Event
"The Book Stops Here" Presidential Reading Group..."The Bully Pulpit" by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Fee:
Free.Location:
Mid Continent Public Library, North Independence Branch. Independence, MO.Dates & Times
Date:
Time:
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Type of Event
Join us as we continue to explore the lives of American Presidents, in a reading group dedicated to the memory of President Harry S Truman.
Description
In an era when cooperation between the national media and the US government seems laughable, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s timely 100-year look backward explores the origins of the type of muckraking journalism that helped make America a better country. Focusing on the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and his successor, William Howard Taft--one-time colleagues and friends who later became sworn foes--Goodwin chronicles the birth of an activist press, which occurred when five of the nation’s best-ever journalists converged at McClure’s magazine and helped usher in the Progressive era. At times slow and overly meticulous, with a lot of backstory and historical minutiae, this is nonetheless a lush, lively, and surprisingly urgent story--a series of entwined stories, actually, with headstrong and irascible characters who had me pining for journalism’s earlier days. It’s a big book that cries out for a weekend in a cabin, a book to get fully lost in, to hole up with and ignore the modern world, to experience the days when newsmen and women were our heroes.
Reservation or Registration: No
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Simon and Schuster, Publishers