Journalists Books - Page 15

Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility

Hollis Gillespie

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

hilarious. 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

At first I thought the title was purely creative, but once I started reading the book I realized Hollis really knows a thing or two about trailers, and is honestly sharing her life experiences as she climbs the ladder of success. The stories in this book are absolutely hilarious, and inspiring for anyone who likes to read about free spirited/creative/honest/successful people.

Editorial Review:

Hollis Gillespie used to be embarrassed about having an alcoholic, trailer-salesman dad and a bomb-making mom with broken dreams of being a beautician. If anyone asked about her family, she would tell them her parents were wealthy and that she came from a refined background. She never mentioned the time they lived in a mobile home two miles north of the Tijuana border.

 

"Trailer Trashed" is a collection of interconnected essays, ranging from hilarious to heart-breaking, all on one broad theme—Hollis Gillespie's relationships with her equally offbeat sisters, her precocious daughter, her bizarre friends, and the people they love. Think David Sedaris meets "Thelma & Louise."

 

"If David Sedaris had a vagina and wasn't such a pussy, he'd write like Hollis Gillespie." --Bust magazine

 

We Are Our Mothers' Daughters

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 33 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Cokie Roberts takes her listeners on a personal and political journey, exploring the diverse roles women have played throughout American history, and the connections and distinctions among different generations of women. On a personal level, each essay is an introduction to one of the fascinating women Roberts has encountered during the course of her reporting career. She also relates powerful and moving anecdotes about the women in her life, like her mother, former Congresswoman Lindy Boggs.

These intimate portraits of extraordinary women become the springboard for more extensive discussions of women's position in politics, business, motherhood, and marriage, as well as other issues. Roberts examines the nature of women's roles, from mother to mechanic, sister to soldier, through the illuminating lens of her personal experience.

Sensitive, straightforward, and perceptive, "We Are Our Mothers' Daughters" celebrates the diversity of choices and perspectives available to women today and ultimately affirms the bond of female solidarity - a vital, powerful interconnection among all women, whatever their backgrounds.

Through The Children's Gate

Adam Gopnik

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Through Gopnik's Gate...New York seen magnificently through a writer's lens 5 out of 5 stars.
15 of 16 people found this review helpful.

I should preface this review with some background: I am a pediatrician, working and living in New York, and this book first caught my eye just from the title. When I read the jacket liner and discovered it was, at least in part, about raising children in New York, I felt I had to give it a whirl. I was not too familiar with Gopnik's essays in The New Yorker, though his name was familiar to me and his writing had been recommended to me many times. It was with this background sense of his work that I began to read.

And read, I did. From the first moment I picked up this book I was engulfed and enthralled. This book is a collection of essays written from the author's perspective. He had lived in Paris for 5 years on assignment for The New Yorker Magazine, and returned to New York City in 2000 primarily out of homesickness and out of a desire to raise his family there. Gopnik knows New York, but a lot had changed since the last time he lived here, and this collection of essays is really about his rediscovery of the city, through his own eyes as well as those of others: his children, most notably, but also his wife and some of his close friends. His essays, which feel at times more like stories, are of course tempered by and work through the enormity of 9/11. And the New York he describes is as much the New York of and around 9/11 as it is the New York that it always has been and yet also a new city formed by nothing other than the march of progress.

His subject matter is of two parts, both close to my own heart--New York city and children. He does them both such amazing justice in this book.
Gopnik's prose is a joy to behold, both familiar and formal, intricately planned yet at times stream-of-consciousness in style. His skill as a writer is as much in this, his technical mastery of the genre, as it is in his easy ability to depict emotions ranging from humor to pathos succintly yet poignantly. His skills suit his subjects perfectly. The city crackles to life underneath his pen, as he captures in amazing clarity what it is like to sit awake and look out at the windows around the city at 3 AM, or what it felt like to watch the city burn 5 1/2 years ago, or what central park means to the city and those in it. He is the quintessential New Yorker, and yet, perhaps because he left the city, he is able now to see it so much more clearly without taking it for granted as the rest of us do.

But the real heart of this book lies in his portrayal of his children. Through his writing we see his love for Olivia and Luke leap off of the page and, without being overly trite, right into our hearts. The way he describes himself already preparing for when they leave home...the way he opines on what the earth must feel like when zen masters leave it--his children are his life, and it shows brilliantly. As someone without children of my own, but who works with them on a daily basis, I can attest to the accuracy with which Gopnik captures their idiosyncracies while still making painfully clear how alike they truly are. By the end of this book, the reader feels he or she knows Gopnik, his family, his children, and the reader feels for him. Or at least I did.

This is, once again, a wonderful read. Light, funny, and yet undeniably heavy and full of rich sadness and depth, and at times all at once. Gopnik has outdone himself. As we step through the Children's Gate, we enter his world, and when the book ends we just don't want to leave.

Editorial Review:

The children's gate is an entrance to Central Park that leads to the playground. Gopnik explores that entrance in metaphor and experience as he recounts his family's return from Paris to New York—a seemingly secure, almost oddly child-friendly New York—in the fall of 2000. Gopnik describes not a city but an extended urban family, and a home charmed by the civilization of childhood. It's a charm that is simultaneously protect from, challenged by, and even shaped around the event that is soon to follow. By turns elegant and exultant, jubilant and poignant, THROUGH THE CHILDREN'S GATE is a loving portrait of a family and their city.

Permanent Midnight: A Memoir

Jerry Stahl

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 40 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Beautiful loser 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

I thought I would hate this book because the guy seemed like some rich Hollywood type who romanticized his bout with drugs. The saving grace, was that the book is completely hilarious.

Permanent Desperation 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Surprisingly, I found this book to be an excellent read. Stahl's extremely honest and no-holds-back dipiction of his "arrival" into Hollywood and his "departure" into heroin addiction, was incredibly exciting and moving. I've read 'em all (regarding addiction) and this is right up there on top. As a recovering addict myself, I find it hard to find an author who is genuinely honest of where the drugs and alcohol take them, and just how hard it is to get back, without having ego replace honesty. Hats off to Stahl for being able to accomplish the far and few between.

Editorial Review:

Now a motion picture starring Ben Stiller, this is the autobiography of Jerry Stahl, a former television writer. Stahl was an aspiring fiction writer who arrives in L.A. and lands a job penning what he considers to be crappy but lucrative TV scripts, and descends into quasi-functional heroin addiction. Available now.

Conversations with Hunter S. Thompson (Literary Conversations Series)

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In 1971, the outlandish originator of gonzo journalism, Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005) commandeered the international literary limelight with his best-selling, comic masterpiece Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Following his 1966 debut Hell's Angels, Thompson displayed an uncanny flair for inserting himself into the epicenter of major sociopolitical events of our generation. His audacious, satirical, ranting screeds on American culture have been widely read and admired. Whether in books, essays, or collections of his correspondence, his raging and incisive voice and writing style are unmistakable.

Conversations with Hunter S. Thompson is the first compilation of selected personal interviews that traces the trajectory of his prolific and much-publicized career. These engaging exchanges reveal Thompson's determination, self-indulgence, energy, outrageous wit, ire, and passions as he discusses his life and work.

Beef Torrey is the editor of Conversations with Thomas McGuane and co-editor of the forthcoming Jim Harrison: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Kevin Simonson has been published in SPIN, Rolling Stone, Village Voice, and Hustler.

Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her

Melanie Rehak

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Total reviews: 32 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A plucky “titian-haired” sleuth solved her first mystery in 1930. Eighty million books later, Nancy Drew has survived the Depression, World War II, and the sixties (when she was taken up with a vengeance by women’s libbers) to enter the pantheon of American girlhood. As beloved by girls today as she was by their grandmothers, Nancy Drew has both inspired and reflected the changes in her readers’ lives. Here, in a narrative with all the vivid energy and page-turning pace of Nancy’s adventures, Melanie Rehak solves an enduring literary mystery: Who created Nancy Drew? And how did she go from pulp heroine to icon? 

 

The brainchild of children’s book mogul Edward Stratemeyer, Nancy was brought to life by two women: Mildred Wirt Benson, a pioneering journalist from Iowa, and Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, a well-bred wife and mother who took over as CEO after her father died. In this century-spanning story, Rehak traces their roles—and Nancy’s—in forging the modern American woman.

The Other Half: The Life of Jacob Riis and the World of Immigrant America

Tom Buk-Swienty

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Editorial Review:

Social reformer Jacob Riis made it impossible for Americans to look the other way; now this inspiring biography restores his greatness.

Drawing on previously unexamined diaries and letters, The Other Half marvelously re-creates the moving story of Jacob Riis, the legendary Progressive reformer and muckraking photographer. Born in 1849 in rural Denmark, Riis immigrated to America in 1870 following a devastating romantic breakup. Penniless and starving, Riis stumbled into journalism, eventually becoming a charismatic police reporter for the New York Tribune, where he befriended Theodore Roosevelt and witnessed firsthand the appalling tenement conditions of late nineteenth-century New York. His resulting exposé, How the Other Half Lives, was the first major American muckraking book. It brought Americans in touch with their lost humanity, establishing a precedent for Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Jane Addams, and Upton Sinclair. Described by Roosevelt as "the ideal American," Riis died in 1914, mourned by millions, a celebrated hero. Tom Buk-Swienty's long-awaited biography, a superb evocation of the muckraking era, is a compelling work, designed with 55 haunting images from Riis's own photographic oeuvre. 55 illustrations.

Entering Hades: The Double Life of a Serial Killer

John Leake

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Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

"I was a greedy, ravenous individual, determined to rise from the bottom to the top . . . It wasn't me!"--Jack Unterweger's final words to his jury

 

Serial killers rarely travel internationally. So in the early 1990s, when detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department began to find bodies of women strangled with their own bras, it didn’t occur to them at first to make a connection with the bodies being uncovered in the woods outside of Vienna, Austria.

 

The LAPD waited for the killer to strike again. Meanwhile, in Austria, the police followed what few clues they had. The case intrigued many reporters, but few as keenly as Jack Unterweger, a local celebrity. He cut a striking figure, this little man in expensive white suits. His expertise on Vienna’s criminal underworld was hard-earned. He had been sentenced to life in jail as a young man. But while incarcerated, he began to write—and his work earned him the glowing attention of the literary elite. The intelligentsia lobbied for his release and by 1990, Jack was free again. He continued writing, nurturing his career as a journalist. But though he now traveled in the highest circles, he had a secret life. He was killing again, and in the greatest of ironies, reporting on the very crimes he had committed.

 

With unprecedented access to Jack’s diaries and letters, John Leake peels back the layers of deception to reveal the life and crimes of Jack Unterweger, and in unnerving detail, exposes the thrilling twists—both in the United States and Europe—that led to Jack’s capture and Austria’s “trial of the century.”

Playing with Trains: A Passion Beyond Scale

Sam Posey

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Why do grown men play with trains? Is it a primal attachment to childhood, nostalgia for the lost age of rail travel, or the stuff of flat-out obsession? In this delightful and unprecedented book, Grand Prix legend Sam Posey tracks those who share his “passion beyond scale” and discovers a wonderfully strange and vital culture.

Posey’s first layout, wired by his mother in the years just after the Second World War, was, as he writes in his Introduction, “a miniature universe which I could operate on my own. Speed and control: I was fascinated by both, as well as by the way they were inextricably bound together.” Eventually, when Posey’s son was born, he was convinced that building him a basement layout would be the highest expression of fatherhood. Sixteen years and thousands of hours later, this project, “the outgrowth of chance meetings, unexpected friendships, mistakes, illness, latent ambitions, and sheer luck” was completed. But for Posey, the creation of his HO-scale masterpiece based on the historic Colorado Midland, was just the beginning.

In Playing with Trains, Sam Posey ventures well beyond the borders of his layout in northwestern Connecticut, to find out what makes the top modelers tick. He expects to find men “engaged in a genial hobby, happy to spend a few hours a week escaping the pressures of contemporary life.” Instead he uncovers a world of extremes–extreme commitment, extreme passion, and extreme differences of approach. For instance, Malcolm Furlow, holed up on his ranch in the wilderness of New Mexico, insists that model railroading is defined by scenery and artistic self-expression. On the other hand, Tony Koester, a New Jersey modeler, believes his “mission” is to replicate, with fanatical precision and authenticity, the way a real railroad operates. Going to extremes himself, Posey actually “test drives” a real steam engine in Strasburg, Pennsylvania, in an attempt to understand the great machines that inspired the models and connect us to a time when “the railroad was inventing America.” Timeless and original, Playing with Trains reveals a classic, questing American world.


From the Hardcover edition.

An Open Book: Chapters from a Reader's Life

Michael Dirda

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Charming, Erudite Memoir 5 out of 5 stars.
19 of 19 people found this review helpful.

Our book group was fortunate enough to have Michael Dirda attend our discussion of this memoir. He is delightful, witty and steeped in the pleasures of reading, just as his book is. It's the story of an insecure, highly intelligent boy from a family of limited means who engages the world through literature. He is guided by several inspiring teachers, but mostly is self-taught as to what makes good reading and the lessons in life to be gleaned from books. While his keen intelligence sets him apart from his family in many respects, he also lives an ordinary and in some respects idyllic boyhood in Ohio.

As Michael Dirda said of one of the books he recently reviewed for the Washington Post, "you really should read this book."

Editorial Review:

"AN OPEN BOOK is the exuberant, beautifully written story of how comics and adventure stories, poetry and Proust can change your life. Hailed by Morris Dickstein as "a glowing tribute to the world of books and the life of the mind," "An Open Book communicates--as Eudora Welty's "One Writer's Beginnings once did--the thrill of great reading to a new generation. In its pages, literary journalist Michael Dirda re-creates his boyhood in Ohio, recalling his colorful family, friends, and teachers as he celebrates the great writers and fictional characters who fueled his imagination.