A revelatory collection reminding us of what journalism used to be—and what it ought to be.
A collection of key pieces of the renowned journalist, who died unexpectedly at 58 in 2015.
Arranged more or less chronologically, these pieces commence in the 1980s, when Carr (The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life, His Own, 2008), a Minnesota native, was a freelancer in his home state. Gradually, we move through his other gigs: Family Times (a monthly local in the Twin Cities), Twin Cities Reader, Washington City Paper, Atlantic Monthly, New York Magazine, and the New York Times, where he died in the newsroom. The earlier pieces include some very personal ones about his substance abuse and struggles with cancer, but there are also investigative pieces about other assorted topics, including hungover airline pilots and a gay political candidate. Throughout are a number of celebrity profiles: Tom Arnold, Sally Quinn, Neil Young, Bill Cosby, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robert Downey Jr. (In the Cosby piece, Carr chides himself for not pursuing the rape allegations about the now-incarcerated comedian.) The author also provides coverage of Bill Clinton’s impeachment, 9/11, and the journalism profession (plagiarism, Fox News, the toxic effects of Ann Coulter). Related to all of this is an 11-page copy of a journalism syllabus for a course he taught at Boston University. Sometimes the pieces are thematically arranged. Near the end are two separated by 12 years; both deal with the view as drivers approach New York City (the author was commuting from New Jersey at the time). Throughout the book, Carr displays profound care about his craft, flashes of humor, and, when necessary, genuine fangs: See his 2015 piece about a neighbor’s cat, and witness the gleam of his verbal scalpel that vivisects Coulter. Carr’s wife, Jill, served as the editor for the book, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, who worked for Carr at Washington City Paper, provides the foreword.
A revelatory collection reminding us of what journalism used to be—and what it ought to be.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-358-20668-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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