ARTICLE: Prof. Bearak’s NYT Mag cover story on tsunami
If you haven’t read it yet, please read the incredible NYT Magazine cover story for Sunday, Nov. 27, by adjunct professor Barry Bearak (he’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning former NYT co-South Asia bureau chief). It’s called “The Day the Sea Came,” and looks at what happened to six survivors in Indonesia during the tsunami and in the months since. According to an editor’s note, it’s the longest piece ever published in the magazine. At 18,000 words, I imagine it’s one of the longest stories by a single writer in the history of the entire paper (in fact, I’d like to hear of anything that was longer). If you missed the hard copy, there’s the online version at http://www.nytimes.com/magazine (at least through the end of this week).
On that site, you can also see an archive of the NYT’s multimedia coverage from Dec. 26, 2004. They did a very good job of covering the tragedy as it happened. Now, with Bearak’s piece a year later, you get to see the devastation in context.
Because of the holiday weekend, I was away in Baltimore and didn’t see the magazine till Monday night. I did something I had never done before: read an NYTM cover story at the first sitting, beginnning to end. Usually, when the Sunday sections arrive on Saturday, I pick up the magazine and start with The Ethicist, William Safire, Lives and flip through the mag, eventually coming back to the bigger stories later in the weekend. Not this time. What an amazing piece of journalism - as someone who followed the tsunami coverage closely, I thought I knew what happened that day, but he showed me so much more and took to me places I never thought I’d go and made me experience things I had no idea about. I urge you to put away a copy, printed or electronic, for your files.
//Sree//
Dec. 3, 2005: ALUM SARAH BACHMAN RESPONDS: I, too, read the whole article at first sitting. Bearak’s byline always signals great content, writing and heart.
Signature Bearak anecdote: The poor fisherman who survived by his
wits and grandfather’s instruction pleading with an official. The
official says only the landlord who owned the fisherman’s humble
rented shack deserved full compensation for his lost property. The
fisherman and his family get nothing. Many writers would say, in so
many words, that the tsunami changed everything and nothing.
(Reminds me of another signature Bearak anecdote in a story from
Bangladesh about a village trial of a man who threw acid on the face
of a married woman who had turned down his romantic advances. The
village elders let the man off lightly. The woman remained horribly
disfigured. The woman’s husband was despairing, thoroughly disgusted
with the village version of justice but unable to change it. In the
story’s last line, he says, ‘But have you seen her?’)
I also appreciated the first person account at the end of the tsunami
story saying exactly how long Bearak had been in Aceh, how many
people he interviewed, etc. Usually, that stuff is buried in an
editor’s note, but this time, it was integrated into the article.
Putting a human face on the story-teller made both him and the story
more down-to-earth, puncturing the epic feel of his great metaphors.
Another instance of heart.
I wonder how the editor decided to run the story? Was the decision
made mostly on the take-your-breath-away writing, or because of the
unusual and utterly devastating nature of the disaster produced
unusually compelling stories, or for some other reasons? What would
it take to get more long narratives like this one in print?
Sarah
