'Newspaperman': A story of success at the Wall Street Journal

Inside the News Business
at the Wall Street Journal
By Warren H. Phillips

McGraw-Hill. 316 pp. $30

It takes awhile for Phillips to reach the good parts of the memoir because it is set up chronologically, beginning with his ancestors, his birth in New York City in 1926, his upbringing as an only child in the boroughs of the metropolis, his prodigy status that led to graduation from high school at 14, his military service as a teenager toward the end of World War II, and his higher education after the war.

Some of that chronicle is interesting. But most of the early chapters are crammed with relatives, friends, and foes who come and go quickly, often without any evident reason for their inclusion in what is meant to be a literary memoir. Even later in the memoir, people - by then some of them famous - come and go quickly, dizzyingly.

In the book's Introduction, Phillips criticizes name-droppers he has known, then pleads guilty to some of that in the pages to come. He justifies it by saying that including the famous might hold the interest of readers. He cites one of his Journal mentors, Barney Kilgore, as saying: "The easiest thing for the reader to do is to stop reading." The name-dropping made me want to stop reading numerous times, rather than holding my interest. The practice becomes more tolerable as the book progresses, as the sections about the rise of the Wall Street Journal's quality and influence are fascinating - for journalists and non-journalists alike.