Press Gallery – Enlightened Journalism

The story of the National Post is the story of ego in ink. The genesis of Canada's rightist national newspaper is every bit as back-room and old boys' club as you believed it to be, conceived over five-martini expensed account lunches and, less glamourously, cramped offices in the Hamilton Spectator. Chris Cobb's broadsheet bio, Ego And Ink, gets behind the scenes to deliver a gripping Post-mortem. It has all the conspiring, double-dealing, secret meetings and gossiping a newshound can handle, not to mention a close look at slap-dash hiring practices (there's really no sport quite like dropping cute English majors into a multi-million dollar start-up newspaper and watching 'em crash and burn).

But beyond simply purient interest, one of the delightful aspects of Cobb's writing is his ability to satirize the profession by exposing newsroom foibles in all their neurotic glory. In a conversation with Toronto Star doyenne Rosie DiManno, for example, Cobb digs deep into the journalist's frail psyche. "Journo-depression," he writes, "is a condition little known outside newsrooms, but it is one that visits itself on most journalists who stick around the business long enough. Usually, it's a temporary, though not necessarily short-lived, condition and will pass when the aggrieved supervising editor moves on. But in untreated cases it can become chronic and cancerous, mutating what was once a keen, driven journalist into someone horribly bitter and intellectually atrophied."

Along with the dark, he captures the trite, childish ways a reporter's mind truly works. "As horribly debilitating as this 'journo-depression' is," Cobb writes, "it can be cured with miraculous ease by a few kind words from the right person, by a plum assignment, or by having a byline above a page-one story. Even better than a byline above a page-one story is a byline and a small headshot of the journalist. This is the water of Lourdes because it says two things: one, they love the story, and two, they think you're a star."

It's this wry insider approach that makes Ego and Ink a compelling read for those in the biz. It's also a means to gather ammunition to support long-held beliefs in Don Mills conspiracies. And there's lots of ammunition. Take, for instance, Black and his merry band's message to metro daily editors (lords of what one arrogant ME termed "the shires") in 1998. "The message from the top was brutal," Cobb writes, "We're a national newspaper company about to lauinch a national newspaper, and although you are not on the team, we expect your full cooperation and we reserve the right to hire who we want from any of your newspapers, and to take any of your news stories if we decide thay are good enough to make your front page. Oh yes, and the newspaper will be funded from the profits made by your newspapers and there's a good chance readers will stop buying your newspaper and buy the new one." Ouch. Six years and zero profit later, it still hurts. – PressGal

Corporations are branded for the same superstitious reason children are baptized: to give them souls. Advertising legitimizes corporate entities, shapes them, names them, and ultimately protects them, Joel Bakan points out in his own heavily-promoted anti-corporate critique.

Under Bakan's gaze, megalithic corporate multi-nationals seem almost fragile: They exist, he argues, because we allow them to, dancing on a narrow ledge of legal footing, courting public opinion in order to survive. In their attempts to endear themselves, most have made cynical and schlocky attempts to soften their image. As early as 1908, he writes, AT&T labelled itself "a good friend and neighbour" in advertisements. General Motors followed suit in an attempt to assuage negative public opinion. One ad exec noted the mega-corp should sell itself as "a big congenial household."

What's best about The Corporation — aside from the central conceit comparing the corporation as a legal "person" to a certifiable psychopath — are the corporate goons themselves. Economist Milton Friedman does a fine turn in both the book and the film, pontificating on the immorality— indeed illegality— of a corporation engaging in moral concern. Corporations cannot do good, he argues, if it in anyway impacts the bottom line or detracts from its focus on making money for stockholders. Therefore, social responsibility is only permissible when its clearly insincere — such charity must benefit the giver more than the receiver. To Freidman and economists and CEOs like him, good intentions in business are akin to good-looking women: both are useful for selling products.

Admissions like these help Bakan reveal how most corporations' heartfelt commitments to social responsibility are simply the result of cost-benefit analyses. What's lovely about the book is that Bakan engages in relatively few theatrics as he points out, ahem, the Emperors have no clothes. They promote the illusion of trustworthiness merely to justify continued freedom from government constraints as the continue to abuse their powers.

Repeatedly, Bakan reveals how shallow these efforts are. Pfizer, for instance, has dined out on the virtue of its free drug program — it donates Zithromax to Africa to treat trachoma, an infection that blinds millions — for years. But as Bakan points out, this is less an example of giving back to the community as getting a break at tax time. The program, one aid organization estimates, costs American taxpayers four times as much in tax write-offs to Pfizer than it would cost the U.S. government to buy the drugs and send then to Africa through aid programs. Closer to home, Pfizer pats itself on the back for cleaning up and shoring up security at the run-down Williamsburg subway station nearest the Pfizer plant. Yet again, the corporation fails to deliver: the platform call boxes dial a security guard that doesnÕt exist. In the end, "corporate social responsibility," Bakan writes," is like the call boxes. It holds out promises of help, reassures people, and sometimes works. We should not, however, expect very much from it." – PressGal

Kill Duck Before Serving:
Red Faces at The New York Times
By Linda Amster and Dylan McClain

It is a rare but wonderful thing, these days, to be able to see a journalist, not as a fabulist, liar, cheat, pretender or plagiarizer, but as a human being, and as such liable to make honest — even amusingly innocent — mistakes.

Kill Duck Before Serving: Red Faces at The New York Times is a refreshing read, a reminder to reporters that you're never too seasoned a scribe or too prestigious a publication to spell "Katharine Graham" wrong 21 times. Kill Duck also offers a lesson for readers — missteps in the media are, in the main, not the product of fourth-estate treachery, right-wing conspiracies, editorial cabals or agenda-driven pundits, but rather typos, computer glitches, mental lapses and just plain poor spelling.

The authors trolled some20,000 corrections for these gems —barely a fraction of the total, they claim. In an average week in 2001, The Times published six or seven corrections of factual errors each day, even with one of the largest copy desks in America: some 120 crusty grammarians presumably combing copy for split infinitives, and apparently lapsing on some of the larger issues.

Some of the most delightful corrections illustrate the perils of long-distance transcription: "Because of a transcription error, a dispatch from Tel Aviv ... referred incorrectly to Yosef Burg, leader of the National Religious Party. It should have described him as a veteran (not Bedouin) in Israeli politics." They expose the sophistication of composing room red-necks: "The original copy clearly contained the expression 'Communist fronts.' Through an error that occurred in the composing room the word 'faggots' was used instead of fronts." And, or course, they reveal the delicate art of raising sources from the dead: "An article referred incorrectly to Roman L. Hruska, former United States senator from Nebraska. He is alive and practicing law in Omaha." They can also be painfully ironic: "A chart about the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting misspelled the names of several advisors."

Not only does The Times get it wrong, but Kill Duck reveals the paper of record sometimes takes several tries to set the record straight, to the point of correcting errors in the previous day's correction. (The sum was not $3.06, but $30.60, or rather $306.) And then there are the nitpickers who make a point of writing in to say "a picture showed summer sausage, not bratwurst." Or numerate Mensa members compelled to point out: "An article incorrectly stated the number of positions possible for the Rubik's Cube. It is 43,252,003,274,489,856,000."

In essence, Kill Duck is a reportorial tonic — the perfect way to cleanse one's own guilt and annoyance after a day of fielding letters and phone calls about gremlins in copy. Journalists are (of necessity) perfectionists and we hate to be wrong, so much so we tend to beat ourselves up over missing commas. But on those hangdog days when you've got a correction in the paper, it helps to keep it all in perspective: at least you didn't advise hundreds of thousands of readers to prepare Muscovy duck with a live bird. ("An article about decorative cooking incorrectly described a presentation of Muscovy duck by Michel Fitoussi, a New York chef. In it, Mr. Fitoussi uses a duck that has been killed.") But hey, there's always tomorrow. – PressGal

The Natashas is not a book. It's a 288-page newspaper article. Which is a shame because it had so much potential. It's difficult to criticize Malarek if only because he's devoted himself to an important and under-reported topic. He's also clearly troubled by his encounters with victims of human-trafficking. But you don't write a successful book on the strength of a good topic and deep convictions. Narratively, The Natashas is a disappointment, made worse by its promise.

It's not for a lack of explosive material. The raw stats are shocking. Organized crime makes more than US$12 billion from human trafficking, off the bodies of women sold into sex slavery. It's the most lucrative business in the world, just behind drug and weapons trades, with more than 800,000 victims worldwide. A full quarter of them are poverty-stricken young women from former Soviet states — an army of abused who johns see simply as interchangeable Slavic beauties known as Natashas.

But although Malarek describes encounters with rescued young women, shell-shocked former victims, organized crime thugs, and police and investigators, his scenes feel wooden and once-removed. The book suffers from an absence of a narrative and emotional core, as Malarek fails to create a sense of intimacy or empathy with the women he describes. It's possible language barriers played a part, but if I didn't trust the author's impeccable reputation, I'd suspect he'd created composite characters — they just don't ring true. In the end, we learn more about how Malarek feels about human trafficking than we do about how the girls themselves feel about being trafficked.

The good news is the book finds a footing in the last 100 pages or so. Buried in the final chapters, after a particularly obvious section on the Internet — (imagine, perverts go online to talk to each other) — lie the most captivating and incriminating stories. Here, Malarek documents American GIs', UN peacekeepers' and ex-pats' addictions to the sex-slave trade. One woman held captive in Bosnia described being bought for $50 and used by a dozen UN International Police Task Force soldiers to celebrate a fellow soldier's 21st birthday. Other soldiers stationed there bragged of buying 12-year-old Natashas of their own for less than $800, keeping them locked in apartments during the day. These tales are disturbing and infuriating, but it's unlikely all readers will persevere long enough to find them. – PressGal

Long before Susan Orlean started writing about dogs and well in advance of her filmic adaptation as Meryl Streep, she was one of the brightest voices in literary journalism. Nowhere was this voice more lively and beguiling than in her first book, Saturday Night, an extraordinary collection of tales of tagging along with ordinary Americans on their Saturday nights on the town. Few feature writers can read this without reproach: it's a simple but sociologically rich subject and we're envious she got there first, then did such a damn fine job.

Orlean goes crusing in Elkhart, Indiana, attends a Phoenix quinceanera, slinks around a Portland bar with a B-grade lounge band, sits out a polka ball in Maryland, mopes with teenage hipsters in L.A., gossips with gum-snapping waitreses in the biggest steakhouse in the U.S.A., fasts at a Miami Beach diet spa, crashes a Park Avenue dinner party, visits a Bowery homeless mission, babysits with a Pleasantville teen, and keeps watch with military officers in an underground missle bunker. Good reading, all ot it. But the writing is onlythe half of it.

Without being the least bit self-indulgent, Saturday Night has a subtext: exploring the reporter's outsider status in the most insider of settings. In a way, it's a book about not belonging, about risking embarassment and, because of it, witnessing magic. It's being a tagalong, heel, misfit, third-wheel. About chucking press passes that bolster confidence and becoming the socially awkward teenager we thought we left behind in high school.

Reporters in search of the ordinary often feel ridiculous. Grieving familes know exactly why you are calling, but those same families lose the script when you want to spend a weekend at the mall with them. "When I showed interest in a subject people considered terribly ordinary," Orlean writes, "Saturday night in the life of a suburban babysitter, for instance – I had some explaining to do."

For most naturally introverted reporters, crashing intimate social gatherings for a story is the very worst sort of hell. Orlean shows us it's also rewarding. Most of her good books are, in some way, about this process, interesting to other reporters in part because of what we can glean of her method. What she does takes a confidence few journalists can sustain, especially when their forays disturb private parties and personal pleasures, "a time when people are most at ease with themselves." – PressGal

Scrappy barely begins to describe Martha Gellhorn. A writer with infuriating talent, Gellhorn high-tailed it out of St. Louis in her early twenties and started scratching out a living writing in Europe. Travelling from France to Spain to Finland, England, China, Vietnam, Italy and Kenya, Gelhorn took her unflinching eye to a dozen different countries. En route, she collected friends, lovers, and most importantly, unique and deeply human stories.

In part, she was driven to keep moving by her need to leave "the kitchen of life" – her term for mind-numbing housekeeping – far behind. Her trajectory from college drop-out to veteran war reporter and minor celebrity was swift yet hard-won. She began inauspiciously, leaving Bryn Mawr for a summer job at the New Republic, where Gellhorn recalled she let in "more typos than ever in the history of the paper." At 21, she moved to the Albany Times Union, dividing her time between cops and corpses. Next stop, Paris. With $75 to her name, Gellhorn scraped by writing news for United Press, dreck for various women's magazines (work she termed "harmless whoring"), and on her return to America, features for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and a first novel that never saw a second printing. It took travelling through the slums of Depression-era mill towns to turn Gellhorn from a diletantte reporter into a mature writer. She crafted her dispatches for the Roosevelts into a critically-acclaimed book on poverty in America, The Trouble I've Seen. She was 27, and she was just getting started.

What followed was a love affair with war reporting, Spain and Hemmingway, in order of importance. Her countless affairs, made so much of by her critcs, are incidental when compared to her desire for adventure, travel and new material, which persisted well into her eighties. At times crafty and selfish, at others naive and vulnerable, Gellhorn was her own woman at a time when "woman" was a dirty word. She had the drive and wit to carve out a name for herself as a foreign correspondent even when denied accreditation. She was forced to stow away on military hospital ships to cross the Channel during WWII and obliged to befriend regiments to obtain food and protection denied her as a woman reporter barred from the American press corps. It never fazed her. She was so good, editors demanded their male correspondents emulate her.

Moorehead's account is precise, darkly funny and absorbing. Gellhorn was a family friend, but Moorehead doesn't let her admiration for the writer sugarcoat her representation. Gellhorn could be childish, stubborn, self-absorbed and cold, and Moorehead doesn't flinch at showing her at her worst: seducing countless married men or abandoning her adopted orphan son Sandy when the child became too plump and truculent for her liking. So, Gellhorn was flawed. She was also brilliant and tough as crimson laquered nails. – PressGal

Consider this a tale of two women journalists. (The modifier, sadly, necessary because it mattered more that you didn't wear pants when Graham and Gellhorn began.) They couldn't be more different. Graham's unbearably privileged upbringing precluded any sort of effort on her part to make her own name as a young reporter. Precluded any sort of independent effort period. Graham had barely begun to wean herself of the silver spoon she was born with by the time she entered Vassar which, she admits, "I had chosen by a process of non-thought ... it was simply the 'in' place at the time." At least we know Graham was no precocious intellectual.

But there's more. In one barely believable passage she writes: "I wore one yellow cardigan through the first weeks of school until Thanksgiving, when someone finally suggested it should be washed. I had noticed girls' sweaters stretched out on towels but had no idea either that I should be following their example or even how to. At home, someone had always removed dirty and discarded clothes, which later reappeared in my drawers. I resolved that problem by sending the yellow sweater out to a cleaner, and never did learn to wash one." It's a seemingly minor detail, but a troubling one. It's almost shameful that the future editor-in-chief of one of the world's most powerful newspapers, which was trusted to act as the voice of the people, was so sheltered from the everyday concerns of the public so as to be ignorant of the mere concept of laundry. That she then deemed herself too important to do it is salt in the wound.

Later in life, it's true, Graham struggles through difficult years, culminating with the mental illness and eventual suicide of her husband, Philip Graham. At this point, the spell of privilege is broken, and the reader feels for Graham, but it remains impossible to truly respect her as a pioneering newspaperwoman, though well before the sweater incident I very much wanted to. As one of the few women in recent history to achieve such a powerful position in journalism, at first glance she's the perfect role model. But as we discover how Graham was swept into her role on her father's coattails — her family surname, more than anything, propelled her through the ranks — something is lost. Her position was one that many more talented reporters and editors who had hardscrabbled their way into the newsroom likely deserved much more than the boss's daughter. On reflection, rather than a tale of two reporters, this may be a tale of the divide between bourgeois newsroom management and plebian reporters. Sadly, this is the way the news business (well, most business) still works. At least Graham is honest enough not to mythologize her career, and she does spin a good story, capturing the Washington Post at the height of its influence. But overall, Personal History is a disheartening lesson in class consciousness, and one can't help thinking that a woman like Gellhorn, given the chance, could have done a far better job. – PressGal

In a remote Australian Aboriginal village on the Timor Sea lives the last keeper of the ancient language Mati Ke. His wife knows few words, his grandchildren speak English gleaned from satellite TV. His aging sister is the only other living fluent speaker, but tribal taboos forbid them to speak. When the old man dies, another of the world's languages will be lost. In Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, Montreal Gazette reporter Mark Abley bears witness to the last gasps of languages like Yuchi, Boro, Manx, Yiddish, Welsh, and Inuktitut. It's a fascinating, touching, and finely crafted study of the devastating effects of English monoculture. Linguists estimate only half the 6,000 languages alive today will exist by 2100; of those, just 600 will be widely spoken. What's lost, Abley concludes, are not only words but "thousands of subtly different notions of truth." –PressGal in BCBusiness Magazine, March 2004

The Road to Hell should be subtitled "everything you ever wanted to know about drug smuggling, hitmen, bikers, murder, undercover policing, running agents and going to trial." Sher and Marsden have left nothing out – this is depth reporting and true crime storytelling at its best. With clean, spare writing and astonishing detail, the authors demystify biker culture at the same time as they illustrate how well the Hells Angels have integrated into mainstream society. No smoky backroom bunker hand-signals here. Hells in Canada are so powerful they can afford to be brazen: renting conference space at the Days Inn, gunning down targets in broad daylight on major highways, setting up headquarters and buying homes half a block down the street from properties owned by police. The idea of bikers plotting coke deals and hits in one of Celine Dion's Nickels family diners sounds preposterous, but it happens. It's chilling to learn of bikers hiding out in neighbourhoods you live in, getting gunned down in front of bars you walk by and running companies you're familiar with. The message: don't get too comfortable.

Complacency, the authors argue repeatedly, is what got us here in the first place. Lack of police interest, resources and cooperation, lack of effective port security, and failure to prosecute biker criminals in the courts for decades allowed the Hells to build an empire. Authorities may not be impressed with the picture the pair paint of the country's Keystone Cops approach to organized crime, but to be fair, police efforts are also well represented. Journalists will marvel at the amount of access, let alone cooperation, Sher and Marsden get from police. As anyone who has probed for details of a homicide on deadline will tell you, just getting an officer to answer questions in gruff monosyllables is a feat. Here, the reporters mine biker cops' characters, lives, frustrations and successes to the same degree as the bikers themselves, getting police to speak openly, emotionally and at length about problems in the force and missed opportunities.

Sher and Marsden's success is in part due to their doggedness. Much of their information comes from police surveillance records and reports from biker police agent Dany Kane entered into evidence at various trials – a goldmine of material no one else had bothered to ask for. But they take considerable risks in reporting, too. Sher later explained to colleagues how he knocked on the doors of the bikers' bunkers and left business cards asking them to call. (He later admitted those clever cards printed only with his name and a cellphone number could hardly protect him from midnight visits at his home when bikers controlled many cellphone and pager operations.) In the course of their whirlwind cross-country research, they show up at biker conferences and conduct sit-down interviews with top-ranking Hells, all without flinching. And once they got the story, they didn't tamper with it. These are seasoned reporters who know that when the material is this compelling, the story will tell itself. – PressGal

When Malcolm Gladwell takes to shamelessly cribbing your work in a New Yorker article, you know you've got a powerful book on your hands. Bradsher's 500-page book is so compelling, though, Gladwell can be forgiven for relentlessly paraphrasing it for a full third of his Jan. 12, 2004, article "Big and Bad." This is a bold, difficult and blessedly unpopular book that one hopes will spark a series of SUV exposés, cribbed or not. The five years Bradsher spent as a Detroit bureau chief and automotive reporter for the New York Times ensures that obsessive accuracy coexists with riveting storytelling. Even better, in High and Mighty Bradsher strips back all the red herrings that normally turn SUV debates into modified episodes of road rage – i.e. discussions of yuppie privilege, accusations of gas guzzling, poor driving and roadworthiness – and goes straight for the jugular – SUVs kill more people. Many more.

SUVs have a kill rate 85 per cent higher than that of midsized cars. They are three times as likely to kill the other driver in a crash, to say nothing of pedestrians. These mammoths are deadlier not just because they're heavier, but because they're designed with unnecessarily stiff bodies and high bumpers. In effect, auto manufacturers could make cosmetic changes to those Chevy Suburbans to save lives, but choose not to because they'd look less cool. Crash compatibility experts say these SUV design flaws kill an extra 3,000 people on American roads each year. As of 2002, there were an army of 20 million of these death machines on U.S highways, and rising.

There's no doubt the reporting in High and Mighty is in the service of a point, but Bradsher shows admirable restraint and maturity in bypassing sensationalism and letting a barrage of solid statistics and internal Big Three memos seal the fate of SUVs. What's refreshing is that Bradsher never stoops to disparaging SUV owners – he lets manufacturers do it for him. "The only time those SUVs are going to be off-road," quips Ford's top marketing rep, "is when they miss the driveway at 3 a.m." Drivers dig themselves in even deeper: taking their foot off the acceleration of their Escalades just long enough to wedge it between their porcelain veneers. "I love it, it makes me feel powerful," says the 16-year-old driver of a jacked-up Suburban. "If someone disses me I can tailgate the crap out of them."

In the end, the tide of information is so damning only a sadistic killer could make a case for purchasing a Tahoe after reading this book. As Bradsher writes: "For each Explorer driver whose life is saved in a two-vehicle driver collision by choosing an Explorer instead of a large car, an extra five drivers are killed in vehicles struck by Explorers." What SUV owners are saying, in effect, is my life is more valuable than yours. Bradsher draws readers to the twin conclusions that this is an utterly indefensible reason for driving a new Navigator off the lot and that his book is a frightening and inspiring example of public advocacy journalism. – PressGal

With a subtitle like A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, how could you not read it? The making of the OED is a tale in itself. It took more than seven decades to create the first 12 volumes, which together defined over half a million words, using 1,827,306 quotations, totalling 178 miles of type and some 227,779,589 individual letters and numbers — not including punctuation. Considering the OED itself took more than 70 years to complete, Winchester's book is a surprisingly quick read. To be honest, though the central story is compelling, the work as a whole is a little thin, like a newspaper feature spun out into a paperback.

The OED, as Winchester tells it, has blood on its hands. The dictionary was the product of a collaboration between editor Professor James Murray and hundreds of volunteer readers trolling the classics for quotes. One of the most prolific contributors was none other than ex-military schizophernic and convicted killer Dr. William C. Minor. Minor and Murray form an indelible bond over the 17 years they worked together and Winchester details their pas de deux in rich detail. Considering the material is more than a century old, he does a remarkable job, but perhaps because it's so old he does a fair bit of padding. As a historian, he's particularly good at digging up old documents. It's a treat to read the headlines from 1872 describing Minor's delusioned shooting of a brewery worker. You can almost see the sidewalk newspaper boy calling, Extra! Extra! Read all about it: "A Heinous Crime," "A Terrible Event," "An Atrocious Occurrence," "A Vile Murder" committed here in Lambeth! Better yet is the copy — or is that purple prose? "The victim of a cruel mistake that left a wife near confinement, and seven childre, the eldest thirteen, to the mercy of the world. It is gratifying to be able to record that the benevolent are coming forward with alactrity to the succour and the fatherless, and it is most sincerely to be hoped that all who can spare even a trifle will do their best to help the victims of this dreadful tragedy."

The Professor and the Madman is part historical mystery and part biography of language, a catalogue of now-obsolete sesquipedalian words (look it up) such as abequitate, bulbulcitate, commotrix, sullevation and adminiculation (those too). A window on a time when gentlemen of good breeding had the leisure and inclination to set up such things as an Unregistered Words Committee and toil in Scriptoriums on what was then and still is considered one of the milestones of literary history. The one word lost? Bondmaid: which, by the way, is defined as "a girl or womean bondservant or slave." – PressGal

In the world according to Stephen Glass, self-proclaimed missionary Jim Johansen drives between Savannah and Atlanta converting Jews to Jesus. He measures miles in smokes and drumsticks, ritualistically ingesting a bucket of Krispy Chic's and sucking on Camels. "It's hard work converting Jews," he confesses between puffs and bites, "and that makes me hungry." Jim Johansen was one of the improbably real people that populated Glass's missives for The New Republic in the early '90s. He may exist, still tearing at chicken legs and praising Jesus, but many of the journalist's sources did not, as we discovered when Glass was caught, fired and thrown into a media firestorm in 1995. Yet readers who loved Glass's fictionalized nonfiction for such characters will find few with the same spark in The Fabulist.

The novel is a retelling of Glass's demise, or rather the demise of a character named "Stephen Glass" who works for New Republic stand-in The Washington Weekly. Glass the novelist is at a clear disadvantage: The media have already told his story. He's left to dazzle with characters and trappings — what should be a simple assignment given his past. It's curious then that in fiction, where his imagination can roam unhindered by the journalistic technicalities of accuracy or truth, Glass fails to conjure the magic that made his articles — with their depictions of Alan Greenspan-worshipping stock brokers and Monica Lewinsky-obsessed collectibles vendors — so vivid and convincing. Ultimately this is where the book fails. There are a few amusing moments, but there are also pages of leaden dialogue and soliloquies on ethics: "Credibility, Steve," an editor advises, "is the only thing that holds journalism together. We're not novelists or poets or moviemakers, we're reporters, and as much as all those other groups say they understand truth, we're the only ones who tell it just as it happened." Ugh.

Glass seems to think people will keep reading to discover why he did what he did. But the real world has moved on; more spectacular fabulists have been unearthed, most recently New York Times pariah Jayson Blair (who, incidentally, is arranging book and film deals of his own). Stripped of his celebrity, Glass is left only with his skill as a writer. Reading The Fabulist, the most pressing question becomes: Where did it go?–PressGal in The Ottawa Citizen, 2003.

Rob Ferguson went to Central Asia so you don't have to. If there were an underlying message in this book that would be it. This is an unusual work — part travelogue, part environmental history, part Beckettian nightmare. Definitely not recommended for those with high blood pressure — as Ferguson's frustration with absurdist Central Asian bureaucrats grows as he attempts to raise awareness of the Aral Sea disaster, so too does the reader's.

It's clear from the start that his mission is futile. The Aral Sea has gone from a sparkling 66,900 square kilometre oasis of slightly briny water to what is now essentially a large salty bog — since the 1960s it has lost 80 percent of its volume while its salinity has increased 40 percent. Soviet cotton schemes, poor irrigation and plain wastefulness are partly to blame. Today, while surrounding post-Soviet -istans (Uzbek, Tajik, Kyrgyz, Kazakh and Turkmen) haggle over who is responsible, the sea steadily retreats. In its wake, it leaves the Aralkum, a vast man-made salt desert, setting the stage for an ecological catastrophe that will affect the lives of some 40 million people. It's enough to bring an environmentalist to tears.

Impossibly, it's Ferguson's Catch-22 type struggle with satanic water management chief Rim Guiniyatullin and his minions, moreso than the tragedy of the Aral Sea, that draws sympathy. He's beset at every turn by the bickering, corruption, politicking and just plain obstinacy of the five countries' water specialist teams. So much so, it seems nothing short of a miracle when Ferguson gets them to agree to a definition of public awareness at a meeting. But don't get your hopes up — in an entire year in Central Asia, this is about all he manages. (That is, aside from exposing an embezzlement scheme and winding up accused of murder.)

Which is to say that The Devil and the Disappearing Sea is not a pleasant book to read. It's annoying and exasperating — which, for a change, is a sign of the author's mastery of the material rather than any failure as a storyteller. There are great tales here, and even better characters: scrubby ex-Soviet apparatchiks with yellow teeth, rumpled suits, ash-heavy cigarettes and the requisite dark glasses, each set on defending his turf with the force of the Red Army. Ferguson finds a black sort of humour in the bureaucratic bafflegab (here every woman is "as beautiful as a spring flower in the mountains" and every specialist "the best in Central Asia"). During mid-project travels to exotic cities, he also turns an observant eye to the details that bring a foreign land to life — wryly noting the many menu permutations of plov, a much-loathed regional dish, for example, or catching Ricky Martin Olé Olé-ing on the radio in Dushanbe. In short, he's an excellent tour guide, albeit to a land you'll never want to visit. – PressGal

In April 1992, 22-year-old Chris McCandless acted out a Jack London fantasy. He made a break from his sheltered suburban life and walked into the Alaskan backcountry to live off the land. He never walked out. It took weeks for authorities to identify the starved corpse they found in the bush. In 1993, when American writer Jon Krakauer wrote an article on Chris's misadventure for Outside magazine, it generated more mail than any other piece in the publication's history. Chris's tale struck a chord with the writer too, who pursued it and turned it into a book. It's an uneven work. Krakauer starts off apologizing for including his own experience facing death on an Alaskan mountain. But this has a place, as do his discussions of other doomed explorers. He should have apologized for his writing instead — he refers in this section to his brush with death as "some forbidden and elemental riddle that was no less compelling than the sweet, hidden petals of a woman's sex." (Jesus. Where on earth was his editor?)

Krakauer's reporting, though, is solid and he's thorough to a fault, so much so he corrects his own conclusions — revisiting his article to fix earlier mistakes. His careful eye opens Chris's family life to readers: catches Chris's wealthy parents in their sweats, looks at their photos, peeks at their resumes, reveals their infidelities. He later travels with them to the camp where Chris died, watching his mother lift a pair of tattered jeans and sink her face in them, breathing in. Yet lovely passages like these are sewn together haphazardly, with stiff topic sentences: "In attempting to understand Everett Ruess and Chris McCandless, it can be illuminating to consider their deeds in a larger context. It is helpful to look at counterparts from a distant place and a century far removed." (Eds note: Awk. B-) If the book fails to gel, it's likely because Chris himself is a difficult protagonist — an immature, selfish and laughably naive subject. That's a death sentence for any writer. Krakauer does his best to ennoble him, but it's hard to feel more than scorn and even harder to understand Krakauer's desire to head into the wild with Chris as his guide. – PressGal

In Scrabble argot, Fatsis has pulled the reportorial equivalent of a rack of great tiles. Word Freak is a seven-letter bingo on a triple word score. Call it anthropological journalism or cultural archeology, Word Freak is a foray into another world. More than 100 mllion Scrabble sets have been sold since the game was first mass-produced in 1948. At least 10,000 people subscribe to the NSA's newsletter. And 400 of the most dedicated make it to the national championship tournament. "The Scrabble tournament," Fatsis writes, "isn't the most highly funtional subculture around." As one former National Scrabble Association official observes: "we're dealing with some bordeline pathology here." The senior citizen hippie communist who's been playing for money in seedy New York gamesrooms for more than 40 years, the middle-aged man known for gastric distress during tournaments and still living with his parents (in that order), the smart-drug addicted, hyper-caffienated, carbo-loading neutotic who won't play without his lucky stuffed-toy manatee — these are the kind of characters you'd pay to appear in your stories.

Fatsis aborts his mission to observe the high-stakes world of competitive Scrabble just one chapter in, and embarks instead on a quest to raise his official score from a measly 761 (and the embarrassing label "good living room player") to an expert 1600-plus rating. "I entered this world because it was a curiosity, a good story," he writes. "Then it became an infatuation. I'm having trouble typing these words, but right now Scrabble is the most important thing in my life." Well, there goes journalistic objectivity. Scrabblers Anonymous, anyone?

Though Fatsis quickly loses his outsider's viewpoint, and though he narrates the book in the first person, it never gets in the way or damages the story. Instead, Fatsis's struggle to escape the ranks of the "blue-haired who have been shuffling tiles since the Truman Administration" is a compelling one and fuels the reader's understanding of the depths of Scrabble obsession. His dry humour and light, understated prose make for a quick, entertaining read. Not to mention educational. Oxtering, Raticides, Filariid, Zinckes, Eloiners, Fustian, Atropine, Zayin, Foveal, Glaives — at minimum, Fatsis's book will enhance your vocabulary. – PressGal

In The Perfect Storm, which is widely regarded as a classic of literary journalism, Junger, an American journalist and contributor to National Geographic, the New York Times and Outside magazines, coaxes land lovers and seasick readers on board with the sheer strength of his writing. We head straight into the lives and fates of the doomed crew of the Andrea Gail on the verge of the storm of a century — a Gale Force 12 storm with 120-mile-an-hour winds and 100-foot rogue waves that hit the Atlantic coastline in the fall of 1991, creating some of the highest waves ever recorded. From page one, there is no putting to port. With a steady hand, Junger initiates readers into life on the fishing boats, safely guiding them through the storm until the moment he eases them under the water, holding their hand as they take their last breath.

Junger's storytelling is gripping, convincing and utterly trustworthy. His narrative voice so unique and enthralling, one could follow it to the bottom of the sea, like a siren. The suspense builds until Junger drowns you with Tyne, Pierre, Sullivan, Moran, Murphy and Shatford, the Gail's unlucky crew, who go under and each become, briefly, "just a consciousness at night in the middle of the sea." Junger does this with horrible precision, but so tenderly you don't really mind. His intricate and terribly intimate dissection of drowning seems a sort of logical extention of the journalistic project — explaining the unknown. "But what was the final moment? What was the final, final thing?" Bobby Shatford's stricken girlfriend, Chris, demands, deep in a bottle after hearing the news. Junger's book eloquently answers her grief, while providing the rest of us an example of writing to aspire to. In short, the perfect book. – PressGal

An interracial couple expecting their first child discovers their fetus has a heart defect. Downs Syndrome too. And now they have just weeks to decide to keep or abort, weeks to pit their intellect (both are PhDs) against their faith (both are Christian though they support abortion). Half their family says "keep," the other half says "terminate." Their father-in-law will barely acknowledge their marriage, let alone a possible interracial and disabled grandchild. Fascinating, explosive, heartwrenching stuff. But the material is well out of Zuckoff's league.

No mistake, this is a good book and worth reading — it couldn't not be given the material. But it could have been so much more in the hands of a better writer. The trouble is, ironically, that Zuckoff is too good of a reporter. Nothing escapes his notice. No character is too minor to be quoted at length, no conversation is left unrecorded, no technical detail — they caught an 8:30 ferry or drove eight miles to the clinic — goes unnoticed. What we have here is, in the vernacular, a notebook dumper. What we don't have is a storyteller, a skilled guide through a complex sequence of events. In part it's because there's little craft — no interpretation of material, no careful editing to highlight just the telling details, no sharp scene setting, no natural narrative arc. And there's even less pacing — every moment is overwritten and played at a fever pitch. The net effect is that the author overwhelms the delicate human moments in the most difficult months of Tierney and Greg Fairchild's lives.

And then there's just plain bad writing. Under no circumstance, for example, should anyone ever refer to a newborn infant struggling to survive in an incubator as "motionless as a roast on a carving table." Absolutely unforgivable. This is undoubtedly the most callous example of Zuckoff's lack of empathy, or slavish devotion to journalistic objectivity, but it permeates his work in subtler ways. The tone of the entire book is strangely clinical, given the material. Zuckoff, with his tight, orderly and precise writing style and authorial detachment seems not to trust emotion and so describes away these moments. Partly, it's because he cuts away from the action to explain the genesis of the ultrasound, or the history of amniocentsis, all fascinating digressions, but one gets the impression they're here to give Zuckoff breathing room — as in, phew, inanimate objects. May we suggest his next book stay strictly in this realm. – PressGal

There's a certain sort of writing that is so smooth and comfortable it feels familiar, even brand new. It happens all the time with music on the radio — the song you swear you've heard before that is in fact a new release. If you get that deja vu feeling reading The Tipping Point, there's a reason — much of Gladwell's book has appeared piecemeal in The New Yorker over the years. But it's also just natural and polished writing that feels known.

The Tipping Point, Gladwell writes, is "a biography of an idea." The book is essentially a case study of the human transmission of information and of group behaviours that shape global trends. We all have a part to play as Connectors, Mavens or Salesmen, Gladwell says, either by putting people in touch with other people, with ideas, or with the desire to act on them. Gladwell himself is a Maven – his euphemism for information junkie. He proves it here — what he does best is synthesize others' primary research, in the form of wildly divergent sociological theories and well-reported behavioural studies, and present them in his own addictive conversational tone. The writer's original reporting consists of splicing this material with quotes from various science, marketing and psychology experts, with a few real people thrown in for good measure. These folks tend to be the best reading — characters like über-Connectors Roger Horchow, a Texan businessman; Lois Weisberg, Chicago's cultural savant; master Maven Mark Albert, Mr. walking Consumer Report; and Salesman Tom Gau, financial planner by day, Tony Robbins clone by night, prove delightful oddities.

If there's a weakness in the book it's that Gladwell knows his strengths too well and relies heavily on them. The Tipping Point feels effortless because it is squarely in his comfort zone. It would be nice to see a writer of his calibre stretch a little — take on a subject that was a little less urbane, spin a tale that's a little more raw or — gasp! — stylistically rough around the edges. Gladwell reached his own tipping point years ago and now that he's firmly established a reputation as a writer of note it would be nice to see him willing to risk it. – PressGal

Reading Wolfe, you've got to expect ego along with your exegesis. But generally, Wolfe delivers a tour de force that renders the ego an annoying footnote. Not here. Hooking Up is an uneven and lacklustre collection of reportage that doesn't quite cut it. Wolfe's at his best detailing the rise and rise of small-town boy Robert Noyce's big-time computer corp. Intel in "Two Young Men Who Went West." He's at his absolute worst railing like a gummy geezer against academe while shaking an American flag in "In The Land of the Rococo Marxists." "America is the very micrometre by which all others must be measured," he squawks, repeatedly.

But Wolfe's monstrous ego really gets the royal treatment in "My Three Stooges," an excrable essay written ostensibly to champion the cause of literary fiction based on actual reportage. In truth, it's just an excuse to exalt — for 26 painful pages — Wolfe's own opus, A Man in Full. He begins: "I realize as clearly as anyone else how unseemly it is for a writer to be anything but insouciant about book reviews, publicity and sales figures... So please believe me when I say I am only going into these crass matters — reviews, publicity, sales — in the case of A Man in Full because they are essential to understanding our story." They are not. But Wolfe goes on at length to quote his own reviews: the novel was, he points out, hailed as "a masterpiece," and found to be "as beautiful as anything ever written." All this in the service of bashing three reviewers who dared disagree: John Updike, Norman Mailer and John Irving. At the end of his tirade, Wolfe concludes his writing is superior, he is the more relevant writer, and his own mode of reportage-based fiction the only real form of literature. The entire episode is distasteful, vulgar and superfluous. Kind of like Wolfe himself.