Good reading for students of journalism and for general readers interested in the history of an extraordinary institution,...
Short biography of the man who turned the Wall Street Journal into the most successful paper in America.
Having taken only a single economics course at DePauw University, Barney Kilgore arrived in New York City in 1929 to accept a reporting job at the Journal a mere seven weeks before the biggest market meltdown in the nation’s history. During the course of his nearly 40-year career he would hold every important position at the paper, revolutionize the notion of business news and turn the enterprise founded by Charles Dow and Edward Jones into a national force. As a field reporter during the Great Depression, Kilgore wrote not for bankers, but for bank depositors, for and from the perspective not of insiders, but of readers, believing business news should be broadly understood as affecting everyone who makes a living. Despite access to a trove of Kilgore’s personal letters, former Journal assistant publisher Tofel (Sounding the Trumpet: The Making of John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address, 2005, etc.) recovers little of this buttoned-up Midwesterner’s inner life, but the story here is mostly about the Journal’s transformation. The author supplies a potted history of the paper, a look at the Bancroft family (especially C.W. Barron), who owned the Journal for 105 years, and mini-portraits of Bill Kerby, Vermont Royster, William Henry Grimes and Casey Hogate, all instrumental to the rise of Kilgore and the Journal. The changes Kilgore wrought, stylistic and substantive, included using anecdotal leads and “nut grafs” to give stories a magazine feel, employing front-page news summaries, establishing nationwide printing plants, adopting the Electric-Typesetter and attending to the new science of opinion polling. All helped shoot the Journal ahead of competitors, giving the paper sufficient clout and credibility to prevail in a memorable 1955 face-off with the country’s largest corporation, General Motors, when the unhappy giant threatened to pull advertising over a dispute with the paper’s coverage.
Good reading for students of journalism and for general readers interested in the history of an extraordinary institution, acquired last year by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-53674-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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
PERSPECTIVES
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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