BOOK REPORTS
BY JAMES BOYLAN
FEAR
AND LOATHING IN AMERICA:
THE BRUTAL ODYSSEY OF AN OUTLAW JOURNALIST 1968-1976
By Hunter S. Thompson; foreword by David Halberstam;
edited by Douglas Brinkley
Simon & Schuster.
756 pp. $30
Here is the frenzied Dr. Thompson
-- scourge of all pretension -- dressed up between hard covers,
introduced by a mainstream journalist, edited by a major historian,
and annotated down to the slightest detail; even Hitler and Mussolini
are identified in a footnote. The raw meat of the volume comprises
Thompson's previously unpublished business correspondence -- his
garrulous struggle to win his way as a vendor of Gonzo journalism
and to try to remain at least barely solvent. Many of the items
are sales letters; that is, a show in the rugged, abusive, meandering
Thompson manner as a preview of the story he intends to write;
nearly as many are dunning letters, demanding payment for work
and expenses. He is most reflective in his letters to Jim Silberman
of Random House, to whom he promised a book to be called "The
Death of the American Dream," which became diffused into his "Fear
and Loathing" books on Las Vegas and the 1972 campaign and his
prolific political journalism. He makes to Silberman the damaging
admission that he was not, in fact, on drugs when he covered Las
Vegas; he just tried to write that way. The last letter to Silberman
serves, by indirection, as a summing-up -- "I'm about 98 percent
happy with whatever ripples I caused in the great swamp of history."
But of course this is not the end; it is the only the second of
three planned volumes.
THE
ELEMENTS OF JOURNALISM: WHAT NEWSPEOPLE SHOULD KNOW AND THE PUBLIC
SHOULD EXPECT
By Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel
Crown. 208 pp. $20
Bill Kovach is the chairman of the
Committee of Concerned Journalists. Tom Rosenstiel is the director
of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. The CCJ is a subsidiary
of the PEJ, which is one of many projects funded by the Pew Charitable
Trusts, and the whole coalition is devoted to the reform and improvement
of American journalism. This book was generated by the forums
that CCJ has held across the country since its founding in 1997,
as well as PEJ surveys, some of which have appeared in cjr. Despite
a perhaps unavoidable blandness from boiling down so much material,
The Elements of Journalism is a useful work. It offers
a contemporary restatement of principles put forth by the Hutchins
Commission more than fifty years ago of journalism's obligations
to remain truthful, independent, open, and, not least, interesting.
The final principle offered is that "practitioners must be allowed
to exercise their personal conscience" -- even, it is implied,
in defiance of employers' policies. This is the freshest and most
controversial element in the discussion, and Kovach and Rosenstiel
are to be commended for raising it, even as cautiously as they
do.
AHEAD
OF TIME: MY EARLY YEARS
AS A FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT
By Ruth
Gruber
Carroll & Graf. 319 pp. $14
In February, a fictionalized Ruth
Gruber was portrayed in a CBS docudrama shepherding a thousand
refugees to the United States during World War II. The real Ruth
Gruber, at the age of eighty-nine, remains a vigorous practicing
journalist. That energy is evident in this memoir of her first
quarter century, initially published in 1991 and now reissued.
She had a breathless early career, every step of which astonished
or appalled her Brooklyn family: to New York University and the
University of Wisconsin; to Cologne where she won a doctorate
that made her what the newspapers called the world's youngest
Ph.D. and where, as a Jew, she first encountered Nazism; to Russia
with credentials from the New York Herald Tribune, where
she became the first foreign correspondent to reach the Soviet
Arctic. All of this is presented as if she had just returned from
Yakutsk, and who cares if she pretends to quote long-ago conversations
word for word? It all rings true.
SECRETS
OF VICTORY:
THE OFFICE OF CENSORSHIP AND THE AMERICAN
PRESS AND RADIO IN WORLD WAR II
By Michael S. Sweeney
The University of North Carolina Press. 274 pp.
$49.95. $18.95 paper
Typically of the cagey Franklin
D. Roosevelt, he named an executive of The Associated Press to
head the Office of Censorship during World War II. Perhaps nobody
but Byron Price could have handled so well the ambiguities of
voluntary suppression of the news -- of censoring while pretending
not to censor. Even given a generally acquiescent press, Price
had a struggle persuading newspapers to keep secrets, keeping
a lid on such scoop-hungry commentators as Drew Pearson, and steering
clear of the propaganda business. Michael S. Sweeney, a professor
at Utah State University, has told the story well, while indirectly
showing how government can control the news media with a velvet
glove.
FAME
AT LAST: WHO WAS WHO ACCORDING
TO THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARIES
By John C. Ball and Jill Jones
Andrews McMeel. 407 pp. $24.95
The authors, a professor of medicine
and a free-lance writer, had the idea of applying the ruler to
a six-year slice (1993-1999) of New York Times obituaries
(9,325 articles) as an index of -- well, what? -- celebrity, achievement,
notoriety, status, or a mixture? The tale is in the numbers, rather
than in the innocuous text. The longest obituary in those six
years, no surprise, was Richard Nixon's (510 inches), more than
twice as large as numbers 2 and 3, Frank Sinatra and Jacqueline
Kennedy Onassis. No person younger than 63 (Mickey Mantle) made
the top twenty-five. The book offers categorized "Apex of Fame"
tables -- African-Americans, led by Ella Fitzgerald; physicians:
Dr. Spock; literary figures: Allen Ginsberg; members of Congress:
Barry Goldwater; actors: James Stewart, Jessica Tandy. Finally,
the most overrepresented occupational groups: writers, artists,
entertainers, athletes . . . and college professors.
James Boylan is founding editor
of CJR and professor emeritus of journalism and
history at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
