Elinor Burkett
Elinor Burkett is one of the oddest, rarest, yet most overlooked species in the journalism zoo. She is practically a holotype. Burkett started out as a history professor, a good one too, I imagine, before switching to journalism and teaming up with the now-New York Times op-ed contributor Frank Bruni. Together, they wrote a very quirky book about consumers’ rights called Consumer Terrorism and a very serious book about the Catholic Church scandal. But as Bruni swung left, Burkett swung — well, it’s hard to describe. She swung to an extreme commitment to open-mindedness which led her past ideology and conventional thinking to new insights into subjects such as the politicization of AIDS, the post-Columbine hysteria over American teens, a (relatively fair) revaluation of conservative women in politics, a biography of Golda Meir, and an utterly delightful book about her decision to travel, as an American, Jewish, woman, to the most dangerous places in the world for Americans, Jews, and women. In So Many Enemies, So Little Time: An American Woman in all the Wrong Places, Burkett visits Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, China, and Vietnam in the wake of 9/11. She doesn’t do this, or much of anything else, to make friends, which is what makes her work so honest and refreshing. ...
