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DOWN THE TUBE

AN INSIDE ACCOUNT OF THE FAILURE OF AMERICAN TELEVISION

Two television veterans address the decay of a medium but cannot come up with clear, substantive solutions to its problems. Baker, who has been a top-level executive in both public and commercial TV, and Dessart, an academic and former vice president at CBS, attempt to tie the decline of the quality of American television to the cycles of government regulation and deregulation that occur in our oscillating political environment. The deregulation of the 1980s, they write, led to rampant commercialism and the rise of saturation-style advertising that has lent itself to such excesses as cartoons designed after already existing toys and, much earlier on, the rise of sales of toy guns and Barbie dolls thanks to Mattel’s early investment in the new medium. They point to the BBC’s lack of commercials as a counterpoint. They also discuss the slow but steady ruin of children’s television that sprang from deregulation and lost funds. (This destruction of children’s television is linked to what German sociologists call Kinderfeinlichkeit—or hostility toward children.) If all this sounds like a bit much for one volume, it is. This is all notwithstanding a seemingly needless digression on world television’s past, present, and future that does nothing but break the continuity between chapters on children’s television and the “underfunded afterthought” of public television—areas that are intrinsically related. Indeed, there’s too much background material in this volume. As a result, the vapidity of much of what is offered today on television is given short shrift—only the E channel’s Talk Soup is offered as an example of the trash television of the 1990s. Unfortunately, though they make a few salient points, Baker and Dessart fail at their ultimate goal: The problems of television remain poorly identified, and the solutions offered seem unrealistic.

Pub Date: April 29, 1998

ISBN: 0-465-00722-8

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Basic Books

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998

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TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.

Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955

ISBN: 0670717797

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955

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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

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