Personal History, Katharine Graham
Personal History, Katharine Graham
13 Rating(s)
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Personal History
A Memoir

Author: Katharine Graham

Narrator: Katherine Graham

Abridged: 2 hr 53 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 12/08/2015


Synopsis

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • PULTIZER PRIZE WINNER • The captivating inside story of the woman who helmed the Washington Post during one of the most turbulent periods in the history of American media: the scandals of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate

In this widely acclaimed memoir ("Riveting, moving...a wonderful book" The New York Times Book Review), Katharine Graham tells her story—one that is extraordinary both for the events it encompasses and for the courage, candor, and dignity of its telling.
 
Here is the awkward child who grew up amid material wealth and emotional isolation; the young bride who watched her brilliant, charismatic husband—a confidant to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson—plunge into the mental illness that would culminate in his suicide. And here is the widow who shook off her grief and insecurity to take on a president and a pressman’s union as she entered the profane boys’ club of the newspaper business.
 
As timely now as ever, Personal History is an exemplary record of our history and of the woman who played such a shaping role within them, discovering her own strength and sense of self as she confronted—and mastered—the personal and professional crises of her fascinating life.

About The Author

Katharine Meyer Graham (1917 – 2001) led her family's newspaper, The Washington Post, for more than two decades, overseeing its most famous period, the Watergate coverage that eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Her memoir, Personal History, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Coco on May 02, 2009

This book was over six hundred pages and I enjoyed them all. While Katharine Graham's autobiography is ostensibly her own history, it's also the history of our country. Beginning with her father, Eugene Meyer, and his close dealings with the Hoover Administration and going all the way through her ow......more

Goodreads review by Mollie on December 05, 2007

I don't always like biographies - they can be very self serving and trite. But I was blown away by this woman. Frankly, I didn't know much about her or her story of taking over the Washington Post upon the death of her husband - a job she really had been preparing for her whole life, if she knew it......more

Goodreads review by Amanda on October 14, 2008

This book had incredible potential. It could have easily been one of the most fascinating American autobiographies ever written. Instead, though I plowed my way through the whole thing, it was tepid, vapid, and bordered on dull. Katherine Graham was born into the Washington elite. She met and sociali......more

Goodreads review by Peggy on January 19, 2009

Boy this book could have used an editor. Although it was an interesting insider look at the newspaper business, Graham was repetitive in the way she described the trajectory of her life and that of her career, using too many specific instances and detail that did not always illuminate her point. Mor......more

Goodreads review by Dale on May 19, 2013

Katharine Graham was thrust into the middle of history, much against her own introverted instincts. She was happy to play supportive housewife and mother while her father ran the Washington Post, succeeded by her brilliant, dynamic and bipolar husband, Phil Graham. Phil was a hugely influential figu......more


Quotes

"Riveting, moving . . . a wonderful book." --Nora Ephron, The New York Times Book Review

"Disarmingly candid and immensely readable." --Time

"Captivating . . . distinguished by a level of 
introspection that ought to be, but rarely is, the touchstone of autobiography." --Newsday


Awards

  • Pulitzer Prize