Word: shirer
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STRANGER COME HOME (369 pp.)-William L. Shirer-Little, Brown...
William Lawrence (Berlin Diary) Shirer is not the man to stop writing novels just because he is not very good...
...that all its characters are "imaginary." But any moderately attentive reader will begin naming the originals who inspired them almost at once, will feel in the end what is sadly true: that Stranger is a sour mash of stale news stories. The only bit of imagination connected with Author Shirer's book is the startling notion of calling it a novel...
Stranger is written in the form of a diary. It is being kept by Raymond Whitehead, who returns to the U.S. after many years as a foreign correspondent to become a news broadcaster (a career that parallels Author Shirer's). Hero Whitehead had once been in the foreign service, but the State Department had found his reports "too literary.'' Someone must have been letting him down gently. Whitehead-Shirer uses "tomes"' and "major opus" for books, "espied" for saw, "eminent solon" for Senator. When Whitehead is thinking deeply, as he does one day at a baseball...
Brinton's writing is quite lucid; in fact he often sacrifices accuracy to gain clarity in making his optimistic generalizations. In such a short book perhaps this is inevitable, but only audacity could permit him to criticize Koestler and Shirer for generalizing their pessimism. With Brinton's hope tipping the scales the other way, the reader is tempted to seek the balanced view somewhere in between...