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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged Page Views

1. May 17, 2011 01:32 PM

   Tabloid City and the Contours of Emptiness

   Pete Hamill’s new novel explores a city in decline

   By Jennifer Miller

   Tabloid City | by Pete Hamill | Little, Brown and Company | 288 pages, $26.99 In the opening pages of Pete Hamill’s new novel, Tabloid City, the editor-in-chief of a dying tabloid called the New York World looks around his dead-of-night newsroom and thinks, “We live in the capital of emptiness.” This is true not just of Hamill’s fictional World—presented...

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2. March 16, 2011 02:56 PM

   A Brief History of “Save Darfur”

   The Darfur lobby was historic. But was it effective?

   By Andrew Stobo Sniderman

   Fighting for Darfur: Public Action and the Struggle to Stop Genocide | by Rebecca Hamilton | Palgrave MacMillan | 272 pages, $26.00 If machetes (rise and) fall in Africa and no American voters are listening, do American politicians care? No, says history. “If every member of the House and Senate had received one hundred letters from people back home saying...

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3. November 3, 2011 01:13 PM

   A Cook’s Tour with Molly Ivins

   A recipe-laden memoir of the columnist’s life and times

   By Nicola Kean

   Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins: A Memoir with Recipes | By Ellen Sweets | University of Texas Press | 288 pages, $29.95 Molly Ivins was many things; columnist, civil libertarian, “professional Texan.” But she also had a reputation as a fabulous cook and legendary hostess. It’s this side of the writer that friend and fellow foodie Ellen Sweets attempts...

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4. October 5, 2011 12:46 PM

   A Stranger Everywhere

   Ze’ev Rosenkranz traces Albert Einstein’s complicated relationship with Zionism

   By Jeremy Axelrod

   Einstein Before Israel | By Ze’ev Rosenkranz | Princeton University Press | 364 pages, $35.00 In the 1920s, the general public began to assume a link between Albert Einstein’s work and his wisdom: as his name became shorthand for genius, it began to evoke not just scientific greatness but a vast, wizardly vision that expressed itself in gnomic formulae. By...

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5. June 27, 2012 06:50 AM

   America’s forgotten war

   Historian Troy Bickham revisits the War of 1812

   By Jordan Michael Smith

   The Weight of Vengeance: The United States, the British Empire, and the War of 1812 | By Troy Bickham | Oxford University Press | 325 pages, $34.95 If any large-scale war in American history has been forgotten, it is the War of 1812. The war between Britain and the United States lasted three years and claimed the lives of 15,000...

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6. April 13, 2011 01:15 PM

   Anatomy of a Journalist

   Janet Malcolm dissects a murder trial, and her own profession

   By Lauren Kirchner

   Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial | by Janet Malcolm | Yale University Press | 168 pages, $25.00 On an October afternoon in 2007, Daniel Malakov, a dentist in the Forest Hills section of Queens, was taking his four-year-old daughter to meet up with her mother, his estranged wife Mazoltuv Borukhova. On his way there, Malakov was...

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7. March 31, 2011 01:09 PM

   Babel

   Robert Lane Greene on why language is always, and never, in decline

   By Daniel Luzer

   You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity | by Robert Lane Greene | Random House | 336 pages, $25.00 There’s a certain outspoken portion of the English-speaking population that’s really, really into grammar. Much like those who are sticklers for, say, etiquette or Robert's Rules of Order, grammar people think of themselves as...

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8. December 20, 2010 02:16 PM

   Copy Cat

   Marcus Boon turns the culture of copying on its head

   By Jane Kim

   In Praise of Copying | By Marcus Boon | Harvard University Press | 304 pages, $25.95 In the mythology section of a used bookstore I once frequented, there was a fat hardcover called The Golden Bough, by a certain Sir James George Frazer, which sat in a perpetually untouched and dusty splendor. At the time, it seemed either very interesting...

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9. October 12, 2011 11:30 AM

   Defining “Fair Use” for the Digital Age

   Aufderheide and Jaszi on how to put the balance back in copyright

   By David Riedel

   Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put the Balance Back in Copyright | By Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi | University of Chicago Press | 216 pages, $17.00 Say you’re an aspiring documentary filmmaker and your subject of choice is the east coast-west coast hip-hop rivalry of the 1990s. It’s likely in your documentary that at some point you’ll focus on...

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10. June 28, 2012 06:50 AM

    Edward Luce charts America’s decline

    Is the United States past its prime?

    By Daniel Luzer

    Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent | By Edward Luce | Atlantic Monthly Press | 291 pages, $26.00 Is America in decline? Almost since America established its hegemony over the rest of the world in the aftermath of World War II we’ve been worried about this question. The recent proliferation of books about the diminution of...

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11. September 21, 2011 02:01 PM

    Failures of Vision

    Errol Morris interrogates photography's place in the public imagination

    By Michael Meyer

    Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography | by Errol Morris | The Penguin Press | 336 pages, $40.00 Here’s a theory: every year photographs become more ubiquitous, and as that growing ubiquity builds to a certain critical mass, our collective understanding of photography’s place in our lives becomes more and more diluted, and our need to reconsider...

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12. December 7, 2011 11:48 AM

    Hell Yes to Hell No

    New book flags ways US targets dissent

    By Justin D. Martin

    Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in 21st-Century America | By Michael Ratner & Margaret Ratner Kunstler | The New Press | 176 pages, $17.95 A number of twentieth-century legal decisions helped establish the US as having one of the freest press systems on earth. In 1925, the US Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protects citizens not only...

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13. June 29, 2012 06:50 AM

    How the US captured the real 9/11 mastermind

    Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer take us deep inside the hunt for KSM

    By Jordan Michael Smith

    The Hunt for KSM: Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed | By Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer | Little, Brown and Company | 368 pages, $27.99 Terry McDermott’s Perfect Soldiers, released in 2005, did not get the attention it deserved. At the time, it was the most complete biography available of the 9/11...

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14. September 28, 2011 12:18 PM

    Jonathan Raban Takes the Scenic Route

    A review of Driving Home, the essayist’s latest collection

    By Phil Campbell

    Driving Home: An American Journey | By Jonathan Raban | Pantheon Books | 496 pp, $29.95 It’s a shame that essayist and critic Jonathan Raban is in his comfortable sixties instead of his restless thirties. The world needs a writer like him hopscotching the globe, making sense of the hurricanes, tornadoes, and tsunamis with which we’re bedeviled. This thought occurred...

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15. February 17, 2011 03:00 PM

    Letter Perfect

    Inside Elizabeth Bishop’s forty-year correspondence with The New Yorker

    By Jeremy Axelrod

    Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence edited by Joelle Biele | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 496 pages, $35.00 “Of course nobody wants to send them anything really ‘good,’” wrote Elizabeth Bishop to a friend in 1945, just after selling The New Yorker another few poems. Her quip was at least half sincere. The magazine, especially in...

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16. June 7, 2011 11:34 AM

    Mad Men: Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test

    A travelogue of insanity with the author of Them

    By Caroline H. Dworin

    The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through The Madness Industry | by Jon Ronson | Riverhead | 288 pages, $25.95 Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through The Madness Industry starts off like a mystery thriller. A neurologist working at the University College London Institute of Neurology receives an odd package in the mail, postmarked Gothenburg, Sweden, containing a strange...

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17. May 25, 2011 12:42 PM

    Memoirs of an Accidental Sportswriter

    Robert Lipsyte’s new memoir recounts fifty years on the sports pages

    By Sam Eifling

    An Accidental Sportswriter | by Robert Lipsyte | Ecco | 256 pages, $25.99 Robert Lipsyte’s An Accidental Sportswriter doesn’t leave the impression that sportswriting is incompatible with journalism, per se. Rather it’s that journalistic skepticism and independence are too often discarded by quasi-fans who report from inside locker rooms. What makes Lipsyte’s new memoir such a plum, especially to us...

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18. May 23, 2012 06:50 AM

    Nonfiction’s ‘meta’ moment

    Reviewing an anthology of “writings about the writings”

    By David Riedel

    Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction | Edited by Jill Talbot | University Of Iowa Press | 242 pages, $39.95 The word “meta” has become an inescapable part of the pop culture zeitgeist. In early May, the Boston Globe published a column by Ben Zimmer about the word’s seeming omnipresence. Zimmer also appeared on NPR to discuss it, saying, “The...

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19. October 26, 2011 02:25 PM

    Notes from Underground

    The posthumous memoir of an alternative press pioneer

    By Cid Standifer

    My Odyssey through the Underground Press | By Michael Kindman | Michigan State University Press | 256 pages, $39.95 We’ve come to expect certain elements from memoirs of 1960s counterculture: weed, LSD, sexual experimentation, communes, Beatles references, and so on and so forth. Michael “Mica” Kindman’s autobiography My Odyssey Through the Underground Press delivers on all of it, but with...

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20. November 24, 2010 09:54 AM

    Number Cruncher

    A new biography vindicates a forgotten innovator

    By Lauren Kirchner

    The Man Who Invented the Computer: The Biography of John Atanasoff, Digital Pioneer | By Jane Smiley | Doubleday | 256 pages, $25.95 In The Man Who Invented the Computer: The Biography of John Atanasoff, Digital Pioneer, Jane Smiley explores the origin story of a tool so ubiquitous that it can at times feel inevitable. As computers get smaller, faster,...

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