Dispatches from the Gilded Age
A Few More Thoughts on Interesting People, Far-Flung Places, and the Joys of Southern Comforts
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- €10.99
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- €10.99
Publisher Description
Dispatches from the Gilded Age is a collection of essays by Julia Reed, one of America's greatest chroniclers.
In the middle of the night on March 11, 1980, the phone rang in Julia Reed’s Georgetown dorm. It was her boss at Newsweek, where she was an intern. He told her to get in her car and drive to her alma mater, the Madeira School. Her former headmistress, Jean Harris, had just shot Dr. Herman Tarnower, The Scarsdale Diet Doctor. Julia didn’t flinch. She dressed, drove to Madeira, got the story, and her first byline and the new American Gilded Age was off and running.
The end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first was a time in which the high and the low bubbled furiously together and Julia was there with her sharp eye, keen wit, and uproariously clear-eyed way of seeing the world to chronicle this truly spectacular era. Dispatches from the Gilded Age is Julia at her best as she profiles Andre Leon Talley, Sister Helen Prejean, President George and Laura Bush, Madeleine Albright, and others. Readers will travel to Africa and Cuba with Julia, dine at Le Bernardin, savor steaks at Doe’s Eat Place, consider the fashions of the day, get the recipes for her hot cheese olives and end up with the ride of their lives through Julia’s beloved South.
With a foreword by Roy Blount, Jr. and edited by Julia's longtime assistant, Everett Bexley.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Garden & Gun columnist Reed (Julia Reed's New Orleans), who died in 2020, profiles activists and artists, travels to exotic locales, and offers tart advice on food and fashion in this colorful essay collection spanning her 40-year career. The book opens with Reed's first byline, a Newsweek story about the 1980 murder of Scarsdale Diet doctor Herman Tarnower by his girlfriend Jean Harris. (Reed, a college sophomore and "part-time library assistant/phone answerer" at the magazine, got the assignment because Harris was the headmistress at her former private school in McLean, Va.) Elsewhere, Reed has a spirited sit-down with death penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean ("I quit trying so hard not to take the Lord's name in vain when she told me an old Mickey Mouse joke with the f-word in it"); recalls how her friends treated her "like someone just diagnosed with a brain tumor" when she called off her first wedding; visits a beauty school in war-torn Kabul, Afghanistan; and reflects on how cooking brought her solace during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Sharp and fearless, these essays are a fitting tribute to Reed's life and career.
