A fascinating, if somewhat distant, portrait of a cultural icon who happened to also be a mom.
Slate.com political correspondent Dickerson explores his mother’s complicated legacy.
In the 1960s, Nancy Dickerson was one of America’s favorite reporters, rising to TV stardom with a combination of Christiane Amanpour’s reporting skills, Katie Couric’s charm and Jackie O’s sophisticated good looks. Her son attributes Nancy’s success in the male preserve of broadcast journalism to hard work and charisma. Born Nancy Hanschman in 1927, she studied with a speech coach and endeared herself to leading Washington hostesses, who taught her the art of scintillating conversation. An affair with Congressman Ken Keating also greased a few wheels; the author believes the rumors of affairs with JFK and LBJ were false. She married widower Wyatt Dickerson in 1962; John was born in 1968. As a mother, Nancy occupied the large middle ground between Joan Crawford and Carol Brady. She gained only ten pounds when pregnant—“No wonder I had to go to all those doctors in adolescence. She starved me,” John writes with a touch of both humor and pathos, referring to more than just food. Her son doesn’t dwell on Nancy-as-feminist-role-model: He’s sympathetic to the sexism that dogged her, yet he raises some subtle questions about her tactics for breaking through the glass ceiling. Going back to work two weeks after giving birth provided a model for other women that was, in his view, “stoic, but not very helpful.” John’s narrative sometimes moves from his mother’s reporting in the 1960s to his own experiences in the same profession. The chapter on Nancy’s coverage of JFK’s assassination, for example, ends with his recollections of covering the disappearance of John Jr.’s plane over Martha’s Vineyard 36 years later. But these autobiographical touches are basically asides; John writes principally as a journalist digging up the facts about Nancy’s life, and at times, one wishes he would open up a bit more about his own feelings.
A fascinating, if somewhat distant, portrait of a cultural icon who happened to also be a mom.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-8783-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
