Course Packed: Max Frankel, The Times Of My Life And My Life With The Times (Freshman Year)

Course Packed is a brief series of autobiographical comments on books that were important to me when I was in college -- named, of course, for those giant stacks of paper many of my classes would insist I purchase. Funny, I kind of miss course packs here in the real world -- and the regular use of highlighters, notebooks and campus meal points.

More than any of my classes, my first year in college was marked by my involvement in the campus newspaper. I got involved in a lot of things, as freshmen do, but writing for the paper became my most common to-do, and it shaped my days in a way I hadn't expected. My 19th birthday found me going over edits to a feature story before cake and presents, and when a week later the War in Iraq started, I remember sitting on my roommate's radiator frantically calling students with family in the Middle East for comment -- as if anyone knew what to say at the time.

Max Frankel's memoir was the kind of book I reserved for after finals, when I needed to be distracted from impending grades and plotting next year's course load. Frankel rose at the New York Times in what used to be the usual way, by starting as a stringer and becoming an integral part of the newsroom, pushing for reforms in the way the Paper of Record covered women and minorities. Along the way he reported from Russia, Cuba and Washington D.C., and won a Pulitzer covering Nixon's visit to China.

Frankel's book is a brick, but it has stayed with me not only because of the obstacles Frankel overcame to get to the Times but the ones he set for himself once he got there. After all, a Jewish kid born in Nazi Germany who was eventually admitted to Columbia and went on to the Times had to be pretty pleased with himself for getting there. It's that quest for excellence -- if stressed over other things, as memoirs tend to do -- that I admire in Frankel and other great editors.

I don't work for the Times, sadly, but I still enjoy journalists' memoirs. The summer after sophomore year I grabbed Arthur Gelb's CITY ROOM off a one-week-only shelf and dutifully read it in the week provided, it was that good. And I'm gearing up to tackle the grande dame of newspaper memoirs, Katherine Graham's PERSONAL HISTORY.