by Paul Matzko ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2020
Students of modern American politics and the sociology of communication will find this provocative, worthy reading.
A scholarly but accessible account of how John F. Kennedy’s administration’s battle against right-wing critics paved a path for the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and their ilk.
Censorship is widely understood to be something that right-leaning institutions and corporations do to left-leaning critics. However, as Cato Institute staffer Matzko writes, in the case of radio bloviators such as Carl McIntire and Billy James Hargis, the roles were reversed. The story turns on the opening of the AM spectrum to syndicators at a time when formerly dominant networks such as CBS switched their attention to TV. Into the gap came right-wing commentators who set to work denouncing liberalism, Cold War accommodationism, and Kennedy’s Catholicism—all of which required payback. Matzko attributes the rise of these nationally syndicated programs, in part, to the ability to take local protests national: A Miami boycott of Polish (and therefore communist) ham went nationwide almost overnight thanks to relentless promotion by McIntire, a New Jersey–based fundamentalist preacher who, over several years in the 1960s, “averaged $2,040,000 in annual receipts”—about $16.8 million today, chump change compared to what his modern counterparts earn but still substantial. The Kennedy administration employed tools such as IRS audits and FCC regulations to crack down on right-wing dissent, guided by the Reuther Memorandum. The selective use of the since-abandoned Fairness Doctrine, which required stations broadcasting McIntire’s “20th Century Reformation Hour” to devote equal time to opposing viewpoints, helped bring down that syndicated program. (When it ended, McIntire attempted to broadcast offshore, which lasted a single day.) Apart from telling this little-known story, Matzko argues, reasonably, that the actions of the Kennedy administration helped reinforce grievances “about the perceived liberal domination of the mainstream media,” complaints about which are the bread and butter of the right even today.
Students of modern American politics and the sociology of communication will find this provocative, worthy reading.Pub Date: May 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-19-007322-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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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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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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