Maddow’s own voice dominates a brisk, largely by-the-numbers biography.
Journalist Rogak (Angry Optimist: The Life and Times of Jon Stewart, 2014, etc.), who has profiled Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, rounds out her take on controversial TV personalities with a breezy biography of MSNBC anchor and political pundit Rachel Maddow.
Rachel, as the author chummily refers to her, has spoken candidly about herself in many print interviews, speeches, and talk show appearances, material that Rogak liberally mines. The result is a book so filled with quotations that it reads like a very long interview. Readers will discover that Maddow first came out as an undergraduate at Stanford, where she became “the most visible out lesbian on campus” and involved herself in gay and lesbian organizations. She also devoted herself to AIDS activism, choosing courses that would give her a rigorous background in public policy and health policy. A stellar student, she won a prestigious Rhodes scholarship that funded a doctorate program at Oxford, where she wrote a thesis on “HIV/AIDS and Health Care Reform in British and American Prisons.” Returning to the U.S., Maddow continued activism and floated among menial jobs before she landed a gig at a local radio station, where “she was surprised to discover that the thing she enjoyed most was to provide her own spin on the topics of the day.” Rogak reiterates Maddow’s goal to “help people” by “disseminating information backed by knowledge and fact and tempered with concern and more than a little bit of humor.” In 2004, she graduated from the local station to the newly formed Air America, where she started as a “rip-and-read newsgirl” and ended with her own two-hour show. In 2008, MSNBC offered her an exclusive contract. Among Rogak’s revelations is Maddow’s love of making artfully crafted cocktails; her meticulous pre-show preparation, spurred by her fear of failure; and her reluctance to marry her beloved partner because of “qualms” about assimilating into the mainstream and losing her identity with gay culture.
Maddow’s own voice dominates a brisk, largely by-the-numbers biography.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-29824-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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