A charming anecdotal account of how a group of ABC execs parlayed an international incident into a news show that redefined late-night television and made little-known anchorman as popular as Johnny Carson. ``The show brought to you by the Ayatollah Khomeini,'' as it was jokingly referred to, Nightline evolved 16 years ago from the series America Held Hostage, ABC's response to their viewers' seemingly insatiable interest in the Iranian hostage crisis. The crisis, which had been expected to be short-lived, dragged on for months, and by then America Held Hostage had broken the Tonight show's monopoly over late-night. The opportunity was ripe for a new show, but what form would it take? Ted Koppel thought that there was no reason to mess with success. He envisioned a continuation of the America Held Hostage series, with an eventual expansion into other serious news topics, and he saw himself as the host. He had been anchoring for much of the hostage crisis and had proved himself an highly intelligent and adept interviewer, one who was quick on his feet. ABC, however, began courting the likes of Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Roger Mudd. We all know who won that round. Koppel and former Nightline producer Gibson provide hilarious behind-the-scenes stories of the chaos inherent in a show that chooses in the morning its topic for that night, only to change it later in the day to cover a breaking story. They also present highlights and lowlights from the show's history, all featuring, of course, Koppel: interviewing, sans translator, a Russian cosmonaut who couldn't speak English; telling Senator Edward Kennedy that he was fat; rudely grilling vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro on foreign policy. Despite the pompous subtitle, a lighthearted look at life inside the one late-night show that takes the world seriously. (TV satellite tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8129-2478-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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