Miller might possess just cause, but one-sided, bitter accounts of her disputes feel unworthy of a talented journalist.
Miller (God Has Ninety-Nine Names: Reporting From a Militant Middle East, 1997, etc.) offers her account of her ignominious departure from the New York Times in 2005 due to her allegedly inaccurate coverage about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Unsurprisingly, the author claims that Times editors, fellow reporters, and various other parties used her as a scapegoat after President George W. Bush and his advisers decided to invade Iraq on the basis of reporting by Miller (as well as various government agency assessments) that the rogue nation posed a danger to the United States. Yes, Miller reveals, she misjudged information provided to her by sources inside and outside Iraq. However, she adds, she did her best to vet her sources in an atmosphere that made separating truth from lies nearly impossible. Along the way to her qualified mea culpa, Miller shares accounts from her four decades of global and domestic journalism. As a memoir of high-stakes journalism, the book is solid. It is especially revealing about why she decided to go to prison for contempt of court rather than reveal a confidential source related to the outing of Valerie Plame, who was secretly employed by the CIA. Prior to her dismissal from the Times, Miller spent 85 days in prison because she felt a professional obligation to honor a promise of source confidentiality. When the author reveals snippets about her personal life, she admirably addresses rumors of romances with powerful men, including a member of Congress. Her occasional references to her late-in-life marriage to book publishing guru Jason Epstein reveal their sometimes-differing viewpoints about domestic life and about reporting risks. Unfortunately, the memoir is marred by frequent score-settling, especially aimed at New York Times editors and publishers.
Miller might possess just cause, but one-sided, bitter accounts of her disputes feel unworthy of a talented journalist.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1601-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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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