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Rating: 
Summary: Do your best
Review: I enjoyed this book of Ted Koppel's private thoughts. One never thinks about the tearful goodbye's to a reporter's loved ones before leaving on a dangerous assignment. Nor considers the unpleasant conditions which much be endured while reporting such a story. I found that the book put a much more human face on neat and tidy reports we see on the evening news. It was also interesting to hear Ted's take on the major news stories of the year. Opinions that could not be shared on national TV. It gave a certain level of comfort to know that a person who has such control over what we hear of the news, is really just a regular person who goes to the store, gets gas for his car and is excited about the birthday of his grandson. A quick read. I skimmed some parts about the Chechen's. But then isn't what he said in the book after all. We, as a nation ,are not too interested in that news.
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Summary: only for those who are in love with Ted
Review: I loved O'Reilly's book (the O'Reilly factor) which succeeds at every point where this book fails. Does anyone really care about Ted's every waking thought spread over 365 entries? Sound contrived and tedious? It is! If I hadn't been delayed on a runway for 6 hours, I would never have gotten through the book, but I was stuck for reading material. I really started to hate Ted by the end of the book for making me this disinterested in some very interesting world events. The problem is, even his interesting thoughts get buried in the mundane details of his family life which, unless you really want to hear about all the visits with his grandchildren, are not that interesting. I guess the best way to classify the book is self-indulgent, as if we all should jump up and down for joy that a famous newsman took the time to give us his daily thoughts for a whole year. The trouble is, I doubt anyone alive today could produce an interesting book from this premise (a daily diary), and certainly not Mr. Koppel. Not even Madonna or any Hollywood star could hold our interest through a year's worth of daily events. If you care about Ted deeply, you may enjoy this book, but for everyone else, I wouldn't recommend it despite many interesting points of view buried within.
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Summary: Ordinary thoughts from an extraordinary life
Review: I read this book a few months ago . . . actually I quit about halfway through. There were sufficient bad reviews that I was comfortable not warning others to avoid it. But it continues to draw some flies. Please, between Ted sharing his love of the high life and big bucks that being a sassy talking head has given him on his Florida Island retreat with his expensive yacht, you are given snippets of the great man's thought processes. At least he admitted he was wrong about many, many of his predictions, not that we wouldn't have known it anyway. But this 'world according to Ted' isn't just egotistical and greasy, it is written like he wants to be remembered. Just awful.
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Summary: Diary copied over into book with no editing.
Review: My first thought in his first couple entries was that he was trying a little to hard to be funny ala Dennis Miller or Jay Leno. However, then I realized that he wasn't, he was just blurting out his thoughts from each day (and almost every day). I feel there was not much cohesion throughout the book. He spends a lot of time on the war in Kosovo, as that was a big event during that year. However, he puts in little tidbits about his growing up and his new house or something irrelevant. Even though it was meant to be his personal thoughts on various topics, I felt he should have organized the material a little bit. On the good side, it was interesting hearing about the difficulties of being a reporter during the war, and getting some of that insider information. Similarly, it was interesting hearing his perspective from having been around for a while in the journalism business. Overall, I made it through the whole book, but every once in a while while listening to it (Audio CD version), I would think, "Now why did he include that?" I feel this work could have been improved through some editting and some thoughtful exclusions or reorganization of the material.
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Summary: Ignore the bad reviews!
Review: Ted Koppel's Off Camera is a caring and informative view into just that, his thoughts and daily activities off camera. Mr Koppel provides us daily journal entries from the year 1999. From Monica to the strains of reporting from Kosovo. I loved reading this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Koppel Comments
Review: Ted Koppel, host of ABC's "Nightline" television show, presents a personal journal in which he muses on the daily events which took place during 1999. His comments range from the insightful and controversial to the personal and mundane. Among other topics, the reader will learn Koppel's thoughts on such things as the state of American journalism -"a sort of competitive screeching;" on the United States Army - more of a buraucracy than an effective fighting force; on a survey of college student's sexual attitudes - shocked that 60% don't consider oral sex as sexual relations; on the weather - irritated that forecasters have to exaggerate by including heat and wind chill indexes. The book is a quick read. It is an intimate, if somewhat tedious, look at the man millions of Americans think they know through his television persona. Those looking for a well reasoned analysis of the major events of the closing year of the century will be disappointed. Those who can take the book for what it is may find it mildly entertaining.
Rating:
Summary: America Held Hostage: Day 254
Review: Ted Koppel. That voice, the music, the graphics. I grew into television news with Ted-- though I called him Mr. Koppel in our private, if fictional, chats about world events. From that stage, I somehow expected a giant to emerge from the pages of "Off Camera", and that giant of a man should know all and tell all because, who could do it better? This is not that sort of book. It does not gossip; it does not lie. It is Mr. Koppel, though, and he's got a great deal to let us in on. What works in this diarist's format is the jangling juxtapositions between waitng for the caller I.D. guy and musing over, "Oh, incidentally, Boris Yeltsin threatened NATO with nuclear war yesterday, if it doesn't stop bombing Yugoslavia. Everybody assumes he's kidding" (92). This sort of mingling of the mundane and the geopolitical reminds us that we cannot wholly escape either world-- it is as reckless to ignore the din of geopolitics as it is to ignore the phone bill. He's saying, "Hey! I, Mr. Big Shot Nightline Guy, have to deal with the daily dumb stuff. Why don't YOU try reading a newspaper?" And yes, he's a little testy on this. And no, he doesn't hold out much hope for what Americans have become. .... "Off Camera" is the voice of Ted Koppel: wry, commanding, knowing. There are spurts of dark humor (the moments of a life stolen while exchanging 32 cent stamps), anger, wonderment, acceptance and love. It is the writing of a journalist and the musings of a man whose sorted out his own mortality. He's a Mr. Koppel who doesn't much like President Clinton either (he'd be dishonest to say otherwise and his reasoning is solid--even though I think he's wrong). In the end, it's Ted Koppel and there are lessons to be learned. Though not a great book, this is one worth owning.
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Summary: Ted Gets Ornery
Review: The strangest myth of journalism is that in order to strive for objectivity, journalists purge themselves (or should purge themselves) of all opinions. Anyone whose ever read an article or seen a news broadcast knows that journalists have opinions, and they express them in all sorts of ways. The way Ted Koppel does in OFF CAMERA is not one of the more typical ways. Here he comments in a journal on the events of 1999, holding little back and stripping his opinions from some of the constraints and codes of his profession. All that isn't striking. What is is the degree to which Koppel is cynical about almost everything. Just about anything of public importance that catches his attention enough to make it into this journal is worthy of disparagement. Take his thoughts on the Kosovo War. At first he disparages the US's motives for getting involved, while later he seems to lament the extent to which problems there came to be ignored. He concludes before thew air war was fought that the NATO could not win that way and that a ground war was inevitable, then forgets to mention that it worked. And so on. But this is interesting. It is interesting to hear someone (Koppel's voice adds to the experience of listening to the audio book version) whose job it is to cover the news, speak with such disdain and even despair about the news. While bleak, Koppel's opinions are also interesting. He has a journalist's flair for putting a story together. I would happily read more of his commentary should he chose to write more. OFF CAMERA is not inspirational - it isn't meant to be. But it is worth hearing (or reading).
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