Newspapers Books

This is an unjustly overlooked classic about how the world we live in came to be.

Having lived from the 40s to the present in Hawaii, this made me remember what it was really like then. Remember the dock strikes and the racial prejudices? A must for Hawaii history buffs.

PRINT CULTURE IN A DIVERSE AMERICA, edited by James P. Danky and Wayne Wiegand, won the 1999 Carey McWilliams Award from Greenwood Publishing Group's MULTICULTURAL REVIEW. The volume was featured at the American Library Association's annual conference in New Orleans and the author's have received a $500 prize.

The Carey McWilliams Award is named in honor of Carey McWilliams, a writer who examined the minority experience and sought ways to make democracy work better in the United States.

I read a marvelous book titled The Printer's Apprentice,written by Stephen Krensky.This story takes place in 1734 in New York.The four main characters are Gus Croft,William Bradstar,Peter Zenger,and the governer of New York.Gus is a young bright child who is an apprentice of William and writes for the Gazzete.William owns the Gazette and teaches Gus a whole lot about writting.Zenger is a bright young man who is the writer for the Neww York Weekly Journal.The governer fo New York is an old man that runs the city.The main problem is that the poor man Zenger is being put on trial because he wrote bad(but true)things about the governer.
In the begining,the governer of New York wanted the Gazette that William owned to be cancled unless better things were written.So William told Gus to go to visit his cousin in Philadelphia to do this.At the same time,Zenger is being placed on trial because he wrote bad but true things about the governer in the New York Weekly trial.It was a great timing because Gus finds this trial with Zenger when he's in Philladelphia.He watches the trial and hears the defendent of Zenger explaining what is libel and what is the truth to the judge and jurores.He tells that what Zenger wrote was true,but if it wasn't true he should be guilty.Eleven years later Zenger dies.
This book tells what happened durring the colonial days.Writers would write things about a person in a high oosision and the person doesn't like it.You may not know that people were put on trial because of this.The high leveled person would say that the writer was writing libel things about him.If the judge lets the writer have the freedom of speech then the writer is innocent and should not be guilty and sent to prison.

GI resistance as detailed in this book through the underground newspapers which projected the collective voice of unrest amoung enlisted men and women, is not only a unique history of GI protest during the Vietnam War, but also a timely look into the blogs, newspapers, letters, and broadcasts of the soldiers in Iraq who resent being kept there for what they believe are the economic interests of large, American corporations.

Have the media become the vice, rather than the voice, of the people? This is one of the many fascinating ideas posed by Christopher Browne in The Prying Game. Good title - seventeen spin-doctors huddled in a three-week brainstorming session could hardly have bettered such a sparkling play on words - and anyone about to catch a flight from Heathrow airport would probably snap the book up for sheer on-journey escapism. The actual content is equally compelling as it tells the story of the media from an insider's point-of-view - Browne is a national newspaper journalist - giving away many tricks the journalist uses to get a story - and the cunning hoaxers who play journalists at their own Prying Game with made-up stories about disappearing celebrities, naughty mistresses and political corruption. However, the hyperbolic high-jinks don't just stop at the title - check out the chapter headings: March of the Moguls, The Tory Story, Keep Taking the Tabloids, The techno-revolution, Media Wars, and, yes, that one again, The Vice of the People. Readers are left in little doubt about the book's content - perhaps not surprisingly for an author who has been a sub-editor on three UK national newspapers. As the sub-title implies "The sex, sleaze and scandals of Fleet Street and the media mafia", this is a potboiler, with the real story of how former Tory minister David Mellor was caught de flagrante by the UK's People newspaper; the House of Commons researcher who had affairs with two leading national newspaper editors, before revealing all to the News of the World; and the huge sums involved in chequebook journalism. And there are plenty of laughs between the tales of scandalous intrigue.

I would recommend this book to people who have browsed the web and now want to get involved in writing their own web pages. I love the fact its Macintosh oriented! Also, this book takes you through a (brief) history of hypertext, html, etc. and explains (briefly) the controversies between purists and standardizers - I have a better understanding of where all this came from. Pfaffenberger is an excellent and entertaining writer - maybe a little tiny bit simplistic in some ways but not condescendingly patronizing and very thorough. After having looked through several books including "HTML for Dummies" (definitely condescending) and another thick book professing to give you everything you need to know on running a website (which was written by a compendium of people and assumed you understood all sorts of things) - I would say this is a great starting point. (I rated a 9 because I feel there is ALWAYS room for improvement...)

Frank Brady's The Publisher is the life story of Paul Block who was a newspaper mogul, advertising executive, and political apologist. The core of this comprehensive and meticulous biography is Block's involvement in the history of newspaper publishing and national advertising -- and his influence on the politics of his day which spanned the Gay Nineties, the Jazz age, and the years of the Great Depression. Biographer Frank Brady places Bock within the vivid and dramatic settings of his time as he re-creates the story of Block as a friend, advisor, or opponent of such men as Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Alfred E. Smith, Jimmy Walker, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Here also is the personal side of Paul Block's childhood as the son of an immigrant ragpicker who eventually came to live in an opulent suite at the Waldorf Towers and a mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. The Publisher is a superbly presented biography of an influential American who lived through "interesting times".

Howard Penn Hudson is the publisher of the Newsletter on Newsletters, is a life-founder member of the Newsletter Pulishers Association, and is president of the Newsletter Clearinghouse. His experience and expertise come through in this book. It clearly and thoroughly discusses every major aspect of subscription and non-subscription newsletters. He talks about writing, design, printing, marketing, the industry as a whole, and much more. He is an excellent writer and communicates his expertise very clearly. Many newsletter examples are given in color. This book is worth the price.

Gilbert Seldes once called the newspaper column the most sophisticated of the popular American arts. It is that and more. It is a raft-ride through the white water of American opinion and thought. It is Mark Twain and Ring Lardner, Will Rogers and H.L. Mencken, Walter Lippmann and Joseph Alsop, Russell Baker and Calvin Trillin. It is nothing less than the American voice fortissimo-often blunt, occasionally eloquent, always opinionated, inspiring, infuriating, delightful. In this wonderfully diverse anthology, New York Times editorial writer Karl Meyer brings together 72 of America's finest columnists, the first such collection ever published. The range of voices is remarkable, stretching from Ben Franklin (who, as Silence Dogood, castigates the evils of demon rum) to Anna Quindlen (who writes on the travails of being pregnant in New York City). H.L. Mencken lambasts Truman's 1948 presidential campaign as 'unhampered by anything resembling a coherent body of ideas." Mary McGrory describes sitting in Judge Sirica's courtroom as the Watergate tapes are played on the "little Sony": how Haldeman slumps in his chair, how Mitchell turns faintly pink. Milt Gross renders a demented comic version of Pocohantas and Keptain John Smeet in American Yiddish dialect ("Hends opp!-odder we'll cot you off de scallop wid a tommyhuck!"). Heywood Broun offers a tongue-in-cheek explanation of "How I Became a Red." And I.F. Stone assails our collective guilt in Kennedy's assassination ("We all favor murder, when it reaches our own hated opponents"). To read these columns is to walk through American history and savor the views of some of our finest commentators, declaiming on everything from freedom of the press to yesterday's double-header.