[.ca] Front Row at the White House: My Life and Times (ISBN 0684868091)

From Amazon.com:
Born in 1920, Helen Thomas was one of United Press International's very few female journalists for years. She promoted herself to UPI's White House Press Corps in 1960 ("I just started showing up every day") and has reported on eight administrations. Her episodic, old-fashioned autobiography contains anecdotes about each president, their first ladies, and their staff. Her stories are often funny, and she doesn't mind when the joke's on her: "Isn't there a war somewhere we can send her to?" Colin Powell inquired after being buttonholed at a party; President Carter's mother said the greatest lesson she learned in 80 years was, "Never to open my mouth around Helen Thomas." She's also fair: even the press secretaries get balanced treatment, though Thomas criticizes the White House's growing efforts to "manage" the news. (Her most affectionate political portrait is of the unmanageable Watergate wife Martha Mitchell.) Thomas pays loving tribute to her parents, hardworking, religious Syrian immigrants, and to her late husband, Associated Press reporter Doug Cornell, but she keeps the focus on the people and public events she covered. Scrupulously impartial when reporting the news, she feels free here to be bluntly opinionated, especially in her unrepentant advocacy of the media's responsibility to ask uncomfortable questions, even when the public condemns them as intrusive. --Wendy Smith

very informative:
Written by a professional,told like a story teller on the front porch somewhere in a small town. The experiences of eight presidents and the insight she brings to you make a great story in itself. The other part of the story with her views intertwined make this a great book that sometimes sounds like fiction but we all know is fact, sometimes to our disdain. Read it and enjoy.

Waste of a day:
I never really enjoyed her work and this did nothing to change my opinion. Just another annoying liberal with a mediocre book.

A Must Read for Political Afficionados:
If you are looking into a behind-the-scenes look at how the White House interacts with the press corps, told by the premiere White House reporter of all time, this is the book for you. Thomas tells her wonderful story in an easy-to-read style that makes this book very, very hard to put down. I read it in less than two days. This will make a valuable addition to any political buff's library.

A Kinder Gentler Side to Her:
I have always assumed that this author would write a book that was full of nasty one liners and little back biting comments. I got that impress just because I have always felt her questions were very brash and aggressive (not that I have any problem with that). It turns out that the book had none of this aggressiveness. As a matter of fact I thought she went easy on all of the Presidents and First Ladies that she covered. The book started out with a rather dull, at least for me, run down of her life up to covering the White House. I was only interested in the White House coverage so this Bio bit of the book was mostly skipped by me. The author laid out her recollections in a nice way. She first covered all the major events within each administration in chronological order. She then did the same for the Press Secretaries, First Ladies and then the Presidents. All of it was interesting with a good number of details about the individual people involved. She had a lot of stories to tell and they filled the book up nicely. Again my only complaint was that it seemed to me that she pulled some of her punches. She really did not give Nixon a lot of trouble for Watergate nor Reagan for Iran-Contra. I thought she was toughest on Clinton, but that could be due to my own likes and dislikes of the Presidents in question. Overall I liked the book and found it easy to read and full of new facts.

A Good Read:
Reading this book is like living history through a legend's eyes!