Kirjahaku

Called "The Poet Laureate of Radio" by critics, Norman Corwin was the top writer at CBS when CBS reigned supreme in radio, and when radio itself dominated public attention. This biography tells the story of Norman's unlikely rise from a triple-decker tenement on Bremen Street in East Boston to the top rung of radio writers during the Golden Age of Radio. A self-taught writer who never graduated from high school, he learned what audiences craved, and he gave it to them. His nuanced "theater of the mind" dramas, tender love stories, and witty comedies were hits talked about long after they were broadcast, and, when his scripts were published, became bestsellers. The week after Pearl Harbor, Norman's show "We Hold These Truths" was broadcast to the largest radio audience ever. His V-E Day broadcast on May 8, 1945, "On a Note of Triumph," made a similarly enduring mark and still constitutes the gold standard for wartime drama.

The relationship between Abraham Lincoln and his two most influential ancestors--his mother and "the Virginia planter," a slaveholder, a shadowy grandfather he likely never met--is rarely mentioned in Lincoln biographies or in history texts. However, Lincoln, forever linked to the cause of freedom and equality in America, spoke candidly of the planter to his law partner, Billy Herndon, who recalled his words, "My mother inherited his qualities and I hers. All that I am or ever hope to be I get from my mother--God bless her." This vital two-generation relationship was nonetheless problematic. In Lincoln's boyhood the planter was a figure he ridiculed while in his young manhood the planter evolved into a role model whom Lincoln revered and associated with Jefferson's overdue ideal that "all men are created equal." Thus galvanized "by blood" to educate himself, to stand for election and to oppose slavery, Lincoln quit farming at age 22. This book explains how he thus followed an inherited family dream.

MAY 7, 1945 (PARIS, FRANCE): Germany has surrendered but U.S. Army censors are holding back that fact. Accepting military orders, all of the correspondents - except one - say nothing. Working up to and then beyond the climactic German surrender at 2:41 a.m., May 7, 1945, in the former French schoolhouse in Reims, France that had become Eisenhower's headquarters, the novel quickly shifts to the Hotel Scribe in Paris. There, as war correspondents write their stories and await the censor's release, they learn that German radio has begun broadcasting news of a surrender still unknown to the people of the United States. Stunned by military hypocrisy, one of the correspondents - a legendary newspaperman here called Fred Morrissey - challenges authority and desperately seeks some way to smuggle out the biggest story of the war. As he bucks the passivity of his peers and fully accepts the certainty of instant retaliation by his own government, he works to tell people back home that Germany has surrendered and the war in Europe is over.Behind this suspenseful novel stands a true story of the end of World War II, misunderstood in 1945 and to this day not widely enough known, when history turned on the act of a single champion who rose to defend the people's right to know against all odds and opposition. Presented here as fiction for the very first time, Germany Surrenders is an exciting historical novel that will grip anyone interested in World War II, war correspondents or the moral issues and complications that arise when fighting censorship.