James T. Fisher

A follow-up to a recent reading of Dooley's "Three Great Books." The background of The Ugly American is also discussed in some detail. A highly readable biography, contextualised with an analysis of America's evolving Cold War policy in South-East Asia in the 1950s, and of the post-war emergence of American Catholics into the mainstream. Dooley's life as a gay man is given the prominence of course entirely missing from his own writings. But Fisher does not look for easy explanations of Dooley's compicated personality, an inspirational charmer who could also be a self-indulgent bully. Fisher emphasises loss and failure at the end of Dooley's brief life: the dismantling of MEDICO, Dooley's medical charity, and the scrutiny of his methods which had started to undermine the hagiography of previous press coverage. A scholarly book with forty pages of footnotes.… (altro)