An appreciative and informative chapter of TV history.
A cultural history of how children’s TV, once criticized for banal programming, changed dramatically in the 1960s.
In 1961, the chairman of the FCC asked, “Is there no room on television to teach, to inform, to uplift, to stretch, to enlarge the capacities of our children?” It was a question that Joan Ganz Cooney and Fred Rogers answered with a resounding yes. Each found jobs in newly established educational-TV stations, and, with determination and imagination, developed groundbreaking children’s shows: Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, which made its national debut in February 1968; and Sesame Street, which debuted in November 1969, attracting an audience of some 2 million households. Drawing on news articles, oral histories, and the archives of the Children’s Television Workshop, Fred Rogers Center, and Jim Henson Company, longtime Vanity Fair contributor Kamp offers a brisk, lively account of the challenges faced by Cooney and Rogers in realizing their shows, the criticism that they incited, and the many programs that emulated their success, such as The Electric Company, Free to Be…You and Me, and ZOOM. Although different in tone—“slow pace versus fast, small cast versus large, low production values versus high”—both Mister Rogers and Sesame Street were shaped by findings in developmental psychology and pedagogy. Rogers saw himself as “the child’s adult friend” who “would introduce experiences of all kinds” and help children to articulate their feelings. Cooney and her Sesame Street team aimed to engage young children—especially those living in the inner city—in learning, with a multicultural, interracial cast. Getting Jim Henson on board “was a coup,” Kamp acknowledges. “The Muppets conferred upon the nascent show a visual and spiritual identity that would set it apart from other children’s programming: “furrier, featherier, weirder, cleverer.” Writing about the evolution of Sesame Street, the author reports some surprising blowback from feminists who objected to its portrayal of women and from viewers who complained “of both racism and reverse racism.” But nothing stopped the show’s impact on children’s culture. Questlove provides the foreword.
An appreciative and informative chapter of TV history.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3780-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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 Yorkerstaff 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
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
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