"Susan, Linda, Nina & Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR (National Public Radio)--by Lisa Napoli--a group biography of four beloved women who fought sexism, covered decades of American news, and whose voices defined NPR

 

Susan, Linda, Nina & Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR 

In the years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, women in the workplace still found themselves relegated to secretarial positions or locked out of jobs entirely. This was especially true in the news business, a backwater of male chauvinism where a woman might be lucky to get a foothold on the “women’s pages.” But when a pioneering nonprofit called National Public Radio came along in the 1970s, and the door to serious journalism opened a crack, four remarkable women came along and blew it off the hinges.

Susan, Linda, Nina, and Cokie is journalist Lisa Napoli’s captivating account of these four women, their deep and enduring friendships, and the trail they blazed to becoming icons. They had radically different stories. Cokie Roberts was born into a political dynasty, roamed the halls of Congress as a child, and felt a tug toward public service. Susan Stamberg, who had lived in India with her husband who worked for the State Department, was the first woman to anchor a nightly news program and pressed for accommodations to balance work and home life. Linda Wertheimer, the daughter of shopkeepers in New Mexico, fought her way to a scholarship and a spot on-air. And Nina Totenberg, the network's legal affairs correspondent, invented a new way to cover the Supreme Court.

Based on extensive interviews and calling on the author’s deep connections in news and public radio, Susan, Linda, Nina, and Cokie will be as beguiling and sharp as its formidable subjects.

“Napoli narrates the origin stories of NPR’s female journalistic superheroes … a history filled with so many powerful moments and fascinating details about journalism, perseverance, and gender bias.” ― Kirkus Reviews  

 

Lisa Napoli

 

Lisa Napoli is a journalist who has worked in all media. She began her career at CNN in Atlanta in the early eighties, worked in local TV news in North Carolina, covered the Clinton campaign and Waco standoff as a field producer for an early iteration of the Fox News Service, produced shows for an upscale division of QVC called Q2, covered the early days of the Web for the NY Times as the first staff columnist/reporter hired for a now defunct-section called CyberTimes, served as Internet correspondent for MSNBC (where she wrote an accompanying column for MSNBC.com) and most recently served as reporter/back-up host for the public radio show Marketplace.

She had never traveled to Asia before she was asked, by chance, to go to Bhutan in 2006.

Her proudest accomplishment, in addition to learning to swim at age 37, are the parties she holds every Friday night, where she relishes seeing friends befriend one another.

A native of Brooklyn, NY and a graduate of Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., Napoli currently lives in downtown Los Angeles, where there’s a giant swimming pool, and hopes in the second half of her life to be a philanthropist. 

http://www.lisanapoli.com