When the journalistic pack bites into a tasty cliché they often refuse to let go, lazily chewing and regurgitating a phrase like “team of rivals” long after the flavor is gone. Derived from the Doris Kearns Goodwin book on Lincoln’s cabinet, that morsel had scant relevance to the cabinet being assembled by Barack Obama, as Read More
I just talked to Doris Kearns Goodwin, who knew Tim Russert for about a decade and who was a frequent guest of his on Meet the Press.
“I feel so bad,” she told me. “He was such a good friend.
“Somebody just called from the television studio and said have you heard the horrible news Read More
New Publishing Mantra:
Plagiarize or Perish
Plagiarism is good business these days. When novelist and Harvard University sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan was exposed as having copied passages from another writer’s work, sales of her book, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, rose sharply. And the day her publisher, Little, Read More
I wanted to buy How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life by Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan, but now I will have to wait until she removes the parts she plagiarized from Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings by Megan McCafferty.
I have plagiarized twice in my life that I know of. The Read More
One score and nine years ago, Doris Kearns Goodwin launched her career as a Presidential historian with Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, a shrewd look at the oversized Texan she’d observed closely during his Presidency and post-Presidency. In the years that followed, she built a stellar reputation as a writer and TV commentator on Read More
One score and nine years ago, Doris Kearns Goodwin launched her career as a Presidential historian with Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, a shrewd look at the oversized Texan she’d observed closely during his Presidency and post-Presidency. In the years that followed, she built a stellar reputation as a writer and TV commentator on Read More
The other Senator from Massachusetts put it as plain as plain can be on Sunday morning.
“This is the most important election of my lifetime,” saidEdward Moore Kennedy.
George Stepha-nopoulos, to whom the remark was addressed, appeared to gape, so the Senator-whose memories and sorrows run deeper-laid it out.
More than 1960, when Read More
The Year of Reading Proust , by Phyllis Rose. Scribner’s, 268 pages, $23.
Wait Till Next Year , by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Simon & Schuster, 261 pages, $25.
Phyllis Rose waited until she was in her 50′s to read Remembrance of Things Past . In her new memoir, The Year of Reading Proust Read More
