MEMOIRS OF A MAVERICK PUBLISHER

At the age of 76, Stern looks back upon a vivid career of more than half a century as publisher of important newspapers in Seattle, Providence, New York City, Camden, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. He and his wife have solid reputations in community service work as well, and he has been consulted by Presidents and other important personages concerning matters political and economic, foreign and domestic. He has definite, often controversial, opinions on the present state of the Fourth Estate, and does not hesitate to diagnose its ills or back up his convictions with statistics. He was one of the first to encourage the Newspaper Guild, and later had at least partial reason to it. He participated -- albeit reluctantly -- in the increasing trend toward monopoly publishing, and learned to deplore its detrimental political effects. He excoriates businessmen so single-minded they lose track of current events, and protests the editorial page's nearly universal loss of local effectiveness. His solutions are implicit, rather than , but as a long look into journalistic life at its apogee, this is .