by Rinker Buck
First published 2002
Rinker Buck arrives at The Berkshire Eagle as a twenty-two-year-old cub reporter, his brain maxed out with ambition and anxiety. The year is the early 1970s, and the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts stretch purple-black against the sky. Buck wants to find his voice as a writer, but first he must survive his job interview with Pete Miller, the newspaper's eccentric publisher who tests him on Civil War history. At the Eagle, a country newspaper in its glory years fresh from winning a Pulitzer Prize, Buck navigates the front lines of both journalism and the sexual revolution. He learns from mentors, stumbles through adventures that only happen to young men who don't know better, and somehow manages to snare an exclusive interview with John Wayne by bringing along a pretty girl who charms the Duke into giving a wonderfully frank story. Buck captures a magical time when nothing seemed impossible, when every new moment opened the world wider.
Genres: american-fiction, 20th-century, biography-memoir, journalism
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, found-family
Setting: Berkshire Mountains, The Berkshire Eagle
Period: Early 1970s
416 pages · Hardcover · PublicAffairs