Journalism Reads

102 Minutes, by New York Times journalists Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, is a nonfiction account that chronicles 102 minutes inside and outside the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Published in 2005, it was a National Book Award finalist that year.  The day begins like many others, with workers inside the buildings comprising over 220 vertical acres checking emails and sipping coffee at 8:30 a.m. Others arrive after dropping off their children at... Read 102 Minutes Summary

All the President’s Men (1974) is the story of the most famous American political scandal of the 20th century. Written by Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the book follows in exacting detail their investigation into the Watergate Hotel break-in and subsequent coverup of that crime. The case began with a story on an unusual burglary attempt at the Democratic National Headquarters in the summer of 1972. It eventually evolved into an investigation... Read All the President's Men Summary

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Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction book by journalist and poet Eliza Griswold. This study guide follows the book’s first edition, which was published in 2018. Griswold is a journalist known for investigative reporting into political issues, having previously published articles in The New York Times Magazine and The Nation. In Amity and Prosperity, Griswold investigates natural gas companies drilling in Pennsylvania’s western Washington County. The... Read Amity and Prosperity Summary

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Black Like Me is a sociological memoir written by John Howard Griffin in 1960. It takes place in 1959 in the deep South of the United States during the end of the segregation era. Griffin, a white man, assumes the appearance and life of a Black man and records his experiences in an attempt to create understanding and bridge gaps between Black and white Americans. Black Like Me was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for... Read Black Like Me Summary

In Blowout, TV host and political commentator Rachel Maddow interconnects a series of global events, all woven together by one common thread: the oil and gas industry. Through the various vignettes, Maddow offers readers a book that is part rallying cry, part exposé, part investigative journalism. Blowout sheds light on forgotten, buried news stories that have been swallowed up and dissolved into the status quo. From the opening anecdote about a Russian gas station opening... Read Blowout Summary

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Crazy: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness, published in 2006, is a blend of memoir and journalism by the author and Washington Post journalist Pete Earley. The book was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2007. Earley’s son, Mike, struggles to receive a diagnosis for his mental illness, resulting in Mike’s arrest and subsequent struggles with the criminal justice system. Earley juxtaposes Mike’s story with the stories of other mentally ill individuals in... Read Crazy Summary

IntroductionFast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal is a 2001 nonfiction book by Eric Schlosser that investigates the business practices of the American fast food industry and the associated agricultural industries that supply it. Following the precedent of Upton Sinclair’s famous 1906 work The Jungle, Schlosser provides readers with a glimpse into the questionable ethics of these large food corporations. Schlosser likewise provides brief historical accounts of fast food’s origins and traces... Read Fast Food Nation Summary

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a 1971 novel by American author Hunter S. Thompson. The book chronicles the story of journalist Raoul Duke and his attorney Doctor Gonzo who drive to Las Vegas, ostensibly to cover an iconic off-road vehicle race. However, they are also looking to “find the American Dream” and take with them a car’s load of hard drugs. Duke is a fictionalized surrogate for Thompson, while Gonzo is based off... Read Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas Summary

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Full Body Burden: Growing up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats is a 2012 nonfiction account by Kristen Iversen. Half memoir, half investigative journalism, the book covers Iversen’s life in a town near Denver, Colorado, as well as Rocky Flats—the nearby nuclear production facility. Quiet, observant, and adventurous, Iversen is the oldest of four children. The family keeps many pets, and Iversen adores horseback riding on their pasture at a new neighborhood near Rocky Flats... Read Full Body Burden Summary

Ghettoside, written by Jill Leovy and published in 2015, follows the investigation of and trial for the murder of Bryant Tennelle, the son of a Los Angeles homicide detective, through the late 2000s. In doing so, the author examines the critical epidemic of black-on-black violence in communities such as South Central Los Angeles in order to explicate the root causes, systemic issues, and contemporary problems that continue to contribute to higher rates of homicide in... Read Ghettoside Summary

Gideon’s Trumpet, written in 1964, is a book that details a landmark court case, Gideon v. Wainwright, that came before the Supreme Court of the United States of America in 1963. It tells the story of Clarence Gideon, whose case became the key foundation of the modern interpretation of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments: that criminal defendants have a right to counsel at both the federal and state level even if they cannot afford a... Read Gideon’s Trumpet Summary

Hiroshima, an account of the first atomic bomb used in warfare, is a nonfiction book by John Hersey. Alfred A. Knopf published it in 1946, several months after it first appeared as an article in the New Yorker. The magazine ran the article at the end of August 1946, just after the first anniversary of the dropping of the bomb, devoting the entire issue to the lengthy piece. The issue sold out immediately and was... Read Hiroshima Summary

Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) is a photojournalistic account of New York City’s working class of the late 19th century and the tenements that housed them. Riis exposes the appalling and often inhumane conditions in and around the tenements. He attributes New York City’s squalor and degradation to sheer greed on the part of landlords who prioritize maximum profits over basic decency. More importantly, he documents these conditions with more than 40... Read How the Other Half Lives Summary

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Henry Sydnor Harrison’s murder mystery “Miss Hinch” is a short story that debuted in McClure’s Magazine in 1911. Harrison was an American novelist, short story author, and journalist from Sewanee, Tennessee, who was born in 1880. The story follows two crafty women through chilly New York streets. Gossip about Miss Hinch, an actress-turned-murderess, pulses through the city as she remains on the run. She uses her skill with costume to evade capture while being chased... Read Miss Hinch Summary

Newjack is a nonfiction book written by Ted Conover. Conover, a journalist, spends a year as a correction officer in Sing Sing Prison and keeps a detailed record of events in a spiral notebook. The story takes place largely at Sing Sing, a historic prison located in Ossining, New York. Sing Sing is a palimpsest of structures dating back to the 1800s: spread across fifty-five acres, the prison includes massive cell blocks, a solitary-housing unit... Read Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing Summary

Barbara Demick’s 2010 nonfiction book, Nothing to Envy, is based on interviews with North Korean defectors from the city of Chongjin, six of whom are profiled in the book. It relays the history of modern Korea, from the end of Japanese occupation after WWII, to the division of Korea into two by the United States, to the economic rise and fall of the North Korean state in the late 20th century. There is a particular... Read Nothing to Envy Summary

Oil on Water is a 2010 novel by Helon Habila, who originally worked as a journalist and poet in Nigeria before becoming a professor of creative writing at George Mason. His writing has earned many accolades, including the Music Society of Nigeria national poetry award, the 2001 Caine Prize, the 2003 Commonweath Writers Prize, the 2008 Emily Balch Prize, and the 2015 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. Oil on Water is his third novel, and foregrounds... Read Oil on Water Summary

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Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County is a 2015 nonfiction book by Kristen Green about the closing of public schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia from 1959 to 1964, following the 1954 United States Supreme Court ruling that school segregation is unconstitutional. During the five years the public schools were closed, black students in Prince Edward County largely went uneducated while a new private school for whites, Prince Edward Academy, opened. The book... Read Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County Summary

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The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster is a nonfiction book published in 2013 by the American journalist Jonathan M. Katz. Katz, a reporter for the Associated Press (AP), gives a detailed, firsthand account of the 2010 earthquake that devastated the Caribbean island nation of Haiti. The book is a journalist's chronicle of the causes and consequences of a natural disaster, how it can... Read The Big Truck That Went By Summary

The Blind Side tells the intersecting stories of Michael Oher (who, after the book’s timeline, went on to have a long career as an NFL left tackle) and how the NFL’s passing game evolved. Folded into these two stories is that of Tom Lemming, who became the first person to evaluate high school football players both independently and on a national scale. His player evaluations impacted college recruiting, shifting it from a regional to a... Read The Blind Side Summary

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In October of 1936, American journalist and novelist John Steinbeck wrote a series of essay-style articles for The San Francisco News on the migration of hundreds of thousands of white farmworkers from the Midwest and the South to work in California’s booming agricultural sector. Known together as The Harvest Gypsies, these seven articles are compiled in the nonfiction book The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath, which was first published in... Read The Harvest Gypsies Summary

The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media is a nonfiction graphic novel written by journalist Brooke Gladstone and illustrated by Josh Neufeld. Throughout, Gladstone’s objective is to resist the idea that the media are a machine that manipulates consumers' minds without consent. Instead, she argues that the media are a “degrading, tedious, and transcendent funhouse mirror of America” (xxi). The media “do not control” (xiv) consumers, the media “pander” (xiv) to them. Consumers fear... Read The Influencing Machine Summary

The Landry News is a young adult novel by Andrew Clements, published in 1998.  It centers on a school newspaper and the lives it touches, the lessons it teaches, and the power it gives people to stand up for their beliefs. The book received the William Allen White Children's Book Award in 2002 and has been translated into five languages. American author Andrew Clements (1949-2019) penned many books for young readers, including his most famous work... Read The Landry News Summary

The Orchid Thief is a nonfiction book by Susan Orlean, originally published in 1998. It is a narrative nonfiction account of the crimes and trial of John Laroche, accused of stealing endangered orchid species from the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve in Florida. The basic story of Laroche and his crimes originally ran as an article in The New Yorker, entitled “Orchid Fever” and published in 1995. The book expands the story and also details Orlean’s... Read The Orchid Thief Summary

The Pelican Brief is a 1992 novel by the American writer John Grisham. The legal thriller tells the story of Darby Shaw, a young law student who uncovers a vast conspiracy. The book was adapted into a film in 1993 starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington.Plot SummaryAn assassin named Khamel kills two Supreme Court Justices. Though the Justices were seemingly at different ends of the political spectrum, the same mysterious figure pays Khamel to kill... Read The Pelican Brief Summary

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The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row, is a 2018 memoir written by Anthony Ray Hinton (with cowriter Lara Love Hardin)—a man who spent nearly three decades on death row in Alabama.  For his book and for subsequent activism to fight the death penalty at large, public figures from Desmond Tutu to Richard Branson praised Hinton's efforts. Hinton is now a renowned speaker on prison reform, forgiveness, and hope... Read The Sun Does Shine Summary

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Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich is a collection of 35 first-person oral accounts of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the former Soviet Union. Originally published in Russian in 1997, the book was translated into English by Keith Gessen in 2005; it has been translated into almost every European language. Alexievich, a Belarusian investigative journalist, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for Voices from Chernobyl in... Read Voices from Chernobyl Summary

War, a battle journal by best-selling reporter and filmmaker Sebastian Junger, describes a year in the rugged highlands of Afghanistan with a platoon of American soldiers who face the worst fighting and toughest conditions of any unit in the US military. Published in 2010, the book describes months of mind-numbing danger, multiple firefights per day, injuries and deaths, and matter-of-fact heroism. The men display extreme toughness, gallows humor, and intense mutual loyalty despite the nearly... Read War Summary

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (1998) describes the Hutu majority’s slaughter of at least 800,000 Tutsis in 100 days in 1994—with author and journalist Philip Gourevitch documenting the meticulous planning behind the genocide. Gourevitch chastises the international community, especially the United States and France, for failing to stop the genocide in accordance with obligations under the Genocide Convention. Visiting Rwanda one year after... Read We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families Summary

Kate Fagan’s What Made Maddy Run: The Secret Struggles and Tragic Death of an All-American Teen (2017) centers on Madison Holleran, a promising young athlete at the University of Pennsylvania who committed suicide in 2014. This is a work of narrative journalism that grew out of Fagan’s award-winning ESPN essay “Split Image” (2015). Fagan brings her experiences as a college athlete on a Division I team and her expertise as a sports journalist to explore... Read What Made Maddy Run Summary