Not especially newsworthy, but perhaps of some interest to news junkies and students of the media. (16 pp. b&w photos,...
Behind-the-scenes glimpses of how the news is made, but nothing that hasn’t been said before.
Schieffer, the folksy Texan perhaps best known for his longstanding role as moderator of Face the Nation, apparently has a Forrest Gump–like ability to be on the spot of breaking news. Then a hometown reporter, he was sidelined by the political columnists when JFK arrived in Dallas in November 1963. He slept in on the morning of the 22nd, but when he heard the news that the president had been shot, “grabbed my black felt, snap-brim Dick Tracy hat and roared off in my two-seater Triumph TR-4 sports car” to the office, where he answered the phone, found himself talking to Lee Harvey Oswald’s estranged mother, and snagged an exclusive interview. Soon thereafter, he was in Mississippi tracking the civil-rights movement and dodging bullets fired by white-supremacist snipers; from there it was on to the big time, only to face in battle, many years later, the cost-cutting, news-hating suits at CBS, who saw to it that “producer Sandy Socolow’s old adage that ‘no one ever got fired for spending too much to cover the news’ was no longer operative.” Schieffer outlasted them and went on to chair Face the Nation, where he booked poets as well as pundits, scholars as well as scandalmongers. Telling us all this, he doesn’t deliver much he couldn’t say on TV, subtitle notwithstanding, except to get in a couple of zingers at the expense of the brass, recall the room-clearing eructations of Texas cops, and reveal that George McGovern once told a heckler to kiss his ass during the ’72 campaign. There’s not much bang for the buck here, and Schieffer’s tendency to dumb it down (“liberals who favor gun control . . . welcome the endless debate over guns because it is a proven way to raise money from their supporters”) is a constant distraction.
Not especially newsworthy, but perhaps of some interest to news junkies and students of the media. (16 pp. b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-14971-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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