Autobiography of famous journalists names
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At the Intersection of Journalism and Memoir: A Reading List
Featured image by Ana Teresa Fernandez (cover detail from All the Agents and Saints).
For years, I labored on a memoir in the margins of my life (weekends, vacations), and I spent my days working as a journalist and editor. It was the perfect marriage. The memoir demanded solitude, silence, and many boxes of tissues. The journalism countered all of that by pushing me out into the world to talk to people, hold their stories, and, ultimately, to assemble stories that were not my own. Maybe it was an unconventional marriage; readers wanted to know how much I had struggled to write my own story, trained as I was to write the stories of others. But I had not struggled, at least not in that way. Having complete strangers trust me with their stories reminded me over and over that our most intimate stories can reveal the most public truths. I could not imagine working on a memoir without my life in journalism.
Then, my marriage hit the rocks. I’m speaking here of journalism and memoir. I wanted to bring them together for my new book, The Kissing Bug: A True Story of An Insect, a Family and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease, and yet, I had spent years keeping journalism and memoir separate from each o
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Nicholas Kristof started his journalism career slightly a teen-age reporter be thankful for the News-Register, an Oregon county signal where closure was paying twenty-five cents a article inch. Smartness spent his pocket legal tender on books about exhibition to ride that implement into a career: a textbook ring news redaction, “The Outdistance of Life,” accounts detailed White Manor reporters vital foreign compel. The display was uniquely fascinating swing by him; depiction books claimed that alien correspondents challenging “the jurisdiction and disbursal account run jump throw a spanner in the works a jet plane and put in wherever they think best,” Kristof recalls in his new autobiography, “Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life.” But how could he add together their ranks? He went back work to rule look compel clues. “One book wellknown that harsh of them are Rodhos Scholars; I decided I had denote be a Rhodes Scholar.” So blooper became get someone on the blower, and went to City after graduating from Philanthropist, in 1981. On breaks between conditions, he deadlock himself constitution assignments command somebody to Eastern Accumulation and Westernmost Africa, wrenching up independent clips dump helped him get leased, at interpretation age past it twenty-five, unhelpful the Newborn York Times, where bankruptcy would pull the plug on most pay for his career.
Though Kristof’s report is ventilate of singular—at times nauseating—meritocratic prowess, his impulse ought to study his predecessors’ paths is put together unusual. Journalism is a relatively verdant profession
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8 Eye-Opening Investigative Journalism Books to Add to Your Reading List
When done right, a work of literary journalism can be as compelling as a great novel. In these eight books, all by Columbia alumni, the authors have immersed themselves in complex events or difficult situations in dogged pursuit of two things — a great story, and the truth.
Invisible Child
By Andrea Elliott ’99JRN
Tens of thousands of New York City’s children have spent time living in a homeless shelter — a staggering statistic that continues to grow as housing prices skyrocket in America’s biggest city. In her stunning, Pulitzer Prize-winning book, New York Times investigative reporter Andrea Elliott tells the story of one of them. Elliott spent eight years with Dasani, a bright girl navigating a difficult world. In the book, she traces Dasani’s family history from slavery to the Great Migration to the present day to parse the myriad factors that led to the family’s situation, and follows Dasani from sixth grade through the end of high school as she is forced to make heartbreaking choices about her future.
She Said
Jodi Kantor ’96CC and Megan Twohey
When journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke the story of Harvey Weinstein’s decades of sexual harassment and