September 12, 2005
Most college freshmen have one class that shatters their adolescent worldview forever; for Worthen, it was a history seminar at Yale taught by retired diplomat Charles Hill. By semester's end, her hero worship had become so intense that she spent every available moment until her 2004 graduation pursuing his life story. The biography reveals Hill as a typical Cold War intellectual, serving his government in China and the Middle East as well as in Washington; most notably, in the Reagan-era Iran-Contra affair he was accused of withholding evidence from the independent counsel. Worthen is much less upset by this possible misstep, however, than by her idol's emotional aloofness from his family. Worthen's youth doesn't serve her work, or her subject, well. She imbues Hill's life with artificial melodrama. She also muses constantly on her own shifting feelings toward "Charlie"—a matter of considerably less interest to readers than to herself—and expresses amazement that he isn't what she had thought. Finally, the reader is drowned in youthful banalities and occasionally naïveté (could anyone find it "alarming" that professors buy coffee at Starbucks just like anyone else?). A more mature perspective might have done more justice to Hill's brilliance. Agent, Andrew Wylie.