An entertaining and mostly admiring life of the legendary columnist.
Biography of a significant voice in 20th-century journalism.
When newspapers were the primary source of news, nearly everyone read Drew Pearson (1897-1969), whose daily column and weekly radio broadcasts expressed strong opinions and revealed government secrets. Though they were often scurrilous and occasionally wrong, they were never ignored. Recent historians have been less than kind, but Ritchie, historian emeritus of the U.S. Senate, draws a more favorable portrait than any during Pearson’s lifetime and brings to life one of the golden ages of investigative journalism. The bestseller Washington-Merry-Go-Round, a spicy political exposé written by Pearson and a colleague, appeared in 1931, and both veteran reporters were fired. Already aggressive self-promoters, they sold the idea of a daily column, which debuted in 1932 as “a mix of important news, amusing events, brisk style, realistic reporting, and crusading spirit.” Before long, the “Washington-Merry-Go-Round” column was a massive success. Until Pearson’s sudden death from a heart attack, the column’s combination of rumor, punditry, and scandal made him a household name. As the author notes, “the columnist took credit for the indictment, imprisonment, censure, and expulsion of a half dozen members of Congress, and the defeat of many more.” A small army of loyal leg men trolled for dirt, but Pearson’s massive audience proved irresistible to elected officials and even presidents, who leaked information even as they denounced him in public. Although generally liberal, he was despised by FDR, Truman, and Kennedy no less than Eisenhower and Nixon. The column continued with his younger collaborator, Jack Anderson, before fading at the end of the century with the rise of the internet. Readers may weary of Ritchie’s relentless stream of half-forgotten scandals, but they will be intrigued by his portrait of a time when muckrakers raked whatever muck they found. Today, with politics polarized into near immobility, commentators still attack government malfeasance, but hard evidence is increasingly irrelevant to their audience, to whom truth is whatever conforms to their ideology.
An entertaining and mostly admiring life of the legendary columnist.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-19-006758-8
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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