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GOD AND THE EDITOR

MY SEARCH FOR MEANING AT THE NEW YORK TIMES

A methodical, sober eyeful for Times devotees and a guiding light for aspiring journalists.

Phelps looks back on a long journalistic career, focusing on his 20 years at the newspaper industry's famous Gray Lady.

The author covers all the requisite bases, beginning with childhood, early struggles over spirituality and schooling and the conflicts he experienced as a pacifist serving as an enlisted navy correspondent. Phelps found his calling as a slave laborer at United Press, then was a copyeditor at the Providence Journal-Bulletin for a few years. The bulk of the memoir concerns his years at the New York Times, where he became news editor of the Washington bureau in 1964. In a clear, professional voice, he writes of bringing balance to reporting, getting the facts straight and digestible and generating the trust that readers must have with their paper of choice. He honed those skills at a time when Vietnam and Watergate were undermining American citizens’ innate faith in government. Phelps explores the Times' scoops and snafus during that seminal era, as well as dynamics within the organization that shaped how news was gathered, framed and delivered. Profiles of Times characters, from A.M. Rosenthal to Max Frankel, are trenchant, as is the author’s dissection of newsroom politics, but what sings is his short course on the journalistic everyday: “The lesson of the Pentagon Papers went beyond distrusting government sources. Whistleblowers should also be distrusted and should be checked as vigorously.” A reporter “should not assume the role of a defense attorney,” avers the author, “but of a judge, making sure all questions are answered.” In 1974 Phelps moved to the Boston Globe, where he played an instrumental role in the paper’s Pulitzer Prize–winning coverage of school desegregation. Though he describes this period as “a coda” to his Times career, it produces some of his most impassioned writing on the responsibility of newspapers to convey information as objectively as possible, so readers can make fully informed judgments.

A methodical, sober eyeful for Times devotees and a guiding light for aspiring journalists.

Pub Date: April 1, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-8156-0914-8

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Syracuse Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

NOTES ON THE FIRST 150 YEARS IN AMERICA

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

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  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist


  • National Book Award Winner

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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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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