Final Word on Murray Book (TRN)

 May 11, 2024

Mike,

I didn't read your book immediately after you gave me the copy--maybe thinking that I had already read it, some chapters more than once. But In the last couple of days, I read it through, and I really gained the experience of the book's achievement. You worked so hard to find a narrative, a kind of continuous thread, and in reading it I  experienced how you really did it, how you marshalled all that reading, all those documents, to create a continuous experience for the reader, and an effective argument for Murray's significance, and also a portrait of his driven personality. As someone who knew him, it feels absolutely right, but also revealing in ways that were new to me. In a way, his work habits and interests were so much a shared part of life at UNH that I forgot how amazing and generative they were. I felt like this book gave Murray back to me, and I'm so appreciative of that. It feels so trite to say you should be proud of this, but I'll say it.

Just before I read your book I read Alan Brinkley's bio of Henry Luce, and some parallels struck me. Murray and Luce were almost exactly the same age; they both had  a missionary sense of their work; they worked intensely. But there is a kind of big optimism that came out of WWII, a robust manliness, a confidence that eluded my generation, I think. Luce coined the phrase "The American Century" --and celebrated American life in Life. There's something of that in Murray, too. Lots of big differences--Luce was a cold warrior, big on Vietnam war. But the parallel struck me. An interesting bio.

Hope all is well with you. I wrote a note to Martha Horn today on the occasion of her retirement. She's the real deal.

Tom