Author(s): Renata Adler

Culture & Ideas

For decades, Renata Adler's writing has upheld and defined the highest standards of investigative journalism. A staff writer at "The New Yorker" from 1963 to 2001, Adler has reported on civil rights from Selma, Alabama; on the war in Biafra, the Six-Day War, and the Vietnam War; on the Nixon impeachment inquiry and Congress. She has also written about cultural matters, films (as chief film critic for "The New York Times"), books, politics, and pop music. Like many journalists, she has put herself in harm's way in order to give us the news, not the "news" we have become accustomed to--celebrity journalism, conventional wisdom, received ideas--but the actual story, an account unfettered by ideology or consensus. The peril that Adler places herself in comes specifically from speaking up (on the basis of careful research, common sense, original thought) when too many other writers have joined the pack. In this most basic and moral sense, Adler is one of the few independent journalists writing in America today. This collection of Adler's nonfiction draws on her early essays, reporting, and criticism, which describe the major crises and hopeful turmoil of the 1960s, and more recent pieces concerned with, in her words, "misrepresentation, coercion, and abuse of public process, and the journalist's role in it." Also included are""writings on film, television, and music, and several uncollected essays on Jayson Blair and the "Times," and the Supreme Court's decision in "Bush v. Gore." Adler has written a new introduction that provides an invaluable and long-overdue assessment of our culture today from one of its foremost chroniclers.