The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight by Marc Weingarten

I suspect this book will only be of interest to those familiar with the work of Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, Gay Talese and other writers who first appeared as part of the New Journalism. The book follows the rise of these and other NJ stars and the magazines that recognised and fostered them: Esquire, New York, Harper's and Rolling Stone.

Early practitioners of the art didn't necessarily adhere to today's standards of verifiable truth (although many did). Thus, I discovered, Michael Herr's Dispatches, the book about Vietnam, contained composite characters and, worse, invented ones. So a passage about a dying soldier telling Herr to "Be careful, Mister. Please be careful," instead of making me weep makes me think, "Oh, come off it, Herr!"

Gail Sheehy spent months investigating the world of prostitutes in Manhattan and then rolled them all into a dramatic blend for a five-part series in New York. That used to be called "fiction.".

But while I was losing respect for Herr and Sheehy, I was gaining it for Norman Mailer, Thompson and . . . well, it's not possible for me to think more highly of Wolfe.

Today we have John Berendt rearranging events and timelines and conflating characters in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. an entertaining read, but once you know part of it is made up, how can you trust any of it? Defended by its practitioners as striving for a "higher truth," true journalists call it "making stuff up." And when you're busted, you get fired from the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Honest descendants of the New Journalism, inheritors of the story form variously called "narrative journalism," "literary journalism" or "creative journalism" insist upon verifiable fact. When they wander into speculative territory, they have footnotes to explain how they got there and back. Think of Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm, John Krakauer's Into Thin Air or Wolfe's The Right Stuff as well as Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down and War Hospital by Sheri Fink, MD.

The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight reads as though Weingarten was learning the history as he wrote. Observations he made in the beginning of the book about the legitimacy of the form as reportage had me grinding me teeth, but by the end I felt he had it right.

The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai by John Tayman

John Tayman, has marvelously succeeded in this sweeping history of the exiles of Molokai. It bears tragic witness to the banishment of the victims of Hansen's disease to a hostile isolated island beginning in 1866 with twelve men and women and one stowaway child and continuing for over a century. Along the way we are confronted with legislative debates such as, "Is it a crime to be afflicted with leprosy?" and although the necessary answer is no, it is a disease, in actual fact these people were treated as criminals. They were rounded up and forcibly exiled. The pages are littered with historical figures and events revealed in both their humanity and their inhumanity. We find Robert Louis Stephenson, Jack London, Mark Twain, and even more recently a skittish John Wayne . We witness Pearl Harbor, and the establishment of Hawaii as the the fiftieth state.
While we do find the posthumous saints such as Father Damien Joseph De Veuster who by one account dug over 1300 graves, and we also find much cruelty. The account of the Dying Den, bears witness to a man being dumped from a wheelbarrow to the threshold of this hell in order to, "spare the sensibilities of the other hospital inmates."
Probably the most succinct description of the history of this disease, "leprosy itself [is] a rich source of ironies, populated ... "with rogues and vagabonds, saints, and martyrs.""
Although this is not a casual read it is worth the time, this lesson must be re-learned and not repeated.


Mary Jones
aka tobiejonzarelli
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