Invisible People

Somewhere in the tangle of the subjects burden and the subjects desire is your story.Alex Tizon Every human being has an epic story. The late Pulitzer Prizewinning writer Alex Tizon told the epic stories of marginalized peoplefrom lonely immigrants struggling to forge a new American identity to a high school custodian who penned a New Yorker short story. Edited by Tizons friend and former colleague Sam Howe Verhovek, Invisible People collects the best of Tizons rich, empathetic accountsincluding My Familys Slave, the Atlantic magazine cover story about the woman who raised him and his siblings under conditions that amounted to indentured servitude. Mining his Filipino American background, Tizon tells the stories of immigrants from Cambodia and Laos. He gives a fascinating account of the Beltway sniper and insightful profiles of Surfers for Jesus and a man who tracks UFOs. His articlesmany originally published in the Seattle Times and the Los Angeles Timesare brimming with enlightening details about people who existed outside the mainstreams field of vision. In their introductions to Tizons pieces, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet, Atlantic magazine editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, Pulitzer Prize winners Kim Murphy and Jacqui Banaszynski, and others salute Tizons respect for his subjects and the beauty and brilliance of his writing. Invisible People is a loving tribute to a journalist whose search for his own identity prompted him to chronicle the lives of others.