Prodigious research and a grateful heart inform this essential biography of an irreplaceable journalist.
The astonishingly assiduous professional life of I.F. Stone (1907–89), who covered stories from the Sacco and Vanzetti trials to the Iran-Contra affair and became an icon to investigative journalists.
Born Isadore Feinstein in Philadelphia to a shopkeeper father, “Izzy” Stone came early to his profession, publishing a little newspaper as a youth. He never stopped writing. The Nation London correspondent Guttenplan (The Holocaust on Trial: History, Justice, and the David Irving Libel Case, 2001) begins on Dec. 12, 1949, when Stone appeared on Meet the Press as the Red Scare was about to explode. After debating the merits of national health insurance with Dr. Morris Fishbein, he didn’t appear on television again for decades. Stone’s radical positions in the McCarthy era ended one phase of his career—working for established journals—and began another: self-publishing I.F. Stone’s Weekly, which endured—and sometimes thrived, especially during Vietnam—for nearly 20 years. As much social and cultural history as biography—Guttenplan offers little about Stone’s personal life—the narrative serves as a textbook for those not alive during the Stone ages. The Depression, American Communism, the New Deal, World War II, the Cold War, the civil-rights movement, the Vietnam War, Israel and the Middle East, assassinations and political corruption and cultural characters of all sorts—these are all critical to an understanding of Stone’s life and work. Guttenplan, who began the book in 1990, makes certain that readers know what and who they are before he proceeds. Though largely admiring of Stone—praise occasionally supersedes analysis—the author reveals that Stone was a tough man to work for; no employee, except his wife, lasted long. His loyalties to fact and the truth trumped just about everything else, friendship included.
Prodigious research and a grateful heart inform this essential biography of an irreplaceable journalist.Pub Date: June 2, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-374-18393-6
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
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
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