Content area
Full Text
SAINT OPRAH Cecilia Konchar Farr. Reading Oprah: How Oprah's Book Club Changed the Way America Reads. Albany: State U of New York P, 2005. xiv + 164 pp.
Kathleen Rooney. Reading With Oprah: The Book Club that Changed America. Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 2005. xiv + 234 pp.
Eva Illouz. Oprah W/nfrey and the Glamour ofMisery:An Essay on Popular Culture. New York: Columbia UP.2003. xi + 300 pp.
Sherryl Wilson. Oprah, Celebrity and Formations of Self. London: Palgrave, 2003. x + 230 pp.
In 1961, the first television talk show hosted by an African American debuted on WRCV-TV in Philadelphia. The Del Shields Show was sponsored by a local brewery, which was trying to tap the segregated liquor market. The program was hosted by thirty-year-old Del Shields, an assistant television director, who had also worked as a radio disc jockey since the late 1950s. In only a matter of weeks The Del'ShieldsShowwas unceremoniously cancelled, a casualty of white backlash in the City of Brotherly Love. A few years later, in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Shields lamented his participation in TV's aborted experiment with racial integration: "[I]t only took 50 letters saying 'Get that nigger off your show or we'll stop drinking your beer' to make the sponsor drop the program. I limped away from that one" (qtd. in Berg).
Fast forward to 1984, when another breakthrough in blackhosted TV talk-showmanship was underway. Thirty-year-old Oprah Winfrey, a ten-year veteran of local television news and talk, took the helm as anchor of A.M. Chicago. In only a matter of months, A.M. Chicago out-rated the rival PhilDonahue Show m the thirty-one markets where they went head to head. The surprising success of A.M. Chicago was not a television anomaly: in the same year, a new sitcom centered on a middle-class black family and called The Cosby Show rocketed to number three in the Neilson ratings. A year later, as Cosby began its four-year reign atop prime time ratings, A.M. Chicago was reborn as The Oprah Winfrey Showand quickly became the highest rated daytime talk show, a perch it would hold for years to come. The national embrace of black celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Cosby-who play the part of beloved...