A lively history of one man’s indelible imprint on American news.
The peripatetic life of a newspaper mogul.
When Roy Wilson Howard (1883-1964), director of the huge Scripps-Howard publishing company, celebrated his 50th anniversary as a newsman, he was lauded by the Cincinnati Times-Star as “a phenomenon of his generation—a born reporter and a top-flight executive, who has never forgotten that the reporter is the core of any newspaper.” Having risen from cub reporter to publisher on par with William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, he “was the ultimate example of the American success story.” Drawing on extensive family archives, Beard (A Certain Summer, 2013, etc.) offers a richly detailed portrait of the man and his times. Howard was energetic and determined but also arrogant, vain, impatient, and exacting. “You are unduly opinionated and intolerant,” he once admonished himself. “Cultivate a greater respect for the ideas and opinions of others even when these run counter to your own.” Early in his career, as president of United Press, Howard extended its reach worldwide, serving nearly 800 papers, with 48,000 wires daily. His prowess made him an internationally prominent figure within news circles and beyond, and that importance was significantly enhanced by his position in the Scripps-Howard organization. He found easy access to politicians, among them, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Dwight Eisenhower. An indefatigable traveler, Howard was given audiences by world leaders, as well: in 1936, he gained an interview with Hitler, who gave “nothing of the impression of a nut”; shortly afterward, he was in Moscow, shaking hands with Stalin. In 1939, in London, Howard met with Anthony Eden, lunched with Winston Churchill, and stopped at the American Embassy to see Joseph Kennedy. He lunched with Dag Hammarskjöld and was friendly with Francisco Franco and Chiang Kai-shek and his wife. He also had a good eye for staff, hiring top-notch editors and reporters, such as Ernie Pyle, but he never relinquished his need to control his vast corporation.
A lively history of one man’s indelible imprint on American news.Pub Date: May 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4930-1753-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
