A compelling chronicle that follows a journalist—and journalism—from the age of typewriters to the era of BlackBerries.
Veteran journalist Kosner offers a meaty memoir that begins with his geeky childhood and ends with his retirement from the New York Daily News.
The author opens his debut with what he calls “the worst thing that ever happened to me”: his firing from Newsweek by Katharine Graham. He later deals with this incident much more thoroughly, but at this point, Kosner turns back to explore his boyhood. He was very bright, wore glasses and was tormented, he says, offering some nostalgic glimpses of summers in Long Beach, visits to museums and the Automat. His journalism career began at P.S. 173, where he edited the mimeographed school newspaper. Next: Bronx High School of Science, where he had trouble with science. Then: City College, where Kosner found his calling on the college paper. He discovered he had the faculties needed for journalism: a news sense, the ability to produce good copy on deadline, tirelessness. His first job was with the New York Post. Soon he was a husband and father, but his profession made it difficult for him to be home much; the marriage suffered and then ended. He moved to Newsweek in 1963, rose through the ranks, got fired in 1979 due in part to his own management failures, which he candidly acknowledges. Meanwhile, he’d met wife number two and embarked on a much more successful union. Kosner’s happiest years were at New York magazine; he got along well with owner Rupert Murdoch and lunched with literary celebrities, but left when the magnate sold the magazine to a vulpine bunch of bottom-liners. Then it was Esquire, but he could not resuscitate the moribund monthly. And finally, the Daily News. Mort Zuckerman, the author says, was the worst owner he ever worked for. Kosner doesn’t quit soon enough, appending a superfluous pile of chestnuts about life that he recently offered at a high-school commencement. And bloggers, he sniffs, are “assholes with opinions.”
A compelling chronicle that follows a journalist—and journalism—from the age of typewriters to the era of BlackBerries.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2006
ISBN: 1-56025-907-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
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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