My Times: A Memoir of Dissent

Arriving in stores alongside Arthur Gelb's City Room, Hess's chronicle of his 24 years (1954-1978) at the New York Times doesn't have the breadth of that other volume (Gelb spent nearly double the number of years Hess did at the Times), but it does offer an enlightening portrait of the""newspaper of record."" Hess worked as an editor, rewriter, foreign correspondent, feature writer, investigative reporter and food critic. His remembrances should be required reading for journalism students, as he covers such topics as the importance of presenting a balanced view, how qualified a reporter must be in order to write about a subject, protecting sources, using press credentials and more.""News is, after all, what the public does not know,"" he writes. This memoir, while imparting information, is at once authoritative and engaging, and deserves a place alongside books by Gelb and other Times luminaries.