Jimmy Breslin
The Man Who Told the Truth
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
“Do not. Confuse me. With. The facts. I tell the truth.”
—Jimmy Breslin
The first-ever biography of America’s greatest crime reporter
In a newspaper career spanning decades, Jimmy Breslin covered the stories that he knew mattered most: the human stories beyond the front page. From the JFK assassination, to the Son of Sam killings, mafia heists, the Crown Heights riots, and the Occupy movement, Breslin’s influential columns captured the lifebeat of the second half of the 20th century. A quintessential New Yorker, Breslin rubbed shoulders with world leaders and neighborhood arsonists, profiled JFK’s gravedigger, and elicited letters from the Son of Sam killer during his reign of terror, all recounted in columns that were personal, blunt, and the truth—at least Jimmy’s version of it.
Jimmy Breslin: The Man Who Told the Truth is the first biography of the legendary writer, vividly portrayed by Richard Esposito, a former colleague of the Big Man. From Breslin’s humble beginnings as a copy boy, to winning the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, the writer’s life was as fascinating as any of his subjects. With the full cooperation of Breslin’s family and interviews with countless of his former coworkers, friends, and enemies, Esposito has crafted a meticulous and revealing portrait of a complex man who bared his soul to the world in column inches.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This admiring biography from journalist Esposito (Bomb Squad) chronicles the career of pugnacious and prolific New York City reporter Jimmy Breslin (1928–2017). Esposito contends that Breslin deserves to be remembered alongside his New York Herald Tribune colleague Tom Wolfe as a progenitor of "New Journalism," citing among other examples Breslin's decision to focus his coverage of John F. Kennedy's funeral on how the man who dug the president's grave experienced that day. Also detailed are Breslin's unsuccessful 1969 bid for City Council president on a platform promising to make the city a state; the taunting letters the Son of Sam wrote Breslin in the mid 1970s; and Breslin's forceful condemnations of Donald Trump for taking out a newspaper ad calling for the execution of the Central Park Five in 1989. Esposito presents Breslin as a consummate reporter—asserting that "he usually used more shoe leather and worked as hard as or harder... than any reporter whose front-page beat was the cops, courts, jails"—and the crisp prose conjures the smoke-filled newsrooms of the industry's mid-century heyday ("Rat-tat-tatting and slamming—powerful, fast, heavy-fingered key strikes—sweating, smoking, crumpling pages into balls that cluttered the desk and dropped on to the floor"). It's a loving ode to a dedicated journalist and the bygone era in which he made his mark.
