A fascinating, if somewhat distant, portrait of a cultural icon who happened to also be a mom.
Slate.com political correspondent Dickerson explores his mother’s complicated legacy.
In the 1960s, Nancy Dickerson was one of America’s favorite reporters, rising to TV stardom with a combination of Christiane Amanpour’s reporting skills, Katie Couric’s charm and Jackie O’s sophisticated good looks. Her son attributes Nancy’s success in the male preserve of broadcast journalism to hard work and charisma. Born Nancy Hanschman in 1927, she studied with a speech coach and endeared herself to leading Washington hostesses, who taught her the art of scintillating conversation. An affair with Congressman Ken Keating also greased a few wheels; the author believes the rumors of affairs with JFK and LBJ were false. She married widower Wyatt Dickerson in 1962; John was born in 1968. As a mother, Nancy occupied the large middle ground between Joan Crawford and Carol Brady. She gained only ten pounds when pregnant—“No wonder I had to go to all those doctors in adolescence. She starved me,” John writes with a touch of both humor and pathos, referring to more than just food. Her son doesn’t dwell on Nancy-as-feminist-role-model: He’s sympathetic to the sexism that dogged her, yet he raises some subtle questions about her tactics for breaking through the glass ceiling. Going back to work two weeks after giving birth provided a model for other women that was, in his view, “stoic, but not very helpful.” John’s narrative sometimes moves from his mother’s reporting in the 1960s to his own experiences in the same profession. The chapter on Nancy’s coverage of JFK’s assassination, for example, ends with his recollections of covering the disappearance of John Jr.’s plane over Martha’s Vineyard 36 years later. But these autobiographical touches are basically asides; John writes principally as a journalist digging up the facts about Nancy’s life, and at times, one wishes he would open up a bit more about his own feelings.
A fascinating, if somewhat distant, portrait of a cultural icon who happened to also be a mom.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-8783-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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 2025 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.
