Page Views
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July 19, 2010 11:43 AM
Hot Zone
A portrait of Pakistan’s volatile frontier
The Most Dangerous Place: Pakistan’s Lawless Frontier | By Imtiaz Gul | Viking | 320 pages, $26.95
Lawless. The word tends to travel in tandem with Pakistan’s tribal areas. Sometimes you also get wild, often restive, and the occasional seething. Where the focus switches from people to terrain, there’s a great deal of rugged or forbidding––implying that hostility is built...
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June 30, 2010 02:16 PM
Celluloid Heroes
A champion jazz critic turns to the silver screen
Warning Shadows: Home Alone with Classic Cinema | By Gary Giddins | W.W. Norton & Company | 416 pages, $18.95
A genius jazz critic who dares turn film critic risks fisticuffs with cineastes. Stick to your syncopated knitting, Giddins! What, you’re not satisfied with your bestselling Bing Crosby bio, your Grammy, your Peabody, Gleason, NBCC, and six Deems Taylor awards?...
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June 17, 2010 02:43 PM
House of Games
A spirited defense of the “digital dollhouse”
Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter | By Tom Bissell | Pantheon | 240 pages, $22.95
Tom Bissell may be onto something when, near the beginning of Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, he compares his subject matter to religion. If, at the outset, you are not inclined to assign meaning to the pleasures and fulfillments of video games, hearing...
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May 03, 2010 12:43 PM
Behind Bars
Roxana Saberi talks about her Iranian captivity
Roxana Saberi was an American freelance reporter living and working in Tehran when she was arrested by Iranian authorities in January 2009. She had been in the country for six years, and was about to return to the United States, where she planned to work on a book about Iran. Instead, she was sentenced to eight years on charges of...
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April 23, 2010 12:19 PM
Flight Path
Have Western journalists given Islamofascism a free ride?
The Flight of the Intellectuals | By Paul Berman | Melville House | 220 pages, $22.95
Paul Berman spends much of The Flight of the Intellectuals relentlessly dismantling a work of journalism—namely, Ian Buruma’s sympathetic 2007 profile of the Swiss Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan for The New York Times Magazine. A brainy, book-length assault on a single magazine piece may...
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April 15, 2010 10:42 AM
Mind Games
Can neuroscience explain the crisis in news?
What Is Happening to News: The Information Explosion and the Crisis in Journalism | By Jack Fuller | University of Chicago Press | 224 pages, $25
Jack Fuller is a veteran of almost four decades in journalism. He reported from Washington and Vietnam. He wrote editorials for the Chicago Tribune, some of which won him a Pulitzer Prize. He spent...
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April 08, 2010 03:01 PM
Head Case
The artful eccentricity of St. Clair McKelway
Reporting at Wit’s End: Tales from The New Yorker | By St. Clair McKelway | Bloomsbury | 619 pages, $18
It’s no secret that New Yorkers nest in cramped, costly pens. The mystery concerns what else they do in those pens. Reading the largely unread St. Clair McKelway, who died in 1980, one senses that up each staircase in the...
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March 26, 2010 12:40 PM
Texas Tornado
A one-woman show resurrects the late Molly Ivins
One-person shows are tricky things, demanding for both actor and audience. The playwright’s almost insurmountable challenge is to create a full-fledged drama with an elemental palette. If we’re lucky, we may end up with an astute character study or a gripping performance.
We are just lucky enough in the case of Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly...
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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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As our readers know, the print version of CJR includes a generous book section. Yet there are still far too many titles to cover in a bimonthly magazine—hence, the theoretically infinite annex that is Page Views. Click here to see every Page Views piece we've ever published.
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Desks
The Audit Business
- WSJ Looks at the Overdraft Bottom Feeders
- Audit Notes: Moody’s Market, Revolving Door, Tables Turned on Zuck
The Observatory Science
- Chronicle Gives “Climategate” Probes Their Due Even wary journalists find little evidence of whitewash
- Climate Bill Blowout It’s a big deal. Where’s the print coverage?
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- Mercury News: Lobbyists As “Shadow Legislature” in CA A special report explains the “Sacramento version” of lawmaking
- The Story Behind the Publication of WikiLeaks’s Afghanistan Logs From Brussels, to a bunker, to blockbusters
