Real
True Narratives
- Andrea Wulf, Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012): a history of how eighteenth-century astronomers “traveled thousands of miserable miles to observe a rare and awesome celestial phenomenon” and thereby understand the solar system.
- Cara Robertson, The Trial of Lizzie Borden: A True Story (Simon & Schuster, 2019): “ . . . she draws upon court transcripts, unpublished reports and Lizzie’s recently discovered letters to tell the story chronologically, from murder to verdict to the case’s long, strange afterlife.”
- Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia (Harper, 2019): “The people who live there, seemingly magically marooned in a tropic Arcadia in the middle of a vast oceanic nowhere: Where did they come from, when did they get there, and how?”
- Simon Heffer, The Age of Decadence: A History of Britain, 1880 to 1914 (Pegasus, 2021): “. . . he does not rely just on secondary literature and makes excellent use of wide-ranging archival research. That approach gives the book a fresh perspective.”
Investigative journalism:
- Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, All the President’s Men (Simon & Schuster, 1974), “the third person narrative by the two Washington Post reporters whose investigative reporting earned their paper a Pulitzer Prize, is a detective story. It turns Watergate into a fast‐moving mystery, a whodunit written with ease, if not elegance.”
- Paul Pringle, Bad City: Peril and Power in the City of Los Angeles (Celadon Books, 2022): “Pringle’s fast-paced book is a master class in investigative journalism, explaining how a reporter wrestles information and documents from reluctant sources and government officials.”
- Matthew Schwartz, Confessions of an Investigative Reporter (Keohler Books, 2020).
- John Pilger, ed., Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs (Jonathan Cape, 2004).
- James Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism (University of Missouri Press, 2006).
- Robert S. Boynton, The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers About Their Craft (Vintage Press, 2005): “IN the three decades since Tom Wolfe anthologized a group of writers under the rubric ‘New Journalism’ and identified them as rivals to the best novelists of their time, a next wave has been gathering. Robert S. Boynton calls this movement the New New Journalism, and he interviews 19 of its leading practitioners in his book of the same name.”
Imaginary
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
In any era, new music illustrates the virtue of investigation and experimentation of musical forms. To the modern ear, the music of composers such as Kurt Weill, Hans Haass, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, Alois Hába, Dieter Schnebel, Paul-Heinz Dittrich, Friedrich Cerha, Luciano Berio, Rolf Liebermann, Cristóbal Halffter, Henri Pousseur, Mauricio Kagel, Rolf Riehm, Brian Ferneyhough, Hanspeter Kyburz, Iannis Xenakis, Vinko Globokar, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry, Michaël Levinas, Younghi Pagh-Paan, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Helmut Lachenmann, Andreas Raseghi, Wolfgang Rihm and Johannes Kalitzke will more than adequately illustrate the point. Works by these and other twentieth-century composers have been offered on a superb compilation of performances at a music festival in Donaueschingen, a small town in southwest Germany: the CD compilation is called “75 Jahre Donaueschinger Musiktage – 1921-1996.” Some of the links here appear to be from those performances.
Compositions:
- Zaimont, Sonata for Piano Solo (2000): the music moves constantly, as though seeking something new.
- Ernest John Moeran, Fantasy Quartet for Oboe and Strings (1946)
Albums:
- Ayn Inserto Jazz Orchestra, “Down a Rabbit Hole”