NOT SO WILD A DREAM

Eric Sevareid wrote this memoir as a young newsman of thirty-two just home from the war. It was favorably received, sold well, and acquired the patina of a reference source. In the introduction written for this reissue, Sevareid calls it an impersonal autobiography, the product of a stringent Lutheran upbringing: ""One did not impose his deepest emotions upon others and certainly not upon strangers."" His afterthoughts blank out the sage of CBS and propel the reader toward the young man from North Dakota (""a large, blank spot in the nation's mind"") who, at seventeen, paddled a canoe twenty-two hundred miles through the northern wilderness, learned the facts of corporate life on the old Minneapolis Star, and entered broadcasting as Edward R. Murrow's protege in WW II. Welcome back.