Best of
Journalism

1989

Modern Primitives: An Investigation of Contemporary Adornment and Ritual


V. Vale - 1989
    An amazing 30-page interview with Fakir Musafar, as well as in-depth interviews with Ed Hardy, Lyle Tuttle, Leo Zulueta, Bill Salmon, Vyvyn Lazonga and other tattoo giants is featured. This book describes non-tribal people who felt and responded to strong "primitive" urges. A classic; this is the first book to chart out all the basic ways to creatively express one's individuality using the body as a canvas, especially emphasizing the need to find something rooted in one's own personal experiences and mythology. Inspiring and wide-ranging, Modern Primitives provides a vast anthropological context for implementing a truly unique body-decoration expression. An illuminating section of quotations rounds out this volume.

My Day: The Best of Eleanor Roosevelt's Acclaimed Newspaper Columns 1936-62


Eleanor Roosevelt - 1989
    . . . She's perfect for us as we enter the twenty-first century. Eleanor Roosevelt is a loud and profound voice for people who want to change the world." -- Blanche Wiesen Cook Named "Woman of the Century" in a survey conducted by the National Women's Hall of Fame, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote her hugely popular syndicated column "My Day" for over a quarter of that century, from 1936 to 1962. This collection brings together for the first time in a single volume the most memorable of those columns, written with singular wit, elegance, compassion, and insight -- everything from her personal perspectives on the New Deal and World War II to the painstaking diplomacy required of her as chair of the United Nations Committee on Human Rights after the war to the joys of gardening at her beloved Hyde Park home. To quote Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., "What a remarkable woman she was! These sprightly and touching selections from Eleanor Roosevelt's famous column evoke an extraordinary personality." "My Day reminds us how great a woman she was." --Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Ernie's America: The Best of Ernie Pyle's 1930's Travel Dispatches


David Nichols - 1989
    Here, Nichols has culled the best of what he wrote and organized it by sections of the country.

The Days Trilogy: Happy Days / Newspaper Days / Heathen Days / Days Revisited: Unpublished Commentary


H.L. Mencken - 1989
    L. Mencken published a reminiscence of his Baltimore boyhood in The New Yorker. With this modest beginning, Mencken embarked on what would become the Days trilogy, a long and magnificent adventure in autobiography by America’s greatest journalist. Finding it “always agreeable to ponder upon the adventures of childhood” (as he wrote in his diary), Mencken created more of these masterful novelistic evocations of a bygone era, eventually collected in Happy Days (1940). The book was an immediate critical and popular success, surprising many of its readers with its glimpses of a less curmudgeonly Mencken.Urged by New Yorker editor Harold Ross to send yet more pieces, Mencken moved on from his childhood to revisit the beginnings of his legendary career. Newspaper Days (1941) charts the rise of the brilliant, ambitious young newspaperman, in an astonishingly short time, from cub reporter to managing editor of the Baltimore Herald. Among the book’s memorable episodes are the display of Mencken’s “talent for faking” in his invented dispatches of the Battle of Tsushima in the Russo-Japanese War—accounts that largely turned out to be accurate—and his riveting narrative of the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904. “In my day a reporter who took an assignment was wholly on his own until he got back to the office, . . . today he tends to become only a homunculus at the end of a telephone wire.”The final volume of the published trilogy, Heathen Days (1943), recounts his varied excursions as one of America’s most famous men, and one who, by his own account, “enjoyed himself immensely,” including his bibulous adventures during Prohibition and his reporting of the 1925 Scopes trial over the teaching of evolution.Until now, however, the story told in Mencken’s beloved Days books has been incomplete. In the 1940s, Mencken began making extensive notes about the published books, commenting on what he had written and adding new material—but stipulating that these writings were not to be made public until twenty-five years after his death. Days Revisited presents more than two hundred pages of this material for the first time. Commentaries are keyed to the main text they gloss with subtle marks in the margin (the volume includes two ribbons to allow readers to flip back to the notes), and they are supplemented by rare photographs, many taken by Mencken himself. Here is Mencken’s classic autobiography as it has never been seen before.

Deeds of War


James Nachtwey - 1989
    

Rolling Stone: The Photographs


Laurie Kratochvil - 1989
    Reprint.

And Their Children After Them: The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: James Agee, Walker Evans, and the Rise and Fall of Cotton in the South


Dale Maharidge - 1989
    With this continuation of Agee and Evans's project, Maharidge and Williamson not only uncover some surprising historical secrets relating to the families and to Agee himself, but also effectively lay to rest Agee's fear that his work, from lack of reverence or resilience, would be but another offense to the humanity of its subjects. Williamson's ninety-part photo essay includes updates alongside Evans's classic originals. Maharidge and Williamson's work in And Their Children After Them was honored with the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction when it was first published in 1990.

Addicts Who Survived: An Oral History of Narcotic Use in America, 1923-1965


David T. Courtwright - 1989
    The drug literature is filled with the stereotyped opinions of non-addicted, middle-class pundits who have had little direct contact with addicts.a These stories are reality.a Narcotic addicts of the inner cities are both tough and gentle, deceptive when necessary and yet often generous--above all, shrewd judges of character.a While judging them, the clinician is also being judged.OCoVincent P. Dole, M.D., The Rockefeller Institute. What was it like to be a narcotic addict during the Anslinger era?a No book will probably ever appear that gives a better picture than this one. . . . a singularly readable and informative work on a subject ordinarily buried in clich(r)s and stereotypes.OCoDonald W. Goodwin, Journal of the American Medical Association . . . an important contribution to the growing body of literature that attempts to more clearly define the nature of drug addiction. . . . [This book] will appeal to a diverse audience.a Academicians, politicians, and the general reader will find this approach to drug addiction extremely beneficial, insightful, and instructive. . . . Without qualification anyone wishing to acquire a better understanding of drug addicts and addiction will benefit from reading this book.OCoJohn C. McWilliams, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography This study has much to say to a general audience, as well as those involved in drug control.OCoPublishers Weekly The authors' comments are perceptive and the interviews make interesting reading.OCoJohn Duffy, Journal of American History This book adds a vital and often compelling human dimension to the story of drug use and law enforcement.a The material will be of great value to other specialists, such as those interested in the history of organized crime and of outsiders in general.OCoH. Wayne Morgan, Journal of Southern History This book represents a significant and valuable addition to the contemporary substance abuse literature. . . .a this book presents findings from a novel and remarkably imaginative research approach in a cogent and exceptionally informative manner.OCoWilliam M. Harvey, Journal of Psychoactive Drugs This is a good and important book filled with new information containing provocative elements usually brought forth through the touching details of personal experience. . . .a There isn't a recollection which isn't of intrinsic value and many point to issues hardly ever broached in more conventional studies.OCoAlan Block, Journal of Social History

Dr. Kookie, You're Right!


Mike Royko - 1989
    In this, his sixth and possibly his funniest collection, he on, he takes on televangelists, Avon ladies, and elevator etiquette with customary verve.

Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Journalism


Whittaker Chambers - 1989
    --William F. Buckley, Jr.

Tapestries of Life: Women's Work, Women's Consciousness, and the Meaning of Daily Experience


Bettina Aptheker - 1989
    concentration camps for Japanese Americans, Chicana cannery workers and southern cotton-mill girls, older lesbians and elderly Jews, Afro-American women in slavery and contemporary Afro-American writers, and others, in order to explore women's ways of seeing. Her analyses of oral histories, novels, legends, poetry, and art show how we can use these records of women's and men's lives.' -- Sandra Harding, Women's Review of Books

Red Line


Charles Bowden - 1989
    In this unclassifiable memoir and meditation Charles Bowden powerfully conveys a desert civilization carrening over the edge--and decaying at its center.

Mollie and Other War Pieces


A.J. Liebling - 1989
    J. Liebling’s coverage of the Second World War for the New Yorker gives us a fresh and unexpected view of the war—stories told in the words of the soldiers, sailors, and airmen who fought it, the civilians who endured it, and the correspondents who covered it. The hero of the title story is a private in the Ninth Army division known as Mollie, short for Molotov, so called by his fellow G.I.s because of his radical views and Russian origins. Mollie was famous for his outlandish dress (long blonde hair, riding boots, feathered beret, field glasses, and red cape), his disregard for army discipline, his knack for acquiring prized souvenirs, his tales of being a Broadway big shot, and his absolute fearlessness in battle. Killed in combat on Good Friday, 1943, Mollie (real name: Karl Warner) was awarded the Silver Star posthumously. Intrigued by the legend and fascinated by the man behind it, Liebling searched out Mollie’s old New York haunts and associates and found behind the layers of myth a cocky former busboy from Hell’s Kitchen who loved the good life.Other stories take Liebling through air battles in Tunisia, across the channel with the D-Day invasion fleet, and through a liberated Paris celebrating de Gaulle and freedom. Liebling’s war was a vast human-interest story, told with a heart for the feelings of the people involved and the deepest respect for those who played their parts with heroism, however small or ordinary the stage.

Strange Ground: An Oral History Of Americans In Vietnam, 1945-1975


Harry Maurer - 1989
    citizens—medics, diplomats, clerks, housewives, spies, grunts, and generals—who lived, worked, and fought in Southeast Asia during America's thirty-year involvement in Vietnam. The result is a work of visceral immediacy and tragic sweep.

Conspiracy of Silence


Lisa Priest - 1989
    Helen Betty Osbourne was only nineteen when she was whisked away from her small-town Manitoba community and stabbed to death with a screwdriver, after which her body was dumped at a nearby pump house. Finally the police decided to reopen the case despite locals pointing fingers at the Cree community - but the real killers, a gang of drunk hoodlums, were doing their best to get away with their crimes.

To Run Across The Sea


Norman Lewis - 1989
    Whether hunting for treasure in Bolivia, discovering forgotten pyramids, or feeding sharks, he draws us into what he calls “the seductions of travel” with ease, delivering cultural experiences with his usual depth, integrity, and elegance.

Writers on World War II: An Anthology


Mordecai Richler - 1989
    Contributors include Auden, Doctorow, Orwell, Shaw, Mailer, Sartre, Terkel, Vonnegut, Shirer, Levi, and many others.

Quake of Eighty-Nine


San Francisco Chronicle - 1989
    

Jarnaili Sarak / جرنیلی سڑک


Raza Ali Abidi - 1989
    Originally a BBC documentary by Abidi, aired in 1986, this book retains the format of the original radio programme with the juxtaposition of travel commentary, history and folklore told in varying dialects along the historic road. The GT Road was built by the Afghan-Indian king Sher Shah Suri in the 16th century by following 3rd century BC routes from the Maurya Empire and continues to serve as a primary route through and across four countries in South Asia. This book is part history, part cultural exposition of the cultures and peoples that thrive around this great road.

The Silent Brotherhood


Kevin Flynn - 1989
    The Silent Brotherhood attracted seemingly average citizens with their call for pride in race, family, and religion and their mission to save white, Christian America from a communist conspiracy. Here is how they became criminals and assassins in their effort to establish an Aryan homeland. 8-page photo insert.

This is London (Witnesses to War)


Edward R. Murrow - 1989
    Dispatches from the ultimate war correspondent of World War II

Honest Rainmaker: The Life and Times of Colonel John R. Stingo


A.J. Liebling - 1989
    Weather Control Bureau, the Great American Hog Syndicate, and the Mid-Continental Chinchilla Rabbitry.

Nicaragua


William Gentile - 1989
    Although its population is less than Oklahoma's, it drove the Reagan administration into desperate acts such as the covert mining of its harbours and the Iran-Contra fiasco. But through it all, the country and its people have remained an enigma. William Gentile's camera probes deep into Nicaragua and discovers a simple, innocent people trying to make a life amid a brutal war. An interview with Sergio Ramirez, internationally respected author and vice president of Nicaragua, explores the country's past under Somoza's dictatorship and its present under Sandinista rule. Gentile's photographs and the candid comments of Ramirez - on the tenth anniversary of the Sandinista revolution - make this a document of historical importance.

Observing The Nixon Years


Jonathan Schell - 1989
    A compilation of writings about the Vietnam War and the Watergate Crisis (1969 to 1975) taken from the New Yorker's Notes and Comment column.

Fragments of Labour: The Story Behind the Labour Government


Bruce Jesson - 1989
    

High Life


Taki Theodoracopulos - 1989