Mike Shea on the month’s new releases
John F. Burnett
Rodale Books
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JOHN F. BURNETT proves a new truism—that all news is local—as he reports on the state of affairs in newsworthy locales from Kosovo to Waco in UNCIVILIZED BEASTS AND SHAMELESS HELLIONS: TRAVELS WITH AN NPR CORRESPONDENT. The twenty-year veteran of public radio, who calls Austin home, takes a measured approach to the stories he’s covered, whether charmingly improbable (“The Leaf Player of Mexico City,” portraying a street musician who ends up on a Kronos Quartet CD), world changing (“Under the Dragon’s Wing in Iraq,” about being embedded with the U.S. ground forces), or simply unfathomable (“Katrina: The Big One”—no explanation necessary). Burnett eschews braggadocio, but it’s hard not to be impressed by the challenges of broadcasting from the kinds of hostile environments where reporters might get washed away, blown away, or simply taken away by the authorities. All for the privilege of a couple minutes on the air—the sound track to America’s morning latte.
Kim Powers
Carroll & Graf
(Read an excerpt)
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There’s an undercurrent of hysteria that threatens to sink KIM POWERS’s memoir, THE HISTORY OF SWIMMING, though the melodramatics have honest roots in the town of McKinney and his classically dysfunctional family: a successfully suicidal mother, an alcoholic father, and a trio of gay brothers whose youngest is plagued by his own drug and alcohol demons. Eldest sib Porky decamps for Washington; Kim and his younger-by-minutes twin, Tim, find work in New York. The narration revolves around Tim’s sudden disappearance on the city streets, possibly because of an epic binge that has left him unconscious or dead. Prompted by a day-old voice message, Kim makes a frantic dash to his twin’s old Texas haunts, but he finds only echoes of Tim’s sober past and is left wallowing in guilt over his brother’s troubled present. The story, while genuinely tragic, would be better served if the tears and tantrums were doled out more sparingly.
Karleen Koen
Crown
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It was twenty years ago that Houstonian KARLEEN KOEN’s fiction debut, Through a Glass Darkly, enjoyed a five-month stay on the New York Times best-seller list. The eighteenth-century historical novel eventually tallied about $2 million in sales, which makes commercial expectations for its follow-up (“long-awaited” seems inadequate), DARK ANGELS, plenty high. This prequel is a genteel piece that traces the romances and intrigues of twenty-year-old Alice Verney, a maid of honor to Queen Catherine in the court of King Charles II. Alice’s determined efforts to land an impressively titled husband are played out against a backdrop of ruthless political machinations, as Charles contemplates both war with the Dutch and a scandalous divorce from his queen, who has not provided him an heir. Dark Angels could sell every bit as well as its predecessor—to that audience who prefers affairs of the heart over affairs of state. Readers looking for a less-courtly fiction might find these 544 pages slight fare indeed.
Alan Weisman
A 33-year career in broadcast news, including lengthy stints with CBS Evening News and 60 Minutes, gave this writer and producer an ideal perch from which to view Texas-born newshound Dan Rather, the subject of Lone Star: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Dan Rather.
Can you point to any news story in particular that represents Rather at the top of his game? I’d say Watergate. It wasn’t a television story—there were no real pictures to show—and the Washington Post was clearly in the lead. But Dan did everything he could to advance it. [Post executive editor] Ben Bradlee later acknowledged that, while his paper owned the story, CBS took it national.
How did he become undone by Memogate? Dan smelled a scoop. He bought into [his producer’s] belief that the documents were proof positive that the president had ducked his National Guard commitment. As the Springsteen song goes, he was “blinded by the light.” I wrote this book to put his career in perspective, so that fifty years of reporting would not be written off by one final mistake.
Rather has agreed to do a hard-news show on Mark Cuban’s HDNet. The alliance is a good fit. Cuban has no problem allowing Dan to go anywhere he wants and report anything he wants.
How do you feel about the state of broadcast journalism? I don’t know of anyone who’s happy about it. The networks simply won’t give their news divisions the airtime they need. We have become marginalized and increasingly irrelevant.
Lone Star: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Dan Rather: Alan Weisman, published by Wiley.
