The Rulebreaker : The Life and Times of Barbara Walters - Susan Page

The Rulebreaker

The Life and Times of Barbara Walters

By: Susan Page

Hardcover | 25 June 2024

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A “smart, juicy, deeply reported” (Katie Couric) biography of the most successful female broadcaster of all time—Barbara Walters—a woman whose personal demons fueled an ambition that broke all the rules and finally gave women a permanent place on the air, written by bestselling author Susan Page.

Barbara Walters was a force from the time TV was exploding on the American scene in the 1960s to its waning dominance in a new world of competition from streaming services and social media half a century later. She was not just a groundbreaker for women (Oprah announced when she was seventeen that she wanted to be Barbara Walters), but also expanded the big TV interview and then dominated the genre. By the end of her career, she had interviewed more of the famous and infamous, from presidents to movie stars to criminals to despots, than any other journalist in history. Then at sixty-seven, past the age of many female broadcasters found themselves involuntarily retired, she pioneered a new form of talk TV called The View. She is on the short list of those who have left the biggest imprints on television news and on our culture, male or female. So, who was the woman behind the legacy?

In The Rulebreaker, Susan Page conducts 150 interviews and extensive archival research to discover that Walters was driven to keep herself and her family afloat after her mercurial and famous impresario father attempted suicide. But she never lost the fear of an impending catastrophe, which is what led her to ask for things no woman had ever asked for before, to ignore the rules of misogynistic culture, to outcompete her most ferocious competitors, and to protect her complicated marriages and love life from scrutiny.

Page breaks news on every front—from the daring things Walters did to become the woman who reinvented the TV interview to the secrets she kept until her heath. This is the “stunning” (Norah O’Donnell), “brilliantly written” (Andrea Mitchell) account of the woman who knew she had to break all the rules so she could break all the rules about what viewers deserved to know.
Industry Reviews
“[A] thorough, compassionate biography… In placing the emphasis on all the rule-breaking Barbara Jill Walters had to do over her long life — she died in 2022 at 93 — the biographer pays respect to a toughness easy to undervalue today.” — The New York Times Book Review

"A compelling, deliciously readable biography of a journalist who changed the face of TV news." — The Washington Post

"[Barbara Walters'] outsize role, and often equally outsize lifestyle and tactics, come alive in The Rulebreaker, an entertaining and well-considered new biography of the pioneering broadcaster... The Rulebreaker shows that icons don’t sparkle all the time, but reminds us that’s sometimes OK, that judgments can be made on the overwhelming balance of a life’s work rather than by questioning every single move as if we’re some latter-day Barbara Walters." The Boston Globe

"Page’s excellent new biography of Barbara Walters, is a nuanced, deeply researched history of the legendary newswoman.. The book ticks all the boxes for a compulsively readable celebrity biography, relating Walters’s improbable rise to fame, her tumultuous personal life, and plenty of juicy gossip featuring a veritable who’s who of the past 70 years."  Washington Monthly

Other Editions and Formats

Paperback

Published: 15th April 2025

Available: 15th April 2025

Preorder. Will ship when available.

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