Reporting Back

Rating:
Summary: Journalism students will find this revealing
Review: Author Lillian Ross has been writing for the New Yorker for half a century, creating profiles and essays which have won her an audience of admirers. Reporting Back questions the attributes which contribute to good reporting and good journalism, with Ross' years of experience backing pieces which blend humor with sharp observation. Journalism students will find this revealing.

Rating:
Summary: same old same old
Review: Lillian Ross's contributions to the Talk of the Town and to the full-length piece are estimable, but she was never one of great talents at the magazine. She has a real flair, though, for recycling her old work. The more you reread it, the thinner it becomes.

Rating:
Summary: Lousy
Review: Once upon a time I used to revere Lillian Ross for her acerbic portrait of Hemingway and her up and down account of the making of John Huston's film of The Red Badge of Courage.

Now when I read her work, in the New Yorker or in omnibuses like this one, I see she is not a great writer, but am ordinary one, and in REPORTING BACK a woman who cannot stop herself from patting herself on the back till it hurts. Don't think I've ever read such a self-congratulatory work. How do people stand her? She says she doesn't like to write about people unless she likes them, but from her writing, one gets the impression she feels superior to everyone, always quoting the little non sequiturs people make by mistake, to make them look stupid.

The idol has feet of clay.