A Pulitzer Prize-winning editorialist and a former syndicated columnist, Edwin M. Yoder Jr. spent forty years as a newspaper journalist. Telling Others What to Think, he writes, is about an education in its broadest sense, the experiences and personal influences that formed him. Yoder traces his aptitude for punditry to the southern storytelling tradition, a long family heritage of scholars and schoolteachers, and his father’s being opinionated - in the better sense of that word. After graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and then returned to his home state. First at the Charlotte News and then at the Greensboro Daily News, Yoder took on the Birch Society and segregation, among other targets. He moved to Washington, D.C., to be editorial page editor of the Star, where he won a Pulitzer in 1979. When that paper folded in 1981, he joined the Washington Post Writers Group as a syndicated columnist, and for fifteen years his column appeared in newspapers around the country and abroad. In his book, Yoder is most compelling when describing the pleasures and hazards of maintaining professional and social relationships with people in the arena of politics and public life - including Washington Post editorial page editor Meg Greenfield, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, and Georgetown University president Father Timothy Healy. Circumspect, forthright, and generous in his reflections, Yoder the man and the pundit prove to be the same. An appendix presents a portfolio of his past columns, sage advice to the aspiring opinion writer, and thoughts on the tabloidization of news in recent years. A rich and intriguing personal story of someone whose job it was to comment on the events of the day, Ed Yoder’s Telling Others What to Think speaks eloquently as well of the wider world of American politics and culture.
