| Welcome to Bill's Book Club! Each month, Bill selects a book that he's
been reading and passes it on to you. See what others have to say about the
book, and then let everyone know what you think! |
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 Things Worth Fighting For
by Michael Kelly (forward by Ted Koppel)
FROM THE PUBLISHER
The collected articles and columns of Michael Kelly, award-winning reporter, war correspondent, columnist, and editor, whose passion for the good story and whose candor and wit made him one of the foremost journalists of our time.
His career reflected myriad colors: he wrote for a large variety of publications, covering a multitude of topics-political, international, and personal-with singular insight, passion, and wit. This collection of his most memorable magazine and newspaper stories and columns-drawn from the Washington Post, New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and other publications-puts on full display the dazzling panoply of his gifts: for physical description and scene setting; for telling detail, brilliant simile, and satirical insight; for prose that is at once mathematically precise and lyrical.
Here are the searing portraits of Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, H. Ross Perot, and other seminal political figures of our time that won Kelly national attention. Here are the stunning dispatches from the first Gulf War that earned him the National Magazine Award for reporting and burnished his journalistic legend. Here are the fierce columns and landmark cover stories that raised disturbing questions about Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the deeply incestuous relationship between Washington, D.C.'s political and media cultures. And here are the loving family portraits and hilarious social commentaries.
"Things Worth Fighting For" represents the body of work of a journalist who demonstrated time and again a surpassing talent for penetrating to the heart of the matter, for advancing far beyond the headlines and surface appearances of people and events to find their true meanings, for getting the story other writers missed and telling it with a verve few other writers could match. |
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| If you would like to purchase this book: |
| Things Worth Fighting For by Michael Kelly (forward by Ted Koppel) |
| Price: $18.86 |
| List Price: $26.95 |
| Hardcover: 448 pages |
| Publisher: The Penguin Group |
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Visit the Book Club Library to read about past book choices.
Questions for discussion on Bill's Book Club Message Boards:
1. Kelly covered Operation Desert Storm (1991), Bosnia (1995), and was killed covering the Iraq war in April 2003. He writes that his coverage of wars convinced him that sometimes, there is a moral imperative for war. Where do YOU draw the line -- when is U.S. military involvement morally justified? When should America be morally compelled to take action?
2. Kelly was the first American journalist to die in the Iraq War -- he had been "embedded" with U.S. and coalition forces. How do you feel about embedded reporters -- should they be used in the coverage of future conflicts?
3. Bill admired Kelly because he was an independent thinker. Who are YOUR favorite independent columnists today?
4. In one of Kelly's most famous columns, "Who Would Choose Tyranny?" (read it now), he writes: "Tyranny truly is a horror: an immense, endlessly bloody, endlessly painful, endlessly varied, endless crime against not humanity in the abstract but a lot of humans in the flesh. It is, as Orwell wrote, a jackboot forever stomping on a human face. I understand why some dislike the idea, and fear the ramifications of, America as a liberator. But I do not understand why they do not see that anything is better than life with your face under the boot...." Do YOU agree?
5. In another of Kelly's most famous columns, "Immorality on the March," (read it now), he writes, "Last weekend (2/25/03), across Europe and America, somewhere between 1 million and 2 million people marched against a war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq.... They believe, as French President Jacques Chirac recently pontificated, that "war is always the worst answer." The people who believe what Chirac at least professes to believe are, at least as concerns Iraq, as wrong as it is possible to be. Theirs is not the position of profound morality but one that stands in profound opposition to morality.... in Iraq... the true moral case is for war." Do YOU agree with Kelly?
6. In that same column, "Immorality on the March," Kelly concludes, "To march against the war is not to give peace a chance. It is to give tyranny a chance. It is to give the Iraqi nuke a chance. It is to give the next terrorist mass murder a chance. It is to march for the furtherance of evil instead of the vanquishing of evil. This cannot be the moral position." Do YOU agree with Kelly?
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