The 2022 Nonfiction Challenge in July -- Books by Journalists

Welcome to July and another month of non-fiction reading!

For the hot & sultry summer (at least in my 'hood) we're going to be delving into books by journalists. Any book by a professional journalist counts. (What does not count are books written by people who are NOT professional journalists, but who have contributed editorials or other pieces to publications.) If someone has been a journalist, or has become one after a career doing something else, that's fine.

Subject? Whatever your heart desires...

I will be asking Anne to post the covers again!

I will be reading The Murrow Boys by Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson, both of whom are ex-journalists, for this challenge.

Well, I messed up -- but let's stick with it. I made August's challenge for July (blame it on the moving), so we'll just roll with it and shift cross-genres to August. Apologies, but I'm hoping it will be more straightforward for you all to find books for July this way!

Coming up in 2022:

August – *Cross-Genres -- Sometimes the most fascinating books are those that cross genres. For instance, a true crime book that involves the theft of an ancient manuscript. Or a travel book that's also about music or theater (I'm thinking of Bernard Levin's hilarious tour of opera/music festivals). Or a biography that is as much about history as it is the person being profiled. Or someone who is writing about gardening, but when the book itself ends up as a memoir. You know these when you see 'em...

September – Biography -- but NOT memoir this time! (*grin*)

October – *From the 'Middle Ages' to the Renaissance. Yes, I know this is a largely European construct, but it also can involve stories of first contacts as Europeans set off to see what was along the coast of Africa or in the 'New World' in this time frame. Let's put this roughly from 1300 CE to 1600 CE? The earliest parts of the Renaissance (other than the Carolingian Renaissance, of course) were visible by 1300, but it was still the 'Middle Ages'. Open to books that explore ideas that would be developed in this time frame but that start earlier. For instance, Marco Polo's travels took him to China and he and others (including Crusaders) were bringing back new ideas and things that had traveled across the Silk Road, such as paper, which then would permit the creation of a hallmark of the new era, the printing press...

November – Books About Books -- a logical followup from a time-frame focused challenge that includes the birth of the printing press!

December – As You Like It -- Look at the year's best lists; wrap up something you've been wanting to finish; seek out something that defies description/categorization.

*New categories for 2022!ame it on the moving), so we'll just roll with it and shift cross-genres to August. Apologies, but I'm hoping it will be more straightforward for you all to find books for July this way!

Here are my two Journalists for the month:

After the Break by Jen Maxfield and where memories go by Sally Magnusson.

I would love to include Andrei Codrescu with these powerful authors,
but he appears to be everything in writing except a journalist.

Here’s the cover thread. I will come back and post images when I’m at a computer.

                                                                             

I'll be reading The Family Roe by Joshua Prager and Dana Milbank's new book, The Destructionists. After that -- well, we'll see!

I am reading Around the World on Two Wheels by Peter Zheutlin, about his great-grandaunt Annie Londonderry's bicycle trip around the world in the 1890s.

I finished Around the World on Two Wheels this evening. It's one of my top reads for the year so far. A lot of Annie's story has been lost to time. The author did an amazingly thorough job of finding contemporary newspaper accounts from across the globe and reconciling the many inconsistencies in the details that changed every time Annie told her story. It no doubt required countless hours of organizing the source material and comparing the details. Annie's journey is put into the broader context of the early years of cycling, the women's movement, and the late 19th century fad for undertaking similar challenges.

I am going to try to read two books this month. The first is a book bullet that I took from Suzanne some time ago. You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War by Elizabeth Becker. This is a book about journalists and I hope it will count for this month. The second is an oldie that has been around for a long time. An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future by Robert D. Kaplan. This book was published in 1998 and I have wanted to read it for a long time. It might be dated, but I guess I will see that as I read it. Kaplan started out as a journalist and was a well known political pundit early in his career. I hope that makes this book qualify for this month.

>2 alcottacre:
I almost selected Murrow Boys for my second book but decided I was more in the mood for some kind of travel book.

>10 benitastrnad: I hope you enjoy the book you chose!

Oh, I missed this! I was going to skip the cross-genres month and had my journalist book lined up for August, so didn't bother checking the thread - bad me. Anyway, hopefully this month, but if not then August, I've got Fintan O'Toole's Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain lined up. I must be some sort of glutton for punishment, Brexit never doesn't make me angry. But reading about it from an Irish perspective will be a useful thing, I think - especially given the spectacular cluster**** of the UK govt not considering the Irish border at all during the Brexit campaign and then wondering why it's turned out to be impossible to resolve.

I am doing lots of enjoyable reading on my first book for this month. It is You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War by Elizabeth Becker and it is REALY good. I heard about this book because it was a book bullet from Suzanne a couple of years ago. We had it in our library so I choose it for this month and it is very good. Thanks Suzanne for shouting out about this one when you read it. I am glad you got my attention with it.

The book is about three of the premier reporters who worked the Vietnam War in the 1960's. They were the first women reporters to be allowed to cover combat and so gave a unique perspective on the war. There is lots of history in this book and lots of social history as well. All of the women faced the war and they faced the social stigma attached to their sex by those in the US State Department and the US military. I am doing lots of bookmarking in this book.

I have just had my first 5 star read of the year! You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War by Elizabeth Becker is an amazing fast paced read. This is a great good fast paced work of nonfiction that reads like it is a novel. It is about three amazing women, Catherine Leroy, Frances Fitzgerald, and Kate Webb, who were journalists covering the war in Southeast Asia in the 1960's and 1970's. Each of the three have an amazing story. Cathy Leroy was French, Kate Webb from Australia, and Frances Fitzgerald was a scion of New York socialites. Each played a profound role in how the Vietnam War was covered as well as being the first women covering combat. They set the standard and defined the role, and what a standard it turned out to be. Fitzgerald wrote some of the best books about the causes and problems of the American policy in Southeast Asia, and Webb was the first to cover Cambodia and predicted what would happen there. Leroy's pictures are some of the most lasting images of the war that are stuck in the public mind. This book makes me want to go read some of the books that they were reading when they were struggling with how to write the Vietnam War, as well as some of the books that they wrote. I am ashamed to say that I had never heard of these women or the role they played in history. Happily, this book has remedied that situation.

This one was a book bullet from Suzanne a couple of years ago and boy am I glad that she promoted this book. It is very good. This is one for anybody who is interested in the history of Indochina, Cambodia, and the Vietnam War. Just in case you missed it - I highly recommend this one. It may be hard to find, but if all else fails there is always ILL. Use it to get this book. It isn't a big book, but it sure packs alot of history and action between its covers.

Thanks Suzanne for pushing this book when you read it. It will be worth the time and effort to track down this book and read it.

I am going to start An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future by Robert D. Kaplan as my second book for this month. This is an old book - it was written in 1998 but I wanted to read it to see if what it has to say was prescient for the time, or not. Kaplan is a well known political pundit and his Wikipedia page says that Kaplan presents conflicts in the contemporary world as the struggle between primitivism and civilizations. Another frequent theme in Kaplan's work is the reemergence of cultural and historical tensions temporarily suspended during the Cold War. This book, Empire Wilderness is not about foreign affairs. It is about the American West and I am eager to see what he has to say about that part of America.

While taking books off the shelf at the library (we are boxing them because our library is closing. The books will go to another library here on campus.) I came across another book by Elizabeth Becker. This one is America's Vietnam War: A Narrative History so I decided to check it out and see how Becker did with a related topic. This book was published in 1992 so it is an older book, but if she wrote it as well as she did You Don't Belong Here then it will be a good read.

>12 Jackie_K: I hope you're 'enjoying' your Brexit book... I agree that the Irish situation is an important twist on the subject, especially given the history of the UK and Ireland and the Good Friday accords. One thing that could make me loathe Brexiteers even more is their utter indifference to Ireland. And now that Nicola Sturgeon is promising another referendum for Scotland -- well, things could become even more 'interesting'....

I thought Joshua Prager's take on the abortion controversy, The Family Roe, was handled brilliantly. With "Jane Roe" and the landmark case at the heart of the narrative, he deftly covers the landscape in terms of the history of abortion and government involvement in regulating it (and regulating women's reproductive rights by also sterilizing the "unfit"), as well as those who advocated for women's rights to choose and the pro-life movement. He does a deft and respectful job writing about the generations of women in Norma McCorvey's family, from her grandmother to her own daughters (including the "Roe baby) and how constraints to their lives limited ALL aspects of their freedom, not just their reproductive freedom. There are few heroes here, and it's chastening to read how Norma was exploited by both sides in the abortion debate. Yes, she was uneducated and a maverick, but those advocating reproductive choice used her as much as the pro-life folks did later in her life. In a way, this is a tragedy, even an epic tragedy, that for me goes to the heart of what the abortion debate should emphasize. How do we ensure that all of us are able to pursue our opportunities and make our choices about the life we want to live; how do we provide stable and loving childhoods, education, opportunities and encouragement? In a way, perhaps, part of the need for abortion signals we have failed in these. Women and girls are vulnerable to abuse, they don't have access to contraception, they don't have a sense of self-worth that allows them to be independent of men should they choose. We don't support families, especially those headed by single women. And so the Roe cycle continues.

>16 benitastrnad: Glad you enjoyed the Elizabeth Becker book, Benita. And it definitely qualifies as she has been a journalist for most of her working life! (Frankie Fitzgerald, btw, is now married to a former colleague of mine; I have loved her work since first reading her iconic book about Vietnam.) I think the book that put Becker on the map for me was one she wrote about returning to Cambodia as part of a tiny group of invited writers and "allies" to witness Pol Pot's regime. It starts with her time in Phnom Penh during the downfall of the Lon Nol government and the arrival of the Khmer Rouge, then deals with what the Khmer call the "Pol Pot time" and its horrors (which she recognizes she didn't fully grasp then) and finally the Vietnamese invasion that brought about the collapse of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. The book came out in the mid/late 1980s, long before it was possible for most of us to safely visit Cambodia, and I seized on it (having come of age against the backdrop of the Indochinese wars, and vividly recalling how, while I was on a ski trip in early 1979, the world came perilously close to war when Vietnam's invasion was followed by Chinese incursions into northern Vietnam (China backed the Khmer Rouge), and then the Soviet Union sent warships from Murmansk down the coast of China as a threatening gesture...) The book is When The War Was Over. It's almost the only contemporaneous account of the Khmer Rouge by an outsider (anyone who accidentally ended up in Cambodia, ended up in the Tuol Sleng torture center and then in the killing fields...) that I know of, and is valuable from that POV.

Yes, I was finally able to go to Cambodia in 2002 (together with a trip to Vietnam and Laos). What was astonishing to me was the different sense I got from each country. Laos was my first stop, and it felt like a country left behind in time. Still ruled by the postwar Communists, extremely poor, very sleepy (I was in Luang Prabang and there were no street lights there; people set out braziers on the curbs to mark where sidewalks ended). And yet very welcoming, in a subdued way. Vietnam was fast-paced, a bit like China in the early Deng Xiaoping years; everyone looking for a way to make money and prosper. And Cambodia? An entire country still trapped in trauma. I suspect it will be another 50 years before the legacy of those horrific years can recede in immediacy.

I started reading The Bulldog and the Helix: DNA and the Pursuit of Justice in a Frontier Town as a book written by a journalist but I only got part way into it when I realized it fit the description of a cross-genre book, something I thought I'd never find. So I've put it on the back burner for now. I've picked up The Billionaire Murders: The Mysterious Deaths of Barry and Honey Sherman for this month's challenge instead.

The Dog with the Chip in His Neck was just added.

The title chapter is not a favorite, but many others are great fun and serious inspiration.

I'm hoping to read Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City, Pulitzer Prize winner by NY Times journalist, Andrea Elliott.

Well, I finally got around to posting cover images. I might read Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, or American Prison by Shane Bauer. I'm also interested in Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City.

>21 AnneDC:
Oh such pretty pictures! thanks.

Here's the image for the book I'm reading.

>17 Chatterbox: I live in Scotland and voted for independence in 2014; I would again too the next time. But honestly, I don't think there's quite enough will for it - there may be a tiny majority for independence now, but it would be another 52-48 situation, and look how well that worked with Brexit (sigh). I do think Scottish independence is likely in my lifetime, but whether it happens next year - well, we'll see, but I'll not hold my breath this time.

I've now finished Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain, and as usual from Fintan O'Toole this was an astutely-observed, often entertaining, and (as a Brit) pretty close-to-the-mark observation of the long lead-up to what eventually transpired in 2016. He lays the blame significantly (not entirely, of course) at the door of the mainstream media for egging on certain narratives about British exceptionalism, and not challenging or even highlighting other narratives at all, but his most savage portrayals are of the politicians and wannabes who jumped on the Brexit bandwagon. He also draws on a number of literary references to explain why things are as they are (including, somewhat unexpectedly, Fifty Shades of Grey). This would have been funny if it wasn't about something so utterly damaging and pointless. I'd definitely recommend his take on Brexit though, he definitely exposes the whole Emperor's New Clothes aspect of it. Le sigh.

I'm going away for a couple of weeks, but hoping to pick up an edited volume by Hardeep Matheru, Wokelore: Boris Johnson's Culture War and Other Stories. She's the editor of the Byline Times, a relatively new, unashamedly left-wing, monthly online newspaper, which does some really high-quality investigation work.

An investigative reporter for the Toronto Star, took on the puzzling story of the deaths of Barry and Honey Sherman in The Billionaire Murders: The Mysterious Deaths of Barry and Honey Sherman. It was interesting to learn more about the couples’ background and their complicated relationships with their children and other family. This all seemed to be exacerbated by Barry’s wealth and how he liked to help people out with his money. Was this the motive behind their deaths?

I know more about the background of the case now but there has been no resolution to this case. I wonder if there will ever be.

Over the past few years, The Byline Times has established itself as a hard-hitting alternative to the UK mainstream media. An online, subscription-based newspaper, it is unashamedly left-wing, and as it is not owned by shareholders or random rich blokes, it is refreshingly free of the tiptoeing round issues that is far too common in the news media these days. Edited by the paper's editor, Hardeep Matharu, Wokelore: Boris Johnson's Culture War and Other Stories is an anthology of articles from the first couple of years of the paper, from 2019, incorporating the aftermath of the Brexit vote, as well as the impact of the covid pandemic, the end of the Trump presidency, and other foreign stories too. This is a compelling account of the politics of the last 2 or 3 years, refreshing in its honesty, and depressing in the picture it paints of political corruption, incompetence, and love of power.

I finally finished The Murrow Boys tonight after starting it in late July. I thought it was an excellent look at how Edward R. Murrow and his associates changed the way that reporting was handled as it transitioned from print to radio.