Powerful People: From Mao to Now, a Reporter's Fifty-Year Pursuit of.

Rowan, Roy

ISBN 10: 0786703121 / ISBN 13: 9780786703128

Published by Carroll & Graf Publishers, New York, 1996

About this Item

25 cm, 300 pages, illus., marginal ink tick marks or lines in margins of a few pages. Signed by the author. A few page corners have been folded, some writing on flyleaf (former owner's information? ) has been blacked out, pencil earasure at rear board.At the age of 12, he began writing, editing, and publishing a four-page, mimeographed neighborhood newspaper, a venture that sparked an ambition to become a journalist. Rowan graduated from Dartmouth College in 1941, and received his MBA from Dartmouth's Amos Tuck School of Business in April 1942. Drafted into the US Army the following month, one of this first duties was to escort Italian Prisoners of War back from North Africa on an Army Liberty ship. In 1946, unable to secure a job as a foreign correspondent, Rowan joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) during the Chinese Civil War between Mao Zedong's Communists and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists. There he also began photographing and writing freelance articles about the conflict, sending his pictures and articles back to major magazines in the United States in the hope of establishing himself as a journalist. Shortly before leaving Shanghai in December 1947, the Time-Life bureau chief approached him and informed him that Life magazine had printed several of his photographs and asked if Rowan could write an article on the war in Henan Province. The next month, Life hired him as their China and Southeast Asia correspondent. Rowan then covered all the major battles of China's Civil War leading up to the fall of Shanghai in May 1949. Following the Communist takeover, Rowan served as Life bureau chief in Hong Kong, Rome, Tokyo (mainly as a war correspondent in Korea), Bonn (covering the Cold War in Europe), and Chicago. In 1961 Rowan was transferred to New York City and appointed Life's assistant managing editor in charge of the magazine's worldwide news coverage. When JFK was assassinated in 1963, he was having lunch with the company's editor-in-chief, Henry Luce, who ordered him to fly out to the printing plant in Chicago to stop the presses and remake the magazine, using the now-famous Zapruder film that pictured the actual shooting of the president.In 1977, Rowan left Time and became a senior writer for Fortune Magazine. Between then and his retirement in 1985, he wrote more than 65 major articles for the magazine, including an exclusive 15-page report on the "Top 50 Mafia Bosses in America.". He "retired" in 1985 but continued to write two or three Fortune articles a year, as well as his second book, The Intuitive Manager in 1986. His third book, Powerful People, was published in 1996, very good. minor edge wear to DJ. Bookseller Inventory # 20745

Bibliographic Details

Title: Powerful People: From Mao to Now, a ...

Publisher: Carroll & Graf Publishers, New York

Publication Date: 1996

Binding: Hardcover

Book Condition: good

Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

Signed: Signed by Author(s)

Edition: First Edition. First Printing.

About this title

Synopsis:

A distinguished journalist shares incisive profiles of some of the individuals who helped shape the history of the twentieth century, from Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek to Ross Perot and including Jimmy Hoffa, Douglas MacArthur, Marshal Tito, and many others. Tour.

From Publishers Weekly:

Rowan, a former correspondent for Time, Life and Fortune, has raided his notebooks to produce a scrapbook of portraits, heavily weighted to his interesting experience in a changing China. As a young reporter wandering about China in 1947, he wangled his way into Life with his accounts of the rise of the Communists. He went on to report from elsewhere, including India, where he portrayed the Nizam of Hyderabad, the wealthiest man in the world in 1948, and East Germany, whose Communist leader, Walter Ulbricht, withstood the protests of his people in 1953. In the U.S., Rowan covered the Little Rock desegregation crisis, negotiated to acquire the notorious Zapruder film of JFK's assassination for Life and followed new President Gerald Ford on his maiden forays into diplomacy. He pads the book with pieces on the likes of Imelda Marcos, Frank Lorenzo and silver magnates Nelson Bunker Hunt and his brother William. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.