Books of The TimesHard Sell, Soft Touch and the Right Question
By Janet Maslin writing in The New York Times
Published: May 5, 2008
Published: May 5, 2008
On the same page in Barbara Walters’s big, bean-spilling memoir there are photographs of Ms. Walters, the undisputed queen of the television interview, and Cha Cha Walters, her dog. One of them looks businesslike. She wears glasses and sits perched at a computer keyboard. The other is perfectly groomed, coiffed and fluffed. She looks ready for her blue ribbon as best in show.
Photo of author by Richard Perry/The New York Times
Barbara Walters last week in her office at the ABC studios.
Barbara Walters last week in her office at the ABC studios.
AUDITION
A Memoir
By Barbara Walters
Illustrated. 612 pp. Alfred A Knopf. $29.95.
Who’s who? Well, Cha Cha is the one who risks eyestrain. And the glamorously posed, taffeta-draped Ms. Walters is displaying what “Audition,” this legitimately star-studded autobiography, has identified as her most useful professional qualities. She has spent more than five decades shattering glass ceilings in the world of television news, using social skills and ladylike persistence just as handily as she has used on-the-air reportorial acumen. From her first shot at doing a big news report on “Today” (the sinking of the ocean liner Andrea Doria), she has unstoppably combined the soft touch and the hard sell.
A Memoir
By Barbara Walters
Illustrated. 612 pp. Alfred A Knopf. $29.95.
Who’s who? Well, Cha Cha is the one who risks eyestrain. And the glamorously posed, taffeta-draped Ms. Walters is displaying what “Audition,” this legitimately star-studded autobiography, has identified as her most useful professional qualities. She has spent more than five decades shattering glass ceilings in the world of television news, using social skills and ladylike persistence just as handily as she has used on-the-air reportorial acumen. From her first shot at doing a big news report on “Today” (the sinking of the ocean liner Andrea Doria), she has unstoppably combined the soft touch and the hard sell.
“What a horrible experience you’ve been through,” she recalls saying to survivors of that 1956 disaster. “You must be feeling terrible. But could you come into our studio tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. to tell us about it?” Ever since then Ms. Walters has gone big-game hunting for the major interviews of her day and been amazingly dependable in bagging her prey.
To give some sense of just how much terrain “Audition” covers, these are some of its many index entries on the subject of interviewing: “with celebrities,” “with difficult people,” “with foreign heads of state,” “impossible-to-get,” “with murderers and alleged murderers,” “with presidents,” “with royalty” and “with people Walters could talk to again and again.”
Read the whole review of this obviously fascinating new book on The New York Times website..
1 comment:
Barbara Walter's life was influenced greatly by her older sister and she's written a beautiful memoir about her life. I read another memoir of a life influence by a sibling that I recommend highly - I actually liked it even more. The memoir is ""My Stroke of Insight"" by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. Dr Taylor became a Harvard brain scientist to find the cause and cure for schizophrenia because her older brother was a sufferer. Then, crazy as life can be, Dr. Taylor had a stroke at age 37. What was amazing was that her left brain was shut down by the stroke - where language and thinking occur - but her right brain was fully functioning. She experienced bliss and nirvana and the way she writes about it (or talks about it in her now famous TED talk) is incredible.
What I took away from Dr. Taylor's book above all, and why I recommend it so highly, is that you don't have to have a stroke or take drugs to find the deep inner peace that she talks about. Her book explains how. ""I want what she's having"", and thanks to this wonderful book, I can!
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