Should interest more than just news or politics junkies.
A former president of ABC News looks back over the stories that shaped his leadership.
Westin succeeded Roone Arledge as the head of the news organization in 1997. Here he presents an insider’s view of some of the bigger stories that broke while he was in charge and defends the continuing value of broadcast news. The major stories included the death of Princess Diana, the Monica Lewinsky scandal and President Clinton's impeachment, the breakdown of exit polling in the 2000 presidential election debacle, 9/11 and the subsequent invasion of Iraq. The author shows how he established himself within the company and also the country as the leader of the most-watched network news broadcast in America. Westin also notes that while networks favored advertiser-funded broadcasting that avoided controversy, Fox News and others “embraced controversy. The more partisan, the better. And this approach was every bit a matter of shrewd business as it was a matter of ideology.” The author’s selected stories demonstrate how the news can be covered without becoming overly polemical, and he argues against the temptation “to cut back on the reporting and seek an audience through the expression of opinion.” In that vein, he looks at Fox's mixture of “twenty-four hour news with polemics” and its relation to conservative politics. ABC News still reaches four times as many viewers as Fox, and Westin discusses how technology and the Web are being used to defend that advantage.
Should interest more than just news or politics junkies.Pub Date: May 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-374-15121-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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