Raucous and enlightening fun.
Two former staffers of one of the world’s most notorious tabloids present the story of how an Australian media magnate changed American media.
Former New York Post writers and editors Mulcahy and DiGiacomo interviewed more then 240 past and present Post staffers, competitors, media watchers, and even story subjects to compile an oral history of the tabloid. They focus primarily on the owner, pugnacious and business-savvy Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who took over the flailing newspaper in the mid-1970s. Interviewees describe how Murdoch, a veteran newspaperman, combined his knowledge of bylines, deadlines, and most of all bottom lines to alter how the American media present the news. Delivered by excellent reporters and prima donna columnists, shaped by Murdoch’s political bent, the paper gained notoriety and circulation due to the gossip peddled on the infamous Page Six and the antics of an eccentric New York real estate operator named Donald Trump, astutely identified by Murdoch as someone who made good copy and would sell papers. While the book’s “inside baseball” accounts of newsgathering, the goings-on in the often-debauched Post newsroom, and the New York scene may bore some readers, the book is catnip for anyone interested in the evolution (or, depending on your point of view, devolution) of the Post in particular and U.S. media in general. For laypeople who may not know the newspaper terminology that peppers the language of many of those interviewed, the authors include a glossary that is both informative and entertaining. The commentary from the candid interviewees, like the Post itself, has it all, from delightfully sublime and critically incisive to completely nonsensical. Mulcahy and DiGiacomo have organized their research and interviews well to craft an interesting and rollicking narrative that will stand as a significant contribution to the history of mass media.
Raucous and enlightening fun.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781982164836
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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