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February 2, 2012 03:48 PM
The Literary Roots of the Gay Revolution
Reviewing Christopher Bram’s Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America | By Christopher Bram | Twelve Books | 371 pages, $27.99
In April of 2011, the pollster Nate Silver of The New York Times observed that four polls in eight months found majority support in the United States for same-sex marriage. Prior to 2010, Silver wrote, just one survey had...
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December 7, 2011 11:48 AM
Hell Yes to Hell No
New book flags ways US targets dissent
Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in 21st-Century America | By Michael Ratner & Margaret Ratner Kunstler | The New Press | 176 pages, $17.95
A number of twentieth-century legal decisions helped establish the US as having one of the freest press systems on earth. In 1925, the US Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protects citizens not only...
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November 29, 2011 01:17 PM
Q&A: News for All the People Co-Author Juan González
The Daily News columnist talks about race and the media
Juan González is a staff columnist for New York’s Daily News, a two-time winner of the George Polk Award for commentary, co-host of Democracy Now!, and former president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, where he was inducted into its Hall of Fame. With Joseph Torres, he is the co-author of News for All the People: The Epic Story...
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November 3, 2011 01:13 PM
A Cook’s Tour with Molly Ivins
A recipe-laden memoir of the columnist’s life and times
Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins: A Memoir with Recipes | By Ellen Sweets | University of Texas Press | 288 pages, $29.95
Molly Ivins was many things; columnist, civil libertarian, “professional Texan.” But she also had a reputation as a fabulous cook and legendary hostess. It’s this side of the writer that friend and fellow foodie Ellen Sweets attempts...
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October 26, 2011 02:25 PM
Notes from Underground
The posthumous memoir of an alternative press pioneer
My Odyssey through the Underground Press | By Michael Kindman | Michigan State University Press | 256 pages, $39.95
We’ve come to expect certain elements from memoirs of 1960s counterculture: weed, LSD, sexual experimentation, communes, Beatles references, and so on and so forth. Michael “Mica” Kindman’s autobiography My Odyssey Through the Underground Press delivers on all of it, but with...
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October 19, 2011 05:13 PM
A Lifesaver Made of Paper
Rosie Garthwaite shows journos how to stay alive in dangerous places
How To Avoid Being Killed In A War Zone | By Rosie Garthwaite | Bloomsbury USA | 304 pages, $16.00
It is difficult to pick up a bright red manual titled How To Avoid Being Killed In A War Zone and not immediately flash to a scene of some poor correspondent, alone and in trouble, desperately looking for the right...
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October 12, 2011 11:30 AM
Defining “Fair Use” for the Digital Age
Aufderheide and Jaszi on how to put the balance back in copyright
Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put the Balance Back in Copyright | By Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi | University of Chicago Press | 216 pages, $17.00
Say you’re an aspiring documentary filmmaker and your subject of choice is the east coast-west coast hip-hop rivalry of the 1990s. It’s likely in your documentary that at some point you’ll focus on...
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October 5, 2011 12:46 PM
A Stranger Everywhere
Ze’ev Rosenkranz traces Albert Einstein’s complicated relationship with Zionism
Einstein Before Israel | By Ze’ev Rosenkranz | Princeton University Press | 364 pages, $35.00
In the 1920s, the general public began to assume a link between Albert Einstein’s work and his wisdom: as his name became shorthand for genius, it began to evoke not just scientific greatness but a vast, wizardly vision that expressed itself in gnomic formulae. By...
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September 28, 2011 12:18 PM
Jonathan Raban Takes the Scenic Route
A review of Driving Home, the essayist’s latest collection
Driving Home: An American Journey | By Jonathan Raban | Pantheon Books | 496 pp, $29.95
It’s a shame that essayist and critic Jonathan Raban is in his comfortable sixties instead of his restless thirties. The world needs a writer like him hopscotching the globe, making sense of the hurricanes, tornadoes, and tsunamis with which we’re bedeviled.
This thought...
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September 21, 2011 02:01 PM
Failures of Vision
Errol Morris interrogates photography's place in the public imagination
Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography | by Errol Morris | The Penguin Press | 336 pages, $40.00
Here’s a theory: every year photographs become more ubiquitous, and as that growing ubiquity builds to a certain critical mass, our collective understanding of photography’s place in our lives becomes more and more diluted, and our need to reconsider...
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September 16, 2011 11:41 AM
Fletch (1985)
Getting the story, one quip at a time
Irwin Fletcher, Fletch to his friends, is an investigative reporter for a Los Angeles newspaper. He writes his columns under the name ‘Jane Doe’ and prefers to work undercover. The tagline for the 1985 comedy Fletch, starring Chevy Chase in the title role, sums up his approach nicely: “Meet the only guy who changes his identity more often than his...
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September 14, 2011 12:09 PM
Tracing the Roots of Modern Conservatism
Remembering the legacies of Thomas Dewey and Robert Taft
The Roots of Modern Conservatism: Dewey, Taft, and the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party | By Michael Bowen | University of North Carolina Press | 272 pp, $45.00.
The origins of the modern conservative movement are ostensibly well-known. William F. Buckley and National Review gave rise to the new right, incarnated in 1964 Republican presidential nominee Barry...
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September 9, 2011 11:34 AM
Call Northside 777 (1948)
Real journalism is too boring for the movies
In an early scene of the 1948 film Call Northside 777, Jimmy Stewart, who plays a reporter at the Chicago Times, interviews a scrubwoman who placed a classified ad (how quaint!) in the paper offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to the exhoneration of her son, who is serving ninety-nine years in prison for killing a cop. The scrubwoman...
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September 1, 2011 06:09 PM
The Parallax View (1974)
(Sometimes) Good Guys Finish Last: Pakula’s sober counterpoint to All The President’s Men
It’s the Fourth of July in Seattle. We’re on the scene with Lee Carter, a young television reporter, who is reporting from the grounds of the Independence Day parade— hand on her hip, purse on her shoulder, dressed all in pink. Carter is earnest but smitten as she announces the arrival of Senator Charles Carroll, who rides in atop a...
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- The Presidential Energy Narrative Campaign coverage takes on a green hue
- Keystone XL Jobs Bewilder Media Reporters still fumbling numbers in wake of pipeline’s rejection
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- USA Today Touts the Government’s Good News on Medicare But was it the full story?
- What Do Ohioans Want from Their Media? Follow the money. Check the facts. And grow a pair.
