Journalism Reads

Steve Bogira’s nonfiction work Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse was published in 2005. Bogira, as a Chicago native and long-time writer for the Chicago Reader, is a social justice advocate and focuses much of his work on poverty and segregation. The work addresses themes of The Injustices of the US Justice System, The Prison-Industrial Complex, and The Influences of Corruption and Politics on Criminal Courts.Content Warning: The source... Read Courtroom 302 Summary

Crazy: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness, published in 2006, is a blend of memoir and journalism by author and Washington Post journalist Pete Earley. The book was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 and recounts the struggles of Earley’s son, Mike, to receive treatment for his mental illness, which results in Mike’s arrest. Earley juxtaposes Mike’s story with the stories of Miami residents with mental illnesses as they navigate life in... Read Crazy Summary

First published in 1977, Dispatches is Michael Herr’s account of his time spent as a war correspondent in Vietnam. The conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia started on November 1, 1955. President Kennedy escalated U.S. involvement in 1961, followed by President Johnson, who committed even more resources and men in 1963. 58,220 U.S. soldiers and approximately 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers lost their lives during the conflict. Michael Herr was a correspondent for Esquire Magazine... Read Dispatches Summary

IntroductionFast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal is a 2001 nonfiction book by Eric Schlosser that investigates the business practices of the American fast food industry and the associated agricultural industries that supply it. Following the precedent of Upton Sinclair’s famous 1906 work The Jungle, Schlosser provides readers with a glimpse into the questionable ethics of these large food corporations. Schlosser likewise provides brief historical accounts of fast food’s origins and traces... Read Fast Food Nation Summary

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a 1971 novel by American author Hunter S. Thompson. The book chronicles the story of journalist Raoul Duke and his attorney Doctor Gonzo who drive to Las Vegas, ostensibly to cover an iconic off-road vehicle race. However, they are also looking to “find the American Dream” and take with them a car’s load of hard drugs. Duke is a fictionalized surrogate for Thompson, while Gonzo is based off... Read Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas Summary

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Published in 2013, Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital is a work of nonfiction by American journalist Sheri Fink. The book, which takes place in August 2005, describes the struggle of staff and patients to survive when trapped in New Orleans’ Memorial Medical Center during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Lacking critical resources, the doctors make a drastic decision that will cause many patients to die via euthanasia. Five Days... Read Five Days at Memorial Summary

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Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream is a 1990 nonfiction book by H. G. Bissinger that explores the American phenomenon of high school football in the small Texan town of Odessa. Friday Night Lights is a New York Times bestseller and inspired a television show and film of the same name. Bissinger, who left his job as a journalist and editor to write the book, moved his family to Odessa for... Read Friday Night Lights Summary

From Beirut to Jerusalem is a 1989 book by the American journalist Thomas Friedman. It chronicles the years he spent as a journalist in the two cities of the book’s name, during a remarkably tumultuous period in that region’s politics. It is part personal memoir, part analysis (leaning on the advice of many of his expert friends, such as Fouad Ajami), part collection of anecdotes ranging from the funny to the heartbreaking to the absurd... Read From Beirut to Jerusalem Summary

Full Body Burden: Growing up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats is a 2012 nonfiction account by Kristen Iversen. Half memoir, half investigative journalism, the book covers Iversen’s life in a town near Denver, Colorado, as well as Rocky Flats—the nearby nuclear production facility. Quiet, observant, and adventurous, Iversen is the oldest of four children. The family keeps many pets, and Iversen adores horseback riding on their pasture at a new neighborhood near Rocky Flats... Read Full Body Burden Summary

Ghettoside, written by Jill Leovy and published in 2015, follows the investigation of and trial for the murder of Bryant Tennelle, the son of a Los Angeles homicide detective, through the late 2000s. In doing so, the author examines the critical epidemic of black-on-black violence in communities such as South Central Los Angeles in order to explicate the root causes, systemic issues, and contemporary problems that continue to contribute to higher rates of homicide in... Read Ghettoside Summary

Gideon’s Trumpet, written in 1964, is a book that details a landmark court case, Gideon v. Wainwright, that came before the Supreme Court of the United States of America in 1963. It tells the story of Clarence Gideon, whose case became the key foundation of the modern interpretation of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments: that criminal defendants have a right to counsel at both the federal and state level even if they cannot afford a... Read Gideon’s Trumpet Summary

Russell Baker (b. August 14, 1925) is an American newspaper columnist, humorist, political satirist, and author. He earned a B.A. from Johns Hopkins in 1947 and began his career at the Baltimore Sun as a police reporter. He was a columnist at the New York Times from 1962 to 1998 and host of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre from 1992 to 2004.His Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Growing Up (1982), recounts his childhood and adolescence during the Great Depression... Read Growing Up Summary

Hiroshima, an account of the first atomic bomb used in warfare, is a nonfiction book by John Hersey. Alfred A. Knopf published it in 1946, several months after it first appeared as an article in the New Yorker. The magazine ran the article at the end of August 1946, just after the first anniversary of the dropping of the bomb, devoting the entire issue to the lengthy piece. The issue sold out immediately and was... Read Hiroshima Summary

Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) is a photojournalistic account of New York City’s working class of the late 19th century and the tenements that housed them. Riis exposes the appalling and often inhumane conditions in and around the tenements. He attributes New York City’s squalor and degradation to sheer greed on the part of landlords who prioritize maximum profits over basic decency. More importantly, he documents these conditions with more than 40... Read How the Other Half Lives Summary

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League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions, and the Battle for Truth is a 2013 work of investigative nonfiction by brothers Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru. The book chronicles the National Football League’s concussion crisis, which came to light with a few career-ending head injuries in the 1990s and became an even more serious issue as numerous deceased former players were found to have developed chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). League of Denial won the PEN/ESPN Award... Read League of Denial Summary

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