Douglas Brinkley - Cronkite [2012]

Unabridged, Read by George Guidall, 96 Kbps
 
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/cronkite-douglas-brinkley/1106580320

Overview
For decades, Walter Cronkite was known as "the most trusted man in America." Yet this very public figure, undoubtedly the twentieth century's most revered journalist, was a remarkably private man. Drawing on unprecedented access to Cronkite's private papers as well as interviews with family and friends, Douglas Brinkley now brings this American icon into focus as never before.

Brinkley traces Cronkite's story from his roots in Missouri and Texas, through the Great Depression and World War II, to his coverage of presidential elections, the space program, Vietnam, and the first televised broadcasts of the Olympic Games. Cronkite was also the nation's voice for many of the most profound moments in modern American history, including the Kennedy assassination, Apollos 11 and 13, Watergate, the Vietnam War, and the Iran hostage crisis.

Epic, intimate, and masterfully written, Cronkite is the much-anticipated biography of an extraordinary American life, told by one of our most brilliant and respected historians.

Editorial Reviews
Library Journal - Library Journal
We all think we know Walter Cronkite, "the most trusted man in America." But, having dug into the just opened Cronkite Archive at the University of Texas at Austin and interviewed over 200 people, from Morley Safer to Katie Couric, Brinkley should tell us much more. This one's big; with a one-day laydown on 5/29, a 250,000-copy first printing, and a seven-city tour.


Oversized biography of the larger-than-life newscaster, still a byword for a TV anchor, at least among viewers of a certain age. As Vanity Fair contributor Brinkley (History/Rice Univ.; The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America, 2009, etc.) writes, Walter Cronkite (1916–2009) was an indifferent student but a constant reader, attuned in childhood to what we would call the news, if at a different pace and intensity. It wasn't an easy childhood: Cronkite's father was an alcoholic, his parents divorced when he was young, and he grew up in the alien confines of coastal Texas, far from his prized Missouri. Nonetheless, he more than rose to the occasion, learning how to speak in a "radio voice" while still a teenager: "In true Lowell Thomas fashion, he interviewed anyone who would stand still and speak into whatever faux microphone prop he held." He also apprenticed at the Houston Post, learning how to write a lean news story, and he had a forward-looking habit, sensing that wire stories were going to be replaced by man-on-the-ground coverage and that television, when it arrived, would surpass radio and other media. Brinkley is very good on Cronkite's early distinction as a war correspondent in World War II under the influence of Edward R. Murrow. The author also gives Cronkite credit for being out ahead on certain stories, such as gay rights, the collapse of the Vietnam War and Watergate. He hints that Cronkite could be a touch prickly and sensitive--for one thing, about his lack of a college degree--but the author doesn't press that far enough; one wants to know more about the enmity between Cronkite and Dan Rather, for example. For all the book's weight, Brinkley, a dutiful and plodding writer, skimps here and there where he should not. The great correspondent and Cronkite-colleague Richard Threlkeld, for instance, gets but a single passing mention. Still, the best portrait of Cronkite--that legendary journalist, certainly worthy of a big biography--that we have.