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THE LONG NIGHT

Name: THE LONG NIGHT
Author: Steve Wick
ISBN: 978-0-230-62318-7

WILLIAM L. SHIRER AND THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

by Steve Wick ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 2011

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In a trenchant discussion of journalism, biography and ethics, Newsday senior editor Wick (Bad Company: Drugs, Hollywood and the Cotton Club Murder, 1990, etc.) examines the life of William Shirer (1904–1993), American war correspondent and author of the landmark book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960).

The author is very much attuned to the conflicts and difficulties of a journalist like Shirer working in a police state. Wick asks what more he might have done, and discusses Shirer’s concerns about getting stories published in New York, where he thought “no one…paid much attention.” Shirer’s knowledge only part of the story. He endured both the German government’s lies and the corporate concerns of CBS, and he had to act on this partial and contradictory knowledge, not the fuller truth now available. He also had to protect his sources. His transmissions were monitored by Nazi spies in the United States who reported back with recommendations for action against him. It was a major undertaking for him to get his diaries and personal papers out of Hitler’s Germany when he left in 1940. The papers eventually provided the necessary documentation for the influential books he later wrote about Hitler's rise to power and the Third Reich. As one of the first broadcast journalists, Shirer was breaking new ground with his nightly transmissions. Unfortunately, we will never know his full story because he protected his sources and burned sensitive papers before he left. A gripping account of a courageous journalist's efforts to alert the world to Hitler's plan, and an engaging discussion of the relationship between journalism and personal integrity, which is as relevant today as it was then.

Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-230-62318-7

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORY | MILITARY

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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.