Word: middletons
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Critics (many of whom are closet composers) so admire her service to music that they never give her a bad notice. Last week the New York Herald Tribune's second-string critic, Francis Perkins, read a book (Drew Middleton's Our Share of Night) through much of the program, finally seemed to sleep. The next day his review was the best she received...
...Personal History in 1935, neither he nor many of his successors has succeeded notably with that difficult formula: the journalistic catchall which mixes autobiographical adventure, eyewitnessing of disaster, punditry, prophecy and philosophy. Some have seemed too wise after the event; many have not seemed wise enough before it. Drew Middleton's Our Share of Night is a welcome exception. It is written with rare honesty and simplicity. Best of all is his reason for writing, stated not in a self-conscious foreword but in the last sentence of the book: "Now perhaps I can forget...
...Middleton has plenty to forget. At 25, in the spring of 1939, he joined the London Bureau of the A.P. That fall he was one of the twelve U.S. correspondents assigned to the British Expeditionary Force. From then on, in England, Africa and Europe-ending with Dunkirk; and later, after the Blitz, returning to the Continent for the New York Times, he saw more of the war than most of his colleagues, rapidly built a reputation for courageous and able reporting. He is now the Times's correspondent in Moscow, but Our Share of Night covers only...
From his book there is little for serious historians to salvage, but the general reader will find some of the best combat reporting done by an American. Much of what Middleton has to say merely underscores what most readers already know; but at least it is convincingly underscored: the unpreparedness of England and France, the defeatism of the French, the unyielding firmness of the British people during the time they stood alone...
...correspondents have ever learned how distasteful I-Was-There writing is to combat veterans. Middleton's book is one of the few that has a fair chance of cracking that resentment, especially in his intensely personal summing...