Regular viewers of the CBS 'Sunday Morning' television program will need no introduction to the writing style of Charles Kuralt. That broadcast has been a refuge from a fast paced and often cynical world for years.
Mr. Kuralt is a lover of people. In this romp through his life, we meet many people whose basic decency slowly whittles away at any jaded view of human society the reader may have held. Mr. Kuralt writes in slow lazy sentences that take time to float around in the reader's brain before comprehensive landfall. They tend to force the reader to stop - and smell the roses.
There are surprises along the way. Anecdotes with punch. The author's view, written eighteen years after the end of the United States military involvement in Viet Nam, that the South Vietnamese had fought with courage and determination for their freedom from a Northern aggressor, was a great surprise. His frank anti-establishment viewpoint of the Viet Nam war startled me.
Stories of the early days of radio and television journalism as well as years spent 'on the road' in America reveal much about both the man and his country. One needn't despair for America. She is alive and well in the heartland. One must but look to see.
As for the world, one chapter, 'The Dentist', is especially poignant. During a tense moment in American-Soviet relations, Mr Kuralt was in Moscow to cover a Reagan - Gorbachez summit. A Moscow resident, a World War II veteran, forced himself on Mr. Kuralt telling an incredible tale. The veteran spoke powerfully of a debt he and other Russian POWs owed to eight hundred American POWs who smuggled food to their Russian counterparts in Stalag 3B during WW II. This food kept many Russian prisoners alive.
Forty three years after the fact, he had his first opportunity to thank the Americans before the world, and he wanted CBS news to tell the story for him. A powerful story powerfully told.
This dandy little book does not preach that human dignity abounds. Nor is there much in the way of self importance within it. And yet, human dignity is affirmed on every page of this very important, very well written work.
Read 'A Life On The Road' by Charles Kuralt - and smell the roses.
Copyright 1996 Louis J. Rose All Rights Reserved.