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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: texts > Essays, journals, letters & other prose works > From 1900
Welcome to the favela, welcome to the rainforest, welcome to the real Brazil. This is the Brazil where a factory worker is loyal to his company for decades, only to find out that they knew the product he was making would eventually poison him. This is the Brazil where the mothers of the favela expect their sons to die as victims of the drug trade while still in their teens. This is the Brazil where the women initiated into the old Amazonian tradition of 'baby-pulling' deliver babies in their own time, far away from the drugs and scalpels of the modern hospital. In the company of award-winning journalist Eliane Brum, we meet the individuals struggling to stay afloat in a society riven by inequality and violence, and witness the resilience of spirit and commitment to life that makes Brazil one of the most complicated, most exhilarating places on earth.
A classic collection of the New Yorker's most urgent and groundbreaking reporting from the front lines of the climate emergency In 1989, just one year after climatologist James Hansen first came before a Senate committee and testified that the earth was now warmer than it had ever been in recorded history, thanks to humankind's heedless consumption of fossil fuels, New Yorker writer Bill McKibben published a deeply reported and considered piece on climate change and what it could mean for the planet. At the time, the piece was to some speculative to the point of alarmist; read now, McKibben's work is heroically prescient. Since then, the New Yorker has devoted enormous attention to climate change, describing the causes of the crisis, the political and ecological conditions we now find ourselves in, and the scenarios and solutions we face. The Fragile Earth tells the story of climate change - its past, present, and future - taking readers from Greenland to the Great Plains, and into both laboratories and rain forests. It features some of the best writing on global warming from the last three decades, including Bill McKibben's seminal essay 'The End of Nature,' the first piece to popularize both the science and politics of climate change for a general audience, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Elizabeth Kolbert, as well as Kathryn Schulz, Dexter Filkins, Jonathan Franzen, Ian Frazier, Eric Klinenberg, and others. The result, in its range, depth, and passion, promises to bring light, and sometimes heat, to the great emergency of our age.
Sir Philip Gibbs was one of the most widely read English journalists of the first half of the twentieth century. This coverage of his writing offers a broad insight into British social and political developments, government and press relations, propaganda, and war reporting during the First World War.
_______________ '[An] acutely observed collection of occasional pieces that pick at absurdist life and reveal him to be a quiz, a cultural critic gifted with precise comic timing' - The Times 'Yes, Jacobson is an entertainer ... And he does indeed entertain, but in a way that stimulates rather than simply amuses' - Sunday Telegraph 'Nobody does it better than Jacobson' - Observer _______________ It takes a particular kind of man to want an embroidered polo player astride his left nipple. Occasionally, when I am tired and emotional, or consumed with self-dislike, I try to imagine myself as someone else, a wearer of Yarmouth shirts and fleecy sweats, of windbreakers and rugged Tyler shorts, of baseball caps with polo players where the section of the brain that concerns itself with aesthetics is supposed to be. But the hour passes. Good men return from fighting Satan in the wilderness the stronger for their struggle, and so do I. The winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize, Howard Jacobson, brims with life in this collection of his most acclaimed journalism. From the unusual disposal of his father-in-law's ashes and the cultural wasteland of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to the melancholy sensuality of Leonard Cohen and desolation of Wagner's tragedies, Jacobson writes with all the thunder and joy of a man possessed. Absurdity piles upon absurdity, and glorious sentences weave together to create a hilarious, heartbreaking and uniquely human collection. This book is not just a series of parts, but an irresistible, unputdownable sum which triumphantly out-Thurbers Thurber. _______________ 'The no-nonsense tone, coupled with a coherent defence of truth, even in uncomfortable circumstances, shows the essayist as a natural comedian' - Prospect 'Jacobson is one of the great sentence-builders of our time. I feel I have to raise my game, even just to praise ... In short, he is one of the great guardians of language and culture - all of it. Long may he flourish' - Nicholas Lezard, Guardian
What is the difference between choking and panicking? Why are there
dozens of varieties of mustard-but only one variety of ketchup?
What do football players teach us about how to hire teachers? What
does hair dye tell us about the history of the 20th century?
Open your eyes to a new world view with 100 women and nonbinary photojournalists' stories from behind the lens. 85% of photojournalists are men. That means almost everything that is reported in the world is seen through men's eyes. Similarly, spaces and communities men don't have access to are left undocumented and forgotten. With the camera limited to the hands of one gender, photographic 'truth' is more subjective than it seems. To answer this serious ethical problem, Women Photograph flips that bias on its head to show what and how women and nonbinary photojournalists see. From documenting major events such as 9/11 to capturing unseen and misrepresented communities, this book presents a revisionist contemporary history: pore over 50 years of women's dispatches in 100 photographs. Each image is accompanied by 200 words from the photographer about the experience and the subject, offering fresh insights and a much-needed perspective. Until we have balanced, representative reporting, the camera cannot offer a mirror to our global society. To get the full picture, we need a diverse range of people behind the lens. This book offers a first step. Relearn how to see with this evergreen catalogue that elevates the voices of women and nonbinary visual storytellers.
Our annual anthology of finalists and winners of the National Magazine Awards 2014 includes Jonathan Franzen's eloquent rumination in "National Geographic" on the damage we continue to inflict on the environment and its long-lasting consequences; William T. Vollman's blackly comic reflections in " Harper's" magazine on being the target of an extensive FBI investigation into whether he could be the Unabomber, an anthrax mailer, or a jihadi terrorist; and Ariel Levy's account of extreme travel and great escape to a remote land -- while pregnant -- in the "New Yorker." Other essays include Wright Thompson's bittersweet profile of Michael Jordan's fifty-something second act ( "ESPN"); Jean M. Twenge's revealing look at fertility myths and baby politics ( "The Atlantic"); David Kamp's poignant portrait of a small town recovering from one of the nation's worst mass shootings ( "Vanity Fair"); Janet Reitman's controversial study of the Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev ( "Rolling Stone"); Ted Conover's eye-opening account of working undercover in a commercial slaughterhouse ( "Harper's"); and Wells Tower's wild tale of bonding with his father at a notorious art and music festival ( "GQ"). The collection also features a short story by the critically acclaimed author Zadie Smith ( "The New Yorker"). Other contributors: Steven Brill ( "Time")Emily DePrang ( "Texas Observer")Kyle Dickman ( "Outside")Steve Friedman ( "Runner's World")J. Hoberman ( "Tablet Magazine")Stephen Rodrick ( "New York Times Magazine")Witold Rybczynski ( "Architect")Matthew Shaer ( "The Atavist")
Elizabeth Gaskell is best known as a novelist and biographer, but she was also a lively and sensitive letter writer, with a vivacious interest in all that was going on around her. This selection from her letters, with a linking commentary, provides a biography of Gaskell largely in her own words. It is in chronological order, with special chapters devoted to her family life, her travels, her charities and her life as an author who was also a wife and mother, in a period when Victorian society and culture were undergoing major changes - especially apparent in the Manchester where she lived. She emerges as a woman of intelligence, integrity and grace, with an enchanting sense of humour, an insatiable curiosity about life, a deep regard for truth and a boundless sympathy for others. This selection by John Chapple, and assisted by John Geoffrey Sharps, was originally published in 1980. With the support of the Gaskell Society it has been reprinted without alteration, except for some new illustrations.
'Maeve's Times is funny and clever and kind, which are excellent qualities in both books and people' Irish Times 'As someone who fell off a chair not long ago trying to hear what they were saying at the next table in a restaurant, I suppose I am obsessively interested in what some might consider the trivia of other people's lives.' Maeve Binchy is well known for her bestselling novels, but for many years Maeve was a journalist. From 'The Student Train' to 'Plane Bores' and 'Bathroom Joggers' to 'When Beckett met Binchy', these articles have all the warmth, wit and humanity of her fiction. Arranged in decades, from the 1960s to the 2000s, and including Maeve's first and last ever piece of writing for the Irish Times, the columns also give a fascinating insight into the author herself. With an introduction written by her husband, the writer Gordon Snell, this collection of timeless writing reminds us of why the leading Irish writer was so universally loved.
A TLS and a Prospect Book of the Year A revelatory, explosive new analysis of the military today. Over the first two decades of the twenty-first century the British Army fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, at considerable financial and human cost. Yet neither war achieved its objectives. Award-winning journalist Simon Akam questions why, and provides challenging but necessary answers. Composed from assiduous documentary research, field reportage, and hundreds of interviews, this book is a strikingly rich, nuanced portrait of one of our pivotal national institutions in a time of great stress. This is as much a book about Britain, and about the politics of failure, as it is about the military.
The Joseph Roth revival has finally gone mainstream with the thunderous reception for "What I Saw," a book that has become a classic with five hardcover printings. Glowingly reviewed, "What I Saw" introduces a new generation to the genius of this tortured author with its "nonstop brilliance, irresistible charm and continuing relevance" (Jeffrey Eugenides, "New York Times Book Review"). As if anticipating Christopher Isherwood, the book re-creates the tragicomic world of 1920s Berlin as seen by its greatest journalistic eyewitness. In 1920, Joseph Roth, the most renowned German correspondent of his age, arrived in Berlin, the capital of the Weimar Republic. He produced a series of impressionistic and political essays that influenced an entire generation of writers, including Thomas Mann and the young Christopher Isherwood. Translated and collected here for the first time, these pieces record the violent social and political paroxysms that constantly threatened to undo the fragile democracy that was the Weimar Republic. Roth, like no other German writer of his time, ventured beyond Berlin's official veneer to the heart of the city, chronicling the lives of its forgotten inhabitants: the war cripples, the Jewish immigrants from the Pale, the criminals, the bathhouse denizens, and the nameless dead who filled the morgues. Warning early on of the dangers posed by the Nazis, Roth evoked a landscape of moral bankruptcy and debauched beauty a memorable portrait of a city and a time of commingled hope and chaos. "What I Saw," like no other existing work, records the violent social and political paroxysms that compromised and ultimately destroyed the precarious democracy that was the Weimar Republic."
George Julian Harney was one of the half-dozen most important leaders of Chartism. This selection from the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle is the first book to reprint any of his journalism. Harney is a key figure in the history of English radicalism. His long life witnessed the Chartist movement from 1830s through to the beginnings of socialism from the 1880s. He wrote about literature, foreign affairs and politics, subjects that should interest anyone with an interest in Victorian Studies. In his youth Harney was an admirer of the most radical figures of the French Revolution. The youngest member of the first Chartist Convention, he was an advocate of physical-force Chartism in 1838-9. His interest to historians has tended to be as the friend of Marx and Engels, the publisher of the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto and leader, with Ernest Jones, of the Chartist left in the early 1850s. Yet his finest period had been 1843-50, when he worked on the Northern Star: for five years he was an outstanding editor of a great newspaper. Almost everyone will be astonished to discover that not only did he live until as late as 1897, but also that in the 1890s he was producing a weekly column for the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle edited by W.E. Adams, another old Chartist and his younger admirer. The column was superbly written, politically challenging, and vigorously polymathic. This is the first selection of Harney's writings to be published.
For over twenty years, people turned to A. A. Gill's columns every Sunday - for his fearlessness, his perception, and the laughter-and-tear-provoking one-liners - but mostly because he was the best. 'By miles the most brilliant journalist of our age', as Lynn Barber put it. This is the definitive collection of a voice that was silenced too early but that can still make us look at the world in new and surprising ways. In the words of Andrew Marr, A.. A. Gill was 'a golden writer'. There was nothing that he couldn't illuminate with his dazzling prose. Wherever he was - at home or abroad - he found the human story, brought it to vivid life, and rendered it with fierce honesty and bracing compassion. And he was just as truthful about himself. There have been various collections of A. A. Gill's journalism - individual compilations of his restaurant and TV criticism, of his travel writing and his extraordinary feature articles. This book showcasesthe very best of his work: the peerlessly funny criticism, the extraordinarily knowledgeable food writing, assignments throughout the world, and reflections on life, love, and death. Drawn from a range of publications, including the Sunday Times, Vanity Fair, Tatler and Australian Gourmet Traveller, The Ivy Cookbook and his books on England and America, it is by turns hilarious, uplifting, controversial, unflinching, sad, funny and furious.
Every day, a powerful and sophisticated underground business delivers thousands of refugees along the Mediterranean coasts of Europe. A new breed of criminals, risen from the post-9/11 political chaos and the fi asco of the Arab Spring, coupled with the destabilization of Syria and Iraq and the rise of ISIS, controls it. The ever-increasing political volatility has offered them new business opportunities, from trafficking millions of refugees to selling Western hostages to jihadist groups. The kidnapping industry in the Middle East is now worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Loretta Napoleoni's exclusive and meticulous research into the business of kidnap and ransom, and its link to terrorist activity, is based on first-hand accounts - from interviews with hostage negotiators to the experiences of former hostages themselves. Merchants of Men is a fascinating and eye-opening exploration of this most shocking of financial interdependencies.
Jon Mee explores the popular democratic movement that emerged in the London of the 1790s in response to the French Revolution. Central to the movement's achievement was the creation of an idea of 'the people' brought into being through print and publicity. Radical clubs rose and fell in the face of the hostile attentions of government. They were sustained by a faith in the press as a form of 'print magic', but confidence in the liberating potential of the printing press was interwoven with hard-headed deliberations over how best to animate and represent the people. Ideas of disinterested rational debate were thrown into the mix with coruscating satire, rousing songs, and republican toasts. Print personality became a vital interface between readers and print exploited by the cast of radicals returned to history in vivid detail by Print, Publicity, and Popular Radicalism in the 1790s. This title is also available as Open Access.
Economic growth is a constant mantra of politicians, economists and the media. Few understand what it is, but they love and follow it blindly. The reality is that since the global financial crisis, growth has vanished in the more industrialised economies and in the so-called developing countries. Politicians may be panicking, but is this really a bad thing? Using real-life examples and innovative research, acclaimed political economist Lorenzo Fioramonti lays bare society's perverse obsession with economic growth by showing its many flaws, paradoxes and inconsistencies. He argues that the pursuit of growth often results in more losses than gains and in damage, inequalities and conflicts. By breaking free from the growth mantra, we can build a better society that puts the wellbeing of all at its centre. A wellbeing economy would have tremendous impact on everything we do, boosting small businesses and empowering citizens as the collective leaders of tomorrow. Wellbeing Economy is a manifesto for radical change in South Africa and beyond.
Why are journalists and politicians trusted to tell the truth as little as estate agents? How can democracy function when everybody just believes whatever they want? Will we ever return to "normal"? Written in an engaging and accessible style for a broad audience, After the Fact? examines how neoliberal and centrist ideologies, unaccountable technology corporations, corporate and governmental mendacity, and complacent, shoddy journalism have combined to produce the political crisis we find ourselves in, and what the challenges will be if we are to survive it. Using a wide array of issues and examples - from identity politics to conspiracy theories to corruption scandals - this book is an entertaining appraisal of our changing relationship to political truth, taking issue with standard discourses around "fake news" and "post-truth".
From the author of The Empathy Exams comes a profound meditation on isolation, longing and the conflicts faced by all those who choose to tell true stories about the lives of others. 'Intelligent, compassionate, and so fiercely, prodigiously brave. This is the essay at its creative, philosophical best' - Eleanor Catton, author of The Luminaries on The Empathy Exams A profound exploration of the oceanic depths of longing and obsession, Make It Scream, Make It Burn is a book about why and how we tell stories. It takes the reader deep into the lives of strangers - from a woman healed by the song of 'the loneliest whale in the world' to a family convinced their child is a reincarnation of a lost pilot - and asks how we can bear witness to the changing truths of other's lives while striving to find a deeper connection to the complexities of our own.
Between 1925 and 1951, Kent Cooper transformed the Associated Press, making it the world's dominant news agency while changing the kind of journalism that millions of readers in the United States and other countries relied on. Gene Allen's biography is a globe-spanning account of how Cooper led and reshaped the most important institution in American--and eventually international--journalism in the mid-twentieth century. Allen critically assesses the many new approaches and causes that Cooper championed: introducing celebrity news and colorful features to a service previously known for stodgy reliability, pushing through disruptive technological innovations like the instantaneous transmission of news photos, and leading a crusade to bring American-style press freedom--inseparable from private ownership, in Cooper's view--to every country. His insistence on truthfulness and impartiality presents a sharp contrast to much of today's fractured journalistic landscape. Deeply researched and engagingly written, Mr. Associated Press traces Cooper's career as he built a new foundation for the modern AP and shaped the twentieth-century world of news.
Since the beginning of human history, stories have helped people make sense of their lives and their world. Today, an understanding of storytelling is invaluable as we seek to orient ourselves within a flood of raw information and an unprecedented variety of supposedly true accounts. In Stories Make the World, award-winning screenwriter Stephen Most offers a captivating, refreshingly heartfelt exploration of how documentary filmmakers and other storytellers come to understand their subjects and cast light on the world through their art. Drawing on the author's decades of experience behind the scenes of television and film documentaries, this is an indispensable account of the principles and paradoxes that attend the quest to represent reality truthfully.
Since the beginning of human history, stories have helped people make sense of their lives and their world. Today, an understanding of storytelling is invaluable as we seek to orient ourselves within a flood of raw information and an unprecedented variety of supposedly true accounts. In Stories Make the World, award-winning screenwriter Stephen Most offers a captivating, refreshingly heartfelt exploration of how documentary filmmakers and other storytellers come to understand their subjects and cast light on the world through their art. Drawing on the author's decades of experience behind the scenes of television and film documentaries, this is an indispensable account of the principles and paradoxes that attend the quest to represent reality truthfully.
This set of essays offers new insights into the journalistic process and the pressures American front-line reporters experienced covering World War II. Transmitting stories through cable or couriers remained expensive and often required the cooperation of foreign governments and the American armed forces. Initially, reporters from a neutral America documented the early victories by Nazi Germany and the Soviet invasion of Finland. Not all journalists strived for objectivity. During her time reporting from Ireland, Helen Kirkpatrick remained a fierce critic of this country's neutrality. Once the United States joined the fight after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, American journalists supported the struggle against the Axis powers, but this volume will show that reporters, even when members of the army sponsored, Stars and Stripes were not mere ciphers of the official line. African American reporters Roi Ottley and Ollie Stewart worked to bolster the morale of Black GIs and they undermine the institutional racism endemic to the American war effort. Women front-line reporters are given their due in this volume examining the struggles to overcome gender bias by examining triumphs of Therese Mabel Bonney, Lee Carson, Iris Carpenter, and Anne Stringer. The line between public relations and journalism could be a fine one as reflected by the U.S. Marine Corps creating its own network of Marine correspondents who reported on the Pacific island campaigns and had their work published by American media outlets. Despite the pressures of censorship, the best American reporters strove for accuracy in reporting the facts even when dependent on official communiques issued by the military. Many war-time reporters, even when covering major turning points, sought to embrace a reporting style that recorded the experiences of average soldiers. Often associated with Ernie Pyle and Bill Mauldin, the embrace of the human-interest story served as one of the enduring legacies of the conflict. Despite the importance of American war reporting in shaping perceptions of the war on the home front as well as shaping the historical narrative of this conflict, this work underscores how there is more to learn. Readers will gain from this work and new appreciation of the contribution of American journalists in writing the first version of history as the global struggle against Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy. |
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