The mini-portraits of the paper's four managing and four editorial-page editors constitute the book's strongest section....
Pfaff (Joseph Pulitzer II and the Post-Dispatch, 1991) paints a beauty-marks-and-all portrait of the least consequential Pulitzer.
Even as he began his 31-year reign as editor/publisher of the staunchly liberal St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Joseph Pulitzer III confronted a media landscape vastly different from the one dominated by his father and even more famous grandfather. Through his financial strategies, diversification into television and cautious stewardship, he managed to keep his family's empire intact. Otherwise, it's difficult to see how anything other than his last name, connoting as it does the very best (the Prize) and the very worst (the yellow) in journalism, recommends him for inclusion in the discussion of great newspapermen. Born to privilege, educated at all the right schools (St. Marks, Harvard), at home in the usual playgrounds of the wealthy (Paris, Zermatt, Bar Harbor), Pulitzer appears to have resignedly entered the family business. Left to his own inclinations, it's likely his knowledge of and passion for art—even as a youth he had a discerning eye, and his wealth enabled him to become an early collector of Picasso, Klee, Mondrian and other modern masters—might have led to a more genuinely accomplished, if more modest, career. Pfaff (Emeritus, Journalism/Penn State Univ.) attempts to persuade us that Pulitzer was other than the ordinarily competent, self-absorbed, aloof, humorless fellow who emerges here, but the author relies principally on interview subjects who owe their lives, fortune, career or portions of their soul to Joe III. Almost completely devoid of the common touch, a not unimportant quality in a newspaperman, he reached his 60s before experiencing the novelty of a bus ride. Charming.
The mini-portraits of the paper's four managing and four editorial-page editors constitute the book's strongest section. Only followers of the fortunes of 20th-century media companies or the most devoted students of journalism will warm to Joe himself.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8262-1607-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 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.
