A memorable collection that shows how much journalism lost with the early death of one of its finest.
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Tizon (Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self, 2014) honors undersung lives in a posthumously published collection.
As a reporter, Tizon (1959-2017) gravitated toward misfits, eccentrics, and outsiders, all of whom he treats with acute sensitivity in this roundup of articles originally published between 1994 and 2017. Two autobiographical pieces form the book’s moral center: an excerpt from his memoir of being Filipino American and the bittersweet June 2017 Atlantic cover story, “My Family’s Slave,” a loving portrait of a woman who worked for his family as a de facto indentured servant. The other entries consist of newspaper articles demonstrating the wide range of Tizon’s sympathies, rooted in his belief that everyone has an “epic story” to tell. This thread ran through all his stories, whether he was writing about the only Muslim family in a Wyoming town after 9/11 or the descendants of a chief of the Nisqually tribe who fought to exonerate an ancestor they saw as unjustly hanged by the authorities. Most of the author’s subjects exemplify broader cultural issues, none more heartbreakingly than the story of a Cambodian widow who saw her parents killed by Khmer Rouge soldiers, which reveals both her implacable grief and American psychiatrists’ lack of preparation for dealing with trauma of that magnitude. More upbeat pieces include “Onward Christian Surfers,” about missionaries on Waikiki Beach, and a profile of “a full-time UFO investigator and possessor of one of the world’s most comprehensive, though unofficial UFO databases.” Skillfully chosen by Verhovek, all of the pieces have brief introductions by fellow journalists or others. The collection lacks the articles for which Tizon shared a Pulitzer with two Seattle Times co-workers, but they remain available on the paper’s website, and many people will want to seek them out after reading this book.
A memorable collection that shows how much journalism lost with the early death of one of its finest.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4399-1830-2
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Temple Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.
Four decades after Watergate shook America, journalist Woodward (The Price of Politics, 2012, etc.) returns to the scandal to profile Alexander Butterfield, the Richard Nixon aide who revealed the existence of the Oval Office tapes and effectively toppled the presidency.
Of all the candidates to work in the White House, Butterfield was a bizarre choice. He was an Air Force colonel and wanted to serve in Vietnam. By happenstance, his colleague H.R. Haldeman helped Butterfield land a job in the Nixon administration. For three years, Butterfield worked closely with the president, taking on high-level tasks and even supervising the installation of Nixon’s infamous recording system. The writing here is pure Woodward: a visual, dialogue-heavy, blow-by-blow account of Butterfield’s tenure. The author uses his long interviews with Butterfield to re-create detailed scenes, which reveal the petty power plays of America’s most powerful men. Yet the book is a surprisingly funny read. Butterfield is passive, sensitive, and dutiful, the very opposite of Nixon, who lets loose a constant stream of curses, insults, and nonsensical bluster. Years later, Butterfield seems conflicted about his role in such an eccentric presidency. “I’m not trying to be a Boy Scout and tell you I did it because it was the right thing to do,” Butterfield concedes. It is curious to see Woodward revisit an affair that now feels distantly historical, but the author does his best to make the story feel urgent and suspenseful. When Butterfield admitted to the Senate Select Committee that he knew about the listening devices, he felt its significance. “It seemed to Butterfield there was absolute silence and no one moved,” writes Woodward. “They were still and quiet as if they were witnessing a hinge of history slowly swinging open….It was as if a bare 10,000 volt cable was running through the room, and suddenly everyone touched it at once.”
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1644-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2015
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