Journalism - Our Man in Boston

Rare Medium • The Sorry and the Pithy

Though mayhem, war, mass murder, civil unrest, homicidal acts of God (known as natural disasters), famine, plague, and genocide seem to be growth industries, the population of brave men and women (naysayers may say “thrill-seeking adrenaline junkies”) who report the news (before service journalism infected a once-honorable calling) seems to be dwindling. One could speculate on the reasons for the diminishment of this endangered species, but cutbacks in news organization budgets or disaster fatigue in the audience would not be among them.

I have had the pleasure to be acquainted with a few such stalwarts—Jon Lee Anderson, Sebastian Junger, Anne Garrels, Alma Guillermoprieto, Francisco Goldman, James Nachtwey, Ruben Martinez, and Saira Shah—and a sense of decency and concern is no small part of the makeup of such people. I might add that a conscience seems to be a component of their makeup. Mark Danner is certainly an exemplar of this small but mighty band and as his new opus, Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War (Nation Books), shows, he has been to and seen some of the worst of recent history.

In what I took to be a singular act by Tina Brown, she made Danner’s expose of the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador the cover story of the Dec. 6, 1993, issue of the New Yorker. Later it was issued as a book, The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War, of which historian Frances FitzGerald opined: “Mark Danner’s account of what happened in El Salvador is a gripping account on three levels—that of the massacre, that of the official cover-up and that of the press. It is also a brilliant piece of writing.”

Since then more of the same has flowed from Danner’s mighty pen (if I may be allowed an anachronism)—from Haiti to Abu Ghraib to U.S. policy on torture.

As Louis Begley (no stranger to the human dark side) offers in the book’s foreword:

The publication of Stripping Bare the Body is a timely act of public service and a literary event, bringing together Mark Danner’s luminously intelligent and engaging narratives and stories from the world’s war zones…they are both a moral history of America’s engagement with the world over the last generation and an account of a twenty-three years’ journey through hell on earth by an ideal observer: Danner is endowed with a passion for truth, great physical courage, a muscular writing style, and a heart as big as a barn.

—Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 23, 2009

» Listen to an interview with Mark Danner.

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Rare Medium • Hand Me That Rake

If you need a reminder of how degraded, sycophantic, lazy, smug, boring, and predictable contemporary journalism has become, San Francisco State University mentor Peter Richardson’s (American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams) A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America (The New Press) accounts for the brief, sparkling life of Ramparts magazine (1962-1975), which carried on in the best American muckraking tradition, winning awards and exposing numerous government depredations, illegalities, and worse (e.g., the use of napalm in Vietnam).

With a national circulation of 250,000 and a list of contributors that includes Warren Hinckle, Robert Scheer, Eldridge Cleaver, Adam Hochschild, David Horowitz (yes, that David Horowitz), Jessica Mitford, Christopher Hitchens, Jann Wenner, Tom Hayden, Todd Gitlin, Thomas Merton, Paul Krassner, Peter Collier, Michael Lerner, Susan Griffin, Noam Chomsky, César Chávez, Seymour Hersh, Angela Davis, and Susan Sontag, we have ample clues to why the San Francisco-based magazine was so influential.

Looking over today’s bland, commerce-driven media landscape, only Mother Jones, Scheer’s Truthdig (both legacies of Ramparts), and TomDispatch show any signs of intent to rabble-rouse—sadly a nearly extinct practice. —Robert Birnbaum, Oct. 8, 2009

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Back Matter • Rekindled

Given the current overheated media climate, it would be normal to call Nicholson Baker’s very thoughtful piece on the Kindle a takedown or bashing—which would be a disservice to journalism (at least that variety still practiced by temperate and diligent reporters), Nick Baker, and even to the subject of his scrutiny, Amazon’s electric reader. Baker, whose Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper is a wonderful treatise on books and archiving, has already made it clear where his preferences lie—though his careful thoughts and research on the Kindle are generous and amusingly detailed (in the way that Baker can be).

And speaking of intemperate journalism: In Newsweek, Jacob Weisberg, Slate’s editor-in-chief, confided that for weeks he’d been doing all his recreational reading on the Kindle 2, and claims it offers a “fundamentally better experience” than inked paper: “Jeff Bezos built a machine that marks a cultural revolution…printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence.” Oh my! —Robert Birnbaum, Aug. 3, 2009

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Current Reads • Sage Advice

At some point, someone will probably fabricate one of those pop-sociology books about the generation that is averse to reading instruction manuals: The Dummies’ Guide to Dummies. (Who is buying all those self-help books and keeping windbags like Tony Roberts in silk?) As I belong to that set and to the subset that reads nothing of a blatantly self-improving mode, I would not normally read a guide to fatherhood, accidental or not, like Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood (W.W. Norton & Co.) by Michael Lewis. However, I have read Lewis’s recent books, The Blind Side and Moneyball (which may or may not be made into a Brad Pitt film with Steven Soderbergh directing and a Steve Zaillian script. I asked Lewis about the film’s status: “They don’t tell me anything.”) What with those alongside a number of his pieces for the New York Times Magazine, I am hard put to find a better reporter working today. (Jon Lee Anderson, Alma Guillermoprieto?)

Not to mention, he can write. This tome collects his bulletins to Slate magazine in which he frankly and relatively lucidly recorded his thoughts about his three children. The book’s dedication is to those kids—“If you don’t want to see it in print, don’t do it”—sage advice for us all, especially in this YouTube life. Parenting (was it just in my lifetime that the word became a verb?) is of course serious business—so serious that some clear-eyed, honest humor is required, and which Lewis amply supplies.

Incidentally, Lewis made his bones doing financial reportage (Liar’s Poker) a subject he revisited for the late Portfolio magazine. —Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 20, 2009

» Read an excerpt from Home Game.

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Genre Genre Genre • J-Noir

Crime story writer Michael Connelly’s latest offering brings back cop beat reporter Jack McEvoy from what I consider the finest of his 20 novels, The Poet, a standalone story that leaves aside Connelly’s long-running L.A. homicide detective Harry Bosch series—though the lethal serial killer the Poet does make another, final appearance in The Narrows, where he is terminally dispatched by Bosch.

The Scarecrow (Little, Brown) has McEvoy being dumped by his newspaper (naturally, he has a large salary) and be replaced by a novice, recent j-school grad. McEvoy decides he wants to go out in blaze of glory, and starts rooting around in what appears to be an open-and-shut murder case. This puts him and his replacement in the cyber-sights of the real killer, who happens to have deep expertise in computer security and the subtleties of hacking and who we come to find is responsible for at least two heinous sexual assault murders.

Given the Scarecrow’s computer skills, we are provided with a fair measure of background in hacking tactics and tricks and more than sufficient dramatic tension. But as much as any element of this book, Connelly, a former newspaper reporter, offers a requiem for the passing of the metropolitan daily print newspaper. —Robert Birnbaum, Jun. 4, 2009

» Read an excerpt from The Scarecrow

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Current Reads • Impact

An April 1999 event at a Colorado high school should have changed the way Americans view childhood and child rearing. It did for me. As the parent of a young boy I can assure you that the harrowing and tragic events at Columbine High School, where two teenage students attempted to blow up the school lunchroom (which would have killed about 500 people) and, when the explosives failed, ended up slaughtering 12 of their fellows and one teacher, injuring countless others, and killing themselves, gave me pause to view adolescent boys and the world they are given with very different eyes.

A number of people have tried to tell this story in some fashion—including Gus Van Sant in the film Elephant and in an oblique way Lionel Shriver in We Need to Talk About Kevin, Jim Shepard’s Project X, Douglas Coupland’s Hey Nostradamus!, and Francine Prose’s young adult novel After. Now Denver writer Dave Cullen, who started covering the Columbine story as a journalist from the time it hit the police scanners and lower-third scrawls on cable stations (a distraction now employed by all of TV), has written a formidable treatise after having spent a decade immersed in this story. Aspiring to the benchmarks set by classic crime accounts such as In Cold Blood and Helter Skelter, Columbine (Twelve Publishers) focuses on killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s motives and, more palpably, some of the impact (no doubt even 10 years may be too soon to tell) that this horror has had on the community. And now, through the wonderous (sic) confluence of new media and commerce, you can see and hear Cullen tout his book for yourself, in the below video. —Robert Birnbaum, Jun. 2, 2009

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About Our Man in Boston

When Robert Birnbaum was an adolescent, his mother took him to the Chicago Public Library every week, and he would leave with armloads of books. Ever since he has been an avid reader—except in the cultural sinkhole era of the ’70s (think Saturday Night Fever).

Illustration by Witold Ridel

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Monday, March 22, 2010