A breezy yet informative behind-the-microphone look at how the news is reported—and at why and how the Fourth Estate has become one of the most reviled professional categories in America today. Veteran CBS reporter Stahl entered TV journalism in an era when women were supposed to provide pleasant filler, but soon she made a name for herself, after she was assigned to cover a “third-rate burglary” that turned into Watergate. And what a niche she carved: two decades covering the White House during the Carter, Reagan, and Bush presidencies, eight years at the helm of Face the Nation, and eight years, so far, as a reporter for 60 Minutes. Stahl writes chattily and incisively of how the news is gathered, giving us insightful glimpses into some of this century’s most important news stories: Watergate, the Carter hostage crisis, Iran-Contra. Still, the book is more than a chronicle of one woman’s rise in journalism and her unreserved account of the trials of making it in a very male world. (Even so, Stahl the mother is refreshingly honest about her professional drive and how she’s managed to combine parenting with profession.) Rather, Reporting Live also takes an intriguing look at how journalism, especially TV journalism, has itself developed. The result is a fascinating chronicle reflecting Stahl’s views on both society and herself. Deregulation, for instance, in her judgment begat more stations even as technology begat more cable—and, yes, even more stations. As a result, TV journalists started “wet-fingering like the politicians, relying on polls so we could give the public what they wanted.” Exit hard-hitting, substantive news; enter tabloid news. News junkies will savor every sound-bite in this sassy memoir. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 13, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-82930-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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