An exemplary work of journalism about journalism, of surpassing interest to any serious consumer of the news.
A deep-dive history of the New York Times in an age of transformation.
The Times, writes veteran political reporter Nagourney, has long borne the sobriquet “the Gray Lady,” but women have seldom figured in its management and upper ranks. The same was true of anyone but white males. As Nagourney, who covered the 2020 election for the paper, writes, this became a source of much concern to the publishers, members of the Sulzberger dynasty, and the paper's editorial and business leadership, who oversaw its transformation not just into a more diverse organization but also one at the forefront of the digital age. It came at a cost: “Newsrooms as a rule are unhappy places: roiled by self-doubt, anger, competitiveness, resentments, and vindictiveness,” and the Times was no exception. Accordingly, episodes of massive bloodletting were not uncommon. In an absorbing case study, Nagourney revisits the checkered career of serial fabulist Jayson Blair, who, in the end, took down his editor, Howell Raines, with him when his inventions were exposed. “I’ve got more arrows in me than Custer’s horse,” Raines once quipped, but this time the horse died. Another critical juncture in the book comes with the tortured saga of the Times’ first woman executive editor, Jill Abramson, whose dismissal stirred up unpleasant memories of a sexual discrimination class action lawsuit filed decades earlier. Nagourney’s account of the Times’ performance during the fraught days after 9/11, the good with the bad, is outstanding. Still, students of the journalism business will most value his study of the halting steps the paper took toward becoming a digital giant, with, today, far more online subscribers than print ones, lending weight to one editor’s observation: “Readers love news articles and narrative. But they clearly want more journalism that doesn’t consist mostly of blocks of text.”
An exemplary work of journalism about journalism, of surpassing interest to any serious consumer of the news.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9780451499363
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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