What I Learned When I Almost Died: How a Maniac TV Producer Put Down His BlackBerry and Started to Live His Life - Couverture rigide

Licht, Chris

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 145162767X ISBN 13 : 9781451627671

Editeur : Simon & Schuster, 2011

Synopsis

What do you learn when your brain goes pop?

Chris Licht had always been ambitious. When he was only nine years old, he tracked down an NBC correspondent while on vacation to solicit advice for a career in television. At eleven, he began filming himself as he delivered the news. And by the time he was thirty-five, he landed his dream job: a fast-paced, demanding spot at the helm of MSNBC’s Morning Joe—one of the most popular shows on cable TV. He had become a real-life Jerry Maguire: hard-charging, obsessively competitive, and willing to sacrifice anything to get it done. He felt invincible. Then one day Chris heard a pop in his head, followed by a whoosh of blood and crippling pain. Doctors at the ER said he had suffered a near-deadly brain hemorrhage. Chris’s life had almost been cut short, and he had eight long days in a hospital bed to think about it.

What I Learned When I Almost Died tells the story of what happened next.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Chris Licht is the co-creator and original executive producer of Morning Joe—the popular daily morning show on MSNBC hosted by Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, and Willie Geist. Before Morning Joe, Licht worked as executive producer on Scarborough Country. He lives in Manhattan with his wife Jenny and their two sons.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

prologue
The Killer Producer

Lately, if I happen to be looking through my address book for a phone number, I’m apt to stop when I come across the name of someone I haven’t been in touch with for a while. A friend, maybe, or an acquaintance. When I do, I’m likely to fire off an e-mail with no more length or gravitas than this:

Hey, how you been?

The gesture is a small one, but I didn’t used to do this. Days that were filled with the pressure and crises of running a national cable television program had little room for casual nicety. If I wasn’t in the control room producing it, I was in my office thinking about how to produce it. If the talent was unhappy, I’d let it gnaw at my gut. If somebody screwed up, I could go off like a roadside bomb, in a finger snap. I knew this. But the show so consumed me that it couldn’t be merely acceptable. It had to be great. I had ambitions. I had to be the killer producer.

Then one day, with no warning whatsoever, I became scary sick in a random and hard-to-figure way, given that I was not even forty years old. Most people with the medical emergency I had do not emerge from the experience physically intact, if they emerge at all. Weeks later, my health restored, I went back to work, and was eager and happy to do so. Illness hadn’t scared me into some big life makeover. I had no urge to surrender my spot in the fast lane for ownership of a B&B in Vermont.

But serious illness had recalibrated me. It had brought a trove of knowledge, as if I had involuntarily paid a painful tuition for an elite education. It was about letting go of my fears. It was about what I could control and what I couldn’t, and how people felt about me, really felt about me. It was about how to use time. It was even about Joe Biden, the vice president of the United States.

It would be nice, I thought, if everyone could get the education I had gotten without having to nearly die.

So I decided to write a book.

© 2011 Chris Licht

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Simon & Schuster
• Date d'édition: 2011
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 145162767X
• ISBN 13: 9781451627671
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 176
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible