James Lardner

Ring Lardner’s influence on American letters is arguably greater than that of any other American writer in the early part of the twentieth century. Lauded by critics and the public for his groundbreaking short stories, Lardner was also the country’s best-known journalist in the 1920s and early 1930s, when his voice was all but inescapable in American newspapers and magazines. Lardner’s trenchant, observant, sly, and cynical writing style, along with a deep understanding of human foibles, made his articles wonderfully readable and his words resonate to this day. Ron Rapoport has gathered the best of Lardner’s journalism from his earliest days at the South Bend Times through his years at the Chicago Tribune and his weekly column for the Bell Syndicate, which appeared in 150 newspapers and reached eight million readers. In these columns Lardner not only covered the great sporting events of the era-from Jack Dempsey’s fights to the World Series and even an America’s Cup-he also wrote about politics, war, and Prohibition, as well as parodies, poems, and penetrating observations on American life. The Lost Journalism of Ring Lardner reintroduces this journalistic giant and his work and shows Lardner to be the rarest of writers: a spot-on chronicler of his time and place who remains contemporary to subsequent generations.

NYPD details episodes as fresh as the shootings of unarmed men that have triggered mass protests against Mayor Rudy Giuliani. It also tells of forgotten but no less compelling dramas such as the Becker-Rosenthal case, in which a police lieutenant went to the electric chair, and the death of Joe Petrosino, a New York City detective gunned down on the streets of Palermo, Sicily, after his cover was blown by the police commissioner. James Lardner and Thomas Reppetto, who know the police world from the inside, throw today's headlines into vivid relief by taking us back more than 150 years through a succession of immigrant waves, long hot summers, and career-destroying crises and scandals. Fascinating as history, NYPD is also a telling look at the fears, the lore, the slang, the secrets, and the rituals of a chronically misunderstood profession.