15 results for "History"

Like a Rolling Stone A Memoir

Jann S Wenner
In this New York Times bestseller, Rolling Stone founder, co-editor, and publisher Jann Wenner offers a "touchingly honest" and "wonderfully deep" memoir from the beating heart of classic rock and roll (Bruce Springsteen). Jann Wenner has been called by his peers "the greatest editor of his generation." His deeply personal memoir vividly describes and brings you inside the music, the politics, and the lifestyle of a generation, an epoch of cultural change that swept America and beyond. The age of rock and roll in an era of consequence, what will be considered one of the great watersheds in modern history. Wenner writes with the clarity of a journalist and an essayist. He takes us into the life and work of Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Bono, and Bruce Springsteen, to name a few. He was instrumental in the careers of Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and Annie Leibovitz. His journey took him to the Oval Office with his legendary interviews with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, leaders to whom Rolling Stone gave its historic, full-throated backing. From Jerry Garcia to the Dalai Lama, Aretha Franklin to Greta Thunberg, the people Wenner chose to be seen and heard in the pages of Rolling Stone tried to change American culture, values, and morality. Like a Rolling Stone is a beautifully written portrait of one man's life, and the life of his generation.
Little Brown 2023-06-27 592 pages

audition

barbara-walters
Young people starting out in television sometimes say to me: “I want to be you.” My stock reply is always: “Then you have to take the whole package.” And now, at last, the most important woman in the history of television journalism gives us that “whole package,” in her inspiring and riveting memoir. After more than forty years of interviewing heads of state, world leaders, movie stars, criminals, murderers, inspirational figures, and celebrities of all kinds, Barbara Walters has turned her gift for examination onto herself to reveal the forces that shaped her extraordinary life. Barbara Walters’s perception of the world was formed at a very early age. Her father, Lou Walters, was the owner and creative mind behind the legendary Latin Quarter nightclub, and it was his risk-taking lifestyle that made Barbara aware of the ups and downs that can occur when someone is willing to take great risks. The financial responsibility for her family, the fear, the love all played a large part in the choices she made as she grew up: the friendships she developed, the relationships she had, the marriages she tried to make work. Ultimately, thanks to her drive, combined with a decent amount of luck, she began a career in television. And what a career it has been! Against great odds, Barbara has made it to the top of a male-dominated industry. She has spent a lifetime auditioning, and this book, in some ways, is her final audition, as she fully opens up both her private and public lives. In doing so, she has given us a story that is heartbreaking and honest, surprising and fun, sometimes startling, and always fascinating.
Random House Audio 2008

Unbelievable My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History

Katy Tur
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Compelling… this book couldn’t be more timely.” – Jill Abramson, New York Times Book Review From the Recipient of the 2017 Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism Called "disgraceful," "third-rate," and "not nice" by Donald Trump, NBC News correspondent Katy Tur reported on—and took flak from—the most captivating and volatile presidential candidate in American history. Katy Tur lived out of a suitcase for a year and a half, following Trump around the country, powered by packets of peanut butter and kept clean with dry shampoo. She visited forty states with the candidate, made more than 3,800 live television reports, and tried to endure a gazillion loops of Elton John’s "Tiny Dancer"—a Trump rally playlist staple. From day 1 to day 500, Tur documented Trump’s inconsistencies, fact-checked his falsities, and called him out on his lies. In return, Trump repeatedly singled Tur out. He tried to charm her, intimidate her, and shame her. At one point, he got a crowd so riled up against Tur, Secret Service agents had to walk her to her car. None of it worked. Facts are stubborn. So was Tur. She was part of the first women-led politics team in the history of network news. The Boys on the Bus became the Girls on the Plane. But the circus remained. Through all the long nights, wild scoops, naked chauvinism, dodgy staffers, and fevered debates, no one had a better view than Tur. Unbelievable is her darkly comic, fascinatingly bizarre, and often scary story of how America sent a former reality show host to the White House. It’s also the story of what it was like for Tur to be there as it happened, inside a no-rules world where reporters were spat on, demeaned, and discredited. Tur was a foreign correspondent who came home to her most foreign story of all. Unbelievable is a must-read for anyone who still wakes up and wonders, Is this real life?
HarperCollins 2018-02-27 304 pages

How Life Imitates Sports A Sportswriter Recounts, Relives, and Reckons with 50 Years on the Sports Beat

Ira Berkow
Memorable Stories From a Half Century of Sports Journalism For the last half century, Pulitzer Prize–winning sportswriter Ira Berkow has been at the center of some of the most memorable moments in sports history. From the World Series, NBA Finals, and Super Bowl, to Heavyweight Title Fights, the Olympics, and The Masters, he has seen and covered them all. After fifty years covering sports, with more than twenty-five as a journalist for the New York Times , How Life Imitates Sports shares how these events—and their participants—have significantly shaped how we as a nation have come to understand and perceive our culture (and even our politics). They are a historical record of one significant sphere of our life and times: sports. From Muhammad Ali to Mike Tyson, Michael Jordan to LeBron James, Jackie Robinson to Derek Jeter, Billie Jean King to Tonya Harding, O. J. Simpson to Tiger Woods and beyond, this collection is a historical record of our times over this past half century, in terms of society, race and gender, politics, legal issues, and the fabric of our sports passions and human condition, ranging from pathos to humor, from introspection to perception. Including additional commentary on when these events first occurred and how they have impacted us today, Berkow shares the knowledge of someone who sat ringside, in the press box, and on the sidelines for some of the most notable moments in our history. So whether you’re a fan of baseball and basketball, or tennis and soccer, How Life Imitates Sports shows you our history from someone who witnessed it first-hand; a worthy collection for anyone who appreciates the highest quality sports journalism.
Sports Publishing 2020-08-04 424 pages

Blue-Eyed Boy A Memoir

Robert Timberg
Acclaimed journalist Robert Timberg's extraordinary, long-awaited memoir of his struggle to reclaim his life and find his calling after being severely burned as a young Marine lieutenant in Vietnam In January 1967, Robert Timberg was a short-timer, counting down the days until his combat tour ended. He had thirteen days to go before he got to go back home to his wife in Southern California. That homecoming would eventually happen, but not in thirteen days, and not as the person he once was. The moment his vehicle struck a Vietcong land mine divided his life into before and after. He survived, barely, with third-degree burns over his face and much of his body. It would have been easy to give up. Instead, Robert Timberg began an arduous and uncertain struggle back--not just to physical recovery, but to a life of meaning. Remarkable as his return to health was--he endured thirty-five operations, one without anesthesia--just as remarkable was his decision to reinvent himself as a journalist and enter one of the most public of professions. Blue-Eyed Boy is a gripping, occasionally comic account of what it took for an ambitious man, aware of his frightful appearance but hungry for meaning and accomplishment, to master a new craft amid the pitying stares and shocked reactions of many he encountered on a daily basis. By the 1980s, Timberg had moved into the upper ranks of his profession, having secured a prestigious Nieman Fellowship at Harvard and a job as White House correspondent for The Baltimore Sun . Suddenly his work brought his life full circle: the Iran-Contra scandal broke. At its heart were three fellow Naval Academy graduates and Vietnam-era veterans, Oliver North, Bud McFarlane, and John Poindexter. Timberg's coverage of that story resulted in his first book, The Nightingale's Song , a powerful work of narrative nonfiction that follows these three academy graduates and two others--John McCain and Jim Webb--from Annapolis through Vietnam and into the Reagan years. In Blue-Eyed Boy , Timberg relates how he came to know and develop a deep understanding of these five men, and how their stories helped him understand the ways the Vietnam War and the furor that swirled around it continued to haunt him, and the nation as a whole, as they still do even now, nearly four decades after its dismal conclusion. Like others of his generation, Robert Timberg had to travel an unexpectedly hard and at times bitter road. In facing his own life with the same tools of wisdom, human empathy, and storytelling grit he has always brought to his journalism, he has produced one of the most moving and important memoirs of our time.
Penguin 2015-07-14 320 pages

City Room

Arthur Gelb
A New York Times Notable Book Arthur Gelb was hired by The New York Times in 1944 as a night copyboy—the paper’s lowliest position. Forty-five years later, he retired as its managing editor. Along the way, he exposed crooked cops and politicians, mentored a generation of our most-talented journalists, was the first to praise the as-yet-undiscovered Woody Allen and Barbra Streisand, and brought Joe Papp instant recognition. From D-Day to the liberation of the concentration camps, from the agony of Vietnam to the resignation of a President, from the fall of Joe McCarthy to the rise of the “Woodstock Nation,” Gelb gives an insider’s take on the great events of this nation's history—what he calls “the happiest days of my life.”
Penguin Group 2004-11-02 672 pages

And Then I Danced Traveling the Road to LGBT Equality

Mark Segal
"[A] swiftly written debut memoir...[Segal] vividly describes his firsthand experience as a teenager inside the Stonewall bar during the historic riots, his participation with the Gay Liberation Front, and amusing encounters with Elton John and Patti LaBelle . . . A jovial yet passionately delivered self-portrait inspiring awareness about LGBT history from one of the movement's true pioneers." --Kirkus Reviews "With great verve and spirit, Segal has rendered a lively and dramatic memoir of the early days of the gay rights struggle; the infighting over strategies and objectives; the long, hard road of progress; and a look at the challenges still ahead." --Booklist On December 11, 1973, Mark Segal disrupted a live broadcast of the CBS Evening News when he sat on the desk directly between the camera and news anchor Walter Cronkite, yelling, "Gays protest CBS prejudice!" He was wrestled to the studio floor by the stagehands on live national television, thus ending LGBT invisibility. But this one victory left many more battles to fight, and creativity was required to find a way to challenge stereotypes surrounding the LGBT community. Mark Segal's job, as he saw it, was to show the nation who gay people are: our sons, daughters, fathers, and mothers. Because of activists like Mark Segal, whose life work is dramatically detailed in this poignant and important memoir, today there are openly LGBT people working in the White House and throughout corporate America. An entire community of gay world citizens is now finding the voice that they need to become visible.
Open Lens 2015 302 pages

Maverick's Progress An Autobiography

James T. Flexner
National book Award laureate; recipient of Special Pulitzer Prize citation; winner of the Life in America Prize the Archives of American Art Award; among many others, James Thomas Flexner has written with distinction about American history and art. He has penetrated many of the charactrers who have shaped history exposing the intricacies of not only the historical figure, but the man beneath the marble image. The range of Flexner's subjects is wide: painters, inventors, doctors, loyalists, traitors, and spies, such luminaries as George Washington, Benedict Arnold, Alexander Hamilton, and John Singleton Copley, are among those Flexner has taken as subjects. After over fifty years of writnig, Flexner, one of America's greatest chroniclers has turned his probing eye back on to the pages of his own life with the same honesty, frankness, wit which have come to signify his form. James Thomas Flexner was born in 1908 on Lexington Avenue, New York City to parents Helen Thomas and Simon Flexner (scientist and first director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical research.) Published in the literary magazine at the Lincoln High School, Flexner's passion for writing was spawned at a young age. This passion would become a source of life long struggle as well as success for Flexner. Journalist for the Herald Tribune, and foremost biographer (as well as making numerous appearances on radio and television,) Flexner's career allowed him access into the quick of the political, social, and artistic movements and developments that shaped the twentieth century. An un-traditional student, Flexner, although graduating magna com laude from Harvard University, often pursued what was to be considered by academics, unorthodox methods of research for his work. Following the passion of his own interests and plotting his own course of research and study, Flexner created of himself a sort of maverick, chartign a course for biography that countered that written in the guide books of academe. While he probed and uncovered the lives of the great men who shaped the past, noteworthy publishers, writers, artists, and politicians of the twentieth century fill the pages of Maverick's Progress. Flexner writes of how influences, acquantances, and friends such as Bernard Berenson, Conrad Aiken, Ivy Lee, Harry Hopkins, Allan Nevins, Logan Pearsall Smith, and Edward Hopper figured in his life, and in his development as a writer. James Flexner has authored more than twenty books, several of them have been recently re-published by Fordham University Press. He was awarded the Gold Medal for Eminence in Biography, by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1988. He is perhaps most well known for his four-volume biography of George Washington which was eventually condensed into one: An Indispensable Man from which two television mini-series have been produced and for which he was awared the Peabody Award and Emmy Nomination. Maverick's Progress offers us a candid an sparkling look into the life of a writer who has indeed been a maverick in the canon of American historians - an individual who himself has been an Indispensable Man.
Fordham Univ Press 1996 510 pages

Messages From My Father A Memoir

Calvin Trillin
Calvin Trillin, the celebrated New Yorker writer, offers a rich and engaging biography of his father, as well as a literate and entertaining fanfare for the common (and decent, and hard-working) man. Abe Trillin had the western Missouri accent of someone who had grown up in St. Joseph and the dreams of America of someone who had been born is Russia. In Kansas City, he was a grocer, at least until he swore off the grocery business. He was given to swearing off things—coffee, tobacco, alcohol, all neckties that were not yellow in color. Presumably he had also sworn off swearing, although he was a collector of curses, such as "May you have an injury that is not covered by workman's compensation." Although he had a strong vision of the sort of person he wanted his son to be, his explicit advice about how to behave didn't go beyond an almost lackadaisical "You might as well be a mensch." Somehow, though, Abe Trillin's messages got through clearly. The author's unerring sense of the American character is everywhere apparent in this quietly powerful memoir, Messages from My Father .
Macmillan 1997-06-12 128 pages

All those mornings . . . at the Post The 20th Century in Sports from Famed Washington Post Columnist Shirley Povich

Shirley Povich
Shirley Povich was the Dean of American sportswriters. As a columnist for The Washington Post for more than seventyfive years, he was an eyewitness to the most thrilling moments in American sports, including: the legendary 1927 Dempsy-Tunney "long count"; the celebrated 1938 race between Seabiscuit and War Admiral; the 1946 signing of Jackie Robinson by the Brooklyn Dodgers; Don Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 World Series; the Ali-Frazier fight of 1971; and the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. But Povich's columns were about more than sports; they reflected the dramatic changes in American society over the course of the 20th Century. Driven by a strong sense of social justice, Povich called for the integration of major league baseball in 1939, and twenty years later he was still at it, attacking Washington Redskins owner George Preston Marshall for having an all-white team. For the 100th anniversary of his birth, Povich's children— David, Maury, and Lynn — and his colleague at the Post, former sports editor George Solomon, have pulled together this panoramic collection of Povich's most beloved columns. The result is a front-row seat to the most awe-inspiring sports moments of our American Century.
PublicAffairs 2006-05-02 432 pages

Blood of the Liberals

George Packer
An acclaimed journalist and novelist explores the legacy and future of American liberalism through the history of his family's politically active history George Packer's maternal grandfather, George Huddleston, was a populist congressman from Alabama in the early part of the century—an agrarian liberal in the Jacksonian mold who opposed the New Deal. Packer's father was a Kennedy-era liberal, a law professor and dean at Stanford whose convictions were sorely—and ultimately fatally—tested in the campus upheavals of the 1960s. The inheritor of two sometimes conflicting strains of the great American liberal tradition, Packer discusses the testing of ideals in the lives of his father and grandfather and his own struggle to understand the place of the progressive tradition in our currently polarized political climate. Searching, engrossing, and persuasive, Blood of the Liberals is an original, intimate examination of the meaning of politics in American lives.
Macmillan 2001-08 405 pages

Memories After My Death The Story of My Father, Joseph "Tommy" Lapid

Yair Lapid
From leading political figure and bestselling Hebrew author Yair Lapid comes a mesmerizing portrait of the author's father, one of modern Israel's leading figures. Memories After My Death is the astonishing true story of Tommy Lapid, a well-loved and controversial Israeli figure who saw the development of the country from all angles over its first sixty years. From seeing his father taken away to a concentration camp to arriving in Tel Aviv at the birth of Israel, Tommy Lapid lived every major incident of Jewish life since the 1930s first-hand. This sweeping narrative will captivate anyone with an interest in how Israel became what it is today. Tommy Lapid's uniquely unorthodox opinions - he belonged to neither left nor right, was Jewish, but vehemently secular - expose the many contradictions inherent in Israeli life today.
St. Martin's Publishing Group 2017-10-24 336 pages

One Man's America A Journalist's Search for the Heart of His Country

Henry Grunwald,Henry Anatole Grunwald
A wise, witty, and humane autobiography filled with a passionate curiosity about the people--and meaning--of America. "One Man's America is at once a stirring account of a young immigrant becoming an American, a personal history of the major milestones of the late twentieth century, a fascinating insider's view of the most widely read news magazine in the world, and a warm and loving family saga. Here also is the remarkable success story of a boy driven from his native Vienna by the Nazis and returning years later as an ambassador; of a copy boy who rose to become editor of "Time magazine. During his long and distinguished career in journalism, Grunwald knew, befriended, and feuded with some of the greatest figures on the world stage, from Whitaker Chambers and Marilyn Monroe to John F. Kennedy and Henry Kissinger to Ronald Reagan and Fidel Castro. But the immense power his position allowed him was tempered by a fierce desire to know everything he could about the mores and folkways of the whole United States, Main Street bankers and student radicals alike, through whom he sought to understand the heart of his adopted country. "One Man's America is, above all, a hymn to the ever-turbulent, ever-changing land of America.
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 1998 672 pages

You Wake Me Each Morning

Lawn Connie Lawn,Connie Lawn
You Wake Me Each Morning That is what listeners around the world have said to Connie for years, as they heard her radio broadcasts in this country and around the world. The first time she heard the phrase was from Sam Lewis, America's long - time Ambassador to Israel. Some listeners have called the voice sexy, authoritative, funny, snobby, or sophisticated. Connie tries to incorporate it all, as she tells the stories that make the news or change history. Of the many compliments she has received, the most important came from Nelson Mandela. The former South African President said he listened to her broadcasts for years while in prison. He told her, during a Washington news conference, "You Gave My People Hope." Then he went onto say, "You are not as big as I thought you were!" In her autobiography, Connie tells of the struggles of a one-woman news bureau. She recounts such events as the unrest in Washington in 1968; the killing of Robert Kennedy (she had one of the last interviews with him); the Invasion of Czechoslovakia, where she stayed for six months; a brief kidnapping in Lebanon in l982, and White House coverage of Presidents from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama and beyond. Connie received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Journalism from the New Zealand National Press Club at the New Zealand Parliament on August 15, 2006. This is a book for people of all ages, but especially those who are working the hardest to find themselves. To all the message is - never give up, be different from the crowd, and have fun!
iUniverse 2010-02 356 pages