Where are the women current events authors?
11 April 2011
Last week my sister and I were discussing Joe Bageant.
If you'll remember, Joe Bageant is the author who wrote last week's Tuesday Article; I linked to it because I was surprised and saddened to hear that Bageant, author of the investigative/current affairs title Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War, had died.
The rest of that day I spent too much time watching Bageant in interviews on YouTube, because the more he talked the more he made sense and the more depressed I got that he was gone. (My favorite quote from the interview I linked to there? "There is only one party, the business party, with two faces: the Democrat and Republican parties.") And pretty soon I was having a discussion with my sister about authors who really made a lot of sense to us. Here was the short list:
Joe Bageant
Wendell Berry
Andrew Bacevich
Matt Taibbi
John Bowe (author of "Nobodies")
Jon Stewart also came up. And here are the other authors we didn't discuss but whom I would add to that list: Kurt Vonnegut, Chalmers Johnson, Tom Bissell, William Langewiesche.
So my question is, why can't I find any women authors who speak to me, especially women who do investigative/journalistic writing on current affairs? Okay, Anne Tyler speaks to me in fiction. And every now and then you stumble across a woman writer like Svetlana Alexievich (author of the superlative title Voices From Chernobyl). But they seem to be few and far between.