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Aleksandra Todorova's Book List Ted Conover, Rolling Nowhere: riding the rails with America's Hoboes, (Vintage, 2001) Award winning writer and journalist Ted Conover was a 24-year-old senior at Amherst College when hit the rails to ride trains with America's hoboes, gathering material for his anthropology thesis. For months, Conover dressed like a hobo, slept like a hobo, ate like a hobo, and smelled like a hobo. When he left the tracks a couple of months later, he wrote the first book to look at the subculture of hoboes from within. Barbara Shulgasser wrote for the New York Times Book Review: "Conover's adventures translate well into print, and Rolling Nowhere is so vivid that every few pages the urge to clack the dust from one's own clothes is almost irresistible." (March 4, 1984, Sunday, Section 7; Page 22, Column 1; Book Review Desk) Rolling Nowhere is more than an anthropological research project; it is a showcase of reporting and first-person story telling all journalists should strive for. Conover's stints on the tracks prove that there are no limits to what journalists can do to get closer to their sources-and that there are no limits to how close you can get to your sources. Conover is a true inspiration to get out in the world, and explore, explore, explore! MORE: Conover's personal Web site, a collection of articles, reviews and interviews by him and about him Book Reporter review Ted Conover, Coyotes: a journey through the secret world of America's illegal aliens, (Vintage, 1987)< What better way to document the lives of undocumented immigrants in the United States than to hang out with them for a year? Having rolled along with America's hoboes already, Conover's next challenge was illegally crossing the Rio Grande with a human trafficker (a coyote) and for the next year, trying to look as non-American as possible. He picks oranges in California and Florida and rides cars in snowstorms at 25mph with his new Mexican friends. He spent a month in a Mexican village and a day in a Mexican jail, and crosses the border again, this time through the Arizona desert. At the end, even the sharp-eyed coyotes took the light-haired and blue-eyed Colorado native for just another Mexican going north to work. Michiko Kakutani writes for the New York Times: "Mr. Conover combines a sociologist's eye for detail with a novelist's sense of drama and compassion; and as one of the principal characters in the story, he is able to turn his own observations and reactions into a kind of index of the cultural differences between Mexico and the United States. There is no attempt on his part to objectively report the complicated facts involved in our country's immigration policy, but then he makes no pretense of doing so. His aim is simply to show the 'human side of the men and women' that La Migra arrests, 'the drama of their lives,' and in that he has defiantly succeeded." Once again, a work to look up to and a true inspiration to any investigative reporter. MORE: Coyotes reviews, as printed on the back cover of the book Ted Conover, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, (Random House, 2000) For his latest journalistic stint, Ted Conover spends a year as a prison guard at Sing Sing. The idea came, he says, after the New York Department of Correctional Services refused to let him visit their training academy and follow-up a recruit for a profile. Convinced he would never understand prisons from outside the walls, Conover took the officer exam, and two years later, entered Sing Sing as a "newjack". Lesson learned? Nothing could stop a journalist from getting the story, if they truly want to and are ready to go far enough to do it. MORE: First chapter of the book available here New York Times book review Newjack reviews, as printed on back cover of the book Interview with Ted Conover on Newjack available here, in RAM format Literal Mind, book review by Kevin Kemper Bookbrowser review BAlaska Justice Forum, review essay by John Riley Mitchell Duneier, Sidewalk. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001)< Sidewalk is not a work of investigative journalism, nor a stint at Village-Voice-style street reporting. Rather, it is a foray into ethnography, the in-depth study of a particular culture or group. Mitchell Duneier, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California at Santa Barbara, goes to the sidewalks of Greenwich Village in New York City to study the culture of the vendors who sell secondhand books and magazines scavenged from the trash. Duneier befriends Hakim Hasan, a book vendor, who then introduces him to the world the sociologist will study for the better part of seven years. He spends every summer and semester break on the sidewalk, gaining the trust of his subjects and recording their interactions with clients, pedestrians and among themselves. Eventually, he writes, they trusted him enough (though one can never be sure, he adds) to keep his cassette recorder on and record their own conversations when he was gone. "Mr. Duneier recounts the origins, travails, fragility of the street community," writes Richard Eder in the New York Times. "He spells out the antisocial aspects of the street people, but his book is a vivid, patient and moving account of those who have inched up from crime and despair to take control, however precarious and scruffy, of their lives." Sidewalk may be a cornerstone work of ethnography, winner of the C. Wright Mills Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Review, but it can hardly be filed with the best works of investigative journalism. For all the mesmerizing dialogue, descriptions and first-hand observation, a journalist would focus on the people, actions and dialogue, and leave out the long passages of sociological analysis that Duneier makes the focus on his work. MORE: The Village Voice Literary Supplement Salon Books. Review by Andrew O'Hehir. Duneier's faculty profile entry for the University of California, Santa Barbara Flak Magazine, review Bill Buford, Among the Thugs (W.W. Norton & Company, 1992) In 1985, English soccer teams were banned from playing for European championships on the continent and English soccer fans were forbidden to attend their teams' matches abroad. There was good reasoning behind it -- known as hooligans, English football fans rampaged stadiums, ruined all that came in their way, looted shops and train stations, threw stones and food at people... you name it, they did it. Bill Buford, who at the end of 2002 will be stepping down after eight years as fiction editor at The New Yorker, was so fascinated with the hooligan subculture (he lived in England from 1977 until 1994), that he started traveling with the fans during the decade when they made the front pages across Europe. He then wrote a book about his experiences. "Mr. Buford pushes the possibilities of participatory journalism to a disturbing degree," wrote CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT for the New York Times June 25, 1992. "He reports getting so drunk with his hooligan pals that he sometimes had trouble remembering what happened. He witnessed violence that he might have been able to impede, though probably at the cost of becoming its victim. He became part of rioting crowds that inflicted property damage and bodily injury. And at times, being part of it all, he even enjoyed himself." Among the Thugs is quite an interesting perspective: an American who knows nothing about soccer gets to know and love the game through a fascinating journalism stint-total subculture submersion. MORE: Brief review, Daniel Pipes Lawrence Wright, Remembering Satan (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994) Remembering Satan is the story of Paul Ingram, a zealously religious father, police officer and political activist in suburban Olympia, Washington, whose two daughters accuse him of having raped them and made them victims in Satanist rituals. The more the girls remember, or are forced to remember, the more hideous the abuses come to be. The scandal, which came to be compared to the 17th century Salem Witch Trials and raised questions about the validity of confessions brought out in a hypnotic state, was first published as a two-part series in the New Yorker and won the 1994 National Magazine Award for reporting. "Mr. Wright has taken a sensationalistic story, the sort of story routinely embraced by supermarket tabloids, and turned it into a thoughtful and gripping book," writes New York Times book reviewer MICHIKO KAKUTANI. To collect the tremendous amount of information on the case, up until the finest little detail, Ingram went through boxes of police investigative files and tape recordings; conducted interviews with police officers and defense attorneys who had questioned Ingram, two of his suspect accomplices, friends of the family, local reporters and dozens of other sources. He also went through numerous books and papers about memory and hypnosis and talked to just as many experts in the field of suppressed memory. Remembering Satan is indeed a showcase of thorough reporting, solely reliant on secondary sources. MORE: Other works by Lawrence Wright: "One Drop of Blood," The New Yorker, July 24, 1994. Verlyn Klinkenborg, The Last Fine Time. (Knopf, 1991) The Last Fine Time is the history of a bar that flourished on the East Side of Buffalo in the 20th century, told through the story of two generations of the Polish-American family who ran it. Verlyn Klinkenborg, a New York Times book reviewer and editorial columnist, a prolific book writer and author of introductions to renowned works such as Conrad's Heart of Darkness, digs into family history (specifically focusing on his father in law Eddie Wenzek) to portray life in postwar America and its dissolving ethnic neighborhoods. "His writing is superb; his sensitivity to the story is extraordinary; and his ability to capture a watershed period in the transition of American cities in one tiny institution like 'George and Eddie's' is unique," writes Anne H. Sullivan for the Library Journal, one of hundreds of positive reviews the book has received over time. Frederick Busch writes for the New York Times book review desk: "[Klinkenborg] can write superbly, and he clearly has a great talent for evoking a place or time... Although the author clearly likes and is interested in the story of Thomas Wenzek, Eddie his son and the other men and women of the neighborhood, he seems to be driven beyond them by his own appreciation of his transforming prose." |
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