Chasing History

Carl Bernstein, a Pulitzer Prize winner and co-author of All the President's Men, is credited with pioneering investigative journalism. In this memoir, subtitled A Kid in the Newsroom, he looks back on how his career began during his restless teenage years in Washington, D.C.

In 1960, Bernstein was sixteen and at risk of not finishing high school. Curious, largely self-taught, and frequently absent from class, he talked his way into a copyboy job at the Evening Star, Washington's afternoon paper. Before he turned nineteen, he was reporting for that same newspaper.

The book moves through the Kennedy years, the growing civil rights movement, and a series of brutal crimes, showing how he learned his trade on the job. Its tone is lively and restless, with humor, candor, and moments of real tenderness, and it portrays a young man determined to pursue the truth.