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(More customer reviews)I'm not from Pittsburgh so some of this matter went over my head but I must say that Clarke Thomas is a smooth journalist of the old fashioned kind who believes that language's transparency can be used to convey information directly to the reader, without bias, without slanting. His history of The Pittsburgh Gazette is interesting because it parallels American history. Why, the Gazette was founded before the US Constitution was signed! It's hard to believe but people loved the news even back then, so much so that horses would deliver the paper on broadsides and it would be read on the village square and in pubs in the tiny hamlets of western Pennsylvania. Reading the progress of the paper over the years of the nineteenth century made me think of that movie THE VILLAGE, the recent film for which an old time village was fabricated in the woods outside Pittsburgh or wherever. The most intriguing characters were the Block family. For me, they were examples of courage because they dared press for integration, both subtly and openly, as the calendar moved from the 1930s through the 1940s and 1950s. Just as Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson and other enlightened figures in baseball gave us a glimpse into an integrated USA, Pittsburgh had its own quiet heroes.
Paul Block, the one who engineered the merger of the POST and the GAZETTE, had an intriguing career too! I have read many books on Hearst and Marion Davies, and never ran into the story which Mr. Thomas reports in this book--that Block and Davies were an item before she met Hearst, and that the three of them palled around together even after she took up with Hearst (one newsman after another for our favorite comedienne, Marion Davies)! It is an eye-opener for sure and presents an interesting sidelight on a much-discussed liaison. I hope that this book will soon produce a related sequel, perhaps one that will reprint the texts of the articles Thomas discusses. It would be great if we had the entire run of the Post-Gazette's coverage on, say, for example, favorite son Andy Warhol, and watch the paper deal with social and artistic changes over the decades.
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