Earlier this month, 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, you could do worse than to give one or more of these books.
Tokyo Vice—Jake Adelstein
The Ambition and the Power—John Barry
The Lonely Soldier—Helen Benedict
The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft—Robert Boynton, ed.
Battle for Justice—Ethan Bronner
Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance—Ian Buruma
The Associated Press Guide to News Writing—Rene J. Cappon
Ghost Wars—Steve Coll
Necessary Illusions—Noam Chomsky
Homer and Langley—E.L. Doctorow
The Unknown Soldier—Joshua Dysart
Breaking the News—James Fallows
The Great War for Civilization—Robert Fisk
Great Plains and Family—Ian Frazier
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda—Philip Gourevitch
Gaily, Gaily—Ben Hecht
War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning—Chris Hedges
Out of His Skin: The John Barnes Phenomenon—Dave Hill
The True Believer—Eric Hoffer
The Great Game—Peter Hopkirk
The Curse of the Mogul—Jonathan A. Knee, Bruce C. Greenwald and Ava Seave
Finding George Orwell in Burma—Emma Larkin
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx—Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes you a Happy Birthday: Unexpected Encounters in the Changing Middle East—Neil Macfarquhar
Paris 1919—Margaret MacMillan
China Safari: On the Trail of Beijing’s Expansion in Africa—Serge Michel, Michel Beurut, and Paulo Woods
Journalistas: 100 Years of the Best Writing and Reporting—Eleanor Mills and Naomi Wolf, eds.
I.F. Stone: A Portrait—Andrew Patner
Scandals, Scamps, and Scoundrels: The Casebook of an Investigative Reporter—James Phelan
Don’t Make No Waves … Don’t Back No Losers—Milton Rakove
The Girls in the Balcony—Nan Robertson
Queen of the Oil Club: The Intrepid Wanda Jablonski and the Power of Information—Anna Rubino
Lords of the Press—George Seldes
The Brass Check—Upton Sinclair
Deogratias—JP Stassen
Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller—Steve Weinberg
Hella Nation—Evan Wright
recommend: "Once Upon A Time In War: The 99th Division in World War II" by Robert E. Humphrey
#1 Posted by Robert E. Humphrey, CJR on Wed 23 Dec 2009 at 06:13 PM
Only 16.6 percent of these authors are female? How typically androcentric and patriarchal thinking -- -- only men are the wise, as in ... the WISE MEN and, only they are, then, worthy of one's precious reading time. Typical thinking. Even at the start of this latest Century's second decade.
Screw it all. I am the World's slowest reader who loves to read. Of the World's readers who actually love it, I am its slowest. Therefore, within my allotted span of time for my life, I have determined that except for Stoltenberg, Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins, only matters, nonfictional or fictional, written by women will I read. Starting and always with Prophetess ROSALIND MILES.
Sooooo much terrific -- and WISE -- material has, for CENTURIES -- since Hypatia and before, been written by women that there is PLENTY of matter to keep one's pique. IF one so ... chose.
Blue Maas
http://longviewredemption.blogspot.com
http://bluemAAs.public.iastate.edu
#2 Posted by blue mAAs, CJR on Thu 24 Dec 2009 at 02:24 PM
FLIP / REVERSE this author - gender disparity: The Columbia Journalism Review yesterday published a loooong list of gift suggestions which had to it material written by authors
only 16.6 percent of whom were male and
of whom 83.4 percent were female.
Guess, Readers, which gender of this list's viewers, then, would
i) sit up and notice this authors' gender - disparity and
ii) just HOW SWIFT it would be that, just how short a time it would take for this inegalitarianism to be noted? ... and, likely, thereto ... gargantuanly commented upon!
As a matter of egalitarian fact, Readers, for true and strong democracy? For a true and strong press? FLIP / REVERSE every aspect of all matters.
blue mAAs
http://longviewredemption.blogspot.com
http://bluemAAs.public.iastate.edu
#3 Posted by blue mAAs, CJR on Thu 24 Dec 2009 at 02:55 PM
Just a short comment. I have just (this morning) E.L. Doctorow's Homer and Langley and join with CJR in encouraging all to read it. Years ago, I advised my students to read Ragtime , if for no other reaspn, work on vocabulary. I'm a longtime reader of Doctorow's and have used his work to exemplify the use of unfamiliar language in such a way as to make "big words" sound as natural and as comfortable as comon slang. Homer and Langley is another example of that particular skill. The story is, of course, very well done. These brothers, Homer and Langley, share a growing interest in living an eccentric life. Homer is the book's narrator and, fortunately, the lesser of two eccentrics. The story,
often reviewed in case a reader forgets, covers "Park Avenue life" from an absence eccentricity and a presence of a very tradition-bound parents, to a wildly nontraditional life with two bachelors who become instatiably bound to eccentric behavior (ie: a Model T stored "forever" in a one time elegant dining room). The beauty of the story begunj in a pre-WW I time and ending in a time with which we are quite familiar. The magic of the short novel is the reader's wish to live than kind of life -- a kind of "Noble Savage" kind of existance without Tarzan swing from trees on vines.
Thank you for the space with which to share my thoughts.
Al Montanaro
#4 Posted by Al Montanaro, CJR on Sun 3 Jan 2010 at 04:47 PM