What a life Harold Evans has had! And what a career! From shoe-leather reporting for a weekly newspaper in a Lancashire mill town, to the editorship of the Sunday Times, where he redefined investigative journalism, broke story after story, sought and won redress for victims of injustice, and got laws changed (for the better), leaving an indelible mark on British society; then to New York, where as a stunningly successful book publisher he published a record number of bestsellers and found the time to write a few himself. In 2001, British journalists voted him the greatest all-time British newspaper editor, and three years later Queen Elizabeth II made him a knight. Evans’s new book, a memoir, is My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times. In it Evans tells the amazing story of his life and career and, along the way, demonstrates what journalism at its best can be. Below is an excerpt:

My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times

By Harold Evans

Chapter 1

Grains of Truth

The most exciting sound in the world for me as a boy was the slow whoosh-whoosh of the big steam engine leaving Manchester Exchange station for Rhyl in North Wales. Every year as summer neared I counted the days to when the whole family—six of us then—would escape the bleakness of northern winters, taking the train for a week at the seaside, buckets and spades in hand.

I was nearly twelve the summer I saw the bodies of the soldiers scattered about the sands.

The soldiers were so still, their clothing so torn, their faces so pale, they looked as if they had died where they fell. And yet they had escaped death, unlike thousands of their comrades left on the battlegrounds of northern France; thousands more were on their way to years in German internment camps. The men I saw were the lucky ones, a few hundred of the 198, 229 of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) who just days before in May-June 1940 had fought their way to Dunkirk. Twenty-four hours before we saw them, they had been on that other beach, being hammed from the air by Stuka dive-bombers, strafed by the machine guns of Messerschmitts, rescue ships ablaze offshore, and every hour the German panzers closing the ring. They were a forlorn group, unshaven, some in remnants of uniforms, some in makeshift outfits of pajamas and sweaters, not a hat between them, lying apart from the rows of deck chairs and the Punch-and-Judy show and the pier and the ice-cream stands. Most of the men who were evacuated had been sent to bases and hospitals in the south of England, but several thousand had been put on trains to seaside resorts in North Wales, where there were army camps and spare beds in the boardinghouses. The bulk of the men sprawled on the Rhyl beach were members of the Royal Corps of Signals attached to artillery regiments; some sixty-four officers and twenty-five hundred other ranks had been sent to the Second Signal Training Center at Prestatyn, which shared six miles of sand with Rhyl. Read More

Hendrik Hertzberg, who writes the Comment piece in the New Yorker, is one of the most respected political commentators around. In his new book ¡Obámanos!: The Birth of a New Political Era, he charts the rise and triumph of Barack Obama in the 2008 campaign, bringing to the task his customary wit, insight, and feel for political history, as well as his incomparably limpid prose style. Here’s an excerpt:

¡Obámanos!: The Rise of a New Political Party

By Hendrik Hertzberg

From the Introduction

My Barack Obama

The presidential election that put Barack Obama in the White House has been variously called the most important, the most exciting, the most surprising, the most significant, the most consequential, and the most expensive in the modern history of the United States. The most expensive it certainly was, as was the one before and the one before that. What about the rest?

I’ve been counting, and it turns out that this presidential election was the fifteenth since I started paying attention. The fifteenth! More than one-quarter of all the fifty-six presidential elections in all of American history! And I’ve been a participant of sorts in every single one of them, beginning as a nine-year-old fourth grader in 1952 (when I “helped” my mother stuff envelopes and pass out buttons at a storefront Stevenson headquarters in our bucolically Republican suburban village) and then, every four years since, as a volunteer, a reporter, a speechwriter, or a purveyor of observation and opinion. I can honestly say that this one—the campaign and election of 2007 and 2008—was, whatever its historical importance and the rest, the most nerve-wracking I’ve ever experienced. Also, in the end, the most satisfying.

I cast my first vote in 1964, for Lyndon Johnson, and have voted for every Democratic nominee since. It’s never been a difficult call—not even in 1968, when, like a lot of people my age (I was in the Navy at the time, but stationed in lower Manhattan and spending evenings doing dogwork at Bobby Kennedy’s midtown headquarters), I hated the Vietnam War and loved R.F.K. I looked upon Hubert Humphrey with a mixture of contempt and pity, but come November I voted for him anyway; I felt sure there was still a good heart under all that cringing, and I thought he’d probably make a decent president. Also, remember his Republican opponent. Read More

David Plouffe managed one of the most original and successful presidential campaigns in American history, one that vaulted a little-known African-American with limited political experience to the White House, overcoming Democratic political royalty (Hillary Clinton), and a bona fide Republican war hero (John McCain) along the way. The Audacity to Win is the riveting inside story of how the Obama campaign pulled it off. Here’s an excerpt:

The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama’s Historic Victory

By David Plouffe

What surprised me at [our first meeting to discuss the vice presidency] was that Obama was clearly thinking more seriously about picking Hillary Clinton than Ax and I had realized. He said if his central criterion measured who could be the best VP, she had to be included in that list. She was competent, could help in Congress, would have international bona fides and had been through this before, albeit in a different role. He wanted to continue discussing her as we moved forward. We met again a couple of weeks later in mid-June and winnowed the list down to about 10 names.

At our next meeting, we narrowed the list down to six. Barack continued to be intrigued by Hillary. “I still think Hillary has a lot of what I am looking for in a VP,” he said to us. “Smarts, discipline, steadfastness. I think Bill may be too big a complication. If I picked her, my concern is that there would be more than two of us in the relationship.”

Neither Ax nor I were fans of the Hillary option. We saw her obvious strengths, but we thought there were too many complications, both pre-election and post-election, should we be so fortunate as to win. Still, we were very careful not to object too forcefully. This needed to be his call. Read More

Remember searching the web before Google? No, me neither — at least I try not to. The company that today shapes our online lives more than any other got its start, back in 1998, by building a search engine that was smarter, faster, better than the rest. The knowing words on everyone’s lips at the time, as I recall, were “OK, great. But how’s it going to make money?” Well, now we know — Google would make money by expanding beyond search to “own” the information space in the information age. In Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, Ken Auletta tells how the company that became a verb came to be: how (and how!) it grew: what its rise and dominance means for traditional media companies (nothing good); and where it’s headed next (in short, everywhere). Here’s an excerpt:

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It

By Ken Auletta

Preface

The world has been Googled. We don’t search for information, we “Google” it. Type a question in the Google search box, as do more than 70 percent of all searchers worldwide, and in about a half second answers appear. Want to find an episode of Charlie Rose you missed, or a funny video made by some guy of his three-year-old daughter’s brilliant ninety-second synopsis of Star Wars: Episode IV? Google’s YouTube, with ninety million unique visitors in March 2009—two-thirds of all Web video traffic—has it. Want to place an online ad? Google’s DoubleClick is the foremost digital advertising services company. Google’s advertising revenues—more than twenty billion dollars a year—account for 40 percent of all the advertising dollars spent online. In turn, Google pumps ad dollars into tens of thousands of Web sites, bringing both traffic and commerce to them. Want to read a newspaper or magazine story from anywhere in the world? Google News aggregates twenty-five thousand news sites daily. Looking for an out-of-print book or a scholarly journal? Google is seeking to make almost every book ever published available in digitized form. Schools in impoverished nations that are without textbooks can now retrieve knowledge for free. “The Internet,” said Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, “makes information available. Google makes information accessible.”

Google’s uncorporate slogan—“Don’t be evil”—appeals to Americans who embrace underdogs like Apple that stand up to giants like Microsoft. Google’s is one of the world’s most trusted corporate brands. Among traditional media companies—from newspapers and magazines to book publishers, television, Hollywood studios, advertising agencies, telephone companies, and Microsoft—no company inspires more awe, or more fear. There are sound reasons for traditional media to fear Google. Today, Google’s software initiatives encroach on every media industry, from telephone to television to advertising to newspapers to magazines to book publishers to Hollywood studios to digital companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, or eBay. For companies built on owning and selling or distributing that information, Google can be perceived as the new “Evil Empire.”

Google is run by engineers, and engineers are people who ask why: Why must we do things the way they’ve always been done? Why shouldn’t all the books ever published be digitized? Why shouldn’t we be able to read any newspaper or magazine online? Why can’t we watch television for free on our computers? Why can’t we make copies of our music or DVDs and share them with friends? Why can’t advertising be targeted and sold without paying fat fees to the media middleman? Why can’t we make phone calls more cheaply? Google’s leaders are not cold businessmen; they are cold engineers. They are scientists, always seeking new answers. They seek a construct, a formula, an algorithm that both graphs and predicts behavior. They naively believe that most mysteries, including the mysteries of human behavior, are unlocked with data. Of course, Wall Street’s faith in such mathematical models for derivatives helped cripple the American economy. Naivete and passion make a potent mix; combine the two with power and you have an extraordinary force, one that can effect great change for good or for ill. Google fervently believes it has a mission. “Our goal is to change the world,” Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, told me. Making money, he continued, “is a technology to pay for it.” Read More

The Audacity of Greed: Free Markets, Corporate Thieves, and the Looting of America

By Jonathan Tasini

Highway Robbery

The United States of America has just lived through the greatest looting of money in its history, a vast robbery that began in the late 1970s and has stretched to the present day. The perpetrators of this grand robbery didn’t just steal a few possessions, or a little bit of cash. Instead, they drained the economy of trillions of dollars, in the process skulking off with a vast fortune that defied imagination while leaving millions of people without jobs, in poverty or without their life savings.

It wasn’t a Willie Sutton kind of robbery, with guns drawn and a slip of paper passed to a bank teller. Sutton, you may recall, was a notorious bank robber who lives on in the public imagination because of a one-sentence answer he gave to explain his particular strategy of making money. When asked why he robbed banks, he supposedly replied (“supposedly” because he later denied ever uttering this memorable phrase), “Because that’s where the money is.” Since Willie was usually well-armed when he committed his crimes, his actions fit well with the classic definition of a robbery, which Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary tells us is “larceny from the person or presence of another by violence or threat.”

No, the robbery I am speaking about was pulled off without a single bullet being fired, and was, for the most part, perfectly legal (though many of the perpetrators actions spilled over into illegality). It was actually more like highway robbery, which Merriam-Webster’s defines as “excessive profit or advantage derived from a business transaction.” You have probably heard of some of the people involved in this highway robbery—Bernard Ebbers, John Rigas, Dennis Kozlowski, Edward Whitacre, Douglas Conant, John Thain, Jeffrey Kindler and David Farr, to name but a few. What do these people all have in common? They are, or were, corporate CEOs. Read More

As noted yesterday, Green Metropolis, by New Yorker writer David Owen, contends that the greenest community in the United States is not Portland, Oregon or Snowmass, Colorado, or someplace in Vermont; it’s New York City. Skeptical? You might be less so after you read this excerpt.

Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability

By David Owen

From Chapter 1

More Like Manhattan

The history of civilization is a chronicle of destruction: people arrive, eat anything slow enough to catch, supplant indigenous flora with species bred for exploitation, burn whatever can be burned, and move on or spread out. No sensitive modern human can contemplate that history without a shudder. Everywhere we look, we see evidence of our recklessness, as well as signs that our destructive reach is growing. For someone standing on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon on a moonless night, the brightest feature of the sky is no longer the Milky Way but the glow of Las Vegas, 175 miles away. Tap water in metropolitan Washington, D.C., has been found to contain trace amounts of caffeine, ibuprofen, naproxen sodium, two antibiotics, an anticonvulsive drug used to treat seizures and bipolar disorder, and the antibacterial compound triclocarban, which is an ingredient of household soaps and cleaning agents. Modern interest in environmentalism is driven by a yearning to protect what we haven’t ruined already, to conserve what we haven’t used up, to restore as much as possible of what we’ve destroyed, and to devise ways of reconfiguring our lives so that civilization as we know it can be sustained through our children’s lifetimes and beyond.

To the great majority of Americans who share these concerns, densely populated cities look like the end of the world. Because such places concentrate high levels of human activity, they seem to manifest nearly every distressing symptom of the headlong growth of civilization—the smoke, the filth, the crowds, the cars—and we therefore tend to think of them as environmental crisis zones. Calculated by the square foot, New York City generates more greenhouse gases, uses more energy, and produces more solid waste than any other American region of comparable size. On a map depicting negative environmental impacts in relation to surface area, therefore, Manhattan would look like an intense hot spot, surrounded, at varying distances, by belts of deepening green. Read More

Part One, Flights

Chapter One

Bujumbura-NewYork, May 1994

On the outskirts of the capital, Bujumbura, there is a small international airport. It has a modern terminal with intricate roofs and domed metal structures that resemble astronomical observatories. It is the kind of terminal that seems designed to say that here you leave the past behind, the future has arrived, behold the wonders of aviation. But in Burundi in 1994, for the lucky few with tickets, an airplane was just the fastest, safest way out. It was flight.

In the spring of that year, violence and chaos governed Burundi. To the west, the hills above Bujumbura were burning. Smoke seemed to be pouring off the hills, as the winds of mid-May carried the plumes of smoke downward in undulating sheets, in the general direction of the airport. A large passenger jet was parked on the tarmac, and a disordered crowd was heading toward it in sweaty haste. Deo felt as if he were being carried by the crowd, immersed in an unfamiliar river. The faces around him were mostly white, and though many were black or brown, there was no one whom he recognized, and so far as he could tell there were no country people. As a little boy, he had crouched behind rocks or under trees the first times he’d seen airplanes passing overhead. He had never been so close to a plane before. Except for buildings in the capital, this was the largest man-made thing he’d ever seen. He mounted the staircase quickly. Only when he had entered the plane did he let himself look back, staring from inside the doorway as if from a hiding place again.   In Deo’s mind, there was danger everywhere. If his heightenedsense of drama was an inborn trait, it had certainly been nourished. For months every situation had in fact been dangerous. Climbing the stairs a moment before, he had imagined a voice in his head telling him not to leave. But now he stared at the hills and he imagined that everything in Burundi was burning. Burundi had become hell. He finally turned away, and stepped inside. In front of him were cushioned chairs with clean white cloths draped over their backs, chairs in perfect rows with little windows on the ends. This was the most nicely appointed room he’d ever seen. It looked like paradise compared to everything outside. If it was real, it couldn’t last.

The plane was packed, but he felt entirely alone. He had a seat by a window. Something told him not to look out, and something told him to look. He did both. His hands were shaking. He felt he was about to vomit. Everyone had heard stories of planes being shot down, not only the Rwandan president’s plane back in April but others as well. He was waiting for this to happen after the plane took off. For several long minutes, whenever he glanced out the window all he saw was smoke. When the air cleared and he could see the landscape below, he realized that they must already have crossed the Akanyaru River, which meant they had left Burundi and were now above Rwanda. He had crossed a lot of the land down there on foot. It wasn’t all that small. To see it transformed into a tiny piece of time and space-this could only happen in a dream.

Read More

The Living Shore: Rediscovering a Lost World

By Rowan Jacobsen

Chapter 2

First Contact

In the early 1990s, a young Canadian marine biologist named Brian Kingzett scored an ecologist’s dream job. The province of British Columbia wanted to know how much of its Swiss-cheese coastline had the potential for shellfish aquaculture. Most shellfish live in estuaries—bays or inlets sheltered from the open ocean—and BC was rich in such areas. Shellfish aquaculture is a form of intertidal farming. You obtain “seed”—baby shellfish resembling grains of sand—from a hatchery, plant it on beaches or mudflats, then harvest the shellfish when they mature in two to three years. Shellfish aquaculture has become a huge worldwide industry, as well as an important restoration tool—because shellfish feed by filtering algae out of water, they are an estuary’s way of keeping itself clean and healthy. Always eager to utilize its natural resources, whether logging, mining, or seafood, and with vast stretches of wild coastline under provincial control, BC embraced shellfish farming in the early nineties.

British Columbia has a staggering 16,780 miles of filigreed coastline, thanks to the glaciers that whittled fjords out of its ridges during the last ice age. Much of this coastline is on Vancouver Island, the largest island on the west coast of North America. A 450-mile-long outrider kissing the coast of Canada, Vancouver Island was not originally part of North America, nor even of Pangaea, the übercontinent formed by all seven of today’s continents. Instead, the earth’s mantle burped Vancouver Island into the South Pacific 400 million years ago. The island began a jaunt across the Pacific, slamming into North America 100 million years ago. But, like an immigrant holding onto her culture, it never quite assimilated with the rest of North America. By staying a few miles offshore, it provided the BC mainland with an epic breakwater sheltering a sailor’s paradise of blue waters, snowy peaks, and protected inlets.

Vancouver Island was full of beaches and mudflats that might be suitable for both shellfish and the farmers who would be harvesting them, but many were hidden amid long stretches of fjord too steep for aquaculture. BC couldn’t exactly convince shellfish farmers to head out into the wilderness if it couldn’t tell them where to go. It needed the equivalent of a real estate catalog for shellfish farms. So in the early 1990s the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food put out a Request for Proposal on a contract to catalog the entire coast. Read More

Our PBC Pick for October is True Compass: A Memoir by Edward M. Kennedy, a finished copy of which arrived at the home of the great senator on the day he died last month.(Gov. Howard Dean explains why we selected True Compass in this video.) Here’s an excerpt.

True Compass: A Memoir

By Edward M. Kennedy

Prologue: The Torch

It was on the sunny spring day of Tuesday, May 20, 2008, that I emerged from a medicated drowsiness in a Boston hospital bed and looked up into the face of a doctor who explained to me in a somber way that I was about to die, and that I had best begin getting my affairs in order and preparing my friends and family for the end.

As I lay in that hospital bed, my friends and neighbors on Cape Cod were just then getting their boats ready for the summer cruises and races. I intended to be among them, as usual. The Boston Red Sox were a good bet to defend their world championship. There was a presidential primary campaign in progress. My Senate colleagues were pushing forward on our legislative agenda. I had work to do. No. As much as I respect the medical profession, my demise did not fit into my plans.

I was hardly “in denial” that I faced a grave and shocking threat to my life. The first symptoms of what would prove to be a malignant brain tumor had struck me three days earlier. They’d descended on me as I padded toward the kitchen of the Hyannis Port house that has been the center of my life and happiness for most of my seventy-six years. I was intent on nothing more than taking Sunny and Splash, my much-loved Portuguese water dogs, for their morning walk. My wife, Vicki, and I had just been chatting and having our morning coffee in the sunroom. Read More

If you’re really up on American political history, you probably know that in his infamous 1979 “malaise” speech, President Jimmy Carter didn’t once utter the word “malaise.” And you probably know that the televised July 15  address, more properly dubbed the “Crisis of Confidence” speech, instantly and irrevocably crystallized Carter’s image in the eyes of the American people as a pessimistic, can’t-do president, hopelessly outmatched by events–which in 1979 included an energy crisis featuring soaring gas prices, endless lines and sporadic violence at the pump, runaway inflation, economic stagnation, and a theocratic revolution in Iran. Carter made the elemental mistake, so the story goes, of blaming the American people for the country’s troubles, conveniently absolving himself from responsibility and self-righteously lambasting Americans’ materialism, their consumerism, their loss of nerve; and from the instant the speech was over so, effectively, was Carter’s presidency.

But it’s not so neat and tidy. As Kevin Mattson convincingly shows in What the Heck are You Up To, Mr. President? the immediate response to Carter’s speech was in fact–a double digit jump in the polls! (Admittedly, Carter was starting from a low baseline: in the summer of 79 he was more unpopular than Nixon had been at the height of Watergate.) Americans, it turned out, appreciated a bit of straightforward honesty, however harsh, from their president. And by way, read the text or watch the video of the speech and you’ll see that Carter was every bit as hard on himself as on the American people.

The problem for Carter was that within a few days he undermined what good his speech did by firing his entire cabinet, which the nation largely read as a sign that Carter had lost control — certainly of events and possibly of his own mind — and his numbers sank again. The year that followed brought an ultimately unsuccessful but damaging insurgent campaign for the Democratic nomination from Edward Kennedy; the Iranian hostage crisis; and the rise of Ronald Reagan, whose communicative gifts and sunny optimism spoke to the national yearning for renewed self-belief and a new tomorrow. Crucially, Reagan’s campaign did a great job of turning Carter’s bracing honesty against him, encouraging a rereading of Carter’s speech as a profoundly un-American exercise in defeatism.

Here’s an excerpt from What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President? Learn more about the book here.

“What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?”: Jimmy Carter, America’s “Malaise,” and the Speech That Should Have Changed the Country

By Kevin Mattson

Introduction

“What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?”

July 4, Independence Day, 1979: Sheets of rain fell on Washington, D.C., and suspense mounted. Would the nation’s biggest fireworks show proceed or be drowned? National Park Service officials huddled in rickety wood structures roped with plastic and decided around 3 p.m. to make an announcement: Please be patient. Then at 5 p.m., they announced an official delay. Four hours later, they canceled the show altogether.

Close by, a different celebration got underway: the annual smoke-in of the Youth International Party (Yippies), an organization founded twelve years earlier by counterculture celebrities Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. There was no Vietnam War to protest in 1979, of course, but the right to get high seemed as urgent as stopping a war. In Lafayette Park, across from the White House, scraggly young adults toked joints, swigged beer and Jack Daniel’s, and set off firecrackers. The rain turned the tangy smell of pot slightly mellower, but when the high wore off, the crowd went berserk. The mob scrambled over a large black fence onto the White House lawn. Cops pursued, dodging beer bottles flung at them. Nine arrests followed, one just a few feet away from the White House.

Perhaps it was fortunate fewer people were on the Mall to be disappointed by canceled fireworks or freaked out by police-hippie melees. Most gas stations in D.C. were shut down, not for the Fourth of July holiday but as a result of the decision by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to cut exports to the United States. This was becoming a summer when people coasted or pushed their cars to stations often to find no gas. Stations with gas reported mile-long lines and three-hour waits. Most D.C. residents simply stayed home on July 4. Those who did search for gas raged. “The greatest country in the world,” one person on a gas line told an inquiring journalist, “is stifled by a few sheiks.” Read More