By JOHN WILLIAMS JUNE 6, 2014
This week, David Carr, The Times’s Media Equation columnist and a culture reporter, reviews “The Invention of News,” by Andrew Pettegree. I asked Carr and a few of his colleagues to recommend their favorite books about journalism.
The reporter Ravi Somaiya cited “Point of Departure,” a collection of mid-20th-century pieces by the British journalist James Cameron. Somaiya said: “His dispatches — from the Bikini Atoll nuclear experiments, and with Albert Schweitzer in what is now Gabon, among others — are vivid, moving and written in a prose so muscular you feel your heart rate rise sometimes. He showed me that you can be honest, accurate and fair and still tell people what you saw and how you felt.”
The media reporter Jonathan Mahler was pained “to have to eliminate so many worthy candidates — but if it has to be one, it has to be Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Scoop,’ which may be the funniest novel ever written. It’s a sendup of Fleet Street, circa 1938, involving a fictitious newspaper called The Beast, a fictitious civil war in a fictitious African country and the hapless foreign correspondent mistakenly sent there to cover it.”
The media editor Peter Lattman also turned to fiction for his choice: “The Imperfectionists,” by Tom Rachman, about a “dying English-language newspaper in Rome. This debut novel from 2010 does a better job of capturing a newsroom and its characters than any nonfiction book I’ve read.”
The question took Carr back to a harrowing moment. “In the hours after the attacks of Sept. 11,” he said, “I was at the corner of Church and Chambers. Building 7 was on fire and then fell. A wall of debris and smoke came rushing up the street, and I dove under a car. I found myself looking into the eyes of a pigeon there and having an interspecies moment. ‘Are we O.K.? Is the world ending? Are we, um, birds of a feather?’ When the moment and wall of crud passed and I collected myself, I noticed a copy of Strunk and White’s ‘The Elements of Style,’ the ur-text of our profession, under the car. It was marked in ink as a Port Authority copy, and I knew it had blown out of their offices at the World Trade Center. I observe none of its edicts — I am a turgid, digressive writer — but love its aspiration and clarity. I put it under glass still containing the dust of that day along with a copy of something I wrote for New York magazine that was the only decent thing I wrote out of all that confusion and mayhem. I treasure its presence in my home even as I leave its advice under glass.”
Quotable
“Back in the day, I was willing to work with people with obvious personality disorders if it meant I’d make more money or get to go to better parties. But now that I’m older I have zero tolerance.” — The literary agent Erin Hosier, in an interview on The Millions
From:http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/08/books/review/the-top-shelf-of-journalism-books.html?_r=0