Inspiring bios of today’s professional heroines.
The long, lonely, unlovely scramble to making it to the top in TV news.
As she did in her fluid multitiered biography Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon—and the Journey of Generation (2008), Vanity Fair contributor Weller takes apart feminist icons of her generation—those who came of age in the 1960s and ’70s—to see how they work and how they made it to prime time. Here, concentrating on the three women of corporate TV news who are still at their peaks—Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric and Christiane Amanpour (the author ignores Judy Woodruff and Gwen Ifill)—Weller finds in their examples bracing tales of tenacity against a bastion of sexism during a time when established newscasters like Harry Reasoner believed women simply did not belong on the air. The passage of Title IX in June 1972 compelled the networks to hire a certain percentage of women or face discrimination lawsuits, and hence Leslie Stahl and Connie Chung got their starts, paving the way for others. At NBC’s Today Show, Couric would benefit from the battle-scarred promotions of predecessors Barbara Walters and Jane Pauley. Sawyer, curiously, languished for four years after Watergate aiding the disgraced President Richard Nixon in writing his autobiography; thus, the brainy, “mysterious,” hardworking reporter had to overcome a stigma when she first came aboard CBS News in 1978. Amanpour, born in London to an Iranian family, became a tireless, well-respected crusading international correspondent for CNN; she was especially instrumental in bringing the Bosnian catastrophe to American attention. Amanpour also had to overcome bias toward women in the field, as well as with regard to her English accent. Weller is most admiring of Amanpour’s gutsiness, rather hardest on “America’s sweetheart” Couric, and clearly smitten with Sawyer.
Inspiring bios of today’s professional heroines.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1594204272
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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