This memoir is wonderfully written, beautifully arranged, and a heart-wrenching but hopeful masterpiece. "Something is afoot within me that I do not understand, the breaking of a contract that I thought could not be broken, a slow perverting of my substance." Anna was living a pleasantly ordinary life, working for the British government, when she started to develop her sensitivity to light. At first, her face felt like it was burning whenever she was in front of the computer. Soon this progressed to intolerance of artificial lights, then of sunlight itself. The reaction soon spread to her whole body. Now, when her symptoms are at their worst, she must spend months on end in a dark room covering window and door cracks, and mummified in layers of light-protectant clothing. She spent her days in the dark talking to people on the phone, watching TV during short periods out of her blacked-out room by looking at its reflection in a mirror, making word games to keep herself occupied, but usually she got through audio books. Lyndsey discovered she could go out for a walk at dawn and dusk for about an hour without it affecting her skin, and her husband made a covering of black felt for the back of the car so they can drive somewhere else, such as a forest, during daylight hours, ready for a sunset walk. Despite everything, Anna's husband named Pete stays around with her. Pete brings some light, although only of the emotional kind, into her life. She feels she should leave him, but is incapable of doing so unless he asks her to go - and thus far, he has not. "That is the miracle that I live with, every day," she writes. With gorgeous, lyrical prose, Anna brings us into the dark with her, a place where we are able to see the true value of love and the world.

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, Cheryl Strayed and Adam Kirsch try to get to the bottom of our long-running obsession with the Great American Novel.

By Cheryl Strayed

The idea that only one person can produce a novel that speaks truth about the disparate American whole is pure hogwash.

In 1868, John William De Forest published an essay in The Nation titled "The Great American Novel." In it, he argued for the rise of fiction that more accurately reflected American society than did the grand, romantic novels of the time, whose characters he thought belonged to "the wide realm of art rather than to our nationality." In the course of making his case, De Forest considered, then cast aside, the likes of Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne before landing on Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was, in De Forest's opinion, if not quite the Great American Novel, "the nearest approach to the desired phenomenon" of a book that captured what was, to him, America - a populace of "eager and laborious people, which takes so many newspapers, builds so many railroads, does the most business on a given capital, wages the biggest war in proportion to its population, believes in the physically impossible and does some of it."

That De Forest was arguing in hopes of not one Great American Novel, but rather the development of a literary canon that accurately portrayed our complex national character, has been lost on many, as generation after generation of critics have since engaged in discussions of who might have written the Great American Novel of any given age, and writers have aspired to be the one chosen - a competitive mode that is, I suppose, as American as it gets. It's also most likely the reason that the idea has persisted for so long. To think that one might be writing the Great American Novel, as opposed to laboring through a meandering 400-page manuscript that includes lengthy descriptions of the minutiae of one's mildly fictionalized childhood (pushing a bicycle up a hill on a hot Minnesota day, sexual fantasies about Luke Skywalker), is awfully reassuring. I have a purpose! I am writing the Great American Novel!

Or so one can tell herself until one day an austere portrait of Jonathan Franzen shows up on the cover of an August 2010 issue of Time magazine alongside the words "Great American Novelist." As I beheld it, I could all but hear the wails and curses of 10,000 novelists across the land - a sizable fraction of whom are also named Jonathan, as it turns out - each of them crushed and furious over the fact that they weren't deemed the One. Never mind that Franzen is indeed a great American novelist. Never mind that a lot of other people are too. Never mind that this idea - that one person, and only one person, in any given generation can possess the intellectual prowess, creative might, emotional intelligence and writing chops to produce a novel that speaks truth about the disparate American whole - is pure hogwash. Jonathan Franzen on the cover of Time with that age-worn, honorific phrase beside his solemn face either rattles or reassures us because we're American. It's in our national character - which is to say, deep in our bones - to believe that when it comes to winners, there can be only one.

But art isn't a footrace. No one comes in first place. Greatness is not a universally agreed-upon value (hence there's no need to email me to disagree with my admiration of Franzen, or to offer advice about whether I should include Luke Skywalker in my next novel). America isn't one story. It's a layered and diverse array of identities, individual and collective, forged on contradictory realities that are imbued with and denied privilege and power. Our obsession with the Great American Novel is perhaps evidence of the even greater truth that it's impossible for one to exist. As Americans, we keep looking anyway.

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the #1 New York Times best seller "Wild," the New York Times best seller "Tiny Beautiful Things," and the novel "Torch." Strayed's writing has appeared in "The Best American Essays," The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Salon, Tin House, The Rumpus - where she wrote the popular "Dear Sugar" advice column - and elsewhere. The movie adaptation of "Wild," starring Reese Witherspoon, was released in December. Strayed holds an MFA in fiction writing from Syracuse University and a bachelor's degree from the University of Minnesota. She lives in Portland, Ore., with her husband and their two children.

-----

By Adam Kirsch

The more deeply a novel lays bare the darkness in American society and the American soul, the more likely it is to become a classic.

Early last year, the publication of Lawrence Buell's study "The Dream of the Great American Novel" gave critics a chance to ask whether that dream is still alive. For the most part, their answer was no. The GAN, to use the acronym Buell employs (taking a cue from Henry James), represents just the kind of imperial project that contemporary criticism has learned to mistrust. What writer, after all, has the right, the cultural authority, to sum up all the diverse experiences and perspectives that can be called American in a single book? To Michael Kimmage, writing in The New Republic, the "dream of the GAN" appeared "silly and naïve and antiquated." Adam Gopnik, in The New Yorker, observed wryly that "nothing is more American than our will to make the enormous do the work of the excellent. We have googly eyes for gargantuan statements."

In his book, however, Buell reminds us that the term "Great American Novel" has seldom been used unironically. Almost from the moment it was coined, by the novelist John De Forest in 1868, it has been used to mock the overweening ambition it names. Buell quotes one post-Civil War observer who compared it to such "other great American things" as "the great American sewing-machine, the great American public school [and] the great American sleeping-car." When Philip Roth actually wrote a book called "The Great American Novel," in 1973, it was, inevitably, a satire.

It might be hard today to find a critic, especially an academic critic, who would accept the idea of the GAN or even of its component parts. Greatness, Americanness and the novel itself are now concepts to be interrogated and problematized. Yet somehow the news of this obsolescence has not quite reached novelists themselves, who continue to dream about writing the big, complex book that will finally capture the country. There is nothing subtle about this ambition: When Jonathan Franzen wrote his candidate for the GAN, he called it "Freedom"; Roth named his attempt (sincere, this time) "American Pastoral." These are titles that call attention to their own scope, in the tradition of John Dos Passos, who titled his trilogy of the-way-we-live-now novels simply "U.S.A."

And the response to "Freedom" and "American Pastoral" - two of the most successful and widely praised literary novels of our time - shows that readers, too, have not given up on the promise of the GAN. The thirst for books that will explain us to ourselves, that will dramatize and summarize what makes Americans the people they are, is one manifestation of our incurable exceptionalism. Of course, we could learn from Tolstoy or Shakespeare what human beings are like, but that does not satisfy us; Homo americanus has always conceived of itself as a new type, the product of what Lincoln called "a new birth of freedom." This conviction, which can be traced in our politics, economic system and foreign policy, cannot help influencing our literature.

Yet as Buell also emphasizes, the novels that we now think of as canonical GANs are by no means patriotic puffery. On the contrary, the more deeply a novel lays bare the darkness in American society and the American soul, the more likely it is to become a classic. "Moby-Dick," the most obvious GAN candidate, is centered on a vengeful megalomaniac; "The Great Gatsby" is about a social-climbing fraud; "Beloved" is about slavery and infanticide. Even "The Catcher in the Rye," a book whose modest scale and New York focus might seem to keep it out of the pantheon of Great American Novels, is at heart a naïvely passionate indictment of American phoniness and fallenness.

Perhaps what drives these books, and drives us to read them again and again, is the incurable idealism about America that we all secretly cherish, and which is continually disappointed by reality. "America when will you be angelic?" Allen Ginsberg demands in "America," which belongs in the much less discussed category of Great American Poems. As long as the question makes sense to us, our novelists will keep asking it.

Adam Kirsch is a columnist for Tablet. He is the author of two collections of poetry and several other books, including, most recently, "Why Trilling Matters." In 2010, he won the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism.

More book reviews and other related topic?
Just go to Dyman Publishing website and visit our EBook Review page. Like us on our Facebook Page for more updates.

Atul Gawande, a Boston surgeon explores the issues of aging and death in this book which, among other books dealing with the same subjects, echoes the driving desire for awareness of the human condition in terms of longevity and living a meaningful life.

We all want a long and meaningful life and yet the reality is that sickness and the onset of aging and its debilitating issues ironically and invariably reduces our capacity to achieve the second precondition: enjoying, not just enduring, life to the very end.

But who among the aged or the truly advanced in age have lived to savor life with the same zest or, if not, to a degree proportional to one's age? For instance, we do not expect the aged to play tennis or to go kayaking as the younger do. But to play pingpong even for a few minutes or to take a leisurely boat ride would do for most elderly people as a worthwhile recreation. Opposed to sitting alone in one's room or lying for days in bed, such interactive activities would make for a truly meaningful life for old people.

And this is what Gawande hopes to spell out in his book: the challenge of individuals, families and governments to shift the emphasis from merely attaining longevity to that of achieving quality life for the aged. That instead of "infantalising" the old, that is, treating them as delicate and vulnerable infants, we should make them feel they have the freedom and capability to do things within their capacity to perform and to accept the consequences as adults and not as mindless infants. In short, they deserve the respect they have achieved just by living long enough to know what they are willing to embrace and to take on whatever risks they choose to undergo. Some prefer to go out with their boots on; why cannot the old also do so wearing pants or skirts and not pajamas?

The author, in fact, points to the phrase "nursing home" as having an imbalanced priority in the minds of most people, particularly those who run them. The focus seems to be on "nursing"; hence, we have ended up with nothing more than institutions - no, virtual hospitals or prisons - where the aged are not allowed to lead completely normal lives but are literally confined or guarded as sickly or danger-prone people. There is no longer the desire to establish the real "home" which they and all of us deserve to have until we depart from this world.

Even Gawande, whose Indian descent has made him aware of the traditional role of the family as the caregiver of the aged, bursts the idea of that supposedly "better option" for the old. As if the traditional way was more representative of true love and caring for the old. The establishment of hospices and nursing homes in the west has, in a way, helped to sustain society's concern for the aged, especially those who no longer have a family to support them in their late years. It is not, we are reminded, the institutions themselves that are wanting but the way we have run them and the way we have used them to perpetuate a misconceived attitude toward the old.

The paradox of modern health care then revolves around having reduced or eliminated the deadly diseases; yet, we have not totally solved the effects of aging, per se. In short, it is the ultimate "disease" we have been carrying around like a hefty bank deposit from the time of our birth which we spend as we wish until the time when we will have exhausted it and the great Banker in Heaven calls us for a final accounting. But Gawande's, unfortunately, book does not deal with the spiritual aspect of aging or dying, only the medical dimension.

While the first part of the book deals with aging and how we can die with self-respect, the second part deals with palliative care (under the supervision of medical practitioners) and how we can die with grace. The author points the proverbial arrogance of doctors who cannot admit defeat in the face of terminal illness. Often, most doctors - and society, in general as well - have only recently recognized not just the need to prolong life but also to allow patients to flourish in life and to experience a "great death".

We all want a great life; but not many would, as the ancient samurais cherished, to have a "good death". It can happen in young age or later in life. But in the case of aging, what palliative care can do, which is what it should be good at, is to provide the complete care as well as the environment where the old can re-experience life within the limited or, what we could call the final dimension of living, they have been gifted with.

It seems ironic that the young have the energy yet lack the wisdom to savor life to the brim hwile the old have the wisdom but not the energy to re-experience life. Nevertheless, the old, with a little help from modern medicine, are on the verge of surpassing the young. And with the increasing population of the aged in almost all societies today, we are compelled to look at these issues and their future repercussions as Atul Gawande has done and to derive insights so that we can apply the lessons in our own lives and in the lives of those we care for.

 

Every fall when new students start taking my classes at Point Park University I ask them what they remember about 9/11. Those memories aren’t always clear or accurate anymore; this year’s 18-year-olds were mostly in kindergarten in 2001. Many don’t realize United Airlines Flight 93 crashed 65 miles east of Pittsburgh in Somerset County.

I started taking students to the Flight 93 Memorial near Shanksville since its dedication in 2011 as a result. We’ve paired that trip with presentations and an annual vigil on campus, something we’ll do again this year.

So when I learned that Tom McMillan, Pittsburgh Penguins vice president of communications, had written a Flight 93 book, I was instantly interested. I contacted him to learn more (full disclosure: I’ve known the author since his Post-Gazette sportswriter days, and he’s an active and involved Point Park alumnus).

A devoted student of history, Mr. McMillan said he had been drawn to the site, visiting it about 20 times before getting a personal tour and becoming a volunteer greeter. Those visits led to his decision to tell as complete an account as possible of the crash, the heroic actions of the 40 crew members and passengers, the investigation, and the memorial’s development.

For two years Mr. McMillan researched books, documentaries, and newspaper and magazine articles; pored over documents, transcripts and flight plans; reviewed the oral histories collected by memorial volunteers; and conducted interviews with 18 family members and officials.

The result: Mr. McMillan created a compelling narrative of the plot’s conception, the terrorist cell formation, pilots’ training — which occurred at Oklahoma and Florida flight schools — and the careful study of U.S. airline security that enabled the 19 hijackers to succeed at striking three targets, killing thousands and wounding a nation.

He developed vivid portraits of the ordinary citizens on board thrust into the role of patriots as they desperately attempted to save their own lives and in doing so spared the U.S. Capitol just 20 minutes away.

I had to put the book down twice — once after his recounting of their heroic insurrection, crafted in chilling detail from the animated flight plan, cockpit voice recorder transcript and the phone calls made from the doomed flight, and again when the descriptions of the grief of those left behind just overwhelmed me.

Of course, much of this has been reported, but as Mr. McMillan notes in his preface, in many pieces. New to many will be the story of Somerset County Coroner Wally Miller, a second-generation funeral home director. He supervised the painstaking scouring of the site for human remains, supported the far-flung family members, organized meetings for them five months after the crash, and spearheaded their successful drive to listen to that cockpit voice recorder.

His humanity and ongoing concern for them, ensuring that part of the memorial become a cemetery for their loved ones’ remains, is evident. Readers will understand completely why the families consider him their hero.

The story of Flight 93 hijacker pilot Ziad Jarrah, an affluent Lebanon native who lived a dual life, also stands out. The aeronautical engineering student fell in love as he moved toward extremism and martyrdom. His return trips to Germany to see his girlfriend worried plot mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Jarrah called her before he boarded the plane in Newark, N.J., although a letter he sent to her recovered by the FBI professed that she should be proud of him “because it is an honor, and you will see the result, and everybody will be very happy.”

It had bothered Mr. McMillan that when the 9/11 sites are referenced, often this one is referred to as “a field in Somerset County.” His book gives residents, officials and emergency responders the credit they deserve. It covers crash witnesses’ accounts, the assistance given to investigators and the extreme care taken with thousands of items left at the temporary memorial.

From the signs and flags posted by students at Shanksville-Stonycreek School, just three miles from the site, to residents standing along the roadway when family members first traveled there and up to their continuing volunteer efforts at the peaceful memorial site, readers will grasp their significance.

Mr. McMillan calls this book his “labor of love” — he is donating his proceeds from it to the memorial — and it is a fitting continuation of the tributes left there by thousands of visitors. While no account can be definitive for many reasons, his book will help secure Flight 93’s legacy and Somerset County’s place in U.S. history.

 

The Mockingbird Next Door: Neighbor's memoir insightful yet gentle

Now that J.D. Salinger is gone, Harper Lee might be the most famous literary recluse in the United States.

In 1960, Lee published the Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird, still one of the best-loved American books and required reading in 70 percent of U.S. school systems.

During the same period, she helped Truman Capote research In Cold Blood, started work on another novel and helped publicize the 1962 movie adaptation of Mockingbird (starring Gregory Peck).

By 1965, however, she had stopped appearing publicly and refused to grant interviews. She has never published another book.

So, in 2001, when Chicago Tribune journalist Marja Mills was sent to Lee's hometown of Monroeville, Ala., to get background on the town and its most famous resident, she wasn't expecting to meet the author.

To her surprise, when she rang Lee's doorbell, she was greeted by her older sister, Alice Finch Lee, who at the time was 89 and still practicing law every day. They had a long, comfortable chat, and the next day, Mills was startled to receive a phone call from Alice's sister, whose full name is Nelle Harper Lee (Nelle to her friends).

"It was as if I had answered the phone and heard: 'Hello. This is the Wizard of Oz,'  " Mills writes.

The two sisters and the journalist became close. By 2004, Mills, who suffers from lupus, was experiencing so much pain and fatigue that she could no longer work at the Tribune, and she decided to spend more time in Monroeville researching the Lees.

Alice and Nelle suggested that the owner of the house next door to theirs might be willing to put it up for rent.

Mills moved into the house - complete with a deer head, a stuffed bobcat and another unidentifiable "crouching creature" - and stayed for more than a year.

The Mockingbird Next Door details the time Mills spent with the Lees and their friends, making daily expeditions to feed the ducks, fishing for catfish with hot-dog chunks as bait, going to the Laundromat and drinking coffee in Mills' kitchen.

In a surprise turn of events this week, however, Lee released a letter claiming that she never authorized Mills to publish anything about her.

The book is as far from an expose as one can get. It's a respectful and clear-eyed account that sticks to the apparent boundaries that Lee set - which means that, among other things, it records only Lee's life in Monroeville, not in New York, where she continued to spend several months a year for many years.

Not that it is sugar-coated.

Lee, 88, comes across as prickly, at best, and capable of casual barbed remarks such as one about Capote, her former friend: "Truman was a psychopath, honey."

Mills counts herself lucky not to have been subjected to the late-night, alcohol-fueled rants that many of Lee's friends said they have endured.

The book, despite its subject's complaints, should be a treat for anyone who has longed to get closer to Lee.

Visit our facebook page and follow us on twitter @DymanPublishing.

Bob Ross, with his big brown Afro and soothing on-screen persona, was known as the ultimate encouraging instructor to thousands who watched his PBS series "The Joy of Painting." Until he died in 1995 at age 52, he was always firm in his belief that there are no mistakes and that any viewer following his simple oil-painting approach could, with a little patience, create pretty landscapes. His hit show spawned a sprawling empire of instructional tapes and franchise art studios, and now "the Bob Ross phenomenon" is the subject of a new book from the University of Mississippi called "Happy Clouds, Happy Trees," by Kristin Congdon, Doug Blandy and Danny Coeyman.

Why is there no Bob Ross artwork in this celebration of Bob Ross? The authors gingerly hint at the "uneasy relationship" that exists between Bob Ross enthusiasts and the folks at Bob Ross Inc., the multimillion-dollar corporation that zealously guards the painter's legacy (and once slapped a cease-and-desist order on a newborn Bob Ross fan club in the United Kingdom).

Hence, artist Coeyman, working on general Bob Ross principles, does his best to imitate the style of the roughly 30,000 paintings Ross left behind - although sometimes he's unsure whether he's making "a Bob or just a blob."

The authors fill in the gaps with an open enthusiasm so vulnerable to parody that the reader can only admire its bravery. They look at Bob Ross as guru, as shaman, as life coach - even, improbably, as sexual provocateur: "Close-ups of Bob's hand showed him mixing, spurting, spilling, whacking, and stroking paint all over the studio," they write as we cringe. "Bob made paint porn."

They look at his oil techniques, simple as they are, and dutifully construct whole worlds of significance for them. Those of us who remember "The Joy of Painting" mainly as a treasured oasis, a deep, cleansing breath in the middle of a busy day, might have to stifle the odd giggle when reading these overly earnest passages. Does everything, we might ask, need to be significant? When the authors defiantly assert Ross's importance to "Art History, pedagogy and cultural anthropology," they seem to be working way too hard.

There are touching moments in "Happy Clouds, Happy Trees": The authors effectively capture the sense of quiet optimism Ross conveyed to his viewers, many of whom probably never got any closer to a blank canvas than the ones they watched him decorate on "The Joy of Painting." There also are defensive moments, most of them in a hilariously catty chapter explaining the differences between Ross and Thomas Kinkade, the feel-good treacle-artist for whom he's often mistaken. ("Kinkade did not paint nature," we're told, "he painted real estate.") And as for any deep personal conflicts that drove Ross to perform, well, you'll have to take that up with Bob Ross Inc.

Donoghue is managing editor of the online magazine Open Letters Monthly.

The character and career of Sir Winston Churchill are both so protean that it is not surprising that there have been studies of the great man emphasizing innumerable aspects, running the gamut from military strategist and statesman to painter and gourmand. Certainly, Churchill as a literary figure is a topic also well worth considering. What other British prime minister won the Nobel Prize for literature? (It was awarded to him in the midst of his second premiership in 1953.) Interestingly, although it was widely believed that this accolade came to him because of his magisterial history of World War II, Jonathan Rose, Kenan professor of history at Drew University, informs us that it was the autobiography "My Early Life" that impelled the (neutral in World War II) Swedes. Well-researched and clearly informed by great admiration and attunement to its subject, "The Literary Churchill" is simply crammed with interesting facts like this - and not just about his oeuvre and his accomplishments. We find out about the origins of his writing with his discovery of it as a talent and much-needed boost as an indifferent student, his literary and theatrical tastes and his affinity for melodrama.

About 4,000 unidentified corpses turn up in the U.S. every year, of which about half have been murdered. Can the Internet help?

The public seems fascinated, if not obsessed, with crime-solving, if the high ratings of TV shows such as "CSI" and "NCIS" are any indication. The interest in crimes often proceeds from the high-profile identity of the victim or perpetrator. Think of the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, the vanishing of Jimmy Hoffa or the trial of O.J. Simpson. At the other end of the spectrum are crime victims who have no identity at all.

These are the John Doe and Jane Doe corpses that are found without any papers or other identification markers. Even in an age when we are tracked electronically by our phone companies at every single moment, about 4,000 unidentified corpses turn up in the U.S. every year, of which about half have been murdered. In 2007 no fewer than 13,500 sets of unidentified human remains were languishing in the evidence rooms of medical examiners, according to an analysis published in the National Institute of Justice Journal.

In her brilliant book "The Skeleton Crew," Deborah Halber explains why local law enforcement often fails to investigate such deaths:"Unidentified corpses are like obtuse, financially strapped houseguests: they turn up uninvited, take up space reserved for more obliging visitors, require care and attention, and then, when you are ready for them to move on, they don't have anywhere to go." The result is that many of these remains are consigned to oblivion.

While the population of the anonymous dead receives only scant attention from the police or the media, it has given rise to a macabre subculture of Internet sleuthing. Ms. Halber chronicles with lucidity and wit how amateur investigators troll websites, such as the Doe Network, Official Cold Case Investigations and Websleuths Crime Sleuthing Community, and check online databases looking for matches between the reported missing and the unidentified dead. It is a grisly pursuit involving linking the images of dead bodies to the descriptions posted by people trying to find someone.

Ms. Halber devotes most of "The Skeleton Crew" to describing a handful of cases that have given rise to this bizarre avocation. It started with an infamous Kentucky crime known as the Tent Girl Case: The victim was known only as Tent Girl because her body was found in 1968 inside a canvas tent bag. The hero of the story is Todd Matthews, a factory worker in Tennessee. Mr. Matthews became fascinated with the mystery in 1988, when he was still a teen, but was unable to find any clues to her identity until a decade later, when he stumbled on new information on the Internet. In 1998 he began searching forums and found one for lonely hearts and genealogy that had an intriguing post from a woman still looking for her long-lost sister, Barbara Hackmann-Taylor.

Barbara had vanished in late 1967, on a date not far from the time when the Tent Girl was found. She had lived near the Tent Girl's locale, and her sister's description roughly matched that of Tent Girl. Mr. Mathews wrote the Kentucky police, who arranged for the remains of Tent Girl to be exhumed and her DNA to be tested. Eureka, it matched, and Tent Girl finally had a name. Mr. Matthews later founded the Doe Network, which became a nexus for curious citizens who wanted to follow in his footsteps.

Ms. Halber superbly reports on this morbid new subculture. Aside from Tent Girl, she describes such odd cases as the Lady of the Dunes found in Cape Cod, Mass., in 1974; the Jane Doe in a red T-shirt who was found in Baltimore in 2000; and what Ms. Halber calls the "head in the bucket" case from Kearney, Mo., in 2001. Besides interviewing the Sherlock Holmes wannabes who have pursued these cases, Ms. Halber talks to police officers, forensic experts and medical examiners. She even attends grisly autopsies. As a result, we learn many unusual details: A human skeleton, it turns out, will fit in a 200-square-inch box.

But the focus on anecdotes, as interesting as they are, diverts attention from a larger question. Just how many murders do these amateur sleuths help solve (if one considers cases like Tent Girl, where the murderer was never discovered, to be solved)? Ms. Halber estimates that, since the identification of Tent Girl in 1998, roughly 30,000 unidentified murder victims have been discovered. The posse of amateur sleuths, as far as I can see from her book, have helped police crack no more than a dozen cases. So 99.99% remain unsolved.

The key to finding a solution to the stockpile of unidentified corpses, I would suggest, is not Internet sleuthing or crowdsourcing the identification of images of human remains, but increasing the efficiency of the FBI's National Crime Information Center database. At present, the NCIC stores more than 100 million fingerprints in its automated fingerprint-identification system and is in the process of developing a national DNA- matching system. Its computers and software need to be upgraded to better mesh with those of local police, sheriffs and medical examiners. Once that task is accomplished, it has the potential to greatly (and speedily) reduce the population of the unidentified dead.

Amateur sleuths, no matter how great their dedication, simply lack the resources. Because of legitimate privacy concerns, they do not have access to this FBI database. To be sure, they now can use a government-run website called National Missing and Unidentified Person System to find a roster of fresh cases, and they can continue searching for macabre matches on the Internet. And amateur sleuthing provides great satisfaction to armchair detectives, the author makes clear, not only in America but in such far off places as Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Indonesia. Ms. Halber's real service is to bring to light the workings of this fascinating new subculture and one can expect her entertaining book will only add to their numbers.

With the founding of the Center for Public Integrity in the 1980s, Charles Lewis probably did more than anyone else to launch institutional nonprofit journalism in America. So it is worth paying attention to what he has to say, especially when his subject includes the fate of journalism itself. Mr. Lewis's "935 Lies" repays such attention, though not right away.

The first half of the book is an unremarkable recounting of America's supposed loss of innocence-its missteps and transgressions as well as its attempts to restore the nation's ideals-from the Tonkin Gulf and Freedom Summer to the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, from the Chilean coup to Iraq. An entire chapter, breaking no new ground, is devoted to the stubborn problem of race in America. The book's historical narrative is meant to show, as the subtitle has it, "the decline of America's moral integrity." The title itself, which the author essentially disowns in a concluding note, refers to 935 statements by the George W. Bush administration about Iraq. Mr. Lewis asserts that the statements were all erroneous but concedes that they may not have been "lies" in the sense of knowing falsehood. In any case, the Iraq war plays only a limited role in Mr. Lewis's tale of woe.

But hang in-or skip to the second part, which is mostly a memoir and almost all about journalism. It includes one of the toughest critiques of television news ever written by an insider. From 1977 to 1989, Mr. Lewis worked for ABC News and then for CBS's news program "60 Minutes."

Mr. Lewis begins with an admiring portrait of Edward R. Murrow, whose wartime reporting and work at CBS in the early 1950s, he believes, embodied a time when the news business managed to avoid the plague of risk aversion that would later come from corporate masters seeking ever larger profits. Then he takes us into the halls of Don Hewitt's "60 Minutes" and makes the most of his own disillusioning experience.

"Serious journalism," Mr. Lewis says, "will necessarily be undertaken by commercial TV news executives with great caution." He argues that, as TV news began seeking a mass audience, the networks became "mostly interested in the illusion of investigative reporting." Time pressures required that almost all their work in this area be derivative of work previously done by others, usually in print. "Well-connected, powerful people and companies with questionable policies and practices," he says, were not investigated "precisely because of the connections and power they boasted."

He describes a CBS corporate culture in which his first 150 story ideas yielded only three broadcast segments, either because there was insufficient time to develop them or because they lacked "characters." What he was being asked to produce, he ultimately recognized, was "formulaic, good-versus-evil" pieces devoid of policy or nuance.

The most acute of Mr. Lewis's frustrations came when Hewitt, the executive producer of "60 Minutes," refused to broadcast a Lewis report on former government officials profiting as U.S. lobbyists for foreign interests unless the name of Hewitt's good friend Pete Peterson, then chairman of the Blackstone BX +1.27% Group, was excised from the script. In the story, a photograph showed five smiling Blackstone executives, all former federal appointees, in a Japanese newspaper advertisement seeking business for their lobbying efforts. Mr. Peterson was singled out by name in the voice-over narrative. Correspondent Mike Wallace, for whom Mr. Lewis worked directly, implored him in a shouting match to remove Mr. Peterson's name, to no avail. But Hewitt was more subtle, simply refusing to schedule the piece for airing. Mr. Lewis bitterly relented to Hewitt's implicit demand and quit the day after the story was broadcast.

As for ABC, Mr. Lewis reports that its legendary news chief Roone Arledge killed a tough story on tobacco at the request of "the Corporate guys," who were fearful that the network could complicate its position in a libel suit that Philip Morris PM -0.35% had already filed against the broadcaster. In another instance, Mr. Lewis was given just a few hours to determine the veracity of an allegation that Lyndon Johnson, when he was Senate majority leader, had accepted large cash bribes. Mr. Lewis accurately calls such an assignment "a fool's errand."

The book's critique is less sure-footed when Mr. Lewis turns from TV to newspapers. At one point he suggests that investigative journalism in newspapers has been in retreat since 1968. He blames the decline almost entirely on "shortsighted greed and increasing corporatization" and hardly at all on the true culprit, the digital revolution that wreaked havoc on newspaper business models. The decline has largely occurred over the past decade, not anything like 45 years, and it has coincided with a collapse in newspaper profitability, which peaked in 2000.

Mr. Lewis's personal story by no means ended when he left broadcast television. The Center for Public Integrity opened its doors in late 1989, and its first report followed up on his last "60 Minutes" piece. The center's mission was to do investigative work in the public interest "using a 'quasi-journalistic, quasi political science' approach," issuing long reports and later books. CPI was really the nation's first independent nonprofit newsroom.

A serial nonprofit entrepreneur, Mr. Lewis has also founded the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and other organizations aimed at promoting and undertaking nonprofit reporting. His reflections, especially on network television, point up the inherent limits of our largest legacy news organizations and embody the hope that new entrants will fill the gaps in newsgathering and, thereby, enlarge the public's capacity for democratic governance.

By Richard J. Tofel

Visit Dyman Publishing for more related articles.

If you're on the hunt for something new and interesting to read, you have plenty of places to turn. This week, we're looking at five of the best book recommendation sites, services, or groups, based on your nominations.

Earlier in the week, we asked you where you went to find something good to read-whether it's based on the things you've already read, someone's suggestions you trust, a website that lets you build a virtual "shelf" of your favorite titles, or just a discussion group. You responded with tons of great ideas, but we only have room for the top five. Here's what you said, in no particular order:

Goodreads

GoodReads is more than just a book recommendation site, although it excels at helping your find new books to read based on the ones you enjoy. You can build a virtual "shelf" of books you own or have already read, share your progress with the books you're currently reading, rate the books you've read, leave reviews, and connect with other readers. You can also use those ratings to get book suggestions from the site's massive database of books. Your friends can make direct suggestions to you, and even if the book suggestions that the site builds aren't enough, you can go diving into user-generated book lists, reviews, and more.

One great thing that many of you mentioned about GoodReads is that you can connect your Amazon account to quickly build your virtual shelf. As you finish books on your Kindle, GoodReads will automatically mark the book as complete and update your recommendations accordingly. It's also hard to understate the power of GoodReads' community, which many of you called out as well. Some of you noted that your favorite authors actively use the service too, and they share what they're reading as well. Read more in its nomination thread here.

BookBub

While BookBub isn't strictly a book recommendation service, it does bring you super-low-cost books based on your interests every day. The service is free, and when you sign up, you tell BookBub what kinds of books you like to read. From there, you'll get an email from BookBub every day (you can choose whether it comes in the morning or evening) with book deals for that day. When we say "deal," we mean it-many of BookBub's titles are free entirely, $0.99, or just a couple of bucks. In some cases, they're new titles that the author is trying to get momentum behind, and in other cases they're just great, under-the-radar titles you might not have discovered otherwise.

I've been a BookBub member for a year now, and the book suggestions run the gamut from extremely useful, amazing finds to horribly pulpy "how did this even get published" genre titles. Your mileage may vary, but the nice thing is that you can tweak your selections at any time, and the books are always cheap. When those great titles come along, you'll have to jump on them though-the sales go quickly. Read more in its nomination thread here.

LibraryThing

LibraryThing has been around for a long time (and it made the top five, along with GoodReads, the last time we asked for your favorite book rec sites) and is still a great user-powered book ratings, review, and recommendation site. The service calls itself the world's largest book club, and that's a lot like the overall feel. Once you sign up, you'll be encouraged to start adding books you've read and leave reviews for them. Behind its book ratings and reviews though, LibraryThing is a powerful tool to catalog and organize your entire book collection. It doesn't take much to add all of the books in your library so you have a running collection of both your physical books and ebooks all in one place. The service will also connect to your Amazon account to automatically pull down books you own and have read.

Thanks to its massive community, its book recommendations are often spot on, reflective of users who have libraries like yours and have rated books the way you have. The basic service is free, and you can add up to 200 books. $10/yr or $25/one time gets you a premium membership that lets you add and catalog as many books as you like. Those of you who nominated it noted that its especially good for people who enjoy non-fiction or books that aren't necessarily in the popular zeitgeist, and for getting recommendations from people who don't just list the same dozen titles over and over again. Read more in its nomination thread here.

Reddit's BookSuggestions Subreddit

If you're a Reddit fan, the /r/booksuggestions subreddit is a great place to go to see what everyone's reading, or to get recommendations based on specific authors or titles you've enjoyed, or see what people suggest in specific genres. Some of the top threads are community challenges and calls for recommendations on a specific theme, but it doesn't take much scrolling to find interesting threads for people looking for specific types of books. One person is bedtime books for their kids that combine epic battles with strong female characters; another person is interested in science fiction titles without aliens or looming galactic threats. The sky's the limit, and you can just as easily post your own topic with what you're looking for.

Those of you who called it out in the call for contenders praised the subreddit for being equally weird and interesting, a label often applied to Reddit in general. You'll definitely find something new and interesting to read, that much is true, although often the most broad recommendations do sometimes tend to follow what's popular and in the common consciousness. Still, if you refine your thread as much as possible and include what you've read and what you're looking for, you're in for good tips. Read more in its nomination thread here.

If you're not interested in registering for accounts, adding your own books, or any of that hassle, Olmenta can suggest some solid titles to you based on general popularity and the curation of the people behind the site. It's a simple tiled list of book covers that the service thinks you should read, and a few genres you can click on if you're looking for something specific, like business, fiction, children's, theatre, poetry, or nonfiction, among others. If you see a book you might be interested in, click on it for a synopsis and a bigger view of the cover, along with a link to buy the book.

Olmenta couldn't be any simpler-but it's a double-edged sword. You'll see what's available quickly, and if you like the suggestions, you'll come back to see updates and new reads. If you don't, there's not much else for you to see. Olmenta's nomination thread reflected that simplicity-you noted that it's hassle-free and elegant, and you don't need to jump through hoops to find a new book. At the same time, the lack of customization means the suggestions aren't really personalized. Read more in its nomination thread here.

Now that you've seen the top five, it's time to put them to an all-out vote to determine the community favorite.

The honorable mentions this week go out to your local library or indie bookstore. A number of you noted that there's nothing wrong with heading to your local library and asking a librarian what to read-after all, they're the most familiar with their own stacks, and have plenty of suggestions, tips, and thoughts of their own to offer you. Whether you're looking for some new, hot title or you want to dive into more obscure areas of literature, you shouldn't overlook your local library, and the hard-working, highly-trained people that work there.

Similarly, many of you suggested heading to your local independent bookstore, especially if you're looking for niche or specialty books on highly specific topics. Looking for books on specifically political topics, or independently published authors whose books are on limited release? Indie bookstores are where you need to go-and the people that work there are likely to have suggestions for you too. I remember my days working in a bookstore: Each of us had a specialty area we were happy to talk about.

 

 

Article Source: Lifehacker