Jessica Mitford (1917-1996) was the daughter of Lord and Lady Redesdale, and she and her famous five sisters and one brother grew up in isolation on their parents' Cotswold estate. Rebelling against her family, she became an outspoken Socialist and brilliant muckraking journalist, authoring many celebrated books. She died while working on a follow-up to The American Way of Death, for which, with characteristic humor, she proposed the title "Death Warmed Over." Jane Smiley is the author of many novels, including Good Faith, Horse Heaven, and A Thousand Acres, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992. Her most recent work is Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel.
For my part, I can't remember when I enjoyed a collection of journalism so much, or laughed out loud so often... It is also useful as, and intended to be useful as, a manual for doing the kind of journalism she did. Guardian Contains some of her finest work and is also a guide to becoming a top muckraker, complete with Mitford's list of essential qualities, such as 'an appetite for tracking and destroying the ennemy'. New Statesman "I wish I could point to some overriding social purpose in these articles." Mitford laments in her introduction. However the lack of an explicit agenda is part of the collection's appeal: these are articles written with a keen eye for injustice, but also with a great sense of personal passion, and a generous, exuberant wit. Observer Most collections of journalistic pieces barely warrant being bound in book form: this one (from 1979) with its wit and irrepressible ebullience, genuinely makes a convincing "classic" of a sort. Scotsman
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