What We’re Reading

Carolyn O
‘Hara

• Into the Abyss: Reporting Iraq, 2003-2006. Journalists offer their first-hand accounts of the war they’ve covered in the Columbia Journalism Review‘s November/December cover story.

Mark Levenstein

• Behind Bars, by Charles Layton. American Journalism Review offers the story of AP photographer Bilal Hussein. 

Will Dobson

• Bill McKibben’s Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America’s Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont’s Champlain Valley and New York’s Adirondacks (Crown Journeys) — In my view, McKibben is the most eloquent nature writer of our times, and his most recent book brings his sensible passion to bear on the region he loves most.

Kate Palmer

• How Terrible Is It?, by Max Rodenbeck, New York Review of Books, Nov. 30, 2006 – A look at several serious works on President Bush’s war on terror reveals not whether the war has been won or lost, but that it’s not even much of a war at all. 
• The press toe the line on the Iraq war, by Vicki Frost, Guardian (UK) (registration required) – A new British survey of Iraq war coverage offers data for the oft-repeated claim that media organizations failed to question government accounts of the war.
• In New Middle East, Tests for an Old Friendship, by Stephen Erlanger, New York Times, Nov. 13, 2006 – The first of a two-part series on the state of the U.S.-Israel alliance looks at how recent events in the region are shaping—and dividing—the two countries.

Travis Daub

• Color Zoo, by Lois Elhert. My 3-month old daughter finds this book mezmerizing. I like the pictures.

Diyana Ishak

• Throwaway Children, by Nancy San Martin, Miami Herald. Part of a multi-part feature series entitled, Children of the Americas. This particular article examines the lives of children in Honduras who work in garbage dumps to find recyclable goods to sell, food to eat, and clothes to wear – as well as efforts to lift them out of poverty.
• Downfall: how Donald Rumsfeld reformed the Army and lost Iraq, by Peter J. Boyer, The New Yorker, Nov. 20, 2006
• Saddam’s trial shouldn’t be fair, by Alasdair Palmer, The Spectator. A look at why international tribunals should not be applied to genocidal heads of state.

Mike Boyer

• Going Blue, by Richard E. Cohen, David Baumann, and Kirk Victor, National Journal, Nov. 10, 2006.
• Pelosi Puts Weight Behind Murtha in Leader Bid, by John Bresnahan, Roll Call, Nov. 12, 2006.