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 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
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