by Linda Greenhouse ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 30, 2017
While raising plenty of significant issues, Greenhouse’s themes remain open to spirited debate.
A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist reflects on the changes and flaws within her profession.
Best known for her decades covering the Supreme Court beat for the New York Times, Greenhouse (Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun’s Supreme Court Journey, 2005) writes frankly of her frustrations at the Times and with journalism in general. Too often, she believes, journalists have pulled their punches, sacrificing truth as they perceive it before the false gods of fairness and objectivity. “The opposite of objectivity isn’t partisanship, or needn’t be,” she writes. “Rather, it is judgment, the hard work of sorting out the false claims from the true and discarding or at least labeling the false.” Greenhouse shows what significant strides journalism has made in what she calls “the post-truth age,” when news stories and headlines now employ language once reserved for opinion pieces or for private conversations among journalists. If a candidate, or even a president, tells a lie, her former paper no longer has qualms about labeling it as such. Yet some will continue to find bias in such labeling and will see what is offered as context or analysis as opinion. The author asks, “does ‘objectivity,’ with its mantra of ‘fairness and balance,’ too often inhibit journalists from separating fact from fiction and from fulfilling the duty to help maintain an informed citizenry in a democracy?” From her perspective, the question is rhetorical, and the answer is apparent. Yet this brief book of argument and anecdote presents a minefield of challenges that journalism itself is far from unified over how to face. And the ground keeps shifting as the mainstream press does its best to remain a watchdog while resisting the label of adversary. The third and final section of the book recounts Greenhouse’s newspaper career, showing how much things have changed since the days when women were an anomaly in the profession, deadlines determined the news cycle, and the internet and smartphones were hard to imagine.
While raising plenty of significant issues, Greenhouse’s themes remain open to spirited debate.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-674-98033-4
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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