The World According to Breslin

Jimmy Breslin

Feb 2012 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

Classic columns from the legendary New York journalist—“a master of the tough-talking, thoroughly researched, contentious, street-wise vignette” (San Francisco Chronicle).
  Although his career spans decades, the seven years that Jimmy 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 his brief, insightful columns, he looked at the city not from the top down but from the bottom up. Eschewing the view of politicians, socialites, and captains of industry, Breslin’s heroes are men like Jim Moran, the cop who drove John Lennon to the emergency room after he was shot, or Barney Baker, an ex-boxer who served as bodyguard to mobster Meyer Lansky. These are average people who see big things, and Breslin is their herald. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Jimmy Breslin including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

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.