A thoroughly researched work replete with intelligence, admiration, balanced criticism, and even a bit of nostalgia.
A generous description and analysis of Firing Line, the weekly TV show hosted for three decades by conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr.
Early on, Hendershot (Film and Media/MIT; What's Fair on the Air?: Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest, 2011, etc.) identifies herself as a liberal, but her work is suffused with a fair and balanced approach to the show that eventually found its home on PBS, where it ran for most of its 33 years (1966-1999). The author’s research is formidable: interviews, major reliance on National Review (the magazine Buckley founded in 1955), and a comprehensive familiarity with the guests and topics on the show, a familiarity clearly acquired by many hours at the video monitor and many hours of reading transcripts. Hendershot’s approach is generally topical and thematic rather than mercilessly chronological. She teaches us about some of the key issues Buckley presented and debated on the program, including Vietnam War crimes, anti-communism, Ronald Reagan’s brand of conservatism, Black Power, and the women’s movement, among others. Continually, Hendershot reveals Buckley’s humor, his enormous vocabulary, his generosity with guests (many of whom he genially eviscerated), and his patrician deference and insistence on decorum. She sometimes becomes a sort of ex post facto judge of the debates, declaring winners and losers. She also shows us the nuts and bolts of the program, especially the determined plainness, even severity, of its simple set and visual effects, virtually unchanged from the show’s inception. Periodically—and especially toward the end—Hendershot attacks the impoverished situation of political debate on TV today, and she notes with sadness the return of conspiratorial thinking, which Buckley had worked hard to shove into the shadows.
A thoroughly researched work replete with intelligence, admiration, balanced criticism, and even a bit of nostalgia.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-243045-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Broadside Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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 2026 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.
