The Hack's first review!
I had a different blog post planned for today, but it's being shunted aside for this: the first review of my book! It's a very happy day because the reviewer liked it.
Here's a link to the whole thing, which includes a slide show and a bonus q&a with me.
And here's the review itself. It's by Ann Klefstad, and it appeared in the online journal Minnesota Artists.
NEWS TO ME: ADVENTURES OF AN ACCIDENTAL JOURNALIST is a career memoir by Star Tribune books editor Laurie Hertzel, mostly about her life at the Duluth News Tribune. It's an amusing and enlightening window into a beautifully drawn, very particular world.
The title's a little misleading: it's true that Hertzel didn't go to J-school (journalism school, in the lingo-loving jargon of newspaper staff), but she entered newspapering young; working jobs from newsroom clerk to librarian to copy editor to reporter to editor, she took to the milieu like a duck to water. If her career was an accident, it was a lucky one.
Salty characters abound in this charming, picaresque tale of the shy girl growing up mentored by the smoky, boozy, old-style reporters that populated the newsrooms of the '70s. Her loving portraits of these denizens never fail to charm: "the jittery religion writer who wore loud plaid pants and a wide white vinyl belt and once dropped his false teeth on the floor," who explained to the young reporter, kindly, the ways of the newsroom; or the business editor with a "luxurious swoop of white hair and a ratty beige raincoat that he wore winter and summer," who brought her books from his collection.
Hertzel tells also about the entry of bright young women into the then male-dominated profession. These women changed the nature of news, and she was one of them, although the continual self-deprecation she practices in the book obscures this at first.
The center of the book -- the hinge of the life it depicts -- is when Hertzel stumbles on features-writer gold: the story of the Finnish Americans who emigrated to Stalin's Russia out of belief in a Communist paradise, and whose hopes were cruelly betrayed by the Great Terror.
When in August of 1986 some Duluth citizens travel to Petrozavodsk in the USSR to establish a sister city relationship, Hertzel wangles her way into the trip, managing to convince her cheapskate editor (some things never change) to finance her ticket.
When the Duluth contingent got off the train in Petrozavodsk, they encountered a group of elderly people on the platform. The Russians began asking, in English, about familiar Duluth scenes: "Are the hills still green? Does the Aerial Bridge still go up and down?" Hertzel was astonished: "I stared at them and tried to figure out who they were, why they were speaking English.... I had completely forgotten Erkki Leppo and his tales of American Finns in the USSR. I touched one of the old people on the arm, to get her attention. 'How do you know the Aerial Bridge?' I asked. The woman smiled at me. 'I was born in Cloquet,' she said." After a wonderfully written account of her Russian train journey, this scene blossoms.
Much of the rest of Hertzel's memoir concerns her subsequent adventures in Russia, Finland, and the U.S. writing the book that resulted from the Petrozavodsk trip: They Took My Father, authored in collaboration with Mayme Sevander, one of the Russian Finns whose father was killed in a purge. As News to Me moves away from the jaunty tale of a girl reporter in an old-school newsroom, it both deepens and slows -- but the story, an individual one now, remains engaging.
Upon finishing her book on the Russian Finns, Hertzel returns to the Duluth News Tribune, but only after a blackly comic scene in which the head of the UMD English Department, a miracle of pompous fatuity, refuses to discuss a practicable way for her to get her B.A. Back at the DNT she works for "the man with three first names," editor Bob Jodon, but her days at the paper are numbered. How can you keep a girl home in Duluth after she's seen the world?
In the mid-1990s she leaves Duluth for Minneapolis, where she works with Minnesota Monthly and then the Star Tribune.
News to Me wraps up with a refusal to muse on the future of journalism: "Me, I keep my head down, do my work, enjoy the hubbub and bustle of the Daily Miracle, fervently hope it lasts." This is the voice of a good reporter -- observe, don't comment or interpret, do the writing as well as you can, and keep showing up. The virtues are humble but essential, and as difficult as anything in the world.
This kind of journalism may be endangered in the age of blogs and blather; I do hope it lasts, too.
Here's a link to the whole thing, which includes a slide show and a bonus q&a with me.
And here's the review itself. It's by Ann Klefstad, and it appeared in the online journal Minnesota Artists.
NEWS TO ME: ADVENTURES OF AN ACCIDENTAL JOURNALIST is a career memoir by Star Tribune books editor Laurie Hertzel, mostly about her life at the Duluth News Tribune. It's an amusing and enlightening window into a beautifully drawn, very particular world.
The title's a little misleading: it's true that Hertzel didn't go to J-school (journalism school, in the lingo-loving jargon of newspaper staff), but she entered newspapering young; working jobs from newsroom clerk to librarian to copy editor to reporter to editor, she took to the milieu like a duck to water. If her career was an accident, it was a lucky one.
Salty characters abound in this charming, picaresque tale of the shy girl growing up mentored by the smoky, boozy, old-style reporters that populated the newsrooms of the '70s. Her loving portraits of these denizens never fail to charm: "the jittery religion writer who wore loud plaid pants and a wide white vinyl belt and once dropped his false teeth on the floor," who explained to the young reporter, kindly, the ways of the newsroom; or the business editor with a "luxurious swoop of white hair and a ratty beige raincoat that he wore winter and summer," who brought her books from his collection.
Hertzel tells also about the entry of bright young women into the then male-dominated profession. These women changed the nature of news, and she was one of them, although the continual self-deprecation she practices in the book obscures this at first.
The center of the book -- the hinge of the life it depicts -- is when Hertzel stumbles on features-writer gold: the story of the Finnish Americans who emigrated to Stalin's Russia out of belief in a Communist paradise, and whose hopes were cruelly betrayed by the Great Terror.
When in August of 1986 some Duluth citizens travel to Petrozavodsk in the USSR to establish a sister city relationship, Hertzel wangles her way into the trip, managing to convince her cheapskate editor (some things never change) to finance her ticket.
When the Duluth contingent got off the train in Petrozavodsk, they encountered a group of elderly people on the platform. The Russians began asking, in English, about familiar Duluth scenes: "Are the hills still green? Does the Aerial Bridge still go up and down?" Hertzel was astonished: "I stared at them and tried to figure out who they were, why they were speaking English.... I had completely forgotten Erkki Leppo and his tales of American Finns in the USSR. I touched one of the old people on the arm, to get her attention. 'How do you know the Aerial Bridge?' I asked. The woman smiled at me. 'I was born in Cloquet,' she said." After a wonderfully written account of her Russian train journey, this scene blossoms.
Much of the rest of Hertzel's memoir concerns her subsequent adventures in Russia, Finland, and the U.S. writing the book that resulted from the Petrozavodsk trip: They Took My Father, authored in collaboration with Mayme Sevander, one of the Russian Finns whose father was killed in a purge. As News to Me moves away from the jaunty tale of a girl reporter in an old-school newsroom, it both deepens and slows -- but the story, an individual one now, remains engaging.
Upon finishing her book on the Russian Finns, Hertzel returns to the Duluth News Tribune, but only after a blackly comic scene in which the head of the UMD English Department, a miracle of pompous fatuity, refuses to discuss a practicable way for her to get her B.A. Back at the DNT she works for "the man with three first names," editor Bob Jodon, but her days at the paper are numbered. How can you keep a girl home in Duluth after she's seen the world?
In the mid-1990s she leaves Duluth for Minneapolis, where she works with Minnesota Monthly and then the Star Tribune.
News to Me wraps up with a refusal to muse on the future of journalism: "Me, I keep my head down, do my work, enjoy the hubbub and bustle of the Daily Miracle, fervently hope it lasts." This is the voice of a good reporter -- observe, don't comment or interpret, do the writing as well as you can, and keep showing up. The virtues are humble but essential, and as difficult as anything in the world.
This kind of journalism may be endangered in the age of blogs and blather; I do hope it lasts, too.
