The Rush Limbaugh Story: Talent on Loan from God : An Unauthorized Biography - Hardcover

Colford, Paul D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312099061 ISBN 13: 9780312099060

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1993

Synopsis

The Rush Limbaugh Story is the first full-length account of the life and times of the conservative funny-man who has become America's most-listened-to radio host, a popular television commentator, a best-selling polemicist, and a political power in his own right. It is a no-holds-barred look at the public and private life of this huge media star.
Rush Limbaugh's worldview was forged by a domineering, ardently Republican father and a small-town Missouri upbringing far removed from the tumult of the 1960s. Paul D. Colford, a New York media columnist who has covered him for five years, details young Rusty's entry into radio as a teenager, an enthusiasm that eventually prompted him to quit college and set out on the gypsy path of a rock-and-roll disc jockey.
Rush lost job after job, along with two wives, but found his calling when he switched to talk radio and his liberal-bashing pranks earned him a wildly receptive following on Sacramento's KFBK-AM. A shrewd syndicator spun him off to a national audience in 1988.
The Rush Limbaugh Story sets his emergence against the changing landscape of network radio as it explores the foibles, the deals, the marriages, the controversies, the bombast, the riches, and the ego of the conservative pitbull whose influence was actively courted by President Bush in the 1992 campaign. Today he reaches more than sixteen million listeners a week via six hundred stations. And those numbers continue to grow while the question remains: Who is Rush Limbaugh?

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

Lightweight bio of Rush Hudson Limbaugh III, the heartland eminence whose glib wit and rough charms have made him a heavyweight champion of tory causes. With no help (or hindrance) from his subject, Colford (a media columnist for Newsday) has cobbled together a once-over-lightly account of Limbaugh's life that, among other shortcomings, provides superfluous detail on broadcast-industry minutiae. The author first tracks the man from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in his determined efforts to forge a career in radio. Having failed as a top-40 DJ and spent five unfulfilling years in promotion for baseball's Kansas City Royals, Limbaugh made a name for himself as host of an afternoon talk show in Sacramento--an act taken national in 1988 by a crafty packager. The rest, so to speak, is history: The immensely popular college dropout (who turns 42 this year) now reaches over four million listeners daily with his brashly conservative radio commentaries. He also presides over a half-hour syndicated TV show and, of course, has written the bestselling The Way Things Ought to Be (1992). While Colford expresses some grudging admiration for Limbaugh--whose jocular broadsides challenge conventional liberal wisdom on fronts from abortion to cultural diversity, the environment, feminists, homosexuality, and taxation--he's at pains to dish such dirt as can be unearthed. Among other matters, the author delves inconclusively into Limbaugh's 4-F draft status during the Vietnam War; remarks frequently on his subject's lifelong weight problems; features sources who view the twice- divorced commentator as a lonely guy; and questions whether a Manhattan-based Limbaugh can survive as a superstar member of the media elite he professes to despise. What Colford doesn't do is offer any sustained analysis of the visceral appeal of an entertainer who's given voice to many of the electorate's deepest aspirations--and fears. A profile of a consequential showman, then, that's more notable for background noise than substantive content. (Eight pages of photographs--not seen). -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Colford, whose weekly radio column appears in New York Newsday and the Los Angeles Times , tracked down Limbaugh's past shows (and past wife) to fashion an entertaining, balanced biography of this outsized phenomenon of the airwaves. Although the book is unauthorized, "Rusty" did not stop the author from interviewing his mother, brother and others close to him. We follow Limbaugh as he defies his father and leaves his Missouri home to find work as a disc jockey, failing time and again before striking it rich in 1988. Now at age 42, he can boast of talk shows and a bestselling book, The Way Things Ought to Be , as well as millions of fans, including former President Bush, for whose reelection Limbaugh campaigned. Observing that his subject seems to have nothing "resembling a personal life," Colford depicts Limbaugh with a sympathy his detractors in liberal political circles aren't likely to share. Photos not seen by PW .
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0312099061
• ISBN 13: 9780312099060
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 242