Here’s mud down your hatch
COME TO THINK OF IT:
Notes on the turn of the millennium
By Daniel Schorr
382 pp. Viking $24.95
Reviewed by Bob Sanchez
The world faces a tsunami of noise and news, speeches and scandals, ongoing war and elusive peace. Newspapers, magazines, television and countless nodes on the Internet compete to tell us what’s happening from the halls of Congress to the threats of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. What they don’t provide us is perspective. How do we make sense of the world?
Daniel Schorr helps. He provides valuable insights into national and world events with a series of terse but thoughtful assessments. Come to Think of It is a collection of Schorr’s National Public Radio (NPR) essays, dating back from 1990, broadcast every few weeks up until 2007. The distinguished reporter is in his nineties now, but if his mind has lost any of its edge, this book doesn’t show it. Schorr has a talent for getting to the heart of complex matters, making his point without using a hammer, and then moving on to the next topic. Where other commentators might show their anger or vent their rage (Lou Dobbs comes to mind), Schorr typically offers his audience a dispassionate look followed by a quietly stated rational conclusion. When circumstances warrant, he may add a rueful shake of the head, but don’t expect frothing at the mouth. You, gentle reader, may feel free to supply your own emotion.
The essays are brief, each little more than a page, so there’s little depth. But he has a particularly effective way of concluding them, so his point is always clear—“The unmaking of the Bush administration marches on,” he concludes earlier this year, or “President Clinton’s first trip to Europe will not rank as the ten days that shook the world.” Rarely, he adds a touch of humor, though his topics don’t generally lend themselves to laughs. In one amusing piece on Russians speaking idiomatic English, he ends with a quote from a Russian who raises his glass and says, “So, Mr. Schorr, here's mud down your hatch.”
Schorr’s essays are uniformly strong throughout the book, whether he writes about Bush I in his 1990 piece, “The Mideast Is a Mess and There Is No New World Order” or about “high-level prevarication” in 2007. Did Attorney General Alberto Gonzales lie about his role in the firing of U.S. attorneys? Schorr simply writes that Gonzales maintained his innocence “in the face of evidence to the contrary.”
Every December, he examines the state of world peace and seldom finds cause for optimism. “Welcome to the divided states of America,” he quotes U.S. News and World Report in 1995, “dedicated to life, liberty, and the pursuit of anxiety ... better luck next year.”
Terry Schiavo and John Paul II come together in 2005 as Schorr writes with compassion about medical decisions and melancholy fates. The public is "spellbound" by two people known because of television, “two human beings whose lives are in the hands of the gods.”
The essays appear in chronological order with a separate chapter for each year, so the book follows the general tide of events—or he may simply write what’s on his mind that week. So consecutive topics may run, as they did in 1991, from Soviet disarray to presidential indecision to Japanese apologies for Pearl Harbor. Sometimes he is prescient, as in the 1993 essay in which he notes that “with the Soviets gone, the [militant Islam] freedom fighters’ mission now turns westward.” Each Schorr piece carries the implicit assumption that the reader is already informed. He doesn’t pretend to know the answers, but thoughtful readers will find worthy analysis here to spur their own thinking.
Come to Think of It is replete with sage observations, which will come as no surprise to his regular NPR listeners. At the end of the book, NPR host Robert Siegel wishes him a happy ninetieth birthday. Perhaps we’ll be reviewing another new offering when he celebrates his hundredth.
Here’s mud down your hatch, Mr. Schorr!
Bob Sanchez is an associate editor of The Internet Review of Books.
His novel, When Pigs Fly, was banned in Alamogordo, NM.
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