A thoughtful if sometimes ponderous history of the capital’s newshounds from the New Deal to the present.
A journalist or two probably followed Abe Lincoln around, and we know that ink-stained wretches dogged Jefferson and Adams. But, US Senate associate historian Ritchie writes, the numbers have changed: “More Washingtonians hold press passes than hold office.” Given such odds, it’s amazing that anyone can keep a secret inside the Beltway, but secrets are kept all the same—in part, one might infer, because even if Washington journalists tend to be liberal, they are also part of a culture that serves them very well, meaning, as Russell Baker observed, “They are, in the pure sense of the word, extremely conservative.” Respect for and even deference to authority have never been much of a problem, then, even when politicians do not merit such consideration; as Ritchie notes, the collective DC press gave Joe McCarthy a pass for years, and McCarthy obliged by presenting reporters with cases of Wisconsin beer and wheels of Wisconsin cheese until finally playing out his Red Scare card. Early newsman Arthur Krock, the New York Times’s man at the White House, managed to tick off FDR so much that the president fed information to anyone but him. Krock got his revenge by being appointed DC bureau chief and pestering FDR for the remainder of his years in office, but by the time the country got around to Nixon, Woodward and Bernstein had to pound on a lot of desks to get their paper to pay attention to the misdoings on Pennsylvania Avenue. Today, Ritchie suggests, journalists still tend to go easy on politicians. And if in the wake of 9/11, Washington’s journalists take themselves more seriously and push for harder information, many still “discard some of their professional distance to rally around the flag and the president.”
Academic in tone, though full of good dish about the likes of Lippman and the Alsops. Of much interest to students of national politics and the media.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-19-517861-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
Categories: HISTORY | BUSINESS | UNITED STATES | SALES & MARKETING | GENERAL BUSINESS | GENERAL HISTORY
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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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