Connie: A Memoir

Pioneering journalist Chung takes an entertaining look back at her career in this winning autobiography. Chung was born to Chinese immigrant parents in 1946 Washington, D.C., the youngest of 10 children, and much of the account traces her arc from shy, self-conscious girl to take-no-prisoners professional who “wanted to be the equal” of her swaggering male peers. She first decided to become a journalist in the late 1960s, after an internship with New York congressman Seymour Halpern exposed her to “the pulsebeat of news events affecting the actions of politicians and Americans’ lives.” In chatty prose, she charts her professional rise, including her stint as an anchor on local network news in 1976 L.A. Things get juicy in passages covering the 1990s, where she rehashes her tense tenure co-anchoring CBS Evening News with Dan Rather (“an old-fashioned guy who feels women should not get their hands soiled”) and her front-row seat to Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer’s feuding at ABC. Chung balances these gossipy recollections with the heartbreak of trying to conceive through IVF with her husband, Maury Povich, and clear-eyed musings on the odds against women in the workplace. It’s an intimate and rewarding personal history. Agent: Matt Latimer, Javelin. (Sept.)

Correction: A previous version of this review incorrectly stated that Chung was the first Asian anchor on local news in L.A.