Looking back
First sentence
I know the date because it is written on the back of the photograph, which was taken, developed, and printed by my great-aunt Mary, who exposed her negatives to daylight in the back yard instead of using the more complex enlarger and darkroom that first my father, and later I, too, would use...
Description
"From his youthful days as a delivery boy for William Randolph Hearst's Baltimore newspapers through his many years as a journalist and commentator, Russell Baker has been a keen observer of American politics and culture. Now, in these eleven essays, all originally published in The New York Review of Books, he looks back on a group of iconic public figures from his own past.". "Here are presidents - Lyndon Johnson feuding with Robert F. Kennedy over the legacy of John F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon in his grasping, spectral exile. Here are would-be presidents - Eugene V. Debs and Barry Goldwater, "gentlemen fallen among brutes," and Hearst himself, feuding with Theodore and then Franklin Roosevelt. Here too are those who set their sights on something besides the presidency: Martin Luther King, in Baker's view "probably the one indisputably great American of the century's second half," Joe DiMaggio, living a life in tragic contrast to his own myth, and the disputatious memoirists of The New Yorker's glory days. And tucked in are glimpses of Marilyn Monroe and Mary Todd Lincoln, a bearded lady and a nudist queen."--BOOK JACKET.