Journalists Books - Page 18

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.

Forever Young: My Friendship with John F Kennedy Jr.

William S. Noonan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 43 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Forever Sad 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I bought this book with some trepidation since Billy clearly sold his soul to write it. But, I could not resist. I was always a great admirer of JFK, Jr. - he was such a classy guy - and such an immense force to try to harness for friendship. The book lays out in vivid detail their amazing friendship and the many happy and horrifying times they shared. This book basically makes you a "fly on the wall" witnessing one of the most profound and beautiful friendships ever put to print. I could not put it down - JFK, Jr. and I are exactly the same age and passed through some of life's milestones at the same time. I found myself comparing where I was in my life as the book unfolded. I am writing this review having just now finished the book and feel an overwhelming sense of sadness - I cried so many times - the great highs and thrills always seemed to be overshadowed by the immense burden of sadness, tradgedy, disease and death that surrounds The Kennedys and those close to them. I can only hope that during my life I will share such a stong, loving, and enduring friendship with another person. Maybe John is looking down on us now laughing at all this debate - I find myself missing him during this season of politics. The world should still have John in it - he lived well, richly and fully - never squandering what he had been given. Make sure you are in the right frame of mind to read this - it may impact you more deeply than you can know.

Editorial Review:

An intimate portrait of John F. Kennedy, Jr., from his closest friend with 16 pages of color photos

From the iconic image of a little boy saluting his father’s casket to his tragic death at age thirty- eight, John F. Kennedy, Jr., was never far from the public eye. Now the friend who John was flying to see the night he died reveals the private man behind the public myth. Billy and John shared summers in Hyannisport and formed a bond in the Kennedy compound that lasted well into adulthood. With Forever Young, Noonan offers a unique glimpse into the private life of his boyhood friend—his courtship with Carolyn, his relationship with his mother, Jackie, and his struggle with being the son of a great man he hardly remembered. Affectionate yet candid, Noonan’s deeply personal memoir ultimately emerges as the definitive portrait of the son of Camelot.

Walter Lippmann and the American Century

Ronald Steel

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

absolutely first rate biography and history 5 out of 5 stars.
21 of 21 people found this review helpful.

This is an absolutely wonderful book. Walter Lippman was the first modern journalist of the US: in a time of parochialism, self-congratulatory muckraking, and yellow journalism, he had an internationalist perspective and strove to introduce the American people to new ideas. At the same time, he was deeply interested in the currents of virtually all major political movements in America, and he studied and then participated in them as an opinion maker. What is truly remarkable about the book is the way that Steel recounts the elements of these movements - encapsulates them in brilliant and stimulating descriptions - in paragrpah after paragraph on the development of Lippman's restless and omnivorous mind. He starts with the muckrakers and Lincoln Steffens as well as Wilson's ideas on the League of nations, moved through the implications of Freud for public policy, to the New Deal (and the ideas of Keynes), the Cold War, and his last great battle on the Vietnam War. But as Lippman looks at each of these problems, he also critiques them, probing for their limitations before moving on to the next great movement. The result is an absolutely first-rate intellectual history of about the first 70 years of the 20C, which in my opinion were far more interesting than the remaining 30. With each movement, at least for me, I wanted to learn more, to go back to the sources and other histories and biographies. Finally, there are also fascinating anecdotes of his intereactions with the great politicos of his time, from his dismissal of FDR as a mediocre thinker to a screaming argument at a party with Dean Acheson over the COld War - "it was two titans facing off" - to the bitter obsession that LBJ developed about him in the 1960s.

Of course, Lippman had a charmed career and sprung from an elite background. This made him somewhat insensitive or disinterested in some developments that hurt people, from the Ku Klux Klan to the McCarthy era. Nonetheless, as Steel points out, in his conservatism he also reflected the most popular opinions of his time, which is the reason he was so relevant.

Steel also gives us a portrait of the man, and it is charming and admiring. His father was a slum lord, of whom he was ashamed and Steel speculates that Lippman's life was a search for a better father figure in American politicians. He also had an empty first marriage, which he abandoned when he fell in love with his best friend's wife, renewing his life in middle age and breaking a number of 1950s taboos. THe portrait is quite moving.

This is a truly great book, and I hope that it will be viewed as a classic someday. I learned an immense amount and felt hungry for more, which is my principal criterion for true excellence in writing.

Highest recommendation.

Editorial Review:

The journalist Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) was a magisterial figure who relished his role as an insider, an adviser to presidents, a shaper and sometime purveyor of government policy. Drawing on conversations with Lippmann and exclusive access to his private papers, Ronald Steel documents the broad flow of Lippmann's career from his brilliant Harvard days and his role in helping formulate Wilson's Fourteen Points in World War I to his bitter break with Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam. Written with clarity and objectivity, this definitive biography presents a commanding portrait of a complicated man and "guides its reader through the first three-quarters of this American century" (The New Yorker).

Ruark Remembered: By the Man Who Knew Him Best

Alan Ritchie

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Robert Ruark (1915-1965) ranks, in the minds of most discerning readers, as the finest outdoor writer ever to grace the American literary scene. His is an enduring fame, thanks primarily to three books, The Old Man and the Boy, The Old Man s Boy Grows Older, and an African classic, Horn of the Hunter. Of course, Ruark was also the author of several blockbuster novels, an immensely popular newspaper columnist, a satirist of considerable skill, and a tireless bon vivant. Fame and the ability to crunch out a prodigious amount of first-rate prose on his battered portable typewriter brought him considerable fortune. Now, some two generations after the Ruark s death, Sporting Classics will release a brand new book on the great author. Just recently discovered, the text was written more than forty years ago by Alan Ritchie, who faithfully served as Ruark s personal secretary and advisor for the last fourteen years of his life. The book starts out with a wonderful foreword by legendary African professional hunter Harry Selby who guided Ruark on a number of his safaris. It also features a number of photographs of Ruark that have never before appeared in any book.

A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband, Danny Pearl

Mariane Pearl

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Total reviews: 49 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In A Mighty Heart, an astonishingly courageous woman tells the terrifying and unforgettable story of her husband's life and death. For five weeks the world watched and worried about Danny Pearl, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan. And then came the news of his shocking and brutal murder. Danny's reasons for being in Karachi, the complete story of his abduction, and the intense effort to find him are told here for the first time.

Mariane and Danny Pearl were working in South Asia, as they had been elsewhere in the world, because they believed that good reporting is essential to our understanding of ethnic and religious conflict around the globe. They knew the risks inherent in the life they chose and took conscientious precautions.

The courage of Danny and Mariane is extraordinary, yet we are dependent on brave journalists everywhere to produce news coverage that educates us. There are many mighty hearts in the Pearl story, many brave people who helped Mariane in her search for her abducted husband. This account is riveting, illuminating, and heartbreaking. We learn, through the urgent tracing of Danny's last movements, about the terrorists' methods, ideologies, and ruthless violence. As soon as Pearl was discovered missing, a global effort began to locate him and identify his captors -- a race against the clock that spanned the dangerous fissures of culture and politics and language that separate Islamic terrorists and America.

Only one person can tell this story: Danny Pearl's wife, Mariane, for it was she who initiated and helped direct the urgent search for her husband and she who can paint a moving portrait of a marriage built on the ideals of truth, justice, and love. Intensely suspenseful despite the known outcome, uplifting at the last, A Mighty Heart is essential reading for our time.

Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence

John Hockenberry

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 35 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

What to do when you answer the door and the wolf is there. 5 out of 5 stars.
7 of 7 people found this review helpful.

I want to keep my review short because, if you have not read this book, reading my review will take up some of the time in which you could be reading the real book. When "Moving Violations" was first published, I heard a review of it on NPR. John Hockenberry is an NPR alum so I expected the book to be almost as good as the review led me to believe. I ordered it from Amazon and devoured it in almost no time. It was actually better than the radio review had led me to expect. A month later, I got a call from Seattle that delivered horrific news. My 21-year-old son had been in a contest with gravity and gravity had won. Although he had just had 18 hours of surgery, there was no way to know if he would ever walk again. Through the years since that time, I have read "Moving Violations" many times. It initially gave me entrance to a new world and was much more helpful to both my son and I than all the rehab publications combined. I knew, from the moment I answered that phone call that both my son and I had crossed into the Twilight Zone and nothing would ever be the same again. The Twilight Zone, however, had at least one map. My son's journey was, and continues to be, unique (as all such journeys are). I did feel, from the very beginning, that we had a preview of some of the directional signposts and even some of the scenic overlooks. I cannot help but think that our family has been living and learning about this new life in a richer way than would never have been possible if we had not read this book. As soon as my son came home from rehab it became clear that he had lost his will to live. I had a captive audience and started reading "M V" aloud. It is well written and mirrors many of the dilemmas in the life of a young male with spinal cord damage. I think it only took two days for my son to get interested enough that he started reading it himself. This book was truly one of the first things that helped him recover his will to live. Living with a catastrophic spinal cord injury is not even at the bottom of the list of interesting travel sites, and while I cannot believe that anyone would take that path voluntarily, "M V" is proof that, along with the horror, there can be adventure and possibilities in life; possibilities that could be so easily missed. So...READ IT! While spinal cord injury may never be a part of your personal life, sooner or later something awful could be. As the Eagles remind us, "The wolf is always at the door." In whatever guise the wolf presents itself, you will have learned something useful about what to do when or if the wolf appears.

Editorial Review:

A journalist for National Public Radio and ABC News recounts the challenges he has faced as a paraplegic at home and abroad, from the dangers of war-torn Iraq and Jerusalem to discrimination at home. Reprint.

Too Soon to Say Goodbye

Art Buchwald

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 32 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

When doctors told Art Buchwald that his kidneys were kaput, the renowned humorist declined dialysis and checked into a Washington, D.C., hospice to live out his final days. Months later, “The Man Who Wouldn’t Die” was still there, feeling good, holding court in a nonstop “salon” for his family and dozens of famous friends, and confronting things you usually don’t talk about before you die; he even jokes about them.
Here Buchwald shares not only his remarkable experience–as dozens of old pals from Ethel Kennedy to John Glenn to the Queen of Swaziland join the party–but also his whole wonderful life: his first love, an early brush with death in a foxhole on Eniwetok Atoll, his fourteen champagne years in Paris, fame as a columnist syndicated in hundreds of newspapers, and his incarnation as hospice superstar. Buchwald also shares his sorrows: coping with an absent mother, childhood in a foster home, and separation from his wife, Ann.
He plans his funeral (with a priest, a rabbi, and Billy Graham, to cover all the bases) and strategizes how to land a big obituary in The New York Times (“Make sure no head of state or Nobel Prize winner dies on the same day”). He describes how he and a few of his famous friends finagled cut-rate burial plots on Martha’s Vineyard and how he acquired a Picasso drawing without really trying.

What we have here is a national treasure, the complete Buchwald, uncertain of where the next days or weeks may take him but unfazed by the inevitable, living life to the fullest, with frankness, dignity, and humor.

“[Art Buchwald] has given his friends, their families, and his audiences so many laughs and so much joy through the years that that alone would be an enduring legacy. But Art has never been just about the quick laugh. His humor is a road map to essential truths and insights that might otherwise have eluded us.”
–Tom Brokaw

Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her

Melanie Rehak

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Total reviews: 33 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.

Naked in Baghdad: The Iraq War and the Aftermath as Seen by NPR's Correspondent Anne Garrels

Anne Garrels

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

Amazing chance to learn the story behind that voice on the radio 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

As a listener to NPR, I feel so much closer to Garrels after learning the backstory behind her reports from the trenches of Iraq. She has extreme skill and intuition at conducting herself in a foreign country, at making people willing to talk, at befriending the right people.

I learned a lot about how much the Iraqi government practiced supression in the old regime. People were terrified for their lives if they talked to foreign reporters, and Garrels had to pay many bribes to get press credentials. When leaving Iraq, corrupt officials invent tests and fees for Garrels and her assistant to pay. Her stories humanized the Iraqi conflict for me--I met both crooks and good guys through Garrels.

Garrels has a great storytelling style. She'll tell an anecdote and then end with a biting one line zinger. She's as taltened on paper as she is on the air, and I'll be watching for more from this amazing woman.

Editorial Review:

As National Public Radio’s much loved and respected senior foreign correspondent Anne Garrels has covered conflicts in Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. In Naked in Baghdad she reveals how as one of only sixteen non-embedded journalists who stayed in the now legendary Palestine Hotel throughout the American invasion she managed to deliver the most immediate, insightful and independent reports with unparalleled vividness and immediacy. Her evolving relationship with her Iraqi driver/minder Amer, and the wonderful e-mail bulletins sent to friends by her husband, Vint Lawrence, counterpoint the daily events of her life in Baghdad, and result in a deeply moving, and intimate portrait by one of bravest and most enlightening news reporters.

The Sound of No Hands Clapping: A Memoir

Toby Young

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Getting In and Out of the Hollywood Business 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

We learn in this witty self-deprecating memoir that it is vulgar and uncool to say "the Industry" when referring to Hollywood films; we must say "the Business." This is one of many funny lessons Toby Young learns when, minding his own business in London, he gets a strange call from a mysterious unnamed Hollywood producer who, having read Toby Young's first book How To Lose Friends And Alienate People, wants Young to write a screenplay about an obscure entertainment figure. Enticed at the prospect of making millions in Hollywood, Young disgruntles his new wife with his chimera quest. The book alternates between Young's Hollywood fiascos and his marital tumult, including the birth of of his first child. The most priceless moments are his correspondences with his friend, the Hollywood writer Rob Young, who teaches him, among other things, how to take a Business Lunch and the "vast repertoire of hand gestures" needed for equals, higher ups, and super bigwigs. These funny moments are part of Young's growing-up process as he becomes disenchanted with the Hollywood Beast. This has the same self-deprecating humor as his first book. For another memoir of disenchantment, check out The Working Stiff's Manifesto by Iaian Levison.

Editorial Review:

With a major motion picture of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People about to be released (starring Simon Pegg, Kirsten Dunst, and Jeff Bridges), there has never been a better time to savor this laugh-out-loud memoir from everyone’s favorite “professional failurist.” The Sound of No Hands Clapping finds Toby pursuing a glamorous career in Hollywood while trying to balance his new life as a husband and parent. Failure-and fatherhood-have never been funnier.