Лучшие книги Гэя Тализа

With a new preface and afterword by the author and drawings by Lili Rethi.

Towards the end of 1964, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge--linking the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Staten Island with New Jersey--was completed. It remains an engineering marvel almost forty years later--at 13,700 feet (more than two and a half miles), it is still the longest suspension bridge in the United States and the sixth longest in the world. Gay Talese, then early in his career at the New York Times, closely followed the construction, and soon after the opening his book The Bridge appeared. Never before in paperback, it remains both a riveting human drama of politics and courage, and a demonstration of Talese's consummate skills as a reporter and storyteller. His memorable narrative--accompanied, as then, by the astonishingly beautiful working drawings of Lili Rethi--will now captivate a new generation of readers.

The classic inside story of The New York Times, the most prestigious, and perhaps the most powerful, of all American newspapers. Bestselling author Talese lays bare the secret internal intrigues behind the tradition of front page exposes in a story as gripping as a work of fiction and as immediate as today's headlines.

Gay Talese, dziennikarz i autor książek o życiu seksualnym Amerykanów, dostaje tajemniczy list. Właściciel motelu w Kolorado wyjawia w nim, że od lat podgląda życie intymne swoich gości i zapisuje wnioski z obserwacji. Podglądacz namawia Talese’a, żeby skorzystał z jego dzienników przy pisaniu kolejnej książki. Zaintrygowany dziennikarz leci do Kolorado, by potwierdzić prawdziwość tej niesłychanej historii. Po lekturze obszernych zapisków podglądacza stwierdza, że doskonale dokumentują one, jak zmieniały się seksualne zachowania Amerykanów. Jednak Talese nie upublicznia dzienników, ponieważ ich autor chce pozostać anonimowy. Dzisiaj, 35 lat później, Gerald Foos zdecydował się ujawnić swoją tożsamość, a Gay Talese napisał o nim fascynującą książkę, która pozwala czytelnikowi zajrzeć tam, gdzie nigdy nie miałby szans dotrzeć.

Gay Talese is the father of American New Journalism, who transformed traditional reportage with his vivid scene-setting, sharp observation and rich storytelling. His 1966 piece for Esquire, one of the most celebrated magazine articles ever published, describes a morose Frank Sinatra silently nursing a glass of bourbon, struck down with a cold and unable to sing, like ?Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel ? only worse?. The other writings in this selection include a description of a meeting between two legends, Fidel Castro and Muhammad Ali; a brilliantly witty dissection of the offices of Vogue magazine; an account of travelling to Ireland with hellraiser Peter O'Toole; and a profile of fading baseball star Joe DiMaggio, which turns into a moving, immaculately-crafted meditation on celebrity.

In this extraordinary work of insight and interviews, bestselling author Gay Talese shares with us the lives of those we don't know and those we might wish we did: Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, Manhattan mobsters, Bowery bums, and many others -- fascinating men and women who define our country's spirit and lead us to an understanding of ourselves as a nation.