The Making of a Journalist

Brilliant and utterly exhilerating, this wry, revealing, and insightful journey into his own life once again reveals how David Zimmerman has been filling the footsteps of the legendary independent journalist Izzy Stone, author of I.F. Stone’s Weekly.

Zimmerman, an exceptional reporter and writer, has spent much of his seventy-year career exposing industry falsehoods, in politics and Big Science, in the New York Times and other major media, and has published five book-length works of nonfiction.  The Times has described him as “an able and extraordinarily industrious science writer.”  In this memoir, Zimmerman travels a long road—from a citified childhood in Chicago to a career as a wildlife investigative reporter, and from the deepest intimacies of private life to the broad panoramas of his chosen field.  The disappearance of a sleeptime toy, a fantasy animal, and his lifetime effort to reclaim it, shape this worldwide odyssey. You will meet Santhi in these pages, and you will come to see how fantasy and reality have richly combined to form the author’s creative lifetime. It’s a trip well worth taking.