Word: hersey
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Forget Britannicus. TIME rarely uses the first person singular, even in bylined reviews. Better stick to Hersey, Nero and power. The deadline is next Tuesday...
Keep to essentials. Hersey's book is about power. He's been a housemaster or whatever at Yale, and they're very keen on power up there. He has also won a Pulitzer Prize, and it seems rather unprofessional to ignore his new book. I thought you were interested in history. Doesn't a novel about Nero inspire any interesting ideas...
...trouble with writing about Hersey, Nero and power is that Hersey doesn't really seem to know much about power. Remember that White House party back in 1965 when Lyndon Johnson invited in a bunch of intellectuals and a lot of them tried to figure out how to protest the Viet Nam War? Hersey's solution was to read aloud some excerpts from his book on Hiroshima...
...nodding its head and catching apples in its mouth the other evening." Lucan is the angry militant, arguing that a writer "must answer to the future." But Lucan is the one who finally betrays the conspiracy, largely out of vanity, which seems to be historically untrue-so what is Hersey trying to tell us about the writer's responsibility...
...Vanitas? Maybe Hersey is being ironic in his use of memos between police officials, though Yalemen are not noted for a sense of irony. The deadline is still next Tuesday. As Tigellinus often says, "This is a command...