Jimmy Breslin

August 19, 2024
This admiring biography from journalist Esposito (Bomb Squad) chronicles the career of pugnacious and prolific New York City reporter Jimmy Breslin (1928–2017). Esposito contends that Breslin deserves to be remembered alongside his New York Herald Tribune colleague Tom Wolfe as a progenitor of “New Journalism,” citing among other examples Breslin’s decision to focus his coverage of John F. Kennedy’s funeral on how the man who dug the president’s grave experienced that day. Also detailed are Breslin’s unsuccessful 1969 bid for City Council president on a platform promising to make the city a state; the taunting letters the Son of Sam wrote Breslin in the mid 1970s; and Breslin’s forceful condemnations of Donald Trump for taking out a newspaper ad calling for the execution of the Central Park Five in 1989. Esposito presents Breslin as a consummate reporter—asserting that “he usually used more shoe leather and worked as hard as or harder... than any reporter whose front-page beat was the cops, courts, jails”—and the crisp prose conjures the smoke-filled newsrooms of the industry’s mid-century heyday (“Rat-tat-tatting and slamming—powerful, fast, heavy-fingered key strikes—sweating, smoking, crumpling pages into balls that cluttered the desk and dropped on to the floor”). It’s a loving ode to a dedicated journalist and the bygone era in which he made his mark.