journalism

Narrative nation

October 21, 2008 | 5 Comments

A new story rises: Obama’s ascent Literature is fragrant with the compost of human misery. With the never-ending story of our impossible burden. With our failure to reach our promise and with our effort to redeem. Journalism, catching history on the fly, is at its best when it holds our stated ideals (the Constitution, say) beside our practice. When it tugs at the sleeve. Truth be told, though, the press’s daily practical purpose is to supply information (anecdotes and images, actually) …

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The get

September 18, 2008 | 4 Comments

David Foster Wallace, who died last Friday at age 46, was a genius novelist whose brilliant, personal, reportage-rich essays were celestial events. His account of John McCain’s 2000 campaign in South Carolina against George W. Bush, collected in Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays, is a revered portrait of American politics. My students read his Harper’s stories “Shipping Out,” a mordant tale of his time aboard a luxury cruise ship, and “Ticket to the Fair,” about the baroque experience of …

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Review: ‘The Truth of the Matter’

August 5, 2008 | 3 Comments

The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction by Dinty W. Moore. Pearson/ Longman. 302 pp. $42.48 The Truth of the Matter, which I’ve used twice now in a 300-level undergraduate introduction to narrative nonfiction, is a complete textbook that can stand alone or be paired with supplemental anthologies such as The Art of Fact, Short Takes, Intimate Journalism, or The Best American Essays of the Century, depending on the instructor’s focus. The first third of The …

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The spirit of revision

July 17, 2008 | No Comments

“Works of art are of an infinite solitariness, and nothing is less likely to bring us near to them than criticism. Only love can apprehend and hold them, and can be just towards them.”—Rainer Maria Rilke Whether composing a poem, struggling with a memoir’s narrative structure, or trying to depict a city’s homelessness problem through one family’s struggle, a writer can be trying to offer a gift to the world. Therefore it’s fitting that an insightful essay on revision in …

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Richard's books

The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead

by David Shields

I loved this inquiry and lament about human mortality, a stealth memoir in which we learn about the author indirectly, mostly in relation to his vibrant, dominating 97-year-old father.

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster

by Jon Krakauer

For some reason not as engaging to me as Into the Wild but a great account; his spare style failed to help me see the mountain, but by the end I felt its cold. I am troubled by the human costs of the sport, as is Krakauer, who seems perm...

House of Prayer No. 2: A Writer's Journey Home

by Mark Richard

A fascinating experiment in point of view: it opens with an overview in distancing third-person; then it becomes a story told in differently distancing second person. His childhood and child self are fascinating. For me, he did not full...

Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals

by Hal Herzog

As a dog owner, an “animal lover,” and a former farmer, I largely enjoyed Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat. Author Hal Herzog’s message is simple and clear: humans’ relationship with animals is illogical and emotional. My bona fid...

Fierce Attachments: A Memoir

by Vivian Gornick

Gornick’s truths blaze off the page, her portraits of others transfix, her sentences and rhythms delight. What she remembers, she says, of growing up in a Jewish tenement in the Bronx, is a building full of women: "Shrewd, volatile, u...

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