A people person offers a friendly, occasionally amusing peek behind the curtain of the radio business.
A memoir of a successful career built on a lifelong love affair with radio.
Duran, whose program is “the most-listened to Top 40 morning show,” presents himself less as a DJ and more as a people connector. He is in the business of making friends, both with unseen listeners and with the stars who appear on his broadcasts and reveal hidden dimensions of their characters. As much as he admires Howard Stern—“a hero to radio people,” he writes, and then continues, “he’s our North Star”—Duran’s own personality and approach are much different. The author is not abrasive and doesn’t try to put people on edge or make them uncomfortable. His radio program is more like a safe haven, where celebrities can let down their hair and be themselves, where those of whatever political affiliation or sexual orientation can feel like they belong. As a child of Dallas exurbia, Duran felt like “a weird kid trying to fit in.” He was not athletic or outgoing, and he realized he was somehow different than the rest of the kids even before he recognized that he was gay—or even knew what that meant. Radio offered a refuge and a connection, a place where he felt like he had a friend and could make friends. He started broadcasting from his own makeshift studio in his bedroom and then pursued it as a vocation. At first, he worked for small Texas stations before moving on to Houston (where cocaine almost derailed him) and other stops before landing in New York, where he has reigned as the morning host at Z100. He has made it seem easy, but here the author shows how and where it hasn’t been: the firings and job switches, the personal tolls in terms of romantic relationships, the dedication it takes to get to the top and stay there. Of radio, he writes, “it’s not about transmitters. It’s not about ad rates. It’s about connecting with people.”
A people person offers a friendly, occasionally amusing peek behind the curtain of the radio business.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982106-33-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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