Monday, March 17, 2008

What is Ben Smith reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Ben Smith, who writes a blog about the candidates for the 2008 Democratic nomination for Politico.

One paragraph from his entry:
I have had a lot of fun lately reading Charles McCarry, the American cold war spy novelist (and spy) who's having a bit of a revival at the moment. The Tears of Autumn, his classic conspiracy-theory version of the Kennedy assassination, is weirdly compelling -- it involves, basically, retribution for American meddling in Vietnam. Until recently, his books were very hard to find -- a 25-cent paperback would be up to a few hundred dollars on Alibris. But Overlook Press, which must have noticed the demand, is bringing them all out again, along with some new ones, which is great. [read on]
Ben Smith grew up on New York's Upper West Side when President Reagan was regularly depicted as Satan in that section of the city, and now lives with his wife and two children in Brooklyn. He followed a straight line from childhood to Politico, charting a course that included a summa cum laude degree in linguistics from Yale College; a summer covering cops at the Indianapolis Star; and two years living in Riga, Latvia as a correspondent for the European edition of the Wall Street Journal.

More recently, he covered New York's City Hall for the New York Sun and politics for the New York Observer. In 2006, he was a political columnist for the New York Daily News and in 2005 and 2006 started three of New York City's leading political blogs, The Politicker, The Daily Politics, and Room Eight, for which he still writes occasionally about the New York scene.

Read Ben Smith's blog at Politico.

Writers Read: Ben Smith.

--Marshal Zeringue