This Is Today: A Window on Our Times - Hardcover

Eric Mink has written This Is Today, about America�s most popular morning show, after more than two decades as a professional observer and commentator on all aspects of the television medium. A veteran staff critic for the New York Daily News and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and a contributor to TV Guide, Time magazine, the New York Times, and, of course, the Today show, among others, he makes his subject relevant for today and for many, many tomorrows. He recently returned to the Post-Dispatch, his hometown paper, to become Commentary Page editor and columnist

Although bizarrely non-chronological, this work does recount, in simple terms, some of the most important historical events of the past 50-odd years, with an emphasis on human interest stories. Covering events, politics, "life issues" and culture, the book is laid out with a modern, vaguely arty feel. Color photos rule (many of them stills from the Today show), with paragraphs of text and all-caps pullout quotes interspersed between them. Mink, a New York Daily News staffer, shows how Today treated each subject, from the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald (Tom Pettit narrates the scene: "There is Lee Oswald-(Gunshot) he's been shot. He's been shot. Lee Oswald has been shot. There's a man with a gun. And it's absolute panic") to an interview with Madonna (when, in 1993, Bryant Gumbel asked her, "What is it about you people find so fascinating?" she responded, "I don't know. I think you should ask them"). A 3-hour DVD accompanies the book.
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