A dauntingly complete portrait of the one of the most powerful and significant figures in American journalism. Walter Winchell was all but forgotten at his death, but he created the modern gossip column and spearheaded the rise of the culture and cult of celebrity. Gabler (An Empire of Their Own, 1988) explains that Winchell uniquely understood that gossip ``was a weapon of empowerment for the reader and listener.'' Born to a Jewish family at the turn of the century, Winchell was an unlikely candidate for national power. After a childhood of Dickensian poverty, he escaped to vaudeville and then moved into journalism. Possessor of a slang-riddled prose style all his own, he was catapulted to fame covering Broadway for the Daily Graphic, a tabloid even more sleazy than any imagined in the mind of Rupert Murdoch. From there he moved to the slightly more legit Mirror, where he gradually switched from covering the demimonde of show folk and the night-clubbing rich to pontificating on national and local politics as a staunch New Dealer. But when FDR died, Winchell began an inexorable shift to the right, eventually falling in with the most scurrilous of red-baiters. A vindictive, selfish man, he died almost forgotten by the world of the famous that he had once terrorized. Gabler tells his rise-and-fall story in almost exhausting detail, recounting Winchell's constant feuding with colleagues and subjects, his army of sycophants, and his troubled family life. The result is alternately riveting and enervating, but Gabler makes a convincing case for Winchell's central role in the transformation of mass media in the middle years of the century. Clearly, the ghost of Walter Winchell is abroad in the land at a time when the O.J. Simpson preliminary hearings merit network coverage and a Supreme Court confirmation hearing does not. Gabler's book is timely, incisive and, for the most part, a good read.
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41751-6
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
