Reading List from Samuel G. Freedman's 1998 Book Seminar

Title	Description	SF says
Simple Justice Richard Kluger Vintage	A sprawling narrative history of the Brown V. Board of Education case.	Though Kluger won a Pulitzer last year for his chronicle of the tobacco industry,Ashes To Ashes, Simple Justice is widely thought of as his masterwork.
There Are No Children Here Alex Kotlowitz Anchor	An immersion book about two boys in the Henry Horner projects in Chicago	This book put poverty back on the national agenda and essentially created the concept of children's issues as a beat.
Articles of Faith Cynthia Gorney Simon & Schuster	A newly-published non-fiction narrative of the abortion wars, focusing closely on two antagonists -- the founder and major opponent of one St. Louis clinic.
The Girls In the Balcony Nan Robertson Fawcett Books	This book tells the story of women at The New York Times and particularly of the major sex-discrimination case they brought in the 1970s.	Unfortunately, it's out of print.
The Last Fine Time Verlyn Klinkenborg Vintage	Story of one blue-collar bar in Buffalo and, through that microcosm, of America's cities from WWII to the present.	Klinkenborg is the finest writer in American non-fiction today. Read his prose and be humbled. I sure was. Out of print.
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down Anne Fadiman Farrar,Straus, Giroux	A tale of the struggle between a family of Hmong refugees and their American doctors over how best to treat the family's epileptic infant.	A compelling and heartbreaking account.

 

Samuel G. Freedman's Newsday Picks

	Title, author, publisher	SGF Says
Favorite Fiction	The Ordinary Seaman Francisco Goldman Atlantic Monthly Press	Big-hearted and hard-headed, this novel tells what when happens a young veteran of the Contra war in Nicaragua crews onto a freighter that never leaves its Brooklyn dock.
Runner-up	The Spirit Catches You Before Their Time Robert Kotlowitz Knopf	A taut and disturbing WWII memoir.
Favorite Non-fiction	The Mansion of the Hill Fred Goodman Times Books	How artists' managers took rock-and-roll from being the voice of the counterculture to just another commodity.
Runner-up	American Pastoral Philip Roth Vintage	The tragedy of a Newark Jew who finds and loses the American Dream.