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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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