Executive editor Cuozzo offers a surprisingly dignified, un-Post-ian memoir of his paper's fight for survival and the tabloidization of the American media. In March 1993 the ailing New York Post was fighting for its life. With the end in sight, Cuozzo pulled out all the stops: ``We might be dead, world—but oh, baby, they'll remember how we went out! And if we're gonna die after 192 years, damn it, we're gonna rock!'' With this bitchin' battle cry, he and a ragged editorial staff coopted the Post's own pages to fight the bankruptcy court that had awarded its ownership to a ``buffoon'': The tabloid of Alexander Hamilton and Pete Hamill had been passed on to Abe Hirschfeld, a builder of open-air parking lots and Manhattan's Vertical Club gyms. The Times applauded the staff's brassy, pungent rebellion. It had taken a long time to get a good review from the traditional journalistic establishment. Thirteen years earlier, the Columbia Journalism Review had called then-owner Rupert Murdoch's in-your-face tabloid a ``force for evil.'' Cuozzo, who started at the Post as a copy boy in 1972, recounts its journalistic life under five different owners, focusing on Murdoch and real estate entrepreneur Peter Kalikow, who both operated the paper, says Cuozzo, as a symbol of their manhood. From the more sedate remove of his features department, Cuozzo celebrates the testosterone-filled newsroom. He tells how Murdoch brought in Aussie and Fleet Street brawlers and turned longtime owner Dorothy Schiff's ``stodgy'' liberal paper into the newspaper that humanized the news and ``put the nation back in touch with itself.'' Cuozzo mixes essays on the virtues of tabloids with colorful Post-iana, including the paper's famous headlines (500-lb. sex monster goes free) and its fierce take-no-prisoners rivalry with the New York Daily News. Cuozzo's is the account of an affable management mensch. It's a great story, but it might be fun to read a spicier version, one as thoroughly uninhibited as the newspaper it celebrates.
Pub Date: July 8, 1996
ISBN: 0-8129-2286-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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