Best of
Journalism

1985

Amritsar: Mrs. Gandhi's Last Battle


Mark Tully - 1985
    The book captures rise of Bhindranwale whose extremism played wedge between Sikh and Hindu, Sikh and Sikh and Punjab and India, the indecisiveness of Indira Gandhi who paid for the catastrophic aftermath with her life. Tully and Jacob bring tragedy of Sikh from many arresting angles. They met Bhindranwale and many other central characters in the drama. They gathered eye witness account from every quarter to fill in this remarkable picture of what occurred and present their thought provoking analysis of what happened.

The Death and Life of Dith Pran


Sydney Schanberg - 1985
    

Dorothea Lange: Photographs of a Lifetime: An Aperture Monograph


Dorothea Lange - 1985
    In the historic decade of the thirties, she was more - a pioneer, a shaper of the medium, and a motivator of the national conscience. Lange's direct, compelling studies of people forced from the land are both a faithful chronicle and a landmark of twentieth-century photography. In her later years, she brought this unique vision to rural communities as diverse as the Mormons of Utah, the countryfolk of Ireland, the fellaheen of Egypt. Dorothea Lange: Photographs of a Lifetime is the most comprehensive collection of the artist's work ever to be published. It begins with portraits from her early years, when she was San Francisco's most fashionable studio photographer, and it concludes with images from her final years, when Lange traveled the globe, then, finally, turned her lens toward children and grandchildren, home, and the familiar objects and events of her daily life. In a penetrating critical biography, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Coles offers an incisive study of Lange's life and work. As one of the great contemporary social investigators, Coles explores in Lange's methods and accomplishments those qualities that enable the "artist-observer" to satisfy the objectivity expected of chroniclers and the subjective emotional involvement of the artist's personal vision. Accompanying the photographs are Lange's own reminiscences and observations, collected from her writings and from interviews made shortly before her death in 1965.

Beyond Belief: The American Press And The Coming Of The Holocaust, 1933- 1945


Deborah E. Lipstadt - 1985
    This most complete study to date of American press reactions to the Holocaust sets forth in abundant detail how the press nationwide played down or even ignored reports of Jewish persecutions over a twelve-year period.

India: The Siege Within: Challenges to a Nation's Unity


M.J. Akbar - 1985
    

Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White


Joseph Lelyveld - 1985
    The complexities of South Africa are illuminated upon in this acclaimed work that takes a close, clear look at the strange realities within that country.

A Poison Stronger than Love: The Destruction of an Ojibwa Community


Anastasia M. Shkilnyk - 1985
    The only thing I know is that alcohol is a stronger power than the love of children. It’s a poison, and we are a broken people. We suffer enough inside, and therefore we understand each other.”—Resident of Grassy Narrows "A work of luminous compassion and rigorous analysis. . . . Should be required reading . . . for anyone interested in the bonds of community that make people human." —M.T.  Kelly, Toronto Globe and Mail Grassy Narrows is a small Ojibwa village in northwestern Ontario, Canada. It first captured national attention in 1970, when mercury pollution was discovered in the adjacent English-Wabigoon River. In the course of the assessment of environmental damage, an even more compelling tragedy came to light. For in little more than a decade, the Indian people had begun to self-destruct. This powerful book documents the human costs of massive and extraordinarily rapid change in a people’s way of life. When well-intentioned bureaucrats relocated the Grassy Narrows band to a new reserve in 1963, the results were the unraveling of the tribe’s social fabric and a sharp deterioration in their personal morale – dramatically reflected in Shkilnyk’s statistics on violent death, illness, and family breakdown. The book explores the origins and causes of the suffering in the community life and describes the devastating impacts of mercury contamination on the health and livelihood of the Indian people. In essence, this is an in-depth and comprehensive study of the forces and pressures that can rend a community apart. As such it is of interest not only to those particularly concerned with the fate of aboriginal peoples on the continent but also to those more broadly concerned with human collective response to unprecedented stress.

Cheeseburgers, the Best of Bob Greene


Bob Greene - 1985
    Amusing, poignant, and often surprising, Cheeseburger's is a unique collection of columns by a journalist who says "Ilike to think of my stories as snapshots of life in America in the Eighties - snapshots taken as I wander around the country seeing what turns up."

Robert Capa: A Biography


Richard Whelan - 1985
    Driven from his native Hungary by political oppression, he was first recognized for photographing the Spanish Civil War. In 1938 he was in China recording the Japanese invasion. During World War II he was in London, North Africa, and Italy, and then in France covering D-Day on Omaha Beach, the liberation of Paris, and the Battle of the Bulge. When the new nation of Israel was founded in 1948 he was there. In 1954 he was in Vietnam, taking photographs until the moment he was killed.Away from battle, Capa gather about him such famous people as Ernest Hemingway and his wife (the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn), Gary Cooper, Irwin Shaw, and Gene Kelly. Whelan shows Capa photographing the street life of Paris, crisscrossing America on assignment from Life, in Russia with John Steinbeck, in Italy with John Huston, on the Riviera with Picasso, and with Ingrid Bergman.

With The Contras: A Reporter In The Wilds Of Nicaragua


Christopher Dickey - 1985
    Finally, the family that had ruled and owned the country was gone. It took its money, which was much of the money the country had. The dictator left. The generals left. The colonels. They fled by helicopter and airplane, by car and on foot. By the nineteenth they were, almost all of them, gone. But the soldiers remained. And in San Juan del Sur, on the Pacific coast of Nicaragua, the rebel Commander Zero, Eden Pastora, was facing the best of the dictator's remaining soldiers: Bravo, Montenegro, "the Rattlesnakes," "the Wild Geese," "the Black and White." Eventually the guardias fled too - some of them, including a tough, murderous sergeant from "the Rattlesnakes" (called Suicida by his men), making their way to El Salvador, from where, as the Contras, they waged sporadic war against the Nicaraguan leftist forces.Christopher Dickey was the first American newspaperman to go into the mountains of Nicaragua with the Contras and come out alive, and his account of the "secret" war that is being waged against the Sandinista government reads like the best fiction. Yet it is as factual as tomorrow's headlines.

On the Road with Charles Kuralt


Charles Kuralt - 1985
    Taking to the highways, he has met the little-known and the famous, and shared them with the rest of us. This heartwarming book reminds us again of some of the extraordinary people he has met over the years in words and photographs, and provides the exact words of the interviews, so that we can permanently enjoy his visits with people we have come to know and care for, again and again.

Between Washington and Jerusalem: A Reporter's Notebook


Wolf Blitzer - 1985
    Wolf Blitzer is one of the few to have done both. An American fluent in Hebrew, Blitzer has interviewed and gained the respect of nearly all the majorpolicy-makers in Israel and the United States over the past dozen years. The late Anwar Sadat credited Blitzer with first giving him the idea of making his historic trip to Jerusalem. The U.S.-Israeli relationship is like no other and this book helps explain why. Most importantly, it outlines the limits of the relationship, explaining why neither country can afford an all-out confrontation. There is special emphasis on the way decisions are made in Washington--the role ofthe foreign policy bureaucracy, Congress, the press, the Jewish community, the Arabs and their supporters, and the official Israeli presence. In addition, chapters cover the special U.S.-Israeli cooperation in military, strategic, and intelligence matters. The book is filled with fascinating vignettes of people: the career diplomat responsible for the explosive (in 1975 terms) Saunders document which said, In many ways, the Palestinian dimension of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the heart of that conflict....the American industrialist who becameinvolved in some spectacular diplomatic back-channel efforts to save Soviet Jews...the German-Jewish refugee secretary of state who came to play such a decisive role in American-Israeli affairs...the three deeply religious leaders, Begin, Sadat, and Carter, who progressed from an agreement to praytogether to an agreement to make peace once and for all. From his unique vantage point, Blitzer considers the potential for either sharp strains or even closer collaboration in the future.

Tocqueville Reader


Alexis de Tocqueville - 1985
    It includes twenty-nine pieces never before translated into English, and a wide-ranging editorial introduction that gives an account of Tocqueville's life as a politician and inspirations as a writer.

Dynamo Going to Waste: Letters to Allen Edee, 1919-1921


Margaret Mitchell - 1985
    A collection of letters written by Mitchell to a college friend during the period, after her mother's death, that she ran her father's prominent Atlanta home.

Cabbagetown: Photographs By Oraien E. Catledge


Oraien Catledge - 1985