The Best American Magazine Writing 2006 (Columbia Contemporary American Religion Series) [Paperback]

The American Society of Magazine Editors (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 28, 2006 | ISBN-10: 0231139934 | ISBN-13: 978-0231139939

In the magazine world, no recognition is more highly coveted or prestigious than a National Magazine Award. Annually, members of the American Society of Magazine Editors, in association with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, select the year's most dynamic, original, provocative, and influential magazine stories. The winning and finalist pieces in this anthology represent outstanding work by some of the most eminent writers in America as well as rising literary and journalistic talents. This prestigious collection includes stories that cover a variety of subjects from Elizabeth Kolbert's investigation into global warming in the New Yorker and James Bamford's look at the PR campaign behind the Iraq War in Rolling Stone to Chris Heath's remarkable profile of Merle Haggard in GQ and Bill Heavey's hilarious account of teaching his daughter to fish in Field and Stream. Other writers include David Foster Wallace ( The Atlantic Monthly), Joyce Carol Oates ( The Virginia Quarterly Review), Priscilla Long ( The American Scholar), Jesse Katz ( Los Angeles Magazine), Marjorie Williams ( Vanity Fair), Hendrik Hertzberg ( New Yorker), Sven Birkerts ( The Virginia Quarterly Review), Erik Reece ( Harper's), Wendy Brenner ( The Oxford American), John Jeremiah Sullivan ( GQ), James Wolcott ( Vanity Fair), and Wyatt Mason ( Harper's).

Wide-ranging in their style and subjects, these writers' stories inform, surprise, entertain, and provide new perspectives on our world. They also reflect elements that distinguish the best in magazine writing: moral passion, investigative zeal, vivid characters and settings, persistent reporting, and artful writing.

(10/16/2006)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The best magazine articles, writes Carter (editor of Vanity Fair), offer a winning combination of access into a new world, disclosure into its secrets and a narrative that transforms information into a compelling story. It's a standard most of these finalists for the American Society of Magazine Editors' annual awards meet with ease. The most sprawling example is David Foster Wallace's profile of talk radio personality John Ziegler (loaded with Wallace's trademark footnotes), but there are also little gems, like Field & Stream columnist Bill Heavey's account of teaching his young daughter to fish. The late Marjorie Williams is represented by her prize-winning essay about learning that she had an inoperable form of liver cancer; other winners include James Banford's reporting about the image consultant who handled the Iraqi invasion for the U.S. government, Elizabeth Kolbert's investigations into global warming and a short story from Joyce Carol Oates. For many readers, though, it's the profiles and feature stories that may hold the most interest, from the prose portrait of Merle Haggard as "The Last Outlaw" to John Jeremiah Sullivan's relating his misadventures at a Christian rock festival. If this anthology were a magazine, everybody would want to subscribe. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Recognizing the winners and finalists in the National Magazine Award, this collection offers some of the finest in investigative and feature writing from well-known and rising talents among American journalists. The collection includes investigative reporting, features, profiles, criticism, and essays in a fascinating breadth of topics delivered with passion, humor, and insight. Priscilla Long, an identical twin, writes about human genetics and cloning, noting that "a genetically identical being is not the same being." James Bamford reveals the covert efforts to foment and market the war in Iraq. David Foster Wallace deconstructs the cynicism and manipulation behind the hosting of talk radio shows. Other writers include Marjorie Williams, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Joyce Carol Oates, and Wyatt Mason. As always, this collection offers readers the opportunity to catch up on the best magazine writing they may have missed. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press (November 28, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231139934
• ISBN-13: 978-0231139939
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #870,923 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Photo by Tony Ober.

Priscilla Long is a Seattle-based writer of poetry, essays, creative nonfictions, fictions, science, and history. She is a longtime teacher of writing to developing professional writers.

She writes a blog-column, Science Frictions, which appears every Wednesday on The American Scholar website: http://theamericanscholar.org/. In Science Frictions science rubs up against the rest of life.

Her new book is The Writer's Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life (2010). The Midwest Book Review called it "a choice advisory and very highly recommended."

"My Brain on My Mind," an abecedarium, appears in the Winter 2010 issue of The American Scholar. "Genome Tome," which also appeared in The American Scholar, received a National Magazine Award for best feature writing.

She is author of Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America's Bloody Coal Industry (1989). Christopher Hitchens called this "an intense and accomplished social history" (New York Newsday). Barbara Kingsolver called it "One of those rare works that asks and answers important questions about who we are...as a nation and how we got to that point" (Women's Review of Books). Howard Zinn commented, "As a piece of historical investigation, it is superbly done. But it is more than a history of the coal industry; it illuminates the development of the American corporate economy in the late 19th and early 20th century, and gives a rare picture of intense class conflict in a country often presumed to lack that. Her account of the Colorado coal strike is not only impeccably accurate but recaptures the drama and excitement of that astonishing event with rare skill."

Priscilla's essays, short stories, and poems appear widely in literary journals such as The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Fourth Genre, Southern Poetry Review, Raven Chronicles, North Dakota Quarterly, The American Scholar, Ontario Review, The Seattle Review, Chattahoochee Review, Passages North, Painted Bride Quarterly, Under The Sun, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Cincinnati Review.

She was a Jack Straw writer for 2009. Her awards also include the Richard Hugo House Founder's Award and awards from the Seattle Arts Commission and the Los Angeles Arts Commission.

She reads her poetry and prose widely, and performed with the Seattle Five Plus One poets during most of the group's existence in the 1990s.

She serves as Senior Editor of www.HistoryLink.org, the online encyclopedia of Washington state history.

She graduated from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and has a Master's of Fine Arts (MFA) degree from the University of Washington.

She was born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and grew up on a dairy farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

Her grandparents on her mother's side were Pennsylvania Dutch. Her paternal grandmother was Scottish, and her paternal grandfather, Walter Long, was descended from the Winslow family, English farmers who migrated to New England in the 1600s.

Walter Long was a reporter for The Philadelpia Bulletin and his grandfather, Stephen Winslow (1826-1907), edited the Philadelphia Commercial List and was known as "the grand old man in the newspaper life of Philadelphia."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Enough high quality items for four stars, April 16, 2007

By 

T. Burket "tburket" (Potomac, MD United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Best American Magazine Writing 2006 (Columbia Contemporary American Religion Series) (Paperback)

Compared to other "Best American..." collections of essays and other members of the family, this one is so-so. Some outstanding contributions and others that did absolutely nothing for me, especially the overly preachy, whiny types. I rather expect non-fiction in collections (rather unfair, I know), so Joyce Carol Oates' fine short story of fiction held its own, but felt a little out of place.

Don't be afraid to give up on or skim any articles that aren't to your liking.

My favorites:

- Marjorie Williams' story of her battle with cancer. Maybe I gave it extra points because I remember her work for the Washington Post. Even if so, truly outstanding, and now I need to read the book of collected works of hers.

- James Bamford's eye-opening and appalling story on the "selling" of the war.

- Wendy Brenner's profile of snake-meister and broadly talented Dean Ripa, someone I had never heard of.

- "The Last Outlaw" on Merle Haggard. I put this one off, thinking the subject wouldn't be very interesting. I was certainly wrong.

- "The Recruit" - try to come up with an interesting wrinkle on military recruiting, without being a polemicist or blatantly one-sided. Jesse Katz did, with his focus on a particular, unusual candidate on his way into the system.

Some comments on others:

- David Foster Wallace's piece from the Atlantic, with its clever, nested footnotes, was amusing. I'm an Atlantic subscriber, which made the piece familiar, plus it's not what I would have chosen as a representative from Atlantic.

- "Girl Meets Bluegill" - very sweet and short, sure to bring a smile to parents.

- "Upon This Rock" - maybe I should have figured this wouldn't be another piece making fun of Christians, since presumably it wouldn't have been fresh enough to be an award winner. Better than expected.

- "Death of a Mountain" - environmental topics appear multiple times in the collection. The destruction of land for coal mining in Kentucky skips the ranting about global issues and hits the other end: how devastating our energy demands can be to the local environment.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Cherry pick the pieces that intrigue you, February 23, 2007

By 

Andy Orrock (Dallas, TX) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Best American Magazine Writing 2006 (Columbia Contemporary American Religion Series) (Paperback)

This compilation is like most of its genre: some of the pieces will intrigue you and compel you to read them; others won't and you can simply skip them. Of course, that list will vary from reader to reader. My personal cherry-pick of the book looked like this:

> 'Host' by David Foster Wallace - Always a delight to read Wallace's footnote-laden, obsessively-researched and minutely-detailed pieces.

> 'The Recruit' by Jesse Katz - A devastating portrait of an Army recruit and the recruiting process.

> 'The Man Who Sold the War' by James Bamford - A portrait of John Rendon; the title of the article says it all. Easy to see why this was awarded the title of 'Best reporting.' Jaw-dropping stuff.

> 'A Matter of Life and Death' by the Marjorie Williams - The author bravely chronicles her own battle with liver cancer.

> 'The Last Outlaw' by Chris Heath - I've never been a Merle Haggard fan...nor am I an anti-fan, but this is simply a spectacularly well-written profile. You get a real sense of Haggard's character. He comes across as personable and honest.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best magazine writing, April 4, 2007

By 

Willie K. Friar "Willie K. Friar, Writer/Lect... (Panama City, RP) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Best American Magazine Writing 2006 (Columbia Contemporary American Religion Series) (Paperback)

I order this collection every year as the editor does indeed choose what I consider the best magazine writing of the year. It is a good way to catch up on the articles you missed during the year. Good for airline reading.