Nearly 25 percent of the 9,000 U.S. newspapers that were published 15 years ago are gone, leaving behind a vast news desert and signs of a weakened democracy. So it’s bittersweet to read Carl Bernstein’s “Chasing History,” a rollicking memoir about the golden age of newspapers. Bernstein ignores the bad karma engulfing the newspaper industry to recreate his rookie days at The Washington Evening Star, a robust afternoon paper that ceased publication in 1981. Bernstein’s nostalgia for those times is so deep that after the first 30 pages I could hear ghostly voices shouting, “Honey, get me rewrite.”
If you count the books Bernstein co-authored with Bob Woodward about their legendary coverage of Watergate for The Washington Post (“All the President’s Men” and “The Final Days”) and “Loyalties,” the book he published in 1989 about his parents’ struggles during McCarthyism, this is Bernstein’s fourth time writing about his life and work. Even for one of the country’s most famous reporters, that’s a lot of Bernstein.
