A top journalist's engaging, worldly-wise account of a 35-year career in what, on the evidence of his wryly anecdotal text, comes off as the news game. All told, Corry spent 31 years with The New York Times (where, in the 1950's, he started as a copyboy in the sports department). Now a fellow at Columbia's Gannett Center for Media Studies, he forsook his otherwise lifelong employer in 1969 for Harper's, returning in 1971 to the Times after Willie Morris had been ousted as editor of that magazine. During his tenure at both publications, Corry formed strong and independent opinions on Manhattan's viscerally liberal literary establishment, as well as on its governance and cafe society. Never forgetting that the access he enjoyed almost anywhere in the world was more institutional than personal, the author covered a wealth of stories at home and abroad—stories ranging from Castro's Cuba through the suicide of Phillip Graham (then head of The Washington Post); political prisoners erroneously believed to be held by a Greek junta; Jackie O.; and Jerzy Kosinski (whose vilification by The Village Voice Corry rebutted in a lengthy Times article). Moreover, as a longtime proprietor of the Times's ``About New York'' column, the author offered readers perceptive takes on the city's haut monde and lesser lights. But he didn't write (as he does here with rueful wit) of his crumbling marriage, financial woes, love affairs, and problems with alcohol. Nor did he pass the sort of public judgment he passes here on famed colleagues and contemporaries—David Halberstam, John Lindsay, Norman Mailer, William Paley, Harrison Salisbury (who ``never met a revolution he didn't like''), William Styron, et al.—though, during a stint as the paper's TV critic, he had a lot to say about the media's handling of news. An absorbing memoir of a journalist's life during the best and worst of times.
Pub Date: Jan. 26, 1994
ISBN: 0-399-13886-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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