Amazon.com Review
Nearly a century has passed since the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer endowed the journalism prize that bears his name, observing, "Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to known the right and the courage to do it, can preserve the public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery." Over that period,
The New York Times and its writers have taken more Pulitzer prizes than any other newspaper, and the sampling of their work that Anthony Lewis offers in this collection ably shows why this should be so.
Taking in book reviews, commentaries on art and architecture, editorials, news pieces, and work that falls into the comparatively new genre of "news analysis," that sampling is more than a celebration of a single newspaper, influential though it may be; it is also a record of historical events as they have unfolded. An entry by Harrison Salisbury, for example, documents the Soviet Gulag system, "so routine, ordinary, and common ... that local residents seem not to have the slightest embarrassment about such phenomena." Another, by Sydney Schanberg, renders a surreal slice-of-life portrait of a Cambodian town undergoing round-the-clock shelling. Still another, by Nicholas Kristof, relates the tragedy of Tiananmen Square as "bullets swooshed overhead or glanced off buildings." Closer to home, the anthology also includes pieces on race relations in America, now-forgotten crimes, and the Reagan-era initiative to build the "Star Wars" antimissile system.
For readers with an interest in world history, contemporary affairs, and good writing alike, Lewis's anthology offers many rewards. --Gregory McNamee
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Lewis (Gideon's Trumpet) a writer with the New York Times for nearly five decades and himself a two-time Pulitzer winner succeeds in presenting some of the world's best recent journalism. This is a book best dipped into for the pleasure of its writing. There are plenty of both prominent and almost-forgotten stories: "Red" Smith on the near-bankruptcy of New York City in the 1970s, Max Frankel on Nixon's 1972 visit to China, Linda Greenhouse on failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. Lewis's fine introductory essay describes the post-Vietnam transformation of American journalism. The war and Watergate, he contends, made the press more skeptical of those in power and more confrontational in tone. Pulitzer Prizes increasingly went to fearless reporters like David Halberstam, whose tragically prescient analysis, in 1963, of the worsening situation in Vietnam constitutes one of the highlights of this book. The American military in Vietnam, wrote Halberstam, faced a bloody quagmire, "a situation like the one that defeated the French in the 1945-54 Indochinese war." Another highlight is Lewis's own analysis of the Warren court, which moved aggressively to "federalize" legal protections in the areas of civil rights and criminal due process. It's a paragon of accessible legal writing. Perhaps the best, and certainly the most important, piece in the collection is Mirta Ojito's unforgettable recent story of two Cuban immigrants, one black and one white and how race comes to define and divide the two friends once they move to Miami. The piece is everything great journalism should be: empathetic, unmistakably relevant and a challenge to our basic ideals. For anyone interested in recent history or journalism at its best, this book will prove worthwhile. Agent, the Wylie Agency.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
