Best of
Journalism
2022
Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom
Carl Bernstein - 2022
Inquisitive, self-taught―and, yes, truant―Bernstein landed a job as a copyboy at the Evening Star, the afternoon paper in Washington. By nineteen, he was a reporter there.In Chasing History, Bernstein recalls the origins of his storied journalistic career as he chronicles the Kennedy era, the swelling civil rights movement, and a slew of grisly crimes. He spins a buoyant, frenetic account of educating himself in what Bob Woodward describes as “the genius of perpetual engagement.”Funny and exhilarating, poignant and frank, Chasing History is an extraordinary memoir of life on the cusp of adulthood for a determined young man with a dogged commitment to the truth.
The Naked Don't Fear the Water: An Underground Journey with Afghan Refugees
Matthieu Aikins - 2022
He is one of millions of refugees who leave their homes that year.Matthieu Aikins, a journalist living in Kabul, decides to follow his friend. In order to do so, he must leave his own passport and identity behind to go underground on the refugee trail with Omar. Their odyssey across land and sea from Afghanistan to Europe brings them face to face with the people at heart of the migration crisis: smugglers, cops, activists, and the men, women and children fleeing war in search of a better life. As setbacks and dangers mount for the two friends, Matthieu is also drawn into the escape plans of Omar's entire family, including Maryam, the matriarch who has fought ferociously for her children's survival.Harrowing yet hopeful, this exceptional work brings into sharp focus one of the most contentious issues of our times. The Naked Don't Fear the Water is a tale of love and friendship across borders, and an inquiry into our shared journey in a divided world.
American Muckraker: Rethinking Journalism for the 21st Century
James O'Keefe - 2022
Compiled from over a decade of investigative reporting coupled with a vast reference of philosophical research, American Muckraker is the definitive guide of truth-telling in the video age.ON POWER They do have tremendous power. But in part it is because we give it to them. We are nothing, but we are not alone. Awe cannot live in fear. The moment you stop caring about what the media establishment thinks of you, is the moment you become truly free. ON INSIDERS The USPS whistleblower, a Marine Corp combat veteran said, “I would rather be back in Afghanistan, getting shot at by Afghans, honest to God,” than be interrogated by federal agent Russell Strasser—who coerced him by saying, “I am trying to twist you a little bit because your mind will kick in…. I am not scaring you, but I am scaring you.” ON PRIVACY The right to record is closely tied to the right to speak or even to take contemporaneous notes about what one sees and hears. As 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt quipped, “People committing malfeasance don’t have any right to privacy…. What are we saying—that Upton Sinclair shouldn’t have smuggled his pencil in?” ON MEANS & ENDS Whereas the novelist Ernest Hemingway said, “What is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after,” Thomas B. Morgan of the 1960s New Journalism contends, “Morally defensible journalism is rarely what you feel good about afterward; it is only that which makes you feel better than you would otherwise.” ON LITIGATION “Polling does not decide the truth nor speak to evidence…. The New York Times have not met their burden to prove that Veritas is deceptive…claiming protections from an upstart competitor armed with a cell phone and a website. There is a substantial basis in law to proceed, to permit Project Veritas, to conduct discovery into The New York Times.” —Project Veritas v. New York Times Company; New York Supreme Court, March 18, 2021
The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir
Karen Cheung - 2022
But in a place that never allowed you to write your own history, even remembrance can be a radical act. Hong Kong has long been known as a city of extremes: a former colony of the United Kingdom that today exists at the margins of an authoritarian, ascendant China; a city rocked by mass protests, where residents once rallied against threats to their democracy and freedoms. But it is also misunderstood and often romanticized, its history and politics simplified for Western headlines. Drawing richly from her own experience, as well as interviews with musicians, protesters, and writers who have made Hong Kong their home, journalist Karen Cheung gives us an insider’s view of this remarkable city at a critical moment in history—both for Hong Kong and democracies around the world. Coming of age in the wake of Hong Kong’s reunification with China in 1997, Cheung traverses the multifold identities available to her in childhood and beyond, whether that was her experience at an English-speaking international school where her classmates would grow up to be “global citizens” struggling to fit in with the rest of Hong Kong, or within her deeply traditional, multilingual family. Along the way, Cheung gives a personal account of what it’s like to seek out affordable housing and mental healthcare in one of the world’s most expensive cities. She also takes us deep into Hong Kong’s vibrant indie music and literary scenes–youth-driven spaces of creative resistance. Inevitably, Cheung brings us with her to the protests, where her understanding of what it means to belong to Hong Kong finally crystallized. Weaving together memoir, cultural criticism, and reportage, The Impossible City transcends borders to chart the parallel journeys of both a young woman and a city as they navigate the various, sometimes contradictory, paths of coming into one’s own.
Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World: what China's Crackdown Reveals about Its Plans to End Freedom Everywhere
Mark L. Clifford - 2022
In preparation for handing the territory over to China in 1997, Deng Xiaoping promised that it would remain highly autonomous for fifty years. An international treaty established a Special Administrative Region (SAR) with a far freer political system than that of Communist China—one with its own currency and government administration, a common-law legal system, and freedoms of press, speech, and religion.But as the halfway mark of the SAR’s lifespan approaches in 2022, it is clear that China has not kept its word. Universal suffrage and free elections have not been instituted, harassment and brutality have become normalized, and activists are being jailed en masse. To make matters worse, a national security law that further crimps Hong Kong’s freedoms has recently been decreed in Beijing. This tragic backslide has dire worldwide implications—as China continues to expand its global influence, Hong Kong serves as a chilling preview of how dissenters could be treated in regions that fall under the emerging superpower’s control.Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World tells the complete story of how a city once famed for protests so peaceful that toddlers joined grandparents in millions-strong rallies became a place where police have fired more than 10,000 rounds of tear gas, rubber bullets and even live ammunition at their neighbors, while pro-government hooligans attack demonstrators in the streets. A Hong Kong resident from 1992 to 2021, author Mark L. Clifford has witnessed this transformation firsthand. As a celebrated publisher and journalist, he has unrivaled access to the full range of the city’s society, from student protestors and political prisoners to aristocrats and senior government officials. A powerful and dramatic mix of history and on-the-ground reporting, this book is the definitive account of one of the most important geopolitical standoffs of our time.
Against the Tide: The best of Roger Scruton's columns, commentaries and criticism
Roger Scruton - 2022
In this book are assembled the very best of his essays and commentaries, arranged thematically. The selection has been made and edited by Mark Dooley, Scruton's literary executor.Throughout this collection, Scruton proves himself to be at his most scintillating and controversial. He writes with passion and conviction about such varied topics as feminism, racism, fascism, Tony Blair and Donald Trump, as well as subjects like global warming, music and architecture. He takes aim at those who defy conservative common sense in favour of liberal falsehoods.This book shows Scruton at his most brilliant and demonstrates how his influence will remain strong and enduring.
The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson: A Battle for Racial Justice at the Dawn of the Civil Rights Era
Chris Joyner - 2022
His first trial lasted only a day and featured a lackluster public defense. The book also tells the story of Homer Chase, a former World War II paratrooper and New England radical who was sent to the South by the Communist Party to recruit African Americans to the cause while offering them a chance at increased freedom. And it’s the story of Thurgood Marshall’s NAACP and their battle against not only entrenched racism but a Communist Party—despite facing nearly as much prejudice as those they were trying to help—intent on winning the hearts and minds of Black voters. The bitter battle between the two groups played out as the sides sparred over who would take the lead on Henderson’s defense, a period in which he spent years in prison away from a daughter he had never seen. Through it all, The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson is a portrait of a community, and a country, at a crossroads, trying to choose between the path it knows is right and the path of least resistance. The case pitted powerful forces—often those steering legal and journalistic institutions—attempting to use racism and Red-Scare tactics against a populace that by and large believed the case against Henderson was suspect at best. But ultimately, it’s a hopeful story about how even when things look dark, some small measure of justice can be achieved against all the odds, and actual progress is possible. It’s the rare book that is a timely read, yet still manages to shed an informative light on America’s past and future, as well as its present.
Still Doing Life: 22 Lifers, 25 Years Later
Howard Zehr - 2022
Twenty-five years later, Zehr revisited many of the same individuals and photographed them in the same poses. In Still Doing Life, Zehr and co-author Barb Toews present the two photos of each individual side by side, along with interviews conducted at the two different photo sessions, creating a deeply disturbing tableaux of people who literally have not moved for the past quarter-century.In the tradition of other compelling photo books including Milton Rogovin’s Triptychs and Nicholas Nixon’s The Brown Sisters, Still Doing Life offers a riveting longitudinal look at a group of people over an extended period of time—in this case with devastating implications for the American criminal justice system. Each night in the United States, more than 200,000 men and women incarcerated in state and federal prisons will go to sleep facing the reality that they may die without ever returning home. There could be no more compelling argument to stop this inhumane practice than the photos and interviews in this book.
Behind Closed Doors: Why We Break Up Families – and How to Mend Them
Polly Curtis - 2022
Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War
Deborah Cohen - 2022
As cub reporters in the 1920s, they roamed across a war-ravaged world, sometimes perched atop mules on wooden saddles, sometimes gliding through countries in the splendor of a first-class sleeper car. While empires collapsed and fledgling democracies faltered, they chased deposed empresses, international financiers, and Balkan gun-runners, and then knocked back doubles late into the night.Last Call at the Hotel Imperial is the extraordinary story of John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson. In those tumultuous years, they landed exclusive interviews with Hitler and Mussolini, Nehru and Gandhi, and helped shape what Americans knew about the world. Alongside these backstage glimpses into the halls of power, they left another equally incredible set of records. Living in the heady afterglow of Freud, they subjected themselves to frank, critical scrutiny and argued about love, war, sex, death, and everything in between.Plunged into successive global crises, Gunther, Knickerbocker, Sheean, and Thompson could no longer separate themselves from the turmoil that surrounded them. To tell that story, they broke long-standing taboos. From their circle came not just the first modern account of illness in Gunther's Death Be Not Proud--a memoir about his son's death from cancer--but the first no-holds-barred chronicle of a marriage: Sheean's Dorothy and Red, about Thompson's fractious relationship with Sinclair Lewis.Told with the immediacy of a conversation overheard, this revelatory book captures how the global upheavals of the twentieth century felt up close.
Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City
Darren Byler - 2022
He shows that the mass detention of over one million Uyghurs in “reeducation camps” is part of processes of resource extraction in Uyghur lands that have led to what he calls terror capitalism—a configuration of ethnoracialization, surveillance, and mass detention that in this case promotes settler colonialism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the regional capital Ürümchi, Byler shows how media infrastructures, the state’s enforcement of “Chinese” cultural values, and the influx of Han Chinese settlers contribute to Uyghur dispossession and their expulsion from the city. He particularly attends to the experiences of young Uyghur men—who are the primary target of state violence—and how they develop masculinities and homosocial friendships to protect themselves against gendered, ethnoracial, and economic violence. By tracing the political and economic stakes of Uyghur colonization, Byler demonstrates that state-directed capitalist dispossession is coconstructed with a colonial relation of domination.
Savage Journey: Hunter S. Thompson and the Weird Road to Gonzo
Peter Richardson - 2022
Thompson’s literary formation, achievement, and continuing relevance. Savage Journey is a "supremely crafted" study of Hunter S. Thompson's literary formation and achievement. Focusing on Thompson's influences, development, and unique model of authorship, Savage Journey argues that his literary formation was largely a San Francisco story. During the 1960s, Thompson rode with the Hell's Angels, explored the San Francisco counterculture, and met talented editors who shared his dissatisfaction with mainstream journalism. Author Peter Richardson traces Thompson's transition during this time from New Journalist to cofounder of Gonzo journalism. He also endorses Thompson's later claim that he was one of the best writers using the English language as both a musical instrument and a political weapon. Although Thompson's political commentary was often hyperbolic, Richardson shows that much of it was also prophetic. Fifty years after the publication of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and more than a decade after his death, Thompson's celebrity continues to obscure his literary achievement. This book refocuses our understanding of that achievement by mapping Thompson's influences, probing the development of his signature style, and tracing the reception of his major works. It concludes that Thompson was not only a gifted journalist, satirist, and media critic, but also the most distinctive American voice in the second half of the twentieth century.