While raising plenty of significant issues, Greenhouse’s themes remain open to spirited debate.
A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist reflects on the changes and flaws within her profession.
Best known for her decades covering the Supreme Court beat for the New York Times, Greenhouse (Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun’s Supreme Court Journey, 2005) writes frankly of her frustrations at the Times and with journalism in general. Too often, she believes, journalists have pulled their punches, sacrificing truth as they perceive it before the false gods of fairness and objectivity. “The opposite of objectivity isn’t partisanship, or needn’t be,” she writes. “Rather, it is judgment, the hard work of sorting out the false claims from the true and discarding or at least labeling the false.” Greenhouse shows what significant strides journalism has made in what she calls “the post-truth age,” when news stories and headlines now employ language once reserved for opinion pieces or for private conversations among journalists. If a candidate, or even a president, tells a lie, her former paper no longer has qualms about labeling it as such. Yet some will continue to find bias in such labeling and will see what is offered as context or analysis as opinion. The author asks, “does ‘objectivity,’ with its mantra of ‘fairness and balance,’ too often inhibit journalists from separating fact from fiction and from fulfilling the duty to help maintain an informed citizenry in a democracy?” From her perspective, the question is rhetorical, and the answer is apparent. Yet this brief book of argument and anecdote presents a minefield of challenges that journalism itself is far from unified over how to face. And the ground keeps shifting as the mainstream press does its best to remain a watchdog while resisting the label of adversary. The third and final section of the book recounts Greenhouse’s newspaper career, showing how much things have changed since the days when women were an anomaly in the profession, deadlines determined the news cycle, and the internet and smartphones were hard to imagine.
While raising plenty of significant issues, Greenhouse’s themes remain open to spirited debate.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-674-98033-4
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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