The Times of My Life and My Life with The Times - Softcover

Frankel, Max

3.97

92 ratings by Goodreads

9780385334983: The Times of My Life and My Life with The Times

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385334982 ISBN 13: 9780385334983

Publisher: Delta, 2000

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Since 1949, when Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Max Frankel began to write for The New York Times, readers have looked to his work as a lens through which they could witness America's role in a rapidly changing world. In this vivid and unforgettable memoir, Frankel chronicles the times of his extraordinary life as he experienced them...within the context of the news stories that defined an era.

A quintessentially American story, The Times of My Life traces Frankel's riveting personal relationship with history...his harrowing escape from Nazi Germany...his life as an immigrant on the streets of New York...and his extraordinary half-century-long career at The Times. In a rich first-person account that moves from Hitler's Berlin to Cold War Moscow, from Castro's Havana to the newsroom of America's most influential newspaper, this powerful, compelling work interweaves Frankel's personal and professional lives with the era's greatest stories, from Sputnik to the Pentagon Papers to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. And it reveals Frankel's fascinating off-the-record encounters with Nikita Khrushchev, Henry Kissinger, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and a host of other history-makers who shaped their times--and ours.
Guiding readers through Hitler's Berlin, Khrushchev's Moscow, Castro's Havana, and the Washington of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, THE TIMES OF MY LIFE reevaluates the Cold War, and interweaves Frankel's personal and professional life with the greatest stories of the era. -->

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Review:

The retired executive editor of the New York Times grippingly evokes his terror as a young Jewish boy in Nazi Germany and his discomfort as an impoverished immigrant in the United States. But it's those 45 years at the Times we really want to read about, and Frankel's account does not disappoint. Yes, he proudly believes his newspaper is America's most important, revered by its educated, influential readers and unswerving in its commitment to informed, impartial reporting. But Frankel is commendably candid about the Times' institutional failings (in particular its slowness to support and promote women, blacks, and homosexuals) and surprisingly so about behind-the-headlines maneuvers among the staff. He airs his differences with the paper's publishers, Arthur Sulzberger and Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and makes it clear that he didn't much care for Abe Rosenthal, his predecessor as executive editor. He's equally frank, in a restrained way, about his personal life (two marriages, three kids) but in approved Times fashion saves most of his plain, yet nicely turned, words for public affairs and the newspaper's response to them. It's just the sort of memoir you'd expect from a newspaper man: dignified, lucid, maybe just a tiny bit self-important, but always interesting. --Wendy Smith

About the Author:

Max Frankel was born in 1930 in Gera, Germany. Raised in New York City, Frankel received his B.A. and M.A. from Columbia University. He has written for The New York Times for fifty years and received the Pulitzer Prize for international coverage in 1973. He served as executive editor of The Times from 1986 to 1994. This is his first book. He lives in New York City.

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