When the school board shuts down the student newspaper, the Ameche Brothers, two budding entrepreneurs with a knack for refurbishing junk but a shaky command of journalistic ethics, step in to help.
"Between laughs, readers will be prompted to think — about what constitutes truth, how the media massages it, and the importance of ethics, fairness, and getting the facts right." — Publishers Weekly (starred review) Adam Canfield has to be the most overprogrammed middle-school student in America. So when super-organized Jennifer coaxes him to be coeditor of their school newspaper, THE SLASH, he wonders if he’s made a big mistake. But when a third-grader’s article leads to a big scoop, Adam and his fellow junior journalists rise to the challenge of receiving their principal’s wrath to uncover some scandalous secrets. From a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and New York Times columnist comes a funny, inspiring debut that sneaks in some lessons on personal integrity — and captures the rush that’s connected to the breaking of a really great story.
"Lots of laugh-out-loud humor, perfectly satirizing state tests, overzealous parents, and kids who are in danger of being enriched to death." -- SCHOOL AND LIBRARY JOURNAL (Ages 8-12) For overprogrammed middle-grader Adam Canfield, waking up to a snow day is a dream come true -- a chance to sleep late, put off planning the next issue of THE SLASH, and make some quick cash with his shovel. But the dream turns into a nightmare when some high-school kids mug Adam for his shoveling money. Then not only does the media blast the embarrassing story, but Adam’s own co-editors plan a contest outing bullies at their school. In a second look behind the scenes at a middleschool newspaper, Michael Winerip deftly blends kid-friendly humor with some provocative issues, including the subtle effects of class and racism and the thrill that comes from speaking truth to power.
Raising money to resurrect the banned school paper brings Adam in contact with some quirky characters in this sharp, funny novel starring the ace middle-grade reporter. (Ages 8-12) A "dirty" school election, suspicious state test scores -- Adam Canfield and his star reporters are chasing some red-hot leads. There’s only one glitch: the school board has shut down THE SLASH for exposing the town’s most powerful family, and now the staff has to find a way to publish it themselves. Enter the Ameche brothers: two goofy kid entrepreneurs with a knack for refurbishing junk -- and a talent for selling ads -- but a shaky command of journalistic ethics. What’s worse, Adam hasn’t a clue why his coeditor, Jennifer, is suddenly acting weird. . . . With kid-friendly humor and a touch of budding romance, this new adventure revisits a winning cast of characters -- and the excitement that comes from uncovering a really great story.
In this rich collection, bestselling author Adam Hochschild has selected and updated over two dozen essays and pieces of reporting from his long career. Threaded through them all is his concern for social justice and the people who have fought for it. The articles here range from a California gun show to a Finnish prison, from a Congolese center for rape victims to the ruins of gulag camps in the Soviet Arctic, from a stroll through construction sites with an ecologically pioneering architect in India to a day on the campaign trail with Nelson Mandela. Hochschild also talks about the writers he loves, from Mark Twain to John McPhee, and explores such far-reaching topics as why so much history is badly written, what bookshelves tell us about their owners, and his front-row seat for the shocking revelation in the 1960s that the CIA had been secretly controlling dozens of supposedly independent organizations. With the skills of a journalist, the knowledge of a historian, and the heart of an activist, Hochschild shares the stories of people who took a stand against despotism, spoke out against unjust wars and government surveillance, and dared to dream of a better and more just world.
From the publisher of the NextDraft newsletter comes a cathartic and humorous ride through the unnerving, maddening hellscape of the 2020 press cycle, reestablishing the line between "real" news and real life. Please lower your shoulder restraint and keep your hands and feet in. You’re about to board a roller coaster ride through a year that was at once laughable and lethal. If you’ve got an anti-anxiety prescription, now would probably be a good time to call in a refill. Please Scream Inside Your Heart is a time capsule; a real-time ride through the maddening hell that was the 2020 news cycle—when historic turmoil and media mania stretched American sanity, democracy, and toilet paper. Who better to examine this unhinged period in all of its twists and turns than news addict Dave Pell, aka the internet’s Managing Editor? Fueled by the wisdom and advice of his two Holocaust-surviving parents, for whom parts of this story were all too familiar, Pell puts the key stories of 2020 into context with pith and punch; highlighting turning points that widened America’s divisions, deepened our obsession with a media-driven civil war, and nearly knocked the country off its tracks. Pell also examines the role of technology in society—and how we somehow built the exact opposite of what we thought we were building. Why did the lies spread faster than the truth? How did our tech addiction contribute to the nightmare? Why do you feel a vibration in your pocket right now? In 2020, the news was everywhere, and everything was political—even the air we breathed. So brace yourself as you’re hurtled through the twists and turns of the corkscrewiest year in American history; one that included two impeachment trials, a global pandemic, Black Lives Matter, the biggest election of a lifetime, a slide towards autocracy, and a warning from the makers of Lysol not to drink their products.
Before Julie Callahan came to the house at 9 Highland Road in Glen Cove, New York, she had spent a good part of her young life in mental hospitals, her mental and emotional coherence nearly destroyed by a childhood of sexual abuse. Fred Grasso, a schizophrenic, had lived in a filthy single-room occupancy hotel. At 9 Highland Road they and their housemates were given a decent alternative to lives in institutions or in the streets. It was a place in which some even found the chance to get better. This perfectly observed and passionately imagined book takes us inside one of the supervised group homes that, in an age of shrinking state budgets and psychotropic drugs, have emerged as the backbone of America's mental health system. As it follows the progress and setbacks of residents, their families, and counselors and notes the embittered resistance their presence initially aroused in the neighborhood, 9 Highland Road succeeds in opening the locked world of mental illness. It does so with an empathy and insight that will change forever the way we understand and act in relation to that world.
Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.
If you're going to read one book about Hollywood, this is the one. As the co-founder of Creative Artists Agency, Michael Ovitz earned a reputation for ruthless negotiation, brilliant strategy, and fierce loyalty to his clients. He reinvented the role of the agent and helped shape the careers of hundreds of A-list entertainers, directors, and writers, including Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Meryl Streep, Sean Connery, Bill Murray, Robin Williams, and David Letterman. But this personal history is much more than a fascinating account of celebrity friendships and bare-knuckled dealmaking. It's also an underdog's story: How did a middle-class kid from Encino work his way into the William Morris mailroom, and eventually become the most powerful person in Hollywood? How did an agent (even a superagent) also become a power in producing, advertising, mergers & acquisitions, and modern art? And what were the personal consequences of all those deals? After decades of near-silence in the face of controversy, Ovitz is finally telling his whole story, with remarkable candor and insight.
Canada’s most celebrated and acclaimed actor lets loose in a magnificent memoir that will delight and enchant readers across the country. A rollicking, rich self-portrait written by one of today’s greatest living actors. The story of a “young wastrel, incurably romantic, spoiled rotten” – his privileged Montreal background, rich in Victorian gentility, included steam yachts, rare orchid farms, music lessons in Paris and Berlin – “who tore himself away from the ski slopes to break into the big, bad world of theater not from the streets up but from an Edwardian living room down.” Plummer writes of his early acting days – on radio and stage with William Shatner and other fellow Canadians; of the early days of the Stratford Festival in southern Ontario; of his Broadway debut at twenty-four in The Starcross Story, starring Eva Le Gallienne (“It opened and closed in one night, but what a night!”); of joining Peter Hall’s Royal Shakespeare Company (its other members included Judi Dench, Vanessa Redgrave and Peter O’Toole); of his first picture, Stage Struck, directed by Sidney Lumet; and of The Sound of Music, which he affectionately dubbed “S&M.” He writes about his legendary colleagues: Dame Judith Anderson (“the Tasmanian devil from Down Under”); Sir Tyrone Guthrie; Sir Laurence Olivier; Elia Kazan (“this chameleon of chameleons might change into you, wear your skin, steal your soul”); and “that reprobate” Jason Robards, among many others. A revelation of the wild and exuberant ride that is the actor’s – at least this actor’s – life.