In equal measure: informative, alarming, discerning, hopeful, proud, and humble.
A former editor of Guardian News and Media (1995-2015) chronicles the profound recent changes in journalism using the Guardian’s story as his primary illustration.
Rusbridger (Play It Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible, 2013), now principal of Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford, shows us continually in his lucid and sometimes-alarming text that technological and cultural changes have occurred so rapidly that newspapers barely had time to inhale before their centuries-old institutions began to crumble, then to reassemble into something quite unrecognizable only a generation ago. The author also tells the tale of how the Guardian metamorphosed during his tenure—from a relatively small newspaper into a web-dominating news presence—but he also narrates the activities of some of the other media giants, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. He highlights the questions that the traditional media were asking themselves: Should we charge readers for online access? How much? And how? (Rusbridger tells us of plans that worked and others that failed.) Should we maintain a print presence? What should be the focus and display of our online offerings? Not surprisingly, the longtime editor of this progressive publication has some sharp words about Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, and the proliferation of (and accusations concerning) “fake news.” He also takes us through some of the key stories and issues of the time—and describes the Guardian’s involvement in them—including Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden and the issue of government secrets and the sometimes-contradictory right of the people to know. Evident throughout is the author’s patent pride in the Guardian and his disdain for writers, publications, and consumers that eschew fact in favor of bias and hype. Rusbridger ends on a note of hope—and concern: “Trust me, we do not want a world without news.”
In equal measure: informative, alarming, discerning, hopeful, proud, and humble.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-27962-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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