A scattershot recounting of a life spent in journalism, as well as a critique of the way news is gathered and reported. In a career spanning nearly 50 years, Bagdikian (The Media Monopoly, 1983, etc.) has seen a great sea change in the world of journalism as family-owned newspapers peopled with colorful, slightly disreputable characters have yielded to media conglomerates and celebrity journalists. He worked for a number of newspapers, including the Washington Post, played a role in the publishing of the Pentagon Papers, and became one of the nation's first media critics. All this, however, does not ultimately add up to compelling material for an autobiography. And Bagdikian has neither the style nor the storytelling talent to make up for the deficiencies of his raw material. He writes like a reporter, not a memoirist, structuring his account in the classic inverted pyramid style dear to journalists: all the interesting material up front, succeeded by increasingly less interesting details. There are also numerous repetitions as well as strange omissions (whole decades seem to pass almost unmentioned) and frequent chronological leaps. There are some interesting sections on his Armenian roots, especially his family's flight from Turkish massacres. And the fluster and cloak-and-dagger drama surrounding the publication of the Pentagon Papers are well detailed. Bagdikian also offers some trenchant and timely critiques of the Fourth Estate, especially the journalistic pose of objectivity, which pretends that reporters are not uniquely shaped by the circumstances of their lives. The subtext of this book, in fact, is how strongly Bagdikian's life influenced his reporting. Thus in place of objectivity, he proposes a standard of ``fairness and balance,'' reporting that ``concentrates on the fundamentals of social justice in any democracy.'' Unfortunately, this is precisely the sort of stolid decency that makes for great obituaries but not great autobiographies.
Pub Date: Aug. 11, 1995
ISBN: 0-8070-7066-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
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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