Michael Walsh

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Michael A. Walsh (born October 23, 1949^[1]) is a music critic, author, screenwriter, and media critic.

Career

After graduating from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York in 1971, he became a reporter for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in February 1972, where he shared the New York State Publishers Association first prize for reporting with two colleagues for a series of articles about heroin in Rochester.

He was named chief classical music critic of the San Francisco Examiner in November 1977 and music critic of Time magazine in the spring of 1981,^[2] where his cover story subjects included James Levine, Vladimir Horowitz and Andrew Lloyd Webber. In 1980 he won an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for music criticism.

From 1997-2002 he was a visiting fellow of the University Professors, Professor of Journalism and Professor of Film & Television at Boston University. He is currently Vice President of the board of the Wende Museum, devoted to East German and Soviet art, artefacts and scholarship, in Culver City, California.

Since February, 2007, Walsh has written for National Review both under his own name and using a fictional persona named David Kahane, the name of which "...is borrowed from a screenwriter character in (the movie) The Player." ^[3] This persona has evolved into one of "...a Hollywood liberal who has a habit of sharing way too much about the rules by which they live to a conservative audience." ^[4]

In January, 2010, in collaboration with the late Andrew Breitbart, he launched BigJournalism.com, devoted to media commentary and criticism. He now writes a weekly opinion column for the New York Post, and in late May 2012 became a featured columnist at PJ Media.

Bibliography

Non-fiction

• Carnegie Hall: The First One Hundred Years (Harry N. Abrams, 1987)
• Who's Afraid of Classical Music (Fireside Books, 1989)
• Andrew Lloyd Webber: His Life and Works (Abrams, 1989, updated 1997)
• Who's Afraid of Opera? (1994)
• So When Does the Fat Lady Sing? (Amadeus, 2008).
• Rules for Radical Conservatives (as David Kahane; Ballantine, 2010)

Novels

• Exchange Alley (1997), a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection upon publication that has since become a cult novel
• As Time Goes By (sequel to the film Casablanca, 1998)
• And All the Saints (2003), a fictionalized account of Owney Madden's life that was a 2004 American Book Awards winner.

Espionage thrillers

• Hostile Intent, featuring the character of "Devlin," a top-secret operative of the Central Security Service, was published in September 2009 by Pinnacle. It reached No. 1 on the Amazon Kindle bestseller list upon its release, and twice appeared on the New York Times's extended bestseller list in October of that year.
• A sequel, Early Warning, was published in September 2010.^[5]
• The third book in the series, Shock Warning, was published in late September, 2011, and two other installments are scheduled.

Film

Cadet Kelly, a 2002 Disney Channel Original Movie (co-written with Gail Parent) starring Hilary Duff was, until High School Musical, the highest-rated Disney Channel movie in history.

Other

Scripts in development include By MARTHA GELLHORN, about the marriage of Ernest Hemingway and his third wife, and How High the Moon, about the lives of Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday.

His principal residence is in Lakeville, Connecticut, but he also maintains residences in County Clare, Ireland, and Los Angeles.

References

External links

• Michael Walsh at the Internet Movie Database