Heroes

by Joe McGinniss

A search for the vanished American hero and the causes of his demise takes the form of an autobiographical commentary on the hero's traits and attractions and on contemporary celebrities who might have achieved hero status

176 pages, Hardcover

First published April 13, 1976

About the author

Joe McGinniss was an American journalist, non-fiction writer and novelist. He first came to prominence with the best-selling The Selling of the President 1968 which described the marketing of then-presidential candidate Richard Nixon. It spent more than six months on best-seller lists. He is popularly known for his trilogy of bestselling true crime books — Fatal Vision, Blind Faith and Cruel Doubt — which were adapted into several TV miniseries and movies. Over the course of forty years, McGinniss published twelve books.

Reviews

[Siddharth Srivastava · Rating 3 out of 5]

aaaah, i wanted to love this so much. a series of unconnected autobiographical essays, but i’m always in awe of anyone writing about their perception of things, especially when they’re aware they lived through as peculiar an era as the 60s/70s america. some good pieces about the heroic culture and the subsequent vanishing, but i wanted so much more.

[Howard Mansfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

Heroes is a broken, brilliant book. I first read it more than 30 years ago and I’ve just reread it. It’s a failed work, but its anguish is piercing and his close-range observations of the famous caught in their fame is unflinching. In short space he captures fame as fatuous: here’s the prisoner Teddy Kennedy; a war hero receiving the same ovation accorded to the kitchen lunch staff; a mad scene as Secretariat wins the Derby; and William Styron managing to be gracious after McGinniss cooks the special crabmeat he’d set aside. There’s maybe 4 or 5 pages about Kennedy and it’s the best thing I’ve ever read about him or the family. In two sentences he captures the emptiness of that poor war hero’s fame. And the Secretariat scene may not be more than 300 words and it is a gem.
He’s a great quick sketch artist. He gets the telling details down on the page, but he can’t write about ideas at all. The sections about the idea of the hero read as if he’d typed them while wearing heavy fireplace gloves. It plods and is in the vicinity of an undergraduate paper. That’s what breaks the back of this book: he can’t bring any definition to his quest. He has stumbled into mistaking fame for heroism.
Towards the end of the book he admits his failings. His honesty about himself, his marriage, his reasons for seeking out the famous do carry the book, but given the brilliance of what he did get down on the page, you’re left wondering about what Daniel Berrigan told him in their drunken pub crawl (other than the punch line to a moose droppings joke) or what William Buckley or any number of people told him. All of it lost in a flood of vodka and beer. Too bad.
McGinniss was only 27 when he won the kind of white-hot attention that dreamed about by writers. In this book he’s left facing his illusions: At the white hot center of fame you are ever more alone with your failings, your loneliness, and yet even though “there is no there there” you can’t stop craving the attention. He sees that in almost everyone he talks to.
Heroes is not a wise book, and that is what it gives it some punch. We’re watching an author come of age. It’s as if we were witnessing evolution as a creature leaves the sea and learns to walk.
The last thing I’ll say is that I pity his poor editor when this finally thumped on her or his desk, a slim book that may have first read like an excuse slip: “Please excuse my son from writing the 500-page tome on the modern hero. He’s been drinking, divorcing, doubting, growing up. He is sober now.”

[Susan Weidener · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book came to me at the right time - when the political craziness going on out there makes longing for a "hero" even more intense and the search ever more elusive.

McGinniss' spare journalistic style - a former columnist with The Philadelphia Inquirer -is reminiscent of Hemingway. He offers the reader shrewd and poignant insight into those who would be heroes, but fall short either through design, death, or their own shortcomings and lack of focus and clarity about who they are and what it all means.

From fascinating portraits of George McGovern to Ted Kennedy to William Westmoreland, McGinniss offers a front row seat during a turbulent time in American history . . . a time when the country lost its innocence - the Vietnam War. His profiles, based on meeting the famous American men of the day, and writing about them, is interwoven with McGinniss' own memoir of an affair gone wrong, his failed marriage, his father's death, his desire to find some meaning in his own life and as a writer.

Such is the power of this book; the search to find a hero of "mythic" proportions in contemporary times and the author's conclusion that they no longer exist. The final sentence resonates with this author, "Writing about an experience, or life, can give it meaning. That writing about the loss of illusions - the vanishing of heroes - can compensate, in however small and unsatisfactory a way, for the no longer deniable fact that they are gone."

[Dale Stonehouse · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not much to this, a series of short essays on meeting some American celebrities to ask their opinion on the loss of American heroes. It is perhaps more a reflection of where the author's mind was at that time; a quick read but mostly forgettable.

[SouthWestZippy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book.