JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Beloved NPR colleague and friend Rose Friedman has died. As an editor and reporter, she played a key part in shaping NPR's arts and culture coverage. For more than a decade, she worked on a variety of pieces about new books, author interviews, even the culinary adventure of cooking chicken in a pig's bladder. Rose died Thursday at home in New York City of cancer. She was 38 years old. Elizabeth Blair has this appreciation.
ELIZABETH BLAIR, BYLINE: Rose Friedman was many things - a books person, a major foodie, a union shop steward. She was in her early 20s when she got a job as an editorial assistant for NPR Books. Pretty soon, she knew the publishing industry inside out and seemed to have read everything.
MEG WOLITZER: She was voracious.
BLAIR: One of the people she worked with on reviews and features was novelist Meg Wolitzer.
WOLITZER: I thought of Rose as this expert almost immediately, in terms of her taste and knowledge in and about books. And I feel that it was something that she'd had her whole reading life.
BLAIR: Beginning in 2013, Rose and a small team spent weeks putting together NPR's annual Books Concierge, an app that would go on to be called Books We Love. Rose and a few others would whittle down hundreds of books nominated by NPR staff and critics into a kind of robust reading guide. Here's Rose explaining how the app works to NPR's David Folkenflik in 2021.
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ROSE FRIEDMAN: So I clicked on eye-opening reads, and then I added nonfiction. And then just for fun, I hit tales from around the world, and it gave me a list of about 15 books.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK: Any I might like?
FRIEDMAN: So the one I thought you'd get a kick out of is called "A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life And Epic Journey Of The World's Smartest Birds Of Prey."
BLAIR: Even as a young staffer in the newsroom, Rose was like an old-school journalist - endlessly curious but highly skeptical. She strived for clarity, context and emotion, also humor.
Rose Friedman loved talking about food. In 2020, she interviewed Chef Bill Buford.
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FRIEDMAN: I swung by his building, and he handed over some ingredients he said I'd need, including the chicken, some wine and what looked like a deflated football loosely wrapped in plastic. He wouldn't tell me where he got it, and it smelled - well - it smelled. But it was part of Buford's plan.
BILL BUFORD: You prepare your bird in the normal way you would for roasting.
BLAIR: Rose Friedman grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. She studied labor history at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Rose brought her passion for labor issues to NPR, acting as a shop steward for SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents the company's editorial workers. She was especially proud of her work convincing NPR to increase its paid parental leave policy.
Rose Friedman is survived by her partner, Andrew Anastasi, and their two daughters, her parents, Carolyn and Jerry Friedman, her sisters Sophie and Nina and numerous admiring friends and colleagues.
Elizabeth Blair, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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