The Man in the Water: And Other Essays

A collection of essays, reportage, and criticism features the author's "Man of the Year" profile of Ronald Reagan for Time, his award-winning article on Hiroshima, and essays on poetry, heroism, and Richard Nixon. 12,500 first printing.

Rosenblatt, a contributing editor to the New Republic and Vanity Fair and a regular essayist for the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour , skillfully draws out his interviewees, whether the person is a homeless woman in New York City who was once a nightclub dancer, a prisoner in Attica smoldering with anger, or a fiercely anti-communist Latvian jazz saxophonist in Leningrad. This wholly engaging collection of essays, articles, reviews and autobiographical sketches includes an extended meditation on Hiroshima, a piece on the "disappeared" victims of Argentina's military dictatorship and the eloquent title essay about a 1982 plane crash into the Potomac, in which an anonymous man rescued fellow passengers before he succumbed to the icy waters. There are disarming profiles of Ronald Reagan, Candice Bergen, New York governor Mario Cuomo; appreciations of African American autobiographies and Langston Hughes's "Simple" stories; and an alarming report on war-torn Sudan where some 100,000 boys, whose parents had been slaughtered, walked barefoot for hundreds of miles in search of safety.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A broad collection of pieces by the MacNeil/Lehrer commentator and author of Life Itself (1992) and Children of War (1983). (Over half of the latter is reprinted here). The ``Man in the Water'' is the heroic passenger in the 1982 air crash who pulled others from the icy Potomac and then perished. With such unforgettable, often inexplicable images, Rosenblatt connects the subject of death with ``the deepest mysteries,'' which he finds ``in facts.'' In the tradition of his heartbreaking essays on children in Cambodia, Belfast, and Lebanon, his recent essay on the Sudan describes a civilization ``on the brink of extinction.'' Some 100,000 boys walked barefoot, sometimes 1,000 miles for weeks or months, to escape the warfare that killed their families and destroyed their Sudanese villages, where Rosenblatt noticed a sign in a hospital posted for the American Ambassador that read ``thank you for coming to see us dying of disease and injuries.'' Rosenblatt conveys the horror of this desolate, isolated landscape ruled by the ``silence'' of starving children too weak to cry out and by the world's failure to recognize and respond. Always analytical, he attempts to decipher Nixon, Reagan, the Louds, Murphy Brown, ``Black Autobiography,'' Lewis Thomas facing death, the teaching of literature, and even ``beauty''--which he recognized in the presence of three elderly women who would read to him as a child. The guiding persona who seeks out morally wrenching subjects is also funny on the subjects of fast food, his attempts to diet, and his brother's telephone pranks. His iconoclastic advice to journalists is to ``betray your sources'' and to ``dwell in a state of puzzlement'' by acknowledging contradictions in people like his courtly physician father and in situations like the ``remote control'' Gulf War, where television seemed to lead away from the truth. In these acute observations and provocative stories, Rosenblatt proves himself one of America's finest and most needed commentators. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In a career that spans the print and broadcast media, Rosenblatt ( Life Itself: Abortion in the American Mind , LJ 3/15/92) has written for a variety of magazines and newspapers and is a regular essayist on the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour. This collection of 54 essays and articles encompasses a range of styles, from a lengthy scholarly essay on black autobiography to a short, snappy piece on an irritating barking dog. It also covers a wide time period, ranging from Rosenblatt's first journalistic article in July 1975, which reflects on the life and death of his father, to his July 1993 consideration of the fate of child victims in the civil war in Sudan. This book should be purchased for journalism collections and considered for public libraries where essay collections circulate well.
- Judy Solberg, Univ. of Maryland Libs., College Park
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Thanks to his appearances on the MacNeil/Lehrer show, Rosenblatt is most likely better known visually than literarily. But like most accomplished writers, he has found a distinctive, sophisticated voice. It's a voice that typically looks for the biggest issue in the littlest place--the mind of a single individual. Many of these 60 pieces examine one person in a stressful situation of lonely heroism, such as a doctor on the verge of death or--as in the title essay--the anonymous man who drowns while encouraging fellow victims of a plane crash to be rescued first. Wars of the 1980s (Lebanon, Sudan, Cambodia)--specifically, the devastation wrought on innocents--engage Rosenblatt, as does the squalor of the down-and-out in U.S. cities. Even when profiling celebrities, such as Ronald Reagan and Candice Bergen, Rosenblatt hones in on the human enigma, the quality of mysteriousness that exists in everyone. That's his trademark, and expressing it with a cerebral penchant for literary allusion--reflecting, still, his 1960s days as a Harvard English professor--adds relish to his substantial, quizzical human interest sketches. Gilbert Taylor