CORRESPONDENCE
CORRESPONDENCE Mixed Vtotes New York, N.Y. To the Editors: Robert Phillips's review of my novel 4 Hero in His Time exhibits every characteristic of slapdash reviewing [Mar. 26}. It is a pastiche,...
...I do think The New York Times tries hard to bring out what it can from reluctant campaigners, and we do try periodically to use some stories making comparisons on claims and promises...
...Once in awhile you can draw some impression that means something from a revealing anecdote like the one about Jimmy Carter the other day omitting Martin Luther King's name from hi| litany of Americans and then, (Continued on page 319) CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 291) when queried, omitting the whole list next time...
...There is often an effort to try for fairness by giving each candidate a story of his own, or an equal amount of space for each candidate in a round-up, and such mathematical effort can involve a lot of air in stories...
...My own long-ago experience in covering campaigns would raise some excuses for the correspondents the candidates do evade serious issues most of the time, or they deliver a standard speech in which they try to supply a new paragraph...
...And then you have another problem whoever gets elected doesn't do much about whatever he or his platform promised, and we just keep operating on opportunism in government unless we're in crises, when things get even tougher...
...Phillips seems to be among that growing tribe of reviewers who struggle for a point-of-view without ever achieving one...
...It doesn't matter to me that his views, of the book are mixed...
...The most ludicrous waste of space is to conclude a review painfully limited in scale as reviews must be-by discussing book binding, about which he knows about as little as he knows about criticism: If he had wanted to destroy my book it would have been as welcome as coherent praise, but wasting space to say precious little about anything seems to be an example of precisely the "conspicuous consumption" we are able, economically and culturally, to ill-afford...
...peter kihss...
...This does mean that correspondents wind up padding stories with whatever color they can find...
...To the Editors: Sisyphus must have much too generous an opinion about me, but I do appreciate the implied flattery and I would love to be able to live up to tiw thought [Darkness at Noon, March 12...
...It is the mix that annoys precisely because the elements never congeal to form a review...
...I do certainly agree with the view that coverage of the would-be Presidential candidates just seems to be obsessed with personalities and quirks and techniques, and we do have to look hard for a kernel about the candidates' thinking...
...It is a pastiche, not a review...
...But you are absolutely right that we do need to know about issues...
...ARTHUR A. COHEN Raising the Issues New York, N.Y...
Vol. 103 • May 1976 • No. 10
