His reportorial approach, combined with a decision to avoid what-ifs, skirts questions such as the validity of the domino theory in 1965 or America's military progress after 1968.
At first hindered by government-imposed censorship, taxes, and other restrictions, newspapers in the 18th century came to enjoy the reportorial freedom and indispensable function that they have retained to the present day.
Also of interest was Dave Eggers's The Circle, a return to more-traditional fiction after his ventriloquist memoir What Is the What (2006) and his reportorial nonfiction work Zeitoun (2009).
Similar reportorial gambits took her into sweatshops, jails, and the legislature (where she exposed bribery in the lobbyist system).
Now Butterfield is the focus of a new book by The Washington Post's Bob Woodward, who with Carl Bernstein formed the reportorial duo who unearthed the Watergate scandal.
McCain shook his head and said, "Yeah, but ... .. "Why are you so hard on yourself?" I asked, realizing that McCain's candor had accomplished a complete reversal of the traditional reportorial situation.
Often, her fiction drew its energy from contradictory qualities: her stories were minutely observed but also suspenseful, matter-of-fact but also fanciful, reportorial but also imaginative.
"I am a student of Sherman Kent," An says, referring to the Yale professor who helped found the C.I.A. Strategic intelligence, Kent wrote in his classic text, "Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy" (1949), is a "reportorial job" based on studying the "personalities" of world leaders.
Pham Xuan An, the psyops intelligence agent, was beginning to acquire the "reportorial" method that he would later employ so brilliantly as Pham Xuan An the Time correspondent.
Within, the stories gloriously meander with asides and observations that blend reportorial happenstance with narrative logic; his dialectical digressions and exotic incidentals suggest both the variety of inner experience that circumstances admit and the malleability of storytelling itself.
No longer reportorial, his pictures became theatrical, sometimes outrageously so, with a cast of characters so peculiar that the work often feels suspended between comedy and tragedy.
