I have always respected Barbara Walters. For a long time I would record and watch The View when I got home from work. (I stopped not long after Star Jones got married for a number of reasons that I won't go into here.) Needless to say, when Walters left 20/20 and said she was working on her memoir I was excited by the prospect of reading about her life. So, when Audition was published earlier this month I jumped on it.

Walters has definitely lived a full life and her career has spanned the history of television. From humble beginnings in the publicity department of NBC's New York affiliate in the early 1950s, she learned the ropes of making live television. Making the transition from producer, to writer, she made her on-camera debut in 1961 and hasn't stopped since. Her intelligence and drive helped her transform her role as a correspondent for The Today Show into being the first female co-host: a position that had not been held by any woman on any network at any time of day. Making the leap to ABC to co-anchor the evening news and do a series specials each year, Walters was met with the scorn of her co-anchor and the judgement of others about her well publicized $1 million dollar salary. Still, she held her head high and forged ahead, doing memorable and ground breaking interviews with world leaders and news makers. By the time she joined Hugh Downs on 20/20 in 1984 she had fully established herself as one of the preeminent television journalists on the air. Rather than rest on her laurels, in 1997 she started the Emmy Award winning morning talk-show The View.

But Audition also gives you a view of Walters off screen: the girl raised by a father who experienced great success and great failure in show business (Lou Walters was the owner/visionary of The Latin Quarter — a nightclub that featured elaborate production numbers that were the forerunners of the Vegas showgirls acts); the sister who appears to still struggle with feelings of deep love and severe guilt about the life of her mentally challenged older sibling; the daughter of a mother whose life revolved around her mentally challenged daughter and the whims of her husband. However, what is most revelatory is the picture of Barbara Walters' relationships with men and her daughter.

While I found the book "fascinating", the writing was disappointing. It felt like I was reading a very long transcript to one a Barbara Walters' Special. A book, to me, is a very different medium than television and a person should adjust the tone of their writing to suit the medium. Furthermore, I found that in writing about Hugo Chávez, Walters exposes herself as either unable to present an unbiased view of critics of the US or she is afraid to take that stand. For example, on page 441 she says of him: "I couldn't wait to meet this loud, rude sworn enemy of the United States". However, she fails to mention that there are indications that the US government took part in the 2002 coup attempt and it comes across like a "if your not with us you are against us" mentality. And while she mentions that there is severe poverty in Caracas, she also states that crime that she states "Chaávez either cannot or does not want to do anything about [the crime]" (pg 440). This made me stop cold and question her basic ability to connect dots: poverty leads to crime. Chaávez is attacking the problem of poverty with his attempt to reverse the damage done to the Venezuelan economy by the economic model forced upon them by IMF in the 1980s vis-a-vis re-Nationalizing many things, including the oil industry (ironically at the same time the US is imposing privatization of the oil industry in Iraq by military action) and providing a social safety net in what Walters sounds fearful of: a "socialist Latin America".

That being said, I would recommend that women read this book to remind themselves that we have a lot of women to thank for breaking down barriers for us to have a greater role in the workforce. I would suggest that they either wait for the paperback or check it out of the library, however.