“The New Kings of Nonfiction” compiled by Ira Glass
Published October 2, 2007 by Riverhead Books
Pages: 464
ISBN-10 : 1594482675
Date Finished: Dec 4, 2017
How strongly I recommend it: 5/10
Find it at Amazon or Bookshop.org
A nice way to get many of the best nonfiction writers in one place, curated by Ira Glass.
My Notes:
First and foremost, they’re incredibly good reporters. And like the best reporters, they either find a new angle on something we all know about already, or—more often—they take on subjects that nobody else has figured out are worthy of reporting.
Great scenes, great characters, great moments.
Yeats, the poet: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’
… familiar bloated examples of an island race who, sweltering under the warm Italian sun, had taken off their shirts, a great, fatty manifestation of the history of pub opening hours, of gallons and gallons of lager and incalculable quantities of bacon-flavored crisps.
: nine months ago John Ziegler’s career was rubble, and Ms. B. Is th only reason he’s here, and she’s every inch his boss, and he’s nervous around her—which you can tell by the way he puts his long legs out and leans back in his chair with his hands in his slacks’ pockets and yawns a lot and tries to look exaggeratedly relaxed. David Foster Wallace
“History with O.J.” and explaining why he’s so incandescently passionate about the case.
… gave the person a look that chilled him to the marrow.
He can reinvent himself daily, according to the discoveries he makes about the world and himself.
Can ego alone explain such displays? Might it be the opposite? What colossal insecurity and self-loathing would demand such compensation?
Wold War II came to America like an epidemic from overseas. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, recruitment offices all over America swarmed with long lines of enlistees; flags and patriotic posters popped up on every street and store window; wild and hysterical cheers greeted the national anthem at every rally and concert and sporting event.
World War II:
Men who appeared able-bodied found themselves harassed on the street by strangers demanding to know why they weren’t in uniform; baseball players who hadn’t yet enlisted, godlike figures like DiMaggio and Williams, were loudly booed by the hometown crowd when they came out on the field.
There were no treaties compelling the nation into the war, no overwhelming strategic or economic pressures; it was self-sufficient in food and raw materials, and it was geographically impregnable.
(The American economy grew by almost half during the war; unemployment was wiped out, and skilled workers were in such short supply that wages began a steep upward spiral.)
Draftees in those days didn’t get to serve out a specified time and then go home—at which point they could tell everybody their war stories.
Friendly fire was a worse problem in World War II than in any other American war before or since. American troops on the ground were so frequently bombed by their own planes that they were known to shoot back with their heaviest guns.
The necessities of war even broke up the conventional properties of marriage: the universal inevitability of military services meant that young couples got married quickly, sometimes at first meeting—and often only so the women could get the military paycheck and the ration stamps.
They were stupefied by the unbroken roar of the explosions and reduced to sick misery by the incessant rain and deepening mud.
… that old bromide from Santayana, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But that’s nonsense. The circumstances that created an event like World War II column’ be duplicated no matter how many millennia of amnesia intervened.
In his memoirs Eugene Sledge recorded that he eventually stopped trying to tell the folks back home what had happened to him in Okinawa. Even among veterans, he writes, “we did not talk of such things. They were too horrible and obscene.”
Power Steer by Michael Pollan
This is an excellent system for all concerned: for the grasses, for the animals and for us. What’s more, growing meat on grass can make superb ecological sense: so long as the rancher practices rotational grazing, it is a sustainable, solar-powered system for producing food on land too arid or hilly to grown anything else.
Fast food indeed. What gets a beef calf from eighty to one thousand two hundred pounds in fourteen months are enormous quantities of corn, protein supplements—and drugs, including growth hormones.
Calves have no need of regular medication while on grass, but as soon as they’re placed in the backgrounding pen, they’re apt to get sick. Why? The stress of weaning is a factor, but the main culprit is the feed.
Corn is a mainstay of livestock diets because there is no other feed quite as cheap or plentiful: thanks to federal subsidies and ever-growing surpluses, the price of corn ($2.25 a bushel) is fifty cents less than the cost of growing it.
We have come to think of “corn-fed” as some kind of old-fashioned virtue; we shouldn’t. Granted, a corn-fed cow develops well-marbled flesh, giving it a taste and texture American consumers have learned to like. Yet this meat is demonstrably less healthy to eat, since it contains more saturated fat. A recent study in The European Journal of Clinical Nutritions found that the meat of grass-fed livestock not only had substantially less fat than grain-fed livestock not only had substantially less fat than grain-fed meat but that the type of fats found in grass-fed meat were much healthier.
What keeps a feedlot animal healthy—or healthy enough—are antibiotics. Rumensin inhibits gas production in the rumen, helping to prevent bloat; tyrosine reduces the incidence of liver infection. Most of the antibiotics sold in America end up in animal feed—a practice that, it is now generally acknowledged, leads directly to the evolution of new antibiotic-resistant “superbugs.”
“Hell, if you gave them [the cows] lots of grass and space,” he concluded dryly, “I wouldn’t have a job.” [he’s the staff veterinarian.
American regulators permit hormone implants on the grounds that no risk to human health has been proved, even though measurable hormone residues do turn up in the meat we eat.
Some animals are irritated by the fecal dust that floats in the feedlot air; maybe that explained the sullen gaze with which he fixed me.
For more… find it at Amazon or Bookshop.org