Sheaf-Boy RD

Free PDF here. 

The cover package alone (here's the - even more, non-PDF - Reader's Digest version), distilling as it does enough up-to-the-month four-color tabloid depravity to provide this blog with its next hundred essays in good cheer of the sort that, for me, can only come from seeing humanity live down, minute by minute, to my wafer-thinned expectations, is worth the download.

The 20 Best Reads of 2011
From magazines, newspapers and the Internet, the most unforgettable articles that crossed our editors' desks (or screens) all year.

... 6. “The Blind Man Who Taught Himself to See,” by Michael Finkel, mensjournal.com, March 1, 2011

Beth Dreher, Senior Editor: “I loved this profile of the quietly amazing life of Daniel Kish, a blind man who, among other things, navigates in the wilderness alone and rides his mountain bike fearlessly using a method more familiar to bats than humans. His trick? He clicks his tongue and uses the faint echo to identify objects around him. Through his foundation, World Access for the Blind, he’s teaching other blind people to take control of their surroundings. This interesting and inspiring piece is a must-read.”

7. “Punched Out: The Life and Death of a Hockey Enforcer," by John Branch, The New York Times, December 3, 4, 5, 2011 (three-part series)

David Noonan, National Affairs Editor: “Without question the best journalism I read this year was this three-part series in the New York Times abut NHL enforcer Derek Boogaard, who died last spring at age 28. Extraordinary reporting, exceptional story-telling. A heart-breaking and infuriating tale about the true cost of our obsession with big-time sports. I posted it on Facebook and I’m replying to all because I want as many people as possible to read it. It’s an example of our profession at its best.”

Robert Newman, Creative Director: “You don’t have to be a hockey or even a sports fan to be engrossed and moved by this powerful and sad tale of Derek Boogaard, once the most feared “enforcer” in the National Hockey League, who died of fight-related injuries at the age of 28. The story follows Boogaard from his childhood in Canada, through his glory days in the NHL, to his physical and mental deterioration from brain damage suffered from his many brutal on-ice fights. It’s the most fascinating, in-depth, all-around well-written story I’ve read in ages.”

... 18. “King James Bible,” by Adam Nicolson, National Geographic, December 2011

Jim Menick, Executive Editor, Select Editions: “The story of this particular Bible is complicated. 54 scholars were charged with the goal of making a translation that would be free of contentious politics, and presented in language accessible to the common people. Their resulting work was not an immediate success, but it ultimately became the standard model of the English language.”

19. “The Road to Melville,” by Mark Strong, Vanity Fair, November 2011

Alison Caporimo, Associate Editor: “I love the piece that Vanity Fair did about Herman Melville (I’m a huge fan). The author Mark Strong re-reads Moby Dick for today’s audience and shows how the epic piece of American literature is still relevant today. He also illustrates why the novel is polarizing and that some readers, like himself, have jumped from one camp (the haters) to the other (the lovers).”

20. “An Unexpected Alliance,” by Lee Siegel, moreintelligentlife.com, November, 2011

Jim Menick: “The last people you would have expected to find each other, at least in correspondence, were the straitlaced poet T.S. Eliot and the anything-but-straitlaced entertainer Groucho Marx. Yet the two carried on a long and rather affectionate exchange of letters proclaiming their interest in each other’s work, culminating in a most singular dinner party. As Siegel writes, “it takes one strange god to know another.”