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
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.
A moving, emotionally charged memoir of the renowned author’s youth in a newly created Israel.
“Almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days,” writes novelist Oz (The Same Sea, 2001, etc.) of the 1940s, “was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer.” Oz’s uncle Joseph Klausner, for instance, kept a 25,000-volume library in every conceivable language, its dusty volumes providing a madeleine for the young writer, “the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship,” even as his grandmother contemplated the dusty air of the Levant and concluded that the region was full of germs, whence “a thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soaps, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and powder always hung in the air.” His own father had to sell his beloved books in order to buy food when money was short, though he often returned with more books. (“My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweetcorn and icecream.”) Out in the street, Oz meets a young Palestinian woman who is determined to write great poems in French and English; cats bear such names as Schopenhauer and Chopin; the walls of the city ring with music and learned debate. But then there is the dark side: the war of 1948, with its Arab Legion snipers and stray shells, its heaps of dead new emigrants fresh from the Holocaust. “In Nehemiah Street,” writes Oz, “once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they’ll burn us all.” In this heady, dangerous atmosphere, torn by sectarian politics and the constant threat of terror, Oz comes of age, blossoming as a man of letters even as the bookish people of his youth begin to disappear one by one.
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100878-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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