Hoffmann (Journalism/Old Dominion Univ.) compellingly argues that one of America's most distinguished journalists used his prestige and eloquence to manufacture influential illusions about great men and events rather than to tell the truth as he saw it. The Jewish son of a radical socialist father and a deeply religious and patriotic mother, Theodore H. White grew up a poor outsider in Boston of the '20s and '30s. Accepted to Harvard but unable to afford it, he worked as a newsboy for two years, reapplied, and was accepted again, this time with a scholarship. According to Hoffmann, these experiences imbued in White a deep desire to be accepted that ``encumbered [his] life.'' In China after graduation, White he accepted a job with the Nationalist Chinese Ministry of Information, essentially producing propaganda for Chiang Kai-shek's embattled regime, while also acting as a correspondent for the Boston Globe. Later White became China correspondent for Henry Luce's Time magazine. Hoffmann argues that White compromised his journalistic integrity, writing glowing articles about Chiang despite inner convictions (expressed to friends) that the Kuomintang regime was brutal, corrupt, and incompetent. As the war progressed, his reporting became more truthful, but he ``would discover that after having created a false image in the public consciousness, correcting that image was enormously difficult.'' According to Hoffmann, White's work created a consensus in American public life that tended to trust the decisions of the American government during WW II and the Cold War. The culmination of this process was White's involvement in the Kennedy administration (his classic The Making of the President 1960 made a hero of JFK) and his self-conscious creation, with Jacqueline Kennedy, of the myth of Camelot. Hoffmann shows that White's adulatory coverage of subsequent presidents sprang from his love of his hard-won position as a journalistic ``insider'' in the world of policymaking. A fist-rate look at how newsand historycan be created and manipulated.
Pub Date: July 28, 1995
ISBN: 0-8262-1010-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
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
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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