Word: alchemist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Leslie H. Whitten is the lead investigative reporter for columnist Jack Anderson and author of The Alchemist...
...ALCHEMIST by LESLIE H. WHITTEN 368 pages. Charterhouse...
Leslie H. Whitten is not just another run of the Hill Washington novelist. He is described as Columnist Jack Anderson's "top aide," which means he is one of the capital's powerful information brokers. He is also a shrewd and entertaining writer who, in The Alchemist, takes a break from the moral-sometimes bluntly alchemical-rigors of changing mud into political pay dirt...
...Mass with a man in a human-skin cape, be privy to a grave robbing or pornographic home movie co-starring a U.S. Vice President, and (perhaps most obscene of all) listen to the tape of a Roman Catholic's bugged confession. Yet behind such lubricious props, The Alchemist is a brisk, semi-tough study of power and love, the intoxications of public life and non-negotiable private satisfactions...
...hero is Martin Dobecker, a nonpracticing lawyer and ex-husband in his early 30s, unusual only in that he is building an alchemist's furnace in his basement. He is diverted from these diversions by Anita Tockbridge, a 45-year-old Assistant Secretary of Labor still on her way up. When Martin becomes her speechwriter and lover, the author has a fine time singing the praises of older women as well as brushing off the old myth that it is the male who is driven by power and the female who seeks security and love...