Journalism Memoir

Peter Jukes, an award-winning TV crime writer, starts at the beginning: October 2013 and the Old Bailey is gearing up for an eight-month courtroom clash. It's a showdown that will pit tabloid newspaper executives in Rupert Murdoch's News International against the British state. The journalists are accused of phone hacking, corrupting public officials, and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. After years of cover up involving News International, the Metropolitan Police, and the government, the judge tells the jury, "British justice is on trial."

In the early sixties, Calvin Trillin got his start as a journalist covering the Civil Rights Movement in the South. Over the next five decades of reporting, he often returned to scenes of racial tension. Now, for the first time, the best of Trillin’s pieces on race in America have been collected in one volume.

The Allied invasions of Sicily and Italy in 1943 were bloody and pivotal, securing the Mediterranean, capitalizing on the overthrow of Mussolini, and pinning down German troops that could have been used on the Russian Front or in France after D-Day. The men who made the Allied victories in Sicily and Italy possible - soldiers and officers, bombardiers and drivers, doctors and generals - are honored and remembered in these minutes by famed war correspondent Richard Tregaskis.

For over 25 years, award-winning journalist Henry Bradsher reported stories from around the world. In this lively and engaging account, Bradsher recounts episodes from a distinguished career that took him to the Himalayas, the jungles of Bhutan, Kremlin caviar receptions, China's Forbidden City, and the battlefields of Vietnam. Throughout, Bradsher emphasizes the unpredictability of a correspondent's life and the strains, perils, and privileges of standing witness to momentous world events.

The biggest crime story in American history began on the night of March 1, 1932, when the 20-month-old son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh was snatched from his crib in Hopewell, New Jersey. The news shocked a nation enthralled with the aviator, the first person to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic. American law enforcement marshalled all its resources to return “Little Lindy” to the arms of his parents - and perhaps even more energized were the legions of journalists catering to a public whose appetite for Lindbergh news was insatiable.

In this perceptive, compelling essay, Katharine Murphy offers a profile of Anthony Albanese in motion – a piece about character, the balance of forces, and the mood of the nation. Are Albanese and his party up for change? Are Australians up for it? What does the new prime minister embody, if anything? Has the centre of the polity shifted, with the success of the Teals and the Greens? Where could – and should – the new government be ambitious?

The inner workings of a writer’s life, the interplay between experience and writing, are brilliantly recounted by a master of the art. Gay Talese now focuses on his own life—the zeal for the truth, the narrative edge, the sometimes startling precision, that won accolades for his journalism and best-sellerdom and acclaim for his revelatory books about The New York Times (The Kingdom and the Power), the Mafia (Honor Thy Father), the sex industry (Thy Neighbor’s Wife), and, focusing on his own family, the American immigrant experience (Unto the Sons).

Bill Littlefield (NPR's Only a Game) presents the second installment in the Library of America series devoted to classic American sportswriters, a definitive collector's edition of the pathbreaking writer who invented the long-form sports story.

Media and law enforcement work at cross-purposes. Law enforcement wants to solve a case as fast as possible and put the guilty behind bars. The media wants a case to drag on as long as humanly possible and do all they can to extricate every last bit of drama—drop by bloody drop—in order to hold the attention of the millions of viewers who have gotten hooked. Law enforcement must abide by rules. The media make their own rules, or break them, or find loopholes to work around them.

August 21, 2013: A chemical weapons attack on the suburbs of Damascus reminds the world of the existence of the Syrian war. Hundreds of journalists from every corner of the world rush to the frontier only to leave disappointed when Obama decides not to bomb. They leave behind 200,000 estimated victims, and more than half of a population of 22 million people dispersed or refugeed in nearby countries: the worst humanitarian crisis since WWII according to the UN.

The voice is Anna Quindlen's. But we know the hopes, dreams, fears, and wonder expressed in all her columns, for most of us share them. With her New York Times-based column, "Life in the 30s", Anna Quindlen valued to national attention, and this wonderful collection shows why. As she proved in Object Lessons and Thinking Out Loud, Anna Quindlen's views always fascinate.

There's No Crying in Newsrooms tells the stories of remarkable women who broke through barrier after barrier at media organizations around the country over the past four decades. They started out as editorial assistants, fact checkers, and news secretaries and ended up running multi-million-dollar news operations that determine a large part of what Americans read, view, and think about the world.

Coming Full Circle: From Jim Crow to Journalism is the memoir of an African American woman who grew up privileged and educated in the restricted culture of the American South in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite Jim Crow laws that affected where she lived, how she was educated, and what civil rights she would be denied, Lloyd would become one of the first African American women to be the top editor of a mainstream daily newspaper. Her memoir is a window on the intersection of race, gender, culture, and the media’s role in our uniquely American experiment in democracy.

Over his 30-year career at Condé Nast, Nicholas Coleridge has witnessed it all. From the anxieties of the Princess of Wales to the blazing fury of Mohamed Al-Fayed, his story is also the story of the people who populate the glamorous world of glossy magazines. With relish and astonishing candour, he offers the inside scoop on Tina Brown and Anna Wintour, David Bowie and Philip Green, Kate Moss and Beyonce and a surreal weekend away with Bob Geldof and William Hague.

From humble junior reporter on the Luton News to globe-trotting feature writer for the Daily Mail and a sometime television executive - this is Leslie Watkins - Les to his friends - reporting the news over 70 years. He tells of Fleet Street in its heyday revealing what went on inside the newspaper world, of scoop after scoop, fake news, murder, and political corruption. Honest, humorous, surprising, and sometimes tragic his journalist's eye view of the world, of breaking news, drink fuelled editorial feuds, and dirty tricks lifts the lid on journalism's golden age.

The colorful, sentimental, funny, affectionate, cantankerous memoir by the most colorful, funniest, most cantankerous-- and probably the most revered-- sportswriter of the last fifty years. Dan Jenkins is accepted as one of the greatest (if not the greatest) golf writer of all time, wrote beloved bestselling novels and abused more corporate expense accounts than anyone who ever lived. It's a touching, laugh-out-loud tribute to the romanticism of old-time sportswriting-- and the glory days of sports.

It's a story almost too tawdry to be true—a con woman prostitute who met the descendant of a Founding Father in a brothel, duped him into marriage using an infant purchased from a baby farm, then went to prison for stabbing the couple's baby nurse—all while in a common-law marriage with another man. The scandal surrounding Evangeline and Robert Ray Hamilton, though little known today, was one of the sensations of the Gilded Age.

In the 1970s, Frank Lucas was the king of the Harlem drug trade, bringing in over a million dollars a day. He lived a glamorous life, hobnobbing with athletes, musicians, and politicians, but Lucas was a ruthless gangster. He was notorious for using the coffins of dead GIs to smuggle heroin into the United States, and, before being sentenced to 70 years in prison, he played a major role in the near death of New York City.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank takes a fair and balanced look at the unsettling rise of the silly Fox News host Glenn Beck. Thomas Jefferson famously wrote that the tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. In America in 2010, Glenn Beck provides the very refreshment Jefferson had in mind: Whether he's the patriot or the tyrant, he's definitely full of manure.

This dramatic story of two men's efforts to save a small Wisconsin daily from obliteration at the hands of the nation's largest newspaper chain brings together startling case histories of the dubious tactics practiced by Gannett and unsparing insights into the newspaper industry.