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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
