr.
Terror and Consent – Phillip Bobbitt
What Color is Your Parachute? – Richard Nelson Bolles
The Image – Daniel Boorstin
The New New Journalism – ed. Robert Boynton
The Gay Place – Billy Lee Brammer
The Path to Power – Robert A. Caro
Silent Spring – Rachel Carson
The Boys on the Bus – Timothy Crouse
Black and White and Dead All Over – John Darnton
Flat Earth News – Nick Davies
Return to Tsugaru: Travels of a Purple Tramp – Osamu Dazai
Anything by St. Francis de Sales
The New Muckrackers – Leonard Downie
Waiting for an Ordinary Day: The Unraveling of Life in Iraq – Farnaz Fassihi
The Forever War – Dexter Filkins
Economics for Dummies – Sean Masaki Flynn
The Predator State – James K. Galbraith
City Room – Arthur Gelb
The Tipping Point – Malcolm Gladwell
Personal History – Katharine Graham
Corrupted Science – John Grant
News is a Verb – Pete Hamill
Pulitzer’s Gold – Roy J. Harris, Jr.
Machete Season – Jean Hatzfeld
Economics in One Lesson – Henry Hazlitt
Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist: Writings from the Ozarks – Edited by Stephen W. Hines
B-Four – Sam Hodges
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life – Richard Hofstadter
Who You Are when No One’s Looking – Bill Hybels
In Search of Memory – Eric Kandel
The Shock Doctrine – Naomi Klein
The Elements of Journalism – Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel
Never Shoot a Stampede Queen – Mark Leiren-Young
Startup Guide to Guerilla Marketing – Jay and Jeannie Levinson
The Journalist and the Murderer – Janet Malcolm
The Road – Cormac McCarthy
Annals of the Former World – John McPhee
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found – Suketu Mehta
The Vanishing Newspaper – Philip Meyer
On Liberty – John Stuart Mill
The Chicago Guide to Writing about Numbers – Jane Miller
Joe Gould’s Secret – Joseph Mitchell
The Tender Bar – J.R. Moehringer
Anything by Haruki Murakami
Innumeracy – John Paulos
The Truth – Terry Pratchett
Lush Life – Richard Price
Once Upon a Distant War – William Prochnau
The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
What Are Journalists For? – Jay Rosen
One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko – Mike Royko
Slats Grobnik and Some Other Friends – Mike Royko
Here Comes Everybody – Clay Shirky
Claim of Privilege: A Mysterious Plane Crash, a Landmark Supreme Court Case and Rise of State Secrets – Barry Siegel
The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications – Paul Starr
The Kingdom and the Power – Gay Talese
Hard Times – Studs Terkel
The Palliser novels – Anthony Trollope
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again – David Foster Wallace
All the King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren
Taking on the Trust – Steve Weinberg
Legacy of Ashes – Tim Weiner
The Man Who Owns the News –
Michael Wolff
The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History – Gordon Wood
The Editors are the staffers of the Columbia Journalism Review.