A deep, nuanced and indignant indictment of the players who have made investigative journalism harder to conduct, even if...
A respected investigative journalist perceived as having a political chip on her shoulder when she left CBS reveals a deeper story.
With more than 30 years in broadcast journalism, Attkisson has received five Emmys and an Edward R. Murrow Award for her work. She makes the claim that she was as doggedly the scourge of Republican administrations as Democratic ones. But with unrelenting coverage of the flubbed healthcare.gov rollout, Benghazi, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' Operation Fast and Furious, the flawed gun-running operation, the author argues that the convergence of a thin-skinned Obama administration’s reaction to her work and “skittish,” liberal ideological news managers at CBS made the climate for her investigative work untenable. (She goes so far as to say that Evening News with Scott Pelley executive producer Pat Shevlin “sometimes had a difficult time grasping complex stories.”) Finding it increasingly difficult to get her segments aired as she conceived of them, Attkisson eventually negotiated a departure from the network—but not before a long, mysterious bout of sophisticated hacking of her computer occurred (the author intimates in the book that someone inside the federal government is responsible and her telling of the hacking makes for thrilling reading). The fact that Attkisson joined the staff of the Daily Signal, the news site funded by the Heritage Foundation, after leaving CBS may indicate she’s conservative by nature, but she doesn’t blindly repeat Republican talking points. Instead, she’s more concerned that politicians on both sides of the aisle often forget that they serve everyday citizens rather than the rich and powerful. “[The politicians] think they own your tax dollars,” she writes. “They think they own the information their agencies gather on the public’s behalf. They think they’re entitled to keep that information from the rest of us and…they’re bloody incensed that we want it.”
A deep, nuanced and indignant indictment of the players who have made investigative journalism harder to conduct, even if those actors are other journalists.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-232284-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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