The 99 Percent

Occupy Wall Street was the most covered news story of 2011. Among those who followed the movement like a storm chaser, Boston Phoenix Staff Writer Chris Faraone is one of the few who blogged about daily Occupy minutiae, but also stepped back to smoke lots of weed, investigate and analyze the protest, and deliver weekly features. Starting in September, Faraone published a series of deep Occupy portraits, traveling to more than a dozen cities from Boston to Seattle. His work illustrates day-to-day Occupy operations, as well the characters who make the movement tick. In the process, he also landed nationwide exclusives, like a scoop on a federation of police officers who support Occupy. Though Faraone is to the left of liberal, he wrote with a balanced reporter's eye, in many cases aggravating readers on both sides of the ideological aisle. Ignoring partisan preferences, Faraone dug for the root of topics ranging from an accused thief who moved between camps, to a veteran anarchist who was inspired by Occupy to come out from underground. As was noted in a recent Columbia Journalism Review profile of Faraone, his approach to covering Occupy was wholly unique, as he became "a one-man swarm: embedding full-time at Boston's Dewey Square encampment; visiting other movements around the country; juggling feature stories, blog posts, radio spots, and Twitter fights." 99 Nights with the 99 Percent is a collection of Faraone's published posts and articles on Occupy, streamlined into a sleek edition that also packs unpublished pieces and a number of bonus features. In addition to pics and illustrations, a series of haiku poems - or "Occupaikus" - run throughout the book, taking readers through a timeline of the first 100 days of the national movement. There are other books on Occupy, but 99 Nights is in a category of its own.