Truth Worth Telling: A Reporter's Search for Meaning in the Stories of our Times

Truth Worth Telling: A Reporter's Search for Meaning in the Stories of our Times by Scott Pelley  424 pp. Audiobook read by the author.

Anchor and Managing Editor of the CBS Evening News and 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley reflects on his life, his career, and the monumental events that shaped that career up to and including the 2016 Presidential Election. Besides his time in Iraq and Afghanistan covering the wars, the most riveting experience was his time on the ground at the World Trade Center on 9/11. The book is not just about him but mostly about the people directly involved in those events. Pelley also makes a strong case for the search for truth that good journalists do and should be doing in these days of "news as propaganda". Scott Pelley is one of the few who tries to uphold the standards of "The Most Trusted Man in America" Walter Cronkite by refusing to air a story until there are at least two verifiable sources, rather than rushing to get a story on the air with sketchy provenance. The book ends with a "lecture" to aspiring journalists about what they should endeavor to accomplish with their careers and a list of CBS correspondents, camera & sound men, and directors who have been killed in the line of duty.

The Bone Clocks / David Mitchell 624 pp.

Bone Clocks, David Mitchell's latest, comes embedded with a print soundtrack.  For each of the book's eras - '80s, '90s, 2010s, etc., he shares the music his characters hear in a way that adds texture and depth to the story.  So it is fitting that I write my review with a song in mind.  It's Sedaka's Breaking up Is Hard to Do.  Careful Blog readers will recall my love bordering on creepy stalker passion for Mitchell's writing in Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Even Number9dream, while not a fantastic book, was a very good one.  But in Bone Clocks, it's not me, it's him.  Or we've just grown apart.  Or something.

Holly Sykes has always heard voices and had nighttime visitors that no one else can see.  So when as a teenager she has a terrifying vision in a tunnel, followed by witnessing a hideous double murder which memory is later redacted, we know that her otherness is gravely important.  (But redacted?  Seriously?  I can watch the X-Files by my ownself, thank you.)

The story follows Holly over her long life, which stretches years ahead of our own time.  We learn that there are Temporals, who live outside of time, in a continuous cycle of rebirth.  They fight the Anchorites, who would like to be Temporal, but can only do so by decanting souls from the living.  We read the story from the points of view of different characters, such as Holly's husband Ed and her short-term lover Hugo Lamb, a delightfully sinister character recycled from the novel Black Swan Green.  Particularly annoying is the long section devoted to Holly's later life friend Crispin, a middle-aged author whose best days are behind him.  He doesn't figure into the plot, really, making it seem that Mitchell has asked his audience to read over 100 pages of semi-autobiographical whining about not winning the Booker.  (Justified whining, but distasteful nevertheless.)  In sum, the novel is 80% character development, with a brief action-packed climax, followed by a frighteningly real post-apocalyptic epilogue.  It has an angry, anti- quality -  anti-Booker committee, anti-religion, anti-Chinese, mild anti-Americanism -  but doesn't compensate us with a compelling mythology or deep meaning.