Best of
Journalism

1984

What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933


Joseph Roth - 1984
    Glowingly reviewed, What I Saw introduces a new generation to the genius of this tortured author with its "nonstop brilliance, irresistible charm and continuing relevance" (Jeffrey Eugenides, New York Times Book Review). As if anticipating Christopher Isherwood, the book re-creates the tragicomic world of 1920s Berlin as seen by its greatest journalistic eyewitness. In 1920, Joseph Roth, the most renowned German correspondent of his age, arrived in Berlin, the capital of the Weimar Republic. He produced a series of impressionistic and political essays that influenced an entire generation of writers, including Thomas Mann, and a young Christopher Isherwood. Translated and collected here for the first time, these pieces record the violent social and political paroxysms that constantly threatened to undo the fragile democracy that was the Weimar Republic. Roth, like no other German writer of his time, ventured beyond Berlin's official veneer to the heart of the city, chronicling the lives of its forgotten inhabitants: the war cripples, the Jewish immigrants from the Pale, the criminals, the bathhouse denizens, and the nameless dead who filled the morgues. Warning early on of the dangers posed by the Nazis, Roth evoked a landscape of moral bankruptcy and debauched beauty—a memorable portrait of a city and a time of commingled hope and chaos. What I Saw, like no other existing work, records the violent social and political paroxysms that compromised and ultimately destroyed the precarious democracy that was the Weimar Republic.

The Killing Fields


Christopher Hudson - 1984
    

The Killing Fields


Sydney Schanberg - 1984
    

Prose and Poetry: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets / The Red Badge of Courage / Stories, Sketches, Journalism, The Black Riders / War Is Kind


Stephen Crane - 1984
    This comprehensive collection includes all his most accomplished and best-known works: five novels, short stories, journalism, war correspondence, and his two completed books of poetry.Here are the classic novels he published in a span of five years: The Red Badge of Courage (1895), about a young and confused Union soldier under fire for the first time; Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), a vivid portrait of slum life and a young girl’s fall; George’s Mother (1896), about New York’s Bowery and its effect on a young workingman fresh from the country; The Third Violet (1897), the story of a bohemian artist’s country romance; and The Monster (1899), a novella about sacrifice and rescue, guilt and isolation.Among his short stories are such masterpieces as “The Open Boat,” “The Blue Hotel,” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” His prose is at the same time dense and lean, suited to his description of the elusive forces that impinge upon his characters, and suited also to his desire not to circumscribe them with traditional moral and interpretive definition. Included here as well are the Whilomville stories of children and childhood in small-town America and the Sullivan County sketches of turn-of-the-twentieth-century rural life.As a journalist, Crane covered the Spanish-American War and the Greco-Turkish War, traveled through Mexico and the West, and reported on the seamier sides of New York City life; the best of his dispatches are gathered here. Also featured are both of Crane’s collections of epigrammatic free verse—The Black Riders (1895) and War is Kind (1899)—and selections from his uncollected poems. His poetry shows strong affinities to Emily Dickinson, while also anticipating the Imagist movement later in the twentieth century.This is the most substantial gathering of Crane’s work ever made available in one volume; it is an enduring testimony to his heroic achievement.

Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes


Ted Conover - 1984
    So, he decided to take a year off and ride the rails. Equipped with rummage-store clothing, a bedroll, and a few other belongings, he hops a freight train in St. Louis, becoming a tramp in order to discover their peculiar culture. The men and women he meets along the way are by turns generous and mistrusting, resourceful and desperate, philosophical and profoundly cynical. And the narrative he creates of his travels with them is unforgettable and moving.

The Day We Bombed Utah


John G. Fuller - 1984
    George, Utah. Within a few days, more than 4,000 sheep were dead of a mysterious illness. Within a few years, a plague of cancer and birth defects had rippled through the area- a plague that may have caused the cancer-related deaths of John Wayne and over 100 other cast and crew members of The Conqueror, which was filmed only miles from the test site. And when the survivors claimed compensation, the government successfully denied all responsibility.This uncompromising expose' of "the greatest government cover-up of all time" brings to light a shocking thirty-year conspiracy of falsified reports, suborned witnesses, and "lost evidence"- a record of shame that, like the testing itself, continues to this day.

Best of the Realist: The 60s' Most Outrageously Irreverent Magazine


Paul Krassner - 1984
    

Foul Ball!: Five Years In The American League


Alison Gordon - 1984
    

Willie and Dwike: An American Profile


William Zinsser - 1984
    

The Orangeburg Massacre


Jack Bass - 1984
    When the shooting stopped, three young men were dead and twenty-seven other students were seriously wounded. What had begun as an attempt by peaceful young people to use the facilities of a local bowling alley had become a violent confrontation between aroused students and the coercive power of the state. This tragedy was the first of its kind on any American college campus and became known as the Orangeburg Massacre.

The Writer's Art


James J. Kilpatrick - 1984
    Kilpatrick, "good, better, and best." With the experience of a lifetime of writing, he tells us, he wants to make a few judgment calls. And Jack Kilpatrick, master of the art, is as good as his word. In the tradition of Theodore Bernstein, Edwin Newman, and William Safire, James J. Kilpatrick gives us a finely crafted, witty guide to writing well. Written for laymen and professionals alike, The Writer's Art highlights techniques and examples of good writing. A section of the book called "My Crotchets and Your Crotchets" comprises more than 200 personal judgment calls, often controversial, often funny, on word usage.

Literary Journalists


Norman Sims - 1984
    Like reporters, they are fact gatherers whose material is the real world. Like fiction writers, they are consummate storytellers who endow their stories with a narrative structure and a distinctive voice.Literary journalists range from such bestselling authors as Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Sara Davidson, to new writers like Mark Kramer and Richard West. What they share is a complete immersion in their subjects.A DAZZLING COLLECTION OF GREAT WRITINGInterviews with literary journalists conducted especially for this book make this not only a superb collection to read and enjoy but the definitive work on some of the most exciting, influential, and critically acclaimed writing of our time.

American Beat


Bob Greene - 1984
    Including his essays from Esquire, his syndicated columns from the Chicago Tribune, and his pieces from ABC’s Nightline, American Beat covers a variety of personal and public problems that will resonate with lovers of all things Americana.

Princes, playboys & high-class tarts


Taki Theodoracopulos - 1984
    

The List


Chet Dettlinger - 1984
    1980's. During this time 29 boys made the list of murdered and missing children. In The List three American institutions, the police, the courts and the press failed in one of the biggest murder mysteries in the annals of American crimes.It is a true story of many unsolved murder mysteries that didn't make "The List" (at least 63 and 22 occurred after Wayne Williams went to jail.

Herblock Through the Looking Glass


Herbert Block - 1984
    America's foremost political cartoonist on the Reagan years in words and pictures--fourteen chapters illustrated with 490 cartoons by the tree-time Pulitzer Prize winner.