The history of immersion journalism

 

Very rare book. Very good condition. PB. 336pp. $30 including postage anywhere in Australia.

New Journalism ... burst on to the American print media scene in the mid-'60s before withering slowly as the 1970s mired itself in detente, oversized clothing and stagflation. In the end, New Journalism vanished - a victim of tighter economic times, the relentless onslaught of television, the VCR and the stylistic excesses of the form itself.

For those unfamiliar with New Journalism, the rubric came to be applied to pieces of writing in popular magazines such as and that ran at great length, packed with detail, the writer's subjective observations and even - in the case of the man who came to be seen as the avatar of the form, Tom Wolfe - extended applications of onomatopoeia.

As Marc Weingarten shows in this thorough and highly readable history of long-form "immersion" journalism, what came to be known as New Journalism had in fact been around well before the 1960s (the term was invented by Wolfe, ever the self-promoter, in 1973). He nominates Jonathan Swift's satirical assault on Britain's occupation of Ireland, , written in 1729, as perhaps the first example of the Gonzo style later associated with Hunter S. Thompson.

(taken from a review published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 2 January 2006. You can read more here.)