The Murrow Boys.

• Author: McElwaine, Sandra

Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson Houghton Mifflin, $27.95 By Sandra McElwaine

In The Murrow Boys, co-authors Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson have set the scene for a saga of war and peace and human frailty: the good and bad times of revered CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow and his devoted acolytes. With a wealth of fascinating material, neatly tied together through a series of mini-biographies, Cloud and Olson give the reader a front-row seat for the cataclysmic events that helped shape America and the world before, during, and after World War II.

This trailblazing cadre of combat correspondents included the intellectual William L. Shirer, Murrow's original hire, and ultimately his closest confidant and alter ego; the master writer Eric Sevareid; the flamboyant Charles Collingwood; the intrepid Larry Leseur; and Mary Marvin Breckenridge, the sole woman to penetrate the inner circle of Murrow's macho male fiefdom.

As the war dragged on, the elite band grew. To fulfill Murrow's directive to "paint pictures in the air," the Boys parachuted out of crippled airplanes, went along on bombing raids over Germany (Murrow himself went on 25), and waded ashore under fire. They defied censors--and their own executives--in order to scoop their competitors. They wrote best-sellers, became the...