Connie

April 1, 2024

Chung, a groundbreaking broadcast journalist, offers a behind-the-scenes account of her life in news--she was the first woman to co-anchor CBS Evening News and the first Asian journalist to anchor a U.S. news program. She details her professional and private life, writing about moving up through the newsroom, reporting big stories, and facing sexism. Prepub Alert.

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July 1, 2024
In her life-spanning memoir, veteran journalist Chung reveals that the seeds of her ambition were planted early. As the first U.S.-born child of Chinese immigrants, Chung embodied the "anything is possible" dream of her parents' adopted nation and the "follow the rules" ethos of their native culture. At once a self-proclaimed "goody two-shoes" and a trash-talker who could go toe-to-toe with her male coworkers, Chung, the first Asian American woman in mainstream TV news, may have mystified network executives who never quite knew what to do with her, but she had no problem winning over audiences. Colleagues, however, were a different story, and Chung sheds light on her most notorious misalliance as the first woman co-anchor for CBS Evening News alongside Dan Rather. From her marriage to talk-show host Maury Povich to her late-in-life motherhood to her role as primary caregiver for her demanding parents, Chung's personal life is as dynamic as her professional experiences. A groundbreaker in the truest sense of the word, Chung is as delightful, forthright, and candid on the page as she is on air.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Big news and reader-bait--trailblazer journalist Chung tells her story in full for the first time.

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July 22, 2024
Pioneering journalist Chung takes an entertaining look back at her career in this winning autobiography. Chung was born to Chinese immigrant parents in 1946 Washington, D.C., the youngest of 10 children, and much of the account traces her arc from shy, self-conscious girl to take-no-prisoners professional who “wanted to be the equal” of her swaggering male peers. She first decided to become a journalist in the late 1960s, after an internship with New York congressman Seymour Halpern exposed her to “the pulsebeat of news events affecting the actions of politicians and Americans’ lives.” In chatty prose, she charts her professional rise, including her stint as an anchor on local network news in 1976 L.A. Things get juicy in passages covering the 1990s, where she rehashes her tense tenure co-anchoring CBS Evening News with Dan Rather (“an old-fashioned guy who feels women should not get their hands soiled”) and her front-row seat to Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer’s feuding at ABC. Chung balances these gossipy recollections with the heartbreak of trying to conceive through IVF with her husband, Maury Povich, and clear-eyed musings on the odds against women in the workplace. It’s an intimate and rewarding personal history. Agent: Matt Latimer, Javelin. (Sept.)Correction: A previous version of this review incorrectly stated that Chung was the first Asian anchor on local news in L.A.

Starred review from August 1, 2024
The dizzying highs and nauseating lows of a landmark broadcasting career. She was the only one of her siblings to be born in the U.S. after her parents arrived from China in 1945. By her twenties, Chung tells us, she had morphed from a meek youngest who "never uttered a peep" into "someone who was fearless, ambitious, driven, full of chutzpah and moxie, who spoke up to get what she wanted." Convinced that she was the equal of her white male colleagues in journalism, she would need every bit of that gumption in the decades that followed, as she smashed through barriers of sexism and racism with stints at each of the three networks. Sentences like this one--"I thought the Gingrich controversy was the worst incident I would face while coanchoring the CBS Evening News, but what was to come made Bitchgate pale in comparison"--lead us from one crisis to the next. The most humiliating occurs in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, when Dan Rather (of the many people who come off badly in this book, he is the worst) sabotaged her career in a way she could never fully recover from. As for narcissistic divas Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer: "Each time I'd pop my head up, Barbara or Diane would whack me with a spongy hammer." Her personal life is full of juice; she and husband Maury Povich had a long-distance open relationship for many years before they married, allowing her exciting interludes with characters like Ryan O'Neal. (She jumps in her sports car, tells him to follow her, and... "Feel free to use your imagination.") At the end of this long road come sweet signs of her impact on the culture: a Connie Chung rest stop on the Garden State Parkway, a strain of marijuana that bears her name, and, most movingly, a whole generation of Chinese American girls named Connie. An irreverent, inspiring chronicle of a great life.

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