A solid biography, of interest to students of journalism and American history.
A well-told life of the early media tycoon, whose influence—though not his empire—has endured to the present.
Joseph Pulitzer (1847–1911) lived a life that, in the words of biographer Brian (Einstein: A Life, 1996), “often resembled a fable.” At 17, he crossed the waters to America, enticed to join the flagging Union Army in exchange for a bounty and citizenship; just before landing in Boston, he jumped ship, swam across the icy harbor, and presented himself directly to the enlistment officers so that he would not have to split the bounty with the agent who recruited him. Charming and well-educated, he easily won his commanders’ trust. After the war, penniless and without prospects, he made his way to St. Louis, where he worked his way up from gravedigger and laborer to reporter for a German-language daily. In 1878 he bought the ailing St. Louis Post-Dispatch for $2,500 and started making a name for himself as a publisher. A born muckraker, he magnified minor-league tales to scandalous proportions, insisting that he was serving the public good by revealing the misdeeds of the powerful and influential. (An example: A minister who had just taken a swig of cold medicine took a seat on a streetcar. The young woman next to him, offended by the smell of alcohol, took another seat. End of story—but the Post-Dispatch’s headline? “A Shocking Story of a Divine.”) The reporters Pulitzer hired, among them Nellie Bly, Stephen Crane, and Irwin S. Cobb, served him well as he went head-to-head with ferociously anti-Semitic rival publisher William Randolph Hearst, played at king-making, warmongering, and politics, and made a huge fortune with which he endowed the prize that bears his name, as well as Columbia University’s famed School of Journalism.
A solid biography, of interest to students of journalism and American history.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-471-33200-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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