No matter where readers are on the political spectrum, this light biography is a tantalizing look into the life of a man who...
A chatty look into the life and motivations of Fox News founder Roger Ailes.
Fans of Ailes will recognize many of the incidents related in Chafets’ (Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One, 2010, etc.) authorized biography. However, for those unfamiliar with Ailes’ story, the author’s narrative traverses his childhood, his early career experiences, his keen political intuitions, and his shrewd understanding of the cable-news business and its role in our media-saturated society. Ailes quickly grasped that personality would drive ratings on cable news. “He realized that it isn’t like broadcast news, an hour or two a day,” explained an Ailes colleague. “It’s a twenty-four-hour operation, which means that a good part of it has to be about opinions.” Once Rupert Murdock hired Ailes and he assembled his news team, Fox News began its ascent. Chafets flushes out his portrait of Ailes through an amalgam of individuals who offer vignettes and quotes describing the Ailes personality, business style and media matters, from their vantage point within or outside of his sphere of influence. Ailes’ conservative stance is well-known, but the author offers a list of Ailes’ liberal friends, including members of the Kennedy clan, Chris Cuomo, a CNN journalist and son of the former governor of New York, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson and Dennis Kucinich, “the longtime darling of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.” Ailes hired Doug Kennedy, a reporter and the youngest son of Bobby Kennedy, to work at Fox. “What people don’t understand is that Roger is very comfortable with others who don’t agree with him,” Kennedy explains. “He knows what he believes and says it—Roger never talks for effect—and we go out to lunch and really go at it. All he asks is that you be real with him in return.”
No matter where readers are on the political spectrum, this light biography is a tantalizing look into the life of a man who altered the TV-news landscape.Pub Date: March 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59523-095-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Sentinel
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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