Told with deep affection and respect, a thoroughly engaging “journey down journalism’s blue highways.”
A Peabody and Emmy Award–winning correspondent reports on the indignities, difficulties, delights and occasional triumphs of small-town newspapering.
Newspapers may be dying, but don’t tell that to Muller (Journalism/Univ. of Southern California; Now This: Radio, Television…and the Real World, 2000)—or to the editors of the Guadalupe County Communicator, the Canadian Record, the Mountain Eagle, the Anderson Valley Advertiser, the Canyon Country Zephyr, the Dove Creek Press, the Big Horn County News or the Norwood Post papers, among the many the author visits along her diverting, informative trip. In tough economic times, these newspapers still get by on ads and subscriptions, providing local news for tiny communities who can’t get that information anywhere else. In small towns—there are over 8,000 weeklies in the United States—newspapers still matter. Sometimes the stories are serious: the school superintendent who unilaterally decides to censor books at the high school, the district-attorney candidate who hides a cocaine habit, the child beaten to death by a single mother’s live-in boyfriend, the beloved local doctor arrested for stealing Indian artifacts from public land, or the elected school board that insists on doing business behind closed doors. Sometimes they are complex: the controversy over a newly built, never-occupied, multimillion-dollar detention facility in Montana that pits one town’s paper against the nearby Crow Tribe’s house organ and stirs up longstanding grievances in the land of Custer. More often, the news hole is filled by club doings, guest column or the three staples of local reporting for which Muller offers a delightful lesson in decoding the small-town style: school sports, where mythmaking and hyperbole rule, the obituaries, where euphemism reigns, and the police blotter, where the decision to name names underscores the special burden of small-town editors everywhere—“they have to live there, too.” Very occasionally under threat of violence, more often facing social isolation or financial pressure, these rural journalists’ devotion to truth-telling keeps the First Amendment alive and communities connected in grassroots America.
Told with deep affection and respect, a thoroughly engaging “journey down journalism’s blue highways.”Pub Date: July 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8032-3016-3
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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