The Last City Room
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Set in San Francisco in the 1960s, The Last City Room chronicles the conflict that erupts, ideologically and physically, between the old guard of an aging city newspaper and the ascendant Berkeley radicals determined to be heard at any cost.
It's almost a tradition in the city room of The Herald for journalists to collapse at their desks, having worked, imbibed, and smoked themselves into the grave. On these occasions the behavior required by the dead man's erstwhile colleagues - a group of cynical old news hounds with skin the color of faded newsprint - is to applaud, simultaneously hailing their fallen comrade and signaling an opening in the city room. It is in this manner that William Colfax, an ambitious young reporter, earns a coveted position as a staff member of this long-respected newspaper. Colfax accepts the offer mere minutes after his predecessor's body has been carted away.
The Last City Room depicts the decline of an influential newspaper in San Francisco during the turbulent early 60s. As the conservatism of the old guard, led by The Herald's publisher and his bylined minions, clashes with the radical leaders ascending to power in the city, Colfax quickly realizes that the golden days of The Herald are long over. With his past threatening to ensnare him between the two warring factions, Colfax's struggle quickly becomes one of not simply proving himself as a reporter, but of maintaining his independence and integrity as a journalist.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The turbulent politics of the 1960s hasten the demise of an old-fashioned San Francisco newspaper in this entertaining but hollow fiction debut from Los Angeles Times columnist Al Martinez (Dancing Under the Moon; City of Angles). Twenty-four-year-old Vietnam veteran William Colfax leaves a smalltown paper to join the staff of the San Francisco Herald just as the Herald begins its precipitous decline, ravaged by the clash between radical community leaders and the paper's reactionary publisher, Jeremy Lincoln Stafford III. His first night on the job, Colfax covers a bombing at the Federal Building. He goes on to make his reputation by following the career of Vito Minelli, a charismatic campus radical who masterminded the crime, finally winning a Pulitzer for his coverage of Berkeley activism. While Stafford attempts to recruit Colfax as a lieutenant in his personal crusade against moral decay, Minelli casts the stodgy Herald as a fascistic foil to aggrandize his own revolutionary rantings. Stafford only fuels the fire with the bombastic editorials he runs on the front page. Soon Colfax's colleagues begin to fall victim to the paper's dwindling circulation, as Colfax finds himself caught in the middle, groping for some balance of personal loyalty, integrity and professionalism. Martinez paints all of this with a broad brush, fashioning a lively melodrama. But the novel is peopled more with types than characters. If Colfax fails to take on much depth, despite rote recollections of a failed romance and his dysfunctional relationship with his father, the others remain mere cartoons. Nor is the well-worn '60s milieu seen from a fresh perspective in this largely forgettable drama of remembrance, likely to be of most interest to West Coast readers and journalism junkies.
