They are: Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette’s Writing for Their Lives: America’s Pioneering Female Science Journalists (MIT Press, 2023); Santi Elijah Holley’s An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created (Mariner, 2024); Jane Ferguson’s No Ordinary Assignment: A Memoir (Mariner, 2023); Alan Philps’, The Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalin’s Propaganda War (Pegasus Books, 2023); and Ari Shapiro’s The Best Strangers in the World: Stories from a Life Spent Listening (HarperOne, 2024). 

Honoring a Storied Biographer

The Sperber Prize is given in honor of the late Ann M. Sperber, the author of Murrow: His Life and Times, the critically acclaimed biography of journalist Edward R. Murrow. One edition of that work was published by Fordham University Press, connecting the Sperber family to the university.

Through the generous support of Ann’s mother, Lisette, the $1,000 award was established to promote and encourage biographies and memoirs that focus on a media professional. It has been presented annually by Fordham University’s Department of Communication and Media Studies since 1999. 

Professor of Communication and Media Studies Amy Aronson, Ph.D., director of the Sperber Prize, said the five finalists emerged from a pool of 48 titles considered for this year’s award. The winner will receive a $1,000 prize and be invited to keynote a public award ceremony held at Fordham’s Manhattan campus on November 11. The 6 p.m. event is free and open to the public.

“Our finalists take readers to profound encounters in less-traveled corners of the U.S. and the world,” Aronson said. 

“They take us behind the front lines in dangerous conflict zones, reveal hidden stories of journalistic risk-taking, and into carefully researched biographies of public visionaries.  All show us the vital importance of journalists and media voices in the world today.” 

Previous winners of the Sperber Prize include Working by Robert Caro, Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles M. Blow, Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley, Lives of Margaret Fuller by John Matteson, Reporter by Seymour M. Hersh, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century by Alan Brinkley, Avid Reader: A Life by Robert Gottlieb, and All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone by Myra MacPherson. The most recent winner was The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler by Kathryn Olmsted. 

The Finalists

LaFollette’s Writing for Their Lives profiles the first generation of women reporters who worked for Science Service, the first news organization in the country dedicated entirely to scientific journalism.  LaFollette, author of Science on American Television, reveals that when the Service began in 1921, very few journalism organizations covered science at all, and those that did treated the subject cavalierly, putting any science hobbyist already on staff onto the rare stories deemed important enough to cover. They were all male hobbyists, of course. LaFollette explores how an aspiring and ambitious group of women writers confronted pervasive sexism and gender discrimination to create meaningful careers for themselves while developing a new and increasingly crucial journalistic beat.

Tupac Shakur, the late rapper who was killed in 1996 at the age of 25, was the “spark” for Holley’s An Amerikan Family, which explores the story of the Shakur family and their work for Black liberation in America. Some may be familiar with the rapper’s mother, Assata Shakur, the activist and writer for the Black Panther Party newsletter, living for three decades in Cuban exile, and many have come to know at least something about the iconic Tupac, her son. But Holley, a writer published in the Atlantic, New Republic, Economist, Guardian, and Washington Post, reveals that the branches of the Shakur family tree spread widely and ran deep into the underground of the civil rights struggle. The book is both a family genealogy and a larger story of one community’s struggle for racial justice, taking extreme, unconventional, and often perilous measures in that quest. 

Ferguson’s No Ordinary Assignment is the memoir of a journalist who has covered nearly every war and humanitarian crisis of our time. A correspondent for PBS NewsHour, Ferguson was in Yemen for the Arab Spring. She managed to report from rebel-held Syria during its civil war despite the ban on foreign journalists. She was one of the last reporters to remain in Afghanistan when the Taliban claimed Kabul in 2021. Born and raised a Protestant in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, Ferguson is no stranger to sectarian violence or grave suffering. Her debut book chronicles the story of a remarkable woman coming into her own in the world’s most perilous and devastating circumstances as she dares to tell the hardest stories on earth as an act of justice.

Philps’ The Red Hotel takes readers inside the experiences of a cadre of American, British, and Australian journalists who reported from Moscow when Hitler invaded Russia in the summer of 1941. They were allowed to stay and report on the war at the Eastern front – as long as their stories were flattering to the Stalin regime. To help ensure this impossibly good press, they were billeted at the luxurious Metropol Hotel and supplied with bottomless vessels of vodka, lavish banquets, and young Russian secretaries and translators who were spies and sometimes prostitutes. Philps, who served as Moscow correspondent for Reuters and foreign editor of the Telegraph, reveals that while many of the translators conveyed Kremlin disinformation, some were dissidents who whispered to reporters about the truth of Soviet life and Stalin’s lies. 

Shapiro’s The Best Strangers in the World takes readers around the globe to reveal the stories behind the sometimes heartwarming, sometimes heartbreaking narratives he reports to his listeners. The co-host of NPR’s All Things Considered, this book, his first, takes readers from Turkey to Ukraine to Indonesia to Northern Iraq; from drag shows in Florida to the corridors of power in Washington, DC; from war-torn locales in the Middle East and Africa as he follows the paths of refugees fleeing conflict to big cities and small towns.  The result is a memoir-in-essays that is a love letter to journalism and a look at scores of individuals who not only refuse to break but also manage to confront life’s ugliness with beauty, meet horror with humor, and smile in the face of whatever might come next.  

For additional information, questions, or press inquiries, please contact Amy Aronson at [email protected].

Becker, who covered Cambodia for the Washington Post, was awarded the Sperber Prize for her biography You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War (Public Affairs, 2022). Kalb was awarded a certificate of achievement for his distinguished career in journalism and two memoirs: Assignment Russia: Becoming a Foreign Correspondent in the Crucible of the Cold War, (Brookings, 2022) and The Year I Was Peter the Great, (Brookings, 2018). 

The Sperber Prize, given annually for biographies and memoirs that focus on a professional in journalism, has been presented annually by Fordham’s Department of Communication and Media Studies since 1999. 

Breaking Out of the ‘Pink Ghetto’

Becker said she wanted to highlight how her subjects—Frances Fitzgerald, Kate Webb, and Catherine Leroy—broke the thickest glass ceiling in journalism by covering the Vietnam War, and in doing so, paved the way for women such as herself. They hailed from three different countries and came from radically different backgrounds, but all three paid their own way to get to Vietnam, and with little formal training, broke out of the “pink ghetto” of fashion, food, and family coverage that women journalists were confined to at the time.

Their outsider status was key, she said, to their ability to look beyond the battlefield, where their male counterparts had been trained to focus their coverage.

“So, you had ultimately with these three women an approach to war that included the whole country, the society, the people,” she said.

“Catherine Leroy spent a lot of time in the field, and she didn’t just take pictures of battle. She took a lot of pictures of soldiers waiting, soldiers being afraid, soldiers being in anguish when they went into battle, soldiers praying with the pastor, reading their mail.”

War Reporting Takes its Toll

Although they found some semblance of success and recognition—Webb won the George Polk award and Fitzgerald won the Pulitzer—Webb and Leroy both suffered from PTSD, and all three had messy personal lives that Becker did not shy away from in her writing. She noted that none of the women expressed regrets about going to Vietnam.

“One of the big gifts for me in writing this book was that I felt it was really good for me as a woman to be a part of all that that,” she said. 

“There was something that we could all be proud of, and I wanted to show that they not only broke the ceiling, but they changed journalism as well.”

Remembering Murrow and His Report on Buchenwald

Kalb, who appeared via Zoom, said he was touched to be honored with an award connected to famed journalist Edward R. Murrow. The Sperber Prize is given in honor of the late Ann M. Sperber, the author of the critically acclaimed biography Murrow: His Life and Times (Fordham University Press, 1999). 

Kalb was the last person who Murrow hired at CBS News, and he said his favorite anecdote about Murrow was how in 1945, he visited the Buchenwald Concentration camp and saw for the first time what a death camp looked like. 

“Murrow was overwhelmed, and when he went back to his hotel room and to sit down to write his piece, he couldn’t do it. I don’t know whether it was two days or three, but it took him a while before he could absorb what he had seen, and be able to present it adequately to the American people on radio,” he said.

An Appreciation for Khrushchev

Today’s broadcast journalists would not be given the same opportunity, he said, and he noted that in writing the third memoir of his time in Russia, which he’s doing now. the benefit of time has given him a better appreciation for Nikita Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964. Khrushchev is a major focus of all three of his memoirs.

It’s hard to believe that Khrushchev was so foolish to believe he could move missiles and 50,000 Soviet troops into Cuba without the United States noticing—thus triggering the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, he said. But Kalb, who covered the crisis as a new reporter, has come around to respect him now, particularly compared to current Russian president Vladimir Putin.

“He was the one Communist leader who recognized that he had made a profound mistake, and he publicly apologized and pulled the missiles out of Cuba and saved the world from a nuclear confrontation,” he said.

“I take my hat off to him this many years later. I don’t know any other Communist leader, perhaps even non-Communist leader, who would have had the guts to do that.”

“I’m a year away from finishing this third memoir, and it is fun, it is exciting, and I thank all of the Sperber committee for thinking about me for this award.”

Auster joined the Department of Communications and Media Studies as a visiting assistant professor in 1996. He was appointed full professor in 2015, a position he held until he retired in 2020. He served as associate chair of the department at the Rose Hill campus from 2002 to 2003, and from 2003 to 2008 at the Lincoln Center campus.

Auster was born in Brooklyn, grew up in the Bronx, and graduated from City College in 1961. He earned a Ph.D. in history from S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook in 1981, and taught at Brooklyn College and SUNY College at New Paltz from 1982 to 1995 before joining the Fordham faculty.

At Fordham, he focused on film and television. He published several books, including American Film and Society Since 1945 (ABC-Clio, 2018), thirtysomething: Television, Women, Men and Work (Lexington Books, 2008), Turn On, Tune In… Television and Radio in the U.S.A. (Altair Publishing, 1994), How the War Was Remembered: Hollywood and Vietnam (Praeger, 1988), and Actresses and Suffragists: Women in the American Theater, 1890-1920 (Praeger, 1984).

In published papers and interviews, Auster weighed in on subjects as diverse as Seinfeld, Frank Sinatra, and the differences between spies in movies and in real life.

In 1999, he was instrumental in launching the Sperber Prize, which is given to authors of biographies and autobiographies of journalists. He served as chairman of the award committee for 20 years.

Brian Rose, Ph.D., a professor of communications who was director of the award following Auster, called him a treasured colleague whose good judgment and empathy were valued on both campuses.

“He brought a tremendous sense of intellectual energy and wide historical background to his media classes, which clearly engaged several generations of students at Fordham. Al’s warmth, generosity, and good humor will be sorely missed,” he said.

Jacqueline Reich, Ph.D., a former professor of communications and media studies who is now dean of the School of Communication and the Arts at Marist College, echoed Rose and said that Auster was fundamental in bringing the Sperber Prize to Fordham.

“His tireless advocacy and devotion to the program was so appreciated by the Sperber family in Anne Sperber’s memory,” she said, noting that he was a charming, gentleman and devoted teacher.

“One of my favorite quotes about him from a student evaluation was “‘I wish he was my grandpa.’”

In 2008, Auster organized, along with Paul Levinson, Ph.D., a conference dedicated to the HBO show The Sopranos. Levinson called him a “one-of-a-kind professor and human being who had a heart of gold, a smile that would light up a room, and an encyclopedic knowledge of everything he taught and talked about.” Levinson recalled asking Auster at the last minute to serve as an associate chair of the department at the Lincoln Center campus. Auster didn’t hesitate, he said.

“I would call him anytime I had an issue that needed discussion, and he always took the call, including at night and weekends. I knew I’d miss him when he retired, and I did. I know now I’ll miss him very much more,” he said.

Thomas McCourt, Ph.D., a retired professor of communication and media studies, credited Auster with making him feel welcome when he first moved to New York City and was feeling out of his league.

“He had a wonderfully dry sense of humor and keen sense of the absurd. We spent hours and hours talking about jazz guitarists!” he said.

“I learned that a number of junior faculty in the department held an informal poll as to which senior colleague they would like to accompany on a cross-country road trip, and Al was the hands-down winner because he had so many great stories to tell. Al was the definition of a mensch.”

In 2016, Auster was recognized for his service at the University with a Bene Merenti medal. At the ceremony, he was lauded for being “a classic New Yorker, exemplifying the wit and heart of the city.” His citation praised him for his significant contribution to his field and to Fordham:

“Dr. Auster’s significant body of work details the history and impact of film and television on the American landscape. His wide-ranging interests are reflected in his many books and articles that have helped shape critical debates on how politics and media interact. In his studies of film and TV programming focusing on the Vietnam War, Dr. Auster has portrayed the complexities and contradictions of creators as activists in an industry typically focused on ratings and financial results,” the citation read.

“Through the years, numerous students have attested to the spirit of inquiry and openness that distinguishes his teaching. His classes provide a broad sense of context in which to address the fundamental questions of philosophy and ethics in past and present media. In both his life and work, Dr. Auster reflects the best aspects of Fordham and New York City.”

Auster’s wife Susan Hamovitch said he had recently begun working on a memoir that he called bubbenmeises, an intentionally misspelled Yiddish word that he defined as “Referring to a number of meanings: a false story, a story that is so eccentric as to be meaningless, or a story intended to divert from the real story. But are more than that because they have defined me [him]and my family.”

In the course of working on it, he’d realized that he was profoundly affected by the Holocaust, which resulted in the murder of his grandmother, aunts, and uncles. After graduating from City College, he worked in radio, for the Canadian Broadcasting Company and WBAI in New York City. It didn’t pay well enough though, she said, so he reluctantly went back to school to earn a Ph.D. in history. He would become a student of Hitler, Stalin, and the Jim Crow era of the Deep South, she said in remarks she delivered in a eulogy.

“His jam though, was to probe historical themes as contemporary American culture, mainly movies, portrayed them,” she said.
“How did film portray the Holocaust?  The War in Vietnam?  Jewish mores?   For his graduate thesis, the question was, which of Hollywood’s stars were diehard suffragists?”

Auster’s life can be summed up as passionate and emotional, she said.
“He breathed the history of this country, from the Suffragist movement to race relations, from John Ford to Jerry Seinfeld, with pride, annoyance, rage and love, I suspect due to the bubbenmeises he’d lived through,” she said.
“He approached his end as he had his life, with kindness, discipline, and a sense of responsibility.  He was an extraordinary man.”

Funeral services will be held Friday, April 1, at 11 a.m. at the Kerhonkson Synagogue in Kerhonkson, New York. The service will be streamed live on Zoom. His wife Susan Hamovich will be sitting shiva on Sunday, April 3 and a shiva minyan at 3 pm. Anyone who would like to share memories of professor Auster are asked to e-mail them to Susan at [email protected]. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you consider making a donation to the Met Council on Housing and/or to Kolot Chayeinu. 

Ironically, the award was given to Hersh for a book— Reporter: A Memoir (Knopf, 2018)—that he never planned to write.

An investigative journalist who’s penned 10 books about topics as varied as Henry Kissinger, John F. Kennedy Jr., and the Gulf War, Hersh said Reporter was actually the result of his failure to finish what would have been his 11th book. After decades cultivating sources deep within the American military and intelligence community, he signed a contract and got a big advance to write a book about former vice president Dick Cheney. Then his sources got cold feet.

“I began to share some of the stuff I was going to say, and they said, ‘We’re going to go to jail if you do that,’” Hersh said at the award ceremony, held at the Lincoln Center campus.

“I’d gotten a huge contract and I’d worked for years on their money, and said, ‘I’m dead.’ [The publisher] said, ‘Well, you can do one of two things. You can go to the gulag and start paying us a dollar a week, or do a memoir.’ So that’s why I did it. Not for mercenary reasons, but to save my life,” he said, laughing.

Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, lauded Hersh, whose work also includes a 2004 bombshell piece about U.S. military abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, for being someone who educates the public through his life’s work. Father McShane called Reporter “a story of incredible strength, and incredible courage that is told with a very critical but loving eye.”

“There is one phrase that I think probably characterizes your life, and it is this: There is no hunger like the hunger of truth,” he said to Hersh.

“Once you have tasted it, it creates a longing, and you have spent your life really giving into that longing.”

Andrew Meier, chairman of the department of journalism at the New School, said at the ceremony that he read Reporter in one night and it left him mesmerized, stunned, and eternally grateful to Hersh for his work. He called it a landmark of our generation. When he reviewed the book last summer for Book Forum, he dubbed it a “miracle.”

“Hersh has done more than stand witness; he has done the hard digging, again and again and again, and even now, he’s still digging, five decades and counting of scoops,” he said.

In his acceptance remarks, Hersh also reflected on the lessons he learned as a young reporter covering crime in Chicago. Some were harsh ones about the pervasiveness of racism, even within journalism, such as when he was instructed by an editor to “cheap up” a story about the death of a family when it was revealed they were black.

He also recalled a time when he was instructed to self-censor a story about police misconduct to protect a good relationship with authorities. And in a knock at the current obsession with breaking news first, he also said he learned you could be a better reporter even if you were the second one to write about something.

Perhaps most relevant to today’s current events, he said, is the value of the sources that he’s been able to cultivate over the years. As an example, he singled out Major General Antonio M. Taguba, who sacrificed his career in the military when he leaked a report on Abu Ghraib to Hersh.

“Over the years I’ve learned that the people to find are those people on the inside who believe in being there even now, in this government, who believe the best thing they can do is the best they can. Who are inside, in a sense, and are not afraid to talk about things that go wrong, and take a chance,” he said.

He also had advice for aspiring journalists in the audience.

“If you want to do better in life and reporting, as a journalist, do read before you write,” he said. “Have enough information so you can do a narrative. That means do a lot of work.”

The Sperber Prize was established in 1999 by Liselotte Sperber to honor the memory of her daughter Ann, who wrote the definitive biography of Edward R. Murrow, Murrow: His Life and Times (Freundlich, 1986).

Past winners have included New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, for his memoir Fire Shut Up in My Bones (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), and Robert Miraldi, who won in 2014 for his biography of Hersh, Seymour Hersh: Scoop Artist (University of Nebraska Press, 2013).

The prize is administered by Fordham’s Department of Communication and Media Studies.

The award, which was presented in a ceremony at the Lincoln Center campus, was given to Stephens for his book The Voice of America: Lowell Thomas and the Invention of 20th-Century Journalism (St. Martin’s Press, 2017).

In accepting the prize, Stephens spoke fondly about his subject, particularly his zest for going literally anywhere in the world for a story.

“He had tremendous spirit, he was a nice man, he was kind to everyone he met, he was interested in everybody he met, and he had this amazing desire to travel, to go there, to put his feet on the ground. It was a real pleasure to follow in his footsteps,” he said.

Joseph M. McShane, S.J. president of Fordham, congratulated Stephens for writing what he called a “lovingly objective” biography of Thomas, who worked in radio from 1930 to 1976, hosted the first-ever television news broadcast in 1939, and traveled to the furthest corners of the globe to report news stories. He singled out Thomas’ granddaughter Anne Thomas Donaghy, who was in the audience, as an honor for Fordham.

“Thomas was an iconic figure whose life is now recorded in masterful prose, in a magisterial way, with affection for the subject,” Father McShane said.

Ron Simon, television curator for the Paley Center of Media, told the audience that although Thomas is not as well remembered today in journalism circles as figures such as Edward R. Murrow, he was the most famous journalist of his time.

While Thomas is perhaps known best for discovering and promoting T.E. Lawrence, AKA “Lawrence of Arabia,” Simon said Stephens made a convincing case that Thomas helped set the standard that contemporary journalists strive to uphold.

“Thomas began his career as a captivating lecturer, using slides and films, sometimes stretching the facts to fit the morals of his stories. But when he commenced his nightly news broadcast when he was 40 years old, he wanted to report the news right down the middle, and not to let anyone know his political persuasion,” he said.

“Mitch persuasively argues that this decision by Lowell to be impartial sets the standard for network news history about creativity and fairness.”

Rick Moulton, director and producer of the documentary The Voice of America: Lowell Thomas and the Rise of Broadcast Journalism, which Stephens appears in, noted at the ceremony that while he was reviewing thousands of visuals for the project, Stephens was tracking down endless written details about Lowell’s life.

“While the paper trail offered a verifiable record, Mitch understood the journalistic principle that if you want to understand the story, you have to walk the ground. So he did just that, literally following Lowell’s life around the world, from Greenville, Ohio, to the gold camps of Colorado, the west side of Chicago, up to Alaska, on to London, the Middle East, India, Nepal, Tibet, and finally Australia,” he said.

“Like the messenger Lowell Thomas, he was traveling on truth’s account, compiling the story of this man, who became, as we sensed, the ‘Voice of America.’”

Stephens, whose children and grandchildren were present for the ceremony, and whose previous work has delved into the history of journalism, said that Lowell had always floated at the edge of his consciousness. But he only considered writing a biography when Moulton, who was with Lowell the day he died in 1981, asked him to be part of his documentary. He said the Sperber award held special significance for him.

“I met Ann Sperber once at NYU when she was visiting to give a talk on Murrow. I’m a great fan of Murrow and her biography of him, so it’s a real honor to accept a prize with her name on it.”

The Sperber Prize was established by Liselette Sperber to honor the memory of her daughter Ann, who wrote the definitive biography of Edward R. Murrow, Murrow: His Life and Times (Freundlich, 1986). It is administered by Fordham’s Department of Communication and Media Studies.

The award, which was presented in a ceremony at the Lincoln Center campus, was given for Gottlieb’s memoir, Avid Reader: A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). It was accepted by Gottlieb’s wife, Maria Tucci. During his considerable career, Gottlieb served as editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf, and The New Yorker. Considered one of the greatest editors of the mid-to-late 20th century, he worked with the era’s leading authors—John Cheever, Salman Rushdie, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, Janet Malcolm, and Robert Caro, to name a few.

Jonathan Crystal, Ph.D., Fordham’s associate vice president and associate chief academic officer, called it an especially relevant tome to be honored amidst a crowd of book lovers.

“I think in the academic world, you’ll find many of us who identify completely with Robert Gottlieb when he writes ‘From the start, words were more real to me than real life, and certainly more interesting,’” he said.

“It was fascinating for me to see how editors work with authors to, as he put it, ‘Edge a book closer to its platonic self.’ I felt like I was peeking behind a curtain and getting a glimpse of this mysterious process.”

Patricia Bosworth, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and a member of the Sperber Prize jury, hailed Avid Reader as a “buoyant memoir of a remarkable career,” and spoke fondly of her experience working with Gottleib on Diane Arbus: A Biography (Knopf, 1984).

She recalled that although she had earned the trust of Arbus’ brother Howard Nermorov, Arbus’ estate refused to work with her or let her reproduce the late artist’s photography.

[Gottleib] said, ‘It doesn’t matter. You’re going to write about the photographs, describe them, find out how she took the pictures. Photographs will not matter,’” she said.

“Once he said that to me, it gave me confidence. I was really worried about it before.”

He taught her that work is more fun than fun, she said.

“Digging deep into something can be one of the most exciting things a writer and editors can do—discovering collecting, shaping. Bob said in his book, that ‘Work is my natural state of being.’ That’s what I learned from him, so I’m forever grateful,” she said.

In remarks delivered on his behalf by Tucci, Gottleib joked that he assumed that, having edited biographies of George Balanchine, Charles Dickens, and Sarah Bernhardt, tackling a book about himself would earn him ridicule for engaging in an “act of nervy self-indulgence.” He said he was thrilled that the prize was being given for a book that is really about books.

“I don’t know which is more gratifying: helping a writer make his or her book even better than it already is, or watching your enthusiasm for a writer or a book spread out into the world at large. And they’ve been paying me to do these things for 62 years now!” he said.

“I’ve always believed that editors should do their work invisibly, without attention being called to them. And yet I can’t pretend I’m indifferent to seeing our work honored, so I’m happy to accept this tribute not in my name only, but in the name of my whole club.”

The Sperber Prize was established by Liselotte Sperber to honor the memory of her daughter Ann, who wrote the definitive biography of Edward R. Murrow, Murrow: His Life and Times (Freundlich, 1986). It is administered by Fordham’s Department of Communication and Media Studies.

What inspired you to write a biography about the New Yorker’s Joseph Mitchell?

My first book was about the founder of The New Yorker, Harold Ross. And one of the great joys of that project was getting acquainted with Joseph Mitchell, who was in his mid-80s at the time but still coming to the office regularly and who was tremendously enthusiastic about my project. Joe Mitchell was still an inspiration to many journalists and his work was still used in our textbooks, but he had never been the subject of a proper biography. It also bothered me that, as the years went by, Joe was becoming better known for his decades-long writer’s block than for his incredible (and indelible) body of work.

In uncovering his life and injecting yourself into his world, what about the man left the deepest impression on you? 

That he is so human—every bit as human and complex and poignant as the characters in his stories. In one sense, there was never a more confident person on earth than Joseph Mitchell. All his life he did what he wanted, confident that he could succeed and would succeed, even when he was just a country kid who up and decided he was going to conquer New York City. On the other hand, there was never a time when Joe wasn’t parrying self-doubt and self-questioning: Did he belong in New York or in North Carolina? Was be being untrue to his roots and his father by leaving the family farm? Should he be writing fiction or nonfiction? And then when he became ensnared in that long, long writer’s block, it was almost heartbreaking. Yet despite all that, in the end his life was a triumph of great talent in the service of others.|

Why do you think Mitchell suffered writer’s block for decades?

There wasn’t one single cause or reason. It was a mystery for which I think my readers wanted a clear, clean solution. But like life itself, it was complicated. I believe it resulted from a combination of factors. Certainly a big one was his chronic depression, which was exacerbated by his growing sense (in the turbulent Sixties and Seventies especially) that he was “a man out of time,” not to mention the sickness and loss of his parents and his great friend and colleague, A.J. Liebling. Mitchell’s wife too would have a lengthy and ultimately fatal illness, and in the meantime he had let himself be diverted by such digressions as his work for New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. But I think the biggest culprit was the perfectionism Joe had about his work that grew more acute with time. In the end, trying to measure up to his own expectations essentially paralyzed him.

Today, the world is bigger and communication so instantaneous. Can you imagine Mitchell in multimedia? 

I’m afraid I can’t. Joe despised the relentless march of modernity, including technology. In my book Ian Frazier recounts how Joe nearly went berserk when The New Yorker replaced its traditional phones with a modern console system. So I can’t see him blogging, much less tweeting!

Blow, who started his career at the Times in 1994 as a graphics editor, joined the op-ed page in 2008. His memoir, Fire Shut Up In My Bones (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), caught the attention of the judges of the Sperber Prize, which is administered by Fordham’s Department of Communication and Media Studies.

It was the first time an African-American writer received the award and just the second time the award went to an autobiography. Blow’s memoir recounts his struggles growing up in a segregated, small-town in Louisiana, in a family to which drama was no stranger.

In his welcome, Joseph M. McShane, SJ, president of Fordham, noted that William Faulkner said that God created man because he loves stories.

“And where are our stories told better than in biography and memoir? You are a part of our life, you open life for us, you help us understand the stories that make God smile, and make life worth living and worth celebrating,” he said.

John Matteson, PhD, professor of English and legal writing at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, noted that readers of Blow’s op-ed column are accustomed to his use of statistics, surveys, and scientific studies to illustrate his writing.

But in Fire Up In My Bones, Blow’s coming of age story describes a quiet, introspective boy who couldn’t cry, but who nonetheless had a lot to cry about: poverty, de facto racism, family strife, and a fateful encounter with an older cousin that drove Blow to consider committing suicide and even murder.

It’s an intimate exploration of one person’s struggle that might otherwise get lost in the larger scheme of life.

“Numbers can help define a condition, but they can never give it a face. At the same time that they inform, they suddenly enable us, if we let them, to forget that every problem—in economics, politics, and sociology—is made up of individual stories, personal losses and pain that only the actual sufferer can know,” he said.

The Sperber award has typically gone to the stories of journalists in their heyday; Matteson noted that Blow’s book about his childhood was an exception.

“What he did, to his great credit, was to describe the sentimental education of a journalist . . . . The many wounds and false steps of his past that he narrates are used to explain how a consciousness and, more importantly, a conscience were formed.”

Blow, in accepting the award, joked that he didn’t think he’d ever get used to people liking a book about a boy who’s poor, damaged, and living in a tiny, nearly forgotten town.

“The idea that people have connected to that kid and believe in him and can see him is just an incredible thing for me,” he said.

In a Q&A, he discussed his experiences with college hazing, his interest in graphics, and how his three children reacted to his memoir, which, for him, had been a challenge to piece a life into book form.

“If I were to write a novel, in some ways it would be easier, because I could make the person do whatever I want them to do,” he said.

“You can’t relive your life, though, so there are fallow periods that are not particularly interesting, and you have to figure out, ‘How do I keep the person engaged with the person who is me, even during the periods of my life that are pretty mundane?”

The Sperber Prize was established by Liselette Sperber to honor the memory of her daughter Ann, who wrote the definitive biography of Edward R. Murrow, Murrow: His Life and Times (Freundlich, 1986).

It is given to the best biography or memoir written by a journalist, and is judged by faculty at Fordham, Columbia School of Journalism, Trinity University, John Jay College, America Magazine, and by biographer Patricia Bosworth and Dr. Alan Sperber, Ann’s brother.

This year’s presentation was held in honor of Liselette Sperber, who died in August at age 103.

Liselotte Sperber, founder of Fordham University’s distinguished Ann M. Sperber Book Award, died on Friday, August 7. She was 103 years old.

Liselotte Sperber was born in 1912 in Mannheim, Germany and emigrated to the United States with her daughter Aenne in September 1939. Her husband arrived six months later, and they settled in Manhattan.

Aenne (who took the name Ann after her U.S. arrival) achieved success with the publication of her best-selling book about Edward R. Murrow, Murrow: His Life and Times, (Freundlich 1986). The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography. She died in 1994.

In 1999, to honor her late daughter, Liselotte established the Ann M. Sperber Book Award for the best biography or memoir of a journalist. The award is administered by Fordham’s communications and media studies department, with three faculty drawn from the department, and other judges drawn from Fordham, Columbia School of Journalism, Trinity University, John Jay College, America Magazine as well the biographer Patricia Bosworth, and Dr. Alan Sperber, Ann’s brother.

Alan Sperber said that in the course of researching her book on Murrow, his sister got to know Joseph Dembo, a professor in Fordham’s communication and media studies department. Dembo later used it as a textbook in his media studies class.

When the award was created, Fordham University Press subsequently re-issued the Murrow biography with a new introduction by journalist Neil Hickey.

“Mom used to attend the meeting where the winning book was selected. One year there was no book felt to be worthy of the award. Rather than being disappointed that the award would not be given that year, she simply said that if there was not a book that was up to the standards of the selection committee, so be it,” Alan said.

Since the award’s founding, it has honored some of the most important memoirs and biographies of journalists, including biographies of Seymour Hersh, Walter Cronkite, Margaret Fuller, Henry Luce, I.F. Stone, Bill Mauldin, Victor Navasky, Arthur Gelb, James B. Reston, Otis Chandler, William Randolph Hearst, the Ochses and Sulzbergers of The New York Times, and William Lloyd Garrison.

“Mrs. Sperber’s vision and generosity were crucial to the Award’s success. She will continue to inspire us as we go forward,” said Sperber award director Brian Rose, PhD, professor of communication and media studies at Fordham.

Funeral services were held on Monday, Aug. 10th at 11:15 a.m. at Riverside Memorial Chapel, 180 W. 76th St., followed by graveside service at Cedar Park Cemetery in Westwood, New Jersey.

Visiting will be held from 2-4 p.m. and 6-8 p.m. Monday-Thursday, with prayer services at 7 p.m., at 150 West End Ave., Apt 22-R, New York, NY.

Miraldi will accept the honor at a ceremony at the Lincoln Center campus’ Corrigan Conference Center on Wed., Nov. 19 at 4 p.m., where he will give short talk on his book, Seymour Hersh: Scoop Artist (Potomac Books, 2013).

The Sperber prize, presented by the Department of Communication and Media Studies, is meant to encourage biographical works that focus on media professionals. It is given in honor of Ann M. Sperber, author of the biography of Edward R. Murrow, Murrow: His Life and Times, (Fordham University Press, 1999) and was established with a gift from Sperber’s mother, Lisette.

Miraldi, who holds a doctorate in American studies and a master’s in journalism, said that investigating one of America’s best investigative journalists required a combination of scholarly research and gumshoe reporting.

The 77-year-old Hersh’s career began in the early 1960s. Miraldi bookends the biography with Hersh’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1969 free-lance coverage of the My Lai Massacre and his 2004 reporting for The New Yorker on the U.S. military’s mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Miraldi, a professor of journalism at the State University of New York’s College at new Paltz, said the research took about eight years. He said he called the legendary journalist to inform him of his plans to write the biography, to which Hersh replied, “I’m not dead you know.”

Miraldi said that as a scholar he “dug” into Hersh’s work, which includes nine books, dozens of New Yorker articles written from 2000 to 2010, hundreds of articles for the New York Times written from 1972 to 1979, and a trove of articles that Miraldi uncovered from the Associated Press archives written between 1962 and 1967. He also examined memos, letters, CIA documents, and FBI files.

Miraldi also contacted hundreds of Hersh’s colleagues, including the late great Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, who told Miraldi that not hiring Hersh “was a helluva’ mistake that I’ll regret for the rest of my life.”

“One is intimidated by investigating one of the greatest investigative journalists, so I’d say that I approached it more as a historian than as a reporter,” Miraldi said. He added that a historian would interview a source and ask “Do they have papers?” to back up a claim, whereas a reporter would ask “Do they have a telephone?”

For his part Hersh was accommodating, if not fully accessible, since he’s at work on a book about former Vice President Dick Cheney. Miraldi said the journalist gave the project a “semi-blessing” and was helpful, but drew the line at access to his family. Nevertheless, the two exchanged plenty of emails and held several phone conversations.

Miraldi said that Hersh was part of movement in journalism that was fed up with “the rule of objectivity,” in light of the horrors of war. With journalism today in a state of profound flux, Miraldi said that he still holds out hope that new generations of journalists will carry on long-form investigative pieces that challenge authority.

“It begs the question as to whether will we see investigative journalism in an age of quick hits, but on the other hand the long form really can flourish in new media,” said Miraldi.

At a Nov. 25 ceremony at the Lincoln Center campus that, by coincidence, fell on the anniversary of Kennedy’s funeral, Douglas Brinkley, Ph.D., was presented with the 2013 Ann M. Sperber Prize.

Brinkley, a professor of history at Rice University, was lauded for the 864-page-longCronkite (Harper Collins, 2012), which delves into the life and career of the CBS newsman dubbed “the most trusted man in America.”

Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, presented the award to Brinkley and invoked the saying, “God created man because he loves stories.”

“If that’s the case, God needs help retelling the stories and bringing them to life,” he said. “Because it is by the retelling of stories, never heard or forgotten, that the delight of God is found in our midst.”
Father McShane was joined in his praise by Sanford Socolow.

Socolow was the executive producer of The CBS Evening News from 1949 to 2000, which Cronkite anchored from 1962 to 1981. A member of the Sperber prize jury, Socolow recused himself from voting this year, as he is cited in the book.

He said that he learned “new details” about Cronkite’s circle, thanks to the stunning depth of Brinkley’s research. Brinkley’s book calls Cronkite’s critical role in breaking the JFK story reveals a “watershed” moment for Cronkite, establishing the newscaster’s reputation.

“Nobody recalls anything about the funeral or the assassination, or the murder of the assassin, without reference to Cronkite,” Socolow said. “Reading the chapter is as exciting as watching the events on television. [Brinkley] has really brought some life into the written word.”

Brinkley, who has written previously about Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, and Rosa Parks, said that when it comes to people like Cronkite, it’s worth the work it takes to track down ancillary figures in their lives.

“In the golden age of tv news—before cable news and the Internet—Cronkite was the commanding person of that era,” he said.

Brinkley said he wanted to write about Cronkite because, as a historian, he experienced events such as the moon landing, Watergate, and the end of the Vietnam War through television coverage.

Cronkite’s insistence that all facts be triple-checked, Brinkley said, was what gave him his gravitas.

“‘It’s my face hanging,’ he used to say. He could be tough. This was not just avuncular Uncle Walt,” Brinkley said.

Amazingly, Brinkley said, he couldn’t anyone in broadcasting who got tired of Walter Cronkite. Even when Cronkite retired, nobody said it was about time he hung it up.

He credited this to Cronkite’s unique way of speaking, which helped him “wear well” when he was invited into American’s livingrooms day in and day out.

“There are only so many voices that you miss. It was a cadence and a pacing that was just remarkable,” he said.

The Sperber award is given annually to an author of a biography or autobiography of a journalist or other media figure. The award was established by a gift from Liselotte Sperber, in memory of her daughter Ann M. Sperber, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-nominated biography of Edward R. Murrow, Murrow: His Life and Times (Fordham University Press, 1998).