Tell Me What You're Reading No. 39: Jen Maxfield - More After the Break: A Reporter Returns to Ten Unforgettable News Stories
Jen Maxfield is an Emmy® Award winning correspondent for NBC 4 New York. She covers breaking news and general assignment stories in New Jersey, and is a fill-in anchor on all of NBC 4 New York’s newscasts. Jen has covered many of the Tri-State area’s most memorable and powerful stories throughout her long career.
More After the Break describes her initial reporting and follow up many years later for the 2003 Staten Island ferry crash, Katrina and Sandy in 2005 and 2012, a 2011 horrendous hit and run casualty, and several other accidents, tragedies and moving stories. The stories themselves are compelling, but mostly I loved Jen’s honesty, and her humility and introspection; the way she expressed the vital role of local news reporters in the community; her bouts of what she referred to as “news guilt”; and her expression of the "moral ambiguity" of her job, while recognizing her professional obligations.
Jen Maxfield - Journalist and Storyteller City Lifestyle
Another Draft of History - (201) Magazine
Twitter @jenmaxfield4NY
Instagram jenmaxfieldnews
What Jen is Reading
Rough Draft: A Memoir, by Katy Tur
Reviews The New York Times | The Washington Post | The Guardian
What Howard is Reading
Trust by Hernan Diaz
Reviews NPR | Los Angeles Times| The Washington Post | The New York Times | The Wall Street Journal
Great read. The Gilded Age, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression … Wall Street, wealth, money, power, immigrants, anarchists … the role of women in society, a search for “truth” along the boundaries between history and fiction. To some extent a period piece, but actually timeless. Highly recommended.
Brooklyn, by Colm Toibin
Reviews The New York Times | The Guardian | The Washington Post | The London Review of Books
Selfless love for a sibling; a relationship born out of either love or loneliness. “White lies“ and unintended consequences; Colm Toibin is terrific.
BIRD BY BIRD Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamotte
Reviews The New York Times | Kirkus Reviews
Perfect title. The most important instruction, and one also given by Stephen King, Mary Karr and George Saunders in their books on writing; Lamotte passes along her father’s guidance to her ten year old brother who was overwhelmed by an assignment to write a report on birds; her father said … "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.” Great advice.
Washington Square by Henry James
Reviews The New Yorker | The New York Review
The plot of this 1890s novel involves a nervous, shy heir who is seduced by a possible trickster of whom their guardian disapproves. Same plot as the first part of Hanya Yanagihara’s recent masterpiece, To Paradise, which also takes place in Washington Square, and which inspired me to read the Henry James masterpiece.
The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn
Reviews (+ obits) The New York Times | The Washington Post | The Los Angeles Times | Saturday Evening Post | Slate | SI | ESPN
Brooklyn in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Dodgers when they were in Brooklyn, and later the traumatizing move to Los Angeles, As I read, I frequently felt as if I was either in a major-league dugout or in the newsroom of the once great and now defunct Herald Tribune. Marvelous book to read, particularly during baseball season. Grabbed this from the outdoor free library at La Villetta, my local Italian restaurant in the City.
Let Me Finish, by Roger Angell
Reviews The New York Times | New York Magazine
I passed The Corner Bookstore on Madison and 93rd on a walk with Carol and Francesca not too long ago, and popped in out of habit, only to emerge with this memoir by the recently deceased, revered essayist and fiction editor of the New Yorker, who was known especially for his essays on baseball. Loved getting to know this great writer and his connection, through his mother, to The New Yorker since its founding. Thank you Frankie.
Fleishman Is In Trouble, by Taffy %Brodesser-Akner
Reviews The New Yorker | The New York Times | The Washington Post | NPR | The Guardian
Recommended to me a few years ago by my friend Rachel Koontz, the great bartender at The Pines, Mt. Tremper, and more recently by my daughter Melanie. Turns out that every Fleishman is in deep trouble! A “graphic novel” in the most literal sense. Lots to think about. Well done.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by William Shakespeare
Oxford Professor Emma Smith - lecture on A Midsummer Night's Dream | The Shakespeare Diaries (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) | Podcast: A Midsummer Night's Dream | Katie Derham explores Britten's version of William Shakespeare's comedy | Understanding Midsummer night's dream as a comedy | LitLife III | Bard with bill | The Globe | Young Prose Podcast: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Misguided or misdirected lovers, Kings and Queens, marriages, and dreams, the irrepressible fairies, the play within the play, and the tension between what some think of as one of Shakespeare’s most sexual plays, and also as the one most suitable for children. An unlikely but highly effective combination.
Horse, by Geraldine Brooks
Reviews The Washington Post |The New York Times | Columbia Magazine | The Atlantic | The Guardian | The Houston Chronicle | The Wall Street Journal | Financial Times | Vineyard Gazette | Australian Women’s Weekly | New York Journal of Books
Terrific story. A good balance of fiction and heavily researched historical content. Suspenseful, and terrifying in many spots. This is a novel about the life of a slave in the pre-Civil War South who expertly trained a legendary race horse, and also about race and racial tensions in the current day.
In a PBS Newshour interview, the author acknowledged the discourse about cultural appropriation and the resulting responsibilities. She said,
“I could have written about the horse and the white owners, but that, to me, would be another unconscionable erasure of the contributions of the Black horsemen. So I knew I was going to have to go there. … I came to the conclusion that it was better to make the honest attempt than to leave the story untold. And, also, I feel like any attempt at empathy, no matter how imperfect it might be, shouldn't be despised, because we need more attempts at empathy, not fewer.”
A highly recommended read.
