“It’s the wonderfully written story of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. They were young metro reporters who were assigned to Watergate when it was seen as a local burglary that happened to be at the Democratic Headquarters in DC. Recall, reports about Watergate didn’t deter Nixon’s reelection by a landslide in 1972. But the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein did catch the attention of senators and the judge in the trial of the burglars who were apprehended during the Watergate break-in.” Read more...
The best books on Richard Nixon
David Greenberg ,
Historian
“It is about a baseball player named Roy Hobbs. He’s a young phenom who gets knifed by a woman on a train and falls away from the game for many years, but comes back at the end of his career and makes it to the major league for one moment of potential triumph. It’s a very dark book, in fact. Roy Hobbs is a really one-dimensional figure…On the one hand, it’s a very gritty book, and on the other hand, it has deep mythic undertones. “ Read more...
Novels with Sporting Themes
Chad Harbach ,
Novelist
“Karen Blixen (pen name Isak Dinesen) never did win the Nobel prize for literature, which is a pity as I do think this, her memoir of living in British East Africa, is one of the most beautifully written books of all time. I am thrilled it got turned into a movie with Robert Redford and Meryl Streep because it made her more famous, and was the way I, personally, got introduced to her. I was 15 at the time, and had always ignored the green-and-white book sitting on my parents’ shelf but, afterwards, I was inspired. When I left high school in 1988, I went to Kenya for a few days by myself and then spent the year teaching in Zimbabwe.” Read more...
Favourite Books
Sophie Roell ,
Journalist
“This book, and the Robert Redford film that’s based on it, have probably brought more people to fishing than any other. At least since Izaak Walton. It’s an explicitly autobiographical novella that is both beautiful and, ultimately, about beauty. Beauty and impermanence. Loss. Fishing, I think, is also about these things: the search for, and the impossibility of holding onto, what is most beautiful. Fishing is part of what holds Norman and his brother Paul together in the story. It is scenery, subject and metaphor at once.” Read more...
The best books on Fishing
Malachy Tallack ,
Memoirist
“By the time Arnhem became a focus for the battle to liberate Europe in 1944, my father and his family had been evacuated. But World War II would forever remain a huge event in his life, the subject of endless dinner table debates and discussions. In 2012, a couple of years before my father died—and when he was in a wheelchair because of the cancer that had spread to his bones—we went back to Arnhem together. We stayed at a guesthouse near his old house and explored some of the places he’d known as a boy. We visited the Airborne Museum. The most well-known book about the Battle of Arnhem is Irish war correspondent Cornelius Ryan’s A Bridge Too Far. The movie of the book, directed by Richard Attenborough and with Sean Connery, Robert Redford and a star-studded cast, is unmissable.” Read more...
VE Day Books: A Personal List
Sophie Roell ,
Journalist
“A Walk in the Woods is a book about keeping everything in perspective. Bill Bryson is an American who lived in England for 20 years and decided that he wanted to find a way to reconnect with America and get in shape. He came across the idea of walking the Appalachian Trail. Now the Appalachian Trail is one of the most gruelling hikes in the world. It’s about 2,300 miles, and goes up and down something like 50 5,000-feet peaks – it doesn’t go around them. Despite this, Bill Bryson produces this delightful self-effacing account of his journey, and it is laugh-out-loud funny on every page.” Read more...
The best books on The Future of Advertising
Steve Lance ,
Entrepreneurs & Business People
“The book showcases both the allure and the ricketiness of the American dream. The story shows the American dream is fragile despite its potency and persistence. It shows its perpetual obsolescence. We often hear that it’s harder to rise from the bottom to the top in the US than it is in many other countries. Even in Fitzgerald’s day, the fluidity of society was fading. Perhaps The Great Gatsby still seems germane because of the way it showed the mismatch between American actualities and American ideals, the two-faced character of the American dream, its materialism and idealism.” Read more...
The Great American Novel
Lawrence Buell ,
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