Douglas Valentine

Morley Safer of CBS, writing in the New York Times:

Mr. Valentine - the author as well of ''The Hotel Tacloban,'' about life in a Japanese prisoner of war camp - has written as turgid and dense and often incomprehensible a book as I have ever had the misfortune to open. Somewhere in those almost 500 gray pages there is stuff of great importance: examples of human folly, courage, stupidity and greed.

Mr. Valentine handles these epic themes as so much fodder from a database - not unlike the paper end of the Phoenix program itself. He has interviewed scores of participants in Phoenix, but instead of putting the interviews into some kind of historical (or even logical) framework - it's called editing - he has simply transcribed them. And if Phoenix acted like Phoenix talked, then the American intervention in Vietnam was even more inept than those of us who were witnesses believed. ...… (mais)

I don't know if Douglas Valentine is brother to Gary Webb, but judging by the way they both write, their minds must be somehow connected. Both authors get so busy cataloging details of the who, what, when, where, why and how that -- to this reader -- their works seem unreadable, stupefying, incomprehensible.

I hold an MA in magazine journalism. I know what the profession demands of practitioners. I know that the books those two authors did on drug crime and drug criminals is hard, dirty, deadly dangerous work. Gary Webb, in particular, paid with his career and his life for names and facts that he gathered and published in his "Dark Alliance" doorstop.

Speaking strictly as a writer, however, I think there comes a time in any journalistic effort when one should stop cataloguing facts and start writing a story. Webb, in particular, got his teeth into a story that should have made a hair-raising thriller and used it to produce a stultifying read.

Valentine, for his effort, told us how a bunch of federal cops (now mostly dead) turned drug-law enforcement into a criminal enterprise. It could have made a lively and useful history, but the author's method turned the material into a paper brick.… (mais)