Stanley Karnow
Stanley Karnow | |
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literature )
Sorbonne, University of Paris , 1947–48
Ecole des Sciences Politiques, 1948–49. | |
Occupation(s) | journalist, historian |
Known for |
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Spouse(s) | China Burma India Theater |
Notes | |
Stanley Abram Karnow (February 4, 1925 – January 27, 2013) was an American journalist and historian. He is best known for his writings on East Asia and the Vietnam War.
Education and career
Karnow was born in Brooklyn in 1925, and had a middle-class, secular Jewish upbringing. His father was a machinery salesman; his mother, an immigrant from Hungary, a homemaker. Interested in writing from a young age, at James Madison High School in Brooklyn he wrote radio plays and was a sports writer and an editor of the school paper.[4][5][3]
Karnow enrolled at the University of Iowa, but left in 1943 to serve in the Army Air Corps, in which he was a weather observer, cryptographer and unit historian along the China-India border. After the war, he attended Harvard University, where he was an editorial and feature writer for the Harvard Crimson and majored in modern European history and literature. Upon graduating in 1947, Karnow went to Paris intending to stay the summer, but wound up staying ten years.[5][6][2]
Journalist
Karnow attended the
Karnow spent the most influential part of his reporting career in east and southeast Asia.
After the war, in the 1970s and 1980s, Karnow was a columnist for
Author
Karnow’s first book was his text for Southeast Asia (1962), a volume in his employer's illustrated, mass-market, Life World Library series.[10] His first major publication was Mao and China: From Revolution to Revolution (1972), a 600-page analysis of the recent Cultural Revolution. The book built on Karnow's Hong Kong reporting on a then-isolated China and a fellowship year at Harvard, and was nominated for a National Book Award.[11] Despite his place on Nixon's Enemies List, Karnow received an invitation to accompany Nixon on his historic visit to China in 1972, during which he sought to confirm the information in his manuscript.[12]
In 1977, two years after the fall of Saigon,
Rising political unrest in the Philippines in the 1980s, culminating in the fall of the 20-year regime of President Ferdinand Marcos, prompted Karnow's second book and television project. The book, In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines (1989), won a Pulitzer Prize for History. Karnow was chief correspondent and narrator for the companion three-part PBS television documentary, The U.S. and the Philippines: In Our Image.[5] Unlike the academic style of his China book, Karnow's narratives on Vietnam and the Philippines combined research, reporting, and personal observations.[15]
Asian Americans in Transition, a report for the Asia Society, appeared in 1992. Half of the chapters were authored by Karnow and half by Nancy Yoshihara, co-founder of the Asian American Journalists Association.[16] The report focused on the characteristics and challenges of Asian immigrants, whose numbers had swelled since the 1960s. Karnow immediately began work on a book on the Asian experience in the United States, but ultimately decided that an Asian was more suited for the job.[16][4]
In his last published book, Paris in the Fifties (1997), Karnow chronicled his years as a young reporter in Europe and North Africa, making use of his copies of dispatches that had been used mostly as background material by Time editors in New York.[6] He contemplated, but never executed, a fuller memoir with notional titles Out of Asia or Interesting Times. A book on Jewish humor progressed only as far as an outline.[4][2] Karnow nonetheless published reviews and articles, and remained a sought-after lecturer and media commentator until his death in 2013.[14]
Karnow was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Asia Society, and the Society of American Historians. His papers pertaining to his work in and on Asia are archived at the Hoover Institution and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.
Personal life
Stanley Karnow was born in a Jewish family[17] in Brooklyn on February 4, 1925, the son of Harry and Henriette Koeppel Karnow (Karnofsky). In 1947 he married Claude Sarraute, then a stage actress from a French literary family, who soon began her own career as a journalist. They divorced in 1955.[6][3]
In 1959, he married Annette Kline, a widowed artist who was working at the time as a
Karnow died on January 27, 2013, at his home in Potomac, Maryland, at age 87 of congestive heart failure.[2]
Works
- Karnow, Stanley (1997). Vietnam: A History. 2nd rev. and updated (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1997). Penguin. LCCN 97197160.
- Karnow, Stanley (1997). Paris in the Fifties (New York, NY: Times Books, 1997). Ill. by Annette Karnow. Times Books. LCCN 97018521.
- Asian Americans in Transition (New York, NY: Asia Society, 1992).
- Karnow, Stanley (1989). In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines (New York, NY: Random House, 1989). Random House. LCCN 88042676.
- Karnow, Stanley (1984). Mao and China: Inside China's Cultural Revolution (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1984). LCCN 84009392.
- Karnow, Stanley (1983). Vietnam: A History (New York, NY: Viking Press, 1983). Viking Press. LCCN 83047905.
- Karnow, Stanley (1972). Mao and China: From Revolution to Revolution (New York, NY: Viking Press, 1972). Introd. by John K. Fairbank. Viking Press. LCCN 77187967.
- "The Vietnam Debacle: The revisionists who believe that the war was just—and winnable—are rewriting a history they don't understand". Salon.com. April 27, 2000. Archived from the original on June 7, 2011. Retrieved January 28, 2013.
- (Preface) The First Time I Saw Paris: Photographs and Memories from the City of Light, Times Books, 1999.
References
- Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale. 2004. Gale Document Number: GALE H1000052288. Retrieved January 28, 2013 – via Fairfax County Public Library. Gale Biography In Context. (subscription required)
- ^ a b c d e Hanes, Stephanie (January 28, 2013). "Stanley Karnow, journalist and Vietnam historian, dies". Washington Post. Associated Press. p. B4. Retrieved January 27, 2013.
- ^ a b c d e McFadden, Robert D. (January 27, 2013). "Stanley Karnow, Historian and Journalist, Dies at 87". The New York Times. Retrieved January 27, 2013.
- ^ a b c d Italie, Hillel (January 8, 2010). "Interesting times, indeed, for Stanley Karnow". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved January 28, 2013.
- ^ a b c d e C-SPAN, Booknotes, May 28, 1989. Brian Lamb interview with Karnow on In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines.
- ^ a b c d Karnow, Stanley, Paris in the Fifties (New York: Random House, 1997)
- ^ Fischer and Fischer, American History Awards 1917-1991, p. 345.
- ^ Karnow, Stanley, "First Blood in Vietnam", American Heritage, Winter 2010.
- ^ Karnow, Stanley, “International Reporting: An Innovation,” Nieman Reports, vol 30, no 2 (Summer 1976), pp 7-10.
- ^ Southeast Asia (New York: Time-Life Books, 1962), reissued 1967.
- ^ Mao and China: From Revolution to Revolution (New York, Viking, 1972. London, Macmillan, 1973). Mao and China was later reissued with different subtitles: Inside China's Cultural Revolution, and A Legacy of Turmoil. John K. Fairbanks, a Harvard historian of China, provided an introduction to the first edition. Karnow in 1964 had locally published a 49-page account, Bitter Seeds: A Farmer's Story of the Revolution in China (Hong Kong, Dragonfly Books)
- ^ Karnow, Mao in China, preface
- ^ "American Experience | Vietnam Online | Film Credits | PBS". PBS. Retrieved January 28, 2013.
- ^ a b Lawrence, Mark Atwood, "In Memoriam: Stanley Karnow (1925–2013): Journalist, Historian, Filmmaker," AHA Perspectives (October 2013).
- ^ Digests of both books were published in the Foreign Policy Association's "Headline Series" of educational resource pamphlets: Vietnam: The War Nobody Won (no 263, 1983); and In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines (no 288, 1989).
- ^ OCLC 26648101.
- ^ "Stanley Karnow , 1925–2013". January 30, 2013. Retrieved October 27, 2018.
External links
- Appearances on C-SPAN
- Remembering Journalist Stanley Karnow Excerpt of his interview on NPRs Fresh Air