Inspiring bios of today’s professional heroines.
The long, lonely, unlovely scramble to making it to the top in TV news.
As she did in her fluid multitiered biography Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon—and the Journey of Generation (2008), Vanity Fair contributor Weller takes apart feminist icons of her generation—those who came of age in the 1960s and ’70s—to see how they work and how they made it to prime time. Here, concentrating on the three women of corporate TV news who are still at their peaks—Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric and Christiane Amanpour (the author ignores Judy Woodruff and Gwen Ifill)—Weller finds in their examples bracing tales of tenacity against a bastion of sexism during a time when established newscasters like Harry Reasoner believed women simply did not belong on the air. The passage of Title IX in June 1972 compelled the networks to hire a certain percentage of women or face discrimination lawsuits, and hence Leslie Stahl and Connie Chung got their starts, paving the way for others. At NBC’s Today Show, Couric would benefit from the battle-scarred promotions of predecessors Barbara Walters and Jane Pauley. Sawyer, curiously, languished for four years after Watergate aiding the disgraced President Richard Nixon in writing his autobiography; thus, the brainy, “mysterious,” hardworking reporter had to overcome a stigma when she first came aboard CBS News in 1978. Amanpour, born in London to an Iranian family, became a tireless, well-respected crusading international correspondent for CNN; she was especially instrumental in bringing the Bosnian catastrophe to American attention. Amanpour also had to overcome bias toward women in the field, as well as with regard to her English accent. Weller is most admiring of Amanpour’s gutsiness, rather hardest on “America’s sweetheart” Couric, and clearly smitten with Sawyer.
Inspiring bios of today’s professional heroines.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1594204272
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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