Tag: #newspaper

I read 2 books in August – the least I had read in a while. Here is a blurb about each of the books I read in August.

“Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg” was a delight. Bragg’s writing is everything I love in narrative journalism: rich sensory detail, storytelling shaped by character, respect for ordinary people, and deep empathy without sentimentality. Bragg won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for his “elegantly written stories about contemporary America” and is the recipient of the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award.

Here are some of the stories that stood out to me:

• Mr. Cain – the Angola prison warden
  • “There comes a time when a man goes through what we call criminal menopause and he is unable to do the crime that he is here for. My prison is becoming an old folks’ home.”
• 1996 – a Baptist church demanding the exhumation of a mixed-race baby
  • The deacons wanted to keep their graveyard “exclusively white.” They later apologized after drawing nationwide attention. It’s mind boggling that this occurred in 1996!
• Stories of the bombings of Timothy McVeigh & Terry Nichols
  • “The embarrassing thing, for this tough man who answers questions in short, machine-gun bursts, is the damage to his eyes. The blast injured his tear ducts, so that there is nowhere for the tears to go except down his face. One of the few people marked by the bombing who does not feel compelled to cry looks like he cries all the time.”
• Oseola McCarty
  • 87-year-old African American washerwoman who spent her entire life scrubbing other people’s clothes for pennies, saved over $150,000, and donated it to the University of Southern Mississippi to fund scholarships for Black students who couldn’t otherwise afford college.
• The Oklahoma City Bombing and the trial of Susan Smith (the South Carolina mother who drowned her children.
  • These stories focused on local grief, broken towns, and police officers haunted by what they witnessed.
• Florida State Troopers on the Skyway Bridge
  • A harrowing look at the officers who spend hours talking desperate people down from the edge
• Brandon C. Blenden
  • As part of his sentence, he must mail a $1 check every Friday for ten years to the parents of the girl he killed. The memo line reads: “For the death of your daughter, Whitney.”

Key lessons from this book:

• Everybody has a story worth telling.
• Sometimes courage is quiet.
• Every person matters. Bragg deliberately wrote about people most newspapers ignored: janitors, coal miners, elderly, widows, children, veterans, prisoners, and small-town families.
• His reporting suggests that good journalism begins with genuine curiosity. He rarely inserts himself into stories and instead listens carefully, observes details, lets people speak, and earns trust.
• Great journalism creates empathy.

4 out of 5 stars

Jade Chang’s “What A Time To Be Alive” is a satire of the spiritual-wellness world and a heartfelt novel about grief, internet fame, identity, and the human hunger for meaning. It’s a book that reminds readers that rarely do we get to choose the things that will change us; they arrive uninvited and rearrange the landscape of our lives.

One of the most affecting threads is Lola’s estranged relationship with her mother. As she reflects, “I always pictured her out there waiting for me to reemerge, to be clever enough to see past her leaving and understand that what she really wanted was to be reunited with me. I always thought I was good at understanding other people’s feelings were just as real as mine, but it turned out there were still mother-sized holes in my field of perception.”

The novel’s satirical mantra – “Be your own beacon” – began as a joke about influencer-speak but deepened into something more sincere as Lola confronted what it means to be seen, to be believed, and to believe in herself. Likewise, the refrain “What a time to be alive” lands with both irony and tenderness and acknowledges that life is absurd, frightening, and beautiful all at once.

• People crave meaning as much as truth.
• The death of someone close creates a sharp split between the “before” and “after,” forcing you to rebuild.
• Authenticity is difficult once it becomes a product. Can sincerity survive an audience? Can wisdom be monetized without becoming marketing? When does helping people become selling yourself?

You can have all the craft in the world, but if you’re not willing to look deeply at yourself, you’re not an artist. It’s being willing to look at yourself and face the embarrassment of putting what you see out there. Fame is a reward for that bravery.

This book was entertaining at times, bizarre at others, and ultimately unlike what I typically read, but its blend of satire and sincerity lingered.

3 out of 5 stars

I look forward to reading, learning, and sharing more with you soon!