Audition: A Memoir
by Barbara Walters
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Book Reviews of Audition: A Memoir
Book Review: EXTRAORDINARY LIFE
Summary: 4 Stars
Barbara Walters has led, by any account, a most extraordinary life marked by encounters with the most important and influential people of the last half century, not to mention some of the most famous and glamorous. Her candor and warmth shine through this sometimes meandering, sometimes repetitive, and sometimes cliche-ridden autobiography. and as a result you feel a kinship with her at the most fundamental human level when it is all over. It is the ostensibly wild disparity between her public life and her private life that make this book so compulsively readable, to me - and then it dawned on me - she's just like me, she's just like everybody else in the world. Troubles, desperate times, love, losing love, ambition, good fortune, timing, and a family that kept its dignity while spiraling into near-ruin while reaching dazzling heights the very next year. I found Barbara's descriptions of her father to be the most thrilling in the book - a true visionary, with panache and talent, he created and sustained, albeit with some major bumps in the road, a world of entertainment that now only exists in places like Las Vegas. Barbara's sure-footed approach to business and her spunkiness and natural humor got her far, but it was almost as if the world turned at exactly the right moment for her to be at NBC at the time they needed her for the TODAY show. Her life since then has become the stuff of television legend - and this extraordinary life deserves the detail and passion with which this book is served. Ultimately, though, it is the ordinariness - the naughtiness - the confessional passages in which Barbara deals quite bluntly with her own character defects - that made this book so remarkably appealing and memorable.Book Review: "There Is Only One Barbara Walters"
Summary: 5 Stars
Barbara Walter's autobiography is a great read. After decades of interviewing people and getting an insight into what makes them who they are, Barbara Walters reveals for the first time what makes her the person she is. It wasn't until she started producing and hosting ABC's "The View" that viewers saw the real Barbara Walters, as it was the first time that she talked about her personal life and the struggles that she has encountered in her life. After reading "Audition" you will see even more insight of not only the best television journalist of our time, but of a person who has had her share of problems, from trying to make it in a male dominated world in the 1960's and 1970's, to raising an adopted daughter who encountered drug addiction. Barbara also talks candidly about her marriages and her relationship with an African-American politician, as well as her family and her struggles with having a mentally challenging sister. Miss Walters also covers her entire career, from her days as "Today's" co-host (the first woman ever to do that), her move to ABC to become the first female to co-anchor the nightly network news, to "20/20" and "The View". She also discusses candidly her problems with Star Jones and Rosie O'Donnell on "The View" and how she was caught in power struggles between them and the network.
"Audition" is a fascinating read that spent weeks on top of "The New York Times" bestseller's list. Barbara Walters is an icon in the truest sense.
Book Review: She did and does her job A rich,honest, courageous and entertaining book
Summary: 5 Stars
There are so much to say about this book, and I suspect many other reviewers have said much of it. I would only say that I came away from the book with a tremendous respect for Barbara Walters, her honesty her courage, her remarkable energy, her loyalty to her parents and sister, her devotion to her daughter, her wisdom in dealing with life's difficulties, her hanging in there in tough situations and knowing how to make the best of them. And much much else. I do have reservations about the book and about some of the things she does. I do not believe she tells the 'whole truth' about her marriages. I do not applaud her willingness to speak with each and every dictator and tyrant , if it will be a good interview. But overall it is impossible not to have great admiration for her great capacity to care about , and help a wide audience know about all kinds of interesting, and often remarkable people. This book tells a lot about the American media world, and American history in the time of her life.
While the book is a good interesting and entertaining read throughout I found that the story of her early years was particularly moving for me. She brings back memories of many lost things, and illustrates again and again how things once cared for as important fall in time to being completely forgotten.
An admirable book by an admirable person.
Book Review: Barbara Walters has had a difficult life and writes well in telling about it.
Summary: 5 Stars
Barbara Walters is an intelligent, diligent and loving person and this shines through in her autobiography. She was a pioneer in television journalism and was punished for that often by men who were chauvinists or just plain mean. Thank God for those men who realized she had talent. She, as many women of her generation, has guilt feelings because her career necessitated a lot of time spent apart from her mother, dad and sister Jackie, who was mentally disabled and also from her daughter Jackie with whom she is now at peace. I think she really cares about the people she interviews and does her homework before she speaks to them. She is amazingly frank about her affairs and her marriages and illustrates again and again how hard it is to have personal relationships when you work as hard as she has over the years. I enjoyed the book.Book Review: Facinating, very candid, very readable.
Summary: 5 Stars
I couldn't put this book down. Walters has written a very personal, highly candid, warm, and occasionally funny book. I can't understand why others put her down for having a career that took away from her personal caring for her daughter. Lots of very active career women are caught with that type of dilemma. And Walters expresses loads of working-mother guilt. Yes, Walters was a highly competitive journalist. She obviously slept around a good bit, but she was candid about it in her book.
All in all this is a well-written book about a very interesting personality.