Deadline Artists--Scandals, Tragedies and Triumphs:: More of America's Greatest Newspaper Columns
With more and more people predicting the demise of print journalism, here’s a reminder of how good it can be. The list of contributor names reads like a journalistic all-star team: Breslin, Buchwald, Dexter, Hecht, Hemingway, Ivens, Kirkpatrick, Lippmann, Mencken, Pyle, Reston, Royko, Runyon—and that’s just a small selection. This is the kind of book you can open at random and find a gem: H. L. Mencken’s commentary on the Scopes Monkey Trial; Damon Runyon’s sharp-eyed portrait of Al Capone at the gangster’s tax-evasion trial; Art Buchwald’s funny-but-also-angry piece about a (fictional) black man’s attempt to register for the vote in 1965 Alabama; Jack London’s eyewitness account of the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; Mike Royko’s incredibly moving 1979 column about the death of his wife; William Laurence’s 1945 firsthand account of the bombing of Nagasaki. If you want to know what good and occasionally history-making journalism looks like, this is the book for you. Needless to say, journalism students should consider it required reading. --David Pitt