Word: wayward
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Campanati also finds time to draw blueprints for the ecumenical reform of the church and deliver lectures in basic apologetics to the wayward Toomey. Ideas about good and evil, the spirit and the flesh, are regularly set forth. But Earthly Powers is no Magic Mountain. Having to cover much ground quickly, Burgess shaves his peaks...
...kind of writing, journalistic and non-journalistic, in his list of accomplishments. He reviewed restaurants; covered boxing matches, great and small; witnessed D-Day and the liberation of Paris as a war correspondent; cranked out short story collections and novellas; and critiqued the state of American journalism in his "Wayward Press" column for years. One of the most prolific and versatile writers of the century, Liebling died frustrated, having failed to write a Great American Novel, a ghost he pursued all his life. He wanted to write a significant novel to legitimize his writing career, much as he always wanted...
...Wayward Reporter, Sokolov digs under Liebling's unrelenting refusal in nearly all of his work to take himself or his profession more seriously than they merited. Never burdened by the prevailing, self-deceptive myth of the objectivity of news reporting, Liebling made his the craft of shaping minute detail with careful description in his pieces until the appearances of his subjects, often the "lowlife" street hustlers and small-time entrepreneurs of New York City, gave way to their unmistakeable reality: the reality Joe Liebling saw in them. Possessed of a memory so remarkable he rarely made notes, but quoted extensively...
WITHOUT THE FOUR YEARS of solid research behind it, Wayward Reporter might have turned into a dry, formal investigation of modern journalistic writing from 19th-century mush to Hearstian sensationalism to the terse prose on the front page of today's New York Times. At times, Sokolov seems a little overwhelmed by the topic, like a python swallowing an elephant. He wrestles with how to treat Liebling's role as a war correspondent, not one of his greatest periods. Sokolov does not compare Liebling's war pieces to other more outstanding journalists of the time, perhaps because he does...
Since the romanticization of the modern reporter, not enough writers have sought to compare today's journalism with that of the long but relatively obscured decades that preceded it. Wayward Reporter revives the ghost of a great journalist without romanticizing it, and rescues sometimes-forgotten journalistic standards for Lieblings of the eighties...