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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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