The Journalist and the Murderer
Written by Janet Malcolm
Narrated by Marguerite Gavin
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
This book is a work of journalism as well as an essay on journalism: it at once exemplifies and dissects its subject. In her interviews with the leading and subsidiary characters in the MacDonald-McGinniss case, Malcolm is always aware of herself as a player in a game that she cannot lose. The journalist-subject encounter has always troubled journalists, but never before has it been looked at so unflinchingly and so ruefully. Hovering over the narrative is the MacDonald murder case itself. The Journalist and the Murderer derives from and reflects many of the dominant intellectual concerns of our time, and it will have a particular appeal for those who cherish the odd, the off-center, and the unsolved.
Janet Malcolm
Janet Malcolm (1934–2021) was the author of many books, including In the Freud Archives; The Journalist and the Murderer; Two Lives: Alice and Gertrude, which won the 2008 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography; and Forty-One False Starts, which was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She was a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. In 2017, Malcolm received the Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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Reviews for The Journalist and the Murderer
18 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Well, isn't this just the most fascinating little book... It is deeply intellectual and analytical about process and meaning, so if you're looking for a gritty true-crime type focus on the McDonald case, it might not be for you. (I love reading books in that vein - it just doesn't describe this piece.) This writer is erudite and articulate, even eloquent at times, but those characteristics are just the backbone of what makes this read so interesting. For one thing, it is, as they say, searingly honest; to a degree that made me almost repulsed at times. That was until I realized that, like most deeply confessional writings, it was the universality and personal recognition of her confessions that made me uncomfortable. Secondly, importantly, the nuance of the overall piece is so patient and committed that you truly need to read (or listen to) the whole book to understand it. I say patient and committed because Malcom has nerves of steel when it comes to fully exploring one perspective on moral issues before countering it with another. You will not have come to a realistic understanding of her ideas until you hear her all the way out. In fact, I think the afterward is critical to this evaluation. I would stress that you haven't really read the book until you get to the end of that. Once you have, you will have so much to ponder and admire in this book that you will probably give it the score of five that I have. Okay, off to re-listen to that afterward. There are layers there. A house of mirrors, a kind of spooky metacommentary. Fascinating.
2 people found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This was a fascinating book, in its review of the Jeffrey McDonald case, as the facts were "known" at different stages in time, and about the ethical issues inherent in various aspects of journalism. I'm sure it must be used as a textbook in journalism classes even now, 20 years after publication. (Being 20 years later, I could find out, but due to congenital laziness, will only surmise!) The comparison of the actual and edited - without attribution - quotations which the author discusses in the epilogue would in itself be worth a class of discussion. Absolutely interesting and worthwhile reading.
2 people found this helpful
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This audiobook just stops before it’s finished, about 15 minutes before the ending.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5While I found Janet Malcolm's "The Journalist and the Murderer" interesting, I'm not sure I would have if I hadn't worked as a reporter. The book is the examination of a lawsuit brought by a convicted murderer against an author who wrote a book about his case, who basically lied about the tone his book would take. Interesting five out of six jurors found in the murderer's favor, which certainly says a lot about the state of journalism these days. While I very much agreed with Malcolm's premise that aspects of journalism are morally indefensible, the author she writes about seemed to really cross the line into stunningly unethical behavior in the name of a dollar. My problem with the book was that it got sort of repetitive after a while. I felt like Malcolm had enough material for a good magazine article, but not quite enough for a book.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is a Must read as a follow on of the podcast Morally Indefensible.