Best of
Journalism

1991

Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets


David Simon - 1991
    Twice every three days another citizen is shot, stabbed, or bludgeoned to death. At the center of this hurricane of crime is the city's homicide unit, a small brotherhood of hard men who fight for whatever justice is possible in a deadly world.David Simon was the first reporter ever to gain unlimited access to a homicide unit, and this electrifying book tells the true story of a year on the violent streets of an American city. The narrative follows Donald Worden, a veteran investigator; Harry Edgerton, a black detective in a mostly white unit; and Tom Pellegrini, an earnest rookie who takes on the year's most difficult case, the brutal rape and murder of an eleven-year-old girl.Originally published fifteen years ago, Homicide became the basis for the acclaimed television show of the same name. This new edition--which includes a new introduction, an afterword, and photographs--revives this classic, riveting tale about the men who work on the dark side of the American experience.

Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?


Molly Ivins - 1991
    One not infrequently sees cars or trucks sporting the bumper sticker "Have fun—beat the hell out of someone you love."

The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America


Nicholas Lemann - 1991
    A definitive book on American history, The Promised Land is also essential reading for educators and policymakers at both national and local levels.

Outlaw Journalist


William McKeen - 1991
    Thompson detonated a two-ton bomb under the staid field of journalism with his early magazine pieces and revelatory "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and "Fear and Loathing" campaign coverage in Rolling Stone. When Thompson was on, there was no one better at capturing who Americans were and what America was, be it in politics, at the Kentucky Derby, or in the Hells Angels' lair. William McKeen became friends with Thompson after writing a monograph on his journalism. McKeen now has interviewed many of Thompson's associates who wouldn't speak before, from childhood friends to colleagues, to assistants who sat around the Woody Creek, Colorado, kitchen control room late at night when Thompson did most of his work. McKeen gets behind the drinking and drugs to show the man and the writer—one who was happy to be considered an outlaw but took the calling of journalism as his life.

Living with the Enemy


Donna Ferrato - 1991
    This critically acclaimed, graphic report on family violence reveals the lives of ordinary women-and the men who batter them.

Powerful Days: Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore


Andrew Young - 1991
    Powerful Days is powerful stuff. The freedom marchers look as heroic as Iwo Jima Marines fighting their way up a mountain--which just about what they had to do.--Newsweek Mr. Moore's stark, crisp photos of freedom marchers beset by police dogs and fire hoses . . . helped to shape the nation's conscience. . . . [This book] contains many images that will be wrenchingly familiar to those who lived through the proud moral turning point in American history, and that might serve to inspire younger generations.--New York Times Book Review Every once in a while we receive a well-documented treasure of American history. This collection is such a treasure. . . . [Moore's] black-and-white photos of that era are classics of photojournalism, and as Powerful Days documents, those classics have lost none of their force and energy.--Southern Living

Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line


Ben Hamper - 1991
    For 10 years, Hamper, as did many of his fellow workers, showed up to work drunk and on drugs, was repeatedly laid off and called back, and battled continuously with foremen and supervisors.Eventually his talent for depicting these wretched work conditions formed into a column, called "Rivethead," that appeared in Midwest newspapers as well as in Mother Jones. This book is based on that column, which takes well-aimed potshots at American management and business and illuminates the world of the automobile builder and lunch pail carrier in hard-edged, vernacular prose.

Means of Escape: A War Correspondent's Memoir of Life and Death in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Vietnam


Philip Caputo - 1991
    Caputo intersperses imaginative retellings of events he witnessed with true accounts of how he became a writer, and what happened when he was sent to some of the most dangerous places in the world. He begins with his childhood and budding career in Chicago. Soon after, he was deep in the Sinai Peninsula searching for the last authentic Bedouin, and reporting from the front lines of the Yom Kippur War. In an eerie parallel to journalist Daniel Pearl's tragic murder, Caputo was held hostage for a week by Islamic extremists while reporting in Beirut. Later, he was singled out by a sniper, and received a bullet in his ankle and a chunk of wall in his head. In Afghanistan in the 1980s, he joined the Mujahideen for a clandestine mission and was nearly captured by Soviet forces. His observations on that war-torn country and its ethos are starkly relevant today.

The Impossible H.L. Mencken: A Selection of His Best Newspaper Stories


H.L. Mencken - 1991
    

Newspaper Designer's Handbook [With CDROM]


Tim Harrower - 1991
    The new edition is now in 4-color and introduces a new chapter on web design.. . This textbook is for journalism students and professionals alike. It is loaded with examples, advice, design ideas, and exercises that teach students how to manipulate the basic elements of design (photos, headlines, and text); create charts, maps, and diagrams; design attractive photo spreads; add effective, appealing sidebars to complex stories; create lively, engaging feature page designs; work with color; and redesign a newspaper.

Baghdad Without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia


Tony Horwitz - 1991
    His quest for hot stories takes him from the tribal wilds of Yemen to the shell-pocked shores of Lebanon; from the malarial sands of the Sudan to the eerie souks of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a land so secretive that even street maps and weather reports are banned.As an oasis in the Empty Quarter, a veiled woman offers tea and a mysterious declaration of love. In Cairo, "politeness police" patrol seedy nightclubs to ensure that belly dancers don't show any belly. And at the Ayatollah's funeral in Tehran a mourner chants, "Death to America," then confesses to the author his secret dream--to visit Disneyland.Careening through thirteen Muslim countries and Israel, Horwitz travels light, packing a keen eye, a wicked sense of humor, and chutzpah in almost suicidal measure. This wild and comic tale of Middle East misadventure reveals a fascinating world in which the ancient and the modern collide.

Rythm Oil: A Journey Through The Music Of The American South


Stanley Booth - 1991
    Rythm Oil—you don't have to know how to spell "rhythm" to have it in your body and soul—is a potion sold on Beale Street in Memphis. The home of Sun Records, B. B. King, Elvis Presley, Howlin' Wolf, and Jerry Lee Lewis, Memphis is also the home of fantastic stories and broke-down dreams. As Booth makes his way from Memphis to the Mississippi Delta to the depths of the Georgia woods exploring the sounds, the music, and the culture of the American South, "he has produced some of the most gracefully written, thoughtful, and thought-stirring musings on the characters—the famous and the forgotten, the infamous and the unknown—who command the kingdom or drift through the shadowland of the South's rich-chorded patrimony" (Nick Tosches, Los Angeles Times).

The Bloomberg Way: A Guide for Reporters and Editors


Matthew Winkler - 1991
    Bloomberg News has earned the respect of journalists and readers around the world for its fast, in-depth and accurate stories.The Bloomberg Way, an internal manual compiled over two decades, reflects the new realities of journalism, in which speed is paramount, the impact of news is instantaneous, and the lines between objectivity and opinion are increasingly blurred.The Bloomberg Way is the most thorough and comprehensive guide to reporting and editing the story of money. This indispensable text for both journalism professionals and students outlines the central principles of Bloomberg News, explaining how to write compelling stories while maintaining standards of accuracy, honesty and ethics.The five F's of reporting: Factual, First, Fastest, Final and Future WordThe essentials of writing an enticing lead and organizing story lines when preparing for breaking news on anything from an earnings release to a market crashWays to keep opinion and speculation out of your writingThe Bloomberg Way stylebook is the most important writer's resource of one of the largest news organizations in the world. It informs as it instructs, from how to conduct effective interviews to analyzing financial reports to the imperative for accuracy and integrity in gathering and publishing news.

The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile's Story of Return & Revolution


Andrei Codrescu - 1991
    A Hole in the Flag is both a chronicle of the changes that have taken place in Romania over the past year, and a personal portrait of a man and his emotional attachment to his mother country--a poetic look at joy and disappointment.

Critical Prose and Letters


Osip Mandelstam - 1991
    He was also a brilliant essayist who took the destruction of his culture as one of his main subjects. This comprehensive volume contains most of Mandelstam's essays, reviews, memoirs, reportage, sketches, polemics, forewords, fragments, and notes -- and the major long prose works of the 1930s, including "Fourth Prose," "Journey to Armenia," and "Conversation about Dante."

Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment


Anthony Lewis - 1991
    The centuries of legal precedent behind the Sullivan case and the U.S. Supreme Court's historic reversal of the original verdict are expertly chronicled in this gripping and wonderfully readable book by the Pulitzer Prize -- winning legal journalist Anthony Lewis. It is our best account yet of a case that redefined what newspapers -- and ordinary citizens -- can print or say.

American Stories


Calvin Trillin - 1991
    In these, "the sort of stories you might tell in front of a fire", Calvin Trillin brings together twelve funny, troubling, moving and always revealing narratives--extended pieces that have appeared in The New Yorker over the past seven years.

Desierto: Memories of the Future


Charles Bowden - 1991
    Desierto brings his method to a new pitch of mournful lyricism and visionary power.

Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press


Roger Fowler - 1991
    Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Gothic Rock


Mick Mercer - 1991
    

Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn


Jonathan Cott - 1991
    Fired in 1877 for his brief marriage to a black woman, he wandered from New Orleans to New York to the Caribbean before finally settling in Japan where, in a unique act of self-transformation, he became a Japanese patriot and patriarch. Full of excerpts from Hearn's writing, Jonathan Cott's insightful portrayal of an extraordinary life recovers for a Western audience a unique figure of the nineteenth century.

Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement


Danny Lyon - 1991
    Within a week he was in jail in Albany, Georgia, looking through the bars at another prisoner, Martin Luther King, Jr. Lyon soon became the first staff photographer for the Atlanta-based Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which already had a reputation as one of the most committed and confrontational groups fighting for civil rights. In Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, Lyon tells the compelling story of how a handful of dedicated young people, both black and white, forged one of the most successful grassroots organizations in American history. In addition to his own photographs, Lyon includes here a selection of historic SNCC documents such as press releases, telephone logs, letters, and minutes of meetings. This combination of pictures, contemporary eyewitness reports, and text creates both a work of art and an authentic work of history. As SNCC's staff photographer, Danny Lyon was present at some of the most violent and dramatic moments of civil rights history: Black Monday in Danville, Virginia; the aftermath of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham; the March on Washington in 1963; the violent winters of 1963 and 1964 in Atlanta; and the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. But Lyon's photographs are more than just a record of marches, jailings, and protests. They take us inside the movement - to the meetings, organizing work, and voter registration drives that were the less visible but no less important side of the struggle. By the time Danny Lyon left SNCC andthe South in 1964, there was an emerging focus on black consciousness in the organization. The movement was changing course and pointing North. Many people have since forgotten the idealistic and truly multiracial character of the movement's early years. Lyon's pictures, taken d

Writer's Guide To Book Editors, Publishers, And Literary Agents: Who They Are! What They Want! And How To Win Them Over!


Jeff Herman - 1991
    The comprehensive directory lists names, addresses, phone and fax numbers, e-mail addresses, and Web sites for hundreds of North American publishers and their editors, literary agents, and others.

Newspaper Days


Theodore Dreiser - 1991
    Louis, Pittsburgh, and New York in the 1890s.

Klanwatch: Bringing the Ku Klux Klan to Justice


Bill Stanton - 1991
    

The Complete Book of Feature Writing: From Great American Feature Writers, Editors, and Teachers


Leonard Witt - 1991
    Stories about people, families, small incidents and huge events, written so every reader feels as if he is a part of the story.These stories are all around you, and the world of feature writing is a fertile one. Editors want — and need — good feature writers. Why shouldn't you be one of them?This book provides a thought-provoking look at how to find, write and sell feature stories. You'll gain insight into the feature as you "sit down" with award-winning feature writers, editors and teachers who share their years of experience with you. You'll get get solid advice on everything from defining a story to interviewing your subjects, from finding your own voice to selling your stories. You'll learn that crafting an excellent feature story is much more than getting the words down on paper — it involves character development, and finding the sublime in the mundane aspects of everyday life. And you'll find specific examples of this process, as well as targeted exercises, to help you hone your own feature writing skills.Feature writing topics are infinite and the outlets many. There's room for all kinds of writers with many styles and many aspirations. This book will help you carve your own path to success in the extremely gratifying world of writing feature stories.

Children Of War, Children Of Peace


Robert Capa - 1991