Sunday, March 8, 2020

Review: Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow

I'm going to out myself right now - I have a huge celebrity crush on Ronan Farrow.  Even though he could easily have used his parents' money, he put himself through law school. He was a UNICEF spokesperson for women and children who were suffering in Darfur and he most recently, as a journalist, outed  Weinstein, Lauer and the practice of catching and killing stories.  This book is his memoir as to how he broke the Weinstein story while beginning at NBC and then, eventually, at the New Yorker Magazine.

I loved this book. It moved quickly and I devoured it in a way that I didn't devour She Said, a book I reviewed here about the same topic.  In large part, I think, Farrow narrates this as almost a spy novel where he's followed a lot, his sources go dark and his bosses at NBC stop him at every turn. The bite sized snippets that are chapters are helpful too.

The book does a masterful job capturing the feelings that Weinstein has (the sheer panic!) and his victims feel. It does a great job in describing the potential consequences people had in coming forward - Farrow himself got fired from NBC for pursuing this story. I loved learning about his process of reporting and what he had to do to ensure that he got things just so.  He was able to talk about all of the aspects of this story - personal impact, professional, victims, perpetrator - in a way that was balanced and informative without being too heavy handed. This is an important book to read as it memorializes a turning point in our culture insofar as power dynamics, sexual harassment and assault and the workplace go.

Definitely worth reading. 

1 comment:

  1. Did you listen to his Catch and Kill podcast? So good!!

    ReplyDelete

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