The campaign to restore the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island was the first major effort to solicit private money for the rehabilitation of a government site. This book chronicles that campaign, from its inception through the selection - and later firing - of Lee Iacocca as chairman, the fundraising effort that ultimately exceeded its goal by $100 million, and the final celebration in 1986 that involved four days of unprecedented hoopla. Ross Holland focuses on the feasibility of public-private cooperation, tracing the project's history as only an insider could. He recalls the roles of career bureaucrats and the Reagan administration, examines the restoration of the Statue of Liberty, Liberty Island, and the old immigration station at Ellis Island, and documents the poor judgments that led to huge cost increases at all three sites.
The picture does not tell the whole story -- Scoop the world -- MacArthur's closed kingdom -- Six survivors -- Some events at Hiroshima -- Detonation -- Aftermath.
2012 James W. Tankard Book Award WinnerFrom 1961 to 1989, a committed group of documentary journalists from the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) reported the stories of America s overseas conflicts. Stuart Schulberg supplied film evidence to prosecute Nazi war criminals and established documentary units in postwar Berlin and Paris. NBC newsman David Brinkley created the template for prime-time news in 1961 and bore the scars to prove it. In 1964 Ted Yates and Bob Rogers produced a documentary warning of the pitfalls in Vietnam. Yates was later shot and killed in Jerusalem on the first day of the Six-Day War while producing a documentary for NBC News.In "Into the Fray," Tom Mascaro vividly recounts the characters and experiences that helped create a unique, colorful documentary film crew based at the Washington bureau of NBC News. From the Kennedy era through the Reagan years, the journalists covered wars, rebellions, the Central Intelligence Agency, covert actions, the Pentagon, military preparedness, and world and American cultures. They braved conflicts and crises to tell the stories that Americans needed to see and hear, and in the process they changed the face of journalism. Mascaro also looks at the social changes in and around the unit itself, including the struggles and triumphs of women and African Americans in the field of television documentary."Into the Fray" is the story of adventure, loyalty to reason, and life and death in the service of broadcast journalism."
“The layman’s impression of a trial frequently comes from stage, motion picture, and television sources, which, while invariably exciting, are a pale simulation of a real trial. My quarrel with these presentations is not that they are technically incorrect, but that they are substantially inadequate. They lack emotional authenticity. They tend to become stereotyped. Their falsity largely defeats their authors’ purpose because the excitement, surprise, and meaningfulness of a real court contest are incomparable and elude imagination. In fictional court scenes one sharp contradiction often breaks the witness, who then hysterically screams a confession. In real life the witness’s fortitude in the face of exposure is as remarkable as a human body’s resistance to incredible torment. The need to survive creates desperation, and desperation makes possible survival. This circle of determination is not easily broken, and in the succeeding pages one will find dozens of entrapments and startling contradictions, leaving the witness no retreat and compelling him to admit his error. Yet he continues to fight back and clutch for the remote chance that the tide will turn and he will not go under. Sometimes, it does, and the bizarre developments that bring it about are also beyond inventiveness. This gruesome struggle exceeds the artificial concept of authors of what constitutes court drama in the same way that true human experience in any sphere exceeds the patterned concept of some fiction.” This gripping legal classic is organized as follows: Prologue: Opening the Green Doors 1. Reputation: The Libel Case of Quentin Reynolds vs. Westbrook Pegler 2. Divorce: The “War of the Roses” and Others 3. Talent: The Case of the Plagiarized Song “Rum and Coca-Cola” 4. Honor: Issue of Nazism in America 5. Life and Limb: Two Cases of Negligence 6. Proxy Battle: The Struggle Over Loew’s
Few American newspapers, perhaps none, have matched the New York Herald Tribune in the crispness of its writing and editing, the bite of its commentators, the range of its coverage and the clarity of its typography. The “Trib”, as it was affectionately called, raised newspapering to an art form. It had an influence and importance out of all proportion to its circulation. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln went to great lengths to retain the support of its co-founder, Horace Greeley. President Eisenhower felt it was such an important institution and Republican organ that he helped broker its sale to its last owner, multimillionaire John Hay Whitney. The Trib’s spectacularly distinguished staffers and contributors included Karl Marx, Tom Wolfe, Walter Lippmann, Dorothy Thompson, Virgil Thomson, Eugenia Sheppard, Red Smith, Heywood Broun, Walter Kerr, Homer Bigart, and brothers Joseph and Stewart Alsop. At the close of World War II, the Herald Tribune, the marriage of two newspapers that had done more than any others to create modern daily journalism, was at its apex of power and prestige. Yet just twenty-one years later, its influence still palpable in every newsroom across the nation, the Trib was gone. This is the story The Paper, a 1986 finalist of the National Book Award for Nonfiction and winner of the George Polk Prize, tells. “Probably the best book ever written about an American newspaper. But it is more than that — a brilliant piece of social history that recounts in vivid and telling detail the changing conception of ‘news’ in America... The book is chockablock with marvelous yarns... And what a cast of characters Kluger has to work with... Some of the most vivid pages in The Paper are Kluger’s portraits of these arresting personalities.” — J. Anthony Lukas, The Boston Globe “Monumental... with a narrative sweep that is always absorbing and sometimes breathtaking... What invigorates this history is Mr. Kluger’s enthusiasm for his subject, which is apparent everywhere in the loving detail with which he tells the story... and in the liveliness of the prose with which he profiles some of the Tribune’s more unusual personalities.” — Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times “Engrossing... if there is a better book about an American newspaper, I am unaware of it... It is loaded to the gunnels with newspaper anecdotes, but at its core The Paper is a book about the relationship between the press and the powerful, the press and the wealthy.” — Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World “The romance of The Front Page, genteel anti-Semitism, the disaster of newspaper labor relations, and the rise and fall of newspaper fortunes. All are there in The Paper. It is irresistible.” — Anthony Lewis “Compelling... most delightfully so when Mr. Kluger is limning the words and deeds of the people who made The Paper crackle with vitality for more than a century... He does a remarkable job of bringing these people to life on the printed page.” — David Shaw, The New York Times Book Review “Remarkable... a fascinating account of a greatness that once was... This book will hold you in its narrative grip as you revel in a story of a grand venture and epic characters... Here the history of a newspaper is a graphic presentation of a nation’s life.” — Kirkus Reviews “Richard Kluger is uniquely qualified to tell this tale... He brings a novelist’s imagination to some vivid material.” — Paul Gray, Time Magazine “Fascinating from start to finish, the best book about American journalism since Swanberg’s Citizen Hearst. Huge and engrossing.” — Larry Lee, San Francisco Chronicle “A magnificently romantic history not only of the ill-fated New York Herald Tribune but of New York newspapering generally... peopled with unforgettable heroes and knaves.” — Robert Sherrill, Chicago Sun-Times
The definitive biography of the most successful female broadcaster of all time—Barbara Walters—a woman whose personal demons fueled an ambition that broke all the rules and finally gave women a permanent place on the air, written by bestselling author Susan Page. Barbara Walters was a force from the time TV was exploding on the American scene in the 1960s to its waning dominance in a new world of competition from streaming services and social media half a century later. She was not just a groundbreaker for women (Oprah announced when she was seventeen that she wanted to be Barbara Walters), but also expanded the big TV interview and then dominated the genre. By the end of her career, she had interviewed more of the famous and infamous, from presidents to movie stars to criminals to despots, than any other journalist in history. Then at sixty-seven, past the age many female broadcasters found themselves involuntarily retired, she pioneered a new form of talk TV called The View. She is on the short list of those who have left the biggest imprints on television news and on our culture, male or female. So, who was the woman behind the legacy? In The Rulebreaker, Susan Page conducts 150 interviews and extensive archival research to discover that Walters was driven to keep herself and her family afloat after her mercurial and famous impresario father attempted suicide. But she never lost the fear of an impending catastrophe, which is what led her to ask for things no woman had ever asked for before, to ignore the rules of misogynistic culture, to outcompete her most ferocious competitors, and to protect her complicated marriages and love life from scrutiny. Page breaks news on every front—from the daring things Walters did to become the woman who reinvented the TV interview to the secrets she kept until her death. This is the eye-opening account of the woman who knew she had to break all the rules so she could break all the rules about what viewers deserved to know.
Great Neck, New York, is one of America's most fascinating suburbs. Settled by the Dutch in the 1600s, generations have been attracted to this once quiet enclave for its easy access to New York City and its tranquil setting by the Long Island Sound. This illustrious suburb has also been home to a number of film and theatrical luminaries from Groucho Marx and Oscar Hammerstein to comedian Alan King and composer Morton Gould. Famous writers who have lived there include Ring Lardner and of course, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who used Great Neck as the inspiration for his classic novel The Great Gatsby. Although frequently recognized as the home to well-known personalities, Great Neck is also notable for the conspicuous way it transformed itself from a Gentile community, to a mixed one, and, finally, in the 1960s, to one in which Jews were the majority. In Inventing Great Neck, Judith Goldstein tells this lesser known story. The book spans four decades of rapid change, beginning with the 1920s. Throughout the early half of the century, Great Neck was a leader in the reconfiguration of the American suburb, serving as a playground of rich estates for New York's aristocracy. Throughout the forties, it boasted one of the country's most outstanding school systems, served as the temporary home to the United Nations, and gave significant support to the civil rights movement. During the 1950s, however, the suburb diverged from the national norm when the Gentile population began to lose its dominant position. Inventing Great Neck is about the allure of suburbia, including the institutions that bind it together, and the social, economic, cultural, and religious tensions that may threaten its vibrancy. Anyone who has lived in a suburban town, particularly one in the greater metropolitan area, will be intrigued by this rich narrative, which illustrates not only Jewish identity in America but the struggle of the American dream itself through the heart of the twentieth century.
