David Grann

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“I Think The Book Is Particularly Relevant Today”

April 20, 2017 in Books, Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

David Grann was asked to name a quintet of great “True Crime” titles for a Five Books interview, and among the volumes about brutal and strange murders, he made a non-obvious and timely choice with All the President’s Men. 

Woodward’s been a perplexing figure for decades and Bernstein has since the 1970s had to wrestle personal demons that sometimes sidetracked his brilliant career, but there’s no denying their book’s greatness or their impact on American liberty.

Of course, dogged journalism alone can’t protect democracy. If enough citizens and congresspeople don’t care that the President is a crook–a traitor, even–any ink spilled will merely document a society in steep decline.

Grann also explained why he didn’t include on his list Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which is written as immaculately as any work can be. He’s most troubled by the issue of veracity, which is certainly valid, though I’m also bothered by how the author suspensefully builds to the Clutter family murders, as if he were penning a thriller about fictional characters.

I wonder if Grann considered Hiroshima by John Hersey.

An excerpt:

Question:

Your fourth book—All The President’s Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward—comes as something of a relief after all maniacal murdering. But it’s still a pretty frightening tale, and no less so for being so well-known. Talk us through it.

David Grann:

It’s probably the most iconic book of reporting in the United States to this day. It’s written by Woodward and Bernstein, and about their investigation, when they were young reporters at the Washington Post, into the shocking crimes committed by President Richard Nixon. When I first read that book, it gave me a sense that reporting could have a nobility and a moral purpose behind it. Of course, much reporting is not quite like that but…

Question:

And, to be clear, the crimes here are moral and political ones. It was articles of the US Constitution that were being butchered, rather than individuals.

David Grann:

Yes. The crimes include everything from breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s offices to bugging political opponents to covering up evidence. I think the book is particularly relevant today which is partly why I picked it. In a day and age when public officials are trying to subvert and muddy the truth, the need for deep reporting to hold these people accountable is as important as ever. This book is a seminal case of that—a case where investigative reporting was essential to revealing the corruption at the highest levels of the United States and to preserving our democracy.

Too often when we think of crime stories, we think of them in one dimensional ways—we think of a bank robbery, or a holdup, or someone breaking into a house—but some of the crimes that are just as important, in some ways maybe even more important, are those that are political in nature. They don’t need to involve murders. This one almost provoked a constitutional crisis.

Question:

And the victim count is much higher. It’s a whole nation.

David Grann:

Precisely, and this was a case where the system was driven to the brink but ultimately functioned: Nixon eventually stepped down. Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting played an essential role in protecting the country. This book, and all the books on this list, have left a mark on me, often in different ways, and what I remember most about this one is the doggedness of the reporting. All the President’s Men is a book where there is no fanciful writing—Bernstein and Woodward are not Mailer or Capote. They are journalists writing perfectly clean, decent prose and they have a story to tell, and they tell it in such a way that it has enormous power.

Question:

It’s certainly a case in which the symbiosis of the writer and the detective is as clear as can be. The writer in this sense is like a vigilante—he has charged himself with finding the truth that no one else, through lack of will or ability, has.

David Grann:

Yes. I think what makes important true crimes books is not simply the stories they relate but the authors that investigate them. You can have investigative historians like Larson. Or you can have investigative reporters like Woodward and Bernstein. In both cases they are trying to unearth some deeper truth. In many true crime books, the author-investigator is not unlike the detectives he or she is writing about. The skills are very similar, I think, in terms of unearthing evidence and trying to create some kind of structure, plot, or narrative that helps to make sense of the chaos, and piece things back together.•

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“He Had This Aura About Him, This Charisma”

April 27, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

I just realized that “The Chameleon,” David Grann’s brilliant 2008 New Yorker article is online for free. It’s a long profile of Frédéric Bourdin, a Frenchman who would serially pose as teenagers. He took the modern obsession with reinvention through “reality” TV and social media to an extreme. The perfect opening:

“On May 3, 2005, in France, a man called an emergency hot line for missing and exploited children. He frantically explained that he was a tourist passing through Orthez, near the western Pyrenees, and that at the train station he had encountered a fifteen-year-old boy who was alone, and terrified. Another hot line received a similar call, and the boy eventually arrived, by himself, at a local government child-welfare office. Slender and short, with pale skin and trembling hands, he wore a muffler around much of his face and had a baseball cap pulled over his eyes. He had no money and carried little more than a cell phone and an I.D., which said that his name was Francisco Hernandez Fernandez and that he was born on December 13, 1989, in Cáceres, Spain. Initially, he barely spoke, but after some prodding he revealed that his parents and younger brother had been killed in a car accident. The crash left him in a coma for several weeks and, upon recovering, he was sent to live with an uncle, who abused him. Finally, he fled to France, where his mother had grown up.

French authorities placed Francisco at the St. Vincent de Paul shelter in the nearby city of Pau. A state-run institution that housed about thirty-five boys and girls, most of whom had been either removed from dysfunctional families or abandoned, the shelter was in an old stone building with peeling white wooden shutters; on the roof was a statue of St. Vincent protecting a child in the folds of his gown. Francisco was given a single room, and he seemed relieved to be able to wash and change in private: his head and body, he explained, were covered in burns and scars from the car accident. He was enrolled at the Collège Jean Monnet, a local secondary school that had four hundred or so students, mostly from tough neighborhoods, and that had a reputation for violence. Although students were forbidden to wear hats, the principal at the time, Claire Chadourne, made an exception for Francisco, who said that he feared being teased about his scars. Like many of the social workers and teachers who dealt with Francisco, Chadourne, who had been an educator for more than thirty years, felt protective toward him. With his baggy pants and his cell phone dangling from a cord around his neck, he looked like a typical teen-ager, but he seemed deeply traumatized. He never changed his clothes in front of the other students in gym class, and resisted being subjected to a medical exam. He spoke softly, with his head bowed, and recoiled if anyone tried to touch him.

Gradually, Francisco began hanging out with other kids at recess and participating in class. Since he had enrolled so late in the school year, his literature teacher asked another student, Rafael Pessoa De Almeida, to help him with his coursework. Before long, Francisco was helping Rafael. ‘This guy can learn like lightning,’ Rafael recalls thinking.

One day after school, Rafael asked Francisco if he wanted to go ice-skating, and the two became friends, playing video games and sharing school gossip. Rafael sometimes picked on his younger brother, and Francisco, recalling that he used to mistreat his own sibling, advised, ‘Make sure you love your brother and stay close.’

At one point, Rafael borrowed Francisco’s cell phone; to his surprise, its address book and call log were protected by security codes. When Rafael returned the phone, Francisco displayed a photograph on its screen of a young boy who looked just like Francisco. ‘That’s my brother,’ he said.
Francisco was soon one of the most popular kids in school, dazzling classmates with his knowledge of music and arcane slang—he even knew American idioms—and moving effortlessly between rival cliques. ‘The students loved him,’ a teacher recalls. ‘He had this aura about him, this charisma.’
During tryouts for a talent show, the music teacher asked Francisco if he was interested in performing. He handed her a CD to play, then walked to the end of the room and tilted his hat flamboyantly, waiting for the music to start. As Michael Jackson’s song ‘Unbreakable’ filled the room, Francisco started to dance like the pop star, twisting his limbs and lip-synching the words “You can’t believe it, you can’t conceive it / And you can’t touch me, ’cause I’m untouchable.’ Everyone in the room watched in awe. ‘He didn’t just look like Michael Jackson,’ the music teacher subsequently recalled. ‘He was Michael Jackson.’

Later, in computer class, Francisco showed Rafael an Internet image of a small reptile with a slithery tongue.

‘What is it?’ Rafael asked.

‘A chameleon,’ Francisco replied.”•

Read also:

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“Fawcett Survived In The Jungle For Years At A Time, Without Contact With The Outside World”

June 13, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Percy Fawcett, 1911, roughly 14 years before his disappearance.

From “The Lost City Of Z,” the 2005 New Yorker article by the great David Grann about Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, who came to a mysterious end in the 1920s while exploring  an isolated Amazonian civilization:

“In the first decades of the twentieth century, Fawcett had been acclaimed as one of the last of the great amateur archeologists and cartographers—men who ventured into uncharted territories with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose. Fawcett survived in the jungle for years at a time, without contact with the outside world, often subsisting for days on a handful of nuts; he was ambushed by hostile tribesmen, many of whom had never seen a white man before; he emerged with maps of regions from which no expedition had returned.

Yet it was his ‘quest,’ as Fawcett called it, to find Z that most captivated Lynch. For centuries after the discovery of the New World, many Europeans believed that a fantastical kingdom of untold wealth was concealed in the ethereal landscape of the Amazon. In 1541, Friar Gaspar Carvajal, a member of the first European expedition to descend from the Andes into the Amazon, reported glimpses of white Indians and women warriors who resembled the mythical Greek Amazons. One early map of South America was adorned with minotaurs and headless beings with eyes in their chests, and well into the twentieth century the Amazon remained, as Fawcett put it, ‘the last great blank space in the world.’

Lynch’s research made him feel certain that Fawcett, unlike so many of his predecessors, was not a soldier of fortune or a crackpot. Fawcett was a recipient of the Gold Medal, the highest honor bestowed on an explorer by the Royal Geographical Society; a skilled mapmaker; and a decorated hero of the First World War. He knew the Amazon as well as anyone. His younger son, Brian, said of him, ‘True, he dreamed; but his dreams were built upon reason, and he was not the man to shirk the effort to turn theory into fact.'” (Thanks Electric Typewriter.)

•••••••••

Grann discusses the topic with that pretend pablum-puker Stephen Colbert:

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“I Had Never Seen Anything Like It…There Were Two Giant Tentacles Right Beneath Us”

April 22, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of “The Squid Hunter,” David Grann’s exciting 2004 New Yorker account about the search for that inscrutable underwater creature, the giant squid:

“On a moonless January night in 2003, Olivier de Kersauson, the French yachtsman, was racing across the Atlantic Ocean, trying to break the record for the fastest sailing voyage around the world, when his boat mysteriously came to a halt. There was no land for hundreds of miles, yet the mast rattled and the hull shuddered, as if the vessel had run aground. Kersauson turned the wheel one way, then the other; still, the gunwales shook inexplicably in the darkness. Kersauson ordered his crew, all of whom were now running up and down the deck, to investigate. Some of the crew took out spotlights and shone them on the water, as the massive trimaran—a three-hulled, hundred-and-ten-foot boat that was the largest racing machine of its kind, and was named Geronimo, for the Apache warrior—pitched in the waves.

Meanwhile, the first mate, Didier Ragot, descended from the deck into the cabin, opened a trapdoor in the floor, and peered through a porthole into the ocean, using a flashlight. He glimpsed something by the rudder. ‘It was bigger than a human leg,’ Ragot recently told me. ‘It was a tentacle.’ He looked again. ‘It was starting to move,’ he recalled.

He beckoned Kersauson, who came down and crouched over the opening. ‘I think it’s some sort of animal,’ Ragot said.

Kersauson took the flashlight, and inspected for himself. ‘I had never seen anything like it,’ he told me. ‘There were two giant tentacles right beneath us, lashing at the rudder.’

The creature seemed to be wrapping itself around the boat, which rocked violently.” (Thanks to The Electric Typewriter.)

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“His Judgment Can Also Transform A Previously Worthless Object Into Something Worth Tens Of Millions Of Dollars”

April 13, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

David Grann recently published an excellent piece in the New Yorker about a mysterious death in Guatemala. Here’s the opening of another great article for the same magazine, 2010’s “The Mark of a Masterpiece,” about an Oxford professor who authenticates art:

“Every few weeks, photographs of old paintings arrive at Martin Kemp’s eighteenth-century house, outside Oxford, England. Many of the art works are so decayed that their once luminous colors have become washed out, their shiny coats of varnish darkened by grime and riddled with spidery cracks. Kemp scrutinizes each image with a magnifying glass, attempting to determine whether the owners have discovered what they claim to have found: a lost masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci.

Kemp, a leading scholar of Leonardo, also authenticates works of art—a rare, mysterious, and often bitterly contested skill. His opinions carry the weight of history; they can help a painting become part of the world’s cultural heritage and be exhibited in museums for centuries, or cause it to be tossed into the trash. His judgment can also transform a previously worthless object into something worth tens of millions of dollars. (His imprimatur is so valuable that he must guard against con men forging not only a work of art but also his signature.) To maintain independence, Kemp refuses to accept payment for his services. ‘As soon as you get entangled with any financial interest or advantage, there is a taint, like a tobacco company paying an expert to say cigarettes are not dangerous,’ he says.

Kemp, who is in his sixties, is an emeritus professor of art history at Oxford University, and has spent more than four decades immersed in what he calls ‘the Leonardo business,’ publishing articles on nearly every aspect of the artist’s life. “

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