Books: Told to Forget

OUR SHARE OF NIGHT (380 pp.]—Drew Middleton—Viking ($3.75).

Since Vincent Sheean's immensely successful Personal History in 1935, neither he nor many of his successors has succeeded notably with that difficult formula: the journalistic catchall which mixes autobiographical adventure, eyewitnessing of disaster, punditry, prophecy and philosophy. Some have seemed too wise after the event; many have not seemed wise enough before it. Drew Middleton's Our Share of Night is a welcome exception. It is written with rare honesty and simplicity. Best of all is his reason for writing, stated not in a self-conscious foreword but in the last sentence of the book:...