by Mitchell Stephens ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 20, 2017
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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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