An entertaining look at a unique journalist.
The first biography of a largely forgotten journalist, documentary producer, and groundbreaking radio newscaster.
Though Lowell Thomas (1892-1981) was the journalist who first documented T.E. Lawrence’s Arabian exploits and later enjoyed a long career as one of the first newscasters on national radio, he is not celebrated like Edward R. Murrow or Paul Harvey. Stephens (Journalism/New York Univ.; Beyond News: The Future of Journalism, 2014, etc.) captures the swashbuckling spirit of this early journalist, who cut his teeth at newspapers in Denver and Chicago while earning numerous degrees. One of his first jobs as a kind of far-flung travel correspondent, subsidized by the railroads, entailed traveling the country and even going to Alaska, trips that stoked his lifelong passion for travel. A person of “prodigious vitality,” Thomas styled himself an expert on Alaska after a few short weeks and began lecturing on the state (with “colored motion pictures”) at venues in New York. He excelled at public speaking, from lectures at Princeton University to Carnegie Hall, at a time (circa 1917) when the public was hungry to learn more and travel. With the outbreak of World War I, Thomas—“part journalist, part author, part world traveler, part adventurer”—finagled his way to the Middle East action via his own business venture (Thomas Travelogues, Inc.), hitching onto “Lawrence of Arabia’s” efforts to galvanize the Arab revolt and chronicling the action (along with Harry Chase) with realistic, and sensational, war footage, which was shown at home as a much-advertised “show.” The blustery Thomas, whose voice Stephens describes as “rich and bracing, even a bit tart,” was chosen to replace Floyd Gibbons on the first daily news brief on NBC (CBS in the West) on Sept. 28, 1930, and he worked at either network for the next 46 years.
An entertaining look at a unique journalist.Pub Date: June 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-137-27982-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
