The New Kings of Nonfiction - Softcover

Michael Lewis; Jack Hitt; James McManus; Lawrence Weschler; Michael Pollan; Bill Buford; Chuck Klosterman; David Foster Wallace; Dan Savage

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1594482675 ISBN 13: 9781594482670

Publisher: Riverhead Books, 2007

Synopsis

A collection of stories-some well known, some more obscure- capturing some of the best storytelling of this golden age of nonfiction.

An anthology of the best new masters of nonfiction storytelling, personally chosen and introduced by Ira Glass, the producer and host of the award-winning public radio program This American Life.

These pieces-on teenage white collar criminals, buying a cow, Saddam Hussein, drunken British soccer culture, and how we know everyone in our Rolodex-are meant to mesmerize and inspire.

About this title

About the Author:

Ira Glass is the producer and host of the award-winning radio and television program "This American Life".

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction

Years ago, when I worked for public radio’s daily news shows, I put together this story about a guy named Jack Davis. He was a Rush Limbaugh fan and a proud Republican, and he’d set out on an unusual mission. He wanted to go into the Chicago public housing projects to instruct the children there in the value of hard work and entrepreneurship. He’d do this with vegetables. His plan was to teach the kids at the Cabrini Green projects to grow high-end produce, they’d sell their crop to the fancy restaurants that are just blocks from Cabrini, and this would be a valuable life lesson in the joys of market capitalism.

So Jack set up a garden in the middle of the high-rises, and for the first few years, it didn’t go so well. Jack was an accountant from the white suburbs and he didn’t relate to the kids or understand the culture of the projects. He made a lot of parents mad. A kid would miss a day’s work in the vegetable garden and Jack would dock his pay, to teach the consequences of sloth. Then all the windows in Jack’s truck would get smashed. Jack’s message was not getting through.

Hoping to turn this around, he enlisted this guy named Dan Underwood, who lived in Cabrini and whose children had been working in the garden. Everyone in the projects seemed to know Dan. He ran a double-Dutch jump-rope team for Cabrini kids that was ranked number one in the city, and a drum and color-guard squad, and martial arts classes. Kids loved Dan. He was fatherly. He was fun.

And while Jack was committed to the idea that they should run the vegetable garden like a real business, Dan saw it as just another afterschool program. “These are children,” he told me. “It’s not like an adult coming to work at, you know, 8:00 and getting off at 4:30, and ‘If you don’t come, you don’t get no money.’ That won’t work, not with a child.” When a kid didn’t show up to pick tomatoes, Dan would go to the family and find out why. He’d buy the kids pizza and take them on trips and get them singing in the van. What they needed was no mystery, as far as he was concerned. They were normal kids growing up in an unusually tough neighborhood, and they needed what any kid needs: some attention and some fun.

And sometimes, when he and Jack argued over how to run the program, they were both aware—uncomfortably aware, I think—how they were reenacting, in a vegetable garden surrounded by dingy high-rises, a bigger national debate. The white suburbanite was stomping around insisting that the project kids get a job and show up on time and not be coddled anymore, all for their own good, all to make them self-sufficient. The black guy was telling the interloper that he didn’t know what he was talking about. A little coddling might be better for these kids than an enhanced appreciation of the work ethic and the free market.

When I was working on this story I thought that Jack and Dan would’ve made a great ’70s TV show, one of those Norman Lear sitcoms where every week something happens to make all the characters argue about the big issues of the day. Sadly, we were twenty years too late for that, and Norman Lear had already set a show—Good Times—in Cabrini Green. One interesting thing about this story was how my officemate at the time hated it. Or maybe hate’s too strong a word. He was suspicious of the story. And he was incredulous at how it seemed to lay out like a perfect little fable about modern America. “Are you making these stories up?” I remember him asking.

But I don’t see anything wrong with a piece of reporting turning into a fable. In fact, when I’m researching a story and the real-life situation starts to turn into allegory—as it did with Dan and Jack—I feel incredibly lucky, and do everything in my power to expand that part of the story. Everything suddenly stands for something so much bigger, everything has more resonance, everything’s more engaging. Turning your back on that is rejecting tools that could make your work more powerful. But for a surprising number of reporters, the stagecraft of telling a story—managing its fable-like qualities—is not just of secondary concern, but a kind of mumbo jumbo that serious-minded people don’t get too caught up in. Taking delight in this part of the job, from their perspective, has little place in our important work as journalists. Another public radio officemate at that time—a Columbia University School of Journalism grad—would come back from the field with funny, vivid anecdotes she’d tell us in the hallway. Few of them ever appeared in her reports, which were dry as bones and hard to listen to.

She always had the same explanation for why she’d omit the entertaining details: “I thought that would be putting myself in the story.” As if being interesting and expressing any trace of a human personality would somehow detract from the nonstop flow of facts she assumed her listeners were craving. There’s a whole class of reporters—especially ones who went to journalism school, by the way—who have a strange kind of religious conviction about this. They actually get indignant; it’s an affront to them when a reporter tries to amuse himself and his audience.

I say phooey to that. This book says phooey to that.

Most of the stories in this book come from a stack of favorite writing that I’ve kept behind my desk for years. It started as a place to toss articles I simply didn’t want to throw away, and it’s a mess. Old photocopies of photocopies. Pages I’ve torn from magazines and stapled together. Random issues of a Canadian magazine a friend edited for a while. Now and then, in working on a radio story with someone, I’ll want to explain a certain kind of move they could try, or someone just needs inspiration. They need to see just how insanely good a piece of writing can be, and shoot for that. That’s when I go to the stack.

As far as I’m concerned, we’re living in an age of great nonfiction writing, in the same way that the 1920s and ’30s were a golden age for American popular song. Giants walk among us. Cole Porters and George Gershwins and Duke Ellingtons of nonfiction storytelling. They’re trying new things and doing pirouettes with the form. But nobody talks about it that way.

I don’t pretend that the writers in my stack of stories are representative of a movement or a school of writing or anything like that. But they generally share a few traits. First and foremost, they’re incredibly good reporters. And like the best reporters, they either find a new angle on something we all know about already, or—more often—they take on subjects that nobody else has figured out are worthy of reporting. They’re botanists in search of plants nobody’s given a name to yet. Take Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker story “Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg,” which at first reads like any other magazine story, until you take a moment to realize what it’s about, which is nothing less than the question “how does everyone know everyone they know?” Or Lee Sandlin’s story, which is attempting to redefine everything we think about World War II and, while he’s at it, all other wars as well. Or Michael Pollan’s story, where he buys a steer to illustrate in the most vivid way possible a thousand details most of us don’t know about where our meat comes from. Or Mark Bowden’s story, which addresses a very simple question, a question that’s so simple that once you’ve heard it, you wonder why you’ve never heard anybody else ask it: what was Saddam Hussein really like?

And these writers are all entertainers, in the best sense of the word. I know that’s not how we usually talk about great reporting, but it’s a huge part of all these stories. Great scenes, great characters, great moments. Often they’re funny. There’s a cheerful embracing of life in this kind of journalism, and a curiosity about the world. What hits me most when I reread Gladwell’s story is not his skill at laying out a series of very enjoyable anecdotes and his even greater skill at deploying scientific research that sheds light on those anecdotes. What hits me most is how the article could be half the length and still hit all its big ideas, and it’s only longer because Gladwell has found so many things that interest and amuse him, and that’s the engine that drives the whole enterprise. There’s a whole section of the article about actors and Kevin Bacon and Burgess Meredith that actually repeats an idea he illustrates elsewhere. And pretty much everything in the story after section five is, to my way of thinking, just there for fun. That includes Gladwell thinking through the consequences of his findings for affirmative-action programs, a scene of Gladwell trying to pin down the inner life of one of his super-connected interviewees, and—best of all—the completely improbable and utterly amazing story of how his protagonist, Lois Weisberg, hooked up with her second husband.

Finally, near the very end of the article, Gladwell is trying to explain once and for all why some of us know such an extraordinary number of people and, like a man writing a fable, he arrives at the moral of his story, which he points out is “the same lesson they teach in Sunday school.” Which is what I love about Gladwell. He stumbles onto some new phenomenon, and he’s trying his damnedest, for page after page, to think through what it means. And part of his mission is sharing the sheer pleasure in thinking it through. This is a special kind of pleasure, and another thing we don’t usually talk about when we talk about what makes a piece of journalism great. It’s the pleasure of discovery, the pleasure of trying to make sense of the world. Take this joyful passage from Jack Hitt’s story about a personal-injury lawsuit so big that the four thousand plaintiff s—just to keep their claims straight—actually had to write their own constitution. As Hitt notes, it’s nearly as long as the U.S. Constitution. What first drew my attention was that absurd name. Stringfellow. Acid. Pits. Modern life rarely shunts nouns together with such Dickensian economy. After I first encountered that singular name in a newspaper article some four or five years ago, it began to appear in my life eerily, serendipitously. If I was in Washington, the Post had a short update; if in San Francisco, then the Chronicle. If, while dressing in a hotel, I caught an environmental lawyer on C-SPAN, then Stringfellow would be cited offhandedly and without explanation. One evening, seated at an intimate dinner party in New Haven, Connecticut, I casually mentioned my growing interest in String-fellow. Across the table a head turned and said, “I’ve worked on that case.” Then another guest spoke up. He, too, was indirectly involved. I was not following the case; it was pursuing me. The newspaper reports I read created a sense of Cyclopean dimension: a specially constructed courtroom, private judges, secret negotiations, a quarter-million pages of pretrial documents, and legal processes of absurd intricacy. The case presented a problem unique in the history of American law. How does a court try four thousand cases that are generally similar but legally different? Judge Erik Kaiser came up with an innovative solution: he would bundle the four thousand plaintiffs into groups of roughly seventeen, and try the bundled cases consecutively. Consider the math: 4,000 divided by 17=235 trials. If each one lasted a little under a year—a conservative estimate—the entire process would be wrapped up in two centuries.

Two-thirds of the way into his story, it takes a remarkable turn, one I’ve rarely seen in any piece of reporting. There’s no way for me to explain this turn without actually revealing the spoiler so jump down to the next paragraph right now if you don’t want to know. Ready? Jack Hitt discovers that the premise of his story is completely wrong. Fantastic, right? Or here’s an excerpt from Bill Buford’s hilarious and disturbing book Among the Thugs, where he spends months with soccer hooligans in England. The thing about reporting is that it is meant to be objective. It is meant to record and relay the truth of things, as if truth were out there, hanging around, waiting for the reporter to show up. Such is the premise of objective journalism. What this premise excludes, as any student of modern literature will tell you, is that slippery relative fact of the person doing the reporting, the modern notion that there is no such thing as the perceived without someone to do the perceiving, and that to exclude the circumstances surrounding the story is to tell an untruth. . . . I do not want to tell an untruth and feel compelled, therefore, to note that at this moment, the reporter was aware that the circumstances surrounding his story had become intrusive and significant and that, if unacknowledged, his account of the events that follow would be grossly incomplete. And his circumstances were these: the reporter was very, very drunk.

That’s the will to entertain.

Part of what’s exciting about Among the Thugs is that Buford is so honest about what happens between him and his interviewees, especially the awkwardness he feels as an outsider in the midst of this tribe of drunk, violent men. They hate him, and they don’t trust him, and he doesn’t pretend otherwise. There’s a transparency to the reporting. Most of the book is Buford putting himself into one situation after another, and simply describing all the chance encounters he has along the way. It’s an inspiring book to read if you want to try your hand at reporting, because it makes the job seem so damned straightforward, and I can’t count the number of copies I’ve given away over the years to beginning journalists. Buford makes it clear how much of reporting is simply wandering from one place to another, talking to people and writing down what they say and trying to think of something, anything, that’ll shed some light on what’s happening in front of your face.

This explicitness about the process of reporting is true for many of the writers in this collection. It’s a shame this technique is forbidden to most daily newspaper reporters and broadcast journalists, because a lot of the power of these stories comes from the writers telling you step by step what they’re feeling and thinking, as they do their reporting. For example, here’s how Michael Lewis explains his interest in the story of a fifteen-year-old named Jonathan Lebed—a minor who got into trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission for trading stocks online: “When I first read the newspaper reports last fall, I didn’t understand them. It wasn’t just that I didn’t understand what the kid had done wrong; I didn’t understand what he had done.”

Much later in the story Lewis interviews the Chairman of the SEC about Lebed’s supposed crime, and he does something I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a reporter do in an interview with a government official. Lewis tells us what he’s thinking, moment by moment, as the SEC Chair trots out one unconvincing argument after another. It’s breathtaking, and skewers the guy in a way I’ve never seen before or since in an American newspaper. What’s even more breathtaking is that somehow, Lewis doesn’t come across as unfair. He doesn’t seem like a hothead, or someone with an agenda. He comes off as a curious, reasonable guy, the most reasonable guy in the room in fact...

About this edition

• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1594482675
• ISBN 13: 9781594482670
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464
• Editor: Ira Glass