Word: gunther
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...task Gunther brings driving curiosity, elephantine memory, gregarious charm, ferocious vitality. Reporter Gunther also has phenomenally sharp ears and eyes for the telling anecdote and the detail that vividly catches the mood. He has a homing instinct for the essentials in a complex situation. He is a master of the art of brain-picking-and of choosing the right brain to pick. From careful homework, he knows precisely what information his story needs, and can extract it with the efficiency of an automatic orange squeezer...
Though widely hailed as a reporter, Gunther is at least as good a rewrite-man. He can take widely scattered strands of information-from books, statistics, official reports, newspaper clippings-and weave them into a pattern that is not only meaningful but brightly his own. Says "Jimmy" Sheean: "He is no mere compiler, for all his massive array of facts. He has repeatedly proved readable to a degree which no assembly of facts could explain. The zest with which he relishes his material gives it the breathless flavor of discovery every time, even aside from the liveliness of the writing...
Three-Day S.O.B. Gunther's Insides have improved almost steadily as he has kept turning them out; he concedes that the years have made him "more guarded and judicious." Says he: "All those books have been a process of educating myself at the public's expense." With Inside Africa (952 pages covering 44 countries), he drew widespread praise from scholars and specialists. Inside Russia Today, in some ways his most challenging assignment, is probably his best book...
...glibness in its execution. In fact, though the book is sprinkled with such minor bobbles as his reference to a nonexistent 25-kopek piece, these are heavily outweighed by his sound reporting, his artful wrap-up of others' findings, and his sober conclusions. Unlike most books on Russia. Gunther's Soviet survey is fortified with perspective gained on three other professional sojourns between 1928 and 1939 for as much as five months at a time. Chuckles Gunther: "When people ask how that s.o.b. dared visit a new country for three days and write about it like an authority...
Months before he set out to inspect Russia in 1956, Gunther buried his Roman nose in books, digests of Soviet newspapers, and a magpie's mountain of clips that he has amassed in more than 30 years. As always when mounting an expedition, Reporter Gunther wrote to dozens of functionaries whom he hoped to interview-and got three replies. Armed with standard 30-day tourist visas, Reporter Gunther and his chic, blonde wife Jane, 41, flew into Moscow in October at the height of the Hungarian uprisings...