Collected Nonfiction: How the Good Guys Finally Won, The World According to Breslin, and The World of Jimmy Breslin

Jimmy Breslin

Oct 2018 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

Colorful, riveting reportage from a one-of-a-kind Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and New York Times–bestselling author.
 
In his career as a legendary New York City newspaper columnist, Jimmy Breslin “leveled the powerful and elevated the powerless for more than fifty years with brick-hard words and a jagged-glass wit” (The New York Times).
 
How the Good Guys Finally Won: Following the burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, as evidence increasingly mounted against President Richard Nixon, Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, the Majority Leader in the House of Representatives, led the charge calling for impeachment. In this New York Times bestseller, Breslin’s blow-by-blow, conviction-by-conviction account is a gripping reminder of how O’Neill and his colleagues brought justice to those who abused their power, and revived America after the greatest political scandal in its history.
 
“Breslin’s reporting is superb and so is his prose, his insights keen and often startling, his wit unceasing.” —Chicago Tribune
 
The World According to Breslin: In an illustrious career that spanned decades, the seven years that Breslin spent at the New YorkDaily News sparked some of his finest work. When New York City tumbled into economic and social chaos at the end of the 1970s, Breslin was there. In this collection of classic columns, he looks at the city not from the top down but from the bottom up, heralding the heroism of average New Yorkers.
 
“Superb . . . a master of the tough-talking, thoroughly researched, contentious, street-wise vignette.” —San Francisco Chronicle
 
The World of Jimmy Breslin: In the 1960s, as the once-proud New York Herald Tribune spiraled into bankruptcy, the brightest light in its pages was an ebullient young columnist named Jimmy Breslin. While ordinary columnists wrote about politics, culture, or the economy, Breslin’s chief topics were the city and himself. He was chummy with cops, arsonists, and thieves, and told their stories with grace, wit, and lightning-quick prose. Whether covering the five boroughs, Vietnam, or the death of John F. Kennedy, Breslin managed to find great characters wherever he went.
 
“Breslin’s touch is absolutely sure.” —The Washington Post Book World

About the author

Jimmy Breslin (1928–2017) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and one of most prominent columnists in the United States. Born in Queens, New York, Breslin started working in New York City newsrooms in the 1940s. He began as a columnist in 1963, when he won national attention by covering John F. Kennedy’s assassination from the emergency room in the Dallas Hospital and, later, from the point of view of the President’s gravedigger at Arlington Cemetery. He ran for citywide office on a secessionist platform, befriended and was beaten up by mobsters, and received letters from the Son of Sam during the serial killer’s infamous 1977 spree. Known as one of the best-informed journalists in the city, Breslin’s years of insightful reporting won him a Pulitzer in 1986, awarded for “columns which consistently champion ordinary citizens.” Although he stopped writing his weekly column for Newsday in 2004, Breslin continued to write books, having produced nearly two dozen in his lifetime. He passed away in 2017 at the age of eighty-eight.