BOOK REPORTS
SHAKING THE FOUNDATION:
200 YEARS OF INVESTIGATIVE
JOURNALISM IN AMERICA
Edited by Bruce Shapiro
Introduction by Pete Hamill
Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books
544 pp. $15.95 paper
Here’s still another anthology of American investigative journalism. It might be thought that Judith and William Serrin’s outstanding Muckraking! (Book Reports, July/August 2002) had used up the quality material. But there is surprisingly little overlap between Muckraking! and Shaking the Foundations, partly because Bruce Shapiro, a contributing editor for The Nation and a teacher of investigative journalism at Yale University, has deliberately favored polished magazine and book reporting over newspaper investigations. He also has a flair for seeking out journalism exposing problems that people might have preferred to ignore. These include not only well-known items such as Seymour Hersh’s My Lai massacre exposé (1969), and Lincoln Steffens’s “The Shame of Minneapolis” (1903) but rarities such as Herman Melville’s vivid description of the cruel practice of “flogging through the fleet” (1850); Carey McWilliams on California’s corporate farms in 1939; Marvel Cooke of the New York Daily Compass in 1952 on the “Slave Market” for temporary domestic workers; Jonathan Kwitny, the Wall Street Journal reporter who died in early middle age, on Mafia penetration of a big meatpacking business in 1979. Even in reprint and removed from their original time and setting, almost all remain vibrant and pertinent.
JOHN EDWARD BRUCE:
POLITICIAN, JOURNALIST,
AND SELF-TRAINED HISTORIAN
OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA
By Ralph L. Crowder
New York University Press
243 pp. $45
The life of John Edward Bruce (1856-1924) spanned the years dubbed by the historian Rayford Logan the “nadir” of African American history — the era in which the promise of Emancipation turned sour and African Americans entered a long, grim struggle for their basic rights. Born a slave in Maryland, Bruce went with his mother to Washington at the start of the Civil War and there, largely self-taught, he developed into a freelance political journalist. His work had a resilient toughness and independence that was reflected in his pen name, “Bruce Grit.” Like most African Americans of his era, he associated himself with the Republicans, who often disappointed him. Over the years, his long political pilgrimage led him away from two-party politics to a self-deterministic black nationalism. He is not remembered for any single work (of the type of Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery) but rather as a man in the background, associated with every major black figure from Frederick Douglass to Marcus Garvey and notable primarily for his toughness and persistence. This biography plods and repeats itself, but adds to the record of a dismal era.
PROTEST AND SURVIVE:
UNDERGROUND GI NEWSPAPERS
DURING THE VIETNAM WAR
By James Lewes
Praeger
243 pp. $67.95
This book may or may not be timely. It recalls and analyzes the sudden expansion of the antiwar underground GI press in the late 1960s. Lewes, who has a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, located more than 130 GI newspapers, none actually published in Vietnam, where, however, underground radio flourished. Their graphic and polemical techniques resembled those of the civilian underground press, but they had a special bitter flavor rising from the resentments of a working-class, draftee army on a failing mission. Lewes describes the efforts of the Pentagon to shut down GI journalism by discharge, transfer, or even court martial; eventually the military backed off. As to timeliness, it does not appear that there is likely to be a GI press in the Iraq era. Unless, that is, it turns out that there is a need for one.
EATS, SHOOTS & LEAVES: THE ZERO
TOLERANCE APPROACH TO PUNCTUATION
By Lynne Truss
Forward by Frank McCourt
Gotham Books
209 pp. $17.50
This book is a phenomenon. As its American edition was published in April, it already ranked first on the Amazon sales list in America, and remained second on British Amazon. What is to explain this, beyond shrewd marketing and word of mouth? Or is it the little joke (“panda walks into a bar”) of the title, centering on the insertion of the stray comma after “eats”? But the greater appeal may be the absolutism of the author, a London journalist. She sets herself up as a kind of madcap Martha Stewart of punctuation — no criminal intent, of course — showing exactly how to put English in order with precise commas, apostrophes, colons, the whole lot. She boasts that she will not tolerate either superfluous or omitted punctuation, and says she goes about with guerrilla markers to correct offenses she spies in the streets. Despite the aggressiveness, the book has charm and humor (some Web sites in fact list it as a book of humor). She provides a bit of history for each punctuation mark, as well as noting a few that have fallen out of use. Most helpfully, she points out good usage as generally understood and then goes on to reveal contradictions and exceptions; for example, the puzzle of using the apostrophe with words ending in “s” or “ss” is a labyrinth. In the end, she is most concerned about the effects on punctuation of electronic writing: “It is a matter for despair to see punctuation chucked out as worthless by people who don’t know the difference between who’s and whose, and whose bloody automatic ‘grammar checker’ can’t tell the difference either.” But she is not ready to give up: “Proper punctuation is both the sign and cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.” We should fight like tigers, she says. Or shoot like pandas?
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