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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
