An exemplary work of journalism about journalism, of surpassing interest to any serious consumer of the news.
A deep-dive history of the New York Times in an age of transformation.
The Times, writes veteran political reporter Nagourney, has long borne the sobriquet “the Gray Lady,” but women have seldom figured in its management and upper ranks. The same was true of anyone but white males. As Nagourney, who covered the 2020 election for the paper, writes, this became a source of much concern to the publishers, members of the Sulzberger dynasty, and the paper's editorial and business leadership, who oversaw its transformation not just into a more diverse organization but also one at the forefront of the digital age. It came at a cost: “Newsrooms as a rule are unhappy places: roiled by self-doubt, anger, competitiveness, resentments, and vindictiveness,” and the Times was no exception. Accordingly, episodes of massive bloodletting were not uncommon. In an absorbing case study, Nagourney revisits the checkered career of serial fabulist Jayson Blair, who, in the end, took down his editor, Howell Raines, with him when his inventions were exposed. “I’ve got more arrows in me than Custer’s horse,” Raines once quipped, but this time the horse died. Another critical juncture in the book comes with the tortured saga of the Times’ first woman executive editor, Jill Abramson, whose dismissal stirred up unpleasant memories of a sexual discrimination class action lawsuit filed decades earlier. Nagourney’s account of the Times’ performance during the fraught days after 9/11, the good with the bad, is outstanding. Still, students of the journalism business will most value his study of the halting steps the paper took toward becoming a digital giant, with, today, far more online subscribers than print ones, lending weight to one editor’s observation: “Readers love news articles and narrative. But they clearly want more journalism that doesn’t consist mostly of blocks of text.”
An exemplary work of journalism about journalism, of surpassing interest to any serious consumer of the news.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9780451499363
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
An important dialogue at a fraught time, emphasizing mutual candor, curiosity, and respect.
Two bestselling authors engage in an enlightening back-and-forth about Jewishness and antisemitism.
Acho, author of Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man, and Tishby, author of Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth, discuss many of the searing issues for Jews today, delving into whether Jewishness is a religion, culture, ethnicity, or community—or all of the above. As Tishby points out, unlike in Christianity, one can be comfortably atheist and still be considered a Jew. She defines Judaism as a “big tent” religion with four main elements: religion, peoplehood, nationhood, and the idea of tikkun olam (“repairing the world through our actions”). She addresses candidly the hurtful stereotypes about Jews (that they are rich and powerful) that Acho grew up with in Dallas and how Jews internalize these antisemitic judgments. Moreover, Tishby notes, “it is literally impossible to be Jewish and not have any connection with Israel, and I’m not talking about borders or a dot on the map. Judaism…is an indigenous religion.” Acho wonders if one can legitimately criticize “Jewish people and their ideologies” without being antisemitic, and Tishby offers ways to check whether one’s criticism of Jews or Zionism is antisemitic or factually straightforward. The authors also touch on the deteriorating relationship between Black and Jewish Americans, despite their historically close alliance during the civil rights era. “As long as Jewish people get to benefit from appearing white while Black people have to suffer for being Black, there will always be resentment,” notes Acho. “Because the same thing that grants you all access—your skin color—is what grants us pain and punishment in perpetuity.” Finally, the authors underscore the importance of being mutual allies, and they conclude with helpful indexes on vernacular terms and customs.
An important dialogue at a fraught time, emphasizing mutual candor, curiosity, and respect.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781668057858
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon Element
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A welcome call to grow up and cut out the whining.
The New York Times columnist serves up a cogent argument for shelving the grudge and sucking it up.
In 1976, Tom Wolfe described the “me decade” as a pit of mindless narcissism. A half century later, Bruni, author of Born Round and other bestselling books, calls for a renaming: “‘Me Turning Point’ would have been more accurate, because the period of time since has been a nonstop me jamboree.” Our present cultural situation, he notes, is marked by constant grievance and endless grasping. The ensuing blame game has its pros. Donald Trump, he notes, “became a victor by playing the victim, and his most impassioned oratory, such as it was, focused not on the good that he could do for others but on the bad supposedly done to him.” Bruni is an unabashed liberal, and while he places most of the worst behavior on the right—he opens with Sean Hannity’s bleating lie that the Biden administration was diverting scarce baby formula from needy Americans to illegal immigrants—he also allows that the left side of the aisle has committed its share of whining. A case in point: the silencing of a professor for showing an image of Mohammed to art students, neither religiously proscribed nor done without ample warning, but complained about by self-appointed student censors. Still, “not all grievances are created equal,” he writes. “There is January 6, 2021, and there is everything else. Attempts by leaders on the right to minimize what happened that day and lump it together with protests on the left are as ludicrous as they are dangerous.” Whether from left or right, Bruni calls for a dose of humility on the part of all: “an amalgam of kindness, openness, and silliness might be an effective solvent for grievance.”
A welcome call to grow up and cut out the whining.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781668016435
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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