An effective melding of political history and media criticism.
Former Newsweek and Los Angeles Times political correspondent Shogan (Backlash: The Killing of the New Deal, 2006, etc.) persuasively argues that the famous 1954 confrontation had a transformative effect on the nascent medium of television.
The Army-McCarthy hearings pitted hard-charging anticommunist Joseph McCarthy and his chief aide, Roy Cohn, against the U.S. Army and its lead attorney, Joseph Welch. The Army accused McCarthy and Cohn of pressuring the military to give preferential treatment to a McCarthy aide, G. David Schine, while the senator countered that the accusation was being made in retaliation for his investigations into Army officials. Shogan ably recounts the many twists and turns of the hearings, including Welch’s famous question to McCarthy (“Have you left no sense of decency?”), but it’s his media analysis that makes the book truly interesting. Television was in its infancy in 1954, but the widely watched live broadcasts of the hearings, as well as Edward R. Murrow’s televised critiques, undoubtedly helped speed the decline of McCarthy’s popularity. Caught in the stark spotlight of live television, his blustering, bullying manner worked disastrously against him. “McCarthy demonstrated with appalling clarity precisely what kind of man he is,” wrote James Reston in the New York Times. Shogan effectively argues that the hearings were a watershed moment for the medium of television, helping to transform it into a key shaper of American opinion. The author has written about the role of TV journalism in politics before, most notably in Bad News: Where the Press Goes Wrong in the Making of the President (2001), and his critiques remain sharp in the historical context of the ’50s. In the final chapter, he widens his view to analyze television’s impact on perceptions of the Vietnam War, presidential politics and 9/11, finding a preoccupation with flash over substance that he tracks back to TV’s infancy.
An effective melding of political history and media criticism.Pub Date: March 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-56663-770-1
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
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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