The Temptation to Do Good, by Peter F. Drucker (Harper & Row, 152 pp., $14.50)
In his old age, Peter Drucker has found himself a new hobby: writing novels. His second one, The Temptation to Do Good, is a tale of academic politics somewhat in the manner of Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe or Carlos Baker’s A Friend in Power-, it deals with the chain reaction of destructive gossip unleashed by Father Heinz Zimmerman, the president of St. Jerome University, who succumbs to “the temptation to do good” and grants an unwise favor to a spiteful faculty wife. This book is, at best, a novel by courtesy; devoid of any credible form of characterization, it reads more like one of those intricate case studies in upper-level management that Mr. Drucker passes out to his students at Claremont Graduate School than like a piece of fully imagined fiction. As long as you don’t expect anything much in the way of conventionally “novelistic” qualities, though, The Temptation to Do Good will engage your mind just as fully and satisfyingly as The Age of Discontinuity, Concept of the Corporation, and Adventures of a Bystander. Mr. Drucker’s subtle reflections on a Catholic university in crisis are worthy of the closest attention, even when inappropriately cast in the form of a novel.
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