Three Blind Mice: How the Networks Lost Their Way, by Ken Auletta
(Vintage, $14). ”Television junkies will love `Three Blind Mice,` and decriers of network mediocrity will find much to admire in it,” reviewer Gary Dretzka wrote in the Tribune last year. ”Three Blind Mice” is the sad story of how the three big television networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, began to lose their 90 percent share of America`s prime-time viewing audience to cable in the mid-1970s, suffered through the corporate takeovers and layoffs of the
`80s, and produced the increasingly poor programming that continues today. The story begins in 1985 when journalist Ken Auletta asked for and was given unprecedented access to all the major players at the networks. ”At CBS, for instance, this ranged from the Loews` Corp. boss Laurence Tisch to Dan Rather to the guy who poured coffee for board members at their meetings,” Dretzka wrote. ”This gives his book the kind of fly-on-the-wall detail that is often lacking in other examinations of American business.” It also gives the reader a clear understanding of how little the network bigshots know about what runs on their own channels. ”`Three Blind Mice` is compelling reading,” Dretzka wrote, ”especially when Auletta defines the process by which such disastrous shows as `Dolly,` `Nightingales,` `Tattinger`s` and `Cop Rock` came to be added to prime-time schedules.”
Harlot`s Ghost, by Norman Mailer (Ballantine, $12.50). ”Harlot`s Ghost” is the ”most daring, ambitious and by far the best written of the several very long, daring and ambitious books Norman Mailer has so far produced,”
reviewer John W. Aldridge wrote in the Tribune last year. Here, Mailer takes on the CIA, writing a fictionalized history of the organization since World War II. Composed of two distinct but closely interwoven narratives,
”Harlot`s Ghost” begins in 1983 with the reported disappearance of brilliant CIA agent Hugh Montague (code name: Harlot). A dead body that may be Harlot`s has been found in the Chesapeake Bay, but the face has been mutilated beyond recognition and the fingertips have been eaten away. The story`s narrator, another CIA veteran, Harry Hubbard takes on the case. The book`s second narrative is a heavily detailed account of Hubbard`s CIA career beginning in 1955 and continuing through his service in postwar Berlin and the Bay of Pigs, and an attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro. It ends with the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. ”Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book,” Aldridge wrote, ”and he has been able to gain steadily increasing control over the often unruly energies that drive his talent.”
Blood Memory, by Martha Graham (Washington Square Press, $12). Martha Graham`s autobiography, ”Blood Memory,” begins in the city of her birth, soot-filled, turn-of-the-century Pittsburgh. She remembers how her father would enthrall her with the stories of Greek mythology, stories that later influenced some of her own work. She traces the formative years of her dance career, working with modern dance pioneers Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. Graham also relates the struggles that accompanied the creation of her own dance company and, later, the glory heaped upon it by the audience and critics. However, ”the keenest insights come in her analyses of her personal life,” reviewer Richard Christiansen wrote in the Tribune last year, particularly those involving her passionate dance partnership with Erick Hawkins, the man she married, divorced and still continued to dance with. ”It is amazing what the spirit can get through if you are determined enough,”
Graham writes. ”I still can`t believe how after we separated, Erick and I still had to dance together. . . Whether it was a dance of consuming jealousy, I Medea and he Jason, or one of tender love like `Appalachian Spring,` he the Husbandman, I the Bride, it came so close to real life that at times it made me ill.” Supplemented by splendid photos, ”Blood Memory” is ”composed of esthetic pronouncements, trivial puffery and sudden, slashing bursts of personal revelation,” Christiansen wrote.
