Larry Kahaner is an American journalist, author, ghostwriter and licensed private investigator. He was born in Brooklyn, New York and now lives in McLean, Virginia.
His books include:
He has received the Jesse M. Neal National Business Journalism Award, the American Society of Business Publication Editors Regional Gold Award and an Associated Press Newswriting Award. He holds a Master of Science in journalism from Boston University. A former BusinessWeek Correspondent, his work has appeared in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Information Week.
As a reporter for the Columbus (GA) Ledger-Enquirer in 1980, he wrote the first in-depth exposé of the textile mills in the city and how they caused byssinosis, also known as 'brown lung disease,' in workers. Byssinosis is caused by inhaling textile particles. For years, workers were reluctant to complain about the illness for fear of losing their jobs. The mills exerted great economic power including owing an adjoining town, Bibb City, owned by Bibb Manufacturing Company. When the series was released, many of the newspaper's street boxes were looted of their copies. The series led to the Georgia legislature enacting laws to allow workers with byssinosis to file workers' compensation claims for the first time. The reportage also garnered several awards including an Associated Press Newswriting Award – Public Service.
Kahaner arguably wrote the first, nationally-syndicated newspaper articles about frequent incidents of sexual harassment of female soldiers at Fort Benning at a time when Pentagon officials said that such cases were rarely reported or brushed aside.
During the early to mid 1980s, Kahaner covered the telecommunications industry as it underwent a massive change from a regulated business, dominated by AT&T, to a deregulated industry that brought in new players and new technologies. As a founding editor of Communications Daily and later as a Washington correspondent for Business Week, in addition to freelancing for other magazines and newspapers, he wrote some of the earliest articles about the new telecommunications landscape, cell phones, email, and the internet, culminating in two books, "The Phone Book," with co-author Alan Green (Penguin, 1983) and "On the Line: The Men of MCI – Who Took on AT&T, Risked Everything and Won" (Warner Books, 1986).
Partly drawing on his experience after college as a technician on an oceanographic vessel that surveyed Massachusetts Bay (The RV Atlantic Twin) Kahaner has authored a thriller "USA, Inc." which was published by Bay City Publishers in December, 2016.