What reporters do, minus breaking news.
Veteran TV journalist Mitchell delivers a memoir of recent political history she has seen up-close.
Her first broadcast, at age 11, was the day’s announcements from the principal’s office of her elementary school in New Rochelle, NY. Following role model Brenda Starr, she became a cub reporter. In Philadelphia, she learned how to cope with formidable politicos like the fearsome Frank Rizzo. It wasn’t much of a leap from that to wider ranging broadcast journalism, covering such eventss as the Jonestown deaths and the Three Mile Island meltdown. She reported on the fantastic Iran-Contra goings-on and the bizarre confirmation hearings on Clarence Thomas. As a member of the White House press corps, Mitchell covered Reagan, Carter, the Clintons and Bushes. Moving down Pennsylvania Avenue, she covered doings on the Hill (her “years in Congress”) and, finally, the wider world: Cuba with Fidel, North Korea with Kim Jong Il, Afghanistan with the Taliban and all the other garden spots. Coverage of domestic politics with the boys on the bus may have been no picnic either, but she has always been the venturesome reporter, ready for the next call. She knows all the people who give the orders that matter, and rarely does she have a bad word for any of them. (Well, maybe she wasn’t so fond of Don Regan.) And she’s circumspect about her own politics, though partisan readers may try to detect certain leanings. The mover-shaker she likes best: husband Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Fed. He is “funny and sweet and very endearing.” Indeed, they seem an exemplary power couple. Beyond Mitchell’s admission that she blogs (for work, though), there is scant personal stuff. That’s kind of charming, especially considering the diminished state of today’s journalism.
What reporters do, minus breaking news.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03403-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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