I received a few books from Amazon yesterday that I intend to read over the next few weeks. As I added the books over the course of the last few months, I hadn’t quite taken in that the books were all of a very similar media theme:
- Shooting History, by Jon Snow
- News from No Man’s Land, by John Simpson
- My Trade: A short history of British Journalism, by Andrew Marr
I have a lot of respect for all three of these journalists, and I fancied a change in reading material from my last few books - most of which have been scientific in one way or another, or light reading material of no particular consequence.
My daily routine - such that it is - certainly almost always involves the Channel 4 news - by far the best, most insightful and detailed news programme at the moment. Many of the other news programmes feel like I’m being treated like a child. But Channel 4 have - for me anyway - the right balance of depth, breadth and detail. If you’re only going to watch one news bulletin in a day, this has to be it.
So I’ve had a lot of respect for Jon Snow for some time, and have eagerly started reading his book, which is a loosely autobiographical book at the moment, but sounds - from some of the notes included in the book - like it will actually give an impression of his views and politics. Already it’s answered the question that for some reason had eluded me until now - Jon Snow is Peter Snow’s cousin on his fathers side. The similarity between them was there for all to see, but until now I had sort of thought they were brothers.
The first few chapters have been fascinating reading, and I’m eagerly looking forward to reading the rest of this book to find out more. With a holiday booked for next week, I’ll have plenty of time to enjoy and learn from these books, by three of our best journalists.
July 28th, 2006 at 1:37 pm
I’ll be interested to know how you find these books, Richard. I have found that novels written by journalists tend to be a bit stilted and it is generally obvious they’re used to writing shorter pieces and in a differnt style. I have just finished reading “Give me 10 seconds” by John Seargent, which I expected to be better, being his autobiography. Even this though suffered somewhat from monotony of expression. I hope Jon Snow and Andrew Marr have avoided this pitfall, and John Simpson, having written more books should be accomplished by now!
January 9th, 2008 at 10:13 am
[...] Snow, former ITN Washington correspondent (My review of his autobiography here), has charged over there the last week or so, and has presented some fascinating conversations with [...]
April 14th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Hello. I am right not interested in finding a good book by a journalist which can be used for my Journalism Today class for a book report. If anyone knows of one and can recomend me please do so. Thank you very much.