The Books Briefing: What’s White and Black and Read All Over?

📚 Citizen Reporters: S. S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine That Rewrote America, by Stephanie Gorton

A great, forgotten black radical

“Timothy Thomas Fortune [was] a newspaper editor, orator, and leader who was born into slavery and spent most of his life advocating for the rights of black Americans. Although not as well known as some of his more famous counterparts, Fortune had a profound influence on the battle for civil rights.”

📚 Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South, by Timothy Thomas Fortune

📚 T. Thomas Fortune, the Afro-American Agitator, by Shawn Leigh Alexander

Should journalists be insiders?

“If journalism is history in a hurry, [Walter] Lippmann’s was usually history from the top down. He traversed an archipelago of wealth and influence, dining with members of the ruling classes who inhabited these islands but not with those in the seas between.”

📚 Walter Lippmann and the American Century, by Ronald Steel

📚 Walter Lippmann: Odyssey of a Liberal, by Barry D. Riccio

📚 Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation’s Journalism, by Christopher Daly

Meet Yang Jisheng: China’s chronicler of past horrors

“When Yang Jisheng’s study of China’s Great Leap Forward was first published in 2008, it quickly established itself as the most thorough and comprehensive account of a tragedy that many people worldwide had never heard of.”

📚 Tombstone, by Yang Jisheng

Jason Rezaian hopes his Iranian captors read Prisoner

“Jason’s is a deeply American story: the son of an immigrant father who, after a long personal journey, succeeds in his ancestral land, reporting on its people for a global audience. In the end, Jason is punished for his work—for doing journalism—by a government scared beyond measure of what that means.”

📚 Prisoner, by Jason Rezaian

The Reference Desk

(New York Public Library)

Write to the Books Briefing team at booksbriefing@theatlantic.com or reply directly to this email with any of your reading-related dilemmas. We might feature one of your questions in a future edition of the Books Briefing and offer a few books or related Atlantic pieces that might help you out.

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Myles Poydras. He’s recently been reading Langston Hughes’s poetry collection.

Comments, questions, typos? Reply to this email to reach the Books Briefing team.

Did you get this newsletter from a friend? Sign yourself up.

Myles Poydras is an editorial fellow at The Atlantic.