The Lede
Dispatches from a Life in the Press
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A fascinating portrait of journalism and the people who make it, told through pieces collected from the incomparable six-decade career of bestselling author and longtime New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin
“The Lede contains profiles . . . that are acknowledged classics of the form and will be studied until A.I. makes hash out of all of us.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
I’ve been writing about the press almost as long as I’ve been in the game. At some point, it occurred to me that disparate pieces from various places in various styles amounted to a picture from multiple angles of what the press has been like over the years since I became a practitioner and an observer.
Calvin Trillin has reported serious pieces across America for The New Yorker, covered the civil rights movement in the South for Time, and written comic verse for The Nation. But one of his favorite subjects over the years—a superb fit for his unique combination of reportage and humor—has been his own professional environment: the American press.
In The Lede, Trillin gathers his incisive, often hilarious writing on reporting, reporters, and their world. There are pieces on a legendary crime reporter in Miami and on an erudite film critic in Dallas who once a week transformed himself from a connoisseur of the French nouvelle vague into a fan of movies like Mother Riley Meets the Vampire. Trillin writes about the paucity of gossip columns in Russia, the icebreaker he'd use if he met one of his subjects socially (e.g.: “You must be wondering why I referred to you in Time as a dork robot”), and the origins of a publication called Beautiful Spot: A Magazine of Parking.
Uniting all of this is Trillin’s signature combination of empathy, humor, and graceful prose. The Lede is an invaluable portrait of one our fundamental American institutions from a master journalist.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This entertaining collection from longtime New Yorker contributor Trillin (Jackson, 1964) collects previously published writings reflecting on his trade. The title essay celebrates the art of the lede, breaking down the brilliance of one written by reporter James Edmund describing a woman who bit a camel "after it sat on her when she and her husband entered its enclosure to retrieve their deaf dog." In "This Story Just Won't Write," Trillin discusses the "group journalism" practiced at Time when he wrote for the magazine in the early 1960s, telling how a team of editors, field correspondents, and fact-checkers synthesized original reporting and background research into 70-line articles. Other pieces sing the praises of fellow reporters, such as "Covering the Cops," in which Trillin examines how crime reporter Edna Buchanan's eye for detail (she was notorious among police for asking such apparently trivial questions as "What did they have in their pockets? What was cooking on the stove?") added depth and humanity to her coverage. The consistently strong selections showcase Trillin's intelligence and wit, though the humor pieces have lost some of their initial punch. For instance, the wry poem "On the Assumption That Al Gore Will Slim Down If He's Intending to Run for President, a Political Reporter Is Assigned to Watch Gore's Waistline" probably landed better when it first appeared in 2007. Still, it's a spirited look at how the news is made.
