Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A biography of a woman of rare achievement. Page, Washington bureau chief of USA Today, biographer of Barbara Bush and Nancy Pelosi, draws on abundant sources and hundreds of interviews to create a brisk, evenhanded biography of Barbara Walters (1929-2022). Beset by an abiding sense of insecurity, Walters grew up seeing that success could swiftly turn into failure. Her father, a nightclub owner, had been “a mercurial breadwinner.” When he made money, the family lived extravagantly, “but always with the risk that he might gamble it all away.” Walters began her rise in TV news as a researcher and writer on NBC’s Today show. Once she took her place on the air, Page writes, “she honed her ability to ask a hard question in a soft way and to make news, and her increasingly prominent profile made it easier for her to snare big names.” Those big names included celebrities of all stripes; world leaders such as Fidel Castro and Yasir Arafat; and even criminals. Page breaks down the elements that made a Walters interview so successful. Getting her subject to cry was a bonus. She attained coveted positions and huge salaries, rarely acknowledging the women who went before her, “as though that might somehow diminish her own achievements.” Women were competitors, rather than allies. Obsessed with her work, her personal life suffered: Three marriages failed; her adopted daughter, neglected by a mother who never was home, struggled with substance abuse. Page recounts Walters’ many affairs, including with Sen. Edward Brooke and Alan Greenspan; her bitter rivalry with Diane Sawyer; and her founding of The View at the age of 67. A former president of ABC News described Walters as “hard-charging and driving and relentless and insatiable and unquenchable and indestructible”—and, as Page reveals, restless, lonely, and only fleetingly happy. A perceptive biography. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.