An effective melding of political history and media criticism.
Former Newsweek and Los Angeles Times political correspondent Shogan (Backlash: The Killing of the New Deal, 2006, etc.) persuasively argues that the famous 1954 confrontation had a transformative effect on the nascent medium of television.
The Army-McCarthy hearings pitted hard-charging anticommunist Joseph McCarthy and his chief aide, Roy Cohn, against the U.S. Army and its lead attorney, Joseph Welch. The Army accused McCarthy and Cohn of pressuring the military to give preferential treatment to a McCarthy aide, G. David Schine, while the senator countered that the accusation was being made in retaliation for his investigations into Army officials. Shogan ably recounts the many twists and turns of the hearings, including Welch’s famous question to McCarthy (“Have you left no sense of decency?”), but it’s his media analysis that makes the book truly interesting. Television was in its infancy in 1954, but the widely watched live broadcasts of the hearings, as well as Edward R. Murrow’s televised critiques, undoubtedly helped speed the decline of McCarthy’s popularity. Caught in the stark spotlight of live television, his blustering, bullying manner worked disastrously against him. “McCarthy demonstrated with appalling clarity precisely what kind of man he is,” wrote James Reston in the New York Times. Shogan effectively argues that the hearings were a watershed moment for the medium of television, helping to transform it into a key shaper of American opinion. The author has written about the role of TV journalism in politics before, most notably in Bad News: Where the Press Goes Wrong in the Making of the President (2001), and his critiques remain sharp in the historical context of the ’50s. In the final chapter, he widens his view to analyze television’s impact on perceptions of the Vietnam War, presidential politics and 9/11, finding a preoccupation with flash over substance that he tracks back to TV’s infancy.
An effective melding of political history and media criticism.Pub Date: March 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-56663-770-1
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
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
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
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