The Making of a Muckraker
Jessica Mitford
263 pages
published in 1979

Jessica Mitford comes from a typical Edwardian upper class family, which produced some very atypical daughters. She herself became a Communist, ran off to Spain during the civil war, later moved to the US and worked as an investigative journalist (or muckraker..). Her sister Diana married the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, while an other sister, Unity developed a crush on Hitler off all people, was an active fascist herself, tries to shoot herself at the outbreak of the Second World War and finally died of menigitis in 1948. A fourth sister, Nancy seemed almost normal in being a writer and self declared snob..

I bought this book as a present for Sandra, because she is a fan of both Nancy and Jessica Mitford. Doing the usual readig of the preface while standing in the bookshop deciding whether or not to get this, I got intrigued enough to want to read it myself as well. Therefore I took it with me on the train trip to my parents last friday, finishing it about half way through.

The Making of a Muckraker is a collection of articles Jessica Mitford wrote, the first written in 1957, the last in 1979. Mitford comments on each article, disclosing some of the "story behind the story", telling whther or not she's pleased with the end result or not, what the reaction to the article was like, etc. Most but not all stories revolve around some sort of scandal or rip off, brought to light by her. There is e.g. a series of articles about the American funeral business, the first of which exposed some of the gouging going there, which eventually led to an entire book on the subject The American Way of Death. The other three articles in the series deal with the reaction to this book.

Another article, "Let us now appraise Famous Writers", deftly skewers the Famous Writers correspondence school scam, which asked quite substantial sums of moeny from its students for not much results. Using famous US writers (hence the name) to endorse the school and suggesting these would actually teach you, they made quite a tidy profit --until Jessica Mitford came along and exposed them.

Some of the articles could've been written yesterday; like the first one "Trial by Headline", which tells of a murder suspect already convicted in the papers before his case could come to trial. Remember the pedophillia hysteria in the UK a while back?

All in all, quite a good collection. I need to read more of her books.