A solid biography, of interest to students of journalism and American history.
A well-told life of the early media tycoon, whose influence—though not his empire—has endured to the present.
Joseph Pulitzer (1847–1911) lived a life that, in the words of biographer Brian (Einstein: A Life, 1996), “often resembled a fable.” At 17, he crossed the waters to America, enticed to join the flagging Union Army in exchange for a bounty and citizenship; just before landing in Boston, he jumped ship, swam across the icy harbor, and presented himself directly to the enlistment officers so that he would not have to split the bounty with the agent who recruited him. Charming and well-educated, he easily won his commanders’ trust. After the war, penniless and without prospects, he made his way to St. Louis, where he worked his way up from gravedigger and laborer to reporter for a German-language daily. In 1878 he bought the ailing St. Louis Post-Dispatch for $2,500 and started making a name for himself as a publisher. A born muckraker, he magnified minor-league tales to scandalous proportions, insisting that he was serving the public good by revealing the misdeeds of the powerful and influential. (An example: A minister who had just taken a swig of cold medicine took a seat on a streetcar. The young woman next to him, offended by the smell of alcohol, took another seat. End of story—but the Post-Dispatch’s headline? “A Shocking Story of a Divine.”) The reporters Pulitzer hired, among them Nellie Bly, Stephen Crane, and Irwin S. Cobb, served him well as he went head-to-head with ferociously anti-Semitic rival publisher William Randolph Hearst, played at king-making, warmongering, and politics, and made a huge fortune with which he endowed the prize that bears his name, as well as Columbia University’s famed School of Journalism.
A solid biography, of interest to students of journalism and American history.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-471-33200-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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