« "The Pirates" by Gideon Defoe | Main | “Murder at the Portland Variety” by M. J. Zellnik »
April 16, 2007
“Personal History” by Katharine Graham
This autobiography by the former Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham won, and deserved, a Pulitzer Prize when it was published a few years before her death in 2001. As a prominent female publisher working in turbulent times, Graham certainly led a memoir-worthy life. The early chapters of the book deal with her wealthy girlhood and privileged adolescence are frustratingly laden with famous names and personalities, but this becomes more tolerable as the story moves forward.
As Graham comes more into her own in the story, the book also comes more into focus. The book smoothly explores her development into a wife/mother/Washington D.C. hostess and so the reader is able to better understand the total upheaval in her life when she suddenly must take over as publisher of the family’s major metropolitan newspaper.
Graham’s candid language and blatant acknowledgment of her early struggles in managing the newspaper make her a far more human figure than in the first chapters of the book. In discussing events befalling her paper: the Pentagon papers, Watergate, a pressmen’s strike, it is clear that Graham’s first concern is the Post. Not the prestige of the job, not her own reputation, but the success and security of the Washington Post.
Katharine Graham definitely lived a life worth reading about, and thankfully, she has done an excellent job of writing about it.
ISBN: 0394585852
Sara, reference assistant
Posted by jnardine at April 16, 2007 09:44 AM