Three women at moments of crisis in their lives, captured in empathetic and revealing portraits. As Washington Post reporter Walsh points out, the three women are accomplished, well known in their spheres, but not all ready for prime-time celebrity coverage. Meredith Vieira, a television reporter who made it briefly as a 60 Minutes correspondent, struggles with CBS to accommodate her life as both a mother and as a reporter. Rachael Worby, trying to reconcile her dual roles as an orchestra conductor and wife of the governor of West Virginia, is seen during one of her husband's critical campaigns for reelection. Alison Estabrook fights to head the breast surgery group at New York City's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center after being passed over because she is a woman. There is drama inherent in each of these tales. Will 60 Minutes let Vieira work from home? Can music balance politics in the life of Worby? Will Estabrook reach her goal? The answers are no, maybe, and yes. That can be told because the meat of this book is not in the climaxes, but in the extraordinary way these women reveal themselves. After a long struggle to get pregnant, Vieira has her first child just as her career takes off. Although the network cooperates with her demands for flextime and her husband has a flexible schedule that can meet the demands of parenting even as two more children arrive, she makes the painful discovery that she does not want to relinquish her powers in the home any more than she wants to give up the power of 60 Minutes. It is a not-always-pretty confrontation with self that many women face. The stories of Worby and Estabrook offer similar revelations and a similar resonance. Stories both unique and universal, notable for illuminating the gremlins of thought and feeling that drive most lives.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80401-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
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 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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
