Diary of a West Point Cadet

The Book of the Week is “Diary of a West Point Cadet” by Captain Preston Pysh, published in 2011. This slim volume tells of a West Point student’s experiences as a member of the Class of 2003.

Pysh (rhymes with “fish”) was originally from a small farm town in Pennsylvania. He was a growth-oriented, goal-oriented individual who survived the military-style draconian training meted out at the academy because he understood the lessons behind the rigor. The place had a demanding, exacting atmosphere– forcing the students to find creative solutions to problems in serving the upperclassmen. Only about one tenth of the students majored in electrical, mechanical or civil engineering. The author was passionate about aerospace engineering. The highlight of his college career was his senior project– an experimental device for NASA that he and his project-group members tested in a KC-135 aircraft.

Read the book to learn more about Pysh’s trials, tribulations and triumphs in navigating the high pressure, military-career oriented institution that is West Point.

Side Note: This book appears to have been written: a) with the aid of speech-recognition software (which has yet to be perfected) or b) simply never edited after the first draft, as it contained an annoying number of misspellings, skipped words and grammatical errors.

Partisans

The Book of the Week is “Partisans” by David Laskin, published in 2000. This book describes the soap-opera lives of a few of New York’s literati from the 1930’s into the 1970’s; specifically those associated with the left-wing publication “Partisan Review.” The relationships of the people described therein were like those of tabloid celebrities. They had alcohol-related physical fights, breakups and reconciliations with their multiple significant others. However, they considered themselves superior to others because they were literate.

This included promiscuous Vassar graduate Mary McCarthy, who, for a spell, shacked up with Philip Rahv, the journal’s editor. In early 1938, she left him to wed Edmund Wilson, more than a decade her senior. “Philip Rahv and Allen Tate… had a gift for spotting new talent… and sleeping with the discoveries when they were attractive females (sometimes the same females…)” In his lifetime, poet Robert Lowell had to deal with the traumas of mental illness and his parents’ deaths.

The women writers in those days, for whom it was customary to attach themselves to men, being female– were forced to confront the issues of “… power, money, work, prestige, sex, domestic labor, body image and freedom.”

Read the book to learn more about the lives and times, books, articles and poetry penned by other “New York intellectuals” too, such as Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick, Hannah Arendt, Caroline Gordon and Diana Trilling.

CNN, The Inside Story

The Book of the Week is “CNN, The Inside Story” by Hank Whittemore, published in 1990. This volume tells the history of CNN, Cable News Network. The point of CNN was to create an alternative to the then-three networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, that monopolized American TV.

In 1976, Ted Turner owned a company that provided cable TV via satellite, consisting of games of the professional sports teams owned by him, and movies. By the end of the 1970’s his goal was to start a 24-hour cable network of just news. He was like the American president Donald Trump in that “…Turner had set the goal and the deadline and the sense of mission; and now, as he always did, he was putting together the people who knew how to make it happen.” However, the entertainment industry in the United States is a completely different animal from the federal government.

Nevertheless, a headquarters– a previously decrepit structure, gutted and created from scratch– for the new cable channel in Atlanta, had been readied sufficiently to provide minimal functionality in six months. The secretary of Reese Schonfeld, a high executive in the venture, had this to say, “… they had sketched out the whole newsroom one night on the back of a grocery bag…”

Launched in mid-1980, CNN evolved into a “revolving door” station (viewers tuned in periodically to see whether there was breaking news; they didn’t watch it every second) because it had to do things on the cheap and fill 24 hours of airtime every 24 hours. The big three networks practiced cartelizing behavior in order to shut CNN out of information-sharing. So CNN sued all parties involved, not just the networks.

Read the book to learn of what became of CNN, up until the book’s writing.