“Pauline Kael drifts away from a half-hearted analysis of 'Kane' to the most lively gossip imaginable about the alleged birth-pangs and labor-pains of the script. Bit by bit, 'Raising Kane' becomes an excuse to lower the boom on Orson Welles so as to resurrect the reputation of the late Herman J. Mankiewicz.”

“Everybody wanted to know where Tom Wolfe had sprung from, this brilliantly talented, seemingly ubiquitous, altogether mysteriously third-person journalist”

How the New Yorker’s poetry editor became our foremost chronicler of contemporary hokum