Customer Reviews

All the News Is Fit to Print: Profile of a Country Editor

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My first reaction upon completing this books was: What a great TV series this would make! It would be in the vein of "Medicine Woman," perhaps, although of more recent vintage. It would, however, chronicle the daily life of a small American town at a fascinating period of American history. As seen through the eyes of a newspaper editor who thought everything was, indeed, fit to print, the series could be a story of America's development. Its location is purely midwestern but allows us to travel to the metropolises of Kansas City, St. Louis, New York, San Francisco--to meet fascinating people from all walks of life and to take pride in what this nation has accomplished. Good reding? You bet!

Though a scholarly biography, the book reveals much more about life in a small mid-west America town at the turn of the century than many other biographies or novels. Well worth reading for an insight into "news" that didn't make most newspapers but which was true in revealing life, the book is nicely crafted and the author writes with a knowing touch.One would wish for more intimate details of the subject's life, but he was a private man, kept no diary, and did not tell his innermost thoughts to his family. The book, however, succeeds, because it reveals the town, Lamar, MO (which happened to be President Truman's birthplace, and where Wyatt Earp had been Marshall and where the Earp kinfolk lived on) and some of the foibles and fancies of American life. I hope the author writes another book soon.

This biography of Arthur Aull, a small-town journalist at the turn of the twentieth century, is a most fascinating read. The role of the small-town newspaper publisher carried much of the moral weight of towns like Lamar, Missouri, during the first half of the twentieth century before the era of instant news carried by radio and television changed everything. The author does a fine job of demonstrating the role in both politics and society that newspaper publishers played during this era. Arthur Aull was routinely used as a classic example of the important role of journalists in developing America by the Journalism School of the University of Missouri. In addition, he was a character that continues to shape the nature of the small town where he published; his legacy newspaper still is in publication.

You'd be hard-pressed to tell a boring story about about a plucky country newspaper editor who had principles and stuck to 'em. But this author has done it. He says the book is an adaptation of his doctoral thesis. That fits. The book reads like a well-done, fully footnoted college paper, not like a dramatic novel. It strives to identify key historical facts at the expense of the reader's interest. With a modest amount of effort, it could have been reworked as a compelling autobiographical novel bolstered by its remarkable display of features of midwestern life during the first half of the 20th Century.