Word: nero
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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...
That Hersey novel is really pretty bad. It's about an unsuccessful conspiracy to murder Nero, but for some unfathomable reason he has chosen to write it entirely as a series of documents, mostly memos between two police officials known only as Tigellinus and Paenus. Even at times of high crisis they stop to send each other long memoranda in a kind of pseudo Latin, using terms like "the fourth night hour." And they consistently refer to Nero as Himself. Do we really need a review...
...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...
...presented a special problem for weekly publications. New York, for example, had already completed its press run of 333,500. Even as the stock market soared briefly in what was called "the Nixon Rally," New York appeared on the stands with a cover cartoon of Nixon fiddling a la Nero while the Stock Exchange burned. Inside was a six-page feature on "Wall Street's Case Against Richard Nixon...