SECOND DRAFTS OF HISTORY

Journalist and essayist Morrow (Evil, 2003) gathers the work of four decades, most from the pages of Time.

Morrow has a capacious mind and a light hand, good qualities for a generalist writing about pretty much whatever he wants in a mass-market publication. Some of the seven-dozen-plus pieces here seem a little pedestrian, to be sure, including the opener, a so-what meditation on sailing and the evanescence of human life; others go nowhere fast, as with a couple of rural cat-on-the-porch, corn-in-the-field reveries that no one does as well as Verlyn Klinkenborg. Still, all are readable, and many are memorable. There’s a slyly subversive piece on the opening of the Nixon Library, for instance, with its mega-sized statues of the likes of Mao and de Gaulle: “Nixon,” Morrow writes, “has always had a habit of dressing the set with giants, setting the delay timer, and then jumping into the picture himself.” Exactly. Morrow is no easier on any of the other politicians who come into his crosshairs: “That has been one trouble with Reaganistic good feeling: a suspicion that it was based on camera angle.” “At his worst moments on the stump, Bush is a sort of amateur terrorist of language, like an eleven-year-old Shi’ite picking up a Kalashnikov assault rifle for the first time and firing off words in wild bursts.” “Nero gave the people circuses. Clinton is the circus.” Against a vaguely dissatisfied take on politics and modern life, though, Morrow offers a humane and even hopeful vision: Remarking on the red state/blue state divide, for instance, he notes that “Americans have always been each other’s evil twins,” which ought to inspire a tiny bit more tolerance, and he closes by observing that forgiveness may be one of the best tools we have for surviving our time, though it “is not an impulse that is in much favor.”

For fans of economical language and thoughtful journalism, a pleasure.