| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

People's Witness: The Journalist in Modern Politics. By Fred Inglis. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. xiv, 416 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-300-09327-6.)

Drawing on Eric Hobsbawm's concept of a short twentieth century, 1914–1991, Fred Inglis offers a loosely knit treatise on the journalism of Western modernity. This is an ambitious project: Critical biographies of publishers, writers, broadcasters, and their work are shaped within a liminal narrative of British and U.S. cultural history. The structure is further fleshed out by two chapters on film and fiction portrayals of journalism. The author's ideological preferences are progressive, neither conservative nor socialist: Raymond Williams objected strenuously to George Orwell's characterization of English life, but "it took a kindly Jewish-American to rebut Williams in the right accents" (p. 168).

The book's main strength is its many intriguing, albeit brief, profiles of such diverse figures as Antonio Gramsci, André Malraux, and Edward R. Murrow. They read as small gems rich with anecdotes. As an undergraduate, Gramsci wrote for a socialist weekly edited by Benito Mussolini, who later as Il Duce imprisoned him for life. The young Malraux was arrested while relocating ancient Khmer relics from Cambodia to France.

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