Reporter: A Memoir
Seymour M Hersh
Alfred A Knopf
355 pages; $27.95
The qualities that make Seymour Hersh a first-rate reporter — his hustle, his wonkiness, his nighthawk drive to unearth a radioactive fact and then top that fact — make him a second-rate memoirist. Like a greyhound or a kamikaze pilot or an insurance man peddling a policy (he sometimes reminds the reader of each), he’s not built for reflection.
It’s all here in his new memoir, Reporter, if by “all” we mean the filing-cabinet details behind his greatest scoops, the settling dust of old deadline clashes. Mr Hersh
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