Journalists Books - Page 21

The Exact Same Moon: Fifty Acres and a Family

Jeanne Marie Laskas

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Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In Fifty Acres and a Poodle, Jeanne Marie Laskas described how she survived her first hilariously tumultuous year at Sweetwater Farm. Now she returns with a funny, touching, and personal new memoir of what happens after your dream comes true...

With a picture-postcard farm, a wonderful marriage, two mules, and a new refrigerator that spits crushed ice, what more can a girl ask for? That’s precisely the question Jeanne Marie asks herself as she and Alex settle into their new life at Sweetwater Farm. Two years ago they left the city behind for a life filled with the practical, often comical, lessons of living close to the land—and they never looked back. Yet when her strong-willed mom is hospitalized with a sudden and mysterious paralysis, Jeanne Marie rushes home to Philadelphia and her extended, sometimes chaotic, but always loving family. It’s there that she realizes what is still missing from her life: a family of her own. Now it’s a matter of bringing up the subject to her husband, Alex, fifteen years older and with adult children of his own, who seems terrified that she’s thinking of adopting a Chihuahua.

With warmth, wisdom, and unfailing humor, Laskas tells the poignant story of her search for motherhood—and what happens when a woman risks happily-ever-after for something even more precious. As she tends to her own ailing mother, Jeanne Marie discovers that the challenges and rewards of living with Mother Nature pale in comparison to those awakened by the nature of mothering.

The Exact Same Moon is filled with hilarious and heartwarming vignettes of people and a way of life you’ll be glad you met. From "borrowing" sheep to help mow the lawn and sitting in on the racy hay jokes at the Agway Equine Clinic, to befriending the notorious old lady who holds the water rights to their future pond, corrupting the neighbors with satellite TV, and learning the fine art of going a-calling, Laskas proves once again that laughter, love, and wisdom are truly homegrown.

Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Reporter and Vietnamese Communist Agent

Larry Berman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

You Cannot Have it Both Ways 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

I might not be as forgiving as some people, but I certainly would have felt betrayed by this man. He seeks to justify everything by stating that he felt the Americans did not belong in Vietnam. Maybe so. But what he did was so deceiful.To just look at the fact that he often helped those closest and known to him from suffering any harm, neglects the hundreds of thousands who died and were wounded as a result of his actions. To top it all off he sent his family to the US when the Communists came !! No doubt for a better life !!This fellow must have been of fairly limited intellect , or at least uneducated.And don't tell me was educated in the US - they let him do some courses... big deal! Did he really believe the Americans would attempt to rule Vietnam the way the French did ? Yes, they would take advantage of economic opportunities ( who does'nt), but what did he think they would have done if the South succeeded ? A good insight into blind nationalism and deceit by one of the most two faced people I have ever encountered. I still cannot understand his mindset.

Editorial Review:

During the Vietnam War, Time reporter Pham Xuan An befriended everyone who was anyone in Saigon, including American journalists such as David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, the CIA's William Colby, and the legendary Colonel Edward Lansdale—not to mention the most influential members of the South Vietnamese government and army. None of them ever guessed that he was also providing strategic intelligence to Hanoi, smuggling invisible ink messages into the jungle inside egg rolls. His early reports were so accurate that General Giap joked, "We are now in the U.S. war room."

In Perfect Spy, Larry Berman, who An considered his official American biographer, chronicles the extraordinary life of one of the twentieth century's most fascinating spies.

H.L. Mencken on Religion

H. L. Mencken

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

No one ever argued more forcefully or with such acerbic wit against the foolish aspects of religion as H.L. Mencken. As a journalist, he gained national prominence through his newspaper columns describing the famous 1925 Scopes trial, which pitted religious fundamentalists against a public school teacher who dared to teach evolution. But both before and after the Scopes trial, Mencken spent much of his career as a columnist and book reviewer lampooning the ignorant piety of gullible Americans.

S.T. Joshi has brought together and organized many of Mencken's writings on religion in this provocative and entertaining collection. The articles presented here include satirical accounts of a range of the religious phenomena of his time. On a more serious note are his discussions of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and the scientific worldview as a rival to religious belief. Also included are poignant autobiographical accounts of Mencken's own upbringing and his core beliefs on religion, ethics, and politics.

H.L. Mencken knew that satire, wit, and clever jesting were the most effective ways to battle religious folly, and he used these weapons to their fullest extent in writings spanning almost three decades.

Unlikely Destinations: The Lonely Planet Story

Tony Wheeler; Maureen Wheeler

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Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Founders of the phenomenally successful publishing company Lonely Planet, Tony and Maureen Wheeler have produced travel guides to just about every corner of the globe.

Lonely Planet Publications was born in 1973 when the Wheelers self-published a quirky travel guide, Across Asia on the Cheap. This was quickly followed by what soon became the backpackers bible, South-East Asia on a Shoestring. Going boldly where no other travel publisher had ventured, they catered to a new generation of independent, budget-conscious travelers long before the advent of mass tourism.

The Lonely Planet Story is a unique mix of autobiography, business history and travel book. It traces Tony and Maureen Wheeler s personal story as well as the often bumpy evolution of their travel guide business into the world s largest independent travel publishing company.

Not surprisingly, after thirty years in the business the Wheelers have an unrivalled set of anecdotes which they share in The Lonely Planet Story. They have been hassled by customs, cheated by accountants, let down by writers, banned in Malawi, berated for their Burma guide and had books pirated in Vietnam. Tony has been gored by a cow in Benares, declared dead around the world in an assortment of gruesome and greatly exaggerated accounts and their company has been accused of the Lonely Planetization of the world.

Through it all, from the heady days of discovery in the 70s to the rocky patch after the September 11th terrorist attacks, the Wheelers passion for the planet and traveling certainly hasn t diminished, and comes shining through in this enthralling travelogue. But above all, their memoir reveals the spirit of adventure that has made them, according to the New York Daily News, the specialists in guiding weird folks to weird places.

A Strong West Wind: A Memoir

Gail Caldwell

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Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In this exquisitely rendered memoir set on the high plains of Texas, Pulitzer Prize winner Gail Caldwell transforms into art what it is like to come of age in a particular time and place. A Strong West Wind begins in the 1950s in the wilds of the Texas Panhandle–a place of both boredom and beauty, its flat horizons broken only by oil derricks, grain elevators, and church steeples. Its story belongs to a girl who grew up surrounded by dust storms and cattle ranches and summer lightning, who took refuge from the vastness of the land and the ever-present wind by retreating into books. What she found there, from renegade women to men who lit out for the territory, turned out to offer a blueprint for her own future. Caldwell would grow up to become a writer, but first she would have to fall in love with a man who was every mother’s nightmare, live through the anguish and fire of the Vietnam years, and defy the father she adored, who had served as a master sergeant in the Second World War.
A Strong West Wind is a memoir of culture and history–of fathers and daughters, of two world wars and the passionate rebellions of the sixties. But it is also about the mythology of place and the evolution of a sensibility: about how literature can shape and even anticipate a life.
Caldwell possesses the extraordinary ability to illuminate the desires, stories, and lives of ordinary people. Written with humanity, urgency, and beautiful restraint, A Strong West Wind is a magical and unforgettable book, destined to become an American classic.


From the Hardcover edition.

I Have Fun Everywhere I Go: Savage Tales of Pot, Porn, Punk Rock, Pro Wrestling, Talking Apes, Evil Bosses, Dirty Blues, American Heroes, and the Most Notorious Magazines in the World

Mike Edison

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

I Have Fun Everywhere I Go is a rollicking, high-octane, always irreverent journey through the seamy side of the publishing industry. Mike Edison’s résumé spans twenty years and a slew of notorious titles, including Screw, High Times, Penthouse, and Hustler. An Ivy League dropout who’s never looked back, Edison embarked on a career that’s landed him in the producer’s chair for one of the worst B movies of all time; on tour with the likes of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, GG Allin, and the Ramones; undercover at a religious cult; on a bender with Evel Knievel; feuding with Hulk Hogan; smoking dope with Ozzy Osborne; and authoring some twenty novels you wouldn’t want your mother to catch you reading—let alone writing. As the publisher of High Times, he battled almost daily with a rainbow brigade of unrepentant hippies plagued with short-term memory loss, and owners who treated their employees more like the tenants of a halfway house for potheads than a team of professional editors and writers, all while leading the magazine to record heights in sales and advertising.

I Have Fun Everywhere I Go combines the fear and loathing of Hunter Thompson’s journalistic thrill rides with the acerbic insider voice of Toby Young. It’s an eye-opening, gleeful view of life on the edge—and the outlaws and oddballs encountered there.

My Name Is Iran: A Memoir

Davar Ardalan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Vanity Book 3 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

This book is poorly edited, and not very effective. The author's story is not that fantastic that it can stand on it's own, and as a producer for NPR, she's just not that interesting. She spends so much time tip toeing around anything that might cast her family in a bad light, that the book feels half baked.
Yes, she went back and forth from Iran a couple of times and had a couple of bad marriages, but so what? She should have written the book about any single one of her ancestors, each of which had a more interesting life than she did.

Editorial Review:

“Ardalan’s testimony to the feminist spirit of the pioneering women in her family, and in the face of centuries-long strictures against the advancement of women, is a supreme achievement.”—Publishers Weekly Drawing on her remarkable personal history, Davar Ardalan brings us the lives of three generations of women and their ordeals with love, rejection, and revolution. Ardalan’s Iranian American parents, who barely spoke Farsi, moved from San Francisco to rural Iran in 1964. After her parents’ divorce, Ardalan briefly joined her father in Brookline, Massachusetts, then, however improbably, decided to move back to an Islamic Iran. When she arrived, she discovered a world she hardly recognized, and one which demanded a near-complete renunciation of the freedoms she experienced in the West. In time, she and her young family make the opposite migration and discover the difficulties, however paradoxical, inherent in living a free life in America.

Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales from a Bad Neighborhood

Hollis Gillespie

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Total reviews: 36 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Drawing on her peripatetic childhood as the daughter of a travelling salesman, and her adult residence in one of Atlanta's seedier crack neighbourhoods, columnist and NPR commentator Hollis Gillespie has assembled a comic, poignant memoir about her life, starring her unusual family and her crazy friends.

NPR commentator Hollis Gillespie's outrageously funny–and equally heartbreaking–collection of autobiographical tales chronicles her journey through self–reckoning and the worst neighbourhoods in Atlanta in search of a home she can call her own. The daughter of a missile scientist and an alcoholic travelling trailer salesman, Gillespie was nine before she realized not everybody's mother made bombs, and thirty before she realized it was possible to live in one place longer than a six–month lease allows. Supporting her are the social outcasts she calls her best friends: Daniel, a talented and eccentric artist; Grant, who makes his living peddling folk art by a denounced nun who paints plywood signs with twisted evangelical sayings; and Lary, who often, out of compassion, offers to shoot her like a lame horse.

Hollis's friends help her battle the mess of obstacles that stand in her way–including her warped childhood, in which her parents moved her and her siblings around the country like carnival barkers, chasing missile–building contracts and other whimsies, such as her father's dream to patent and sell door–to–door the world's most wondrous key–chain. A past like this will make you doubt you'll ever have a future, much less roots. Miraculously, though, Gillespie manages to plant exactly that: roots, as wrested and dubious as they are.

As Gillespie says, "Life is too damn short to remain trapped in your own Alcatraz." Follow her on this wickedly funny journey as she manages to escape again and again.

Somewhere Towards the End: A Memoir

Diana Athill

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Editorial Review:

An esteemed memoirist examines aging with the grace of Elegy for Iris and the wry irreverence of I Feel Bad About My Neck.

Diana Athill is one of the great editors in British publishing. For more than five decades she edited the likes of V. S. Naipaul and Jean Rhys, for whom she was a confidante and caretaker. As a writer, Diana Athill has made her reputation for the frankness and precisely expressed wisdom of her memoirs. Now in her ninety-first year, "entirely untamed about both old and new conventions" (Literary Review) and freed from any of the inhibitions that even she may have once had, Athill reflects candidly, and sometimes with great humor, on the condition of being old—the losses and occasionally the gains that age brings, the wisdom and fortitude required to face death. Distinguished by "remarkable intelligence...[and the] easy elegance of her prose" (Daily Telegraph), this short, well-crafted book, hailed as "a virtuoso exercise" (Sunday Telegraph) presents an inspiring work for those hoping to flourish in their later years.

A Hundred and One Days: A Baghdad Journal

Asne Seierstad

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Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

From the best-selling author of The Bookseller of Kabul, an intimate look at the daily lives of women, children, and other noncombatants under siege in Baghdad

For one hundred and one days Asne Seierstad worked as a reporter in Baghdad. Always in search of a story far less obvious than the American military invasion, Seierstad brings to life the world behind the headlines in this compelling--and heartbreaking--account of her time among the people of Iraq. From the moment she first arrived in Baghdad on a ten-day visa, she was determined to unearth the modern secrets of an ancient place and to find out how the Iraqi people really live.

What do people miss most when their world changes overnight? What do they choose to say when they can suddenly say what they like? Seierstad reveals what life is like for everyday people under the constant threat of attack- first from the Iraqi government and later from American bombs. Displaying the novelist's eye and lyrical storytelling that have won her awards around the world, Seierstad here brings to life an unforgettable cast of characters, from foreign press apparatchik Uday, to Zahra, a mother of three, to Aliya, the guide and translator who becomes a friend. Putting their trust in a European woman with no obvious agenda, these and other Iraqis speak for themselves, to tell the stories we never see on the evening news.