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THE MURROW BOYS

Name: THE MURROW BOYS
Author: Stanley Cloud
ISBN: 0-395-68084-0

PIONEERS ON THE FRONT LINES OF BROADCAST JOURNALISM

by Stanley Cloud & Lynne Olson ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 6, 1996

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An absorbing, frequently poignant narrative about the heroes of CBS radio news, the men and women who set the standards for broadcast journalism during WW II, and about what happened to the heroes, and the standards, in the years that followed. Although there were great journalists in WW II besides those surrounding Edward R. Murrow, those who were hired and nurtured by Murrow to broadcast the war for CBS radio—Eric Sevareid, Larry LeSueur, William L. Shirer, Charles Collingwood, and Howard K. Smith, among others—have always shared a special mystique. As the husband-and-wife team of Cloud (former Washington bureau chief for Time) and Olson (former Moscow correspondent for Associated Press) explain, radio news was still in its infancy, and Murrow's live war coverage was the first time the medium's dramatic potential was realized. The authors show that these new radio journalists played an important role in shaping American public opinion about the war: Despite the emphasis by CBS bureaucrats on ``objectivity,'' the Murrow group engaged in more than a simple presentation of facts, ranging from the overt editorializing of Sevareid's eloquent broadcasts from London during the blitz to Shirer's masterful use of irony and insinuation from Berlin. They had to contend constantly with attempts at censorship. Despite their travails, the Murrow Boys enjoyed commercial success: Some wrote well-received books (Shirer's Berlin Diary, Smith's Last Train From Berlin), and some became celebrities in their own right, a portent of the media stars of later years. This success, and the journalists' identification with corporate interests, though, were to have a corrosive effect, as the authors demonstrate: Decades after the war, the traditions of Murrow had faded, replaced by sensationalist and commercialized journalism that lacked either the drama or the intellectual content of CBS radio's brilliant wartime coverage. A nicely told look back at what was, and a glimpse of what might have been, in the field of broadcast journalism.

Pub Date: May 6, 1996

ISBN: 0-395-68084-0

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
A QUESTION OF HONOR
by Lynne Olson & Stanley Cloud

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.