Journalism - Collections & History, Rock & Roll - General & Miscellaneous, Newspapers & Magazines - General & Miscellaneous, 20th Century American History - Social Aspects - General & Miscellaneous, Popular Culture - United States
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Overview
Rolling Stone has published the freshest, rawest, hippest, most savage writing around, and in the process has changed the face of American journalism. Since twenty-one-year-old Jann Wenner founded Rolling Stone in 1967, it has interacted with the surrounding culture in a way no publication has before or since - pioneering, breaking barriers, reinventing what journalism is, what it can talk about, what it can do. Over the years, Rolling Stone has given its writers only one overriding edict: take chances. The magazine's willingness to push the envelope has attracted the talents of the best, brightest, brashest minds of our time - in Lawrence Wright's words, "literary hellcats who brushed aside journalistic conventions and social taboos to get at new ways of telling the truth." And by giving these minds free rein, Rolling Stone has been the forum for the freshest and most inventive journalism of the last quarter century. The Best of Rolling Stone is a collection of thirty-seven of the magazine's most important and influential articles of the last twenty-five years, by writers such as Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey, Tim Cahill, Greil Marcus, Kurt Loder, and P. J. O'Rourke. Included is an inttoduction by founder and editor-in-chief Jann Wenner, and new prefaces by each writer describing in intimate and sometimes lurid detail the story behind the story - what it's like to work in the cultural hothouse that is Rolling Stone. The result is both a dazzling compilation of the best journalism of the past quarter-century and a fascinating behind-the-scenes history of the maverick magazine that made it happen. The range of these articles is breathtaking. From Thompson's chronicles of Fear and Loathing in the Nevada desert to Wolfe's tale of the Brotherhood of the Right Stuff from Howard Kohn's search for the truth behind the murder of Karen Silkwood to Greil Marcus's meditation on the death of Elvis Presley, The Best of Rolling Stone is a rich and definitive documEditorials
Publishers Weekly -
Rolling Stone editor Love has assembled 37 highlights from the hip magazine's first 25 years (although inexplicably the most recent entry here is Anthony DeCurtis's July 1990 essay on the waning days of communism in the Soviet Union). With prefaces by the mostly male authors (five contributors are women), the pieces are a generally absorbing and provocative skim of liberal American cultural and political interests; their impact, however, has been blunted through abridgement and some don't pass the test of time (particularly stale are Robin Green's story of the marketing of teen idol David Cassidy and David Black's expose on AIDS). Further selections include Robert Greenfield touring with the Rolling Stones in 1971, Hunter Thompson practicing ``Gonzo'' journalism, Tom Wolfe probing the psychology of astronauts, Marcelle Clements telling us why she and her friends no longer smoke pot and David Harris interviewing Ron Kovic, a paralyzed former marine who became an anti-war activist. In other essays, Joe Eszterhas tracks daredevil Evel Knievel, Howard Kohn links Karen Silkwood's death to a corrupt nuclear plant, Howard Kohn and David Weir get the inside scoop on fugitive Patty Hearst, Greil Marcus grieves for Elvis, Randall Sullivan shows how a cheerleader's murder by a less popular classmate is symptomatic of the greed-driven eighties, Tim Cahill hikes across Death Valley and P.J. O'Rourke is disgusted by Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. (Oct.)Book Details
Published
September 1, 1993
Publisher
New York : Doubleday, 1993.
Pages
528
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780385425803