FREEDOM PRIZE FOR FISK

British journalist Robert Fisk has won the Lannan Foundation's 2006 Lifetime Achievement Prize for Cultural Freedom. It carries a cash award of $350,000. As Borat might say: "Verr nize!"

A full-page ad announcing the award in today's New York Times cites an excerpt from Fisk's massive 2005 book, "The Great War for Civilisation," which, ironically, the NYT Book Review excluded from its list of 100 Notable Books of the Year.

If you haven't had a chance to read Fisk, have a look at the column he wrote last June in The (London) Independent about Haditha. It ran under the headline "On the shocking truth about the American occupation of Iraq." The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reprinted it with this headline: "The way Americans like their war." Believe me, you will be shocked. Even now, knowing what you think you know, you will be shamed:

Yes, the Nazis were much worse. And the Japanese. And the Croatian Ustashi. But this is us. This is our army. These young soldiers are our representatives in Iraq. And they have innocent blood on their hands.

Just FYI: We've posted lots of related items, including MR. JONES, MEET MR. FISK, LESS FLAG-WAGGING, PLEASE, CREDIT WHERE DUE, AND BONES TO PICK and FISK ON THE JOURNALISTAS and WHAT MEANS GENOCIDE? There are others. If you're interested, they're easily found by inserting his name under "Search this site" in the right column.

November 6, 2006 1:30 PM |

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Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by Straight Up | published on November 6, 2006 1:30 PM.

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