A substantial and useful study of the underknown pioneer whose conviction and energy did much to shape the content and...
The man behind Murrow and much more.
Engelman (Journalism/Long Island Univ.; Public Radio and Television in America: A Political History, 1996) examines the life and career of influential and controversial news producer Fred Friendly (1915–98), best known for his long association with crusading journalist Edward R. Murrow. Born Ferdinand F. Wachenheimer, Friendly was one of the most profoundly influential figures in the history of broadcast journalism. After successfully producing a series of innovative news programs for radio, he caught the attention of CBS News, where he teamed with Murrow to create Hear It Now and See It Now, radio and TV documentary series that re-created historic events for audiences. The Friendly/Murrow partnership capitalized on these successes to pursue increasingly provocative subject matter, such as an investigation of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist campaign, that frequently brought them into conflict with CBS founder William Paley. Named head of CBS News in 1964, Friendly resigned his post two years later when the network refused to preempt a rerun of I Love Lucy for live coverage of the Senate Foreign Relation Committee’s hearings on Vietnam. Dramatic, outsized, principled and self-promoting (he sent his letter of resignation to the New York Times), this action encapsulated the many contradictions at the heart of Friendly’s persona. Quotes from colleagues and friends describe him by turns as dynamic and domineering, warm and bullying and passionately idealistic and wearyingly petulant. Friendly continued to wield vast influence over his field after leaving CBS. He taught at Columbia’s Journalism School, established a highly regarded series of public seminars on media and virtually invented the concept of public television. Engelman’s comprehensive research—he cites the dyslexic Ferd Wachenheimer’s school report cards—brings his driven subject into vivid relief. The prose may be dryly academic, but the man, his times and his achievements come through.
A substantial and useful study of the underknown pioneer whose conviction and energy did much to shape the content and character of American broadcast journalism.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-231-13690-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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