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
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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