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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

New Haven. Photo: Wally Gobetz, Flickr

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Kidnapping a Nazi General: Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Perfect Heist

W. Stanley Moss's drawing of the Kreipe abduction. Via Wikimedia Commons .

Patrick Leigh Fermor | Abducting a General: The Kreipe Operation in Crete | New York Review Books | November 2015 | 31 minutes (8,432 words)

Below is an excerpt from Abducting a General, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s recently published memoir of a remarkable military operation in Crete: the kidnapping of a Nazi general. It was the only such kidnapping to have been successfully undertaken by the Allies. During his lifetime Leigh Fermor was Britain’s greatest travel writer, best known for A Time of Gifts. As recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky Read more…

‘My Depression’ Author Elizabeth Swados on Her Brother’s Mental Illness, Homelessness and Early Death

Photo via NYCReligion

The theater and lit worlds suffered a great loss this week with the passing, Tuesday, of Elizabeth Swados, 64, a prolific writer and composer of groundbreaking, socially conscious musicals like “Runaways” and a collaboration with Garry Trudeau on a production of “Doonesbury.” She was the author several novels, memoirs and children’s books.

Most recently, Swados published My Depression: A Picture Book, a graphic memoir about her struggle with depression. It was made into an animated HBO documentary, which aired in July.

But long before she wrote about her own mental illness, Swados wrote about her brother’s. In an excerpt from her memoir, The Four of Us: The Story of a Family, which appeared in The New York Times Magazine in August 1991, she told the story of her brother, Lincoln, who suffered from schizophrenia, and died homeless in New York City in the late eighties.

Several months before my brother’s housing crisis reached its peak, I was walking down Broadway on my way to a Korean deli. I saw two derelicts seated in the middle of the sidewalk. They were dressed in layers of rags and having a heated argument about Jesus Christ. One of them had paraphernalia spread around him in a semicircle, as if to sell his wares. But none of his rags or rusty pieces of metal or torn papers was a recognizable item. He wore a jaunty cap pulled to one side, and there was tinsel in his filthy hair. His face was smeared black. A few steps farther along, I realized the “derelict” was my brother. I leaned down next to him, softly said his name and waited. He stared at me for several moments and didn’t recognize me at first. When he finally saw that it was me, he let out a cry like a man who’d had a stroke and couldn’t express his joyous thoughts. We embraced for a long, long time. His smell meant nothing to me.

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Longreads Best of 2015: Science

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in science writing.

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Longreads Best of 2015: Crime Reporting

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in crime reporting.

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Chris Vogel
Articles Editor at Boston magazine.

The Great Cocaine Treasure Hunt (Daniel Riley, GQ)

This is easily one of my favorite stories of the year, regardless of genre. Sure it has buried treasure, 70 pounds of cocaine, and a questionable undercover sting in the Caribbean, but it’s also a tale about the power of story and good story telling. I’m pretty sure I emailed Riley’s opener to more people this year than any other, which starts like the seductive thrum of a GTO:

Good Goddamn, the way Julian told that story. It was the sort of story that imbued the mind with possibility. That lingered like campfire smoke in a sweater.

But it wasn’t just the particulars of the story—Julian burying the million-dollar stash of coral-white cocaine he’d found washed up on the beach in Culebra—that captured Rodney Hyden’s imagination. It was the sounds of the story—the slithering South Carolina accent, the whistly snicker at parts that weren’t funny to anyone but Julian. And the picture of the storyteller, too. The silver hair down around Julian’s shoulders, the big Gandalf beard distracting from his slight frame, the bare feet, and always that Mason jar of wine that kept bottoming out and filling right back up again.

I mean, c’mon. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2015: Under-Recognized Books

We asked our book editors to tell us about a few books they felt deserved more recognition in 2015. Here they are.

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Anna Wiener
@annawiener

Rules for Werewolves (Kirk Lynn, Melville House)

I read this book in one fast gulp, anxious fingers poised to flip the page. In Kirk Lynn’s debut novel, a band of young runaways moves swiftly through the suburbs, squatting in foreclosed houses and in the homes of unwitting vacationers, wild eyes trained on the promise of a self-made utopia. The thrills and pleasures of this new society are the benign trappings of suburbia (well-stocked refrigerators, lavender soap, the privacy of closed doors) coupled with the first bright licks of freedom. As the pack grows tighter, defining the boundaries of its own morals and ideology, it also grows more feral. Unbridled idealism and independence begin to unravel into violent and irreparable ends.

Structurally, Rules for Werewolves seems to borrow from Lynn’s background as a playwright: the book is composed of alternating sections, some of which are monologues from shifting perspectives; the rest is raw dialogue, high velocity and high stakes, deftly capturing the insecurities, intoxication, and desperation of people determined to survive on their own terms. From the pack’s pastoral vision to Kirk’s unsettling depiction of the waning American suburbs—littered with empty houses, an echo of unrealized aspirations—the book reminds that utopia’s volatility comes always from within. Read more…

The Myth of the Birth of Rock ‘n ‘Roll

Who created rock ‘n’ roll? Sam Phillips, the owner of the legendary Sun Records who first recorded Elvis Presley, claimed he did. But history is written by the winners and the outspoken. In The New Yorker, Louis Menand writes about Peter Guralnick’s biography Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll, and about the larger racial, commercial and economic factors, and the other players, that also shaped the music we call rock n roll.

Still, it raises an interesting question. Phillips had had success in 1951 with a song called “Rocket 88” (the title refers to a model of automobile), performed by Ike Turner’s band and sung by Jackie Brenston, who became the headliner (much to Turner’s annoyance). The band had damaged an amplifier on the way to the studio, so it buzzed when music was played. Phillips considered this a delicious imperfection, and he kept it. That is the sound that makes the record, and many people have called “Rocket 88” the first rock-and-roll song. (I guess some song has to be the first.) But “Rocket 88” was performed by a black group. Why, if white kids were already buying records by black musicians, did the breakthrough performer have to be white?

The answer is television. In 1948, less than two per cent of American households had a television set. By 1955, more than two-thirds did. Prime time in those years was dominated by variety shows—hosted by people like Ed Sullivan, Steve Allen, Milton Berle, and Perry Como—that booked musical acts. Since most television viewers got only three or four channels, the audience for those shows was enormous. Television exposure became the best way to sell a record.

On television, unlike on radio, the performer’s race is apparent. And sponsors avoided mixed-race shows, since they were advertising on national networks and did not want to alienate viewers in certain regions of the country. Nat King Cole’s television show, which went on the air in 1956, could never get regular sponsors. Cole had to quit after a year. “Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark,” he said.

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Longreads Best of 2015: Sports Writing

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in sports writing.

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Mina Kimes
Senior Writer at ESPN the Magazine and espn.com.

This is Why NFL Star Greg Hardy was Arrested for Assaulting his Girlfriend (Diana Moskovitz, Deadspin)

Last year, the NFL was rocked by several incidents of domestic violence, starting in September with the release of a video of Ray Rice’s assault of his then-fiancee and peaking in February, when charges against star defensive end Greg Hardy were dismissed after his accuser disappeared. By November, most football fans had moved on. Diana Moskovitz did not. She continued to tirelessly report on the issue, and in November, Deadspin published a devastating scoop: pictures that showed exactly what happened between Hardy and his ex-girlfriend, Nicole Holder, that night in Charlotte. Moskovitz’s piece, which laid out the facts of the case in meticulous detail, forced many to confront what had happened. It also pushed readers to ask why it took photographic evidence to make the world care.

Broke (Spencer Hall, EDSBS)

A common criticism of longform writing, especially on the internet, is that it’s too self-centered; too many features rely on the first person, and too many writers insert themselves into their pieces. This is often true. But sometimes, as with the case of this stunning Spencer Hall essay, it’s an incredibly effective technique.

By juxtaposing the story of his own family’s financial struggles with the larger story of the systematic impoverishment of college athletes, Hall compels readers to look at the issue in a new way: through the lens of personal pain. He shows us that the controversy over whether college athletes should be paid for their services isn’t an intellectual or economic debate, but an ethical one. By denying athletes the right to earn a living, the NCAA forces them to live with the looming threat of financial insecurity—an ache that Hall himself knows all too well. Read more…

We Are All Compromised: The Access Game Isn’t Dead Yet

Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg, via Wikimedia Commons

John Herrman’s excellent Awl series on the anxious state of the media business (featured in our latest Top 5) should be required reading for anyone who creates or consumes content on the internet. His conclusions—advertising models are sputtering, no one wants to pay for news, Facebook dictates the entire tenor of conversation and its subject matter—do so much to explain why we are inundated by media but largely unsatisfied with what floats to the surface. Come for Herrman’s dystopian vision—a future in which professional journalism is suffocated to death—and stay for the animated robot GIFs. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo by Jessica Rinaldi, Boston Globe

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

* * *

Read more…