An appropriately large-scale account of the media giant at the very heart of British life.
A comprehensive biography of the British Broadcasting Corporation, “the embodiment of public service broadcasting, a template to emulate.”
Hendy, a professor of media and communication and former BBC producer, offers both a history of the institution and its key personnel and an assessment of its difficulties and successes living up to its self-professed mission "to inform, educate and entertain.” The author offers his personal “version of the BBC story, not an officially approved one”—but one bolstered by “several years of invaluable help from the BBC accessing and navigating my way through its archival treasures.” Hendy begins with the founders—Cecil Lewis, John Reith, and Arthur Burrows—and its initial incarnation as a radio company in 1922. Early on, the author points out that although the BBC is not a government-run entity, it exists only by Royal Charter, funded by a license fee set by Parliament. Its history is inextricably woven into the fabric of 20th-century Britain: the 1926 General Strike, when the BBC averted a real threat of government takeover; the close collaboration with the World War II–era government, which included the sending of coded messages during broadcasts; an eyewitness account of the direct hit on its home in Broadcasting House during the Blitz; the robust patronage of the new medium, TV; and its ever increasing role as a truly global institution. Hendy ably dissects the BBC's approach to popular entertainment and the arts without sparing due criticism. In 1975, for example, reporter Mike Phillips argued that the BBC “failed accurately to reflect the lives, problems and aspirations of immigrant minorities.” Throughout, the author offers brief profiles of numerous outsize personalities across the media, politics, and the arts. He also meticulously lays out the many attempts, by both Conservative and Labour governments and by rival media, to derail the BBC's editorial independence—e.g., during the Suez Crisis and the Falklands War. Much of this history has been told before but never in such well-researched depth and sparkling detail.
An appropriately large-scale account of the media giant at the very heart of British life.Pub Date: March 29, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-61039-704-9
Page Count: 656
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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