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| Audition: A Memoir | 
 enlarge | Author: Barbara Walters
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy Used: $9.43
You Save: $20.52 (69%)
New (73) Used (71) Collectible (12) from $9.43
Avg. Customer Rating:  238 reviews
Sales Rank: 691
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 624
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.2
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.2 x 2.2
ISBN: 030726646X
Dewey Decimal Number: 070.92
EAN: 9780307266460
ASIN: 030726646X
Publication Date: May 6, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Visible shelf wear -- may have some notes/markings on pages
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| Customer Reviews:
 Open mouth; insert foot! July 3, 2008
5 out of 9 found this review helpful
If you like Barbara Walters and want to continue to like her; DO NOT READ this book. If I could have selected zero stars, I would have. I am totally turned off to someone I thought was a wonderful journalist and a powerful woman in her field. I cannot imagine what she was thinking when she wrote this book. First of all, it is not written well at all. It follows no chronological order what-so-ever and it is often very difficult to determine if we are talking about something that happened last year or in 1972. I found myself constantly re-reading and revisiting earlier chapters to determine what period in time I was reading about. I know you can't really know someone from a written account but by her own words, she lost any respect I might have had for her. Her affairs with married men, her arrogance at her abilities, her lack of parenting that caused her daughter many years of hardship, her selfishness with regard to her parents and her mentally challenged sister... it all disgusts me. I found myself actually getting angry at her cold heartedness and lack of humanity. Since I really can't find a single nice thing to say about this book and I don't want to give away any of the daunting details for anyone who might be looking for an awful book to read, I'll leave it as that.
 Enjoyed it very much May 7, 2008
4 out of 10 found this review helpful
It is long, but I really enjoyed it. She has been a part of our lives for so very long, and has provided much enjoyment over the years. This is a good read.
Editor of Michele Cozzens' award winning women's fiction A Line Between Friends
Walters is a Trailblazer for Women in the Media May 15, 2008
4 out of 11 found this review helpful
Mary Greenwood, author ofHow to Mediate Like a Pro: 42 Rules for Mediating Disputes
Barbar Walters is a trail blazer for women in the media. Audition is a fascinating ride from the 40's to the present showing women's role in journalism. On the early days of the Today Show there was the Today Girl, the one "girl" allowed to do special segments on the Today Show. Walters was never a Today Girl, but when there were three women doing women's segments, one was considered too caustic and the other too elegant, so Walters got to do live advertisements for sponsors such as Alpo Dogfood, where she would feed hungry dogs on the air. When it was her turn, they stopped using the Today Girl moniker. OF course, she was the first to co-anchor the nightly news which she did with Harry Reasoner in the 70's.
She was the first to interview many famous politicians, celebrities, and entertainers. The inside cover lists all her interviews from A-King Abdullah to Z-Catherine Zeta Jones. It is in very small print and there are thousands of names. Castro, the Shah of Iran, Truman Capote, the Dalai Lama, Hugo Chavez, Moshe Dyan, a joint interview with Anwar Sadat and Meachem Begin, and all the presidents and their wives. In the 90's instead of retiring, she started a new Women's Daytime program called the View. She also did 20/20 for over twenty years.
In addition to all the firsts, we learn a lot about Walter' early days in Boston, New York and Miami Beach. We learn about the ups and down of her father's career, who was the impressario of the Latin Quarter in New York but had many business failures and successes. Barbara knew from an early age that she would probably need to support her family, including her "mentally retarded" (the term used then) sister and therefore, Barbara was always worried about money so she could help her parents and sister financially.
We learn about the rr's in Barbar's speech and how that is a result of being brought up in Boston. We learn that she went to a speech therapist and even tried to speak with words without r's and then how she decided to just speak naturally. We find out that Gilda Radner's skits on Saturday Night Live initially hurt her feelings, but that one night when she saw Gilda, she had her do her impression especially for her.
We learn about her fertility treatments; her adoption of her daughter, Jackie; her daughter's rebellious teenage years, her husbands and divorces, her love affairs, and her endless travel all over the globe to get the story.
I am an Art Deco Tour Guide in Miami Beach and was particularly interested in the days in the 40's when Barbara was a girl and her father ran the Lou Walters Miami Beach Latin Quarter on Palm Island where Al Capone lived just down the street. People like Milton Berle, Sophie Tucker, and Jimmy Durante entertained there and people like Jack Kennedy and Howard Hughes went to the show. The Walters also bought the pistachio house next door to the club. Apparently both were previously owned by Bill Dwyer, a notorious bootlegger and the owner of Tropical Park Race Track. Mr Dwyer thought he had some claim on the house and arrived with his henchman to live there. Mr. Walters took a gamble and and allowed Mr. Dwyer to live in the same house with his family. Mr. Dwyer took a shine to Barbara, who was in elementary school, and took her to the track. She was too young to go in, but Mr. Dwyer parked so she could see the horses. Barbara would give him a few bucks to bet and "miraculously" she always won. Barbara said these were some of the happiest times for the Walters family.
The book is long, but I appreciated the fact that she wrote a complete memoir in one volume. I loved this book. First I loved it because Walters was a trail-blazer for women. I have seen her pave the way for other women in so many ways and I am not sure she has gotten all the credit she deserves. Secondly, it has been an interesting life from her days when she lived down the street from Al Capone in Miami Beach to the famous people she has interviewed. With all the fascinating people mentioned, I did not get the feeling that she was name-dropping. She was writing as a journalist and giving us some background on some heady times. I recommend this to all women, especially younger women, who may not appreciate the trials and tribulations of the women who have gone before them. I recommend to anyone who is interested in show business from the early days of Milton Berle and Martha Raye to the Academy Award Winners of today. I would also recommend to anyone who wants to read a good book.
Walters Takes a Long Look Back But Not an Entirely Illuminating One May 25, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Watching Barbara Walters recently on "The View", I saw not a relevant journalistic icon but an impeccably dressed party hostess whose recall of people and past events often seemed to escape her. She even admitted not remembering an interview she had with Barack Obama years before his recent visit to the show. Walters' more outrageous co-hosts and sometimes even more outrageous guests make her seem all the more hermetically sealed from the real world, and she often appears to play the role of den mother constantly reminding people how important etiquette and humility are the greater part of valor. While her memoir shows the 78-year-old icon to be sometimes focused more on decorum than personal revelation, she also reflects upon a genuinely fascinating life in surprising detail. Even as her former colleague, the sadly embittered, surgically emaciated Star Jones, labels Walters an adulteress in the "sunset of her life", there is no doubt that it is a life well lived, full of intriguing encounters with unique personalities - some historically important, others not so much.
She recounts her interviews with journalistic precision, especially the ones with the more elusive political figures like Golda Meir and Fidel Castro. Her reputation as an interviewer remains admired among her colleagues, even with a few legendary lapses along the way, such as asking Katharine Hepburn what tree she would be. Walters perfected her personal technique by nurturing her subjects into a sense of exalted self-worth and ensuring them that she would never stray from their comfort zone during the interview. It may come across as disingenuous, but the results of her bonding approach are inarguable. She gets the "gets" that others simply don't because she doesn't violate their trust in her. Not too surprisingly, the polarizing figures provide the basis of the most interesting interviews recalled here - Castro, Monica Lewinsky, Henry Kissinger, Muammar Gaddafi. Less intriguing are her recollections of behind-the-scenes contract negotiations with her various employers. In 1976, she broke the glass ceiling by jumping from the security of her long tenure at NBC's "The Today Show" to the shark-infested waters at ABC where she broke the glass ceiling be becoming the network's first anchorwoman. Her anchoring was a ratings disaster (shades of Katie Couric's current situation), and Walters was carefully repositioned back to interviewer where her true skills could be exhibited.
She is justifiably viewed as a feminist icon, but ironically, she achieved such status through a strictly feminine approach to her interviewing. Gratefully, Walters makes no apologies for her driving ambitions, even having residue resentment over not convincing Richard Nixon to give her first crack at an exclusive, post-Watergate interview. Despite accompanying him on his groundbreaking 1972 China trip, she was passed over in favor of David Frost. There are other nuggets to savor like how she had to censor an interview with a drunken Betty Ford. Walters also spends a good amount of the book on her celebrity-filled childhood as the daughter of impresario Lou Walters, who owned the legendary Latin Quarter nightclub. However, media attention has naturally been drawn to Walters' carefully worded kiss-and-tell relationships, in particular, with Alan Greenspan and former Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke. The latter has engendered some controversy since she had an interracial relationship with a married man for most of the 1970's, but none of these affairs come across as particularly exploitative. In fact, if anything, Walters makes a deep impression as a most devoted friend and confidante, which is part of the problem with her voluminous 624-page book. She's just a bit too guarded to be completely illuminating.
Really interesting insight to Barbara Walters May 12, 2008
3 out of 7 found this review helpful
Very interesting biography, honest and well written. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and highly recommend it. What an extraordinary life!
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