Journalism

Reporting: Writings from the New Yorker

Name: Reporting: Writings from the New Yorker
Author: David Remnick
ISBN: 9780307275752

by David Remnick

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Overview

David Remnick is a writer with a rare gift for making readers understand the hearts and minds of our public figures. Whether it’s the decline and fall of Mike Tyson, Al Gore’s struggle to move forward after his loss in the 2000 election, or Vladimir Putin dealing with Gorbachev’s legacy, Remnick brings his subjects to life with extraordinary clarity and depth.

In Reporting, he gives us his best writing from the past fifteen years, ranging from American politics and culture to post-Soviet Russia to the Middle East conflict; from Tony Blair grappling with Iraq, to Philip Roth making sense of America’s past, to the rise of Hamas in Palestine. Both intimate and deeply informed by history, Reporting is an exciting and panoramic portrait of our times.

Synopsis

From one of the most gifted and widely read journalists at work today, a volume that collects the best of his pieces from The New Yorker over the last fifteen years. David Remnick is fascinated by the men and women obsessed with creating the history of our era as well as those intent on chronicling it. Public figures rarely step away from their public selves. But Remnick has the ability to see the private self beneath the public façade and give readers startling glimpses of familiar figures: Al Gore attacking George Bush as he tries to make sense of his incomprehensible loss in the 2000 election, Tony Blair struggling for votes in the midst of the Iraq crisis.

In Reporting, Remnick returns to two countries he knows well, Russia and Israel. His account of Vladimir Putin contending with Gorbachev’s legacy affords a fresh view of postcommunist Russia; his appraisals of Benjamin Netanyahu, Ariel Sharon, and Sari Nusseibeh of the P.L.O. shed unexpected light on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. Often, Remnick’s intent is to see someone up close, if only for a moment in time: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as he packs his bags to return to Russia, Václav Havel as he prepares to end his career as President of the Czech Republic.

Whether David Remnick is writing about Katharine Graham and the state of American newspapers, the literary visions of Philip Roth and Don DeLillo, or the decline and fall of Mike Tyson and the sport of boxing, his powers of observation, analysis, compassion, and wit are always present. Reporting is confirmation of Remnick’s skill at writing insightful and influential political and cultural narratives, and of his unique gift for bringing his subjects to life on the page with extraordinary clarity and depth.

The New York Times - Pete Hamill

As a writer, Remnick practices a classic journalistic style: concrete nouns, active verbs, graceful sentences, solid paragraphs, subtle transitions. A sly wit often punches up the prose, and he is hip in the original sense of the word, which was "knowing," not "fashionable." One measure of his accomplishment is what he avoids: jargon, prophecy, slang that instantly grows moldy, those ugly words that come out of sociology or the Beltway ("proactive," "impact" as a verb, too many others). I've been edited by Remnick and interviewed by him, and came away from each experience respecting his intelligence and professionalism. As an editor, he wants to make the writer's work better; as a writer, he treats the reader as an informed, intelligent equal.

About the Author, David Remnick

David Remnick has been the editor of The New Yorker since 1998. A staff writer for the magazine from 1992 to 1998, he was previously The Washington Post's correspondent in the Soviet Union. The author of several books, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the George Polk Award for his 1994 book Lenin's Tomb. He lives in New York with his wife and children.

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Editorials

Pete Hamill

Publishers Weekly

Remnick's last collection of pieces (The Devil Problem) was published in 1996-two years before he became editor of the New Yorker (the magazine in which many of those essays appeared). This new collection of his essays from the New Yorker is divided into five parts, to account for Remnick's varied interests: the first focuses on politics and current events, including Katharine Graham and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Following that are sections on writers (Philip Roth, V clav Havel), Russia (Vladimir Putin, the Romanovs), Israel/ Palestine (Benjamin Netanyahu, Hamas) and boxing (cornerman Teddy Atlas, Larry Holmes). In his introduction, Remnick describes many of his subjects as those who "tend to be elusive." It is Remnick's art to reveal subtle, truthful qualities of people such as Don DeLillo, Mike Tyson and Al Gore who are reluctant to disclose themselves. Remnick is an ideal reporter, combining erudition, curiosity, wit, an eye for the telling anecdote and empathy. (May) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Remnick, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and editor of The New Yorker since 1998, here collects profiles and essays he wrote for that magazine from 1997 to 2006. The 22 pieces appear in five untitled sections that could be called "Power" (e.g., Tony Blair, Katharine Graham), "Writers" (e.g., Don DeLillo, Philip Roth), "Russia" (e.g., Putin, Solzhenitsyn), "Israel" (e.g., Arafat, Sharansky, Netanyahu), and "Boxing" (e.g., Tyson, Lenox Lewis). That this book is a kind of miscellany can be seen in its Library of Congress classification under "A," the province of "general" works. The pieces are of course well researched, well written, and with well-observed details, but there's nothing particularly arresting about them. Remnick does update almost half of the pieces with new postscripts (e.g., noting Katharine Graham's death). However, as he lacks the cult of such New Yorker writers as John McPhee or an identity as one of the magazine's prose stylists (think of A.J. Liebling's coverage of the boxing scene!), demand from general library patrons may be limited. Libraries subscribing to databases such as ProQuest will have access to most of this material online. An optional purchase for academic libraries serving journalism or creative writing programs.-Michael O. Eshleman, Kings Mills, OH Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

New Yorker editor Remnick (King of the World, 1998, etc.) continues a happy tradition of self-anthologizing, gathering favorite pieces from the past two decades. If there is a theme in these disparate pieces, it is to be discerned in what Remnick calls his "attempt to see someone up close, if only for a moment in time." Thus two sterling profiles of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who may have kept himself at an Olympian remove in his gated-compound exile in Vermont, both out of Frostian disdain for his neighbors and of justifiable paranoia, given the hatred the Soviet regime felt for him. Philip Roth, another Remnick subject, keeps himself similarly inaccessible in the New York countryside, mostly so he can get his writing done; by Remnick's account, the prolific Roth does little else, though "over the years, Roth has let himself be diverted at times from his work." Don DeLillo won't admit much diversion at all, unlike Vaclav Havel, who put a human face on Czechoslovakia's postcommunist government by, among other things, puttering about in the halls of the presidential palace on a motor scooter. Remnick's pieces often touch on thorny issues, as with his profile of an American-Russian couple who are shaking up the world of translation of Russian literary classics and his little study of British leader Tony Blair, who muses, just before the Iraq invasion, about getting rid of Robert Mugabe and "the Burmese lot" and concludes that such types should be removed from the stage when possible: "I don't because I can't, but when you can you should." Remnick also profiles boxers, in the closing section on the sweet science, which is seemingly a passion of Remnick's but a decided step down from thepolitical and writerly topics he's pursued thus far. Elegant, interesting, even memorable, certainly more so than most magazine writing. First printing of 40,000