If you sleep too late on weekend mornings to catch Chris Hayes’ MSNBC show, Up With Chris Hayes, then record it and watch it with your morning joe. You’ve seen him on MSNBC a thousand times, sitting in for your other favorite MSNBC anchors.
We hold some truths to be self-evident, and the most obvious is that The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is really funny. Kevin Bleyer is one of the writers on The Daily Show, and he is of course really funny. Follow the logic here: Kevin has written a book about the Constitution, and it too is really really funny. Not the ship, the Constitution, but the other Constitution, that brief document that has shaped our legal system, our government, our electoral system, and our society for the past 225 years.
The difference between fictional thrillers and Seth Jones’ new book, Hunting in the Shadows: The Pursuit of Al Qa’ida Since 9/11, is that Seth Jones’ thriller is nonfiction. For lovers of the spy thriller genre, or the newer fictional genre pertaining to global terrorism, you’ll wonder when the next fictional thriller bestseller will credit Seth Jones’ terrific new study. Seth Jones may not be a bestselling thriller writer just yet, but he produces heart-stopping nonfiction literature.
Time magazine isn’t supposed to be funny. Nor is it supposed to be provocative and politically incorrect. But thanks to Joel Stein, it is all that. Joel’s Time pieces cover issues of the moment that we’ve absorbed and internalized– and he takes those issues, holds them up to us, and has at it.
Dan Rather, one of the titans of broadcast journalism, is one of the most distinguished news journalists in American media history.
Erik Larson’s books, which include Devil In The White City, and In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, take a moment in our American experience and turn that moment into the most riveting and thrilling story imaginable. Each of his books reads like a thriller, set against a grand tableau, where we get to know the players intimately. And sometimes it’s a challenge to remember that Erik Larson’s books are nonfiction– because truth is always so much stranger than anything we could make up.