'A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir,' by Donald Worster

"The nature lover and conservationist John Muir is at once famous and indistinct in the minds of most people. Doubtless there are ardent souls who could give a credible account of his life, but not many — not even among those who share the passion that led Muir in 1867, at age 29, to embark on a thousand-mile walk from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico and drove him to continue rambling hither and yon throughout his long life. Muir is revered but remote. He needs a substantial biography to bring him into focus.

Donald Worster aims to fill that gap. One of the founders of environmental history, the author of a well-received biography of the explorer and scientist John Wesley Powell and long a student of the landscape and history of the American West in particular, Worster brings superb scholarly credentials to the task. What he lacks is the ability to tell a story. Readers with a merely casual interest in Muir aren’t likely to persist. But the doughty ones who stay the course will be rewarded. The record of Muir’s life that Worster has scrupulously assembled, fascinating in its own right, takes on added significance as Worster sets it in context.

Worster frames his narrative in a surprising way, as an exemplary tale about the rise of liberal democracy. For authority he cites Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America”: “In a seldom-noticed chapter of the book, Tocqueville noted that the liberal democratic revolution seemed to encourage a strong feeling for nature. Its philosophical tendency, he wrote, is to tear down the traditional doctrines of Christianity and put in their place a new religion of nature, or what he called ‘pantheism.’ ”

What Tocqueville deplored, Worster celebrates. In his telling, Muir’s passion for nature is best understood alongside a mostly gradual, if at times dramatic, shift in American society toward racial equality, equality between men and women, and the like — a shift which, in Worster’s reckoning, entailed liberation from Christian orthodoxy. “Traditional Protestantism,” with its emphasis on economic productivity and self-denial, “was weakening its hold, and Muir was one of those cutting away at its roots.”

The tale begins in Scotland, in the seaport of Dunbar, where Muir spent his first 11 years. His father, Daniel, a successful merchant, was a man of intense religious convictions who was dissatisfied with traditional denominations. Ultimately Daniel Muir was drawn to the restoration movement associated with Alexander Campbell, which claimed to return to the unspoiled beginnings of the Christian faith, free of the excrescences that had built up in the intervening centuries. In 1849, the Muir family emigrated to the United States, where the Campbellite movement began, settling in Wisconsin. Young John was expected to work hard and long, and his father was a cruel taskmaster. Many years later, in “The Story of My Boyhood and Youth” (1913), Muir recalled the frequent beatings he received, sometimes accompanied by ranting sermons. Little wonder that Muir grew up to reject his father’s creed.

But Muir did not settle into bitterness. On the contrary: he took an inexhaustible delight in the natural world, seeing in it the hand of a God who differed greatly from the grim deity of his father.

To get a palpable sense of this delight, which was at the very core of Muir’s life, it would be helpful to supplement Worster’s account with another new book, ­Nature’s Beloved Son: Rediscovering John Muir’s Botanical Legacy, by Bonnie J. Gisel, with images by Stephen J. Joseph (Heyday Books, $45). These extraordinary images of plant specimens Muir lovingly collected, now digitally restored and enhanced, along with writings from his notebooks and elsewhere, show how he combined exacting attention to the stubborn particularities of nature with frankly mystical rapture at its splendors.

And yet, as Worster makes clear, Muir came close to setting aside this great love after he dropped out of the University of Wisconsin in the early 1860s. A rather aimless period followed until he found a job in Indianapolis at Osgood, Smith & Company, a steam-powered factory that made wooden hubs and spokes for wagon wheels. Muir excelled at the job and was soon promoted. He took an intense interest not only in the technical aspects of the factory but in questions of efficient management, going so far as to chart a typical day’s labor with the aim of “harmonizing all human behavior in the factory with the rhythm of machines,” as Worster writes. That John Muir, of all people, should thus anticipate the notorious “scientific management” studies of Frederick Winslow Taylor seems incredible. But Worster shrewdly observes at the outset of the book that Muir, “regardless of where he traveled, would remain a Lowland Scot all his days,” and he could easily have become another dynamic industrialist in the Scottish diaspora.

One day, while Muir was repairing a belt for a circular saw, a file flew into his face, temporarily blinding him. Although he healed nicely and regained his sight, the shock of the experience made a lasting impact. “Those weeks of darkness,” Worster writes, “had wrought a permanent change in his thinking, and that change would gather force during the spring and ensuing summer. He would never go back to Osgood, Smith. He would throw down his tools, abandon forever any career in industry or invention, and seek his own independent way on earth.”

In a film or a novel, this turning point might be dismissed as heavy-handed, but real life isn’t so fastidious. From this decisive moment, Muir went on to become “John Muir,” lean and bearded, roaming everywhere from the Yosemite Valley to the Mojave Desert, fighting the good conservation fight (though his heart was never in politics), writing articles and books that prepared the way for the modern environmental movement.

Worster reproaches his subject for backsliding: “As he aged and became more prosperous and prominent, with a national following to lead, he became more traditional in his beliefs — by no means reverting to a conservative, evangelical Christianity, but sounding more and more like a typical theist or Transcendentalist seeking beyond nature a God in heaven, a Creator of the world’s material forms, or a great Spirit hovering over the earth.”

Worster goes so far as to attribute this alleged change in Muir’s outlook to the effects of “money and fame,” which “had made him more of a conformist than he seems to have realized.” I see no warrant for this ungenerous judgment. Muir’s mature faith was formed by the time he left Osgood, Smith — and it always contained a strong sense of divine presence. When Muir decided to leave the factory behind, he wrote, he bid “adieu to all thoughts of inventing machinery”; instead he would spend his life “studying the inventions of God.” For Muir, as Worster acknowledges, this faith wasn’t threatened in the least by the ideas of Charles Darwin, whom he defended as a “devout and indefatigable seeker after truth,” though Muir vigorously rejected the notion that evolution disenchanted the world, leaving us to come to terms with nature red in tooth and claw.

When the Scottish mystic died, he left an estate worth the equivalent of more than $4 million today, thanks to hard work and frugality. He suffered disappointments, losses and vexations, and yet to the end possessed an unshakable assurance in the goodness of things that made him akin to Julian of Norwich: “All shall be well.”

A PASSION FOR NATURE

The Life of John Muir

By Donald Worster

Illustrated. 535 pp. Oxford University Press. $34.95

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'Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East,' by Martin Indyk

"With “Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East,” Martin Indykhas written a timely and valuable history of his years as one of the Clinton administration’s top Middle East specialists. Indyk managed regional policy in the White House and State Department and twice served as ambassador to Israel. He worked closely with Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak in their unsuccessful efforts to negotiate peace treaties with the Palestinians and Syria. He had a chillier relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu, whose tenure as prime minister in the late 1990s he sees as a negative turning point in which the peace momentum set in motion by Rabin was deliberately brought to a halt.

Indyk also helped design the Clinton administration’s dual containment policy against Iran and Iraq, a policy whose results look better today than they did eight years ago, thanks to the disastrous mistakes made by the Bush administration in both ­arenas. But Indyk isn’t looking for historical vindication. That would have made for a less interesting and useful book. His main interest is drawing the right lessons from the Clinton administration’s failures and frustrations in order to design wiser regional policies for the future.

Thanks to the November election results and the multiple Middle East crises the Obama administration now must confront, that future may be said to have arrived. And Indyk’s reassessments have been rendered even more relevant by the return of Clinton administration veterans to key jobs in the Obama administration, including the appointment of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.

Many of Bill Clinton’s Middle East policy goals now look exceedingly optimistic, perhaps unrealistically so. Israel reached no overall peace agreements with the Palestinians or with Syria. Iran’s weak, embattled re­formers spurned the Clinton administration’s tentative offers of re-engagement. Saddam Hussein continued playing cat and mouse with United Nations weapons inspectors — although, it later turned out, Iraq’s unconventional weapons programs were more effectively contained than Washington realized.

For all the disappointments, American prestige and influence in the region were far higher when Clinton left office than they are today. One main reason, Indyk notes, is that Clinton and his diplomats understood the crucial links between progress in ­Israeli-Arab peacemaking and the strength of America’s bargaining position with the countries in the Persian Gulf. Those connections are even more powerful today than they were in 2001.

But while the Clintonians got the big picture largely right, Indyk reports that they often tripped themselves up by mistakes of tactics or timing. For example, Clinton failed to grasp when Hafez ­al-Assad, then the Syrian president, was and was not serious about peacemaking, leading to botched summits and the failure to clinch an agreement that seemed within reach. Washington was often surprised and angered by the diplomatic thrusts and retreats of Ehud Barak, some of them, Indyk tells us, driven by advice from Clinton’s own pollsters, sent to help Barak shore up his domestic political support. And in the crucial months after the Camp David summit broke down, Clinton took too literally the multilayered messages and coded assurances he got from Yasir Arafat.

These mistakes flowed from a more basic problem — a failure to grasp that the Middle Eastern leaders the Clinton team was dealing with, Arab, Israeli and Ira­nian, had their own political needs and motives, which did not always coincide with Washington’s expectations or with the requirements of successful peacemaking. That is why Indyk titled his book “Innocent Abroad.” Indyk sees virtue in what he (too naïvely) characterizes as America’s innocence of ulterior motives. But he rightly sees the need to temper this innocence with a more realistic understanding of how Middle Eastern politics actually work.

Indyk’s own grasp of these ­larger Middle Eastern realities sometimes falters. He is too quick to reduce complex Arab societies to trite historical stereotypes about pharaonic traditions and desert kingdoms. He considers it legitimate for Israel to modify peace proposals to satisfy domestic constituencies but rarely thinks it legitimate for Arabs to do the same. Israel is a democracy, and the Arab societies it negotiates with are not. But no Arab leader is free to disregard public opinion on the fate of Palestinian refugees, sovereignty over Muslim religious sites in Jerusalem or the return of territories conquered by Israel in 1967.

Given the deep hole the United States has dug for itself over the past eight years, it will not be easy to reclaim the role of honest broker necessary for successful Middle East peacemaking. No one expects Washington to be strictly neutral between Israel and the Arabs, but it must again be perceived as reasonable and balanced in its expectations and demands. Following Indyk’s advice in “Innocent Abroad” would be a good place to start."

INNOCENT ABROAD

An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East

By Martin Indyk

Illustrated. 494 pp. Simon & Schuster. $30

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'Banquet at Delmonico's: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumpth of Evolution in America,' by Barry Werth

“Trying to write intellectual history is like trying to nail jelly to a wall,” the historian William Hesseltine once observed. Standing hammer in hand, there are three obvious ways to grasp hold of this slippery subject. The first is to focus on the thinkers or, to continue the craftsman metaphor, the producers of the ideas. The second method is to concentrate on the genetic development of the ideas themselves, or the product. The third is to focus on the consumers; that is, to trace the transmission and interpretations of these ideas among the wider population.

In “Banquet at Delmonico’s: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America,” Barry Werth seeks to show how the concept of evolution evolved in the decades after the Civil War, to become a dominant lens through which Americans viewed their rapidly changing world. A slippery subject, indeed. But Werth, the author of “The Scarlet Professor” and several other books, takes firm hold by keeping a tight, almost cinematic, focus on the intellectual producers — the fossil-hunters, biologists, preachers, economists, historians, industrialists, politicians and editors — “who accepted the overall truth of gradual development as a principle of biological descent, but disagreed sharply among themselves on ­other essential questions, and on the deeper implications for society, and for God.”

Werth depicts these ferociously ambitious thinkers as engaged in a Darwinian fight to the finish, each vying to lay out the most persuasive theories and win the widest reputation. This apt fusion of form and content makes for a surprisingly suspenseful and fast-paced story. Werth effort­lessly brings each eccentric character to life through colorful details and well-chosen anecdotes, while taking us on a whirlwind tour of Gilded Age politics and society. “Banquet at Delmonico’s” crackles with energy and wit.

The central rivalry was between two English titans, the naturalist Charles Darwin and the philosopher Herbert Spencer. Although his reputation has been eclipsed by Darwin, Spencer published his “doctrine of development” two years before Darwin’s “Origin of Species” appeared in 1859. It was Spencer who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” to refer to Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

Darwin and Spencer shared two basic tenets. The first was the universality of conflict, or the belief that all beings are in competition for limited life-sustaining resources. The second was the principle of adaptation, that those beings who best adapt to their changing environment will be the ones most likely to dominate resources and to reproduce. For a generation raised to believe in a static and harmonic world, bound by the laws of nature and predetermined by God’s plans, these ideas were revolutionary.

Beyond this, however, the two men generally parted company. Darwin was a scientist and a ruthlessly inductive thinker who formulated his hypotheses over 25 years of painstaking observation of plants, animals and fossils. Spencer, by contrast, was a deductive polymath who prided himself on his ability to spin all-encompassing theories out of limited information. Spencer believed that his “universal law of evolution” could apply to everything in the cosmos, including human psychology, language, morality, race, government and society.

Perhaps their biggest difference, however, was the issue of teleology, or ­whether evolutionary development implied a design or purpose. “The forces behind Darwinian evolution were random, mindless, blind, but for Spencer survival of the fittest also meant survival of the best, suggesting a cosmic value system,” Werth writes. “Progress wasn’t accidental; it was imperative, even programmed.” As Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron, philanthropist and Spencer acolyte, liked to say, “All is well since all grows better.” Or in the sharper tones of the Yale political economist William Graham Sumner, “A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be.”

It was Spencer’s wide-ranging attempts to apply the concept of organic evolution to society, rather than Darwin’s more cautious and narrow theories of biological change, that caught fire in the competitive, by-your-own bootstraps atmosphere of post-Civil War America. As Edward Livingston Youmans, the founder of The Popular Science Monthly and Spencer’s main American promoter, often observed, much of what was called Darwinism in the United States should actually be called Spencerism. This was especially true of what has become known, often pejoratively, as “social Darwinism,” or “the anti-philanthropic, anti-meddling side” of Spencer’s legacy, in Youmans’s words. Even so, by 1880 Spencer’s American followers had declared victory over Darwin in the race for popular influence.

I am hesitant to complain of any book that could make the abstruse debates of a dozen dyspeptic eggheads read like an intellectual thriller. Werth is a gifted writer, and his subject is especially important in our current economic crisis, as Americans are reassessing their belief that social progress will grow naturally out of unfettered free-market competition.

Yet complain I will. By keeping such tight hold on one portion of intellectual history — the thinkers thinking — Werth lets the other two aspects slip from his grasp: why and how average people absorbed these ideas into their lives and the worth of the ideas themselves. As a narrator, Werth never pauses the action long enough to step back, sum up and compare the barrage of complex and contradictory ideas. We never get the benefit of the historian’s broader perspective. This absence is especially odd because Werth is terrific at explaining on the fly. He nimbly leads us through many historical thickets, including the causes of the economic depression of the 1870s, the switchbacks of federal Indian policy, three thorny presidential elections and one presidential assassination.

The lack of extended asides matters less when discussing the relatively straightforward conflict between Darwinism and religion. The Deistic Darwinians state their position thus: “We know of old that God was so wise that he could make all things; but behold he is so much wiser than even that, that he can make all things make themselves.” To which the atheists and the Biblical literalists reply: “Well, I just don’t see it.” Another stalemate in the eternal battle between belief and unbelief.

But this lack of wider perspective matters a great deal as we get to the social and political implications of Spencerism. It quickly becomes clear that the concept of “the survival of the fittest” gives license to a multitude of contradictory views and schemes. It could be (and was) used to argue for both the extermination and the assimilation of the Native American population; it was the rhetorical weapon of both the imperialist and the pacifist, the government regulator and the laissez-faire businessman, the eugenicist and the caregiver.

As Worth’s book reaches its climax, this lack of perspective weakens the suspense he works so hard to create. Without occasional authorial guidance, it is difficult to decide which ideas — and thus which thinkers — to root for. We don’t feel the intellectual noose tightening, because we never tally up which logic falls apart, which theories are discredited by closer observation and which are disastrous in actual application. Werth closes with a stirring account of a famous banquet in New York in late November 1882. Scores of America’s leading men jammed into Delmonico’s Restaurant to officially declare Herbert Spencer the greatest thinker of the 19th century. Darwin had been dead only six months, but in the panegyric he prepared for the evening Edward Youmans placed the flag of Spencer’s victory squarely on Darwin’s grave. Charles Darwin, Youmans proclaimed, will remain “the most distinguished naturalist of the age, but Mr. Spencer will abide the honor of complete originality in developing this greatest conception of modern times, if not, indeed, of all time.” Yet Werth never even gestures to the historical irony that it is Darwin whose reputation lives on, while Spencer has been almost entirely forgotten. After all, it was Spencer himself who insisted that survival is prima facie proof of superiority."

BANQUET AT DELMONICO’S

Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America

By Barry Werth

362 pp. Random House. $27

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'Benjamin Disraeli,' by Adam Kirsch

"Benjamin Disraeli was a novelist, a statesman and a professing, practicing Christian, but to understand him one also needs to know that he was born a Jew. It was in the working out of the implications of this bare fact that his literary and political career, as well as his confessional affiliation, are to be understood. Or this, at least, is what Adam Kirsch contends in “Benjamin Disraeli,” his contribution to the “Jewish Encounters” series. “Disraeli’s Jewishness,” Kirsch writes, was “the central fact about him.” It was “both the greatest obstacle to his ambition and its greatest engine.” Does Kirsch, a contributor to The New Yorker and other publications, make good on his thesis?

For sure, he offers a rounded account of his subject. We learn that the proximate cause of Disraeli’s baptism was a quarrel his father had with his synagogue, that Disraeli himself had an incomplete education, that he was a novelist before he became a politician and was a politician for many years before he became a statesman. Kirsch acknowledges his political skills, his ability to outmaneuver his opponents, both by compromise and by an even greater radicalism, even his unattractive habit of identifying himself with the powerful instead of the powerless. Disraeli’s positions on the principal issues of the day are identified — his early opposition to free trade and his championing of the cause of empire, his criticism of Victorian utilitarianism and materialism, his defense of the established Church of England, his willingness to extend the franchise to defeat his liberal enemies and the eccentric grounds of his support for Jewish emancipation. All this can be obtained elsewhere, but Kirsch sets it out succinctly and authoritatively.

Disraeli was born in 1804, more than half a century before Jews were permitted to sit in the British Parliament. He died in 1881, just months before the first pogroms in Russia. That is to say, his life spanned the final years of one kind of anti-Semitism and the first years of a much more dangerous kind. The first kind sought to preserve the Jews in their pre-­emancipation condition, as far as was possible. It resisted liberal efforts to bring Jews into civil society on equal terms; in politics it maintained Christian suspicions of Judaism. It was not violent so much as exclusionary. When it failed at the legal level, it persisted at the social level — keeping Jews out of clubs, societies, universities and so on. It expressed itself in snobbery and ill-tempered condescension.

The second kind of anti-Semitism was quite different. It was predicated on beliefs in the immense power of the Jews, their malignity, their responsibility for everything that was wrong about the modern world. It was based, as Kirsch writes, “no longer on contempt but on fear and hatred.” It was lethal in its ultimate object. Jews here constituted not a vexation, but a menace.

It was in relation to the first kind of anti-Semitism that Disraeli defined himself. He sought to arrive at a self-definition that made him immune from being regarded as contemptible. He invented a bogus pedigree for himself (out of Spain, from Venice), and he talked up whenever he could the intellectual and social distinctions of the Jews as a whole. As part of this project, however, he inadvertently contributed to the emergence of the second kind of anti-Semitism.
Disraeli redefined Judaism as a matter of race rather than religion, and in his ­novels “Coningsby” (1844), “Sybil” (1845) and “Tancred” (1847), he celebrated occult Jewish power, always exercised behind the scenes, and always determinative. The mysterious Sidonia (who figures in all three novels), Kirsch correctly observes, “looks like nothing so much as an anti-­Semitic hate figure.” In “Coningsby,” Disraeli has Sidonia confide, “You never observe a great intellectual movement in Europe in which the Jews do not greatly participate.” “Russian diplomacy,” he says, is “organized and principally carried on by Jews”; the “mighty revolution” that will come in Germany is “entirely developing under the auspices of Jews.” “The myth of Jewish superiority,” Kirsch writes, “which Disraeli had advanced to counter the fact of social inferiority, now interacted with the paranoid superstitions of anti-Semites to disastrous effect.”

Disraeli was himself the object of anti-Semitic attack in the late 1870s because he insisted that the British national interest lay in supporting the Ottoman Empire against its Christian minority communities. For this piece of “realist” international politics, he was abused as “a very Hebrew of Hebrews,” the “Jew Earl, Philo-Turkish Jew and Jew Premier,” and the “traitorous Jew,” the “haughty Jew” and the “abominable Jew.” He was a leader of the “Turkophile party,” its “most rabid element.” He was the premier of a “Jew government.” He was a wizard, a conjurer, a magician, an alchemist. He was a “man of the East,” an “Asiatic.” “For the past six years we have had an Asiatic ruler.” He was a “wandering Jew,” “sprung from a race of migratory Jews.” He was raised “amid a people for whose ideas and habits he has no sympathy and little respect.” He was a “sham Christian and a sham Englishman.” He was the “charioteer” of a “Juggernaut car,” dragging “the whole of Christendom” over the rights of the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire.

Most cartoons gave him an immense nose and curly black hair; he was represented as “our modern Shylock.” Many of the illustrations related him to the Devil (“the most authentic incarnation of the Evil One”). At least two portrayed him in the act of ritually murdering the infant Britannia, and in one of these his great adversary, the liberal politician Gladstone, is the distressed mother, arriving perhaps too late to save her child. And there was a note sounded for the first time, but to be repeated many times thereafter: the Jews want war, against the national interest.

The anti-Semites of his day insisted that Disraeli was bogus in every respect but his identification with Jews and Judaism. A superficial reading of Kirsch’s book might conclude that its author agrees with this judgment. But that would be mistaken. First, because Kirsch shows that on the specifically political issues, Disraeli was promoting British interests, rather than anything that could be identified as a “Jewish” interest. And second, because Kirsch also demonstrates that Disraeli’s engagement with Jews and Judaism was an almost entirely literary affair. It was in his fiction, not in his political judgments, that he endeavored to counter “the myth of Jewish vulgarity and greed with an empowering myth of Jewish talent and influence.” “Disraeli’s imagination of Jewishness did what he needed it to,” Kirsch concludes. “It gave him the confidence to compete with the best-born men in England.”

Kirsch argues that the alternative career of Jewish leader was ever before Disraeli but that he did not want it. Though what Kirsch describes as “the dream” of Zionism had a “powerful allure” for Disraeli, “neither the conditions of Jewish life in Europe nor his own personality allowed Disraeli to play the role that would eventually fall to Theodor Herzl.” He imagined Judaism in ways that were psycho­logi­cally empowering, but paid little attention to the condition of actually existing Jewry.

Disraeli was not a man who was easily discouraged. His strong desire to impress others led him in the unusual direction of provocativeness rather than ingratiation. He did not want to escape his English milieu, he wanted to triumph within it. He did indeed triumph, achieving everything in his life that he set out to achieve. It was an extraordinary career, one to which Kirsch, in this elegantly written book, does considerable justice."

BENJAMIN DISRAELI

By Adam Kirsch

Illustrated. 258 pp. Nextbook/Schocken. $21

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'Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia,' by Jonathan Brent

"In January 1992, Jonathan Brent, the editorial director of Yale University Press, flew to the newly re-established nation of Russia in a bid to secure the rights to publish selected material from Soviet archives for the Annals of Communism project of his press. The previous month, Russia’s new leader, Boris Yeltsin, had declared that the hitherto secret party, state and K.G.B. archives would be opened, and scholars and publishers from around the world were eager to explore and exploit this potential bonanza. There was even heady talk of a Russian version of the Nuremberg trials, with the Communist Party in the dock.

It did not quite work out like that. There was no trial. The K.G.B. archives have been selectively closed, and many obstacles have been placed in the path of researchers; Vladimir Putin’s Russia began reimposing the power and prerogatives of the state in a way that owed as much to czarist as to Soviet traditions. Despite this, Yale University Press, along with the Hoover Institution and some other scholarly enterprises like the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project, have done extraordinary work and fundamentally changed many orthodox views of the Soviet era.

Brent’s engaging memoir, “Inside the Stalin Archives,” reveals as much about the grim realities of post-Soviet life and bureaucracy as it does about the archives themselves. Equipped with little Russian and few contacts, but with an almost palpable sense of decency and honest intentions that illuminate his book, Brent explains for the general reader as well as for specialists how he went about his work in the new Russia. In gloomy offices and run-down party buildings, and even in the old office of the secret police chief Lavrenti Beria, he offered fair contracts to Russian editors and researchers; they were paid as much as their Western counterparts, and promised respect and academic recognition as well.

Through Yeltsin’s wretched early years of poverty and dislocation in the 1990s and through the sleeker but more menacing times of Putin’s oil-enriched restoration of traditional authority, Yale University Press has published more than a score of important books. It has recently published newly discovered stenographic records of some 30 Politburo meetings in the 1930s and ’40s, and it is working on Stalin’s personal archive.

Brent is among the first to stress that none of this could have been achieved without the brave and honest work of Russian archivists and scholars in the Soviet period and after. He relates one haunting anecdote of a respected and elderly historian who just two years ago published a straightforward study that included the historically true statement that Red Army troops had occupied Lithuania even before Hitler’s invasion of 1941. Officially ­threatened with the loss of his apartment and pension, and retaliation against his daughter’s career if he dared repeat such allegations, he tells Brent: “It is a return to the 1970s. There is nothing to do about it.”

That is a telling point. Russia is not going back to the Terror of the 1930s or to the gulag, but to a softer and greedier form of power that has echoes of Leonid Brezhnev’s years and of prerevolutionary czarism. There will be no return to the period of Lenin’s 1922 memorandum, unearthed by Brent’s Yale project and published in “The Unknown Lenin,” which explains that it was only now “when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh . . . that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy, not stopping [short of] crushing any resistance.”

The Yale project has established beyond doubt that the Soviet authorities knew exactly what kind of social hell they were inflicting. Andrei Vyshinsky, the chief prosecutor during the purge trials of the 1930s and later the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, wrote a memorandum on his 1938 inspection tour of the gulag: “These prisoners have deteriorated to the point of losing any resemblance to human beings. . . . Somebody — obviously hostile — is arranging for people to die en route and to die upon arrival.” That is the classic Stalinist response; for any flaws in the system, sabotage must be responsible.

Among the gems in the archive, Brent tells us, is a cache of pornographic cartoons, idly sketched by Politburo members during their meetings. Stalin drew one graphic scene that illustrated his accompanying note: “For all the sins, past and present, hang Bryukhanov by the testicles. If the testicles hold out, consider him acquitted by trial. If they do not hold, drown him in the river.” Bryukhanov, a commissar of finances, was shot in 1938.

We know a lot about Stalin now, including his fondness for musicals (he even tried his hand at lyrics). After exploring his personal library with its copious annotations, Brent concludes that Stalin was as much intellectual as brute and calls him “an idealist in the sense that he believed completely in the primacy of ideas.” Brent has a point; Stalin believed in his ideas to the death, or as he put it: “mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts — yes, by his thoughts — ­threatens the unity of the socialist state.”

If one hero emerges from “Inside the Stalin Archives” it is Aleksandr Yakovlev, a former Columbia University graduate student and Soviet ambassador to Canada, and perhaps the real intellectual author of glasnost and perestroika. Yakovlev, badly wounded in the Nazi siege of Leningrad, was a traditional Russian intellectual who had a bumpy career in the party until Gorbachev brought him onto the Polit­buro to be its most liberal voice. After Gorbachev’s fall, Yakovlev continued to campaign for full disclosure of the Soviet past, and he tells Brent of one of the pivotal moments in the last days of the Soviet regime. In the winter of 1991, when Lithuanian crowds began demonstrating against Soviet rule, Gorbachev asked Yakovlev, “Should we shoot?”

If a single Soviet soldier fired a single bullet on the unarmed crowds, Soviet ­power would be over, Yakovlev replied. Bullets were fired, almost certainly not on Gorbachev’s orders, and the Soviet Union collapsed seven months later. What Yakovlev did not tell Gorbachev, although he thought it as he left the room, was that if the troops did not shoot, Soviet power would also be over. Its time had passed; the game was up. And the documents from the archives that Brent has managed to publish go a long way to explaining why."

INSIDE THE STALIN ARCHIVES

Discovering the New Russia

By Jonathan Brent

Illustrated. 335 pp. Atlas & Company. $26

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'The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America,' by Steven Johnson

"The Age of Categories is dead. Strangely, it never went by that name, or any name. Also curious is the fact that its boundaries are unclear: it overlapped the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason and some others, but succumbed to the atomizing atmosphere of the Information Age. Knowledge, it held, went hand in hand with nomenclature and delineation. As science developed, branches formed. Elemental to the college and university were academic departments, each of which came surrounded by high walls. A datum was deemed to fit within the confines of chemistry or sociology or the history of spoons or whatever, and that was more or less that.

Now we perceive the limitations of those old categories and scoff; we value multidisciplinarianism and genre-bending. The life of the mind is more chaotic, but also more exhilarating.

Often a new boundary-crossing perspective comes simply from going back to original sources — to the time before categories hardened. Study the famous late correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, Steven Johnson notes, and you find only five references to Benjamin Franklin and three to George Washington, but 52 to Joseph Priestley, the scientist/theologian who is often credited with the discovery of oxygen.

Johnson is an exemplar of the post-categorical age. In “Everything Bad Is Good for You,” he brought brain chemistry and other disciplines to bear on pop culture, and argued, among other things, that video games make you smarter, not dumber. “The Ghost Map,” his 2006 book about the great cholera epidemic in 19th-century London, mixed bacteriology, epidemiology and history. Johnson’s new book, “The Invention of Air,” shows its genre-mixing in its subtitle; it uses Priestley as the fulcrum for a story that blends “science, faith, revolution and the birth of America.” What enlivens the book is that Johnson does not simply describe the system within which Priestley and his contemporaries hashed out the features of classical science; he sets it against other, later systems for comprehending physical reality, showing laymen how far we have come from the classical age of science.

Johnson is better at popularizing science than at writing historical narrative. He opens his account at the London Coffee House in 1765, with Priestley meeting some of his fellow scientific dabblers; the scene-setting is meant to draw you in, but it feels both flat and overwrought. I say this not to be petty but to encourage the reader to push on. When Johnson discusses Priestley going on a “streak of legendary proportions” — a period when he made a series of major discoveries and inventions that would shape the course of science — he himself comes alive as a thinker, delving into the concept of “streaks of innovation” and where they come from, pulling and stretching “streak” so that the Renaissance shares a page with Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak.

Much of “The Invention of Air” is standard history-of-science; the topics have been covered before, and well: Jenny Uglow’s 2002 book “The Lunar Men” was a fuller, richer account of the interpersonal linkages of Priestley, James Watt, Erasmus Darwin and other Enlightenment tinkerers. But Johnson adds something valuable. “How much of the Enlightenment do we owe to coffee?” he asks at one point, then goes off into a little essay on coffeehouse culture and coffee’s effects on the brain. Elsewhere he offers a brilliant “Intermezzo” set in 300 million B.C., which roots Priestley’s work on oxygen, and the whole advent of life on earth as we know it, in the Carboniferous era, when supersize plant-life — 130-foot-high mosses, trees with three-foot leaves — led to a rise in the oxygen content of the atmosphere. The era didn’t last long (in the grand scheme of things), but in addition to changing the air, all that decayed vegetal mass eventually transformed into stored energy in the earth, which humans would begin to use in Priestley’s time to fuel the industrial age. Thus Johnson completes a rather enormous circle, as Priestley did much of his work literally on top of England’s coal fields.

The “long zoom” approach gives Johnson’s book power, makes it a tool for under­standing where we stand today, and makes it satisfying in several ways. For one, it allows Johnson to present a convincing case that Priestley’s most notable discovery was not oxygen (Carl Scheele had done similar work before him, and Antoine Lavoisier better understood the element) but rather carbon dioxide. So why is Priestley’s name more associated with oxygen? Because it is an element whose importance — mammals need it to breathe — was already apparent, and thus its discovery could be readily comprehended. Carbon dioxide, by contrast, was part of, as Johnson says, “a system, a flow of energy and molecular change,” which was not apparent until much later. Appreciating carbon dioxide required understanding the role plants play in the ecosystem. Ecosystem science, Johnson writes, “is a discipline that by nature is built out of the layered interactions between multiple fields of expertise,” including microbiology, chemistry, botany, geology and atmos­pheric physics. By performing a series of experiments with sprigs of mint under a glass, “Priestley had laid the cornerstone for that amazing body of knowledge, but the building itself didn’t become visible for a hundred and fifty years.”

“The Invention of Air” isn’t only about air, or science, however. There is the rest of the subtitle: “faith, revolution, and the birth of America.” As a theologian, Priestley was a bit of a wild man for his time; his scientific perspective led him toward a variety of materialism, and he wrote tracts against the worship of saints and the divinity of Jesus. This endeared him to Thomas Jefferson, who credited Priestley with developing a Deistic faith — shorn of supernatural paraphernalia — that he could believe in.

The last part of the book follows Priestley to America in the days after the Revolution, where he injects himself into the Federalist-Republican debate. Johnson connects Priestley’s politics — and that of his American colleagues — to science. “The American experiment was, literally, an experiment, like one of Priestley’s elaborate concoctions in the Fair Hill lab. . . . The political order was to be celebrated not because it had the force of law, or divine right, or a standing army behind it. Its strength came from its internal balance, or homeostasis, its ability to rein in and subdue efforts to destabilize it.”

One reason Johnson seems to have been drawn to Priestley is because of his style; Priestley was irrepressibly open, sharing his data and observations with whoever was willing to listen. This may have cost him some credit in discoveries, but to Johnson it makes Priestley the godfather of the open-source era. And this may be where Johnson’s genres blend together most fully. As a “compulsive sharer,” Joseph Priestley believed wholeheartedly in the free flow of information: in letting insights from science flow into the streams of faith and politics, in trusting in the human mind as the ultimate homeostatic system, able eventually to find its internal balance no matter how large the disruption. In his day, the French and American Revolutions were the major tests to that theory. We in our age have our own."

THE INVENTION OF AIR

A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America

By Steven Johnson

Illustrated. 254 pp. Riverhead. $25.95

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'Fifty Miles From Tomorrow: A Memoir of Alaska and the Real People,' by William L. Iggiagruk Hensley

"The Far North of the imagination is a cartography of cartoon proportions, made even more so by the sudden celebrity of Sarah Palin. In shorthand, Alaska is white, cold and exotic, or it’s a cruise ship fantasy of fast-melting glaciers and camera-friendly caribou seen between first and second helpings at the buffet table.

But every now and then someone comes along with a story that lays a serious claim to Alaskan authenticity, advancing the Outside’s view of what life is really like in the Great Land.
With his memoir of Alaska, the Inupiat elder William L. Iggiagruk Hensley offers a coming-of-age story for a state and a people, both still young and in the making. And while there are familiar notes in the Dickensian telling of this tale, Hensley manages to make fresh an old narrative of people who arise just as their culture is being erased — be they “Braveheart” Scotsmen or outback Aborigines. His book is also bright and detailed, moving along at a clip most sled dogs would have trouble keeping up with.

Hensley’s life runs from the Alaska at “the twilight of the Stone Age,” as he says, to the petro-dominated modern state with its thriving native corporations and ­billion-dollar energy schemes. Hensley saw it all, and shaped much of it.

On one level, his story is first-person history, for it was in Alaska that the government tried something radically different in settling land claims of indigenous people. Instead of reservations, natives set up regional corporations — everyone a shareholder with an initial stake of land and money in what Hensley calls “the most sweeping and fairest Native American land settlement.”
On a personal level, the book is riveting autobiography. Anyone who thinks times are hard now need only consider a winter spent on an ice floor under a sod roof, and the prospect of a life-or-death journey to the outhouse.

“For me, Alaska is my identity, my home and my cause,” he writes. “I was there, after all, before Gore-Tex replaced muskrat and wolf skin in parkas, before moon boots replaced mukluks, before the gas drill replaced the age-old tuuq we used to dig through five feet of ice to fish.”
Hensley was raised just north of the Arctic Circle on the shores of Kotzebue Sound. On a clear day, he probably could see Russia from his house, for it’s a mere 90 miles across the Bering Strait. The international date line is 50 miles away, and hence the title.

The first part of the book — to me, the most fascinating — is a depiction of the nearly lost world of a North American hunter-gatherer community. Born in 1941, Hensley was raised by his mother’s cousin in a village of 300 people with no electricity, no lights, no telephones. Winter is a nine-month affair, mostly dark. Women were prized for having strong teeth, the better to crimp dried sealskins into ­mukluks.

The perils included not just 50-below-zero weather, but random cruelties of the primitive life. An episode of botulism — fermented walrus meat, a delicacy, went bad — killed Hensley’s adopted father.

Though it sounds harsh, Hensley writes favorably of the boy’s world of hunting, fishing and exploring under the midnight sun, and the joy of having an ancient connection to a place: “There are few people in America who can say that their forebears were here 10,000 years ago. That is a powerful thing.”

The story of his early life reads like “Angela’s Ashes” without the baroque sense of misery. The oppressors here are missionary and government do-gooders, insistent on eradicating native culture in a rush to assimilation. Hensley notes that his parents’ generation was schooled by people who forced children to write “I will not speak Eskimo” 100 times on the board.
At 15, Hensley was sent to Christian boarding school in Tennessee, where — naturally — he learned about sex and Southern cooking. He couldn’t stand the food, citing pimento cheese sandwiches in particular.

An excellent student, athlete and, by his own account, boyfriend, he went on to college at George Washington University, a series of oddball jobs and a political career in a time of tumult and possibility.

He became a Thomas Jefferson of sorts for native people after a vast oil field was discovered in Prudhoe Bay. Led by Hens­ley, natives held up the state’s attempt to exploit those oil riches until aboriginal land claims were settled.

The resolution came in the form of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, awarding 44 million acres of land and nearly $1 billion to the first Alaskans. It set up a series of regional corporations, some of which became Fortune 500 companies.

But the rush to modern life took a big psychic toll. Alcohol, suicide, domestic violence — the familiar litany of native social ills — prompted a long journey of the soul for Hensley. As with every other episode of his life, it is told here with a Far Northern twist and an intimacy with the land and the heart. "

FIFTY MILES FROM TOMORROW

A Memoir of Alaska and the Real People

By William L. Iggiagruk Hensley

Illustrated. 256 pp. Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24

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'Elsewhere, U.S.A.,' by Dalton Conley

"Pity the poor Organization Man. Once upon a time, he ruled the American Century with his natty fedora and his quest for “belongingness.” Sure, every­one loves him in “Mad Men,” but these days his wife makes more money than he does, his kids take more meetings and the senior v.p. next door has started wearing age-­inappropriate indie rock T-shirts. Even his shrink finds his pre­occupation with the authentic self passé. And the sociologists can’t stop writing his obituary.

Dalton Conley is the latest. “A new breed of American has arrived on the scene,” Conley, a professor at New York University, declares in “Elsewhere, U.S.A.,” his compact guidebook to our nervous new world. Instead of individuals searching for authenticity, we are “intraviduals” defined by shifting personas and really cool electronics, which help us manage “the myriad data streams, impulses, desires and even consciousnesses that we experience in our heads as we navigate multiple worlds.” The denizens of our “Elsewhere Society,” Conley argues, “are only convinced they’re in the right place, doing the right thing, at the right time, when they’re on their way to the next destination. Constant motion is a balm to a culture in which the very notion of authenticity . . . has been shattered into a thousand e-mails.”

But that constant motion doesn’t quite take the form we might think. Americans, Conley argues, are no longer the geographically rootless nomads of our national mythology. These days, once we have children we change partners — in a pattern he calls “dynamic polygamy” (basically serial monogamy, but kinkier) — more often than we change locations. (Or jobs: the percentage of long-term workers at large firms has actually increased.) And for all our sense of rising insecurity, individual incomes are not more volatile than they used to be. It just feels that way, thanks to the two-earner household in which women enter and exit the work force according to shifting child-rearing demands.

What has changed, Conley argues, is our sense of time and value. In an “economic red shift,” the merely affluent feel themselves falling behind the superrich even as they pull ahead of the average worker. And so they clock endless hours in the online “portable workshop,” mindful of the opportunity cost of not working. Finally, the new “price culture” puts a dollar figure on everything while undermining confidence in our ability to know the value of anything, including ourselves. “The division between price and value has increasingly collapsed under the weight of economic rationality that spreads like wildfire across sectors of our existence,” Conley writes. “In today’s economy, many are dogged by the question ‘What was my value added?’ ”

The “constant fear of being exposed, cut out or outsourced,” he argues, “is the principal pathos of the era.” But he’s not talking about assembly-line workers looking anxiously toward China. Instead, he cites the competition between ophthalmologists and “community-college-educated technicians” over Lasik surgery and a Harvard Business Review article about “fraud anxi­ety” among C.E.O.’s that was “voted third best for 2005.” And then there’s the vanishing airline snack. Instead of complimentary peanuts, Conley laments, passengers are now given a sales pitch, capped with the announcement that “American Airlines is happy to accept American Express or other major credit cards.” How many billable hours were spent developing that cross-marketing deal, he wonders, and what was it worth? As with Amex, so with all of us. “Value is elusive” in our “symbolic economy,” he writes. “So our own worth is therefore elusive, too.”

For a big-picture guy, Conley seems strangely preoccupied with free food. Making the obligatory visit to Google headquarters, he’s “stunned” by the no-charge cafeteria, not to mention the valet dry cleaning, roving massage therapists and giant employee sandbox (but no on-site childcare). Google “epitomizes the Elsewhere Ethic better than any other company,” except that the Googlers happily riding the Wi-Fi-enabled shuttle to their “(n)office” (as Conley hopes we’ll start calling it) aren’t anxious, fragmented or bitter about their leaders’ private 767. “I tried my best to foment discontent,” Conley writes, “but there was none lurking there. . . . I must admit it freaked me out, in the same way that zombies in a horror movie might.”

Conley frets about the “psychic violence” of our increasingly unequal service economy, but his class-consciousness translates mostly into an acute sensitivity to embarrassment. Like an episode of “Seinfeld,” “Elsewhere, U.S.A.” tends to move from one baroquely awkward social experience to the next. At an upscale restaurant, Conley is mortified to discover that the waiter is an old dorm mate from his “elite public university.” He cringes when his sister gets bossed by the nanny. Recalling the time he went to see “Do the Right Thing,” he confesses to not joining the people who walked out in protest when the theater showed a commercial. “I knew they were ‘doing the right thing,’ ” he writes. “But I didn’t want to miss the . . . movie. . . . I resolved the dispute between my multiple selves by giving in to the desire to see the film.” In the Elsewhere Society, he explains, “guilt is often the moral ax that serves to split our selfhood into intravidualistic fragments.”

Conley is a lively if sometimes overheated writer, and his book usefully summarizes all sorts of far-flung academic research while repurposing the latest pop-sociological idea entrepreneurship, from Chris Anderson’s “long tail” to Richard Florida’s “creative class.” But what’s Conley’s value added? The parts of the book that feel true also feel very familiar, while the rest feels less like a coherent argument than a series of disconnected riffs on The Way We Live Now. Call it stand-up sociology: Conley is much exercised about T-shirts, bottled water, personal trainers, “the proliferation of eating options at sports stadiums,” and people who bus their own tables at McDonalds. Tip jars, he argues, threaten democracy and “cheapen smiles in general.” And “the rise of Skymall” is evidence that “the very concept of public space is collapsing before our eyes.” (He really must spend a lot of time on airplanes.)

Refreshingly, Conley doesn’t tell us to smash our BlackBerrys, shred the takeout sushi menu and get back to the family dinner table. “Do not hold yourself to a mythologized standard of the past,” he writes in his conclusion, before falling prey to the same confirmation bias he mocked earlier in the book, when he chided social science research for “magically” confirming that middle-class child-rearing practices are best. “The successful professional parents,” he boldly predicts, “will be the ones who manage to blend their child-rearing duties with their professional ones, making their children comfortable in high-pressure, high-status work environments.” Follow the citation to some intriguing research conducted in the Conley home (n)office. “Here I must confess to years of screaming at my wife for trying to involve the kids in her work life as well as yelling at her to turn off her cellphone during ‘family time.’ I was wrong, and she was right. . . . But I can’t bring myself to apologize in the main text, so I am relegating this to an endnote.”

ELSEWHERE, U.S.A

By Dalton Conley

221 pp. Pantheon Books. $24

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'The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes,' by Bryan Burrough

"It may be hard for outsiders to accept, but there is, in fact, a Texas canon. Opinions vary, but my list would include T. R. Fehrenbach’s “Lone Star,” John Bainbridge’s “Super Americans,” John Graves’s “Goodbye to a River,” Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove” and his nonfiction classic “In a Narrow Grave,” certain Molly Ivins columns, the Texas portions of Willie Morris’s “North Toward Home,” Billy Lee Brammer’s “Gay Place,” ­Tommy Thompson’s vastly underrated “Blood and Money” and Edna Ferber’s “Giant.” Not all of these works are great literature, and not all of them were written by ­Texans, but they’re all required reading if you want to understand the Texas soul. It’s a complicated thing, a roiling psychic stew of narcissism, ambition, brilliance, humor, vengefulness, pettiness, fearlessness and, of course, a bottomless pit of need. (For what? Pretty much ­everything.)

The irresistibility of the Texas rich in particular has persisted to this day, even as the most recent Texas president was leaving the White House in ignominy. Our super­rich are the gift that keeps on giving, a consistent and gloriously entertaining reminder that life can always be lived bigger, better and, sometimes, appallingly dumber than the average human mind can imagine. Bryan Burrough, a co-author, with John Helyar, of the seminal “Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco,” and a native Texan himself, would seem a natural to chronicle this world, and to a large part, in “The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes,” he succeeds.

Every good history needs a conceit, and Burrough has attempted nothing less than a history of modern (as opposed to contemporary) Texas as told through the lives of Roy Cullen of Houston, Sid Richardson of Fort Worth, and Clint Murchison and H. L. Hunt of Dallas, men who are — it seems almost impossible to this Texan — fast fading into history. “If Texas Oil had a Mount Rushmore, their faces would adorn it,” Burrough writes. “A good ol’ boy. A scold. A genius. A bigamist. Known in their heyday as the Big Four, they became the founders of the greatest Texas family fortunes, headstrong adventurers who rose from nowhere to take turns being acclaimed America’s wealthiest man.” Those who don’t know these stories will find “The Big Rich” lively reading, replete as it is with the requisite anecdotes of ­Texas excess: Hunt maneuvering among his three families, Cullen staging a war bond drive that included professional wrestlers performing in tandem with the local symphony. Here is the stereotypical rich lout wearing and then discarding $100 bills as bow ties, and another riding his pet lion to get the mail. Here, too, is the opening of the fabled Shamrock Hotel in Houston, an event that Time magazine said “combined the most exciting features of a subway rush, Halloween in a madhouse and a circus fire.”

But Burrough, with his gifts for both synthesis and lyricism, brings more to the table than that. His set pieces describing the events at Spindletop, the gusher that started it all, and the rise and fall of the wildcatter Glenn McCarthy (the model for Ferber’s Jett Rink) are impeccably rendered, as are the tales of many other fabled characters. Burrough has also done estimable new reporting, showing links between Texas money and national politics that stretch back far earlier than the days of Lyndon B. Johnson; while recording the ups and downs of that relationship, he shows how the stereotype of the Texas oilman shifted from beloved buffoon to evil greed-head to would-be assassin. (See J. R. Ewing, and Oliver Stone’s “JFK.”)

Texas in the early part of the 20th century was little more than a lumber and cotton colony of the East Coast, with nothing but resentment to show for it. The men who would change all that appeared different on the surface but, deep down, were remarkably similar: Cullen, for instance, grew up in a family of reduced circumstances, read Dickens and dreamed of restoring his mother to “the massive white plantation home he would build someday, with porticoes and trellises and gardens, just like the beloved family plantation the hated Union men had burned.” Murchison, “saddled with the body of a snowman — big head, beanbag nose, no neck to speak of — and a face like a dish of melted ice cream,” was similarly steely, but where Cullen was intuitive, he was a man of science, able to do complex calculations in his head. The son of an East Texas banker, he teamed up early with Richardson, the son of a local bar owner, in what would become a lifelong partnership of untold riches and Texas-size pranks. Hunt, the richest man in the world at various times in his life, was, arguably, the craziest of the four, possibly certifiable.

But all these men were fiercely independent, deeply suspicious of Yankees and undoubtedly brilliant, though each had a weakness for believing that just because he was brilliant in one way, he was brilliant in all ways. Borrowing on a grand scale was a rule of the game: “If you’re gonna owe money, owe more than you can pay,” Murchison advised. “Then the people can’t afford to foreclose.” Not surprisingly, the four men also possessed the oilman’s cast-iron optimism, which Cullen, coming home from drilling one too many dry holes, expressed simply as “Tomorrow’s another day.”

Burrough deftly advances these men through history, showing how they made their vast fortunes in one five-year window, from 1930 to 1935, thanks largely to the failures of the major oil companies during the Depression. Along the way to becoming the richest men in the world, they built their mansions — Cullen got his columned dream home, Murchison and Richardson bought competing islands off the Gulf Coast — and made ample use of private planes. (On a visit to the Murchisons’ Mexican ranch, the Duchess of Windsor was flown to Tampico to get her hair done.)

All employed their wealth to spread their political views: Cullen and Hunt railed against Jews, blacks and Communists while championing the far right; Murchison and Richardson cozied up to every pol from Franklin Roosevelt to Dwight Eisenhower to Lyndon Johnson. They tried to unseat Vice President Richard Nixon and got John Connally to grease many a wheel. (J. Edgar Hoover was another ally and sometime investor.) Texas oil fueled prosperity in the 1940s and ’50s, which made the Big Four political kingmakers on a scale never seen before; the growth of (cheaper) Middle Eastern oil made them bullies as they tried to hang on to what was theirs. In particular, all but Richardson supported Senator Joseph McCarthy, an alliance that eventually cost them dearly. “All they do is hate,” said Sam Rayburn, the speaker of the House and a fellow Texan.

Resurrection would come, to some extent, with the next generation. In a wonderful bit of positive thinking, Burrough posits that Clint Murchison Jr. assuaged Dallas’s post-assassination shame by building America’s team, the Cowboys.

It’s all there and more, which is this ambitious book’s strength and its weakness. By the time we get to the successes and failures of the next generation — Clint Jr.’s excesses with drugs and women; Bunker and Herbert Hunt’s illegal-­wiretapping and silver-cornering fiascoes; the takeover of Disney by the Bass brothers (Richardson’s great-nephews) — the book starts to feel more like a marathon than a jaunt. By the end I was longing to sit on one of Murchison’s verandas, drink in hand, and savor a single good story while a cool breeze blew through the trees. Murchison might have said the author bit off a little more than he could chew. Of course, that puts Burrough in some very good company.


THE BIG RICH
The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes
By Bryan Burrough
Illustrated. 466 pp. The Penguin Press. $29.95
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'Ballet's Magic Kingdom: Selected Writings on Dance in Russia, 1911-1925,' by Akim Volynsky

"This is a fantastic book. We find out not only about the vicissitudes of Pavlova’s alimentary canal but also about the skeletal structure of her knees, the size of her arch, the height of her jumps, her “sensuous” lower lip and the slope of her “ravishing” shoulders. All this and a clear explanation of the layers of her ample soul. What more could one want to know about the ballerina, long dead, whose name evokes, more than any other, the art she practiced — the art that plumbs the depths of the physical to reach, on occasion, the mystical? “Ballet’s Magic Kingdom” is the first English-language edition of the dance writings of Akim Volynsky, one of the greatest writers on ballet (don’t worry, nobody has heard of him) in the whole 350 or so years of the art form’s relatively brief history. The book, covering the years 1911-25, has been lovingly edited and translated by Stanley J. Rabinowitz, a professor of Russian at Amherst who directs the college’s Center for Russian Culture and holds the Henry Steele Commager professorship there.

The list of great writers on dance is short; a three-dimensional, nonverbal art, existing only in transient live performance, provides an excellent disincentive to use language. Not since the precise and furious writings of Lincoln Kirstein have we read (in English) such informed, cultured and unapologetically opinionated prose on ballet. This book is indeed, as Rabinowitz writes in his excellent introduction, Volynsky’s “hymn to the sublime art of dance.” His uncompromising, impassioned stance is a refreshing reminder of classical ballet’s ability to transcend the corporeal — especially while we endure our current long dance recession, when most dancers are just, well, dancing. (Looking for the next Balanchine, who died only 26 years ago, is an exercise in nostalgic vanity: we haven’t had another Shakespeare yet, and he died almost four centuries ago.)
Volynsky, perversely and rather irresponsibly, does not refer to Louis XIV, whose Académie Royale de Danse (founded in 1661, 45 years after Shakespeare’s death) codified the classical ballet language — pas de basque, jeté, glissade, piqué, cabriole, fondu, rond de jambe, gargouillade. He prefers to trace the art back to classical Greece and believes, as Rabinowitz wrote in The Russian Review in 1991, that “balletic dance alone preserved the character of the Hellenic sense of plastic art.” Volynsky finds in it the fruition of the philosophies of Kant, Spinoza and Nie­tzsche.This guy is not confusing tutus with froufrou.

The book is a must for anyone claiming a love of ballet, but it is also the perfect antidote for anyone — I know you’re out there — who still thinks ballet is merely a pretty spectacle with pretty girls (not that it also isn’t). If you can wade through Volynsky’s sometimes dense but always hugely entertaining and surprising text, you will never look at a toeshoe, a tiara or a tendu, not to mention an entire ballerina sporting all of the above, in the same way again. You will realize that you are looking, according to Volynsky, at a being truly not of this world, but here, for now, in this world, who can show you a kind of beauty and truth you will not find anywhere else — not in a book or painting, not in science, not in meditation, prayer or jogging, not in organic hibiscus juice and not even in death, should you survive it.

But then Volynsky was there, in the audience, witnessing firsthand the mythic Russian ballerinas of the early 20th century who have come to symbolize that other­worldly creature from a magic kingdom who twirls on the tips of her toes and then, inevitably, ineffably, bourréesaway into the wings of eternity where she resides. Clearly, he was there for us, to bring a real sense of just who were Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina, Mathilda ­Kshesinskaya, Olga Preobrazhenskaya, Agrippina Vaganova, Elizaveta Gerdt, Vera Trefilova and the haunting Olga Spessivtseva. He reports on Isadora too, and, despite an eye wounded, offended, by her overt rejection of ballet’s lexicon, he allows that in her, culture “has become flesh,” and “from her ardent heart she has erected an icon to the personal.” Not that he valued the “personal” very highly; Volynsky was a classicist to the core.

Chaim Leib Flekser was born in 1861 into an Orthodox Jewish family of booksellers in Ukraine. At 18 he moved to St. Petersburg, where he lived for the rest of his life. He became a lawyer, with a dissertation in philosophy, but quickly got involved in the bustling cultural life of the city. For the next 40 years he was a highly respected, always controversial editor and prolific modernist critic, publishing under the name Akim Volynsky. “Only idealism — the contemplation of life through the idea of the spirit, through the idea of divinity and religion — can explain art,” he wrote. “I value books more than life,” he stated, and wrote ones on Dostoyevsky, Leonardo da Vinci and the novelist Nikolai Leskov. There was a brief early marriage.

By the first decade of the 20th century, Volynsky’s exacting literary standards, arrogance and strident pronouncements had alienated everyone — and most publications — so he turned to his beloved ballet, devoting himself to its cause for the remaining years of his life. In 1917 he took over the directorship of the School of Russian Ballet and gave to it, in the words of an acquaintance, “his last coins.” At his death he left more than 350 dance articles; a treatise on classical ballet, “The Book of Exaltations” (which constitutes the second half of this book); and a “monumental” unpublished book on Rembrandt. He lived like a monk in what was described as “an empty room, with a solitary kitchen table in the middle of it, and an iron bed.” He needed space for an interior existence of such passion and idealism as to make one feel that furniture is a bourgeois distraction from life’s true treasures. Like Anna Pavlova.

“Pavlova speaks and sings in her dancing,” Volynsky writes in 1911. “Her ebullient personality, full of fire and light, does not prevent her from magically falling into the flow of the pure modern figures that flow one from the other with the same lightness and naturalness with which ideal similarities of mathematics conceptually grow and silently combine in their beautiful dance of elevated and looping truths.” One of the delights in reading Volynsky is his complete comfort in moving from global, spiritual concerns to penetrating detail of an almost too intimate nature:

“Pavlova’s foot is charming — small and narrow. The structure of her leg is right, but somewhat concave in the knees. Her kneecaps almost touch. This is why Pavlova lacks the perfect turnout one finds in Vera Trefilova. . . . Pavlova’s legs are lanky and muscular, taut like a goat’s. . . . In reality, Pavlova’s elevation, if strictly measured, would not outdo Vaganova’s. . . . Onstage she flies at rapid speed up and down, obliquely, near the floor, against all logic, against all the laws of gravity, with her widely opened, dark brown eyes, in which fire burns.”

Finally, Volynsky gets to the nitty-­gritty of this woman, who he says is “more . . . from God than from nature,” with an astonishing report on her eating habits. “Pavlova furiously flits around all day,” he writes. “She has breakfast and then eats nothing until the evening. But 15 minutes before the curtain goes up, she quickly gulps down five ham or roast-beef sandwiches. And then she flies onto the stage.” Five? Like a goat?

Volynsky’s commitment to Pavlova is sorely tested by her decision to travel outside Russia, to those “degrading . . . nightspots” we call theaters. It was, however, on these missionary voyages that she brought the art form to millions, in all corners of the world, like no one before her. He suggests that she is whoring herself to money, while in fact she whored herself to Terpsichore. “The rays of light cast into the soul of this artist by the Creator of the universe,” he insists, “will undoubtedly be replaced there with the pathos of market transactions from which one can mint a fortune. A column of dust circles the eaglet, which has fallen onto the road of vanity and deceit.” Capitalist horrors aside, one feels in Volynsky the agony of an abandoned lover.

He gives us a rare and gripping close-up of the 18-year-old Georgi Balanchivadze (before he was George Balanchine) as a new member of the Maryinsky company, dancing the Candy Cane in Act II of “The Nutcracker.” It is worth quoting at length:

“I must mention the great success provoked by a still quite young and unusually musical artist. Balanchivadze dances the buffoon with a hoop . . . with an energetically expressed and folksy rhythm. He stands in the hoop slantwise, in profile to the audience, and totally sparkles in the silvery design of his costume. His face is deathly pale from agitation. The youth is tall and full of wild intensity. He waves the hoop and tosses it under his feet. Then he encircles himself with it and rushes downward like a hurricane. In his day Romanov won fame for this number, but now Balanchivadze has gained the upper hand with his young, lively and superbly disciplined talent.”
Volynsky writes the following year, 1923, of his longing for “a ballet master for the new epoch” when “everything in classical dance, with its characteristic means and indigenous voices, will burst into an eternal Hyperborean hymn. Everything will be explained and justified in the rays of Apollonian sunlight: the toes, turnout, the hidden wisdom of the human body itself.” Five years later — two years after Volynsky’s death, in 1926 — as if answering that call, Balanchine would choreograph Stravinsky’s “Apollo,” and the age of Hyperborean Balanchine was begun.

In his assessment of individuals, Volynsky brings to much-maligned elitism an invigorating level of disdain and demonstrates truly top-notch ruthlessness. He really has it in for Mikhail (Michel) Fokine, calling his choreography in “Carnaval” “pantomimic bric-a-brac” and in “Les Préludes” simply “painful to think about.” Fokine, he declares, “carries out a policy that abandons the spiritual for the everyday, the great for the trivial. It is clear that we are dealing here with a catastrophe on the stage.” In “Egyptian Night,” “the blunders continue,” Volynsky reports from the end of his rope, “and there are totally unnecessary bas-reliefs.” I, too, hate unnecessary bas-reliefs.

He of the take-no-prisoners school of criticism says of Agrippina Vaganova, whose name graces the school of the Kirov to this day, that she is “remarkable,” but then writes of “her flaws in conscious moral substance”; still, “one should not demand from a talented person what is impossible for her.” Ouch!

Aside from priceless portraits of dancers, Volynsky devotes himself to the language of ballet and its meanings. If you’ve never been quite sure what an arabesque really is, Volynsky explains: “The leg thrown back into an arabesque is, of course, nothing but a symbol of consciousness in its forward rush.” In fouettés, he writes, “the soul becomes the arena of the most intense feelings, from healthy and natural to pathological and demonic.” (“Swan Lake” requires 32 of these demonic interludes in quick succession, resulting, historically, in more than a few pathological ballerinas.)

As for the poor pirouette, often “a lamentable fiasco on the stage,” Volynsky does not find its best exponents in “the inhabitants of the Scythian-Sarmatian valleys. The Russian woman, marvelous material for psychological novels, is too capriciously unsettled and insecure in her aesthetic emotions, too bifurcated between good and evil in the internal structure of her character. Pirouette requires a monolithic character, the exultation of the infinite, and absolute integrity and faithfulness to the guiding center.” And in those binding, merciless satin slippers — pointe shoes — that allow a dancer to scale the summit of human height, Volynsky finds the apotheosis of “vertical culture,” culled from Kant, where “everything will ascend upward, . . . the conscious spirit in its highest moral and individual soaring.” The body, to Volynsky, is “a scroll of ideas,” and ballet a moral quest or nothing.

In “The Book of Exaltations,” Volynsky provides a mesmerizing discourse covering everything and anything in classical dance. We get the positions, the classroom, the ballets, the types of dancers, the music, the choreography, the exaltation of it all. He delves into the deeper meaning of turnout, upon which all ballet is based, and sees it extending not just over the legs but “over all parts of the body,” including the eyes, where “contact is now made not only with the woman’s body but with her soul. . . . The hysterics of desire vibrate within us, passing through laughter and tears. This is what turned-out eyes are!” Some might call them roving eyes, but I bow to Volynsky.

He connects a dancer’s elevation to “the sensation of flight” and then proceeds on a delightful flight of his own: “Man is born with Taborian cliffs within, with cupolas, steeples and all kinds of heights, and from childhood his will crawls and clambers higher and higher unless its natural growth is prematurely interrupted by a bad education or tragic fate.” (Mount Tabor, in Galilee, is said to be the place of Christ’s Transfiguration.) The poetic sequences continue rather sensuously with his commentary on woman — “a botanical creature” — and her body, which for him, like Balanchine, is what ballet is all about. “A kind of invisible aquatic element flows through a woman’s body,” he writes, “and when you come close to her you feel the fresh spray of this everlasting cascade. When you find yourself among women, especially at balls, you literally begin to swim in the living, collective fluid of life that surrounds you.” Whoa, boy! A neoprene tux, perhaps?

IT was, in the end, the “botanical” ballerinas who owned Volynsky — and one in particular. “In your articles there is something immortal,” Gorky wrote to Volynsky, “a sadness about the meaning of life and a regret over its shallowness in our day, a passion for the mysteries of existence and much beauty and pain.” And nothing produced more ecstasy, or despair, for Volynsky than the divine Olga Spessivtseva, the ballerina he called “the weeping spirit”:

“This is a talent completely harmonious, balanced and consummate in its appearance, which is where all its wealth has gone. . . . Her gentle, slightly protuberant forehead — somewhat in the spirit of Carlo Dolci — is feminine and charming, like an oval of a delicate plant. . . . The permanent stamp of undying childhood lies in this artist. . . . This is a spirit that weeps about its limits. . . . She does not ignite the audience with the fire of her talent but extends over them the palpitating cover of all those tears, as yet unborn but already tormenting her heart.”

Volynsky’s acute sensitivity proved prescient about this numinous dancer’s fragility. Spessivtseva spent 20 years — long after Volynsky’s death, from 1943 to 1963 — institutionalized after several nervous breakdowns, and then lived the remaining 28 years of her long, sad life cloistered at the Tolstoy Foundation nursing home in New York State. She died at the age of 96, forgotten by all but a few.

The young composer Valeriyan ­Bogdanov-Berezovsky described how Volynsky, Spessivtseva and he often had tea together in St. Petersburg in the early 1920s, when she was at the height of her career. Volynsky “was already an old man, unattractive, wrinkled,” Bogdanov-Berezovksy wrote, with “a slightly sagging lower lip and a penetrating glance that seemed less to photograph than to X-ray you. . . . Next to the incomparable beauty of Spessivtseva he produced the impression almost of a Quasimodo. . . . He was tormented by her, he tried to get closer to the object of his adoration.”

But as his words reveal to us now, Volynsky was Spessivtseva’s Cyrano, and through him we know her, his “weeping spirit.” Ultimately, Volynsky’s writings depict a profound love affair between a deeply refined man — perched on his Taborian cliff with his “looping truths” — and the vaporous sylphs who externalized, and verticalized, within the frame of a gilt proscenium, the beauty of his own ecstatic and despairing soul."


BALLET’S MAGIC KINGDOM
Selected Writings on Dance in Russia, 1911-1925
By Akim Volynsky. Edited and translated by Stanley J. Rabinowitz
Illustrated. 288 pp. Yale University Press. $35
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'Baptism by Fire: Eight Presidents Who Took Office in Times of Crisis,' by Mark K. Updegrove

"Mark K. Updegrove’s “Baptism by Fire” is not a fiery book. Updegrove, a former publisher of Newsweek and author of “Second Acts: Presidential Lives and Legacies After the White House,” seeks to provide succor to a nation reeling from foreign and domestic woes. As he examines the record of eight presidents, from George Washington to Gerald Ford, Updegrove’s tone is seldom less than soothing and sonorous. This is not the stuff of revisionist history seeking to topple great men from their plinths, but a dutiful account that buffs them to a gleaming finish intended to leave the onlookers oohing and aahing in admiration.

Often there is much to admire. Washington’s grave deportment and decisiveness ensured that the fledgling Republic gained a firm footing. He quashed the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania, supported the creation of a national bank, and shrewdly refused to take sides between France and Britain. But that wasn’t all. As a firm believer in a robust central government, Updegrove observes, Washington recognized that if the nation’s new capital “were to rival those in Europe, it must be steeped in majesty reflecting the country’s character.” Thomas Jefferson, by contrast, favored a small city made up of little brick buildings and anonymously entered a design contest for the president’s house with a plan in the style of Palladio’s Villa Rotonda. Washington knew better. He insisted upon a stately mansion and added his own flourishes, including intricate carvings. According to Updegrove, Jefferson “sneered at the final design, which, like the growing federal government, was both larger and more imperial than to his liking.”

As president, however, Jefferson blatantly (and fortunately) contravened his own strict view of the presidency’s limited powers by authorizing the Louisiana Purchase, which more than doubled the size of the United States and plunged it into debt. Less uplifting is Jefferson’s speaking against slavery while practicing it himself. (Updegrove oddly remarks that “his alleged relationship with his slave Sally Hemings still remains in question.” It doesn’t.) As president, he did adhere to his precepts concerning social informality. He presided over cafeteria-style dinners and padded about the White House in threadbare slippers, prompting a British diplomat to condemn his “utter slovenliness and indifference to appearances, and in a state of negligence actually studied.”

When it comes to Abraham Lincoln, Updegrove does not have to contend with such vexing inconsistencies. The encomiums pour forth. Lincoln, Updegrove writes, “would have brightened at the knowledge that the nation he rescued in the face of blistering adversity a century and a half ago stands today — despite outsized imperfections — as the envy of the world.”
Then there is Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was initially dismissed by Walter Lippmann as an “amiable boy scout.” At a moment when some conservatives are declaring that the New Deal actually prolonged the Depression, Updegrove quite correctly says that Roosevelt’s blizzard of programs “would strengthen liberty itself.”

And what of Roosevelt’s homespun successor, Harry S. Truman? After a somewhat rocky start, Truman stared down the Soviets and established the doctrine of containment. In contrast to the rollback doctrine espoused by the hard right in the 1950s, which calumniated Truman and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson, as liberal traitors, Truman struck out on a sensible middle course of patiently waiting for the Soviet Union to decay from within.

Updegrove runs into some difficulties with more modern presidents. He extols John F. Kennedy as an able leader who kept his wits about him during the Cuban missile crisis but says little about Ken­nedy’s role in Vietnam. Updegrove’s unqualified praise for Gerald Ford is even more problematic. Yes, Ford was right to pardon Nixon. But he scarcely rises to the level of a Roosevelt, and his presidency was distinguished by little other than his gaffes and blunders, including claiming several times in a debate with Jimmy Carter that Poland was not under domination by the Soviet Union.

As he conducts his amiable stroll through the past, Updegrove would have us believe that his gallery of greats should instill “hope and confidence in our future.” In this moment of crisis, “we are invested in the hope that Barack Obama is the best of us.” No doubt. But given the havoc wrought by George W. Bush, even plain competence should begin paying big dividends."

BAPTISM BY FIRE

Eight Presidents Who Took Office in Times of Crisis

By Mark K. Updegrove

292 pp. Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press. $25.95

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'Presidential Command: Power, Leadership, and the Making of Foreign Policy

"Peter W. Rodman’s posthumously published study of seven presidents’ struggles to manage foreign and national security policy brings to mind an incident when the Brooklyn Dodgers manager Leo Durocher started a rookie in center field. After the rookie misjudged several high flies and screaming liners, Durocher jerked him out and took the position himself, but then misplayed several easy chances. Durocher charged into the dugout, grabbed the rookie by the shirt and yelled, “Kid, you’ve got center field so screwed up, now no one can play it.”

For those who find comfort in believing their nation’s role in the world is being guided by sober, thoughtful, wise and judicious men and women, this book is not to be recommended. Indeed, its look at behind-­the-scenes policy-making may give America’s enemies considerable comfort. And a skeptical reader may conclude that foreign policy is a field so messed up no one can manage it. But “Presidential Command” should be on the short list of readings for members of the Barack Obama administration — as much for its pointing out the mistakes to avoid as for illustrating the procedures to emulate.

From Richard Nixon through George W. Bush, our foreign and defense policies, like sausages, have been produced by processes of chopping, grinding, churning and smashing. Secretaries of state and defense contest for influence, with national security advisers of varying talents brokering between the two or pushing their own agendas. Meanwhile, the president and his cabinet are perpetually at war with the military and diplomatic bureauc­racies over the formulation and conduct of security affairs.

Rodman, who died at age 64 shortly after completing this book, served in advi­sory capacities in the Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II administrations and was an aide to Henry Kissinger on most of his breakthrough initiatives. He thus had an insider’s view of the sausage factory for more than two decades. During the Carter and Clinton administrations he more or less had a front-row seat.

The Rodman ideal is a strong president with a strategic vision served by self-­confident cabinet officers who work collegially to produce an imaginative range of policy options that are then imposed on the “permanent government” bureauc­racy and saluted by a quiescent Congress. It goes without saying that none of the seven successive administrations analyzed here met this standard. Nixon receives high marks for using his secretive partnership with Kissinger to outfox his own administration. George H. W. Bush benefited greatly from fortuitous cabinet collegiality and is complimented for adroit management of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Gerald Ford was handcuffed by post-Watergate assertions of Congressional oversight. Ronald Reagan possessed a remarkably clear, and highly idealistic, picture of a world he wished to create, but could not bring himself to negotiate peace between his defense and state secretaries. Carter and Clinton suffered from having well-intentioned and talented but indecisive policy advisers. And George W. Bush is notable for bringing to office an intelligent, cleareyed worldview but then getting sidetracked by a number of high-minded, honest mistakes about Iraq.

Rodman’s “lessons learned” include these: the president must be forceful, engaged and dominant; his (or her) secretary of state, not the national security adviser, should be the leader in developing foreign policy; cabinet secretaries should represent the president’s views to their respective departments, not the reverse; and policy consensus should be facilitated by groups of subordinates like the Principals Committee, which was instituted by the elder Bush under his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, and consisted of key cabinet secretaries.

Though a committed Republican conservative, Rodman (whose advice assisted the United States Commission on National Security for the 21st Century, on which I served) passes a general test of balance. He cites positive attributes of Carter and Clinton, and weaknesses of each Republican president. But proximity and ideology shade his judgment. In Rodman’s view, Kissinger and James A. Baker, a secretary of state under the first Bush, are considerably superior to Cyrus Vance, Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright, secretaries of state in Democratic administrations. Ronald Reagan struggled with “duality,” while Jimmy Carter had “schizophrenia.”

There are more consequential matters, however, in Rodman’s analysis. The first has to do with the abuse of presidential authority, which was systematic in the cases of both Nixon and George W. Bush. Rodman largely excuses such abuse as the result of excessive zeal in side­stepping the loathed permanent government and a balky or recalcitrant Congress. Constitutional requirements of Congressional oversight and Bill of Rights protections are not mentioned or are brushed aside.

Rodman accurately attributes the younger Bush’s excessive zeal to long-harbored beliefs by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld that presidential authority had been dangerously eroded by post-Watergate reforms, and that it had to be restored if foreign and national security policies were to be adequately pursued. He does not dwell on troublesome issues like telecommunications surveillance, suspension of habeas corpus, torture, extraordinary rendition and a range of other quasi-imperial presidential excesses, all justified by the declaration of a “war on terror.”

Rodman also neglects the influence of ideology on policy, especially the role of neoconservatives with regard to Iraq and the greater Middle East. Confusion and conflict in Republican administrations is attributed to personalities and bureauc­racies rather than to tensions within the Republican Party between traditional conservatives, cautious about foreign entanglements, and neoconservative interventionists, whose Wilsonian idealism often cloaked imperialist designs. This division caused Bush I advisers like Scowcroft to dissent from Bush II’s Iraq adventure.

Finally, and most disconcertingly, Rodman succumbs to the fantasy that the much-maligned permanent government, frustrated at being systematically marginalized by the Nixon-Kissinger duo, colluded to bring down the Nixon presidency. Other presidents may have been “rogues and miscreants,” but Rodman finds “in­triguing” the theory that “the demise of Nixon was due to no less than the revolt of the bureaucracy whose power he had striven so assiduously to break in every sphere.”

This kind of nonsense seriously under­mines an otherwise worthwhile and instructive book and, by implication, excuses many troublesome abuses in the current administration. It is one thing to insist on presidential authority in foreign policy. It is quite another to casually accept violations of the Constitution in executing that policy."

PRESIDENTIAL COMMAND

Power, Leadership, and the Making of Foreign Policy From Richard Nixon to George W. Bush

By Peter W. Rodman

351 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95

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