An illuminating TV show biography that will appeal most to fans, but no need to read it all at once.
Insider accounts of 60 Minutes, published in conjunction with the program’s 50th anniversary (and counting), a milestone that makes it the longest airing show in the history of TV.
A mixture of professional and personal gossip, as well as accounts of controversial episodes aired during the hour each Sunday evening (as well as other time slots during the early years), the book is mostly chronological, with one major exception. 60 Minutes executive producer and former CBS news chairman Fager begins with the third decade (1988-1998) because he believes that demonstrating the saga of the program after it reached maturity is the most effective way to help readers understand both the internal dynamics and the external impacts. Following the first section, the author travels back to the first decade and then settles into chronology with decades two, four, and five. Always at the center of the saga is founder Don Hewitt (1922-2009), portrayed as a benevolent newsroom dictator who mercilessly drove the show’s producers and on-air correspondents. Almost every correspondent receives attention from Fager, who tells of journalistic and personal blemishes as well as successes. Mike Wallace is clearly the most dominant of the talent portrayed here, followed by Morley Safer, Harry Reasoner, Ed Bradley, Lesley Stahl, Steve Kroft, and Scott Pelley. To his credit, the author also offers detailed insights into many of the program’s producers, who are rarely seen by viewers but generate most of the story ideas and conduct most of the reporting. Fager provides an up-to-date account, noting the rise of Donald Trump and the eight pre-presidential Trump episodes on 60 Minutes, including one about how he drove up rents to perhaps illegally evict tenants in his residential buildings. The author covers so many stories—about domestic politics, corporate wrongdoing, global wars, celebrity high jinks, adoring profiles, among dozens of others—that the book is best consumed a few pages per sitting.
An illuminating TV show biography that will appeal most to fans, but no need to read it all at once.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3580-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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 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.
