11 results for "Biography"

Rough draft: a memoir

Tur, Katy
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “It’s a hell of a story.” — The New York Times “A stunning and revelatory memoir.” — Oprah Daily From MSNBC anchor and instant New York Times bestselling author Katy Tur, a gripping memoir about journalism, family legacy, and personal struggles, recounting her volatile childhood, the burden of legacy, and her climb to success in a demanding career. When a box from her mother showed up on Katy Tur’s doorstep, months into the pandemic and just as she learned she was pregnant with her second child, she didn’t know what to expect. The box contained thousands of hours of video—the work of her pioneering helicopter journalist parents. They grew rich and famous for their aerial coverage of Madonna and Sean Penn’s secret wedding, the Reginald Denny beating in the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and O.J. Simpson’s notorious run in the white Bronco. To Tur, these family videos were an inheritance of sorts, and a reminder of who she was before her own breakout success as a reporter. In Rough Draft , Tur writes about her eccentric and volatile California childhood, punctuated by forest fires, earthquakes, and police chases—all seen from a thousand feet in the air. She recounts her complicated relationship with a father who was magnetic, ambitious, and, at times, frightening. And she charts her own survival from local reporter to globe-trotting foreign correspondent, running from her past. Tur also opens up for the first time about her struggles with burnout and impostor syndrome, her stumbles in the anchor chair, and her relationship with CBS Mornings anchor Tony Dokoupil (who quite possibly had a crazier childhood than she did). Intimate and captivating, Rough Draft explores the gift and curse of family legacy, examines the roles and responsibilities of the news, and asks the question: To what extent do we each get to write our own story?
Atria/One Signal Publishers 2023-05-02 272 pages

Airhead: The imperfect art of making news

Maitlis, Emily
It's thirty seconds to air. The interviewee has walked off in a huff. The next guest hasn't arrived. There's a wall of riot police behind me. The cameraman only speaks Hungarian and has cut my head out of the shot but I don't know his word for 'wide angle'. Then comes the quiet. Utter silence in my head. We've just lost comms with the whole team back in London. I can choose to scream. Or to surrender to the moment. Then, a hand is waved at me as a visual cue. And I start talking. The things that are said on camera are only part of the story. Behind every interview there is a backstory. How it came about. How it ended. The compromises that were made. The regrets, the rows, the deeply inappropriate comedy. Making news is an essential but imperfect art. It rarely goes according to plan. I never expected to find myself wandering around the Maharani of Jaipurs bedroom with Bill Clinton or invited to the Miss USA beauty pageant by its owner, Donald Trump. I never expected to be thrown into a provincial Cuban jail, or to be drinking red wine at Steve Bannon's kitchen table or spend three hours in a lift with Alan Partridge. I certainly didnt expect the Dalai Lama to tell me the story of his most memorable poo. The beauty of television is its ability to simplify, but that's also its weakness: it can distill everything down to one snapshot, one soundbite. Then the news cycle moves on. Airhead is my step back from the white noise. Before and after the camera started rolling, this is what really happened.
Michael Joseph 2019 335 pages

Breaking news: a memoir

Fletcher, Martin
During three decades covering wars, revolutions, and natural disasters, Martin Fletcher worked his way from news agency cameraman to Tel Aviv bureau chief for NBC News, facing down his own fears while facing up to mass killers, warlords, and murderers. These extraordinary, real-life adventure stories, told with humor and elegance, describe Fletcher's growth from clueless adventurer to grizzled veteran of the world's trouble spots. Can you eat the food of a warlord who stole it from the starving? Do you listen politely to a terrorist threatening to blow up your children? Do you ask the tough questions of a Khmer Rouge killer, knowing he is your only ticket out of the Cambodian jungle?
Thomas Dunne 2009-10-27 254 pages

The Geraldo show: a memoir

Rivera, Geraldo
During my half a century in public life, my image and reputation have had more ups and downs than the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island. I have been called savior and sinner, fool and wise man, crusader and exploiter, hothead and dope. I am routinely scorned, admired, beloved, and belittled—which one is usually based on when the viewer tuned in. Were you around for my early days as a crusading local newsman? Did you waste an evening with me inside Al Capone's empty vault? Were you watching when the bombs dropped in Afghanistan or Iraq, or did you tune in to the raucous talk show when my nose was broken in the best television studio brawl ever caught on tape? Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, and my employment by the conservative rabble-rousers of Fox News—and, more recently, with the coming of the Age of Trump—my professional life has been even more difficult to define. How could a sincerely progressive native-born Jew-Rican New Yorker like me ever work for an outfit better suited to the vibes of Orange County, California, the Dixie, Appalachia, or the Mountain West? How could I not condemn and obstruct a wrecking ball like Donald Trump? Over five decades, I have met most of the era's good and bad guys, from Ronald Reagan to Charles Manson, Fidel Castro to Yasser Arafat, Muhammad Ali to John Lennon, and Elvis Presley to Michael Jackson. Two figure heavily in this book, both longtime friends: Roger Ailes, the disgraced yet undeniably brilliant creator of Fox News; and Donald Trump, once a flamboyant playboy, billionaire businessman, and now 45th President of the United States. At the vigorous twilight of a long and largely improvised life lived in plain sight, I have little left to prove. Faced with a series of random chances, for better and worse, what I made of my life is what I made of those chances. Time has enlightened and humbled me. Sincerely, Geraldo Rivera
BenBella Books, Inc 2018-04-03 366 pages

The year I was Peter the Great

Kalb, Marvin L.
The year 1956 was an extraordinary year in modern Russian history. It was called "the year of the thaw"--a time when Stalin's dark legacy of dictatorship died in February only to be reborn later that December. This historic arc from rising hope to crushing despair opened with a speech by Nikita Khrushchev, then the unpredictable leader of the Soviet Union. He astounded everyone by denouncing the one figure who, up to that time, had been hailed as a "genius," a wizard of communism--Josef Stalin himself. Now, suddenly, this once unassailable god was being portrayed as a "madman" whose idiosyncratic rule had seriously undermined communism and endangered the Soviet state. This amazing switch from hero to villain lifted a heavy overcoat of fear from the backs of ordinary Russians. It also quickly led to anti-communist uprisings in Eastern Europe, none more bloody and challenging than the one in Hungary, which Soviet troops crushed at year's end. Marvin Kalb, then a young diplomatic attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, observed this tumultuous year that foretold the end of Soviet communism three decades later. Fluent in Russian, a doctoral candidate at Harvard, he went where few other foreigners would dare go, listening to Russian students secretly attack communism and threaten rebellion against the Soviet system, traveling from one end of a changing country to the other and, thanks to his diplomatic position, meeting and talking with Khrushchev, who playfully nicknamed him Peter the Great. In this, his fifteenth book, Kalb writes a fascinating eyewitness account of a superpower in upheaval and of a people yearning for an end to dictatorship
The Brookings Institution 2017-10-10 290 pages

Outside the box: a memoir

Sherr, Lynn
ABC-TV's Lynn Sherr writes a savvy, witty, and moving memoir about events that have shaped her life and her career as one of the first women to break through in broadcast television As a reporter for 40 years, most of them on television, Lynn Sherr has brought clarity and insight to many of the most compelling news events of our day—from politics to murder trials to the space program. Now this widely respected award-winning journalist lets us in on what she's seen "inside the box" as she steps outside for a reality check. She tells how television journalism has changed over the years, for better and for worse, and explores the critical state of TV news today. Her accounts of the political and cultural upheavals she covered also make this a social history of our time. When she first began in the industry, newspaper editors bluntly told her, "We don't hire girls," but Lynn persevered, both covering and experiencing the emergence of modern feminism. All that despite being fired from her first TV job! She also addresses the heartbreak of her husband's death followed by her own battle with colon cancer. Lynn Sherr opens up about those painful times with an honesty that will touch and inspire readers. Her personal accounts—growing up in Philadelphia, where her father was a pioneering professional basketball player; suddenly becoming a stepmom; slipping off to commune with giraffes—all underscore her insistence on always keeping one foot outside the box.
Rodale 2006-09-05 360 pages

Love in black and white: a memoir of race, religion, and romance

Cohen, William S.
Streaming Video on Love In Black & White now available at Expandedbooks.com Most Americans regard the World War II period as belonging to the "greatest generation," but it was also a time when religious intolerance and racial violence flourished. Shamefully, it was commonplace to see signs that read "Whites Only" or "Jews Not Allowed." It is within this world that this compelling memoir is set. William Cohen, born in Bangor, Maine, was the eldest son of a Jewish father and a Protestant Irish mother. Janet Langhart, an African-American, was raised in Indianapolis, Indiana by her single parent mother, a Southern Baptist. The book draws fascinating parallels between the histories of two people from different regions, races, and religions, as both are witnesses to and targets of the social tensions of the day. Throughout Love in Black and White, readers accompany Bill and Janet in their struggle to overcome to the barriers of ethnic and racial bigotry and hatred. The stories are rich and profound. At times they are amusing. Other times, harrowing. Against impossible odds, Bill would be elected to serve his country as a U.S. Congressman and Senator, and Janet would become a prominent television personality, activist, and highly respected businesswoman and author. Opposites in so many ways―in color, faith and culture―seemingly a bundle of contradictions, they meet in 1974, become friends, and eventually fall in love. They decide to marry on Valentine's Day 1996 in the very place that once harbored some of the nation's most prominent racists-the U.S. Capitol. They receive the surprise of a lifetime when Bill is asked by President Bill Clinton to serve as the nation's 20th Secretary of Defense. It is a calling that proves to be life transforming for both him and Janet, as they lead, inspire and bring comfort to the men and women who defend our nation. It is at the Pentagon where they witness just how powerful our nation ca
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers 2007 373 pages

Reporting live from the end of the world

Shukman, David
When frontline BBC news reporter David Shukman switched beat from world affairs to environment in 2003, he feared he might be in for a dull life. He couldn't have been more wrong. His new job has taken him to every corner of the earth: journeying up the fabled North West Passage in the Arctic, chasing after loggers in the Amazon and battling through plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean, getting trapped in Siberian blizzards along the way. Reporting Live from the End of the World charts Shukman's extraordinary adventures, in the process providing a fascinating eye-witness account of the state of the planet. Wonderfully written and often very funny, the book will be loved by travel, science or environment readers alike.
Profile 2010 307 pages