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- <text id=89TT3392>
- <link 90TT2269>
- <title>
- Dec. 25, 1989: On Time
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1989
- Dec. 25, 1989 Cruise Control:Tom Cruise
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- BOOKS, Page 89
- On Time
- </hdr><body>
- <qt> <l>RIGHT PLACES, RIGHT TIMES</l>
- <l>by Hedley Donovan</l>
- <l>Henry Holt; 463 pages; $27.95</l>
- </qt>
- <p> Three decades after Henry Luce slated him as heir apparent,
- Hedley Donovan still professes uncertainty as to what virtues
- the Time Inc. founder saw in deciding he would become (as he did
- from 1964 to 1979) the company's editor in chief. But readers
- of Donovan's urbane, frequently self-chiding memoir will be able
- to guess. He blended a heartland bourgeois regard for American
- values with a worldly disdain for puffery. He took pride in
- being able to change his mind -- notably, on Viet Nam and
- Richard Nixon. In chronicling his life from the rectitude of a
- Minnesota boyhood to a Rhodes scholarship in Hitler-threatened
- Europe, formative days at the Washington Post and in Navy
- intelligence, writing at FORTUNE and editorial stewardship of
- Luce's empire, Donovan displays a skill at casting ethical and
- political debate in human terms and a gift for precision in
- portraying colleagues. On some topics -- the long decline of the
- weekly LIFE, endless jockeying in middle management, assorted
- ideas for new magazines that failed or were never tried -- the
- tale bogs down. But Donovan gives readers a candid sense of how
- decisions were made, complete with glimpses of pressure being
- applied (and resisted) by half a dozen Presidents and countless
- tycoons.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
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