Word: reader
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...times it seems that almost everyone who has laced on climbing boots or set a spinnaker has written a book about the experience. Although reading such stuff can be fun, the armchair adventurer feels a certain guilty unease. At this very moment, for instance, while the reader's arteries are slowly clogging, alarmingly energetic people like David Horning are out there somewhere, training for races like the Alcatraz Challenge. This is a particularly gruesome example of the newly popular self-torture called the triathlon: a 1.5-mile swim in cold and swirling water from San Francisco's Alcatraz...
...veracity, try Deadlines, written by Philadelphia Inquirer Film Critic Desmond Ryan and crammed with enough lore and craft about U.S. newspapers to qualify the reader for a diploma from the Annenberg School of Communication at Penn. Around a wheezing plot about a young investigative reporter trying to get the Big Story (a U.S. Congressman turns out to be-gasp!-corrupt), Ryan writes knowledgeably about libel law, newsroom computerization, labor disputes, inheritance taxes and galleys of other forces threatening to turn American newspapers into bland copies of one another...
...folk) at least can take out an ad in rebuttal. Mobil in particular likes to express itself on all kinds of public questions. In an ad, a company is free to put its best foot forward, and if figures are cited, they will almost certainly be accurate. But the reader wonders whether other facts and contrary arguments have been given their full weight. Skeptical questioning is missing. That is the role the press plays, and it plays it best when it keeps a neutral distance not too hand in glove with its source...
Many of the characters are shrewdly if harshly drawn stereotypes. Only Dawn is wholly likable, and her situation is so extreme that the reader pays a credulity tax with almost every chapter. Dr. Shinefeld, effective as a therapist, is a lulu of a loser as a woman. Ressner's treatment suggests that what another writer called the Impossible Profession is still beyond easy analysis. -By William A. Henry...
Fossey firmly establishes these animals in the world where they belong. She may give them cute names like Puck, Pantsy and Macho, but she maintains her scientific distance. There are enough kinship studies, spectographic charts and dung analyses to keep specialists happy. The general reader will be rewarded with adventure, in which virtually nothing has been distorted by preconception or self-absorption. Gorillas in the Mist is a work of direct and refreshing experience. If 1,000 Hamlets were chained to typewriters for eternity, they could not have written this book...