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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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