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ANYONE WHO READ the news for the last four or five years already knows as much of the substance of Jerry Ford's Presidency as the reader of this book. Ford still defends the pardon of Nixon and the Mayaguez debacle, his acts of mercy and macho, his twin disaster--there is nothing new here. He explains the problems of inflation and the budget and energy, and excuses his lack of imaginative leadership in confronting these problems by calling his Presidency "a time to heal," borrowing from Ecclesiastes. If it actually were a time to heal, that healing called...
Hoagland does not burden the reader with a false sense of wonder or an exaggerated sense of adventure. He conveys what he learns as something that a middle-aged man should already know: months of wandering in a hard place make one sick, lonely, itchy and tired. "I was weary," he writes, "of the whole African calliope - that nagging, pulsing musical din that has been reverberating strongly without letup for thousands of years before you arrive and will be continuing without any respite for sickness or fatigue long after you have left the earth...
Journalistic previewing constantly diminishes an event, boring the reader before it happens, making an election either an unsurprising confirmation of what was foretold or else an exercise in judging whether a candidate has done as well "as expected." This can be unfair, as it was to Senator Edmund Muskie in New Hampshire in 1972. Long before the primaries, a Boston Globe poll prematurely "gave" Muskie 65% of the vote; on election day, though Muskie beat George McGovern, 46% to 37%, the press proclaimed McGovern the real winner...
...comes dangerously close to unimaginable Holocaust humor. It is funny and embarrassing at the same time, a God-forbidden break in decorum that allows the anarchic spirit out for a breath of air. Roth has always excelled at this, and if the reader is offended, The Ghost Writer strongly suggests that it is not the author's problem.-R.Z. Sheppard
...unaccustomed reader is first put off by the loose-leaf holes along the spine of the magazine's austere brown cover; an invitation to scholars and librarians, he thinks. Vowing to persevere, he skips stories about the Rotterdam oil market and campaign-financing laws and tries one examining the computer industry's relations with the Labor Department. Uninvited daydreams about the Maryland shore intrude. He tries reading "Congress and the Dairy Industry." Muscles relax, the heartbeat slows. Then he turns to "Managing the National Grain Reserves." Zzzzzzzz...