Flashing Before My Eyes: 50 Years of Headlines, Deadlines & Punchlines

In a country obsessed with voyeurism, Schaap's book will find a receptive audience. Schaap (Turned On) fleshes out a chronology of his journalism career with endless yarns starring the last half-century's leading lights in sports, politics and the arts. From smoking a joint with Joe Namath to removing a strange animal from the leg of Bobby Kennedy's wife, Ethel, and taking in a World Series game with Lenny Bruce, Schaap's ubiquity ensures a surfeit of stories and, for that matter, ego. Schaap's strong presence introduces a strange underlying conflict: this purported autobiography is rife with stories about other people, told by a confessed egomaniac who insists that his characters come alive because he lays low. The result is a laissez-faire account whose anecdotes exceed their telling, and whose narrator never strays far from the foreground. Schaap can seem haughty, as when he describes his goal of writing a book each year: ""I have come up short... only thirty-three books in the last thirty-nine years of the twentieth century."" And though readers will tire of hearing that he was the youngest senior editor in the history of Newsweek, he undercuts his braggadocio by pointing it out himself: ""Have I broken the record for name-dropping yet?"" he jokes early on. Possibly. But the array of luminaries on Schaap's roster keeps him from sounding like a broken record. (Jan.)