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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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time
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12258900.046
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1990-09-22
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BOOKS, Page 89On Time
RIGHT PLACES, RIGHT TIMES
by Hedley Donovan
Henry Holt; 463 pages; $27.95
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.