Rating: 
Summary: Good Autobiography, Dull History
Review: Read this book if you are interested in what it is like to, for instance, be a foreign correspondent for the New York Times in Greece. The biographical sections are interesting, but unfortunately didn't make a full book---so they decided to add some filler. The section about John and Abigail Adams in mildly interesting but the remainder of the filler material is dull, dull, snoringly dull.Now, about the Roberts. They spend a lot of time talking about her being a Catholic and he being a non-practicing Jew. The impression that I got was that she would have been in bigger trouble with her parents bringing home a Republican than a Jew. Since he is somewhat casual about his religion, she picks up the slack by adopting some Jewish rituals like a passover seder, a Hannakuh celebration and the like. When you consider that Jesus celebrated both those holidays himself, its not such a long stretch for Cokie. What irked me, and really bothered me to the core, was their chutzpah. They have been in the rarified air of Washington and the national media for so long, they don't even realize how distant they are from the rest of us. It is never said, but the implication is clear---we don't count. The world is controlled by the Roberts who are friends with the Brokaws, who are buddies with the Wertheimers, who are close to the Totenbergs, who hang out with the Hedrick Smiths etc., etc. etc. until it makes one feel rather insignificant. This close knit cult has shared pizza and McGovern, cocktails and Cuomos, pork rinds and Clintons, and thinks of the remainder of us as residents of "flyover country"----the places you fly over on your way from Washington to the Coast. I actually liked Cokie a lot more before I read this book than I did afterwards. Her "Q" rating took a big drop in my mind. As for Steve, I now know who he is (you've seen him if you watch Washington Week in Review). My overall impression: they fit a mold---they are "the media elite." Skip it.
Rating:
Summary: Good Autobiography, Dull History
Review: Read this book if you are interested in what it is like to, for instance, be a foreign correspondent for the New York Times in Greece. The biographical sections are interesting, but unfortunately didn't make a full book---so they decided to add some filler. The section about John and Abigail Adams in mildly interesting but the remainder of the filler material is dull, dull, snoringly dull. Now, about the Roberts. They spend a lot of time talking about her being a Catholic and he being a non-practicing Jew. The impression that I got was that she would have been in bigger trouble with her parents bringing home a Republican than a Jew. Since he is somewhat casual about his religion, she picks up the slack by adopting some Jewish rituals like a passover seder, a Hannakuh celebration and the like. When you consider that Jesus celebrated both those holidays himself, its not such a long stretch for Cokie. What irked me, and really bothered me to the core, was their chutzpah. They have been in the rarified air of Washington and the national media for so long, they don't even realize how distant they are from the rest of us. It is never said, but the implication is clear---we don't count. The world is controlled by the Roberts who are friends with the Brokaws, who are buddies with the Wertheimers, who are close to the Totenbergs, who hang out with the Hedrick Smiths etc., etc. etc. until it makes one feel rather insignificant. This close knit cult has shared pizza and McGovern, cocktails and Cuomos, pork rinds and Clintons, and thinks of the remainder of us as residents of "flyover country"----the places you fly over on your way from Washington to the Coast. I actually liked Cokie a lot more before I read this book than I did afterwards. Her "Q" rating took a big drop in my mind. As for Steve, I now know who he is (you've seen him if you watch Washington Week in Review). My overall impression: they fit a mold---they are "the media elite." Skip it.
Rating: 
Summary: Where were their editors?
Review: This book, along with Cokie's "We Are Our Mothers' Daughters," is our current Book Club assignment. Having stalled part way through that book, I picked up this one in the hope I'll be able to participate at least partially in the discussion. For such shallow work, this is remarkably tedious reading! The opening "dialogue" chapters should have been drastically trimmed. Should we care whether or not Cokie's ever owned grey Bermuda shorts? And lucky them -- having the political connections to end-run the marriage license requirements. A revelation: it's good to be rich and famous. The format of the "researched" chapters is interesting -- a paragraph lifted from someone else's work, with a "whaddya think about that!" one-line observation tacked at the end. Next month's Rosamunde Pilcher is going to feel like Faulkner by comparison.
Rating: 
Summary: Read the book, not just the reviews!
Review: This is a wonderfully intelligent and inspiring book. I'm not married and don't plan to be, but I celebrate the relationship that has grown and endured. I personally distrust a "reviewer" that seems to base his or her comments on a review that they've read. Trust the rest of us -- it's a interesting story and a great read!
Rating:
Summary: You'll enjoy this book. You'll laugh and you'll cry over it.
Review: This is refreshing book about two respected journalists, radio and TV personalities and their lives, their family relationships, marriage, children, backgrounds and parents. But, they add to the book's interest by cleverly weaving into the fabric, historical research, stories about other couples in other times and situations ranging from the colonial period, to the life-and-death struggles of African American slaves, homesteaders of the American wild west, and European immigrants escaping the holocaust. The authors have used a unusual conversational dialog style, with occasional interruptions, as would be when couples talk, and the dialog includes many of Cokie's sharp-witted and hilarious one liners. As they juxtapose their own Cokie and Steve paragraphs, you feel as if you are listening in. This book will be popular for the same reasons as "Forest Gump" was popular. Steve and Cokie let you into their thoughts and lives with a seldom-achieved wit, style, and clarity. And they do it with panache, avoiding the embarrasing intimacy of a revealing "tell-all"---President Clinton's paramours might benefit from a writing course from Professor Roberts. You won't want to put the book down, and you'll want to hug your mate or your best friend after you finish. Its easy to recognize, and to laugh and to cry about many of the anecdotes the Roberts describe, especially if you are in Cokie and Steve's generation, or are, or have been married, or have had children, or travelled abroad, or lived far away from family.
Rating:
Summary: Pity Them, Pity US
Review: Ureadable by any thinking person, this loathesome, self-indulgent book represents the lowest sort of media-celebrity self-promotion (so far!). If you thought "The Greatest Generation" was an overly sentimental and self-serving piece of poop (and the likely product of focus-group surveys) at least the people it (superficially) claims to celebrate actually accomplished something by "winning the war that made you possible". What Cokie and Steve have done, in contrast, is to focus their attention on:themselves! Cringe in horror as this mis-matched duo contnstruct a tragically unequal marraige of Apha-Female and Beta-Wimp (Jewish Steve accepts a Catholic marraige and makes himself subservient to plotical-brat Cokie's social-climbing). For a glimpse of the psychological consequences, watch the horrendously smug and self-infatuated Cokie on "This Week" and the pitiful, shattered ex-human that is Steve on "Late Edition". Shiver as Cokie dismisses the consequences of centuries of brutal racism (She's from the South!). During the Gult War, Cokie opined that African-Americans should stop complainig about their serving and dying-disproportionatey- in America's wars. After, all each war has brought social "progress" for blacks in its wake! So just shut-up and keep on dying and you might even get to host your own TV show like Cokie-some day! More recently (and more pertitnent to this book): On NPR, Cokie proclaims the mad cousin of Miami the "second mother of Elian" (a kind of latter-day Virgin Mary, I guess). The next week on CNN, Steve "changes" his previous, pro-father stance to embrace his wife's characterization of Marisleysis --"I was wrong to take the father's part". . . In the reactionary neo-Catholic Hell that is Cokie's mind, the father has NO RIGHT to his own son, just as STEVE has no right to defend this position after the GREAT AND POWERFUL COKIE HAS SPOKEN. Whatever else you do, don't buy or read this book.
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