Today's reporter inhabits an environment ranging from hostile to apathetic. Somewhere beyond the blistering criticism and rabid mistrust is the writer's haunting suspicion that today's revelatory art will line the reader's birdcage before his or her lunchtime McChicken. I get it. My entire professional career has been spent filing Right-to-Know and other public information requests, working the phones, chasing the perfect photo, and hammering at the keyboard in the hopes of something legible. On occasion I've mined something of both meaning and impact. That's what the writers I've featured have done as well as anyone I've ever read. May you find their journalism as inspiring as I do.
I wrote
Jailing the Johnstown Judge: Joe O'Kicki, the Mob and Corrupt Justice
Real-life P.I. Ethan Brown pulls no punches with this wrenching exposé of deep-South police corruption.
Murder in the Bayou parts the curtain on inescapable connections between eight women killed in a rural Louisiana parish between 2005-2009..
Clocking in at less than 250 pages, this one is thick as swamp fog with the backgrounds and rap sheets of all players, indicted and unindicted. Brown's boots-on-the-ground approach to this story is evident in the interviews he scored with the central characters of this backwoods underworld.
The result is not just a triumph of journalism; it's a triumph of courage. I was inspired by Brown's devotion to the story and, more importantly, to the families and friends of these marginalized women.
An explosive, true-life southern gothic story, Murder in the Bayou chronicles the twists and turns of a high-stakes investigation into the murders of eight women in a troubled Louisiana parish.
Between 2005 and 2009, the bodies of eight women were discovered around the murky canals and crawfish ponds of Jennings, Louisiana, a bayou town of 10,000 in the heart of the Jefferson Davis parish. Local law enforcement officials were quick to pursue a serial killer theory, opening a floodgate of media coverage—from CNN to The New York Times.…
Seek finds Johnson mining his own humanity through true tales of Alaskan gold prospecting and the manhunt for a serial bomber.
He loses himself in fungus at an Oregan hippie festival and searches for God at a Christian biker rally in Texas. His travels take him to the sometimes-literal frontlines of the news, including the hellish delirium of the Liberian civil war and conversations with Constitution-toting Montanans bent on the overthrow of the United States government.
Johnson's writing in this compilation of essays was absolutely searing and a revelation to me. This stuff belongs in the home library of anyone who's ever aspired to pick up the pen.
“Johnson writes with a fervor that can only be described as religious. Seek is scary and beautiful and ecstatic and uncontrolled…he elevates the mundane to the sublime; he boils things down to their essence. He’s simply one of the few writers around whose sentences make you shudder.” —Adrienne Miller, Esquire
Part political disquisition, part travel journal, part self-exploration, Seek is a collection of essays and articles in which Denis Johnson essentially takes on the world. And not an obliging, easygoing world either; but rather one in which horror and beauty exist in such proximity that they might well be interchangeable.…
Believe it or not, this irreverently titled gem was recommended to me by a pastor.
Charlie LeDuff is no saint, but his sermons on racial unrest, politician-class hypocrisy, and the poisoned water of Flint, Michigan should evoke some Old Testament outrage in any red-blooded American.
LeDuff shrugs off the tired tropes and narratives for a God's-honest odyssey of the U.S. to document corrosions within our culture and society. I dig his style and, more critically, his clear-eyed examination of the problems average people are facing across the country.
Sh*tshow! is a fun and refreshing read, sure to help recharge the batteries of even our most cynical.
A daring, firsthand, and utterly-unscripted account of crisis in America, from Ferguson to Flint to Cliven Bundy's ranch to Donald Trump's unstoppable campaign for President--at every turn, Pulitzer-prize winner and bestselling author of Detroit: An American Autopsy, Charlie LeDuff was there
In the Fall of 2013, long before any sane person had seriously considered the possibility of a Trump presidency, Charlie LeDuff sat in the office of then-Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, and made a simple but prophetic claim: The whole country is bankrupt and on high boil. It’s a shitshow out there. No one in the bubbles of Washington,…
The Dark Side of Camelot is Sy Hersh's controversial takedown of the Kennedy dynasty.
Sidestepping the conspiracy theories surrounding the president's murder, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter hones his spotlight on the man's life instead; a glamorous one riddled nonetheless with self-imposed scandals on a dizzying array of levels.
The book is loaded with volumes of interviews with retired Secret Service, CIA agents, and other insiders who knew a different John F. Kennedy than most of the public. Their revelations depict a man obsessed with revenge and sex in ways that nearly turned our Cold War hot.
An adage is that history books are written by the victors. The Dark Side of Camelot is proof that the truth-tellers have a say sometimes as well.
Sex, the Kennedys, Monroe and the Mafia; the controversial American bestseller - 'Hersh has found more muck in this particular Augean stable than most people want to acknowledge' Gore Vidal
Jack Kennedy had it all. And he used it all - his father's fortune, and his own beauty, wit and power - with a heedless, reckless daring. There was no tomorrow, and there was no secret that money and charm could not hide.
In this groundbreaking book, award-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh shows us a John F Kennedy we have never seen before, a man insulated from the normal consequences…
Journalists: You had to know you weren't escaping this one without an obligatory ode to the godfather of Gonzo.
I picked this one over Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 and other classic compendiums simply because it stands apart from most of his other work. The Rum Diary gives us the opportunity to see stretch Hunter stretch legs as a novelist.
Set in beautiful Puerto Rico, the story follows the exploits of a newspaper crew (who else) searching for lowbrow highs while grappling with the existential doom (what else) of a sometimes hopeless vocation.
Hunter rarely misses his targets, and this novel is no exception. I re-read it frequently in an attempt to absorb his perhaps primary lesson; that our writing can and should be everything but boring.
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THE BOOK THAT INSPIRED THE MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING JOHNNY DEPP
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'Remarkable - a genuine, 100% proof discovery of great literary importance' - Mail on Sunday
'Hilarious, utterly real and tragic ... A lithe, well-crafted gem of a novel which leaves the reader disturbed and grinning in a way that makes people sitting nearby change seats' - Scotland on Sunday
'Crackling, twisted, searing, paced to a deft prose rhythm ... a shot of Gonzo with a rum chaser' - San Francisco Chronicle
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The sultry classic of a journalist's sordid life in Puerto Rico
Paul Kemp has moved…
In 1988, Judge Joe O'Kicki was regarded as one of the most brilliant legal minds in the United States. He was sworn in as the president judge of a Pennsylvania county and on the fast track to a federal bench.
A state police vice unit, however, was in the midst of covert operation into O'Kicki's personal affairs. The judge would be accused of soliciting bribes and running the county as if he were a "battleship commander." Later he'd concoct a plan to flee the country and exact revenge on his enemies. Set in the aftermath of the 1977 Johnstown flood and including the memos of whistleblowers, contemporary interviews, and excerpts from O'Kicki's unfinished tell-all memoir, Jailing the Johnstown Judge re-examines this infamous case.
About myself: As a novelist I’m crazy for detail. I believe it’s the odd and unexpected aspects of life that bring both characters and story worlds to life. This means that I try to be an observer at all times, keeping alert and using all five – and maybe six – senses. My perfect writing morning begins with a dog walk in the woods or on a beach, say, while keeping my senses sharp to the world around me and listening out for the first whisper of what the day’s writing will bring.
This book is a literary historical novel. It is set in Britain immediately after World War II, when people – gay, straight, young, and old - are struggling to get back on track with their lives, including their love lives. Because of the turmoil of the times, the number of losses, and the dangerous and peculiar circumstances people find themselves in, sexual mores have become shaken and stirred.
But what happened after the war, in the time of healing and settling down? This novel examines the emotional, romantic, and sexual lives of three characters searching for a way to proceed.
Love never dies in this novel by “a writer of addictive emotional thrillers” (The Independent).
Told from three perspectives A Particular Man is about love, truth and the unpredictable consequences of loss.
When Edgar dies in a Far East prisoner-of-war camp it breaks the heart of fellow prisoner Starling. In Edgar’s final moments, Starling makes him a promise. When, after the war, he visits Edgar’s family, to fulfil this promise, Edgar's mother Clementine mistakes him for another man.
Her mistake allows him access to Edgar’s home and to those who loved him, stirring powerful and disorientating emotions, and embroiling him…
