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as a weekly practice I listen to npr and do a little sketch on one of the stories. take a look, you can click on the illustration to make it bigger!

Wednesday, May 7, 2008

barbara walters' lifelong 'audition'.



In her new memoir, Audition, Walters recalls a childhood marked by her father's long hours and her parents' troubled marriage. "The biggest misconception, until now, is that I have had this blessed life — that part of it is true. But [the misconception is] that it's all been smooth sailing," Walters tells Steve Inskeep. "I wanted people to know that my life, too, has had not just great ups, but also great downs."

In revealing the biggest misconception about herself, the veteran journalist answers a question that she's been asking her subjects for years. If you ask subjects about the biggest misconceptions about themselves, "very often they will come out with the very thing that people want to know [but that subjects] have not wanted to talk about," Walters says.

The first woman to co-anchor a nightly newscast , Walters says she has interviewed "almost every head of state of importance, every president of importance, every murderer of importance." But despite all of her experience, she says, "I really have felt that I have been auditioning most of my life."

-excerpt from NPR

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Barbara Walter's life was influenced greatly by her older sister and she's written a beautiful memoir about her life. I read another memoir of a life influence by a sibling that I recommend highly - I actually liked it even more. The memoir is ""My Stroke of Insight"" by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. Dr Taylor became a Harvard brain scientist to find the cause and cure for schizophrenia because her older brother was a sufferer. Then, crazy as life can be, Dr. Taylor had a stroke at age 37. What was amazing was that her left brain was shut down by the stroke - where language and thinking occur - but her right brain was fully functioning. She experienced bliss and nirvana and the way she writes about it (or talks about it in her now famous TED talk) is incredible.

What I took away from Dr. Taylor's book above all, and why I recommend it so highly, is that you don't have to have a stroke or take drugs to find the deep inner peace that she talks about. Her book explains how. ""I want what she's having"", and thanks to this wonderful book, I can!