More interesting than Smith himself is the author’s portrayal of the news business in the 1950s and ’60s.
The life and work of a noted White House reporter.
A week after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy made clear that she wanted to keep certain reporters from writing about her husband’s presidency. Foremost among them was Merriman Smith (1913-1970), whom she derided as a bitter old man. Since 1941, Smith had been the White House reporter for United Press International, and he had become a celebrity in his own right, the author of several books, and a guest of Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, and Merv Griffin on late-night TV. But as reporter and former New York Post editor Sanderson portrays Smith in his debut book, Jacqueline Kennedy had every reason to dislike him: an alcoholic, Smith was a mean drunk; he lashed out in anger and frustration at his first wife and often at his bosses at UPI; he was ruthlessly competitive, always “poised to battle his colleagues to get the story first and right.” Sanderson cites one altercation with a young reporter who dared to contradict Smith about the exact moment when Lyndon Johnson took the oath of office after the assassination. “He practically put a hammer lock on me,” the reporter claimed, due to the one-second difference in time. Sanderson implies that Smith’s concern over details made him a great reporter, but still, he emerges as a difficult, self-important, combative man. Focusing on Smith’s reporting of the Kennedy assassination, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, Sanderson conveys the tension and confusion after the event, as Smith and other newsmen scrambled to ascertain facts. Smith soon became a favorite of LBJ, who gave him special access and used him “as a conduit for routine information meant to enhance his image.” Drawing on interviews and many oral histories, Sanderson recounts Smith’s tormented life, but he strains to justify why he merits this biography.
More interesting than Smith himself is the author’s portrayal of the news business in the 1950s and ’60s.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5107-1264-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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 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
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