Journalists Books - Page 23

Nightmare Years: 1930 - 1940

William Shirer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

As European correspondent for a number of American newspapers during the 1930s, William L. Shirer witnessed at first hand many of the pivotal events in the buildup to World War II. At the Nuremberg rallies, when Hitler roared through the streets celebrating his newly-won domination of Germany, Shirer was there. In Munich, as Chamberlain abandoned the Czechs, Shirer was there. In Vienna during the night of the Anschluss, in Berlin, when Hitler loosed his Blitzkrieg on Poland and began the war, Shirer was there. Through articles, broadcasts and translations of Hitler's speeches, Shirer tirelessly tried to warn the world of the terrible evil that was growing in Germany. The Nightmare Years, a No. I bestseller when first published in America in 1984, is not only the fascinating eyewitness account of this cataclysmic decade, but also the more personal story of a young American caught in tense and desperate times, struggling to survive and provide a life for himself and his family as the world lurched inexorably towards war.

'More than any conventional history book, Shirer's memoirs let a reader relive history' -People

'A superb journalist. ..Shirer was close enough to Hitler to feel the Nazi leader's messianic personal force. ..An unusually fine book' -Time 'No one ever did more to explain the rise of the Nazis' -Barbara Tuchman

'An outstanding achievement of journalistic history; indeed it is the best kind of accurate and absorbing history' -Washington Post

More Than Money: True Stories of People Who Learned Life's Ultimate Lesson

Neil Cavuto

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In this phenomenal New York Times bestseller, Neil Cavuto shares the inspirational stories of an array of personal heroes, many of whom motivated him to continue his career as he battled cancer and multiple sclerosis.

Joining the nascent Fox News Channel in 1996, Neil was set to establish himself as one of business journalism's most important players. Ten years after being diagnosed with cancer, however, Cavuto was dealt another body blow: He was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. As friends and strangers alike gathered to offer their support, he became attuned to the stories of others in the business world who also triumphed over serious setbacks of their own. More Than Money shares with us their personal stories, among them:

• Evelyn Lauder, the cosmetics executive who pioneered the pink ribbon campaign after her own battle with breast cancer
• Richard Branson, who overcame dyslexia and used his creativity and entrepreneurial spirit to build the Virgin empire
• Michael Wilson, a senior executive at the Royal Bank of Canada, who launched a public campaign to raise awareness of and money for treating depression after his son committed suicide
• Jon Huntsman, who survived two bouts with cancer to build one of the largest petrochemical companies in the world and found one of the most prominent cancer research centers

Moving, sincere, and wise, More Than Money profiles individuals whose stories are a testament to courage, compassion, and dignity in the face of adversity.

Mencken: The American Iconoclast

Marion Elizabeth Rodgers

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A towering figure on the American cultural landscape, H.L. Mencken stands out as one of our most influential stylists and fearless iconoclasts--the twentieth century's greatest newspaper journalist, a famous wit, and a constant figure of controversy.
Marion Elizabeth Rodgers has written the definitive biography of Mencken, the finest book ever published about this giant of American letters. Rodgers illuminates both the public and the private man, covering the many love affairs, his happy marriage at the age of 50 to Sara Haardt, and his complicated but stimulating friendship with the famed theater critic George Jean Nathan. Rodgers vividly recreates Mencken's era: the glittering tapestry of turn-of-the-century America, the roaring twenties, depressed thirties, and the home front during World War II. But the heart of the book is Mencken. When few dared to shatter complacencies, Mencken fought for civil liberties and free speech, playing a prominent role in the Scope's Monkey Trial, battling against press censorship, and exposing pious frauds and empty uplift. The champion of our tongue in The American Language, Mencken also played a pivotal role in defining American letters through The Smart Set and The American Mercury, magazines that introduced such writers as James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Langston Hughes.
Drawing on research in more than sixty archives including private collections in the United States and in Germany, previously unseen, on exclusive interviews with Mencken's friends, and on his love letters and FBI files, here is the full portrait of one of America's most colorful and influential men.
"This biography, the best ever on the sage of Baltimore, is exhaustive but never exhausting, and offers readers more than moderate intelligence and an awfully good time."
--Martin Nolan, Boston Globe

Where We Have Hope: A Memoir of Zimbabwe

Andrew Meldrum

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Moved me deeply 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 13 people found this review helpful.

As a Zimbabwean living abroad I sceptically picked up a copy of this book. I would read with dread Andrew Meldrums daily news reports on the dire and continually worsening situation in Zimbabwe on a Zimbabwean news website. I was very pleasantly surprised by the depth of feeling he developed for the country and his positive outlook in this book. I was moved by all his personal experiences and interactions with people there and the dangers he faced on a daily basis just doing his job. Someone needed to speak up and let the international community know about the teriible things that went happened in Zimbabwe from Gukurahundi to the farm invasions and I admire him for his bravery and perseverance. He chronicled our history from an eyewitness point of view and brought it all alive again. It allowed me to relive the 80's and 90's again. I cringe whenever I hear news of Zimbabwe on the television but this book made me feel proud to be Zimbabwean and I have recommended to my non-Zimbabwean friends as a way of understanding what happened to Zimbabwe. Excellent book!

Editorial Review:

Where We Have Hope is the gripping memoir of a young American journalist. In 1980, Andrew Meldrum arrived in a Zimbabwe flush with new independence, and he fell in love with the country and its optimism. But over the twenty years he lived there, Meldrum watched as President Robert Mugabe consolidated power and the government evolved into despotism. In May 2003, Meldrum, the last foreign journalist still working in the dangerous and chaotic nation, was illegally forced to leave his adopted home. His unflinching work describes the terror and intimidation Mugabe’s government exercised on both the press and citizens, and the resiliency of Zimbabweans determined to overturn Mugabe and demand the free society they were promised.

Muckrakers: How Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, and Lincoln Steffens Helped Expose Scandal, Inspire Reform, and Invent Investigative Journalism

Ann Bausum

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Hold the presses! Here's the sensational story of the birth of investigative journalism in America. At the turn of the 20th century, news reporters and monthly magazines collaborate to create a new kind of journalism—in-depth, serialized exposés of corporate, labor, and political corruption. Many of these stories become instant bestsellers in book format: books like The Jungle, Upton Sinclair's classic account of corruption in the meat-packing industry.

Ann Bausum's dramatic narrative follows a generation of dedicated journalists who force responsible changes in industry and politics as America thrives. Muckrakers is the inside story of public-spirited journalism right through its evolution, with profiles of latter-day practitioners like Woodward and Bernstein and today's Internet bloggers.

Ann Bausum's storytelling savvy will engage and inspire young people to cherish age-old values such as truth and public accountability. Muckrakers is the scoop on American journalism.

La Vida Loca (Always Running): El Testimonio de un Pandillero en Los Angeles

Luis J. Rodriguez

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"A los doce años, Luis Rodríguez ya era un veterano de la guerra entre las pandillas de East Los Angeles. Atraído por una cultura pandillera aparentemente insuperable, fue testigo de un sinfín de balaceras, golpizas y arrestos y, más tarde, con un miedo cada vez mayor, presenció cómo las drogas, los asesinatos, los suicidios y una delincuencia callejera carente de sentido cobraban la vida de amigos y familiares.

Poco tiempo después, Rodríguez encontro la manera de dejar atrás la vida del barrio a través de la educación y el poder de las palabras. Así pudo liberarse de años de violencia y desesperación. Una vez alcanzado el éxito como poeta chicano varias veces galardonado, Luis llegé a pensar que las calles ya no lo perseguirían, pero entonces su hijo ingresó en una pandilla. Rodríguez luchó por su hijo mediante el relato de su historia personal. La Vida Loca es una vívida croónica que se adentra en las motivaciones de la vida de las pandillas y nos advierte de la muerte y la destrucción que, tarde o temprano, se lleva la vida de sus participantes.

A ratos desgarradoramente triste y cruel, La Vida Loca es a la larga una historia verdadera, llena de inspiración, esperanza y sabiduría, y una lección duramente aprendida para las nuevas generaciones.

When All the World Was Young: A Memoir

Barbara Holland

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A summing up 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 13 people found this review helpful.

"Growing up is the process of learning how many things you can't do and how many people you can't be. When you've winnowed them out, what's left is you." - Barbara Holland

I've said before of author/essayist Barbara Holland that she has a remarkable talent for perceiving the small details of life and living. Or rather, a talent for remembering what she perceives and subsequently bringing it to the attention of the lumpish rest of us.

In mid-2006, Holland wrote a piece for the magazine AARP, "Being 70: The View from Up Here." So, published in 2005, WHEN ALL THE WORLD WAS YOUNG can perhaps be taken as Barbara's final word on the subject of her formative years. Somehow, I don't expect a sequel.

This volume is Holland's episodic narrative of her life from shortly before the beginning of World War II, at which time she was about six, to her first job in the display department of the Hecht Company in her (apparently) very early twenties. Measured against the comparatively happy memoirs of other female writers - Laura Shaine Cunningham (Sleeping Arrangements) and Doris Kearns Goodwin (Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir) come to mind - WHEN ALL THE WORLD WAS YOUNG is surprisingly bittersweet. The author is not reticent about her sternly authoritative stepfather, a self-absorbed mother disengaged from maternalism, her shoplifting phase, her high school abortion, and her wretched first marriage.

As in all of Holland's books that I've read to date, her wry, iconoclastic humor is a joy. She relates how, in the fourth grade, she was given the assignment of reading a passage from the Bible to the class every morning.

"I read my classmates a psalm a day, looking for the most rousing ones to hold my audience. ('Thou hast also given me the necks of mine enemies, that I might destroy them that hate me. They cried, but there was none to save them: even unto the Lord, but he answered them not. Then did I beat them small as dust before the wind. I did cast them out as dirt in the streets.' Psalm 18, perfect for the playground.)"

Because of her talent for perception, she comes across with unorthodox snippets of insight, such as: "Peculiar relatives make good stories in later life, but to a child they're a wobbly rudder." Or this: "Down below the grownup eye level, even the best-kept suburb seethed with action."

I wished WHEN ALL THE WORLD WAS YOUNG was two, three, four times as long. As a child, Barbara was an awkward loner who found companionship with only one or two really close friends, and who otherwise found escape in books. I soon realized that she and I, when growing up, were much alike. And my affection for her has grown accordingly.

Editorial Review:

Acclaimed writer Barbara Holland, whom the Philadelphia Inquirer has called “a national treasure,” finally tells her own story with this atmospheric account of a postwar American childhood. When All the World Was Young is Holland’s account of growing up in Washington, D.C., during the 1940s and ’50s, and is a deliciously subversive, sensitive journey into her past.
Mixing tales of an autocratic stepfather, a brilliant, reclusive mother, and a houseful of siblings with jump-rope rhymes and dangerous sled runs, teachers both wise and weird, and a child’s-eye view of war, Holland gives readers a unique and sharp-eyed look at history and the world of childhood as it used to be.

In Defiance of Hitler: The Secret Mission of Varian Fry

Carla Killough McClafferty

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

An engaging and heroic narrative 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This is the newest and in my opinion best introduction to Varian Fry, still a relatively unknown and unsung hero of World War II. This book is targeted at a young audience, nevertheless I recommend it to anyone seeking an introduction to a remarkable man through whom we can all draw inspiration. The author has done an excellent job conveying the danger, intrigue, frustration and ultimate success of the Emergency Rescue Committee's most charismatic character. The photographs are excellent as well as the appendix and source notes.

Great job Carla Killough McClafferty

Editorial Review:

On August 4, 1940, an unassuming American journalist named Varian Fry made his way to Marseilles, France, carrying in his pockets the names of approximately two hundred artists and intellectuals – all enemies of the new Nazi regime. As a volunteer for the Emergency Rescue Committee, Fry’s mission was to help these refugees flee to safety, then return home two weeks later. As more and more people came to him for assistance, however, he realized the situation was far worse than anyone in America had suspected – and his role far greater than he had imagined. He remained in France for over a year, refusing to leave until he was forcibly evicted.


At a time when most Americans ignored the atrocities in Europe, Varian Fry engaged in covert operations, putting himself in great danger, to save strangers in a foreign land. He was instrumental in the rescue of over two thousand refugees, including the novelist Heinrich Mann and the artist Marc Chagall.

Kinfolks: Falling Off the Family Tree - The Search for My Melungeon Ancestors

Lisa Alther

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In this dazzling, hilarious memoir, best-selling author of Kinflicks Lisa Alther chronicles her search for the missing--often mysterious--branches of her family tree.

Most of us grow up thinking we know who we are and where we come from. Lisa Alther's mother hailed from New York, her father from Virginia, and every day they reenacted the Civil War at home in East Tennessee. Then one night a grizzled babysitter with brown teeth told Lisa about the Melungeons: six-fingered child-snatchers who hid in cliff caves outside town. Forgetting about these creepy kidnappers until she had a daughter of her own, Lisa learned that the Melungeons were actually a group of dark-skinned people--some with extra thumbs--living in isolated pockets in the South. But who were they? Where did they come from? Were they the descendants of Sir Walter Raleigh's Lost Colony, or of shipwrecked Portuguese or Turkish sailors? Or were they the children of European frontiersmen, African slaves, and Native Americans? Theories abounded, but no one seemed to know for sure.

Learning that a cousin had had his extra thumbs removed, Lisa set out to discover who these mysterious Melungeons really were and why her grandmother wouldn't let her visit their Virginia relatives. Were there Melungeons in the family tree? Lisa assembled a hoard of clues over the years, but DNA testing finally offered answers.

Part sidesplitting travelogue, part how--and how not--to climb your family tree, Kinfolks shimmers with wicked humor, illustrating just how wacky and wonderful our human family really is.

I Have Fun Everywhere I Go: Savage Tales of Pot, Porn, Punk Rock, Pro Wrestling, Talking Apes, Evil Bosses, Dirty Blues, American Heroes, and the Most Notorious Magazines in the World

Mike Edison

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

I Have Fun Everywhere I Go is a rollicking, high-octane, always irreverent journey through the seamy side of the publishing industry. Mike Edison’s résumé spans twenty years and a slew of notorious titles, including Screw, High Times, Penthouse, and Hustler. An Ivy League dropout who’s never looked back, Edison embarked on a career that’s landed him in the producer’s chair for one of the worst B movies of all time; on tour with the likes of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, GG Allin, and the Ramones; undercover at a religious cult; on a bender with Evel Knievel; feuding with Hulk Hogan; smoking dope with Ozzy Osborne; and authoring some twenty novels you wouldn’t want your mother to catch you reading—let alone writing. As the publisher of High Times, he battled almost daily with a rainbow brigade of unrepentant hippies plagued with short-term memory loss, and owners who treated their employees more like the tenants of a halfway house for potheads than a team of professional editors and writers, all while leading the magazine to record heights in sales and advertising.

I Have Fun Everywhere I Go combines the fear and loathing of Hunter Thompson’s journalistic thrill rides with the acerbic insider voice of Toby Young. It’s an eye-opening, gleeful view of life on the edge—and the outlaws and oddballs encountered there.