Reporting can be artful as well as informative, especially if the reporter is Emmanuel Carrère. The essays and articles collected here are invested with empathy as well as irony and rendered in lean, evocative prose. Carrère is one of France’s most popular contemporary authors, a novelist and screenwriter who brings his skills into journalism. The subjects of his crime reporting and political profiles included in 97,196 Words are more familiar in his homeland than here, but his writing (well translated by John Lambert) should be of interest to anyone who cares about the expressive power of words.
