My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times

From Strand Bookstore

Harold Evans, author of the NY Times bestseller, The American Century, is also the former president & publisher of Random House. Here, he recounts a wild, wonderful tale of the newspaper life that formed the basis of his storied life - life sketches from the 1930s to his service in World War II; through towns big & those almost off the map. Evans discusses his passion for the crusading style of reportage he championed, his clashes with Rupert Murdoch, and his struggle to put journalism in the service of those with lives less fortunate. There are eccentrics throughout, & angry editors screaming over the intercom. Most of all, there is Harold Evans's love of the printed world. Illus.

From the Publisher

From a wartime beach in Wales to the gleaming skyscrapers of twenty-first-century Manhattan, the extraordinary career of Fleet Street legend Harold Evans has spanned five decades of tumultuous social, political and creative change. Just how did a working class Lancashire boy, who failed the eleven-plus, rise to a position where he could so effectively give voice to the unheard? Born in the bleak years between the wars in the sprawl of Greater Manchester into a thrifty, diligent and loving family, Evans inherited only the privilege of his parents' example. Theirs was a work ethic that led Evans through night school classes, national service and a passionate commitment to regional life, and, finally, to his unassailably successful editorship of one of our greatest newspapers, the Sunday Times. Whether unpicking the murderous chaos of Bloody Sunday, pursuing a foreign correspondent's murderers or uncovering the atrocity of Thalidomide, this consummate newsman evokes his contagious passion: for the real story and the truth.

Review

Nicholas Lemann - New Yorker
"One can think of MY PAPER CHASE as a potent exercise in escapist nostalgia--as an intoxicant that's bound to produce, at least in journalists, the irresistible high of revisiting the halcyon era of the mainstream media....[But the] system is gone, as is the way that people like the young Evans operated within it, and what's most arresting about MY PAPER CHASE is that Evans makes us miss them."

Review

Leonard Downie - Washington Post
"Evans's memoir, aided by prescient personal diaries, is a victory lap....Although his engaging, conversational narrative is sprinkled with wry self-deprecation and generous credit for many people he worked with over the years, its hero is clearly the first-person narrator, to a sometimes cloying degree."

Review

Publishers Weekly
"Old-school newspapering comes alive in this scintillating memoir....Written with self-deprecating humor and quiet conviction, this is a fine valedictory for a heroic style of journalism one hopes still has a future." (starred review)

Review

David Carr - New York Times Book Review
"Sir Harold Evans knows his way around a story....[H]e describes an epoch past, an era in British journalism when type was poured hot, articles deemed unfit landed on an actual spike, and the men--and it was mostly men--who commanded all of it were literate buccaneers....Like printing presses, the narrative cranks up slowly but then begins whirring as it celebrates bygone glories and dwells on the truths of good journalism that still obtain."

Review

Peter Stothard - Times Literary Supplement
"[A] series of dramatically crafted stories recalled from the highest newspaper perch of all....MY PAPER CHASE elegantly evokes...an earlier newspaper age....Much of what is powerfully described here has, indeed, vanished for all time...."

More about the book

Legendary Sunday Times editor Harold Evans describes his rise from a humble beginning in Manchester (his parents were manual laborers, and his grandparents could not read) to running The Times for two decades during journalism's golden age from the 1960s to 1980s. Selected by the New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of 2009.