An intriguing account sure to interest working women and news junkies alike.
The MSNBC personality writes about her roller-coaster career in TV news.
Since 2007, Brzezinski has gained notoriety as Joe Scarborough’s moderate sidekick on Morning Joe, but her defining moment as a journalist came, ironically, during June that year, when Paris Hilton was released from jail. Asked repeatedly to deliver that bit of infotainment as the lead headline, Brzezinski refused and promptly hopped off her anchor’s chair and shredded the story. How she reached the point of such gutsy on-air defiance is the main subject of her memoir. “My one abiding thought,” she writes, “was, Look, I’m forty years old, and I’ve been doing this a long time, and I can’t pretend that this is news…I thought, You know what? Fire me. Go ahead. Like I’m scared of that happening again. And underneath that thought was another: This feels good.” The youngest of three siblings, Brzezinski grew up in the charmed shadow of her famous parents, Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, and Emilie Benes Brzezinski, an accomplished sculptor. Though the author says that her familial role was often that of “keeping the conversation going,” an important early lesson she learned from her mother and grandmother was that she could accomplish anything. Her ambition set her on the road to a major anchoring job, finding the right husband and raising children. Along the way, when she rose to the top at CBS News only to be fired and end up unemployed for more than a year, Brzezinski says the lesson she has gleaned is “pace yourself.” While the author seeks to advise women on negotiating the charged family-career divide, the most memorable moments are those in which Brzezinski simply tells her story, displaying her struggles and achievements as a journalist, wife and mother.
An intriguing account sure to interest working women and news junkies alike.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60286-111-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Berkley Prime Crime
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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
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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