A personal story that reveals much about the evolution of American liberalism.
Workmanlike biography of the woman who for 40 years owned and published the New York Post.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Dorothy Schiff (1903–89) is that she ever managed to break out of the decorative role assigned by her wealthy German-Jewish parents and grow into a person with ideas of her own. Documentary producer Nissenson, making her print debut, emphasizes her subject’s progressive views, privileged background and good use of numerous husbands and boyfriends. Schiff’s first marriage, to unserious gentile party boy Dick Hall, removed her from her parents’ watch and gave her two children in quick succession. Second husband George Backer brought her into a literary, theatrical circle, and she got an initial taste of politics while working for FDR’s 1936 reelection campaign. In 1939, the Backers acquired the reputedly radical Post, whose draining debts Schiff would devotedly assume for the next 40 years. Three years later, she kicked her husband out and took control of the paper; in 1943, she married enterprising Post editor Ted Thackrey, who had shown her the ropes. The Post’s liberal, pro-Zionist, anti-communist stance was favored by Jewish immigrants and the working classes. After she divorced Thackrey in 1949, Schiff made the paper economically viable by courting advertisers and bringing on strong, loyal editors and writers such as James Wechsler, Paul Sann, Murray Kempton, Max Lerner, Pete Hamill, Alice Davidson, Sylvia Porter and Ted Poston, one of the first black reporters at a New York newspaper. She stuck to her New Deal ideals through the 1950s, though the paper lost its muckraking zeal and its financial fortunes began to decline in the late ’60s. Schiff sold it to Rupert Murdoch, its owner today, in 1976.
A personal story that reveals much about the evolution of American liberalism.Pub Date: April 5, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-31310-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
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
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