Century's Witness: The Extraordinary Life of Journalist Wallace Carroll

More praise for Century's Witness:

"This perceptive biography shows how one self-effacing editor set the standard for quality coverage in WWII-and through the 1950s and 1960s. The Wallace Carroll playbook, with its insistence on thoroughness and fairness, continues to inform generations of journalists."

"I marvel at the prodigious research Mary McNeil engaged in to produce this important chronicle....She has that important capacity to put the reader right in the center of the action, whether it's stories about the bombing in London or the newsroom of the Winston-Salem Journal when the Pulitzer Prize announcement was made. I hope this magnificent book finds its way into the marketplace, where people who care about American journalism see what McNeil has produced-it's a real gift!"

"In my first two newspaper jobs, I worked for Wally Carroll, once at the Washington Bureau of the New York Times and again at the Winston-Salem Journal. He was universally revered in both places, though reverence is in short supply in newsrooms. How I wish I had asked him about reporting from London on the Blitz, or about being one of the first American reporters with the Russian army in World War II. He could be wrong-and McNeil is frank about the two big mistakes of his career. But at his best-and he was mostly at his best-he stood for the greatest values of daily newspapers, as reporter, editor, and publisher. I feel lucky to have read McNeil's wonderful book."

"Wallace Carroll was a man of great charm and intelligence as well as a great twentieth-century journalist reporting on some of the most critical moments in American history-during World War II as a United Press reporter on the rooftops of London as German bombs exploded all around him to serving as publisher of a newspaper in a southern city bursting with provincial pride and economic and racial disparities. Wally brought the same impeccable standards to local issues, which were also American in scope-the arts, school desegregation, the Vietnam War, and the environment. Carroll's life is a model for our time as we search for our own local heroes. McNeil, one of Carroll's students at Wake Forest University, has done her homework well: she shows us what mattered in his life, and what should matter in ours."

"To today's journalists, Wallace is less well-known that his son, John, who became the editor of the Los Angeles Times, but he is no less worthy of recognition. McNeil's thoughtful and well-executed study should go a long way toward giving this exemplary journalist his due."

"Carroll's story is the kind of romance that persuades many of us to be drawn to journalism as a profession. As a globe-trotting, unflappable observer and interpreter, he had a nose for what was important, and he somehow managed to be on the scene of some of history's major turning points. As we struggle to maintain democracy and high-quality, independent journalism, this detailed examination of the role that a journalist can play should inform us as we try to refashion and preserve this important profession."