Word: gooders
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...writing to be found in any mystery of recent months appears in Jonathan Valin's Extenuating Circumstances (Delacorte; 234 pages; $15.95). His detective, Harry Stoner, yet another of the shopworn ex-cops so beloved of the genre, is hired to investigate the disappearance of a wealthy politician and do-gooder. The missing man is found tortured to death. His killers: two boy prostitutes, one of whom was seeking a father figure, the other of whom scorned his client as a masochistic "beat freak." The who in this whodunit is known early in the story. Valin is more interested in precisely...
...draw a profile of the typical do-gooder, and the only thing certain is that it is probably wrong. Volunteer work is not the sole province of the housewives holding Christmas fairs, the idle rich sponsoring benefits and the young selling cookies. The aggressive, entrepreneurial cast of much modern charity reflects the fact that the largest number of volunteers, according to a J.C. Penney survey, are between the ages...
...BRIGHT SHINING LIE by Neil Sheehan (Random House; $24.95). In a riveting portrait, John Paul Vann, a top U.S. adviser in Viet Nam, emerges as a man who embodied the contradictions of his ill-fated mission: a courageous do-gooder with a dark streak of amorality...
...BRIGHT SHINING LIE by Neil Sheehan (Random House; $24.95). In a riveting portrait, John Paul Vann, a major architect of U.S. policy in Viet Nam, emerges as a man who embodied the contradictions of his ill-fated mission: a courageous do-gooder with a dark streak of amorality...
...secret vice" he could not or would not control. To Sheehan, who worked as a young wire-service reporter in Viet Nam and went on to obtain the Pentagon papers for the New York Times, Vann is the very symbol of the U.S. in Viet Nam: a courageous do-gooder masking a dark streak of amorality. Vann's story, as told by Sheehan after 16 years of painstaking reporting, is not just a biography but a sweeping history of a war that, Sheehan argues, the U.S. could never have...