by Mike Jaccarino ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A genuine, sometimes rambling account of a crucial chapter in the decline of print journalism.
Journalistic memoir documenting nasty competitions between the New York Daily News and New York Post.
In his debut book, former Daily News reporter Jaccarino effectively evokes a bygone era, focusing on the pugnacious personalities behind both papers, from the 1980s through the 2000s, as print journalism suffered significant entropy. “In New York,” writes the author, “these vast, macro trends didn’t eradicate the News or the Post, but put them on a collision course.” He documents these commercial and demographic changes, noting that “probably no one is more responsible for the modern News-Post rivalry than Rupert Murdoch. When he arrived, the News and Post didn’t directly compete.” Jaccarino’s storytelling, which sometimes falls victim to digression, focuses on the “runners and shooters,” or street reporters and photojournalists, and he portrays them as ruthless, cynical eccentrics who often began “to fray emotionally, or grow calloused.” Although he reminisces about colorful colleagues, the author structures his account via personal recollections of his knockabout experiences as a News runner himself. These dramatic episodes provide behind-the-scenes perspective on events ranging from the police shooting of Sean Bell in Queens to O.J. Simpson’s arrest for robbery in Las Vegas. These tales of tense stakeouts, murders, and various scandals have a pungent authenticity. As a rival runner observed, “You’re some shitter, Jaccarino.” This results in less discussion of the institutional politics behind the “tabloid wars,” with editors focused on circulation figures, witty headlines, and occasional publicity stunts. While noting that Gawker declared the News as the war’s loser, the author asserts, “there was no widespread discontent at the News in mid-2008.” Yet the industry was wounded by the 2008 financial crisis, shedding jobs and never recovering profitability. Still, Jaccarino, who was laid off in 2011, claims that few insiders saw it coming. “The tabloid war was the story behind the story, the one the public never read,” he writes.
A genuine, sometimes rambling account of a crucial chapter in the decline of print journalism.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8232-8738-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Empire State Editions/Fordham Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2020
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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