Jon mooallem biography






My latest book is a collection of essays called SERIOUS FACE. People like it. (⭐️Publisher's Weekly: "A rich collection, a portrait of human resilience and helplessness" ⭐️Booklist: "Readers will laugh and tear up" ⭐️BookPage: "Such a gifted storyteller it almost doesn't matter what he's writing about" ⭐️Kirkus: "A master essayist" ⭐️The TODAY Show, best summer read: "If you want humanity, this is it.") I'd love it if you'd order it now from an independent bookstore, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple or wherever.

My last book, THIS IS CHANCE!, about the 1964 Great Alaska Earthquake and radio broadcaster Genie Chance, was named a best book of 2020 by Amazon, BuzzFeed and Brainpickings. Maybe you missed it because it had the misfortune of coming out exactly as the pandemic was shutting everything down. Please buy a copy at an independent bookstore, Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Apple.

My first book, WILD ONES, about endangered species in America, was chosen as a best book of 2013 by The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, NPR’s Science Friday and Canada’s National P

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Includes the name: Jon Mooallem

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The Publisher Says: In 1910, the United States—its population exploding, its frontier all but exhausted—was in the throes of a serious meat shortage. But a small and industrious group of thinkers stepped forward with an answer, a bold idea being endorsed by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and The New York Times. Their plan: to import hippopotamuses to the swamps of Louisiana and convince Americans to eat them.

The only thing stranger than the hippo idea itself was show more the partnership promoting it. At its center were two hard-bitten spies: Frederick Russell Burnham, a superhumanly competent frontiersman, freelance adventurer, and fervent optimist about America’s future—Burnham would be the inspiration for the Boy Scouts—and Fritz Duquesne, a.k.a. the Black Panther, a virtuoso con man and cynical saboteur who believed only in his own glorification and revenge. Burnham and Duquesne had very recently been swo

Alumni Portrait: Writer Jon Mooallem

Neanderthals, bipedal black bears, lesbian albatrosses, and wallets returned to their owners after being lost for decades: the cornucopia of subjects tackled by Jon Mooallem are matched only by their quirkiness.

The New York Times Magazine contributing writer’s work has run in publications like California Sunday Magazine, Slate, and ESPN The Magazine, and in podcasts including This American Life and 99% Invisible.

A Colorado College alum and 2006 graduate of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Mooallem developed his eye for unique stories and angles in part from the need to find fresh takes on heavily covered topics. Early in his career, he felt like a journalism outsider, thinking “there’s no way I can compete on actual” news stories.

Mooallem’s quick ascent to some of the country’s most prestigious journalistic organizations started with The Hudson Review in New York, where he sifted—drearily, he recalled—through its poetry slush pile. The opportunity to read through outside magazines the literary journal kept on hand

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