Journalists Books - Page 6

How To Lose Friends And Alienate People: A Memoir

Toby Young

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 90 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Brilliantly hilarious but sometimes annoyingly bitter. 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

OK - I really enjoyed this book. At its best Toby Young's "How to Lose Friends & Alienate People" is utterly laugh out loud funny. I honestly can't remember a book where I have literally cracked up so many times. (Colbert's book made me laugh too - but not this kind of out loud public sniggering on the train that made others notice me in an embarrassing way). The best bits are when he takes on (and names names) the peacock culture of the big Conde Nast culture mags and their ab fab brass and human adornments. He's also justifiably famous for his celebrity party antics (which specialize in gate crashing and then being ejected by bouncers). Time and again he blithely justifies himself stepping way out over the line and getting himself into classic scrapes - lapses of taste and judgment - and humiliating jams of a dizzying variety. An incredibly high percentage of these episodes are just "rilly rilly" funny (I'm an American and that's how I say it - in alliterative Toby lit). His evolving envious relationships with Alex De Silva and Graydon Carter are recurrent themes in the narrative; as well as his literary, social, and sexual ambitions. His madcap ways, clever use of recurrent themes, and deft comic timing are a big part of the comic goodness. The fact that Toby's a great writer doesn't hurt either.

This comic achievement makes me more tolerant of the parts that weren't so good... Like the parts where Toby's sour grapes about not getting laid makes him expound pedantically on the shallowness of the New York glitterati maidens he chooses to pursue. I mean - who's really being shallow here? Then there's his plunge into full blown alcoholism... There are comic moments but much of it is actually genuinely tragic. In the latter chapters when Mr. Young gets introspective about his self-destructive streak he redeems himself somewhat by showing us some self awareness and getting a handle on both his alcoholism and his romantic shallowness - but it's a bit too little too late. It's not that Toby's bad boy antics are too risque. It's that his bitterness and sour grapes over his lack of temporal and carnal success colors his philosophical ramblings - giving them an aspect of priggish self indulgence that is ... well ... alienating. You'll see lots of negative reviews of people who just hate him for it and it's easy to see where they're coming from.

Will you love or hate this book? That depends on how interested you are in the NYC literati glitterati world and how much fun you'll have seeing a drunken party boy lurch about in it breaking all the rules and stepping on all the toes. Personally - my life shares too many details in common for me not to love this book. But it is not an unconditional love. I can't help feeling that Mr. Young is just too self involved and immature to use as much philosophy as he does. Maybe that's just my American patriotism talking (he's skewering American culture when he's doing this) - but that's how I feel. Thus the 4 stars. Reading over what I just wrote it sounds pretty negative - so why do I only dock it one star? Toby is a comic genius. That's pretty rare. This book might not be entertainment perfection but it's a wild ride, a trip down the rabbit hole, a view into a fully realized world, and - in the end - a real hoot.

Editorial Review:

In 1995 high-flying British journalist Toby Young left London for New York to become a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Other Brits had taken Manhattan--Alistair Cooke, Tina Brown, Anna Wintour--so why couldn't he?But things didn't quite go according to plan. Within the space of two years he was fired from Vanity Fair, banned from the most fashionable bar in the city, and couldn't get a date for love or money. Even the local AA group wanted nothing to do with him.How to Lose Friends and Alienate People is Toby Young's hilarious and best-selling account of the five years he spent looking for love in all the wrong places and steadily working his way down the New York food chain, from glossy magazine editor to crash-test dummy for interactive sex toys. A seditious attack on the culture of celebrity from inside the belly of the beast, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People is also a "nastily funny read." --USA Today

Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson

Corey Seymour, Jann S. Wenner

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 31 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Few American lives are stranger, more action-packed, or wilder than that of Hunter S. Thompson. Born a rebel in Louisville, Kentucky, Thompson spent a lifetime channeling his energy and insight into such landmark works as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - and his singular and provocative style challenged and revolutionized writing.
Now, for the first time ever, Jann Wenner and Corey Seymour have interviewed the Good Doctor's friends, family, acquaintances and colleagues and woven their memories into a brilliant oral biography. From Hell's Angels leader Sonny Barger to Ralph Steadman to Jack Nicholson to Jimmy Buffett to Pat Buchanan to Marilyn Manson and Thompson's two wives, son, and longtime personal assistant, more than 100 members of Thompson's inner circle bring into vivid focus the life of a man who was even more complicated, tormented, and talented than any previous portrait has shown. It's all here in its uncensored glory: the creative frenzies, the love affairs, the drugs and booze and guns and explosives and, ultimately, the tragic suicide. As Thompson was fond of saying, "Buy the ticket, take the ride."

Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching

Paula J. Giddings

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

Editorial Review:

In the tradition of towering biographies that tell us as much about America as they do about their subject, Ida: A Sword Among Lions is a sweeping narrative about a country and a crusader embroiled in the struggle against lynching: a practice that imperiled not only the lives of black men and women, but also a nation based on law and riven by race.

At the center of the national drama is Ida B. Wells (1862-1931), born to slaves in Mississippi, who began her activist career by refusing to leave a first-class ladies' car on a Memphis railway and rose to lead the nation's first campaign against lynching. For Wells the key to the rise in violence was embedded in attitudes not only about black men but about women and sexuality as well. Her independent perspective and percussive personality gained her encomiums as a hero -- as well as aspersions on her character and threats of death. Exiled from the South by 1892, Wells subsequently took her campaign across the country and throughout the British Isles before she married and settled in Chicago, where she continued her activism as a journalist, suffragist, and independent candidate in the rough-and-tumble world of the Windy City's politics.

In this eagerly awaited biography by Paula J. Giddings, author of the groundbreaking book When and Where I Enter, which traced the activist history of black women in America, the irrepressible personality of Ida B. Wells surges out of the pages. With meticulous research and vivid rendering of her subject, Giddings also provides compelling portraits of twentieth-century progressive luminaries, black and white, with whom Wells worked during some of the most tumultuous periods in American history. Embattled all of her activist life, Wells found herself fighting not only conservative adversaries but icons of the civil rights and women's suffrage movements who sought to undermine her place in history.

In this definitive biography, which places Ida B. Wells firmly in the context of her times as well as ours, Giddings at long last gives this visionary reformer her due and, in the process, sheds light on an aspect of our history that is often left in the shadows.

Are You Somebody?: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman

Nuala O'Faolain

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 81 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Self-preservation did not come instinctually to Irish journalist Nuala O'Faolain. One of 9 children--her mother had 13 pregnancies in all--she grew up in the 1940s and '50s in a defeated Dublin household. Her reporter father seems to have spent his time and money, and even love, elsewhere--and as the family grew more isolated and unable to cope, alcohol became her mother's only way out. "One of the stories of my life has been the working out in it of her powerful and damaging example in everything," the author admits, "Nothing mattered to her except passion." Some of O'Faolain's siblings emphatically didn't make it, but she was lucky to find refuge in books. They have been a defense, a comfort, and a delight.

Does her memoir then follow the standard rags-to-self-acceptance trajectory? Are you wondering if perhaps you can give it a miss, and in fact send the entire genre on a well-deserved vacation? Don't. Are You Somebody (the title unaccountably lost a question mark somewhere between the Irish and American editions) offers a wrenching account of childhood and a highly provocative take on the sexual and professional situation of Irish women. Though literature made O'Faolain, the male-dominated literary life and industry certainly didn't, and she now gives it more than a few body blows. It was a world in which writing and drink mattered far more than women: "The 'literary Dublin' I saw lied to women as a matter of course and conspired against the demands of wives and mistresses.... Women either had to make no demands, and be liked, or be much larger than life, and feared."

Irish women didn't seem to know to look for, let alone demand, equality. O'Faolain miraculously avoided pregnancy; but others were not so blessed. "Lives were ruined at that time, thousands and thousands of them, quite casually.... They were hotly pursued, and half longed to yield, but they were not able to defend themselves against pregnancy, and they were destroyed if they got pregnant." For all her energy and ambition and good fortune (and she needed this trio to jump her family's "sinking ship" and avoid getting pregnant), O'Faolain fell for the cant that she must marry, have children, and serve. Some will be initially shocked by her assertion that she was lucky never to have had a child. "Childbearing, along with bad education, relationships that managed to be simultaneously all-absorbing and rewarding, and financial dependence--these were the enemies of promise. But that's not why I'm glad; I didn't think of myself as having promise. I'm glad because under the old system it was so easy to rear children badly. The child wouldn't have properly survived." Yet the '70s enabled her to break out of the assumptions and realities of Irish women's lives, not to mention her yearning to be like "the troubled, rich, English upper-class people in books."

At the end of her memoir, O'Faolain knows she finally is, in fact, somebody. Still, those who don't recognize her see her only as a single, middle-aged woman. Like children, such individuals "aren't supposed to kick up." Thanks to this bracing book, the author gets to permanently do so. The writing exercise has answered some of her questions and some of her fears, but O'Faolain is too honest not to admit that for others there is no response or cure. She leaves us wanting to know more about her life but grateful that she has allowed us in.

Mississippi Sissy

Kevin Sessums

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 47 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A Memoir from a Child's Stance with the Vocabulary of a Poet 5 out of 5 stars.
205 of 211 people found this review helpful.

MISSISSIPPI SISSY by Kevin Sessums has been a successful best seller since the journalist entered the realm of novelist in 2007. The reason for the extended readership of this coming of age story of a gay male in the 1970s South may puzzle some, but read a few chapters and the reason is clear: this is hilarious, sensitive, perceptive, colloquial writing at its best with the added attribute that Sessums' writing style is as eloquent as those writers he admired as a child - EM Forster, Flannery 'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, WH Auden, Toni Morrison, and Eudora Welty.

Sessums writes with candor about the racism he witnessed in the 1960s and 1970s, but his viewpoint is equally distributed between the gnarly vindictive vantage of his father and other white adults and the gentle love he worshiped in his closeness to his African American caretakers and colleagues. Orphaned at age 8 with his father's death in an automobile accident and his mother's subsequent death from cancer, Sessums was allowed more leeway with his propensity to dress and act like a 'sissy' and eventually came into his own sexuality both by exposure to a Pedophilic evangelist and his own exploration of gay bars and satisfying encounters with surprising partners (his first real love was a champion athlete who just happened to be African American!).

And while every page of this beautifully rendered memoir is full of elegant prose describing such issues as Southerner response to civil rights, the murder of JFK and MLK, Jr., participation in the lives of famous writers by way of his close friend Frank Hains, a journalist who molded Sessums in many ways, the author shares many of the idols of television ('What's My Line?' cast) and movies (Audrey Hepburn, etc) and other icons of the times of his maturing, giving the reader a memory book that goes far beyond simply a true personal memoir. Love, death, abuse, disease, racism, and dreams for a life of understanding blend on nearly every page. This is a book that is likely to become a classic and deserves all the weeks it spent on the national Best Seller Lists. It is just 'swell'! Grady Harp, August 08

Editorial Review:

Mississippi Sissy is the stunning memoir from Kevin Sessums, a celebrity journalist who grew up scaring other children, hiding terrible secrets, pretending to be Arlene Frances and running wild in the South. As he grew up in Forest, Mississippi, befriended by the family maid, Mattie May, he became a young man who turned the word "sissy" on its head, just as his mother taught him. In Jackson, he is befriended by Eudora Welty and journalist Frank Hains, but when Hains is brutally murdered in his antebellum mansion, Kevin's long road north towards celebrity begins. In a memoir that echoes bestsellers like The Liar's Club, Kevin Sessums brings to life the pungent American south of the 1960s and the world of the strange little boy who grew there.

Canoeing with the Cree

Eric Sevareid

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

And, They Said It Couldn't Be Done 4 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.

"Eric Sevareid made his name as a CBS news correspondent. But at a young age, Sevareid experienced an adventure most only dream of. Sevareid detailed the journey in his book "Canoeing with the Cree". Now to mark the 75th anniversary of Sevareid's journey, two Minnesota men plan to make the same trip." Tim Post

In 1930 two young men paddled their way from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay in Canada. A trip of 2200 miles. Everyone told them it could not be done. Eric Sevareid, then a 17 year old, fresh graduate of high school, and his best buddy, Walter Port, planned the entire trip. They garnered financial support, collected supplies and a canoe and paddles and off they went. Five months later after trials and tribulations, they made it to Hudson Bay. Their journey is documented by Eric Sevareid, who gathered the weekly diaries he sent to their local Minneapolis paper, and in 1935, he wrote this book.

I stepped back in time to the 1930's when life seemed to be more innocent and the world a safer place to be. Sevareid who went on to become one of the most revered journalists of our time, wrote in an unpretentious manner, and we can feel the excitement of their adventures. They traversed unknown land and water. No one, it seems, had ever accomplished this trek. Even the best canoeists in the country failed. How then, did these two young lads accomplish this journey? Intelligence and good luck, I'd say. They questioned everyone they met, took upon themselves to digest all of the information and made decisions based on their best judgement. And, most of the time they were correct. They had no radio, no maps( this was uncharted country), little preserved food except for hardtack, but they had their ingenuity and the assistance of all of the people they met.

The North Country was mostly woods. Camps, small towns and two larger towns had been established for hunting and trapping. Most of the humans they met were Indians who were kind and generous. As a matter of fact, most of the people they met were in awe of their journey and shared whatever food, equipment and conversation they were capable. The trip was amazing when we look at the obstacles they faced. Water, roaring cold water, sometimes rapids, sometimes falls, no maps, only the word of mouth of strangers, and cold brutal weather at times. Or hot humid weather with flies and gnats. They discovered all sorts of wild animals but were never in real danger. They had their tent, two paddles, food, water, ponchos and several blankets. This seems like a story of new adventurers discovering a new world, and in fact this is what they were. Two 17 year old lads set out on an adventure and one day after another they found one. Extraordinary when you think about it.

Since the time of Eric and Walter, several other duos have made the trip by canoe. However, they had maps, food that could be kept for months and the best of camping equipment. This is not to lessen these young men's courage, but to think 78 years ago, this was accomplished with such primitive arrangments and care.

This was an exciting read and one page after another flew by. The book was difficult to put down. Easy, simplistic writing. but some of the most important writing I have found. The boys parents and friends did not hear from them often and at times, I am sure the parents were worried. But the two lads persevered and the trip was taken.

Highly Recommended. prisrob 06-26-08

Not So Wild a Dream

The Eleanor Roosevelt Story

Editorial Review:

In 1930 two novice paddlers--Eric Sevareid and Walter C. Port--launched a secondhand 18-foot canvas canoe into the Minnesota River at Fort Snelling for an ambitious summer-long journey from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay. Without benefit of radio, motor, or good maps, the teenagers made their way over 2,250 miles of rivers, lakes, and difficult portages. Nearly four months later, after shooting hundreds of sets of rapids and surviving exceedingly bad conditions and even worse advice, the ragged, hungry adventurers arrived in York Factory on Hudson Bay--with winter freeze-up on their heels. First published in 1935, Canoeing with the Cree is Sevareid's classic account of this youthful odyssey. The newspaper stories that Sevareid wrote on this trip launched his distinguished journalism career, which included more than a decade as a television correspondent and commentator on the CBS Evening News. Now with a new foreword by Arctic explorer, Ann Bancroft.

The Ride of Our Lives

Mike Leonard

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 39 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Ride of Our Lives is the humorous yet deeply moving account of NBC journalist Mike Leonard’s cross-country odyssey with his eccentric parents, three grown children, and a daughter-in-law. Full of ups and downs, laughs and tears, the month-long journey becomes a much larger tale of hope, persistence, and valuable lessons learned along the way. A celebration of the ties between parents and children, as well as the unforgettable community of people one can meet across America, The Ride of Our Lives is an inspiring narrative of self-discovery and self-fulfillment–and how one unique family found blessings and simple pleasures on the road called life.

“Touching, hilarious . . . should be required reading in every family.”
–Tom Brokaw

“Poignant moments of questions and discovery, of truth-telling and memories.”
–The Charlotte Observer

“Often laugh-out-loud funny and sometimes heartbreakingly sad.”
–St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Delightful.”
–Chicago Tribune

“Heartfelt and whimsical . . . a cross-country trek through life’s lessons . . . Mike Leonard is a storyteller at heart, and each anecdote . . . punctuates the family’s love, struggles, and triumphs. In short, this is one ride worth taking.”
–Rocky Mountain News

Kill the Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb

Nick Schou

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Kill the Messenger tells the story of the tragic death of Gary Webb, the controversial newspaper reporter who committed suicide in December 2004. Webb is the former San Jose Mercury News reporter whose 1996 "Dark Alliance" series on the so-called CIA-crack cocaine connection created a firestorm of controversy and led to his resignation from the paper amid escalating attacks on his work by the mainstream media. Author and investigative journalist Nick Schou published numerous articles on the controversy and was the only reporter to significantly advance Webb's stories. Drawing on exhaustive research and highly personal interviews with Webb's family, colleagues, supporters and critics, this book argues convincingly that Webb's editors betrayed him, despite mounting evidence that his stories were correct. Kill the Messenger examines the "Dark Alliance" controversy, what it says about the current state of journalism in America, and how it led Webb to ultimately take his own life. Webb's widow, Susan Bell, remains an ardent defender of her ex-husband. By combining her story with a probing examination of the one of the most important media scandals in recent memory, this book provides a gripping view of one of the greatest tragedies in the annals of investigative journalism.

Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora

Andrew Lam

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

STRIKINGLY HONEST AND TRUE 5 out of 5 stars.
17 of 18 people found this review helpful.

As I read this collection of essays, I almost felt as if it were my own memoir. Lam's feelings of growing up in two different cultures struck a cord in me and made me realize that someone else out there felt the same way I did growing up in America.

This is an important piece of literature because it truly captures the sentiment of the Vietnamese-American torn between two cultures, betweeen the contemporary and the traditional, between two separate generations, between war and peace.

For anyone who grew up feeling not really accepted by either your heritage culture or the current one, this is the book for you. Lam truly captures the Vietnamese-American experience and I highly recommend this book.

Andrew is a gifted writer and a gate keeper / historian for Vietnamese Americans 5 out of 5 stars.
11 of 11 people found this review helpful.

Perfume Dreams is a must read book for all Vietnamese Americans. Andrew is a gifted writer, a gate keeper / history teller for Vietnamese American who are living in America. He has never lost his touch with his root.

The Perfum Dreams touches all sides of experiences the Vietnamese refugees and immigrants. The "haves and not haves, the fortunate and unfortunate" lives of Vietnamese-Americans.

I am looking forward for more of his future books. We should all feel proud to have someone like Andrew to keep us in touch with ourselves and remind us of the challenges in living in America.

Editorial Review:

Winner of the 2006 PEN/Beyond Margins Award

A Book Sense Notable Book December 2005

The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant

Dan Savage

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 123 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Best known for his syndicated sexual advice column, "Savage Love," Dan Savage shares his own story in The Kid, a hilarious account of his efforts--along with his partner--to adopt a child. (Whoops, make that his boyfriend; Savage can't stand the "genderless" P-word: "Straight people and press organs that want to acknowledge gay relationships while at the same time pushing the two-penises stuff as far out of their minds as possible love 'partner.' I hated it.") Savage doesn't give an inch on the sexuality issue; it's hard to imagine that a homophobic reader would even pick up The Kid, but if it happened, Savage's unapologetic presentation of his life would quickly scare that reader off. Which isn't to say that he paints a rosy picture of homosexual cohabitation: the very first scene finds Dan's boyfriend, Terry, locking himself in the bathroom after a fight over the music on the car stereo. The misadventures continue through each step of the open-adoption process, in which Dan and Terry get to know their baby's birth mother, and the first few weeks of parenthood. The Kid is a wonderful, charming account of real "family values" that proves love knows no limits.