Page Views
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March 18, 2010 12:43 PM
Hooking the Big Ones
Matt Labash’s meetings with remarkable men
Fly Fishing with Darth Vader: And Other Adventures with Evangelical Wrestlers, Political Hitmen, and Jewish Cowboys | By Matt Labash | Simon & Schuster | 336 pages, $25.99
Matt Labash has a nose for sniffing out the strange and the strangely compelling American characters, particularly those knee-deep in the tragicomic spectacle of our national politics. Fly Fishing with Darth...
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February 23, 2010 02:48 PM
Remote Control
How Joseph Pulitzer built a media powerhouse—in absentia
Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power | James McGrath Morris | Harper | 559 pages, $29.99
What is most striking about the latest biography of Joseph Pulitzer is how little time he actually spent tending to his two newspapers, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York World. A close reading of James McGrath Morris’s Pulitzer: A Life...
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January 21, 2010 12:03 PM
Character Studies
A new anthology from David Maraniss highlights the human factor
Into the Story: A Writer’s Journey Through Life, Politics, Sports and Loss | By David Maraniss | Simon & Schuster | 283 pages, $26
The collected works of journalists often fall flat in book form. The recycled pieces from newspapers and magazines can seem stale. Frequently, a writing style that is perfectly serviceable for quick consumption turns out to...
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January 13, 2010 03:11 PM
Free At Last?
An impassioned pitch for press freedoms in the new century
Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-Open: A Free Press for a New Century | By Lee C. Bollinger | Oxford University Press, 224 pages, $22.95
It is a good day when a leading university president takes the time to write a book lauding the First Amendment. It’s an even better day when that president is Columbia’s Lee Bollinger, and the driving...
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December 10, 2009 09:00 AM
Rebel with a Cause
Molly Ivins in high definition
Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life | By Bill Minutaglio and W. Michael Smith | PublicAffairs | 360 pages, $26.95
On July 6, 1964, Henry Holland, the brilliant and eccentric scion of a wealthy Texas family, was driving his motorcycle down a country road when a dog ran into his path. Holland swerved, his bike slammed into a roadside guard...
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December 02, 2009 11:29 AM
Show and Tell
An enlightening history of the Danish cartoon controversy--minus the cartoons
The Cartoons that Shook the World | By Jytte Klausen | Yale University Press, 240 pages, $35
Many Americans will remember the Danish cartoon controversy of 2006, which prompted violent riots, consumer boycotts, and death threats. Few will remember the cartoons themselves, and with good reason. In the United States, only a handful of magazines and newspapers reprinted the notorious...
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November 20, 2009 11:47 AM
Heroes and Villains and Literary Geniuses
Literary critic and CJR's Ideas + Reviews editor, James Marcus, sat down last night for a discussion with author David Hajdu to discuss Hajdu's latest book, Heroes and Villains, a collection of essays on music, movies, comics, and pop culture mostly written in Hajdu's role as music critic for the New Republic.
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November 12, 2009 03:13 PM
Bomb Squad
The explosive rise (and final fizzle) of Ramparts
A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America | By Peter Richardson | The New Press | 272 pages, $25.95
It only took a few years for Ramparts to evolve from an earnest Catholic lay magazine published in the suburbs of San Mateo County to a high-spending, scoop-breaking, muckraking journal whose San Francisco...
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November 04, 2009 01:27 PM
Picture Perfect
A DVD reissue of Scandal Sheet is good news indeed
I don’t know any newspaper people who don’t like a good newspaper movie. I'm not sure why this is so--do cops like cop movies? I guess we all like to see what the filmmakers get right, and what they get wrong. And I don’t mean movies where one of the lead characters happens to work at a newspaper (like Marley...
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October 01, 2009 11:55 AM
Throw the Rascals In!
Joe Flaherty's classic account of Mailer and Breslin on the hustings
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In this season of a perfectly dull mayoral election, and in this year that is the fortieth anniversary not only of Woodstock, Chappaquiddick, the moon landing, the Manson murders, and the Miracle Mets but also the celebrated Mailer-Breslin campaign of 1969, let us pause for a couple hours to dust off and read Managing Mailer. In this half-great... -
September 24, 2009 12:00 PM
California Dreaming
An era of "strange quietude" in the Golden State
Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance | By Kevin Starr | Oxford University Press | 576 pages, $34.95
All is not well in California. As has been widely noted, our state is broke--and perpetually on fire. Its legendary thirst for water is looking risky as the West dries up, and the U.C. system, a flagship of public education,...
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September 16, 2009 10:50 AM
Out of Africa
The raw and redemptive odyssey of a Burundian refugee
Strength in What Remains | By Tracy Kidder | Random House | 304 pages, $26
“The world is full of miserable places,” Tracy Kidder wrote in Mountains Beyond Mountains, his 2003 chronicle of Paul Farmer, a Boston doctor who worked to bring adequate health care to ill and desperately poor people in Haiti. “One way of living comfortably is not...
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August 27, 2009 01:54 PM
Core Competencies
Alex Jones on why we must maintain the "iron core of news"
Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy | By Alex S. Jones | Oxford University Press | 256 pages, $24.95
Having passed my fortieth year as a professional journalist, with an emphasis on investigative reporting, perhaps I am crotchety. Perhaps you should stop reading at the close of this paragraph. Or, alternately, perhaps I am justified...
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August 19, 2009 01:07 PM
Asphalt Jungle
A fresh look at a monumental smackdown over urban renewal
Wrestling With Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City | By Anthony Flint | Random House | 256 pages, $27
All city dwellers, and especially New Yorkers, owe a debt to Jane Jacobs. More than anyone else in the mid-twentieth century, she made the argument in favor of humane cities: which...
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