Having predicted that high-profile news readers were an endangered species in Anchors (1990), the Goldbergs follow up with a dirt-dishing biography of the madcap media mogul who has done as much as anyone to imperil network television. While they steer clear of value judgments on whether Robert Edward (``Ted'') Turner III has been a force for good or ill, the authors make a fine job of recounting how he built a transnational Atlanta-based empire that encompasses a half-dozen TV networks (including CNN), the MGM film library, pro sports franchises, movie studios, satellite facilities, and allied show-biz assets. Wall Street Journal correspondent Robert Goldberg and father Gerald (an emeritus professor of English at UCLA) also offer credible perspectives on the pivotal role a domineering, alcoholic parent played in the development of their subject's career and character. By their authoritative anecdotal account, Turner (b. 1938) has been a world-class philanderer, toper, and yachtsman as well as entrepreneur. Even so, the thrice-married (most recently to Jane Fonda) Turner has done more than well for himself. Among other unlikely accomplishments, he created an immensely influential (and now profitable) infotainment enterprise from the regional billboard-advertising firm he inherited after his father's suicide. An ultracompetitive operator, ``Terrible Ted'' (as he's known to friend and foe alike) relishes going against the grain of conventional wisdom in the cable-television industry and elsewhere. Nor does the so-called Mouth of the South shy from broadcasting either his idiosyncratic opinions or bedroom and boardroom conquests. Along his wayward ascent, however, Turner acquired a social conscience; at any rate, the erstwhile archconservative now devotes much of considerable energy to environmental causes and international peace. A gossipy, human-scale rundown on an American original whose larger-than-life ambitions and appetites have yet to be sated. (16 pages photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-15-118008-3
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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