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What we could not know in 1959, what biographer A.M. Sperber makes abundantly clear, is that we were watching the shell of a driven man who had exhausted his incredible stores of emotional energy to international cooperation, then to radio coverage of the horrors of World War II, and on to shape the formation of the CBS new department during the explosion of the television era and the age of McCarthy. Sperber traces the rise and decline of this charismatic, almost manic, entrepreneur from the most unlikely of origins, that of a lumberjack named Egbert who quickly realized the liabilities of his given name in the male work camps of Washington State.
Egbert, now Edward, chopped wood only long enough to scratch and claw his way into Washington State College. A student with fingers in many campus pies, he joined an organization called the International Institute of Education in 1931. The IIE in the early 1930's was a form of college student exchange program, one of its sponsors being the not-quite-ready-for-prime-time Columbia Broadcast System. When Murrow spoke at a West Coast gathering of IIE representatives, he earned himself election to the national office of the IIE in New York, a paid position there, and free air time on CBS radio. Murrow produced Sunday afternoon radio lectures and round table discussions, demonstrating a flair for attracting international speakers. As Murrow learned more about the plight of Jews in Germany from reporter [and later close friend] William Shirer, he used the machinery of the IIE in the United States to rescue as many Jewish intellectuals as possible and place them in American colleges. It was a tactic not universally appreciated, nor would his close cooperation with the Russians be forgotten by J. Edgar Hoover.
By the beginning of the Battle of Britain, Murrow was assigned full time by CBS to provide radio coverage of Hitler's assaults and to coordinate the company's European reporting network. It is impossible to capsulize here the horrors of those eighteen months for Murrow and for England generally, when every night brought a terror at least as awful as the World Trade Center bombing. Murrow created a network of European radio correspondents-many of whom would become household names in their own rights. He overcame industry biases against putting reporters on the air and using taped reports from the fields. But most of all, he revolutionized the very style of radio news into "factual storytelling" by his nightly accounts of German bombings that by happenstance occurred during the East Coast's prime time 7 P.M. radio news hour. Later, as the theater of war shifted east, Murrow was among the first western reporters to see first hand an operating extermination camp. He could not bring himself to talk about it over the air for several days.
Murrow returned to CBS in New York a conquering hero of sorts, the network's hottest property. Sperber does a good job in explaining why the postwar Murrow-CBS marriage was a stormy one. For one thing, the war years had reshaped Murrow into a cross between an Old Testament prophet and a posttraumatic stress sufferer. He would never be quite at home in an industry moving toward television, increased advertising dependence, and escapism. Secondly, Murrow was too much the prophet to claim objectivity. He would never be confused with, say, Bob Trout. Long before Woodward and Bernstein, Murrow crafted the art of investigative reporting for a presumably concerned nation, particularly through the medium of his weekly "See It Now" series, a rough and tumble forerunner of "60 Minutes." His most controversial television piece, his hour-long exposure of Joe McCarthy, was out and out editorializing, albeit accurate. In Murrow's mind, he was serving the common good. Others were not so sure. Thirdly, Murrow himself had a past that made him a potential network liability. When he produced his "Harvest of Shame" documentary, for example, hardly a paean for capitalism, those with long memories would recall his enthusiastic embrace of Russian intellectuals in the late 1930's with the IIE.
The great irony in the breakup of Murrow and CBS is that the deciding infidelity may possibly have been unintentional. In 1960, with quiz show scandals threatening the credibility of the television industry, CBS President Frank Stanton announced a policy to eliminate the appearance of deceit in any of his network's programming, not just quiz shows. When pressed as to the extent of this policy, the network cited other programming, including rather surprisingly Murrow's own "Person to Person" prime time home visits to celebrities. In one reading of this event, Stanton may have simply been protesting the pre-scripting of interview questions and the staged walk-through of the homes. Or, there may have been a subtler message. A young Harry Reasoner inquired of Murrow on air, in so many words, "why are you, the Jeremiah of the industry, wasting precious prime time with the innocuous drivel of fighters and starlets?"
Unlike Reasoner and Howard K. Smith, who felt no compunction about switching networks, Murrow lived and died CBS. Illness and ultimately death interrupted his stint as window dressing for the Kennedy administration in 1965. Perhaps his prodigious cigarette smoking had finally claimed him. More likely, it was the pressure of living so many lives in one frail human shell.

He was the virtual prototype of the international newsman, urbane, well-spoken, and yet brutally honest and beyond reproach. He conveyed a sense of integrity that became a model for eeryone who followed, from the early days of colleagues like Eric Sevareid, Harry Reasoner, David Brinkley, and Walter Cronkite to the well-polished and quite cosmopolitan Peter Jennings. He beacame a power unto himself, gaining unrivaled credibility and relevance with the American people, with a somewhat dour and hyper-serious demeanor, almost a paradoy of himself as he related the latest in the world news. This work concentrates on his incredible gifts as well as on his initial work during the second world war exposing the truth and horrors underlying fascism. In the process, he gained widespread credibility not only for himself, but also for the so-called fourth estate and privilege for journalists at large. later he founded a team incorporating the best of the wartime correspondents , including Willaim Shirer, Charles Collingwood, Howard K. Smith, as well as many others.
Yet after the war he received both greater fame as well as a kind of denouement, in the sense that in order to rise and maintain his poosition at the top of the new world of television-based journalism, he had to deal with moral cretins and the contamination of corporate money politics. Eventually this led to a break between Murrow and CBS, although in the process he forged bonds with such new notables as Fred Friendly that led to the famous series "See It Now". Even in the midst of all this very public history, Murrow was at the same time a very private, shy, and melancholy man, who was given a very rich personal life he managed to keep far from the foibles of the cameras. This work by Ms. Sperber is a seminal work, one that takes a loving and fascinating look at a complex, memeorable, and highly moral man who managed to make his way through the temptations of the 20th century while keeping his dignity and integrity along his rather remarkable way. Enjoy!

Thus the rather innocuous commentator Walter Cronkite is the grand old man, whereas Sperber's Murrow is known only to journalism wonks.
The shallowness of the broadcast, electronic media, which prized immediacy (the now) from its inception, is hard on any sort of historical accuracy in commemorating Murrow. Had Murrow lived at the time of Thomas Carlyle or Walter Bagehot he would have been, I think, more kindly treated: for the medium of the book is friendlier to the very idea of preservation of the memory of the author. The whole material point of broadcast, and the Internet, is extraction of content from modern denizens of grub Street, who dare not think of themselves as authors, let alone bourgeois subjects with social power over and above that of the corporation.
Murrow, with a certain naivety, thought to use radio and then TV to communicate a level of complexity to the ordinary man only seen in books. But even his allies saw that the medium is the message (not necessarily a benign fact, nor one to be celebrated, as McLuhan himself spelled out in The Mechanical Bride.)
Reading a book imparts a certain depth and respect for complexity in the reader. Half-listening to a lunatic like Sen "Tail Gunner Joe" McCarthy while doing the dishes is apt to impart oversimplified half truths, a fact which McCarthy was low enough to use. While first-order McCarthyism in the form of naive anti-Communism is on the wane, second-order McCarthyism, where signifiers such as "economic growth" and the fear of job loss replace the red Menace and are used by the cynical in precisely the same way McCarthy used "communists in the State department that lost China."
Murrow's respect for complexity and willingness to try to communicate complex truths to the audience ultimately, as Sperber relates, had him gently retired from CBS and into directorship of the US Information Agency under Kennedy.
This book is an excellent read. It points up the fact that in many ways, the 1960s and 1970s were an infantile reaction to mere complexity and nuance. In this reaction, the popular mind was subtly persuaded to think of commentators, who did not pander to the worst in us, as stuffed shirts who "think they know more than the common lot." Thus even Cronkite was more acceptable because he hewed more closely to the policy that jelled under Murrow and that is described by Sperber, a policy in which departure from a vague centrist position was "opinion and not fact", but "facts" could include quite a lot of opinion...as long as it followed a centrist party line.
For example, as LA commentator Mike Davis points out in Ecology of Fear, wild fires are news only if they threaten upscale houses. This is now "fact": fires in ... SROs in downtown LA are no longer news, but fires near big ranches (probably referred to by their Yupped out owner with Yup irony as "mah spread") are news leaders. For the same reason that underpaid smoke jumpers die protecting "mah spread" (on the public dime, I might add), a fire in Malibu, or in Jackson Hole, is a "fact": a fire in LA or even Idaho Falls is a nonfact, and it shows "bias" and "opinion" to foreground this interpretive bias.
No opinion wants in logic to be an opinion. An ordinary man, expressing the "opinion" that the Chicago Cubs will take the pennant this year, is not shooting off opinions for theire own sake. Instead, our boy wants his "opinion" to become solid fact in the future.
Likewise, when Ed Murrow gave his famous anti-McCarthy broadcast, he was not, in good conscience, stating mere personal opinions for there own sake. His opinions wanted to be mere facts about Tail Gunner Joe, and Murrow's managers would have done well to state more clearly, not that the broadcaster not state "personal opinions", but instead that the broadcaster either state the opinions of the owners of the station, or else zip up, and restrict himself to such facts (such as the words coming off the wire service copy) that everyone, except the clinically insane, agrees to be facts.
Falsity and intellectual dishonesty is a toxic byproduct of media with longterm effects, and it can be stated fairly that Murrow may have been able to stop smoking if he had been able to come to a more honest contract with his employers. Instead, Paley and Stanton (despite the better angels of their nature) used the guy. During the 1940s and on radio, Ed Murrow's left-liberal views were simply less hazardous and more popular with viewers than they became in the 1950s, and Murrow was eased out as his entire perspective, and on-air persona, became less intelligible to a more suburban, less unionized viewership.
Of course, Paley and Stanton could not have done otherwise, and Frank Stanton much later (in a brouhaha over a late 1960s program) proved he had integrity. Perhaps the broadcast journalist should be an independent contractor who buys time from the airwaves under some sort of deal and says whatever he wants to say, making the listeners the ultimate arbiter of whether the guy is worth listening-to. But the problem with this pure market model is of course the bearer of bad news and the odd Cassandra who is confused with the content of the bad news, and whose value to society (in warning society of the ways in which it is in trouble) cannot be reflected in a market model at all. Nobody goes to the fair to buy a Nasty Story, or a detailed list of his own defects of character. The Catholic did not pay the priest to hear his confession.
No society can tolerate, under a pure market model, a Savonarola or Murrow at his most extreme, and legal professor Cass Sunstein (cf. Republic.COM) shows, gently, how a pure market model leads to "cascades" of opinions, where Internet users have gorged themselves sick on falsity (such as the centrality of the Second Amendment, or the wickedness of Clinton), and, bulimically, spread their fantasies. This of course is where government by the people, for the people and of the people comes into play, including a Constitutional role for the super-ego (aka "the Nanny State.")
In an era of pandering to malformed ids and egos that find their ego satisfaction in pure transfer of negative emotions to the Other, this is of course a non-starter, but this merely shows how far we've declined (from Ed Murrow to hate radio.)

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The authors of this novel have created a very real family. To bring this story alive, many famous people (and events) of the past become minor characters: Walt Whitman, Henry James, The Civil War, the Stock Market Crash of the 20's, the Stonewall Riots of the late 60's. This helps to place the family saga into the context of the various time periods. This is an excellent book, a rewarding book. The frequent tragedy is countered by the strength of many of the characters, especially Patrick, Elizabeth, and Polly. While it is very long, it is great fun to read.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Plot Summary: The story begins when young Tom Endicott and his bride, Fanny move to the village from the city in 1845. Tom doesn't realize the fragile hold Fanny has on her sanity yet, nor that her family had literally married her off to be rid of her and exiled the two to the then far-off village of Greenwich. Sexual frustrations mount as Tom, due to Fanny's resistance, is unable to make love with his wife after their first time. They have a child from that first time, but when Tom in a fit of frustrated passion forces himself upon Fanny, the resulting child, Claude is rejected by its mother and grows up to be a withdrawn, quiet boy, who dies an early death from an opium addiction. Tom, in frustration turns to the family's Irish maid, Molly, a lusty woman who enjoys sex. This passionate affair leads to a pregnancy. It is a boy, Tom's illegitimate son, Patrick. Patrick grows up with his mother Molly in the Irish ghetto and it is he who will eventually carry the Endicott name into the next generation.
Patrick eventually is reunited with the Endicotts when Claude and Molly die. He becomes the son Tom always wanted. Patrick marries Elizabeth, Claude's childhood friend and produces the next generation of Endicotts. This becomes the longest saga in the Endicott story as Patrick becomes one of the movers and shakers in the growth and development of the village and the growing metropolis of New York. When his 10-year-old son dies, Patrick turns inward and his wife Elizabeth turns to an old family friend for solace which results in another illegitimate child, Polly. But Patrick, thinking Polly is his daughter, is rejuvenated and he fathers a second son, Eugene. Eugene is a supreme disappointment to Patrick and 'daughter' Polly is his life now. When Eugene marries and has a son himself, Seth, Patrick accepts his grandson with great joy. However, Eugene, confused and unhappy, leaves his wife and young son and returns to his family home in Greenwich Village.
The next great turn of events is when Patrick catches Eugene in the basement having sex with a workman modernizing the family house with new electrical wiring. Shame drives Eugene away to self-destructiveness. His sister Polly cannot forgive him but his mother Elizabeth tries to protect him from his own downward spiral. Patrick never really recovers. When Patrick finally dies, the family saga shifts to Polly and Eugene. Eugene, finally accepting his gay sexuality becomes a writer of note, even a celebrated playwright. Polly more and more accepts her gay brother as her own life becomes entangled in sex and alcohol. Eugene suddenly dies in a horrible accident, just as he is getting to know his own son Seth. Through much anguish, Polly finally defeats her own demons and becomes a strong, giving woman. Polly works hard to keep her extended family of cousins, nephews, and other relatives together. Much tragedy follows this family, but Polly triumphs, saving her family members from their own self-destructiveness over and over. In the end Polly herself, now well into her 80's in 1975, dies a quiet, peaceful death, the last Endicott in Greenwich Village.



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At the time of writing this, there are just a handful of reviews of Dunsany's "The King of Elfland's Daughter", which was first published in 1924 and which is one of the true classic fantasies of all time. And I doubt a great number will follow.
That's fashion for you.
Still, in about twenty or thirty years from now, I very much doubt if a lot of fantasy afficianados will be able to remember Terry Goodkind at all (let alone "Soul of the Fire"). But I do know that they'll remember Dunsany. As they will William Morris, E.R. Eddison, C.S. Lewis, and - of course - J.R.R. Tolkien.
You see, these are the original masters of fantasy. A lot of good - at times great - fantasy has been written since then (writers like Patricia McKillip, Stephen Donaldson, Ursula LeGuin, Guy Gavriel Kay come to mind), but these are the Old Ones. The ones, if you like, Who Knew What They Were Talking About.
To explain (in the case of Dunsany): a few years back, when in Ireland, I tried to visit the Dunsany ancestral home (yes, this is real aristocracy). I remember asking a local farmer for directions; then, after a little searching, I found a secluded gateway. I drove up the lane, crowded with trees, turned right - and there it was. One of the most beautiful and hospitable - and very real - castles you could imagine. And it suddenly dawned on me: if you lived in such a place - if your family had, for generations, lived in such a place, in such a troubled country, with so much pain and turmoil - you probably couldn't help but turn to some sort of fantasy. And that fantasy couldn't help but be more true than what all of us could come up with, munching our microwaved Internet dinners before flickering monitors and filing billion dollar law suits against any company that produces potentially harmful products.
Not knowing where it came from, it's easy for us to try to decide what good fantasy is - it seems we don't even need to read to book to review it - but we might do well do realise, every now and then, that some of it was written with a far greater perspective than we could aspire to.
In the end, "The King of Elfland's Daughter" is one of the masterpieces of early fantasy. It takes a little getting used to - like Henry James, for example - but if you like fantasy fiction at all, you must read this book. It is one of the very few fantasy books that if worth just about any price you pay for it.
One final remark: an absolutely excellent collection of Dunsany's shorter fiction was recently published by Victor Gollancz under the title "Time And The Gods" (Fantasy Masterworks Series). As far as I know, this has not been published in the US, but you should be able to get it from Amazon.co.uk. Buy it immediately; these stories will probably be out of print again very soon.

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A truly fascinating read, this is one of very few books concerning the fastest powered manned aircraft program, the hypersonic X-15, which ultimately reached an unofficial record of Mach 6.7. Thompson, along with Scott Crossfield and Neil Armstron, amongst others, flew the X-15 in the early 1960s. This book does justice to the historic program, while maintaining the interest of even the most casual reader, which cannot be said of NASA's X-15 Mission Reports.
This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the X-15 flight test program or those interested in the early X-plane projects, as is Thompson's "Flying Without Wings." Those looking for an exciting and engaging non-fiction read should also pick up "At the Edge of Space."

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Hits:
"Chain Home, Low" What happened to those affected by Dream's disappearance?
"Each Damp Thing" Barbara Hambly has a good grasp of Gaiman's cast of characters. Set in The Dreaming this one would have made a good comic.
"Seven Nights in Slumberland" Little Nemo? Now Windsor McCay's work makes more sense. I think.
Both Wanda stories. A character that certainly warranted more examination than the comic allowed.
"Endless Sestina" For the sheer nerve of it.
"The Gate of Gold" The flip side of "The Writer's Child," but much more fulfilling. There really are "good" dreams.
"A Bone Dry Place" Dream and Delirium together again.
"The Mender of Broken Dreams" The concept is not new, but it is so well written you won't care.
"Valosag and Elet" There are so few folktales being written anymore. At least good ones.
"Stopp't-Clock Yard" Captures the true essence of Gaiman's creation. This is another one that Gaiman could have written.
Misses:
Desire stories. This character is tedious as all stories end up being variations on the same theme. Especially "The Witch's Heart" it goes on and on....
"The Birth Day" A clever idea but not fully developed.
"Splatter" A little obvious.
"The Writer's Child" Ditto.
"Ain't You 'Most Done?" 32 pages long and I couldn't remember what it was about by the time I finished the book. And it's one of the last stories.
Advertising Clive Barker's participation. It's a frontispiece and it's Death not Dream.
Taking an existing character, whose popularity lies in a graphic medium and using him and his supporting cast as the basis of an anthology is a risky proposition. While this book is not entirely successful, it's definitely worth a read for the Sandman fan.

It loses a star cause there's no actual Gaiman stories (although his comments at the start of each book are nearly as interesting as the stories - 'what Gandalf's rock'n rolling younger brother would look like if he were secretly a pirate' is a truly funky description for anyone).
For me the best are the Barbara Hambly, 'Stopp'd Clock Yard' and the 'Ain't you the most done' stories - the collection does veer pretty wildly between cool, cute 'n funky and seriously weird / sick.... Depends what you like. Like the comics, don't let children read it.


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Mostly about definitions of fundamental concepts of Physics, Thermodynamics, definitions and more definitions. There is no Chemistry at all. The closest you can get is one page periodic table without clear definition and methodological explanation and bonding types. There is no information on Chemical reactions.
