[In Heroes] Joe McGinniss says he's going to write about heroes and winds up writing mostly about himself and his problems. It's as though you were promised a full account of the kidnapping of Helen and the ensuing wars between Greece and Troy, but instead got only an entertaining account of a crap game inside the Trojan horse.

To be sure, McGinniss does go through the half-hearted ritual of seeking out some headliners—people like John Glenn and George McGovern and William Buckley and Daniel Berrigan—to see if he can find the yeast of heroism. He fails, not only because he has prejudged their failure in a very silly fashion ("The truth was, we did not have heroes anymore because there were no heroic acts left to be performed") but also because the kind of hero he was looking for had to measure up to some sort...