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IT’S NEWS TO ME

Name: IT’S NEWS TO ME
Author: Edward Kosner
ISBN: 1-56025-907-8

THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF AN EDITOR

by Edward Kosner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 25, 2006

A compelling chronicle that follows a journalist—and journalism—from the age of typewriters to the era of BlackBerries.

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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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)