A methodical, sober eyeful for Times devotees and a guiding light for aspiring journalists.
Phelps looks back on a long journalistic career, focusing on his 20 years at the newspaper industry's famous Gray Lady.
The author covers all the requisite bases, beginning with childhood, early struggles over spirituality and schooling and the conflicts he experienced as a pacifist serving as an enlisted navy correspondent. Phelps found his calling as a slave laborer at United Press, then was a copyeditor at the Providence Journal-Bulletin for a few years. The bulk of the memoir concerns his years at the New York Times, where he became news editor of the Washington bureau in 1964. In a clear, professional voice, he writes of bringing balance to reporting, getting the facts straight and digestible and generating the trust that readers must have with their paper of choice. He honed those skills at a time when Vietnam and Watergate were undermining American citizens’ innate faith in government. Phelps explores the Times' scoops and snafus during that seminal era, as well as dynamics within the organization that shaped how news was gathered, framed and delivered. Profiles of Times characters, from A.M. Rosenthal to Max Frankel, are trenchant, as is the author’s dissection of newsroom politics, but what sings is his short course on the journalistic everyday: “The lesson of the Pentagon Papers went beyond distrusting government sources. Whistleblowers should also be distrusted and should be checked as vigorously.” A reporter “should not assume the role of a defense attorney,” avers the author, “but of a judge, making sure all questions are answered.” In 1974 Phelps moved to the Boston Globe, where he played an instrumental role in the paper’s Pulitzer Prize–winning coverage of school desegregation. Though he describes this period as “a coda” to his Times career, it produces some of his most impassioned writing on the responsibility of newspapers to convey information as objectively as possible, so readers can make fully informed judgments.
A methodical, sober eyeful for Times devotees and a guiding light for aspiring journalists.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8156-0914-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Syracuse Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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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