CONNIE

The dizzying highs and nauseating lows of a landmark broadcasting career.

She was the only one of her siblings to be born in the U.S. after her parents arrived from China in 1945. By her twenties, Chung tells us, she had morphed from a meek youngest who “never uttered a peep” into “someone who was fearless, ambitious, driven, full of chutzpah and moxie, who spoke up to get what she wanted.” Convinced that she was the equal of her white male colleagues in journalism, she would need every bit of that gumption in the decades that followed, as she smashed through barriers of sexism and racism with stints at each of the three networks. Sentences like this one—“I thought the Gingrich controversy was the worst incident I would face while coanchoring the CBS Evening News, but what was to come made Bitchgate pale in comparison”—lead us from one crisis to the next. The most humiliating occurs in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, when Dan Rather (of the many people who come off badly in this book, he is the worst) sabotaged her career in a way she could never fully recover from. As for narcissistic divas Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer: “Each time I’d pop my head up, Barbara or Diane would whack me with a spongy hammer.” Her personal life is full of juice; she and husband Maury Povich had a long-distance open relationship for many years before they married, allowing her exciting interludes with characters like Ryan O’Neal. (She jumps in her sports car, tells him to follow her, and... “Feel free to use your imagination.”) At the end of this long road come sweet signs of her impact on the culture: a Connie Chung rest stop on the Garden State Parkway, a strain of marijuana that bears her name, and, most movingly, a whole generation of Chinese American girls named Connie.

An irreverent, inspiring chronicle of a great life.