Good luck and fortune did seem to follow him from birth through prep school and Harvard (where the tattoos and a couple of boozy nights in jail happened), naval combat in World War II, high-profile reporting jobs with the Post and Newsweek (where the occasional pot and flings are recorded), and leadership of the ever-rising Post through the Pentagon Papers and Watergate era. The book is "called `A Good Life' because that is what I've had," Bradlee writes. By force of example, if not reflection, "A Good Life" presents an instinctive leader in his natural habitat. Yet it is punctuated, too, by those pithy Bradlee-isms that underlie his reputation for straight shooting and shrewd judgment. The book is crammed with spicy episodes and recollections, with little attempt at introspection and analysis. Or maybe this all corresponds to the Bradlee you do know: the kinetic, magnetic, live-in-the-moment operator, foul-mouthed and cantankerous, inspiring and endearing, perhaps his journalistic era's Last Action Hero, Old Guts and Gonads in the flesh.Īs the retired executive editor of the Washington Post insists from the start, this is "a memoir, pure and simple." Bradlee lets everything hang out, writing as he talks, in a breezy, salty, no-baloney style.
Kennedy to a porn movie one election night, the lusty inamorato who romped through flings and flirtations on several continents. Here's the Ben Bradlee you may not know: the ex-jailbird with a snake tattoo on his rump, the sometime dope smoker who took John F. His leadership and investigative drive during the Watergate scandal led to the downfall of a president, and his challenge to the government over the right to publish the Pentagon Papers changed the course of American history.īradlee’s timeless memoir is a fascinating, irreverent, earthy, and revealing look at America and American journalism in the twentieth century - a “sassy, sometimes eye-poppingly, engrossing autobiography.must reading” ( The New York Times Book Review).By Ben Bradlee Simon & Schuster 499 pages $27.50 After Bradlee took the helm in 1965, he and his reporters transformed the Post into one of the most influential and respected news publications in the world, reinvented modern investigative journalism, won eighteen Pulitzer Prizes, and redefined the way news is reported, published, and read. The most important, glamorous, and famous newspaperman of modern times traces his path from Harvard to the battles of the South Pacific to the pinnacle of success at The Washington Post.
The classic New York Times bestselling memoir by legendary Executive Editor of The Washington Post Ben Bradlee-with a new foreword by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and an afterword by Sally Quinn.
0 kommentar(er)
