Showing titles in Journalists, Editors & Publishers

From the great biographer of the Romantics, This Long Pursuit is a sweeping exploration of a career devoted to the art of life-writing. Thirty years ago Richard Holmes published Footsteps - a revolutionary novel that would become a best seller and influence profoundly a whole generation of younger writers. The Long Pursuit is a companion audiobook in that it ranges widely over the arts, science, poetry and inspiration to reflect upon the practice and importance of biographical writing.

The purpose of this insider's account is to provide an answer to all these questions and more. Andrew Marr's brilliant, and brilliantly funny, book is a guide to those of us who read newspapers, or who listen to and watch news bulletins but want to know more. Andrew Marr tells the story of modern journalism through his own experience.

Sir David Frost, who died suddenly in August 2013, was the only person to have met and interviewed every British Prime Minister since Harold Wilson as well as seven Presidents of the United States. Other world leaders he interviewed included Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Vladimir Putin, Henry Kissinger, Benazir Bhutto, Shimon Peres, Yasser Arafat and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Ida B. Wells is an American icon of truth telling. Born to slaves, she was a pioneer of investigative journalism, a crusader against lynching, and a tireless advocate for suffrage, both for women and for African Americans. She cofounded the NAACP, started the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago, and was a leader in the early civil rights movement. This engaging memoir relates Wells’ private life as a mother as well as her public activities as a teacher, lecturer, and journalist in her fight for equality and justice.

Laura Kasinof studied Arabic in college and moved to Yemen a few years later - after a friend at a late-night party in Washington, DC, recommended the country as a good place to work as a freelance journalist. When she first moved to Sanaa in 2009, she was the only American reporter based in the country. She quickly fell in love with Yemen’s people and culture, in addition to finding herself the star of a local TV soap opera.

Not a single country anywhere in the world has achieved gender equality. In more than a few countries, progress for women has stalled or is reversing. Voters in the United States chose a misogynist over a female candidate for president. Yet in many of these countries, the majority of politicians and business leaders profess to believe in gender equality - as well they might. One report predicts a boost to global GDP of £8.3 trillion by 2025 simply by making faster progress towards narrowing the gender gap.

Before turning to her life of crime - running a one-woman forgery business out of a phone booth in a Greenwich Village bar and even dodging the FBI - Lee Israel had a legitimate career as an author of biographies. But by 1990, almost broke and desperate to hang onto her Upper West Side studio, Lee made a bold and irreversible career change: inspired by a letter she’d received once from Katharine Hepburn, and armed with her considerable skills as a researcher and celebrity biographer, she began to forge letters in the voices of literary greats.

After that summer in Kabul province, the young freelancer became a staff reporter for The Times of London, covering conflicts in Northern Ireland, the Gulf, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Balkans, but Afghanistan never let him go. Death of a Translator is a searingly honest description of a mind haunted and eventually paralysed by the terror of post-traumatic stress disorder.

A poignant, often comical account of coming-of-age in the time after the Cold War and before Putin, One Ukrainian Summer evokes a unique moment in one country's history, and is a love letter to its people and culture.

Kim Barker is not your typical, impassive foreign correspondent—she is candid, self-deprecating, laugh-out-loud funny. At first an awkward newbie in Afghanistan, she grows into a wisecracking, seasoned reporter with grave concerns about our ability to win hearts and minds in the region. In The Taliban Shuffle, Barker offers an insider’s account of the “forgotten war” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, chronicling the years after America’s initial routing of the Taliban, when we failed to finish the job.

Awaiting the return of her husband and young son from a road trip, Obiajulu Ejiofor receives shattering news. There’s been a fatal car crash, and one of them is dead. In Where the Children Take Us, Obiajulu’s daughter, Zain E. Asher, tells the story of her mother’s harrowing fight to raise four children as a widowed immigrant in South London. Drawing on tough-love parenting strategies, Obiajulu teaches her sons and daughters to overcome the daily pressures of poverty, crime and prejudice—and much more.

In this last book of a three-volume series, William L. Shirer recounts his return to Berlin after the Third Reich’s defeat. Having fled Berlin and imminent arrest by the Gestapo in 1940, Shirer returned to Europe in October 1945 to verify the facts of the Fuhrer’s death, thus bringing to a close - or so he thought - his involvement with the Third Reich. He describes his return to his homeland and his ensuing careers as a broadcast journalist and author. He describes the McCarthy years and how the blacklist affected his own network, CBS.

A moving and illuminating memoir about the life of world-famous author and historian Iris ChangIris Chang's best-selling book, The Rape of Nanking, forever changed the way we view the Second World War in Asia. It all began with a photo of a river choked with the bodies of hundreds of Chinese civilians that shock Iris to her core. Who were these people? Why had this happened and how could their story have been lost to history? She could not shake that image from her head.

Charles M. Blow’s mother was a fiercely driven woman with five sons, brass knuckles in her glove box, and a job plucking poultry at a factory near their segregated Louisiana town, where slavery's legacy felt close. When her philandering husband finally pushed her over the edge, she fired a pistol at his fleeing back, missing every shot, thanks to “love that blurred her vision and bent the barrel.” Charles was the baby of the family, fiercely attached to his “do-right” mother. Until one day that divided his life into Before and After—the day an older cousin took advantage of the young boy.

Dana Brown was a 21-year-old college dropout playing in punk bands and partying his way through downtown New York’s early-'90s milieu when he first encountered Graydon Carter, the legendary editor of Vanity Fair. After the two had a handful of brief interactions (mostly with Brown in the role of cater waiter at Carter’s famous cultural salons he hosted at his home), Carter saw what he believed to be Brown’s untapped potential, and on a whim, hired him as his assistant

Hunter S. Thompson, "smart hillbilly"; boy of the South; born and bred in Louisville, Kentucky; son of an insurance salesman and a stay-at-home mom; public school-educated; jailed at 17 on a bogus petty robbery charge; member of the US Air Force (airman second class); copy boy for Time; writer for The National Observer; et cetera.

One of the trailblazers of the modern female foreign correspondent, former Guardian reporter Hella Pick fled her native Austria as a Jewish child refugee in 1939. Over three decades she covered the volatile global scene, first in Africa, then in America and Eastern Europe. During 35 years with the Guardian, she reported on the Watergate Scandal in Washington, on Martin Luther King's march from Selma to Montgomery and on the Gdansk shipyard uprising in Poland.

A quasi novant'anni, Corrado Augias è un prezioso testimone del cambiamento. L'Italia di oggi - esclusi gli eterni vizi nazionali - assomiglia poco a quella di ieri. Augias ci racconta l'infanzia passata in Libia al seguito del padre ufficiale della Regia Aeronautica; la guerra e i bombardamenti; l'incubo di una feroce e lugubre occupazione; gli anni in un collegio cattolico, per lui che oggi si confessa ateo.

Declan Walsh is one of the New York Times's most distinguished international correspondents. His electrifying portrait of Pakistan over a tumultuous decade captures the sweep of this strange, wondrous, and benighted country through the dramatic lives of nine fascinating individuals. On assignment as the country careened between crises, Walsh traveled from the raucous port of Karachi to the salons of Lahore, and from Baluchistan to the mountains of Waziristan. He met a diverse cast of extraordinary Pakistanis....

Gargoyle is a compilation of written work by British journalist Jake Hanrahan, collecting his on-the-ground reporting from all the wrong crowds. In this book, he visits hidden places and speaks to tough people - from the militant hideouts in Kurdistan, to the secret safehouses of dark web drug dealers.