The Last City Room

William Colfax returns from Vietnam to find a society in turmoil, and his new job as a reporter for the San Francisco Herald lands him smack in the middle of the action. From his unique vantage point as a member of the hard-drinking, fast-living crowd of reporters and editors at the Herald, we see the escalating war between the old-line Establishment represented by publisher Jeremy Stafford III and his cronies on one side and the young men and women of the emerging new order on the other...When it comes to a writer's infusing a book with authenticity, there's just no substitute for experience, and Al Martinez has it. A newspaperman for more than four decades, Martinez knows that world, and every page of The Last City Room rings with truth. But Martinez brings more than experience to the table, much more. As readers of his bi-weekly Los Angeles Times columns know, he doesn't just observe the human condition, he sees right into it and serves it up in a style that melds humor, irony, compassion, outrage, affection and pathos, often all in the same piece. It's his unique combination of experience, a keen eye, and the ability to render what he sees in clear and affecting prose that makes The Last City Room such a wonderful read. Before the story is over, the bay area Movement will be nearly torn apart by intrigues from both the right and the left, a great metropolitan daily will topple, and Colfax, like the society itself, will be changed forever.

For those whose knowledge of newspapers work begin and end with television series, Al Martinez sets the record straight in "The Last City Room," the story of a fictional San Francisco newspaper on its last legs. Against the growing drumbeat of campus radicals opposing the Viet Nam War, Martinez pits a fiercely independent right-wing publisher against the "trust-nobody-over-30" students of the 1960s. His dysfunctional "family" of reporters and editors create a fascinatingly true picture of the pre-corporate newspaper business, a time when editorial judgements, love lives and the failures of the world in general were dissected in gin mills across the street from the city room. I feel I knew every one of those characters, and maybe I did. If you lived through that era, you need to read Martinez' book to tweak your memories. If you're younger, it will make you wish you had been there. It will leave a tear in your eye and a smile on your face.Gayle B. Montgomery, Retired Political Editor, Oakland (California) Tribune

For those whose knowledge of how newspapers work begins and ends with television series, Al Martinez sets the record straight in "The Last City Room," the story of a fictional San Francisco newspaper on its last legs. Against the growing drumbeat of campus radicals opposing the Viet Nam War, Martinez pits a fiercely independent right-wing publisher against the "trust-nobody-over-30" students of the 1960s. His dysfunctional "family" of reporters and editors create a fascinatingly true picture of the pre-corporate newspaper business, a time when editorial judgements, love lives and the failures of the world in general were dissected in gin mills across the street from the city room. I feel I knew every one of those characters, and maybe I did. If you lived through that era, you need to read Martinez' book to tweak your memories. If you're younger, it will make you wish you had been there. It will leave a tear in your eye and a smile on your face.Gayle B. Montgomery, Retired Political Editor, Oakland (California) Tribune

As all accomplished artists know how to use colors correctly to shade for effect, Al Martinez knows how to use his rich prose to write an eyewitness description of a doomed newspaper in San Francisco during the '60s. In this novel, William Colfax, a 'Nam veteran, starts as a cub reporter, and during the telling, evolves into an experienced, cynical journalist from his observations of the campus revolution and the corruption in all strata of the city. Colfax introduces the reader to the turbulent Berkeley activists, the scandalous police, the ant-Communist, fanatic power brokers, and the hard-drinking, quirky city room's staff-his family at the San Francisco Herald. For years I've read Mr. Martinez's column in the LA Times and through those columns have learned a little about the man. He saw action in the Korean "conflict" and was a reporter on a Bay area newspaper, so he wrote a story that he knows well. I recommend this book to anyone who appreciates excellent writing while reading a sound story about newspapering and complicity.

I have been a novelist for many years and before that a journalist. As a novelist and former journalist I assure you "The Last City Room" affords you the best of both worlds--fiction and how a newspaperworks. ... You needn't have set foot in the swirl of a metropolitan newspaper city room in the 1960s or lived through those turbulent times of violent anti-everything fervor in San Francisco to be caught up in Martinez's passionate evocation of those days and times. "The Last City Room" takes you there. It's a marvelous book.