Journalists Books - Page 14

Happy Days Were Here Again: Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist

William F. Buckley Jr.

Amazon Price: $13.80 List Price: $18.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Basic Books Amazon Marketplace: 28 new & used starting at $11.71

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Professionals & Academics -> Journalists
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Everything You Could Expect. 4 out of 5 stars.
7 of 7 people found this review helpful.

This is a fine collection of the thoughts and witticisms of William F Buckley. It covers most any area that Mr. Buckley holds an Interest whether it be politics, social affairs, sailing, classical music and spending time with dignitaries and well to do people. It is fantastically written (as can be expected from Buckley) however it seemed to talk just over the head of the common man. With his infatuation with the Ryder Cup and talking about people who are important to him, really have no impact on my life. All in all it is a very well written fast paced collection. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys political and social commentary. And to anyone who just like to read something different than a novel or text of history.
Thanks For Your Time:
T

Editorial Review:

In Happy Days Were Here Again, William F. Buckley Jr. offers a collection of his finest essays from the latter part of his long career. Sometimes celebrating, sometimes assailing, Buckley takes on opponents ranging from Mikhail Gorbachev to Carl Sagan to Leonard Bernstein; reflects on the academic scene, the Gulf War, and the idea of sin; and offers appreciations of friends, both right and left. For everyone who appreciates the wit and style of America’s pre-eminent conservative, this is a must-have collection.

Ruark Remembered: By the Man Who Knew Him Best

Alan Ritchie

Amazon Price: $26.40 List Price: $40.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Sporting Classics Amazon Marketplace: 7 new & used starting at $26.40

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Authors
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Memoirs
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Professionals & Academics -> Journalists

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Robert Ruark (1915-1965) ranks, in the minds of most discerning readers, as the finest outdoor writer ever to grace the American literary scene. His is an enduring fame, thanks primarily to three books, The Old Man and the Boy, The Old Man s Boy Grows Older, and an African classic, Horn of the Hunter. Of course, Ruark was also the author of several blockbuster novels, an immensely popular newspaper columnist, a satirist of considerable skill, and a tireless bon vivant. Fame and the ability to crunch out a prodigious amount of first-rate prose on his battered portable typewriter brought him considerable fortune. Now, some two generations after the Ruark s death, Sporting Classics will release a brand new book on the great author. Just recently discovered, the text was written more than forty years ago by Alan Ritchie, who faithfully served as Ruark s personal secretary and advisor for the last fourteen years of his life. The book starts out with a wonderful foreword by legendary African professional hunter Harry Selby who guided Ruark on a number of his safaris. It also features a number of photographs of Ruark that have never before appeared in any book.

Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found

Jennifer Lauck

Amazon Price: $12.00 List Price: $14.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Washington Square Press Amazon Marketplace: 137 new & used starting at $0.01

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Authors
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Memoirs
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Professionals & Academics -> Journalists

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 118 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A Child's Story of Survival 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Jennifer's memories of her childhood contains the detail and emotion that captures readers and draws them into her early life. At a too-young age, she assumes much of the care of her terminally ill mother. You are drawn into the vivid scenes of her mother's illness, the all-too-brief attention from her father and the cruelties of her brother.
Her life becomes increasingly difficult as first her mother dies, her father remarries and the stepmother resents and mistreats her. After her father's heart attack, Jennifer suffers greatly from neglect and malice from her stepmother and step-siblings.
You can't stop reading, but at times it is hard to keep going as you relive her life through her words. You fear for the child and hope it doesn't get worse, but it does. If you've read The Glass Castle and Angela's Ashes, then add this book to your reading list. It's a memorable account of a dreadful childhood and the ability to endure and overcome hardship.

Editorial Review:

To young Jenny, the house on Mary Street was home -- the place where she was loved, a blue-sky world of Barbies, Bewitched, and the Beatles. Even her mother's pain from her mysterious illness could be patted away with powder and a kiss on the cheek. But when everything that Jenny had come to rely on begins to crumble, an odyssey of loss, loneliness, and a child's will to survive takes flight....

Still Waters

Jennifer Lauck

Amazon Price: $11.95 List Price: $14.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Washington Square Press Amazon Marketplace: 87 new & used starting at $0.01

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Authors
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Memoirs
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Professionals & Academics -> Journalists

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 43 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Gritty and Moving .... 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I will be honest ~~ this book did not move me to tears like "Blackbird" did ~~ but it did make me angry ~~ really angry and disgusted with human beings, especially those who are in charge of taking care of the children who need them. I was so relieved when I read the ending of "Blackbird" that Jennifer was going to be rescued by her father's family (though I was really confused as to why Aunt Georgia and Uncle Charles didn't pick her up at the bus stop since they were the ones that went looking for the Lauck kids in L.A.). Then I picked this book up, the sequel to "Blackbird" and finished it in two days.

This is a fast paced book ~~ it skims a lot of Jennifer's growing up years but it dealt with her anger and frustrations. She was separated from her brother, Bryan, as he "chose" to live with Uncle Leonard and Aunt Sylvia. Jennifer didn't get to choose ~~ after spending several weeks with her grandparents, her father's parents, (a few weeks where she began her healing process and started to feel safe) she was sent to live with Peggy and Dick, her father's youngest sister and husband. From the very beginning, Dick made her feel like that she was never welcomed. Peggy was inconsistent with her behavior and gradually became meaner to her over the years, in spite of the fact that she loved Jennifer's mother and was one of her closest friends. Jennifer grew up in various places in the Northwest, confused, lonely and gradually getting angrier. Shuffled among different relatives, enduring sexual abuse, emotional abuse, basically being her aunt and uncle's (though they eventually adopted her) housekeeper/cook and on and on. The dishonesty of her relatives boils me ~~ and no wonder why Jennifer was so angry and bitter by the time she made her escape at the age of 18.

Then her brother committed suicide. Bryan was never close to Jennifer and she mistakenly thought he had the "better" life since he was an all A student, and so handsome. When Jennifer finally went on a journey to discover peace and the truth of what happened to her family and how it impacted her, she discovered so much more about Bryan that the reader ends up grieving for him too. By the end of the book, Jennifer has faced her demons and rediscovered the youth she missed out on by enjoying her son's life. She was able to find peace again.

This book is about surviving. This book is about finding peace in the worst that life can offer you. This book is an inspiration to all people ~~ regardless of how they live their lives. This book is just a wonderful sequel to the first one and for once, it shows that someone can have a happy ending in spite of it all. It shows how some people can survive neglect and abuse and how some people can't. It shows the power of forgiveness and the power of letting go.

This is one that I will definitely recommend to my book club to read ~~ it provides so much fodder for conversation just by reading these alone! It is not easy reading but sometimes, readers just need to be reminded that life isn't always easy and reading about someone else's struggles can affirm our sense of survival. At least Jennifer's story did.

7-10-07

Editorial Review:

Clutching her pink trunk filled with the relics of a lost childhood, twelve-year-old Jenny steps off a bus in Reno and into the wide-open future. Separated from her brother, Bryan, and passed from caretaker to caretaker, Jenny endures as she always has: by following the inner compass of the survivor. But when Bryan chooses a tragic destiny, Jenny must at last confront the secrets and lies that have held her prisoner for years. Embarking on a search for answers, the adult Jenny discovers that the past cannot be locked away -- even when unraveling one's own anger and pain seems impossible. Now, in the warmth of her marriage and in the eyes of her child, Jennifer finds her own miracles. A hardened heart learns to love. A damaged soul finds peace. And life, once merely a matter of survival, becomes rich with the joys of truly living.

Too Soon to Say Goodbye

Art Buchwald

Amazon Price: $12.21 List Price: $17.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Random House Amazon Marketplace: 114 new & used starting at $0.01

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Professionals & Academics -> Journalists
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 32 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

When doctors told Art Buchwald that his kidneys were kaput, the renowned humorist declined dialysis and checked into a Washington, D.C., hospice to live out his final days. Months later, “The Man Who Wouldn’t Die” was still there, feeling good, holding court in a nonstop “salon” for his family and dozens of famous friends, and confronting things you usually don’t talk about before you die; he even jokes about them.
Here Buchwald shares not only his remarkable experience–as dozens of old pals from Ethel Kennedy to John Glenn to the Queen of Swaziland join the party–but also his whole wonderful life: his first love, an early brush with death in a foxhole on Eniwetok Atoll, his fourteen champagne years in Paris, fame as a columnist syndicated in hundreds of newspapers, and his incarnation as hospice superstar. Buchwald also shares his sorrows: coping with an absent mother, childhood in a foster home, and separation from his wife, Ann.
He plans his funeral (with a priest, a rabbi, and Billy Graham, to cover all the bases) and strategizes how to land a big obituary in The New York Times (“Make sure no head of state or Nobel Prize winner dies on the same day”). He describes how he and a few of his famous friends finagled cut-rate burial plots on Martha’s Vineyard and how he acquired a Picasso drawing without really trying.

What we have here is a national treasure, the complete Buchwald, uncertain of where the next days or weeks may take him but unfazed by the inevitable, living life to the fullest, with frankness, dignity, and humor.

“[Art Buchwald] has given his friends, their families, and his audiences so many laughs and so much joy through the years that that alone would be an enduring legacy. But Art has never been just about the quick laugh. His humor is a road map to essential truths and insights that might otherwise have eluded us.”
–Tom Brokaw

The File: A Personal History

Timothy Garton Ash

Amazon Price: $10.17 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Vintage Amazon Marketplace: 38 new & used starting at $5.75

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Leaders & Notable People -> Political
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Professionals & Academics -> Journalists
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"Eloquent, aware and scrupulous . . . a rich and instructive examination of the Cold War past." --The New York Times

In 1978 a romantic young Englishman took up residence in Berlin to see what that divided city could teach him about tyranny and freedom. Fifteen years later Timothy Garton Ash--who was by then famous for his reportage of the downfall of communism in Central Europe--returned. This time he had come to look at a file that bore the code-name "Romeo." The file had been compiled by the Stasi, the East German secret police, with the assistance of dozens of informers. And it contained a meticulous record of Garton Ash's earlier life in Berlin.

In this memoir, Garton Ash describes what it was like to rediscover his younger self through the eyes of the Stasi, and then to go on to confront those who actually informed against him to the secret police. Moving from document to remembrance, from the offices of British intelligence to the living rooms of retired Stasi officers, The File is a personal narrative as gripping, as disquieting, and as morally provocative as any fiction by George Orwell or Graham Greene. And it is all true.

"In this painstaking, powerful unmasking of evil, the wretched face of tyranny is revealed." --Philadelphia Inquirer

Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

A. Scott Berg

Amazon Price: $15.30 List Price: $17.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Riverhead Trade Amazon Marketplace: 33 new & used starting at $2.78

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Authors
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Professionals & Academics -> Journalists
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Winner of the National Book Award
and a National Bestseller...

MAX PERKINS: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg took the literary world by storm upon its publication in 1978, garnering rave reviews and winning the National Book Award. A meticulously-researched and engaging portrait of the man who introduced the public to the greatest writers of this century, Berg's biography stands as one of the finest books on the publishing industry ever written. Unavailable for the last few years, MAX PERKINS is now being re-released (on the fiftieth anniversary of the great editor's death.

The driving force behind such literary superstars as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, Max Evarts Perkins was the most admired book editor in the world. From the first major novel he edited(Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise(to the last(James Jones's bestselling From Here to Eternity(Perkins revolutionized American literature. Perkins was tirelessly committed to nurturing talent no matter how young or unproven the writer.

Filled with colorful anecdotes about everything from Perkins's struggles to convince the old guard at Scribners to publish his visionary (and often controversial) authors to his falling out with one of his most brilliant discoveries, Thomas Wolfe, MAX PERKINS reveals with insight and humor the professional and personal life of one of the most legendary figures in the history of American publishing. Given unprecedented access to the correspondence between Perkins and his writers, Berg has fashioned a compellingly thorough biography that is as entertaining as it is informative.

A vivid portrait of one man's life and a revealing behind-the-scenes look at the creation of literature, A. Scott Berg's MAX PERKINS: Editor of Genius is a masterful achievement in scholarship and writing.

Katie: The Real Story

Edward Klein

Amazon Price: $10.17 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Three Rivers Press Amazon Marketplace: 49 new & used starting at $7.11

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Television Performers
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Leaders & Notable People -> Rich & Famous
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Professionals & Academics -> Journalists

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

New York Times Bestseller

A no-holds-barred account of the rise—and dramatic stumble—of a media icon.

In this probing portrait of a struggling news queen, bestselling author Edward Klein rips away the mask that has hidden the many faces of Katie Couric: the strong, independent woman and the needy wife and lover; the grieving widow famed for her kindness to others and the fiercely competitive diva; the consummate television interviewer and the stumbling network anchor.
Drawing from scores of interviews with people who have never spoken openly about Couric before, Katie: The Real Story absorbingly chronicles Katie’s rise to the top—from her early days at CNN to her nightly spot on CBS. You’ll read about:

Katie and her husband, Jay Monahan: “Jay had come to believe that the only thing that stood between Katie and divorce was her fear of negative publicity.”

Katie’s diva behavior at CBS: “A technical problem left Katie standing without a script. . . . As soon as the red light on the top of the camera went off, she screamed. One of the executives said, ‘Just a minute, Katie; the reason you make $15 million a year is to carry off these little glitches like a pro.’”

Katie and her parents: “She constantly sought [their] approval, but . . . [they] were better at telling her what she had done wrong than what she had done right.”

Katie and Matt Lauer: “Matt had privately told several executives at NBC that he would quit his job if they signed up Katie for another four years.”

Kill the Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb

Nick Schou

Amazon Price: $10.17 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Nation Books Amazon Marketplace: 43 new & used starting at $3.74

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Professionals & Academics -> Journalists
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Kill the Messenger tells the story of the tragic death of Gary Webb, the controversial newspaper reporter who committed suicide in December 2004. Webb is the former San Jose Mercury News reporter whose 1996 "Dark Alliance" series on the so-called CIA-crack cocaine connection created a firestorm of controversy and led to his resignation from the paper amid escalating attacks on his work by the mainstream media. Author and investigative journalist Nick Schou published numerous articles on the controversy and was the only reporter to significantly advance Webb's stories. Drawing on exhaustive research and highly personal interviews with Webb's family, colleagues, supporters and critics, this book argues convincingly that Webb's editors betrayed him, despite mounting evidence that his stories were correct. Kill the Messenger examines the "Dark Alliance" controversy, what it says about the current state of journalism in America, and how it led Webb to ultimately take his own life. Webb's widow, Susan Bell, remains an ardent defender of her ex-husband. By combining her story with a probing examination of the one of the most important media scandals in recent memory, this book provides a gripping view of one of the greatest tragedies in the annals of investigative journalism.

Out Of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa (A New Republic book)

Keith Richburg

List Price: $24.00 By: Basic Books Amazon Marketplace: 68 new & used starting at $0.01

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Ethnic & National -> African-American & Black
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Ethnic & National -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Ethnic & National -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 124 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Keith B. Richburg was an experienced and respected reporter who had paid his dues covering urban neighborhoods in Washington D.C., and won praise for his coverage of Southeast Asia. But nothing prepared him for the personal odyssey that he would embark upon when he was assigned to cover Africa.In this powerful book, Richburg takes the reader on an extraordinary journey that sweeps from Somalia to Rwanda to Zaire and finally to South Africa. He shows how he came to terms with the divide within himself: between his African racial heritage and his American cultural identity.Are these really my people? Am I truly an African-American? The answer, Richburg finds, after much soul-searching, is that no, he is not an African, but an American first and foremost. To those who romanticize Mother Africa as a black Valhalla, where blacks can walk with dignity and pride, he regrets that this is not the reality. He has been there and witnessed the killings, the repression, the false promises, and the horror. “Thank God my nameless ancestor, brought across the ocean in chains and leg irons, made it out alive,” he concludes. “Thank God I am an American.”