A comprehensive biography of the British Broadcasting Corporation, “the embodiment of public service broadcasting, a template to emulate.”
Hendy, a professor of media and communication and former BBC producer, offers both a history of the institution and its key personnel and an assessment of its difficulties and successes living up to its self-professed mission "to inform, educate and entertain.” The author offers his personal “version of the BBC story, not an officially approved one”—but one bolstered by “several years of invaluable help from the BBC accessing and navigating my way through its archival treasures.” Hendy begins with the founders—Cecil Lewis, John Reith, and Arthur Burrows—and its initial incarnation as a radio company in 1922. Early on, the author points out that although the BBC is not a government-run entity, it exists only by Royal Charter, funded by a license fee set by Parliament. Its history is inextricably woven into the fabric of 20th-century Britain: the 1926 General Strike, when the BBC averted a real threat of government takeover; the close collaboration with the World War II–era government, which included the sending of coded messages during broadcasts; an eyewitness account of the direct hit on its home in Broadcasting House during the Blitz; the robust patronage of the new medium, TV; and its ever increasing role as a truly global institution. Hendy ably dissects the BBC's approach to popular entertainment and the arts without sparing due criticism. In 1975, for example, reporter Mike Phillips argued that the BBC “failed accurately to reflect the lives, problems and aspirations of immigrant minorities.” Throughout, the author offers brief profiles of numerous outsize personalities across the media, politics, and the arts. He also meticulously lays out the many attempts, by both Conservative and Labour governments and by rival media, to derail the BBC's editorial independence—e.g., during the Suez Crisis and the Falklands War. Much of this history has been told before but never in such well-researched depth and sparkling detail.
An appropriately large-scale account of the media giant at the very heart of British life.Pub Date: March 29, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-61039-704-9
Page Count: 656
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
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BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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