Secrets: A Writer in the Cold War

Brodeur (The Great Power-Line Coverup), who for many years, as a staff writer at the New Yorker, was perhaps the preeminent environmental journalist of his generation, here presents a combined polemic and memoir. As he has proved in a number of ground-breaking articles of the kind that magazine no longer runs, he is a superb polemicist, patiently assembling incontrovertible facts, then recording the evasions and hostilities of the industries he indicts-most notably the asbestos business and more latterly the electric companies whose high-tension power lines, he maintains, emit dangerous electro-magnetic fields. It is in fact his revisiting of those massive controversies, and the way he places them in the context of an embattled America whose capitalist excesses were seen for nearly 40 years as the only bulwark against the menace of world communism, that is the most valuable part of the book. His memoirs, involving a skeleton in the family closet, Army life in Germany, his run-ins with the CIA as a young writer in Paris, are mildly entertaining but a little stiff. Brodeur's value as a reporter has been his healthy skepticism and his enormous appetite for work, which have both helped to save lives and bring to book those responsible for much needless death and suffering; and his book (which, perhaps unsurprisingly these days, did not find an American publisher) is a salutary reminder of that fact. (Apr.)