An honest, engaging self-portrait of a woman who forever changed racial and gender dynamics in media.
A journalist’s trailblazing rise and swift fall in TV broadcasting.
In the prologue, Simpson introduces herself as an everywoman filing through a dehumanizing TSA security line until a starstruck security screener recognizes her and asks why she’s no longer on ABC’s Word News Tonight Sunday. That moment posits the central question of the book and turns what otherwise would have been just an autobiography into an autobiographical whodunit. In chapters more thematic than chronological—a structure that occasionally disorients the reader by jumping back and forth in time—Simpson details her family’s mixed racial origins, her exposure to fierce racism in the Jim Crow South and her slow climb up the rungs of journalistic success, from a radio broadcaster in Chicago to the coveted anchor position on World News Tonight Sunday, glass ceilings raining down upon her throughout the journey. In Chicago, she was the first woman to broadcast radio news and the first black woman to anchor a local newscast. She was also the first black woman to become a national network TV correspondent and anchor a national network newscast. And, in 1992, she was the first minority or woman to moderate a presidential debate. In her more than 40 years on the air, she covered a myriad of events, from Martin Luther King Jr.’s protests against housing segregation and the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago to strife in Africa and the vice presidency of George H.W. Bush. However, the book is most intriguing in the detailed accounts of the vicious sexual harassment and racism she faced from white men, and how she steadfastly worked to improve the career prospects of women and minorities. She is to be lauded for placing candor before feminist and racial dogma, especially when she concludes who was ultimately responsible for encouraging ABC executives to remove her from the air in the early 2000s.
An honest, engaging self-portrait of a woman who forever changed racial and gender dynamics in media.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1452062365
Page Count: 300
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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