No comments about Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman.

No comments about A Sacred Trust: Nelson Poynter and the St. Petersburg Times.

No comments about Letter from Washington, 1863-1865 (Great Lakes Books).

No comments about A Spiritual Journey: Why I Became A Christian Scientist.

1 comments about The Right Place at the Right Time.

1. "The Right Place At The Right Time" is an excellent professional memoir that has the merit of being both entertaining and informative. From his early days of working as a sub-editor for the Reuters international news service in London, to the pioneering way he later helped to break the mold of network television's pack journalism, Robert MacNeil tells wonderful stories from one of the most interesting periods of the 20th century.

   MacNeil was there when the Belgian Congo was granted its independence and--like many developing African nations unprepared for the end of colonial rule--fell into tribal feuds and warfare. He reported from the front lines of the Cold War in Berlin as the Wall was being built, and was in Cuba during the missile crisis. He was there at the assassination of President Kennedy and (in all probability) even met Lee Harvey Oswald just minutes after the shooting. MacNeil covered the 1964 presidential campaigns of Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson, fought the Nixon Administration to prevent the federal government from interfering with freedom of the press on public television, and ultimately gave up a comfortable job with the BBC to launch what would later become the "MacNeil/Lehrer Report."

   During the most turbulent years of the 1960s, it is clear that MacNeil was haunted by the escalating body count of the Vietnam War, and his disillusion with the conflict in Southeast Asia runs throughout this book like a subtext that puts many of the breaking news events into a sort of special perspective. For a man who has interviewed everyone from Charlie Chaplin to the Ayatollah Khomeini (before the fundamentalist revolution in Iran), it is remarkable how his focus keeps returning to the Vietnam War and what it did to America at home and overseas.

   Accordingly, "The Right Place At The Right Time" is full of colorful, often funny, sometimes heartbreaking, stories about the people touched by events beyond their control. MacNeil has a keen eye for how the broadcasting business can illuminate or distort the facts of a particular case, and he goes to considerable effort not to let his work slip into the cliche of stale formula punditry. For the most part, he succeeds. His criticism of modern television news as being obsessed with style over substance is especially devastating. He demonstrates a respect for the intelligence of his viewers that seems rare among the media today.

   If MacNeil's book has a fault, it is that the author never ventures into the realm of a true autobiography. The man himself is something of a cipher. While it is admirable that he has not indulged in the type of confessional, introspective New Journalism that is so fashionable and trendy among writers now, MacNeil is so reserved about protecting his privacy that he says more about one of his old grade-school teachers than he does about his family. Even Walter Cronkite's recent autobiography told the reader more about his wife and children than MacNeil does at any point in this account. After a while, it tends to deprive him of a human dimension. You learn something of his political leanings (liberal), for example, but he never includes more than a passing reference to any part of his domestic life, and that makes him come across as rather bloodless and remote.

   Nevertheless, that small quibble aside, "The Right Place At The Right Time" is one of those few books that really does have something important to say, and does so with grace and wit to spare. The short chapters fly by quickly. And when you reach the end, you may even realize that MacNeil has not only provided food for thought, but also left you looking at the broadcasting industry in ways that you haven't before.

No comments about At the White House: Assignment to Six Presidents.

2 comments about Hemingway in 90 Minutes (Great Writers in 90 Minutes).

1. I love all his 90 minute series. This is Cliff notes for adults. Excellent



2. Hemingway in 90 Minutes is a well-written introduction to Hemingway's life and works. Strathern incorporates many of the current ideas about Hemingway and synthesizes them well. He makes you want to go back to the works, and if you've never read much Hemingway, he serves as a great entree.

5 comments about I & Claudius: Travels With My Cat.

1. Not one of the best travel-related pieces I've read. Driving alone, de Vries has no-one to play off against so in order to provide some dialogue, she makes constant references to conversations with her cat throughout the book. This is funny the first time but should be left as a one-off joke. De Vries flogs it until it become irritating to read.

   In addition to this, I would assume large tracts are fictitious: the very odd-coincidencies, the almost-slapstick moment where she knocks an important boss into a pool, the 'stay with people after knowing them 10 minutes' etc. It can't have happened this way.

   One for the cat lovers; for readers who like travel, try something else.




2. Of all travel books I've read so far, this one has got to be the most hilarious and magnificent. Clare writes with gusto and love for her cat and of travel, and one feels as if they're right along with the couple as they travel throughout the USA. Another great novel to read by De Vries is "Of Cats and Kings", which is equally, if not more, stunning and entertaining. Readers don't have to be cat people to laugh at De Vries antics and mishaps. I would highly reccommend this novel to any female of any age, for it deals with feminine humor and romance.



3. Everyone really seemed to love this book so I thought I'd check it out, but besides being easy to read I didn't find much merit in it. In the end she just really annoyed me. Her generally snippiness was people made me cringe, and she never seemed very aware of her surroundings (although I give her props for the incident in the bar in Texas, I believe it was). As a traveler, I could never imagine trusting total strangers like she does. Sure, I know that if you don't take risks you miss out on a lot, but the fact that she lived to write this book is amazing in and of itself considering the huge amount of trust she puts in total strangers.

   Perhaps not being a huge cat lover was also problematic. I couldn't relate to her rantings about Claudius.

   I think my biggest beef with the book, which I notice other people really enjoyed, was Claudius's insights. I found it very distracting how she'd experience something, and then Claudius would chime it with its historical value.

   There were amusing parts, such as her time in Las Vegas, but all in all, I wouldn't recommend this book. Well, maybe to a cat person.




4. Clare's relationship with Claude is priceless and gorgeous, and though perhaps the future customer probably doesn't really care to read about the reviewer, my experiences are directly related to my love of this book, and frighteningly uncanny...she's right on the mark with this one and I know there are more out there who'd agree.
   
   Just as Clare was, I am 28 years old, lost my mother to cancer , and had travelled across North America with my beloved cat, Sampson, twice when I read this book.( I would like for the record to state that he is equally as magnificent as Claude) and like her, I am terrified more than anything in the world to lose him.

   Clare's relationship with Claude is painfully sincere, and I feel less of a maniac to hear that someone else was as obsessed and driven by her fears and dependance on shopping as her own retail therapy.
   Her confused love for America and Americans, as well as road tripping is hilarious and well shared by this reader. Though I cried buckets,laughed out loud more than once and am still somewhat heartbroken (there is one small paragraph that brings sobs to my throat just to think of it-beautiful), it moved me immensely and all I wanted to do was get home to my boy when I finished it.
   For anyone who loves their pet (any pet) like a child this is your reminder why you do. Marvelous, Clare!
   Is there anywhere we can write to her? Does anyone know?




5. Of course you will read all the other reviews here, and they are pretty right-on. Clare is a bit of a female Holden Caulfield; she is amusing and appealing while going through real trauma and not always behaving well. Unlike Holden of course, she is real and this is a true story. However, do not mistake "I & Claudius" for a how-to-travel-with-your-pet manual or a travel guide to the United States. This is HER story (and Claudius' ). I cried so when it ended-- because it was beautiful and because I was sorry it was over!

No comments about Honorable Exiles: A Chilean Woman in the Twentieth Century.

2 comments about LETTERS TO MILENA (Kafka, Franz, Works.).

1. These are Kafka's best letters . He pours forth his broken soul to the woman who can and does understand him. His language is painful and beautiful. Milena the Czech woman married to another Jewish man is too trapped by her life. Their love is impossible also because Kafka within himself is impossible. The letters are powerful and bring a sense of compassion and loss for these two remarkable people who each in his own way ( Kafka through his tuberculosis) Milena ( in a concentration camp) lose their lives when young.



2. These letters written by Franz Kafka to Milena comprise my most loved Kafka letters. Writing to Felice, his former fiancée, he was less mature - could he be said to have been less himself? In 'Letters to Milena' he asks at one point (I paraphrase) 'Is it you I really love or the existence that you give to me?' Couldn't any of us ask this question of the person we really love and of ourselves when we really love? I think Milena, whom his biographers considered a far more fitting companion for Kafka than Felice; Milena who in Berlin, years younger than the ageless Franz, living desperately and often pennilessly with her loved hurtful husband (who frequently withheld money from her, so that at one point she worked as a railway porter) - this woman who 'lived her life down to the depths' and who was a writer in her own right - really did give Kafka existence in the years they wrote and too infrequently met. She did not let the nervous, procrastinating and intensely self referential Kafka hide from her - which may be part of why he loved her - and when he is finally prevailed upon to visit her, deliciously drolly reassuring her that if he does get onto a train he will likely as not get off it at the right stop, she does not wait until they each arrive at the much discussed meeting point to actually meet him, but goes unflinchingly to his hotel, cutting off Kafka's apprehensions, making everything in their meeting easy, amicable and precious to him.

   'If only it were possible to go to Berlin, to become independent, to live from one day to the next, even to go hungry, but to let all one's strength pour forth instead of husbanding it here, or rather - instead of one's turning aside into nothingness!' Kafka wrote in his diaries in 1914 whilst still engaged to Felice. Milena, for a little while, allowed him to feel he was living, the tragedy was that concurrently Kafka's terrible illness was progressing, depriving him of time and physical energy. He was a man who needed so much time, and who had so painfully little, but, notwithstanding his not infrequent sensation of 'turning aside into nothingness', Kafka lived, he lived his whole life as few, very few, ever do, these letters are a testimony to his intense aliveness and to his genius as a writer. I envy Milena, even though she knew eventually she could not leave her husband for Kafka, she was still the woman who received the treasure of these letters. And yet - a reader has to, bewildered, witness and realize the inevitability and sadness of the eventual cessation of Kafka and Milena's communication, witness Kafka poignantly losing his plans for their future and the idea that Milena can live with him, witness both withdrawing and both mourning.

   'M was here', Kafka wrote (again in his diaries, 8th May 1922, when he was more or less housebound with his illness) 'won't come again; probably wise and right in this, yet there is perhaps still a possibility whose locked door we both are guarding lest we open it, for it will not open of itself.'
   
   I treasure this book. I've read and reread it so that the pages are all dog-eared, falling out and closely annotated all over. To anyone who finds themselves drawn to Kafka I'd say get your hands on a copy or two.