Superficial View Of Yaleman Who Co-founded Time

The sub-title of this book is only fifty percent accurate. It says that Briton Hadden was the co-founder of 'Time.' And that is true. It also says that the book is a biography. And this assertion is wildly misleading and ought to be chopped up a syllable at a time.

Noel F. Busch has written, instead of a biography, a zippy account of the founding of 'Time,' with special reference to the life of Briton Hadden. A good bit of that account is fascinating, but taken altogether, it does not make a satisfying book. For the result is no more a thorough picture of 'Time's' origin and growth than it is a thorough job on Hadden.

Just what manner of man was this Briton Hadden who was voted the "most likely to succeed" by the same Yale class that voted Henry Luce the "most brilliant," and who proceeded, with Luce, to create 'Time' before he was twenty-four? Busch tolls you that he was an "editorial prodigy." By this, Busch seems to mean that from the first months of his life Hadden was possessed by the desire, and the ability, to publish his ideas and to get them "off the page and into the reader's mind." Hadden was also highly competitive and vastly ambitious: he planned to make a million dollars by the time he was thirty. But once he has said this much, Busch proceeds to embellish rather than to develop his story. And his occasional efforts to probe deep frequently border on the ridiculous. "The urgency of Hadden's impulse toward life," he writes, "started with his original struggle to stay alive in the first place." This "struggle" took place when "little Hadden" was between one and six weeks old, and was brought about by his premature birth. "Ever since that time," Busch goes on, "he had lived harder and faster than other people; reached to more things, fought more battles, had more thoughts and feelings."

A good bit of the trouble with 'Briton Hadden' is in its style. Busch is a senior editor on 'Life,' and he writes with all the brightness and clarity that go along with the frequent superficiality of that magazine's prose. There is a tremendous difference between the apparently effortless writing of a real stylist and the glibness that characterizes this book. And Busch's thinking is as glib as are his sentences. He deals more in notions than in ideas; and his book is a sketch, not a biography.