An Especially Good View
Watching History Happen
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In more than five decades as a reporter, editor and publisher, Peter Osnos has had an especially good view of momentous events and relationships with some of the most influential personalities of our time.
As a young journalist for I.F. Stone's Weekly, one of the leading publications of the turbulent 1960s and in 18 years at The Washington Post , he covered the war in Vietnam and Cambodia, the Soviet Union at the height of Kremlin power, Washington D.C. as National Editor, "Swinging London" in the 60s and Thatcher's Britain in the 1980s.
At Random House and the company he founded, PublicAffairs, he was responsible for books by four presidents -Carter, Clinton, Obama and Trump; celebrated Washington figures including Robert McNamara, House Speaker Tip O'Neill and Vernon Jordan, first ladies Rosalynn Carter and Nancy Reagan, the billionaire George Soros, basketball superstars Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Magic Johnson, legendary spies, political dissidents and the writers, Molly Ivins and Peggy Noonan, among many others.
In this unusually wide-ranging memoir, Osnos uses a reporter's skills to portray historic events and encounters beginning with his parents' extraordinary World War II experiences escaping Europe to India, where he was born, to the present day. He shares unique portraits of the famous people he worked with and an insider's perspective of the news and publishing businesses. As he charts the evolution of his career and recent history, he also explores the influence and impact of family, character, curiosity, luck, resilience, a well-pressed suit and some unexpected wrinkles.
Also featuring a "virtual attic" of photographs, documents and video at anespeciallygoodview.com.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The acclaimed journalist and publisher debuts with an underwhelming look at his life. Osnos was born in 1943 in India and immigrated to the U.S. with his family shortly after. He grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side, studied journalism at Columbia, and moved to Washington, D.C., to write for the liberal-leaning I.F. Stone's Weekly in 1965. That, in turn, led to his 18-year career with the Washington Post, where he covered the Vietnam War and the Soviet Union, served as the paper's foreign editor, and eventually became its national editor. He left journalism in 1984 to join Random House, where he founded his own imprint, PublicAffairs, in 1997. Early on, Osnos confesses that, in writing his memoir, he erred on the side of overinclusiveness; that choice inundates his narrative with extraneous details such as a self-serving nod to childhood friends including actor Brandon De Wilde ("my most famous playmate") and Hill Street Blues creator Steven Bochco. Other musings border on tone-deaf—in one instance he reflects he couldn't "imagine a better way" for a reporter with a young family to spend their time than three "engrossing" years living in the Soviet Union (failing to note the challenges his wife and daughter must have experienced). While Osnos has undoubtedly had an impressive career, less would've been more here.
