News Meeting

02:11 PM - July 20, 2011

Summer Reading Club

Recommend a book for a journalist this summer

By The Editors

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I put off reading Mat Taibbi's 'Griftopia' because I follow his columns obsessively and thought it wouldn't have anything new, but when I finally started reading I couldn't put it down. His account of the financial crisis is at once colorful, technical, and concise. My recommendation is universal: it's not too dense for readers who aren't familiar with finance, but it's also got plenty of sticky details for those who think they've read all there is to know deregulation and the bailout.

#1 Posted by Xiafang, CJR on Wed 20 Jul 2011 at 04:50 PM

A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
Paris Trout, Peter Dexter
Townie, Andre DuBus III
The Big Short, Michael Lewis
Black Mass, Dick Lehr & Gerard O'Neill
Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell

#2 Posted by Paul Sweeney, CJR on Wed 20 Jul 2011 at 04:52 PM

IN THE SLEEP ROOM by Anne Collins details the CIA's notorious and barbaric mind control experiments conducted on unwitting psychiatric patients at the Allan Memorial Institute during the 1950's and '60's. Seven former patients eventually sued our government, then settled out of court for $750,000 and an apology.

#3 Posted by D. H. Kerby, CJR on Wed 20 Jul 2011 at 04:57 PM

The Cruel Radiance by Susie Linfield on photography and political violence. A fascinating study of the power of photography and some of the best photographers of war and disaster.

#4 Posted by Robin Lindley, CJR on Wed 20 Jul 2011 at 05:55 PM

LATE EDITION: A LOVE STORY, by Bob Greene, wonderfully rich, detailed, bittersweet memoir of the old days at an Ohio newspaper, with a newsroom full of characters, decades ago when people depended foremost on print, very familiar to me breaking into journalism with the Providence Journal in the 1960s. M. Charles Bakst, J-School '67

#5 Posted by M. Charles Bakst, CJR on Thu 21 Jul 2011 at 10:29 AM

Books I've enjoyed this summer so far: "Savages" by Don Winslow; "Winter's Bone" by Daniel Woodrell; "Severance Package" by Duane Swierczynski; "Silk Parachute" by John McPhee; "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot; and "Dark Voyage" by Alan Furst. But I admit I've been thinking of going back to revisit a couple of favorites: "Boss" by Mike Royko, a brilliant depiction of how a big city REALLY works and "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller, which will hit the 50th anniversary of its publication this fall.

#6 Posted by Craig Pittman, CJR on Thu 21 Jul 2011 at 10:37 AM

Kevin Boyle's ``Arc of Justice,'' Pete Hamill's `Tabloid City,'' Manning Marable's great biography of Malcolm X, Ward Just's ``Rodin's Debutante,'' David Willman's ``The Mirage Man,'' Bill Rempel's ``At the Devil's Table,'' Jim Stewart's ``Tangled Web.'' For any of you who missed them in recent years, I highly recommend ``The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks'' by Rebecca Skloot, ``The Looming Tower'' by Lawrence Wright, ``The Dark Side'' by Jane Mayer, ``Claim of Privilege'' by Barry Siegel and ``The Race Beat,'' by Hank Klibanoff and Gene Roberts.

#7 Posted by Henry Weinstein, CJR on Thu 21 Jul 2011 at 01:40 PM

Given the state of journalism and the news of the world, Evelyn Waugh's satirical "Scoop" seems particularly relevant.

#8 Posted by Jerry Kavanagh, CJR on Fri 22 Jul 2011 at 10:25 AM

"Anne of Green Gables." This classic from 1908 will take your mind off work and lower your blood pressure by at least 30 points. 50 million copies sold.

#9 Posted by HLM, CJR on Fri 22 Jul 2011 at 01:23 PM

Timberline, by Gene Fowler, if you can find it. The book, long out of print, is an hilarious anecdotal history of the early days of the Denver Post. Fowler makes the Post sound like the worst newspaper in the world; its founders, Frederick Bonfils and Harry Tammen, come across as charlatans of the highest order -- Bonfils was once arrested and tried for stalking and sucker-punching the elderly owner of a rival newspaper. And yet it's all so entertaining that you want to hop in a time machine and get a job there, or at least buy a subscription. Among the newspaper anecdotes are dozens of funny, exuberant looks at frontier life and the men and women who lived it; for one, Timberline introduced the world to unsinkable Titanic survivor Molly Brown, whose exploits were later dramatized in film and on Broadway. Highly, highly recommended.

#10 Posted by Justin Peters, CJR on Fri 22 Jul 2011 at 01:54 PM

The companion serial novels now underway at
www.saturnrendezvous.com. Serial aspects aloft. Serious issues afoot...and it can be a mystery to thee...

#11 Posted by Ken Herbert, CJR on Sat 23 Jul 2011 at 09:08 PM

"Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage" by Hazel Rowley (who, sadly, died earlier this year just after publication). This tale of the Roosevelts, and the influence on their public lives, shows the value of coming back to what might be thought well worn ground. While many things have been thought to be known or hinted at, Rowley makes great use of newly found or released documents to give these firm foundations. It also gives a fresh take on a relationship which remade a nation.

While a novelistic telling, "Anatomy of a Moment" by Javier Cercas, takes on the real events of an attempted coup in the Spanish parliamentary chamber in 1981. While ruminating on the politics of post-Franco Spain, it also shows how quickly myths can be made, especially in a period where people are hungering for a new national story in the post-fascist era.

Finally: anything by Tony Judt. Nay, everything. A loss to public life; and when you talk of a man of letters, Judt should be your exemplar.

Greg Mitchell's "The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics". A campaign that obviously put paid to celebrity politics in California.

David Foster Wallace's "The Pale King", not least for the hope that the scraps around your desk may one day be turned into art.

Orlando Figes' "Crimea". Because if I don't praise it, he will.

#12 Posted by Stephen Murray, CJR on Mon 25 Jul 2011 at 01:03 AM

The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand. I hesitate to mention this book, since every time I bring it up someone inevitably wants to get into a discussion about the conservative political philosophy behind it. Political pontification aside, this is a wonderful tale told beautifully, with part of the plot revolving around a corrupt newspaper baron and his heavy hand on the content of his paper.

#13 Posted by Alysia Santo, CJR on Mon 25 Jul 2011 at 09:30 AM

In the summer I read a lot of crime novels. In the winter, too, come to think of it. I just finished a good one, Laura Lippman's "Every Secret Thing." Lippman's characters, most of them women in this book, are so sharply drawn you'll think you've met them, including a callow and ambitious reporter who plays a role in a story about the reverberations of child's murder. Lippman worked at the Waco Tribune-Herald and the San Antonio Light before spending twelve years at the Baltimore Sun, so she knows her way around the newsroom scenes.

#14 Posted by Mike Hoyt, CJR on Mon 25 Jul 2011 at 10:23 AM

Recently, I finally got around to reading Adam Hochschild's "Bury the Chains," about the British anti-slavery movement, which had been on my bookshelf at home for a few years. It's as good as the blurbs say -- a fascinating, unfamiliar story and a really impressive piece of popular history, written with a journalist's feel for narrative.

Mother Jones interviewed Hochschild when the book came out; the Q&A is here:

http://motherjones.com/politics/2005/01/bury-chains-interview-adam-hochschild

#15 Posted by Greg Marx, CJR on Mon 25 Jul 2011 at 04:07 PM

"Stop the Presses!" By Steven Banks. SpongeBob Squarepants dons a newsboy cap and, with his pal, Patrick, launches a newspaper, the Bikini Bottom Gazette. To boost sluggish sales, they go tabloid--fabricating scandalous, eye-grabbing stories about friends and employers (“Krabs’s Secret Love”) and hacking into neighbors’ voicemails (ok, not that last part). A quick, colorful read with lessons for children and adults alike about privacy, ethics, friendship, and business.

And, I intend to read "Half the Sky" by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (on bedside table since last summer).

#16 Posted by Liz Cox Barrett, CJR on Tue 26 Jul 2011 at 09:31 AM

I recently started re-reading the Collected Stories of Richard Yates. The entire collection is beautifully written, funny, sad. The themes and characters build and echo without being redundant. One story is set amid the duelings of the tuberculosis ward and the paraplegic ward at a post-WWII VA hospital. Representative line from TB patient: "Those paraplegic bastards think they own the goddamn place."

There's also a story called "Builders" about a writer for a financial news wire who doesn't know anything about finance ghostwriting the memoirs of a New York taxi driver. Yates is often called a writer's writer, but he's too good at exposing the most desperate corners of writers' souls to be doing their public reputation many favors.

What he can do - and does with every line - is show writers how to write well and think deeply.

#17 Posted by Michael Meyer, CJR on Tue 26 Jul 2011 at 12:11 PM

If you have not read Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn, you should. A hilarious look at Fleet Street in the late 1960s.

#18 Posted by jim kelly, CJR on Tue 26 Jul 2011 at 02:18 PM

For anyone interested in data-driven journalism, the classic Precision Journalism by Pulitzer-winning Philip Meyer, the just-out Visualize This by Nathan Yau of the Flowing Data blog, on the grounds that graphical analysis is central both to exploratory data analysis and communicating the results to your audience, and The Tiger That Isn't by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot. The last is an entertaining run through the use and abuse of statistics in politics and journalism.

#19 Posted by Peter Aldhous, CJR on Wed 27 Jul 2011 at 10:12 AM

War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges (anti-memoir)

#20 Posted by Anton W, CJR on Thu 28 Jul 2011 at 08:34 PM

Blood River by Tim Butcher of The Daily Telegraph. So you considered yourself on the intrepid side did you? This tale will make even the most seasoned scribe-against-the-odds fancier blanche. Excellent backdrop too on Congolese history.

#21 Posted by christopher potter, CJR on Fri 29 Jul 2011 at 06:51 AM

I'm going to go back in time a bit, to recommend "Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman" by Merle Miller, who interviewed Truman for a proposed TV feature that was never produced. A caveat is that the book was controversial for possible forged quotes, especially ones involving Dwight Eisenhower. That said, Truman's philosophy of honesty and hard work is an elixer against the phoniness of politics today. While it's truly sad to think that someone like Truman would never rise to the surface in today's political world, it's also fascinating to think that, if only someone would speak as honestly and with as much common sense as Truman did, he or she would probably be elected President - just as Truman was in spite of conventional wisdom.

#22 Posted by Robert Speed, CJR on Mon 1 Aug 2011 at 01:48 AM

Tim Groseclose's new book. (lol)

#23 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Tue 2 Aug 2011 at 12:04 PM

"This Kind of War," by T.E. Fehrenbach, is a history of the Korean War and was written before Vietnam ramped up, but explains why every war we've fought since WWII had to be fought as a limited engagement and why they all will end not with a bang but a whimper. Truman and Eisenhower understood. LBJ must not have got the memo.

Also Norman Mailer's "Executioner's Song" to me is the high water mark of the New Journalism and Mailer's best work. Needs to be read in one fell swoop for maximum effect. Great beach read.

#24 Posted by T. Jackson, CJR on Wed 3 Aug 2011 at 06:33 PM

"The Shock Doctrine", by Naomi Klein should be a must read for all financial journalists. It is what is happening now in this country. (USA)

#25 Posted by gregh, CJR on Sat 6 Aug 2011 at 11:41 PM