Book Description
In this remarkable memoir, The New York Times's Max
Frankel tells his life story the way he lived it--in tandem
with the big news stories of our time.
"I escaped into America, and beyond it. The idea of
America became my proud passport. A passion to conform made
me a patriot. The discovery of words turned me into a
skeptic. And the journalist's press pass sent me vaulting
across borders to gain a spectacular perspective on our era.
Like the astronauts floating in outer space, I've had a rare
glimpse of the earth in my times, and it gave me an
irrepressible urge to record the journey."
Max Frankel started to write for The New York Times as
a student at Columbia in 1949, and during the next half
century he held just about every important position on the
paper--foreign correspondent, Washington bureau chief,
editorials editor, and executive editor.
When The Times of My Life begins, Max Frankel is a boy in
Nazi Germany; we experience the terror of his wartime escape
with his heroic mother, their immigrant lives in New York,
and a teacher's inspired decision that he could belatedly
learn to read English if he learned to write it. And so Max
Frankel found his career. His book, like his life, moves
through Hitler's Berlin, Khrushchev's Moscow, Castro's
Havana, and the Washington of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. It
reevaluates the Cold War and interweaves Frankel's personal
and professional lives with the era's greatest stories, from
Sputnik to the Pentagon Papers, from the building of the
Berlin Wall to its collapse, all the while tracking the
tensions of managing the world's greatest newspaper.
Beautifully written, filled with anecdotes and insights, The
Times of My Life evokes an unparalleled life as it embraces
America in our time.
