Review by Choice Review
Capturing the multiple dimensions of William Shirer's peripatetic life is a challenge that Cuthbertson (independent scholar) meets in this impressive volume. One of the original "Murrow Boys," Shirer (1904-93) brilliantly bore witness, on CBS radio, to life in Hitler's Berlin from 1935 to 1940, and enjoyed the fruits of fame before his fall from grace during the McCarthy era. Shirer's strength of character during his years in the wilderness is well limned. So too are his lifelong selfishness, his serial infidelities, and his stubborn refusal to reconcile with Edward R. Murrow, who let him down during disputes with CBS president William Paley in the late 1940s. Shirer struggled financially until the publication of his blockbuster The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (1960), which brought him new prominence and launched his second career as a popular historian. Though Cuthbertson fails to exploit relevant manuscript collections beyond Shirer's own papers, that flaw is counterbalanced by numerous interviews and Cuthbertson's ready command of a plethora of printed sources that flesh out the highs and lows of the journey of a remarkable 20th-century character. Cuthbertson amply demonstrates what made Shirer tick and why his work mattered. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers. --Michael J. Birkner, Gettysburg College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
IN NOVEMBER 1957, a Newsweek column called "Where Are They Now?" noted that William L. Shirer, "made famous by his nightly radio reports from Berlin during the early years of the war and by his book 'Berlin Diary,' has been off the air nearly 10 years and is now a writer and part-time lecturer." The item had the ring of a professional obituary. After reaching the height of celebrity, influence and wealth as a member of Edward R. Murrow and CBS radio's lauded wartime broadcasting team in Europe, he was fired, and later blacklisted during the Red Scare. He was so broke he could not afford to fix the furnace in his Connecticut farmhouse. Shirer spent his days tapping away on the typewriter he had set up on a table in one corner of his barn. He was hard at work on the book that would turn his reputation around for good, plunging once more into the Nazi era, many years of which he had witnessed firsthand in Berlin and Vienna: in the Austrian capital for the Anschluss, at Nuremberg for party rallies and in occupied France with the German Wehrmacht. As a correspondent, Shirer had gotten to know the likes of Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Heinrich Himmler and, most intimately, Hermann Göring. With a dose of luck he had even scooped the Germans themselves on the French surrender. A broadcast he had taped for delayed transmission was aired live instead - before the Nazis had a chance to announce it. The book he was writing went far beyond what he had personally witnessed. He had access to the 42-volume "Trial of the Major War Criminals" that had been compiled by the Allies. There was a trove of documents in United States Army warehouses in Alexandria, Va. The Hoover Library at Stanford had files belonging to Himmler. For postwar interviews he could turn to people like Gen. Franz Haider, the former chief of the General Staff of the Supreme High Command of the German Army, who crucially had kept a diary. Shirer located transcripts of Hitler's phone calls with subordinates and planning documents for the death camps. "Having lived and worked in Nazi Germany, Shirer found it utterly fascinating to read primary documents that cast new light on events that had long perplexed him or that he had not known at all," Ken Cuthbertson writes in "A Complex Fate: William L. Shirer and the American Century." One day he recalled how a group of librarians at the Library of Congress "trundled out" a cart full of Hitler's personal papers. "I was astonished that they had not been opened since being cataloged. We took to untying the ribbons that bound them. Out fell what to me were priceless objects: among others, scores of drawings and paintings that Hitler had done in his vagabond youth in Vienna." On the evening of Aug. 24, 1959, "after five years of work, he finally typed the words 'The End' on the last page of his manuscript, Page 1,795," Cuthbertson writes. Despite its length and complexity, "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," as the historical doorstop was titled when it was published in 1960, won the National Book Award and was the biggest seller in the history of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Shirer never fit comfortably into the mold of a "Murrow Boy," unlike Eric Sevareid and Howard K. Smith. He was older than Murrow and a far more seasoned reporter. The man who had covered Gandhi in India and been the only Western reporter at a coronation ceremony in Afghanistan had little interest at first in radio, which he saw as light entertainment. But Shirer had just lost his job with Hearst's International News Service when he went to meet Murrow at Berlin's elegant Adlon Hotel on Aug. 27, 1937, and was willing to look past his disdain of radio for the sake of a paycheck. Even as the threat of Nazism loomed ever larger over Europe, Murrow and Shirer were forced to arrange for a concert by a children's choir and in one instance to track down "any parrot available" to "talk microphonely." Shirer wanted to know if the parrot had to speak English. "German parrot O.K.," Murrow answered. With shades of Buzzfeed evolving from listicles and cat photos to entirely new approaches to delivering hard news, the Murrow Boys went on to revolutionize broadcast journalism. Cuthbertson recounts the improvised thrill of the first-ever roundup from correspondents dotted all across Europe beaming the voices back to the United States, a model for network television broadcasts to this day but an outright marvel at the time. Shirer was frustrated that he couldn't do the kinds of live broadcasts from the streets of Berlin that made Murrow famous during the London Blitz. Eventually he was no longer even allowed to say "Nazi" because "the word supposedly sounded 'negative' to American ears, and so the preferred term was now 'National Socialist.'" Shirer was all too aware that merely talking to a German could get that person hauled off to a concentration camp, or even killed. One morning he picked up a newspaper over breakfast to learn that the Nazis had beheaded two young women he knew for criticizing the regime. "I was numbed at the thought of their heads - dark hair and lovely, refined faces - being chopped off." By the end of 1940, he had returned to New York. It was Murrow's turn for a touch of jealousy when Shirer's "Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 19341941" topped the best-seller lists, moving 600,000 copies in its first year. According to Cuthbertson, Shirer earned the equivalent of $1.4 million in 1943 but spent a lot of it on champagne at the Stork Club and other luxuries. His later firing by CBS caused an outcry. Critics at the time viewed it as a mix of censorship and the broadcaster bowing to advertisers, but Shirer himself admitted that perhaps he was "guilty of what the ancient Greeks called hubris." It's easy to see why George Clooney would want to make a movie about the tall, dashing Murrow, rather than the dowdy Shirer with his mustache and balding pate, who was missing one eye from a skiing accident. THE TROUBLE IS that an uncharismatic protagonist can feed a biographer's urge to evangelize rather than just tell the story. "The Murrow Boys," by Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson, which "A Complex Fate" repeatedly cites, depicts Shirer as churlish, spendthrift and philandering, but he also seems more rakish and fun than in Cuthbertson's loyal telling, which could have used some of the pace and urgency of that book. Cuthbertson, the author of a biography of the journalist John Gunther, seems intent on pulling Shirer out from behind Murrow's shadow by insistently telling the reader how great the man was. Yet it's easy to understand why the author fell for this perpetual underdog. Shirer lost his father when he was just 9 years old, found himself on the brink of penury numerous times and, like so many hurt by the McCarthy era, did not deserve to be named in the publication "Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television," which left him scraping together speaking fees and nearly ended his career for good. Finally, in his struggle to explain Nazism, Shirer found what Cuthbertson calls "the story of a lifetime, a story so compelling, so terrifying, so bizarre and so historically important that he had to tell it." In several classic volumes he did just that. As a correspondent, Shirer had gotten to know Himmler, Hess, Göring and von Ribbentrop. NICHOLAS KULISH, formerly the Berlin bureau chief for The Times, is now a correspondent in New York. His most recent book, written with Souad Mekhennet, is "The Eternal Nazi From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Aribert Heim."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 22, 2015]
Review by Library Journal Review
In 1925, recent college graduate William L. Shirer left Iowa for Europe, where he became a successful foreign correspondent. He was hired by CBS Radio's Edward Murrow in 1937 and together they revolutionized radio; broadcasting spellbinding live reports from Berlin (Shirer) and London (Murrow), sharing an urge to alert complacent Americans to alarming developments in prewar Europe. Cuthbertson (Nobody Said Not To Go) traces how Shirer's superior reporting and linguistic talents, knowledge, intellect, ego, and determination contributed not only to his journalist and commentator superstardom but also to his personal turmoil, especially his traumatic rift with Murrow. The adventurous years in Europe (1925-40), provide especially gripping reading. During the 1950s, falsely blacklisted as a Communist sympathizer but determined not to be defeated, Shirer lectured and wrote his best-selling The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Cuthbertson examines Shirer associates' memoirs, letters, and other records to balance the sometimes questionable veracity of Shirer's memoirs. This engaging account of Shirer's life and groundbreaking accomplishments during tumultuous times also raises such fundamental journalistic issues as objectivity, corporate sponsorship, censorship, political correctness, wartime embedded reporting, and contemporary "citizen journalism." VERDICT Readers at all levels, but especially students of 20th-century history, broadcasting, and news media, will relish this vivid biography.- Margaret Kappanadze, Elmira Coll. Lib., NY © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
