BOOK REPORTS
A MIGHTY HEART: THE BRAVE LIFE AND DEATH OF MY HUSBAND, DANNY PEARL
By Mariane Pearl, with Sarah Crichton
Scribner 278 pp. $25
The kidnapping and brutal execution in Pakistan of Daniel Pearl of The Wall Street Journal occurred only two years ago, but this reconstruction by his widow seems to come from a remote historical epoch, those fevered months after September 11 and before Iraq. Mariane Pearl, then pregnant and now a mother, vividly captures the confusion and agony of her husband’s disappearance — he was working on a story related to Richard Reid, the failed airliner bomber — as viewed from the Karachi home of her friend and fellow journalist Asra Q. Nomani, which became headquarters for the officials, police, agents, fixers, and hangers-on that coalesced to manage the search for Danny. She worked with them tenaciously, even ferociously. Her portraits of this polyglot crew are shrewd, vivid, and balanced, and surprisingly tolerant of their ultimate failure. Her telling of the story, sometimes almost minute by minute, simulates breathlessness and disorder while remaining detailed and coherent. It is no surprise that the book has been optioned for a film version. Looking back, she emphasizes the paradox that Daniel Pearl was the least reckless of journalists; in fact, he wrote a guide for his newspaper on protecting its correspondents in hazardous places. He had done his best to ascertain whether his last fateful interview would be safe. But of course there were no guarantees.
EXPOSÉS AND EXCESSES: MUCKRAKING IN AMERICA, 1900-2000
By Cecilia Tichi
University of Pennsylvania Press
234 pp. $29.95
Cecilia Tichi, a professor of English at Vanderbilt University, offers a stimulating contribution to Pennsylvania’s series called “Personal Takes.” Her take is on muckrakers a hundred years ago and in the present era — or, as she puts it, from The Jungle to Fast Food Nation. The respective celebrity and obscurity of those two titles measure the distance between then and now. Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, Ida M. Tarbell, and their kindred produced a body of melodramatic “literature of exposure” that is still regarded as classic journalism. Tichi nominates as their peers today Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed; Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation; Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies; Laurie Garrett, Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health; and Joseph T. Hallinan, Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation. Her interviews with each writer make it clear that in skill, seriousness, and social intent they are by and large worthy peers of their sainted predecessors. Yet the new muckrakers are not part of a movement; their work may be read widely but none of it has caught the attention of the nation like The Jungle. The difference, Tichi says, is in our changing times. The muckrakers of the early twentieth century were adjuncts to a widely shared agenda of reform, a middle-class striving toward a better, more just society. The new muckrakers win prizes and even get on best-seller lists, but they work in a vacuum. Who, she asks, “might be the likely players driving new social movements?” The answer is far from clear.
ALL IN THE DAY’S WORK: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
By Ida M. Tarbell; Introduction
by Robert C. Kochersberger, Jr
University of Illinois Press
412 pp. $21.95 paper
Sixty years after her death, Ida M. Tarbell has outlasted all her muckraking colleagues. She is the subject of extended discussion in Exposés and Excesses (above), was posthumously inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, and in 2002 was one of four women journalists honored on a new series of postage stamps. Now her memoir, first published in 1939, has been reissued. The title reflects the story — the long life of a woman who never stopped working, and in fact never had the means to stop. She was born before the Civil War, lived her girlhood in the oil country of Pennsylvania, drudged at the Chautauquan magazine, spent a long writing sabbatical in Paris, and then, for McClure’s, produced the laborious, detailed reporting that became known as muckraking — most notably in her history of the Standard Oil Company. All of this and her long, less notable subsequent career — she became an admirer of tycoons and had kind words for Mussolini — are recounted here in a kind of deadpan. Even the breakup of the McClure’s staff in 1906, which her diary reveals to have all but destroyed her, is recollected in tranquility. Here, one concludes, is a woman who never found a cause that truly engaged her passions, not even the woman’s movement that now honors her.
PRESS BOX RED: THE STORY OF LESTER
RODNEY, THE COMMUNIST WHO HELPED BREAK THE COLOR LINE IN AMERICAN SPORTS
By Irwin Silber
Temple University Press
236 pp. $59.50, $19.95 paper
Until 1936, the Daily Worker, newspaper of the American Communist Party, treated baseball as an opiate of the masses. But with the coming of the Popular Front, the Worker embraced all things American, and put a novice writer, Lester Rodney, in charge of a new daily sports section. Rodney was a Communist, of sorts, and a deep-dyed New York-style baseball enthusiast. He ran an orthodox sports section, and joined the Baseball Writers’ Association and befriended many of the game’s stars. He says that Leo Durocher remarked to him, “You know, Rodney, for a fucking Communist, you sure know your baseball.” There was one difference; he and the Worker campaigned for the integration of baseball — an issue on which the mainstream press and the baseball establishment remained silent. He was serving in the army in 1945 when the breakthrough came with the Brooklyn Dodgers’ signing of Jackie Robinson. Rodney left the party in 1958 without much regret, became an atheistic religion editor, and at last report was in his nineties, living in California and playing tennis. This ebullient account is less a formal biography than a memoir compiled from extended interviews, and less valuable for its politics than for its incidents and insights about the midcentury golden era of sport.
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