Writers Who Make Sense of the Wide World
The ASSASSINS’ GATE: AMERICA IN IRAQ by George Packer
Profile by David Glenn
MAXIMUM CITY: BOMBAY LOST AND FOUND by Suketu Mehta
Interview by Carl Bromley
DEEP WATER: THE EPIC STRUGGLE OVER DAMS, DISPLACED PEOPLE, AND THE ENVIRONMENT by Jacques Leslie
Review by Tom Vanderbilt
THE SHAME OF THE NATION: THE RESTORATION OF APARTHEID SCHOOLING IN AMERICA by Jonathan Kozol
Review by Linda Perlstein
BAIT AND SWITCH: THE (FUTILE) PURSUIT OF THE AMERICAN DREAM by Barbara Ehrenreich
Review by Kim Phillips-Fein
Welcome to CJR’s annual books issue. In the following sixteen pages you will enter five complex worlds — some of them exotic and even deadly, others more familiar and placid, at least on the surface — and learn how five writers used a variety of reporting and analytical strategies to dive deeply into those worlds and bring back stories that illuminate and explain them: George Packer’s fierce effort to overcome his own preconceptions about the war in Iraq; Suketu Mehta’s methodical burrowing through the thickets of Bombay; Jacques Leslie’s gripping portraits of people whose lives are forever altered by the construction of dams; Jonathan Kozol’s devastating reexamination of our re-segregated schools; and Barbara Ehrenreich’s surprising undercover trip with the corporate unemployed as they lose their grip on the American Dream. This is now the kind of journalism that is done less and less in magazines and more and more in books. This issue also introduces a new approach to the world of books at CJR, as our traditional focus on books about journalism expands to include reviews of relevant nonfiction books — works of journalism — with an eye toward the writer’s methods and the subjects that bear broadly on journalism. We hope you enjoy it.
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