Special Collections
Investigative Reporters and Editors Award
Description: The annual IRE Awards recognize outstanding investigative work and help identify the techniques and resources used to complete each story. This collection includes award winners and finalists. #award
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The Sellout
by Charles GasparinoIn the spirit of Barbarians at the Gate and Liar’s Poker comes The Sellout, the definitive book on the recent collapse of Wall Street, one of the most dramatic and anxiety-ridden era in national socioeconomic history. In this powerful business narrative, Charles Gasparino, the author of Blood on the Floor and King of the Club, captures how avarice, arrogance, and sheer stupidity eroded Wall Street’s dominance, made many of our country’s most fabled financial institutions vulnerable to significant new foreign control, and profoundly weakened the financial security of millions of poor and middle-class American families.
The War Behind Me
by Deborah NelsonA seasoned journalist uncovers a secret archive of hundreds of war crime investigations, tracks down the people involved, and emerges with a disturbing and revelatory story of what really happened in Vietnam.
The Shadow Factory
by James BamfordJames Bamford has been the preeminent expert on the National Security Agency since his reporting revealed the agency’s existence in the 1980s. Now Bamford describes the transformation of the NSA since 9/11, as the agency increasingly turns its high-tech ears on the American public. The Shadow Factoryreconstructs how the NSA missed a chance to thwart the 9/11 hijackers and details how this mistake has led to a heightening of domestic surveillance. In disturbing detail, Bamford describes exactly how every American’s data is being mined and what is being done with it. Any reader who thinks America’s liberties are being protected by Congress will be shocked and appalled at what is revealed here.
Exposed
by Mark SchapiroThe United States was once the pioneer of new approaches to environmental protection. In the 1970s and 1980s an American mix of scientific rigor and legal muscle gave birth to a body of environmental regulations and laws that was seen as a model around the world. But no more; leadership has switched. The European Union is asserting new priorities that are far more protective of citizens' health and the environment than those in the United States and they have the economic muscle to back them up.
Best Care Anywhere
by Phillip LongmanPhil Longman, an award-winning journalist and senior fellow at the New America Foundation, tells the compelling story of how the Veterans Administration, once notorious for dangerous, dirty and scandal-ridden hospitals, transformed itself into what is demon¬strably the highest quality health care system in America. By making extensive use of electronic medi¬cal records and evidence-based medicine the VA has devel¬oped a model of 21st century health care that boosts safety, cost effectiveness, and patient satisfaction, and provides deep les¬sons for overhauling the U.S. health care system. Drawing on real world examples and the latest scientific research, Best Care Anywhere--now in it's second edition--is particularly with the passage of health care reform in America, offering readers powerful new ways of thinking about health care. "Among the most important social policy books published in the last decade." --Ezra Klein, The Washington Post
Curveball
by Bob DroginCurveball answers the crucial question of the Iraq war: How and why was America's intelligence so catastrophically wrong? In this dramatic and explosive book, award-winning Los Angeles Times reporter Bob Drogin delivers a narrative that takes us to Europe, the Middle East, and deep inside the CIA to find the truth about the lies and self-deception that led us into a military and political nightmare.
Enrique's Journey
by Sonia NazarioIn this astonishing true story, award-winning journalist Sonia Nazario recounts the unforgettable odyssey of a Honduran boy who braves unimaginable hardship and peril to reach his mother in the United States.
When Enrique is five years old, his mother, Lourdes, too poor to feed her children, leaves Honduras to work in the United States.
The move allows her to send money back home to Enrique so he can eat better and go to school past the third grade. Lourdes promises Enrique she will return quickly. But she struggles in America. Years pass. He begs for his mother to come back. Without her, he becomes lonely and troubled. When she calls, Lourdes tells him to be patient. Enrique despairs of ever seeing her again.
After eleven years apart, he decides he will go find her. Enrique sets off alone from Tegucigalpa, with little more than a slip of paper bearing his mother's North Carolina telephone number. Without money, he will make the dangerous and illegal trek up the length of Mexico the only way he can-clinging to the sides and tops of freight trains. With gritty determination and a deep longing to be by his mother's side, Enrique travels through hostile, unknown worlds.
Each step of the way through Mexico, he and other migrants, many of them children, are hunted like animals. Gangsters control the tops of the trains. Bandits rob and kill migrants up and down the tracks. Corrupt cops all along the route are out to fleece and deport them. To evade Mexican police and immigration authorities, they must jump onto and off the moving boxcars they call El Tren de la Muerte--The Train of Death.
Enrique pushes forward using his wit, courage, and hope-and the kindness of strangers. It is an epic journey, one thousands of immigrant children make each year to find their mothers in the United States.
Based on the Los Angeles Times newspaper series that won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for feature writing and another for feature photography, Enrique's Journey is the timeless story of families torn apart, the yearning to be together again, and a boy who will risk his life to find the mother he loves.
Blood Money
by T. Christian MillerIt was supposed to be quick and easy. The Bush Administration even promised that it wouldn't cost American taxpayers a thing--Iraqi oil revenues would pay for it all. But billions and billions of dollars, and thousands of lives, later, the Iraqi reconstruction is an undeniable failure. Iraq pumps out less oil now than it did under Saddam. At best, Iraqis average all of twelve hours a day of electricity. American soldiers lack body armor and adequate protection for their motor vehicles. Increasingly worse off, Iraqis turn against us. Increasingly worse off, our troops are killed by a strengthening insurgency. As T. Christian Miller reveals in this searing and timely book, the Bush Administration has fatally undermined the war effort and our soldiers by handing out mountains of cash not to the best companies for the reconstruction effort, but to buddies, cronies, relatives and political hacks--some of whom have simply taken the money and run with it. Blistering, brilliant and shocking, this will be the breakout title when it comes to Iraq books, and the catalyst for national debate.
The Looming Tower
by Lawrence WrightTHE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING BESTSELLER, NOW A MAJOR NEW TV SERIESThis is the definitive account of the run-up to 9/11: from the man who lit the spark of radical Islam in 1948, to those who built up a terror network, and to the FBI agent whose warnings of 'something big' coming were ignored until the Twin Towers fell.'The Looming Tower is a thriller. And it's a tragedy, too' The New York Times'The most detailed (and thrilling) account we have of the events that led to the destruction of the Twin Towers' Observer, Books of the Year'Possibly the best book yet written on the rise of al-Qaeda ... beautifully written and wonderfully compelling' William Dalrymple'We meet some formidable schemers and killers ... fabulists crazed with blood and death' Martin Amis
No Place to Hide
by Robert O'Harrow Jr.An award-winning reporter for The Washington Post, O'Harrow reviews some of the surveillance and identification technologies and procedures now being used by corporations and governments against the American people. He begins with the flood of measures adopted during the six weeks after the September 2001 attacks. Other topics include the data revolution, Total Information Awareness, and the government's eyes and ears. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
On American Soil
by Jack HamannOn a hot August night in 1944, a soldier’s body was discovered hanging by a rope from a cable spanning an obstacle course at Seattle’s Fort Lawton. The body was identified as Private Guglielmo Olivotto, one of the thousands of Italian prisoners of war captured and brought to America. The murder stunned the nation and the international community. Under pressure to respond quickly, the War Department convened a criminal trial at the fort, charging three African American soldiers with the lynching and firstdegree murder of Private Olivotto. Forty other soldiers were charged with rioting, accused of storming the Italian barracks on the night of the murder. All forty-three soldiers were black. There was no evidence implicating any of these men. Leon Jaworski, later the lead prosecuter at the Watergate trial, was appointed to prosecute the case and seek the death penalty for three men who were most assuredly innocent. Through his access to previously classified documents and the information gained from extensive interviews, journalist Jack Hamann tells the whole story behind World War II’s largest army court-martial—a story that raises important questions about how justice is carried out when a country is at war.
Critical Condition
by Donald L. Barlett and James B. SteeleExposing the most controversial, little-known practices of America’s most flawed system, Time magazine’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative team pulls back the curtain on the health care industry to explain exactly how things grew so out of control. Dirty examination and operating rooms in doctor’s offices and hospitals . . . Health care executives pulling in millions in bonuses for denying treatment to the sick . . . More than 100 million people with inadequate or no medical coverage . . . This may sound like the predicament of a third-world nation, but this is America’s health care reality today. The U. S. spends more on health care than any other nation, yet our benefits are shrinking and life expectancy is shorter here than in countries that spend significantly less per capita. Meanwhile, HMOs, pharmaceutical companies, and hospital chains reap tremendous profits, while politicians—beholden to insurers and drug companies—enact legislation for the benefit of the few rather than the many, while the entire system is on the verge of collapse. In CRITICAL CONDITION, award-winning investigative journalists Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele expose the horror of what health care in America has become. They profile patients and doctors trapped by the system and offer startling personal stories that illuminate what’s gone wrong. Doctors tell of being second-guessed and undermined by health care insurers; nurses recount chilling tales of hospital meltdowns; patients explain how they’ve been victimized by a system that is meant to care for them. Drug companies profit by selling pills in the same manner that Madison Avenue sells soap, while Wall Street rakes in billions by building up and then tearing down health care businesses. And politicians pass legislation perpetuating the injustices and out-right fraud the system encourages. By analyzing the industry and offering an insightful prescription for getting it back on the right track, CRITICAL CONDITION is an enormously compelling investigative work that addresses the concerns of every American.
American Taboo
by Philip WeissIn 1975, a new group of Peace Corps volunteers landed on the island nation of Tonga. Among them was Deborah Gardner -- a beautiful twenty-three-year-old who, in the following year, would be stabbed twenty-two times and left for dead inside her hut.Another volunteer turned himself in to the Tongan police, and many of the other Americans were sure he had committed the crime. But with the aid of the State Department, he returned home a free man. Although the story was kept quiet in the United States, Deb Gardner's death and the outlandish aftermath took on legendary proportions in Tonga.Now journalist Philip Weiss "shines daylight on the facts of this ugly case with the fervor of an avenging angel" (Chicago Tribune), exposing a gripping tale of love, violence, and clashing ideals. With bravura reporting and vivid, novelistic prose, Weiss transforms a Polynesian legend into a singular artifact of American history and a profoundly moving human story.
The Price of Loyalty
by Ron SuskindA devestating account of the inner workings of the George W. Bush administration, written with the extensive cooperation of former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill. As readers are taken to the very epicentre of government, this news-making book offers a definitive view of Bush and his closest advisers as they manage crucial domestic policies and global strategies within the most secretive White House of modern times.
The Flickering Mind
by Todd OppenheimerThe Flickering Mind, by National Magazine Award winner Todd Oppenheimer, is a landmark account of the failure of technology to improve our schools and a call for renewed emphasis on what really works. American education faces an unusual moment of crisis. For decades, our schools have been beaten down by a series of curriculum fads, empty crusades for reform, and stingy funding. Now education and political leaders have offered their biggest and most expensive promise ever—the miracle of computers and the Internet—at a cost of approximately $70 billion just during the decade of the 1990s. Computer technology has become so prevalent that it is transforming nearly every corner of the academic world, from our efforts to close the gap between rich and poor, to our hopes for school reform, to our basic methods of developing the human imagination. Technology is also recasting the relationships that schools strike with the business community, changing public beliefs about the demands of tomorrow’s working world, and reframing the nation’s systems for researching, testing, and evaluating achievement. All this change has led to a culture of the flickering mind, and a generation teetering between two possible futures. In one, youngsters have a chance to become confident masters of the tools of their day, to better address the problems of tomorrow. Alternatively, they can become victims of commercial novelties and narrow measures of ability, underscored by misplaced faith in standardized testing. At this point, America’s students can’t even make a fair choice. They are an increasingly distracted lot. Their ability to reason, to listen, to feel empathy, is quite literally flickering. Computers and their attendant technologies did not cause all these problems, but they are quietly accelerating them. In this authoritative and impassioned account of the state of education in America, Todd Oppenheimer shows why it does not have to be this way. Oppenheimer visited dozens of schools nationwide—public and private, urban and rural—to present the compelling tales that frame this book. He consulted with experts, read volumes of studies, and came to strong and persuasive conclusions: that the essentials of learning have been gradually forgotten and that they matter much more than the novelties of technology. He argues that every time we computerize a science class or shut down a music program to pay for new hardware, we lose sight of what our priority should be: “enlightened basics. ” Broad in scope and investigative in treatment, The Flickering Mind will not only contribute to a vital public conversation about what our schools can and should be—it will define the debate. From the Hardcover edition.
All the Rave
by Joseph MennAt age 17, Shawn Fanning designed a computer program that transformed the Internet into an unlimited library of free music. His company, Napster, became a household name. It did not take long for the music industry to declare war, one that has now engulfed the biggest entertainment & technology companies on the planet. Here is the definitive account of the Napster saga, revealing secret takeover & settlement talks, the role of Shawn¿s uncle in controlling Napster, & hidden agendas & infighting from Napster¿s trenches to the top ranks of the media giant Bertelsmann. ¿A riveting account of genius & greed, visionary leaps & disastrous business decisions, & the clash of the hacker & investor cultures with that of the copyright establishment. ¿ Illus.
Perfectly Legal
by David Cay JohnstonOne of the country's top investigative reporters reveals how the richest 1 percent of the country has rigged the tax code and other laws in its favor. Since the mid-1970s, there has been a dramatic shift in America's socioeconomic system, one that has gone virtually unnoticed by the general public. Tax policies and their enforcement have become a disaster, and thanks to discreet lobbying by a segment of the top 1 percent, Washington is reluctant or unable to fix them. The corporate income tax, the estate tax, and the gift tax have been largely ignored by the media. But the cumulative results are remarkable: today someone who earns a yearly salary of $60,000 pays a larger percentage of his income in taxes than the four hundred richest Americans. Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston exposes exactly how the middle class is being squeezed to create a widening wealth gap that threatens the stability of the country. By relating the compelling tales of real people across all areas of society, he reveals the truth behind: * "middle class" tax cuts and exactly whom they benefit * how workers are being cheated out of their retirement plans while disgraced CEOs walk away with millions * how some corporations avoid paying anyfederal income tax * how a law meant to prevent cheating by the top 2 percent of Americans no longer affects most of them, but has morphed into a stealth tax on single mothers making just $28,000 * why the working poor are seven times more likely to be audited by the IRS than everyone else * how the IRS became so weak that even when it was handed complete banking records detailing massive cheating by 1,600 people, it prosecuted only 4 percent of them Johnston has been breaking pieces of this story on the front page of The New York Timesfor seven years. With Perfectly Legal, he puts the whole shocking narrative together in a way that will stir up media attention and make readers angry about the state of our country.
Betrayal
by The Investigative Staff of the Boston GlobeWinner of the Pulitzer Prize for Public ServiceThe story behind this groundbreaking book--one of the most significant works of investigative journalism since Woodward and Bernstein's reporting on Watergate--has been brought brilliantly to life on the screen in the major new movie Spotlight.Here are the devastating revelations that triggered a crisis within the Catholic Church. Here is the truth about the scores of abusive priests who preyed upon innocent children and the cabal of senior Church officials who covered up their crimes. Here is the trail of "hush money" that the Catholic Church secretly paid to buy victims' silence--deeds that left millions of the faithful in the U.S. and around the world shocked, angry, and confused. Here as well is a vivid account of the ongoing struggle, as Catholics confront their Church and call for sweeping change.
High and Mighty
by Keith BradsherFrom the book: Sport utility vehicles have taken over America's roads - pushing fuel consumption up and traffic safety down. Keith Bradsher has long been at the forefront of critical SUV coverage and in HIGH AND MIGHTY he delivers a thorough, undeniable indictment of these vehicles as much worse than cars for their occupants, for other motorists, for pedestrians, and for the planet itself. This masterpiece of investigative j'ournalism shows how a flawed regulatory system, a desperate Detroit, and our national love for "bigger and better" have combined to create a highway arms race that puts us all at risk.
Body of Secrets
by James BamfordThe NSA is the largest, most secretive and most powerfull intelligence agency in the world. With a staff of 38,000 people, it dwarfs the CIA in budget, manpower and influence. Recent headlines have linked it to economic espionage throughout Europe and to the ongoing hunt for the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. James Bamford first penetrated the wall of silence surrounding the NSA in 1982, with the much-talked-about US bestseller THE PUZZLE PALACE. In BODY OF SECRETS he offers shocking new details about the inner workings of the agency, gathered through unique access to thousands of internal documents and interviews with current and former officials. Unveiling extremely sensitive information for the first time, Bamford exposes the role the NSA played in numerous Soviet bloc Cold War conflicts and discusses its undercover involvement in the Vietnam War. His investigation into the NSA's technological advances during the last 15 years brings to light a network of global surveillance ranging from on-line listening posts to sophisticated intelligence-gathering satellites. In a hard-hitting conclusion, he warns the NSA is a double-edged sword: while its worldwide eavesdropping activities offer the potential for tracking down terrorists and uncovering nuclear weapons deals, it also has the capacity to listen in on global personal communications.
The Lost Children of Wilder
by Nina BernsteinIn 1973 Marcia Lowry, a young civil liberties attorney, filed a controversial class-action suit that would come to be known as Wilder, which challenged New York City's operation of its foster-care system. Lowry's contention was that the system failed the children it was meant to help because it placed them according to creed and convenience, not according to need. The plaintiff was thirteen-year-old Shirley Wilder, an abused runaway whose childhood had been shaped by the system's inequities. Within a year Shirley would give birth to a son and relinquish him to the same failing system. Seventeen years later, with Wilder still controversial and still in court, Nina Bernstein tried to find out what had happened to Shirley and her baby. She was told by child-welfare officials that Shirley had disappeared and that her son was one of thousands of anonymous children whose circumstances are concealed by the veil of confidentiality that hides foster care from public scrutiny. But Bernstein persevered. The Lost Children of Wilder gives us, in galvanizing and compulsively readable detail, the full history of a case that reveals the racial, religious, and political fault lines in our child-welfare system, and lays bare the fundamental contradiction at the heart of our well-intended efforts to sever the destiny of needy children from the fate of their parents. Bernstein takes us behind the scenes of far-reaching legal and legislative battles, at the same time as she traces, in heartbreaking counterpoint, the consequences as they are played out in the life of Shirley's son, Lamont. His terrifying journey through the system has produced a man with deep emotional wounds, a stifled yearning for family, and a son growing up in the system's shadow. In recounting the failure of the promise of benevolence, The Lost Children of Wilder makes clear how welfare reform can also damage its intended beneficiaries. A landmark achievement of investigative reporting and a tour de force of social observation, this book will haunt every reader who cares about the needs of children.From the Hardcover edition.
The Informant
by Kurt EichenwaldFrom an award-winning New York Times investigative reporter comes an outrageous story of greed, corruption, and conspiracy--which left the FBI and Justice Department counting on the cooperation of one man . . .
It was one of the FBI's biggest secrets: a senior executive with America's most politically powerful corporation, Archer Daniels Midland, had become a confidential government witness, secretly recording a vast criminal conspiracy spanning five continents.
Mark Whitacre, the promising golden boy of ADM, had put his career and family at risk to wear a wire and deceive his friends and colleagues. Using Whitacre and a small team of agents to tap into the secrets at ADM, the FBI discovered the company's scheme to steal millions of dollars from its own customers. But as the FBI and federal prosecutors closed in on ADM, using stakeouts, wiretaps, and secret recordings of illegal meetings around the world, they suddenly found that everything was not all that it appeared.
At the same time Whitacre was cooperating with the Feds while playing the role of loyal company man, he had his ownagenda he kept hidden from everyone around him--his wife, his lawyer, even the FBI agents who had come to trust him with the case they had put their careers on the line for. Whitacre became sucked into his own world of James Bond antics, imperiling the criminal case and creating a web of deceit that left the FBI and prosecutors uncertain where the lies stopped and the truth began.
In this gripping account unfolds one of the most captivating and bizarre tales in the history of the FBI and corporate America.
Meticulously researched and richly told by New York Times senior writer Kurt Eichenwald, The Informant re-creates the drama of the story, beginning with the secret recordings, stakeouts, and interviews with suspects and witnesses to the power struggles within ADM and its board--including the high-profile chairman Dwayne Andreas, F. Ross Johnson, and Brian Mulroney--to the big-gun Washington lawyers hired by ADM and on up through the ranks of the Justice Department to FBI Director Louis Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno.A page-turning real-life thriller that features deadpan FBI agents, crooked executives, idealistic lawyers, and shady witnesses with an addiction to intrigue, The Informant tells an important and compelling story of power and betrayal in America.
A New York Times Bestseller
The Book of Honor
by Ted GupThis is a story of heroes and secrets. In the entrance of the CIA headquarters looms a huge marble wall into which seventy-one stars are carved--each representing an agent who has died in the line of duty. At the base of this wall lies "The Book of Honor," in which the names of these agents are inscribed--or at least thirty-five of them. Beside the dates of the other thirty-six, there are no names. The identity of these "nameless stars" has been one of the CIA's most closely guarded secrets for the fifty-three years of the agency's existence. Even family members are told little--in some cases, the agency has denied the fact that the deceased were covert operatives at all. But what the CIA keeps secret in the name of national security is often merely an effort to hide that which would embarrass the agency itself--even at the cost of denying peace of mind for the families and honor due the "nameless stars. " In an extraordinary job of investigative reporting, Ted Gup has uncovered the identities, and the remarkable stories, of the men and women who died anonymously in the service of their country. In researchingThe Book of Honor, Gup interviewed over four hundred current and former covert CIA officers, immersed himself in archival records, death certificates, casualty lists from terrorist attacks, State Department and Defense Department personnel lists, cemetery records, obituaries, and tens of thousands of pages of personal letters and diaries. In telling the agents' stories, Gup shows them to be astonishingly complex, vibrant, and heroic individuals--nothing like the suave superspies of popular fiction or the amoral cynics of conspiracy buffs. The accounts of their lives--and deaths--are powerful and deeply moving, and in bringing them at long last to light, Gup manages to render an unprecedented history of covert operations at the CIA.
Animal Underworld
by Alan GreenA vast and previously undisclosed underground economy exists in the United States. The products bought and sold: animals. In Animal Underworld, veteran investigative journalist Alan Green exposes the sleazy, sometimes illegal web of those who trade in rare and exotic creatures. Green and The Center for Public Integrity reveal which American zoos and amusement parks dump their "surplus" animals on the middlemen adept at secretly redirecting them into the private pet trade. We're taken to exotic-animal auctions, where the anonymous high bidders are often notorious dealers, hunting-ranch proprietors, and profit-minded charlatans masquerading as conservationists. We visit some of the nation's most prestigious universities and research laboratories, whose diseased monkeys are "laundered" through this same network of breeders and dealers until they finally reach the homes of unsuspecting pet owners. And we meet the men and women who make their living by skirting through loopholes in the law, or by ignoring the law altogether. For anyone who cares about animals; for pet owners, zoo-goers, wildlife conservationists, and animal welfare advocates, Animal Underworld is gripping, shocking reading.
Bitter Pills
by Stephen FriedWe take our medicines on faith. We assume our doctors are well-informed, our drug companies scrupulous, our FDA diligent--and our medications safe. All too often we're wrong. Just how wrong is documented in this critically acclaimed portrait of the international pharmaceutical industry by one of our most highly respected investigative journalists.According to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), adverse drug reactions are the fourth leading cause of death in America. Reactions to prescription and over-the-counter medications kill far more people annually than all illegal drug use combined.Stephen Fried's wife took a pill for a minor infection--and ended up in the emergency room. Some drug reactions go away in a few hours or days. Diane's did not. This emotionally wrenching experience launched Fried into a five-year examination of the entire pharmaceutical industry, the most profitable legal business in the world. Rigorously documented, Bitter Pills is a full-scale portrait of pill making and pill taking in America today, presented through the powerful human drama of doctors, patients, drug companies, the FDA, and government regulators as they war for control of our medicine cabinets.From the Trade Paperback edition.