The Murrow Boys by Stanley Cloud & Lynne Olson

I’ve had The Murrow Boys for years; I read (and blogged about) Lynne Olson‘s Citizens of London in 2010(!) and gave that book to others as a gift that year. My dad liked it so much he read Olson’s other books and he sent me The Murrow Boys at one point when he was done with it. I had it on a shelf, and then recently when I read a Maisie Dobbs book that featured a character who wanted to become one of Murrow’s “Boys” I remembered it and decided to pick it back up. Both Olson and her husband and co-author Stanley Cloud were journalists themselves.

I enjoyed this detailed history of Murrow and his “band of brothers.” It provides their stories and the story of early news reporting. I didn’t really realize that prior to Murrow’s work, radio news was just someone reading bulletins. Murrow pioneered the idea of reporters providing context either through the details and observations his team became known for that made the Blitz come to life over the radio in millions of American homes, or through analysis.

As interesting as the stories of these reporters and their adventures are, the book opens with a scene at Eric Sevareid’s memorial service in 1992, where one of the other Murrow Boys, Larry LeSueur, was more or less ignored and the celebrity journalists of the day pontificated without really honoring Sevareid’s contributions. The book ends on that same note. The trajectory from the rise of intelligent, carefully reported and deeply considered news presented by people who had a good deal of knowledge and understanding of the topics they covered to the media landscape of the mid-1990s when The Murrow Boys was written is sad.

Early on, Murrow clashed with the people at CBS who wanted “objectivity” over analysis. Olson and Cloud note that there is a difference between what Murrow noted CBS’s Ed Klauber brought to newsroom ethics — “standards of integrity, responsibility, and restraint” — and thinly veiled control by management and sponsors over what reporters can say and how far they can go in calling out propaganda and untruth. Murrow and his Boys struggled against both wartime censorship and the meddling of CBS’s ownership and commercial sponsors. Later in the television era, they struggled against the network’s pursuit of profit as well.

And really nothing has changed today. I was just reading yesterday about Walter E. Hussman, a newspaper publisher who has given millions to University of North Carolina, derailing UNC’s tenure process for Nikole Hannah-Jones. He apparently believes that he has more of a right to define “impartiality, integrity, objectivity and truth-seeking” than someone whose Pulitzer prize winning 1619 Project threatens the white dominant narrative of America’s origin story. In her excellent piece in the Charlotte Observer, Paige Masten, a recent UNC graduate, points out, “. . . this debate isn’t a question of whether we should continue to do our due diligence and thoroughly investigate both sides. It’s about whether we should give both sides equal weight when the facts clearly favor one side over the other.”

Murrow and the Boys made that argument when they were told to stop reporting on the rise of the Nazis, and later, when they were pressured not to question Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunting. They were told that they had to be “objective” in reporting about these things — but what that meant, in fact, was that they were expected to refrain from saying that they were wrong. Did that serve the public good? No. And they struggled against it, working to get their analysis — which was always based in a clear understanding of the facts — across anyway.

Today I read a column, “Science Librarianship and Social Justice: Part Two Intermediate Concepts,”* and this stood out to me: “Neutrality provides a way to stay silent and observe injustices instead of commenting or acting and making that silence seem to be a moral triumph instead of a moral failing.” What the owners of CBS wanted in Murrow’s time and what Hussman wants now, is to make staying silent on injustice in the name of “neutrality” into a noble act. When the truths the media expose, both in reporting and commentary or analysis, challenges what the powerful or dominant say is the truth, it inevitably leads those who identify with the powerful and dominant to cry “bias.” What they are really saying is that they want reporters to be more like the early pre-Murrow news broadcasters on radio who just read a list of what happened.

Or the TV news producers that the last of the Murrow boys watched turn news broadcasts into entertainment. As Olson and Cloud note, on commercial stations (rather than public television and radio) “broadcast news seemed to have little interest in helping viewers and listeners make sense of bits and pieces of information it put on the air, providing illumination and context.” And our media landscape today, twenty-five years after The Murrow Boys was published, is rife with misinformation and edutainment, punditry that is simply about repeating the ideological stance of powerful sponsors and owners, and a steady barrage of fear mongering.

At least it’s nothing new. My dad always says that reading history, he is somewhat comforted that we’ve been through all the things we’re experiencing before, and that while things do get bad, they sometimes also get better. I hope that’s the case. The Murrow Boys is a good read, and important one, that doesn’t spare Murrow or his Boys from critique, but also shines a clear light on the dangers of putting profit and power ahead of truth.

• Bussmann, J., Altamirano, I., Hansen, S., Johnson, N., & Keer, G. (2020). Science Librarianship and Social Justice: Part Two Intermediate Concepts. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, (95). https://doi.org/10.29173/istl2570

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The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

First a quick shout out for the most recent Maisie Dobbs mystery, The Consequences of Fear, by Jacqueline Winspear. I usually don’t review a series book (especially not book 16), and I just wrote about Winspear’s memoir, but I wanted to mention that this series continues to be very entertaining and intriguing.

As was The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I was thinking today that it’s a perfect example of fiction that deals with tragic events but manages to leave the reader hopeful. Actually, it left me deeply curious. I wished mightily that the main character, Esme Nicoll, was one of the real people Williams wove into her story. Unfortunately she’s entirely fictional but it’s a testament to debut novelist (and already accomplished scholar and writer) Williams that I believed she could be real, right up until I read the author’s note.

Williams was inspired by real stories about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, and several of the characters Esme grows up knowing, and later working with, are actual people. I read a book about the making of the dictionary many years ago (by Simon Winchester, and so had Williams, and she noticed the lack of women. But she knew women were involved, notably editor James Murray’s daughters, and some of the volunteer contributors who sent in words or definitions. The OUP blog notes that Murray also hired a woman academic, which was uncommon at the time.

Esme is the daughter of one of Murray’s assistants, and as a small child she sits under the sorting table where the slips with words on them are organized. She develops a habit of taking slips from the floor. As she grows up she begins gathering words of her own, because she realizes that many of the words her friend, the Murray’s maid Lizzie, uses are never going to be in the dictionary because there aren’t published quotes to support them. She tells Lizzie that women sometimes use words differently, and those meanings are not reflected in the dictionary. Esme gathers those, too, writing up and stashing slips in a trunk under Lizzie’s bed.

Esme is a wonderful character, whose human imperfections make her very believable. Williams weaves in the story of Edith Thompson, real life OED contributor, sub-editor, and proofreader, by making her Esme’s aunt, a fascinating woman who has a big influence on Esme’s life. And she works in some astute observations about gender roles and class differences, as well as two key historical events that impact Esme and the other characters, and the making of the dictionary: the women’s suffrage movement and WWI. Williams includes lovely details about the workings of the Oxford University Press where the dictionary was printed, as well as other locations around Oxford, and the famous Scriptorium — a glorified shed — in the Murray’s garden where much of the work proceeded until Murray’s death.

But mainly she makes it entirely believable that a woman working on the dictionary might start a side project to recognize all the left out words. Gareth, a compositor at the press, finds Esme picking up slips of some of her collected words off the floor of the Scriptorium after a male assistant has dismissed her work as unimportant. Gareth asks her why words that are in common use aren’t in the dictionary. She explains where she gets her words. From “The poor. People who work at the Covered Market. Women. Which is why they’re not written down and why they’ve been excluded. Though sometimes they have been written down, but they’re still left out because they are not used in polite society. . . . They’re important.”

A delightful read. Entertaining, interesting, and full of heart and truth.

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The Wrong Kind of Woman by Sarah McCraw Crow

Sarah McCraw Crow‘s debut novel, The Wrong Kind of Woman is set in New Hampshire, where we both live (Yes, I know her; no she didn’t ask me for a review). It’s set in the early 1970’s on a fictional college campus that, as McCraw Crow notes in her acknowledgements, “bears some resemblance to Dartmouth College before coeducation.” In the opening pages, Oliver Desmarais dies hanging Christmas lights, leaving Virginia, his widow, and Rebecca, his thirteen year old daughter. Much of the book concerns how Virginia and Rebecca each deal with Oliver’s death and their new lives. Virginia copes with the fact that she gave up her own academic life when she got married and became a mother and decides to revisit her unfinished doctoral thesis over a decade later. Rebecca tries to deal with missing her dad, feeling embarrassed by her mom, and navigating early adolescence.

There is another thread in the book about Sam Waxman, a junior at the college, who is struggling to figure out where he belongs on campus, in his family, and in the world, and what he wants to do with his life. He’s a math major taking a course in a new field — computer science — learning to program and listening to lectures that predict there will be computers in every office before long. He falls for an activist who wants to involve him in plans he’s not comfortable with, but he wants to impress her, so he struggles to find a way to help.

I think what impresses me most about this book is that the characters are very believable. They are imperfect people who sometimes worry too much about what other people think, or what the best way forward might be. They stumble. Sometimes they realize they’ve done the wrong thing and try to make amends. Virginia realizes she misjudged the small group of women professors on campus because she had taken her late husband’s view rather than forming her own, for example.

I also enjoyed how McCraw Crow captured the time not just in better known historical references like the Vietnam War and protest movements, but also in things like the back to the land movement, the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (which produced Our Bodies, Ourselves), frosted lipstick, and pop and jazz references. Virginia’s idea for taking her dissertation in a new direction by writing about Sarah Miriam Peale is another interesting aspect of the plot — it makes sense that a woman with an emerging sense of the women’s liberation movement and her possible role in it would choose to elevate a lesser known female member of a famous art family.

An entertaining novel about people trying to change with the times and with their changing lives. Book clubs will enjoy it — not too long, solid writing, and lots of interesting relationships to discuss.

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Radio Girls by Sarah-Jane Stratford

I saw a review of Radio Girls somewhere, and thought it was just the thing after my Infinite Jest fail and an interesting but not exactly light nonfiction read. I was right. Sarah-Jane Stratford based her novel on some real people — especially Hilda Matheson and her friends (who included Lady Nancy Astor and Vita Sackville-West) and the BBC Director General John Reith — and some fictional characters. Her heroine is the fictional Maisie Musgrave, who was born in Canada, grew up in New York, and ran away to become a WWI nurse even though she was underaged. When we meet Maisie, it’s 1926, and she is back in London after attending secretarial school in New York, and is trying to find work. Maisie is young and fairly adrift, having never known her father and never really felt any love from her mother.

She becomes a secretary at the BBC, working for both the Director General’s assistant and Hilda Matheson, who heads the Talks Department. The novel follows Maisie’s ups and downs as she discovers she doesn’t have to be mousy, she loves radio, she’s capable, and she longs to write. It’s her story, but it’s also the story of her time, and the BBC at that time, especially the development of the Talks. I enjoyed the parts about political events, especially the passage of universal suffrage and the first vote for all British women. Maisie also finds her way into a mystery that leads to a brush with spying and to a subplot about British fascists who want to take over the press. And she learns a great deal from Hilda.

In her author’s note, Stratford tells readers that many of the bits about the BBC, its inner workings and growing pains, Hilda Matheson’s accomplishments, and Reith’s actions at the helm are true. So are some of the facts about British fascists, although the story Maisie uncovers is fictional. Also true are the parts of the book about women having a hard road to advancement or even to working after marriage. Some of the plot gets a bit far fetched but it’s a fun read. I came away wanting to read more about Hilda Matheson — what a woman! —  and about the BBC.

Radio Girls isn’t perfect — some of the plot is far-fetched, and some of the language is a bit stale, with characters turning “bright red” or “white” whenever they are expressing shock or anger, for example. But I really enjoyed this debut and kept thinking it would make a wonderful Masterpiece production. Maisie is a delightful character.

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The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan

Denise Kiernan‘s book is subtitled The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win WWII. No matter what you think of the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the story of the thousands and thousands of people who came to a huge tract of muddy land in rural Tennessee to work at the Clinton Engineer Works is fascinating. I admit I did not know about Oak Ridge,  or site X, and only vaguely knew of Hanford, WA, because when we lived near Seattle the extent of radioactive contamination there was big news. But I never realized either site was part of the Manhattan Project. I knew the bomb was built and tested in New Mexico, and that was about it.

The Girls of Atomic City really illuminates the massive size of the Project, the web of protection the government wove around the work at Oak Ridge, where uranium was enriched, and the impact the Project had on ordinary lives. The women Kiernan interviewed and writes about are examples of how much independence women gained when they entered the work force in support of the war effort, and of how fleeting it was for most of them, when marriage and motherhood often meant the end of a woman’s work outside the home.

I enjoyed reading about the sociological aspects of life in a top secret community — where workers were warned that spies and informants may be afoot, and their fellow workers were drafted as “creeps,” who watched and listened for anyone spilling secrets. It is remarkable that the majority of the thousands of workers also had no idea what they were making; each knew how to do their own work and did just that little bit. Disturbingly, most didn’t even know what were working with. Only on Aug. 6, 1945, did it become apparent.

Kiernan’s structure, however, made the book less enjoyable for me. There were chapters about some of the individual women she interviewed, and chapters about the Manhattan Project and the scientists whose work made nuclear weapons possible, and these alternated. There was some chronological order, but otherwise the story jumped around. Perhaps because I did not read in long sittings but a few pages at a time, I frequently felt a little lost. Maybe this is a narrative device employed to recreate the sense of secrecy? If so it worked; personally, as a reader, I prefer more straightforward storytelling, especially for nonfiction. An interesting read, nonetheless.

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