The reader gets no insight into the emotional or psychological reasons that led Hecht to frantically overbook his schedule (he was frequently forced to write a film in a couple of afternoons, or farm it out to friends), no insight into how he was able to reconcile this furious commercial work with his vociferously proclaimed ambitions to be a serious literary artist.
China's central government has publicly proclaimed ambitions to turn nine of its universities into its own version of the Ivy League.
Under Lagos's energetic governor, much lauded in the international financial media, this crowded megalopolis of high rises, filthy lagoons, fierce traffic jams and sprawling slums, home to perhaps 21 million people, has proclaimed its ambition to become the region's, if not Africa's, premier business center.
The move to give them such freedom is likely to benefit London and the South-east, a magnet for business, while Osborne proclaims his ambition to bridge the North-South divide.
It proclaimed a broad ambition: to serve as a base for attacks throughout the region and to replace the infidel governments of Yemen and Saudi Arabia with a single theocratic state.
For his part, David Cameron, the Conservative leader, proclaimed an audacious ambition for the Tories "to replace Labour as the party of the NHS" in 2008.The intense political focus on the health service springs from continuing public worries about its condition.
Its open-plan offices, packed with young coders tapping away at their keyboards, are part of an ambition, proclaimed on noticeboards around the floor, for GE to become one of the world's ten biggest software firms.Like cars and planes, the sophisticated industrial machines GE makes these days have ever less metal and ever more lines of code.
The more bullish Sam Allardyce replaced him, thus realising his loudly proclaimed life's ambition, but there was a sense of suppressed relief emanating from the FA bosses who, following a newspaper sting, accepted his resignation after only 67 days, one sketchy victory and an outlay, all told, of around £4.5m.
Though Delos proclaims grand ambitions, only four titles have been released so far.
But in a straight fight between Shadow's eagerness to please and, say, Destiny's production values, sterility and self-proclaimed ambition, and there's only one winner for me, and it's not Bungie.
