A review by kylegarvey
Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University by

adventurous informative inspiring medium-paced

1.0

 

Monumentally pretentious, very often too blunt or facile for me, so much that I begin to resent it and feel bad while reading it, accused, pained. What's this feeling? I'm sure the assemblers of this collection were looking for something quite different all along, to instill joie de vivre in their readership or something. In acknowledgments, "kept track of countless pieces of paper"; and in preface, "unscrambles and sorts the messages of a complex world". Ok. Sure. Those are decent principles 

 

A lot of arguable stuff all along (I didn't go to journalism school, won't ever do a normal interview, yada yada) but there's really nothing that you could ever argue with here. I mean, it's all coded in this super-exceptional 'yeah, but' language that negates everything, while exemplifying everything at the same time. Weird. Can we always be "honest to a fault" (23)? 

 

Some stuff I have to react to like 'Nah. Fuck off'. "Stories are the opposite of hard news, the opposite of the easy anecdote" (155). Ok, I have a vague familiarity with journalism, but a lot of this strikes me as presumptuous, skunky trash! Just go in media res, pick some quirky departure, and you might soon have something, or you might not have anything now here for one thing but something later elsewhere for something else. Ok? Who cares?