The Barbara Walters Next Door

Posted by Seth at 8:20 AM on May 9, 2008

If you've not yet noticed, the media has been clogged with even more Barbara Walters than usual lately, the 78-year-old TV journalist and delightfully addled View ring referee doing overtime to plug her new memoir, Audition. (Defamer videographer and foremost Waltersologist Molly McAleer gives it three empty Hostess cupcake wrappers out of a possible four!) On last night's ABC tie-in special, Audition: Barbara Walters' Journey, Walters sat down with smarmy news anchor Charles Gibson for a one-hour trot down memory lane. (Sadly, it was trampled in the ratings by the bloodthirsty crowd who had gathered in Fox square to witness Jason Castro's dredlocked melon lopped off like a Rastafarian rugby ball.) Among her reminiscences, that default assignment for any young, ambitious journalist in the early '60s sporting a swell set of gams: a tour of Playboy Bunny duty, slinging buck-fifty cocktails and steaks while executing perfect Bunny-dips, all in the service of the fourth estate. Va-voom, Miss Walters. Va-voom! [Audition: Barbara Walters' Journey]

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Tags: abc | barbara walters | clips | objectification | playboy

Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)

Jimmy

Posted June 5, 2008 12:42 PM

Barbara Walter's life was influenced greatly by her older sister and she's written a beautiful memoir about her life. I read another memoir of a life influence by a sibling that I recommend highly - I actually liked it even more. The memoir is ""My Stroke of Insight"" by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. Dr Taylor became a Harvard brain scientist to find the cause and cure for schizophrenia because her older brother was a sufferer. Then, crazy as life can be, Dr. Taylor had a stroke at age 37. What was amazing was that her left brain was shut down by the stroke - where language and thinking occur - but her right brain was fully functioning. She experienced bliss and nirvana and the way she writes about it (or talks about it in her now famous TED talk) is incredible.

What I took away from Dr. Taylor's book above all, and why I recommend it so highly, is that you don't have to have a stroke or take drugs to find the deep inner peace that she talks about. Her book explains how. ""I want what she's having"", and thanks to this wonderful book, I can!