Review
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September 26, 2012 11:18 AM
Brief Encounters
Short reviews of Anonymous in Their Own Names and At the Fights
Anonymous in Their Own Names: Doris E. Fleischman, Ruth Hale, and Jane Grant | By Susan Henry | Vanderbilt University Press | 294 pages | $35
What did Doris E. Fleischman, Ruth Hale, and Jane Grant have in common? According to their biographer, Susan Henry: they shared an era, the early-middle decades of the 20th century; they were talented media...
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September 24, 2012 10:49 AM
The lying game
Is it ever okay to tell a whopper in the name of journalism?
In 2007, investigative journalist Ken Silverstein went undercover to test Washington lobbyists’ taste for sleaze. Using an alias, Silverstein created a fictitious energy firm that ostensibly did business in Turkmenistan and approached professional lobbyists to see if they could help cleanse the regime’s neo-Stalinist reputation. The bill for services rendered—newspaper op-eds bylined by established think-tankers and academics, visits to...
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September 10, 2012 11:00 AM
Talking trash
What's more important, human dignity or freedom of speech?
The lead article in the sports section of the July 1 New York Times was about an Italian football player of African descent who scored both goals in his team’s defeat of Germany in the Euro 2012 semifinals. It was not an article about racism, but it noted in passing that “he has endured racial abuse, monkey chants from...
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August 14, 2012 10:49 AM
Brief Encounters
Short reviews of Out on Assignment and Famous Long Ago
Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space | By Alice Fahs | University of North Carolina Press | 360 pages, $37.50
Frank Luther Mott’s once-standard history, American Journalism (1962 edition), covered in two paragraphs the era to which Alice Fahs now gives a whole book—the impact of an energetic, determined cohort of several hundred women...
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August 8, 2012 10:31 AM
All on the same page
A new essay collection suggests technology will enhance book culture, not kill it
Mark Bauerlein, an english professor at Emory University and the author of the 2004 National Endowment for the Arts study “Reading at Risk,” tells a story about an Apple Store sales display that convinced him the digital generation was in open revolt against the printed book. I first heard the lecture, called “Milton vs. Myspace: The Menace of Screens,” as...
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August 6, 2012 11:00 AM
Deconstruction boom
Barlett & Steele hammer away, again, at the middle-class decline
Meet Barbara Joy Whitehouse, known as Joy, whose life story seems to constitute a catalogue of misfortune.
The widow of a long-haul truck driver killed in a highway accident, she is a cancer survivor whose lung disease keeps her attached part-time to an oxygen tank. At 69, she resides in a mobile home near Salt Lake City and subsists...
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July 24, 2012 10:54 AM
Blinded by the fight
In a new book on poverty in America, the authors’ lectures undercut their message
In 2009, reporter Chris Hedges and cartoonist Joe Sacco set out to capture the state of American desperation. Over the next two years, the men took a misery tour of some of the worst places in America: the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, which paces the nation in drug abuse, alcoholism, and teen suicide rates; Camden, NJ, one of...
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May 28, 2012 06:50 AM
Brief Encounters
Short reviews of Hitlerland and Yazoo
Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power | By Andrew Nagorski | Simon & Schuster | 385 pages, $28
As Adolf Hitler trans-formed himself from a failed regional politician to the most feared tyrant of the 20th century, Americans were on hand to observe, report, and warn. Andrew Nagorski, a Newsweek veteran and now head of a public-policy...
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May 23, 2012 06:50 AM
A master’s missteps
Fixated on Kapuscinski’s flaws, a new biography misses the point
Celebrated for his reportage about world-changing events and leaders of his day—the Iranian Revolution, Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia—the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski has remained in the headlines since his death in 2007 largely due to questions about his veracity: How accurate was his reporting? How truthfully did he describe his own life? Were...
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May 21, 2012 06:50 AM
The re-entry problem
America’s tough-on-crime policies didn’t work. Now what?
Over the course of eight days in 1978, a 15-year-old terror named Willie Bosket managed to satisfy his curiosity about what it felt like to kill someone. He did this by purchasing a .22 handgun from his mother’s boyfriend, paid for with funds obtained from robbing sleeping passengers in New York City’s subway system, and shooting his next two robbery...
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May 15, 2012 06:50 AM
The astroturf Cassandra
Why hacks like Andrew Keen really fear the social Web
Long before Facebook or Foursquare, men like the late management consultant Martin Jay Levitt were connoisseurs of social networks. At the beginning of each new gig Levitt would have a client’s human resources director create detailed diagrams mapping the relationships between all employees, accounting for gossip, date of hire and pay, even details of his sex life, if any were...
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April 9, 2012 06:00 AM
Brief Encounters
Short reviews of Ghost of the Ozarks, News for All the People and After the Fall
Ghost of the Ozarks: Murder and Memory in the Upland South | By Brooks Blevins | University of Illinois Press | 304 pages, $29.95
The “quirky crime” story was an inescapable aspect of newspaper culture in the 1920s. Publications hundreds of miles distant, scanning for news that would entertain, would dispatch reporters to cover a trial in some forsaken crossroads,...
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April 5, 2012 06:00 AM
Reading Room
An illustrated review of the New York Post's app
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March 14, 2012 12:12 PM
Your Black Muslim History
A new book tackles issues larger than one murdered reporter
Killing the Messenger: A Story of Radical Faith, Racism's Backlash, and the Assassination of a Journalist | By Thomas Peele | The Crown Publishing Group | 441 pages, $26.00
It’s said that the devil is in the details, and experienced writers would agree that the tiniest details can make or break a story. This may tempt authors to emphasize or...
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- Audit Notes: pyramid people, Disney and ABC, no USA Today paywall Roddy Boyd digs into a diet-shake pyramid scheme
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- NBC News sets good example for Medicare reporting People perspective leads to clear explanation of impact of proposed changes
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