Personal History: A Memoir by Katharine Graham
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER ? PULTIZER PRIZE WINNER ? The captivating inside story of the woman who helmed the Washington Post during one of the most turbulent periods in the history of American media: the scandals of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate In this widely acclaimed memoir (Riveting, moving...a wonderful book The New York Times Book Review), Katharine Graham tells her story--one that is extraordinary both for the events it encompasses and for the courage, candor, and dignity of its telling. Here is the awkward child who grew up amid material wealth and emotional isolation; the young bride who watched her brilliant, charismatic husband--a confidant to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson--plunge into the mental illness that would culminate in his suicide. And here is the widow who shook off her grief and insecurity to take on a president and a pressman's union as she entered the profane boys' club of the newspaper business. As timely now as ever, Personal History is an exemplary record of our history and of the woman who played such a shaping role within them, discovering her own strength and sense of self as she confronted--and mastered--the personal and professional crises of her fascinating life. Editorial Reviews Riveting, moving . . . a wonderful book. -Nora Ephron, The New York Times Book Review Disarmingly candid and immensely readable. -Time Captivating . . . distinguished by a level of introspection that ought to be, but rarely is, the touchstone of autobiography. -Newsday - From the Publisher Personal History was the winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for biography. Katharine Graham died on July 17th, 2001. - Barnesandnoble.com Not just the story of Graham's stewardship of The Washington Post, this 'personal history' ranges from her favorite tennis partner (George Schultz) to her husband's fall into madness and suicide. - Library Journal Graham will forever be remembered as the publisher who never said no to Woodward and Bernstein during the Watergate scandal. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir is just as riveting; highly readable prose turns her life into a story as complex and surprising as the one that started at the Watergate. - Brills Content Nothing that has been printed about Graham is as compelling as the story she herself tells. -- The New York Times Book Review - Nora Ephron Gracious, often touchingly ingenuous, at once panoramic and particular, Graham's autobiography absorbingly reconstructs her life of worldly privilege and affective deprivation as the daughter of one formidable man and the wife and widow of another, then chronicles her own rise to the challenges of captaining The Washington Post. Katharine Meyer-her blue blood diluted only slightly by her father's Jewish roots, her development stunted severely by a self-aggrandizing mother-survived the conventions and emotional isolation of a richly endowed girlhood to marry the irreverent Phil Graham, whom she celebrates for liberating her from her un-spontaneous self and the weight of her family mythology. It was he who 'put the fix in our lives' . . . and, shatteringly, put a gun to his head after escalating manic-depression climaxed in his running off with the latest of his unsuspected paramours, leaving Katharine to abject devastation. That she was utterly bereft of social confidence by middle age seems to have been both cause and effect of Phil's defection; nonetheless, she determined to go to work to preserve for her children the Post, which Phil had taken over from her father. (With characteristic modesty and felicity, she extols the 'originality' of the friend who planted the idea that she could run it.) But also, she quite fell in love with the paper and the burgeoning corporate enterprise. It was an excruciating coming-of-age, because of her constant self-doubt and frankly poor management and because of the magnitude of the events played out on her watch-each revisited in reflective, defensive, parochial detail: the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, the pressmen'sstrike, the company's going public, major acquisition and personnel decisions. Graham's book, like her life, is harnessed to history, political and journalistic (even her best friends were famous). Her myriad stories-discreet to a fault-humanize a whole pantheon of personalities. Her personal drama, however, upstages the rest. - Kirkus Reviews
Publication Details
Title:
Author(s):
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Binding: Paperback
Published by: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group: , 1999
Edition:
ISBN: 9780375701047 | 0375701044
688 pages.
Book Condition: Very Good
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