Scary Monsters and Super Freaks: Stories of Sex, Drugs, Rock 'N' Roll and Murder

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Summary: World Class Reporting and Writing
Review: I'll get the disclaimer out of the way first. The smartest thing I've done in my journalistic career was one of the first things I ever did. That was convincing Mike Sager to join me at the Emory University newspaper. It was my introduction to the Sager school of reporting and writing. Live the story or, better yet, live with the story. Mike calls it the anthropological approach to journalism and during the last twenty-five years he has been doing that for a living.
We used to talk about the New Journalism, which was all the rage when we started. It was Tom Wolfe this, Richard Ben Cramer that. But Mike has carved out his own genre, word by word, story by story and the results are on stunning display in Scary Monsters.
Mike is the classic journalistic success story. He dropped out of law school after just a few days and took a job working as a copy aide at the Washington Post (not before he almost lost the job because he failed the spelling test!). He worked his way up to reporter, starting out on the police beat, and there was no holding him back.
But can he write? I've read these stories over the years as Mike has written them and I've read them again recently. Each is captivating, that sort of anthropological expedition into an event, a person, a story, that you will soon recognize as uniquely Sageresque. Taken individually or as a collection, they are a great read. Money well spent. Mike's work is already being taught in journalism schools and for good reason.
The best part of this? Mike has so many other stories, from his first foray into magazine writing, which was when he went in search of Marlon Brando, to his more recent work in Esquire, which places him in the pantheon of great writers who have filled the pages of that magazine. Let's hope that with the success of this book, we'll get the next collection soon!

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Summary: New journalism's next brilliant superstar!
Review: Mike Sager is Writer-at-Large for Esquire Magazine, and here offers a major collection of magazine articles and profiles that equal the best of the best work by Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe. Rock stars, space cults, high-profile frauds, slimy politicians and doomed porn actors among others come under Sager's discerning inspection; he details some of the more spectacular failures of recent times with a narrative flow and punch that equals the best fiction. This might well be the work that Nathaniel West might have done if he wrote nonfiction. A terrific read

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Summary: True Crime
Review: You have probably read some of these articles over the years in magazines and weekly newspapers. Here are some great stories of the last twenty years. Stories about John Holmes and Rick James are great. Mike Sager goes into great detail to give a rounded picture of all his subects. The stories about journalists Janet Lewis and Veronica Guernin are pretty intense. Some of this stuff is about obsessions we all had about ten years ago like Easy-E Eric Wright and the Heaven's Gate Crowd. It's funny how time flys. Check it out.