No comments about Afghanistan's accidental reporter: leaving California behind for two summers, Hyder Akbar, 18, sent riveting radio dispatches from his parents' homeland.(Media)(Biography): ... An article from: New York Times Upfront.

1 comments about Ruth Hall (Girlebooks Classics).

1. The first novel by Fanny Fern, otherwise known as Sara Payson Willis, is a semi-autobiographical tale of a talented writer who loses her husband and is forced to support herself and two young children in the mid-1800s. Fern writes with biting social commentary on the subject of traditional assumptions of a woman's place in society.
   
   The chapters are short and character details are sparse. With a journalist's style, Fern builds her story through snippets of information and dialog. In these snippets, she fearlessly depicts real-life events and people, draping them in a fictional guise. Most of Fern's family is here--her father and brother and in-laws--in all their vicious detail. We follow the "story" of Ruth Hall from her happy married life to groveling for work while her relations turn a blind eye to her poverty and suffering. Upon her first successes as a paid writer, she takes the same approach in exposing the underhanded tactics of publishers, especially when dealing with women.
   
   Fern states in her preface that Ruth Hall is not a novel, preferring the term "continuous story". She wrote at variance with the traditional themes and styles of the time and therefore received her share of criticism for it. However she also had supporters. Notably, Nathaniel Hawthorne hoped that Fern's writing would encourage her female contemporaries to follow her example and "throw off the constraints of decency...then their books are sure to possess character and value."

No comments about Clever Hearts: Desmond and Molly MacCarthy : A Biography.

No comments about Charles Demorse Pioneer Statesman and Father of Texas Journalism.

1 comments about Dana and the Sun.

1. Candace Stone was one of the two best eaachers I ever had through 19 years of schooling. Taught European History at Anderson College (Anderson, Indiana) in the mid 1950s. Took great pride in the fact that she had ben investigated by the U.S. House of Representatives UnAmerican Activities Committee. Remember them? Great Great teacher who taught us not just the facts, but how to think our way through the facts.
   Jim Burgin. Class of 1959

1 comments about Around the World in 80 Years - Newsrooms, Sound Stages, Private Encounters and Public Affairs.

1. Ted Berkman has spent all of his adult life in the media and in this, his autiobiography, he takes on a ride through the various incantations of its development. We are able to meet well known figures such as Edward R. Murrow, Harry Truman, King Farouk, Sheilah Graham and others in Hollywood, Washington DC, Egypt, Japan and other places. This man is an excellent writer and teacher--I picked up this book at the Santa Barbara Writers' Conference where he teaches biography--and he provides thought-provoking commentary on the media influences and its growth. He left me thinking hard about the Internet and what it will mean as it grows evermore. But the book is also entertaining. His descriptions of Egypt and of growing old are both heartrendering and unforgettable. Consider picking this one up. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

2 comments about The Right Place at the Right Time.

1. This is a too little-known book. MacNeil, whom many of us got to know on 'The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour', had a brilliantly diverse journalistic career before winding down on PBS. The book is full of interesting stories, told in the historical context of their time and the directness of a reporter's style. MacNeil clearly also has a good sense of humor which adds a nice touch.

   Even if you're not particularly interested in foreign affairs, you'll find plenty interesting in MacNeil's experiences abroad. Spend a little on this book -- it's worth your time.




2. "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 A Red in the House: The Unauthorized Memoir of S.E. Fleischman.

No comments about William Archer: A Life.

No comments about A century of newspapering: The Simons of Lawrence (Newcomen publication).