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
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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