Bagdikian's book spans the human gamut, from the time of his birth when he was almost left for dead during a massacre of Armenians in Turkey to his becoming an editor of a leading American daily and a dean of the School of Journalism at Berkeley.

As a child, Bagdikian lived in two worlds - the world of his puritanical clergyman-father, whose parish was in a small New England town, and the world of his truck-driver uncle and his grandfather who made bathtub beer during Prohibition. Bagdikian had to attend church regularly but he made money for college tuition on a boardwalk with friends who were pitchmen and gamblers.

As a professional journalist, Bagdikian continued his insider-outsider roles - his double vision - as one of the country's leading journalists and as a leading critic of his own profession. An enemy of secrecy in government, as editor at the Washington Post Bagdikian obtained and was instrumental in overcoming governmental censorship in publishing the secret "Pentagon Papers" on the Vietnam War.