A thoughtful record of the days when the going was good—and television was both informing and entertaining.
From veteran TV newsman and foreign correspondent Utley, a memoir of life in the newsgathering business.
Utley, the son of a noted radio announcer, is here more intent on describing the changes he has witnessed in television than offering confessional details of his private life. He joined NBC in 1963 (after college and military service) as its stringer in Brussels, where his boss was John Chancellor—a useful contact and good friend. Posted next to Vietnam, he was able to witness the war escalate firsthand as the US presence increased. During the years that Utley covered the war, television became an important player in shaping public opinion, and it was clear to him then that the visual reporting was in large part responsible for America’s losing the battle to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese. He suggests that 1963 (when polls found for the first time that a majority of Americans got their news from TV) was the year that the US finally became a television society, and he sees the years that followed as a golden age of television news programs—when Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, and Walter Cronkite became revered national icons. But he also observes that “if in the 1960s the news on television was the reporting of events, in the 1970s it was increasingly about how to attract viewers and a mass audience.” He recalls how these changes affected his career, describes interviews with such notables as Anwar Sadat and Albert Speer, relates his experiences covering overseas wars, and includes such “soft” news stories as a Club Med ski trip to Switzerland. Although realistic about the end of television as he once knew it (and the networks’ current preference for stories that entertain or invite empathy), Utley is optimistic that cable stations like C-SPAN will provide a niche for serious new broadcasts.
A thoughtful record of the days when the going was good—and television was both informing and entertaining.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-891620-94-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2000
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
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