Briefly Noted Book Reviews
The Huntress, by Alice Arlen and Michael J. Arlen (Pantheon). This entertaining biography of Alicia Patterson, the founding editor and co-publisher of Newsday, unfolds against a glittering backdrop of wealth, prestige, and print. A scion of the Patterson-Medill publishing dynasty (her great-grandfather and her father founded the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News, respectively), Patterson launched Newsday in 1940, on Long Island, quickly building it from a small suburban daily to an influential national paper. Patterson’s success came relatively late in life, and much of the book catalogues her various rich-girl-in-the-Jazz Age high jinks: ditching husbands one and two, hunting water buffalo in Indochina. Her family—forceful, dysfunctional, and fascinating—takes center stage in these chapters, and the result is a finely drawn, multigenerational portrait of life in the golden era of print journalism.