Next book

HEADLINE JUSTICE

INSIDE THE COURTROOM: THE COUNTRY'S MOST CONTROVERSIAL TRIALS

Entertaining memoirs by a reporter who covered some of the biggest trials of the century, as well as many other great events. Wilson spent most of her career at the New York Daily News when it was the most popular daily newspaper in America. Though assigned to everything from political conventions to space shots, she gained her greatest renown for writing detailed daily accounts of celebrated criminal trials, including that of Confidential Magazine's publishers in the 1950s for invading the privacy of Maureen O'Hara, Dorothy Dandridge, and other stars; the Sam Sheppard and Carl Coppolino trials, which brought F. Lee Bailey to prominence in the 1960s; the prolonged insanity of the Manson Family trials at the beginning of the 1970s; Bailey's losing effort in the case of Patty Hearst, a.k.a. Symbionese Liberation Army guerrilla ``Tania''; and the conviction of girls'-school headmistress Jean Harris for murdering her inconstant lover, diet doctor Herman Tarnower, in the early 1980s. Wilson retired after the Harris trial because, in her view, control of the Daily News had descended to editors who ``neither knew nor cared about how to handle a story as complicated as a trial for a stylish tabloid like the News.'' Wilson's unabated bitterness toward those she considers responsible for her beloved paper's demise may or may not be justified, but the sort of strong, canny editors she lauds throughout her book might have suggested downplaying it a bit here. Nevertheless, it's easy to see why Wilson misses the excitement and camaraderie of a time when the same group of big-name reporters showed up for every major trial, editors gave reporters enough space to provide a full account of a day's events, and ``the idea was to take your job—not yourself—seriously.'' No deeper than one would expect from tabloid journalism, but just as lively and amusing.

Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1997

ISBN: 1-56025-108-5

Page Count: 240

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996

Categories:
Next book

IN MY PLACE

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

Next book

THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

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

Categories:
Close Quickview