'Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English,' by John McWhorter

"English is subjected to a great number of descriptors in “Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue,” John McWhorter’s brief and engaging look at some of the history of our language. It is, among other things, “very special,” “not normal,” “miscegenated,” “interesting,” “peculiar” and, in case we haven’t yet gotten the point, “genuinely weird.” McWhorter’s goal is to shine some light on topics he feels that authors of the typical “grand old history” of English, with their “fetish” for vocabulary at the expense of grammar, have left out.



McWhorter is a past professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and Cornell; a current senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute; and the author of numerous books on both language and race. Refreshingly, this book is neither a dry examination of academic minutiae nor an excessively simplified history. McWhorter’s book is a welcome change from the sort of scholarly book in which the foundation of an idea seems often to be built on the ­corpses of the author’s enemies. He may disagree with a number of his predecessors, but he is unflaggingly polite in doing so, either not mentioning them by name, or emphasizing that he enjoys and respects their other work immensely.

“Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue” is by no means a complete chronicle of our language. McWhorter is more interested in, as the subtitle puts it, “the untold history of English.” He points out that English has what he calls “kinks” in its grammar, qualities that are not shared by any of its relatives in the Germanic family of languages, but which do exist in a number of the Celtic ones, and questions why it is that these Celtic influences on English have gone unnoticed. I am frequently of the opinion that “untold histories” have remained untold for a very good reason, and it is testament to McWhorter’s persuasiveness that I took umbrage on behalf of Welsh and Cornish.

McWhorter states that he has two lessons that he intends to get across. “First, there is nothing unique about English’s ‘openness’ to words from other languages.” And “second, there is no logical conception of ‘proper’ grammar as distinct from ‘bad’ grammar that people lapse into out of ignorance or laziness.” (“Grim little rules” like the one against using “they” as a ­gender-neutral singular pronoun, he writes, make no sense — hey, Shakespeare did it — but laymen cling to it “like Linus to his blanket.”)

It’s not so surprising that English’s “openness” to words fails to overwhelm McWhorter — he’s a linguist, and as a bunch linguists tend to be less impressed with the words that make up a language’s vocabulary than they are with how those words fit together. Along the way he also touches on what the Vikings took away from our grammar, takes a skeptical look at the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (which holds that language affects thought patterns) and raises the question as to whether the ancient Phoenicians may have had more of a hand in our language than is currently thought.

As for his own language, McWhorter occasionally adopts a tone that is jarringly colloquial. He has already established a relaxed yet informative style in which to explain linguistic history to a general audience, and he does it quite well — he gains nothing by beginning sentences, as he is wont to, with “Yeah” or “But check this out.”

A more comprehensive history of the language can be found in David Crystal’s “Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language” or “The Story of English,” by Robert McCrum, Robert MacNeil and William Cran. But McWhorter has provided a pleasingly dissenting view — one that wears its erudition lightly."




OUR MAGNIFICENT BASTARD TONGUE
The Untold History of English
By John McWhorter
230 pp. Gotham Books. $22.50

Read More......

'The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan,' by Gregory Feifer

"In early January 1988, 39 Soviet paratroopers were positioned on a cliff overlooking the Gardez-Khost road in southeastern Afghanistan. Their job was to protect the soldiers below, who were trying to open up the dangerous, heavily mined route. All around waited Islamic fundamentalists who had spent the last eight years fighting the Red Army and the government it had installed in Kabul just after Christmas 1979.



Soon, groups of black-clad mujahedeen, probably from Pakistan, were crawling toward the Soviets from all directions, machine guns blazing. The Soviets fought back valiantly. A helicopter soared in daringly through heavy fog to deliver ammunition. One soldier died while trying to wire together weak spare batteries to make a radio work.

For all their courage, though, the Soviets were adrift. They were outsiders, fighting outsiders, in a third country — and they didn’t really understand why. The Pakistanis believed they were on a mission from God and screamed “Allah Akbar!” as they headed toward battle. The Soviets could think to respond only with the names of their faraway hometowns. “For Borisov!” one hollered as he threw a grenade.

The scene sums up much of the folly of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The Russians held off the attackers and got the road open. But the paratroopers soon left their position, the tanks below moved on, and the mujahedeen quickly retook it all. The fight was won, but the battle was lost — and of course the war would be too. Three and a half years later, Borisov became part of a newly independent Belarus.

Gregory Feifer relates these events in his fascinating new book, “The Great Gamble.” It’s a highly readable history of the conflict, which began with so haphazard a decision to intervene that Feifer gives credence to the assertion of one general staff officer that “no one ever actually ordered the invasion of Afghanistan.” It just happened through inertia and confusion under the sclerotic Soviet leadership of the late ’70s and early ’80s.

The author, NPR’s Moscow correspondent, tells the story mainly through the eyes of Soviet veterans and spies. The results are vivid and original — even though there are limitations to basing so much of the book on individual, self-serving recollections. For example, Feifer describes in detail how the K.G.B. hustled four Afghan ministers out of the country in ammunition boxes. It’s a great story, but Feifer appears to rely on one K.G.B. intelligence operator for most of the dialogue and drama. And two pages after it ends, Feifer reveals that one of the allegedly smuggled ministers denies the whole thing.

The book’s structure and style mean that Feifer adds little specifically to the question that will draw many readers: What can the United States learn for its own wars today? Feifer flicks at the topic, but the grim answers he offers have already been absorbed: don’t shoot up wedding parties, never underestimate fanatics who know the terrain, and remember that all politics in Afghanistan are messy. Remember, too: Fighting these guys is hard. According to Feifer, the mujahedeen were canny enough to smuggle heroin into Soviet barracks to get their adversaries hooked.

Even if Feifer fails to offer what his publisher calls “striking lessons for the 21st century,” he succeeds in his main goal: presenting a new side of a long, sorry war that would leave an estimated 1.3 million Afghans dead and the Taliban surging through the ravaged countryside toward Kabul. It’s “a tragic human story,” Feifer writes — and one that he recounts with skill."




THE GREAT GAMBLE
The Soviet War in Afghanistan
By Gregory Feifer
Illustrated. 326 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99

Read More......

'A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub,' by Bill Barich

"If you close your eyes and imagine an old-fashioned Irish pub, you might think of worn wood floors, bric-a-brac on the walls and gents in flat caps. According to Bill Barich, an American writer based in Dublin, this stereotype is great for tourism worldwide but wields a culture-sapping strength that’s killing off pubs in Ireland itself. Nothing less than the country’s national identity is at stake.



Driven by a need to experience a timeless tavern like the one in John Ford’s 1952 film “The Quiet Man” — a place with a strong sense of community, where the art of conversation flourishes — Barich travels throughout Ireland and is routinely disappointed. The pubs he finds are either lifeless “museum pieces,” corporate sports bars with TV screens or shameless fakes hawking manufactured nostalgia. The old cereal boxes and tin signs advertising tobacco at E. J. Morrissey’s are, Barich laments, “just for show.” The banjo-and-bodhran-playing musicians at the Brazen Head resemble “a tepid version” of the Clancy Brothers. Throughout Ireland, literary giants like Joyce and Yeats are memorialized in ways that suggest they were regulars at a laughably improbable number of spots.

Inauthenticity and modernization, Barich concludes, have ruined bar fun (or “craic as it’s known to the Irish). Interviews with elderly publicans like Dessie Hynes help Barich understand why the old-fashioned businesses are dying: Tougher drunk-driving laws keep people from venturing to local taverns, and members of the community no longer convene in public houses. (Yet another reason to dislike Starbucks, shopping malls and the Internet.)

Greed also takes some of the blame. “Pubs aligned with the leisure industry,” Barich explains, describing popular gimmicks like quiz nights with cash prizes, Texas Hold ’Em tournaments, bingo and karaoke. At one low point, he finds himself surrounded by five Bud-drinking jocks watching a soccer match while the barman sends text messages on his cellphone. Elsewhere, Barich encounters a device that lets patrons pour their own pints, “thereby reducing the contact between people even further.” He’d cry into his beer if only he could find a decent one: Even the local Guinness — “flavorless,” “sticky,” tainted with burnt barley — falls short.

But as rural pubs are dying in the mother­land, the concept has become a hot commodity around the world. The Dublin-based Irish Pub Company has built about 500 bars in 45 countries. Their advice: Add an “& Son” tag to make your place sound older. The multinational drinks conglomerate Diageo-Guinness sells Irish Pub Concept (I.P.C.) business plans. And statistics suggest that more stout is now sold in Nigeria than in Ireland.

These changes — insidious byproducts of globalization — come across as relentless downers, but Barich weaves a ­never-ending stream of oddly engaging historical and literary references into every dead end. In explaining why some publicans doubled as undertakers up until the mid-1900s, he notes that “under the Coroners Act of 1846, any coroner had the right to dispatch a dead body to the ­closest pub, and the proprietor was obligated to store it, usually in a cool cellar with the kegs of beer, until an inquest could be held. The law stayed on the books until 1962.”

To shed light on the manly art of drinking (and perhaps lend credibility to his beer-soaked pursuit), Barich invokes all kinds of Irish literary heavyweights, including Conor McPherson, William Carleton and Flann O’Brien, whose poem “The Workman’s Friend” inspired the book’s title. Occasionally his digressions seem overly indulgent — not every reader will care that a bartender named Helen McLean, in the crossroads hamlet of Bally­scannel, was once fond of ballroom dancing — but Barich’s passion for boozy subjects is broad and undeniable. He’s equally at ease covering the effects of the temperance movement and introducing regional slang terms for being drunk.

By the end of his travelogue, Barich admits that “there’s a good deal of hand-wringing . . . over what it actually means to be Irish” and that plenty of Irish men and women don’t actually mind the disappearance of old pubs. And while he finds a few worthy spots, he never deeply contemplates the paradox that makes them worthy. He has, after all, based his notion of authenticity on a few plays and poems and an American movie — on a romanticized stereotype."




A PINT OF PLAIN
Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub
By Bill Barich
242 pp. Walker & Company. $25

Read More......

'1848: Year of Revolution,' by Mike Rapport

"Two thousand eight was not a change year. Eighteen forty-eight was a change year. A series of liberal revolutions exploded from one end of Europe to the other, toppling governments from France to Hungary to many of the small German and Italian states. The revolts are not well known in the United States, but they rank in the annals of upheaval alongside the American Revolution in 1776, the French Revolution in 1789 and the end of European Communism in 1989 (relatively gentle though that was).



In “1848: Year of Revolution,” a lively, panoramic new history, Mike Rapport describes the uprisings of that year while making clear their modern resonance. The revolutionaries, he argues, were overmatched by near-impossible challenges that sound remarkably familiar today. They had to wrestle with the demons of nationalism, which threatened to drag liberal revolutions down into the muck of ethnic conflict. They had to forge new constitutional orders that could temper violent radicalism. And they had to confront the grinding poverty and social misery of the freshly empowered masses, who had unattainable expectations for economic growth and social equality. The book’s descriptions of impoverished serfs and alienated city dwellers could equally well be about peasants in the Chinese countryside and migrant workers in Beijing and Chongqing today.

Rapport, a lecturer in history at the University of Stirling in Scotland, begins by explaining that European order had been frozen since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, with conservative rule imposed by the great imperial courts. Chief among the absolutists was Klemens von Metternich, Austria’s icy chancellor, haunted by memories of the cataclysmic wars after the French Revolution. “In times of crisis,” the loftily paranoid Metternich wrote, monarchs had to show themselves as “fathers invested with all the authority which belongs to heads of families.” The flesh-and-blood emperors were rather less impressive: Czar Nicholas I was a pioneer in creating Russia’s brutal secret police, while Austria’s “mentally disabled” Emperor Ferdinand was called “Ferdy the Loony” by his subjects.

During a deep economic crisis in the 1840s, the desperate misery of peasants, artisans and the urban poor generated popular rage at the Metternichian system. In the past, nervous governments had censored their press, clamped down on labor unions and froze the middle class and professionals out of politics. When liberals rose up in places like Naples and Piedmont, they were crushed by Austrian forces. Polish nationalists got stomped under Austrian, Prussian and Russian boots; in 1830, a Polish revolt ended with Russia hauling 80,000 Poles off to Siberia in chains.

What were wild demands in 1848 are democratic dogma today: free speech, parliaments, religious liberty, jury ­trials. But despite such noble goals, the revolutionaries were easily enraptured with violence. The great Italian democrat Giuseppe Mazzini, whom Metternich called the most dangerous man in Europe, believed that “ideas ripen quickly when nourished by the blood of martyrs.”

The insurrections were astonishingly widespread, with different local grievances detonating in sequence across the continent — a virtual European Union of rebellion. They were ignited by a riot in Austrian-ruled Milan, which was followed by a revolution in Sicily. Next, protest marchers in Paris clashed with the munici­pal guard, prompting riots across the city. The French government had no stomach for the military onslaught necessary to crush the revolt, and King Louis-Philippe helplessly fled to Britain with his queen, assisted by a British vice-consul who provided the royal couple with the alias “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”

Then German liberals and workers, thrilled by the news from Paris, took to the streets. In Hungary, Lajos Kossuth, a noble turned vehement radical against Austrian domination, thundered for self-government free from “the pestilential air” of Metternich’s absolutism. In Vienna itself, troops opened fire on rebellious crowds; the shaken Austrian government allowed a constitution and forced Metternich to resign. Even in reactionary Prussia, where soldiers unleashed artillery against the mutinous citizenry in Berlin’s streets, the king had to grant a constitution. The only great powers spared bloody chaos were Britain, where constitutional government and middle-class support were already established, and Russia, where the czar choked off any hint of revolt, radicalizing subsequent generations of revolutionaries.

After the electric jolt of success, the revolutionaries staggered under the weight of governing. One of the most neuralgic issues was nationalism. Metternich had struggled to maintain an empire made up of at least 11 nations, including restive Hungarians and Italians. After him, the “springtime of nations” left the continent awash in conflicting ethnic claims. In Frankfurt, radicals demanded a unified German state. But what about non-­Germans living in that future Germany, like Danes and Poles, and what about Germans living outside a united Germany? One German politician chillingly noted “the preponderance of the German race over most Slav races . . . is a fact.” Many Austrian monarchists and Catholics, although ethnically German, disliked the prospect of joining their ostensible brethren.

Smaller nations weren’t much kinder. Hungarians simultaneously demanded an end to Austrian rule and authority over Transylvania, to the resentment of many Romanians living there. The prospect of allowing Jews to vote in a liberated Hungary set off a wave of anti-Jewish riots, scaring the government into postponing Jewish emancipation temporarily. Some members of minorities in Hungary, particularly many Croats, decided they had preferred Austrian rule. Croatian troops marched to within 30 miles of Budapest before being routed by Hungarian forces. When Romanian and Serbian peasants rose against Hungarian rule, they were slaughtered.

As the revolutionaries struggled to provide social and economic progress, the old order reasserted itself. The liberal government in Hungary was crushed by devastating invasions from Austria and its ally Russia. In German lands, disillusionment after 1848 paved the way for experiments in dictatorship. Asked what could restore Prussian authority, Otto von Bismarck, sitting at a piano, played the Prussian infantry’s charge march. He later said, “The great questions of the age are not decided by speeches and majority decisions — that was the big mistake of 1848 and 1849 — but by blood and iron.” In France, Louis-­Napoleon Bonaparte, the callow nephew of the famous conqueror, launched a coup d’état in 1851, rounded up dissenters and installed himself as Emperor Napoleon III. Rapport sees in 1848 the “germinating bulbs” of European authoritarianism.

He tells a good yarn, with a keen eye for ground-level details, like the “constitutional pastries” produced by revolution-minded Viennese bakers. Still, while trying to keep readers from getting lost in the deepening blizzard of revolts and interventions, Rapport sometimes strains for writerly effect, as when he calls Napoleon “the incorrigible Emperor” — a cutesy description of a military tyrant seen by many Russians at the time as the anti-Christ incarnate. He also stumbles when he says that Metternich “was not troubled” by the Greek rebellion against Ottoman rule; in fact, the Austrian minister described it as “six years of torments.”

It’s hard to read this book without feeling a deepening reverence for successful postrevolutionaries like Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel, who first made revolution and then made the unheroic compromises that are the lifeblood of actual democratic government. People will always thrill to utopian demands for perfection, from Mazzini to Che. But it’s what comes next that counts: the daily humdrum of effective governance."




1848
Year of Revolution
By Mike Rapport
Illustrated. 461 pp. Basic Books. $29.95

Read More......

'The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found,' by Mary Beard

"In Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s popular 19th-century novel “The Last Days of Pompeii,” a scrumptious multicourse dinner of the stereotypically Roman sort is served in the superbly appointed house of the hero, Glaucus. With its peristyle garden, luxurious furnishings, nimble attendants and anatrium filled with paintings that “would scarcely disgrace a Raphael,”Glaucus’ Campanian bachelor pad might serve as “a model at this day for the house of ‘a single man in Mayfair,’ ” Bulwer-­Lytton wrote.



In her engrossingly mischievous “Fires of Vesuvius,” Mary Beard recreates the scene with gusto, pointing out that this Pompeiian mansion is in fact based closely on a real one, the so-called House of the Tragic Poet. But among some unsavory facts that Bulwer-Lytton “fails to point out to his readers,” Beard writes, is that the kitchen, too tiny to have produced much of a banquet anyway, was the site of the house’s only latrine. And worse: “Just over the back wall of the garden . . . was a cloth-processing workshop, or fullery. Fulling was a messy business, its main ingredient being human urine. . . . The work was noisy and smelly. In the background to Glaucus’ elegant dinner party there must have been a distinctly nasty odor.”

Beard, a classics professor at Cambridge University,takes cheeky, undisguised delight in puncturing the many fantasies and misconceptions that have grown up around Pompeii — sown over the years by archaeologists and classicists no less than Victorian novelists and makers of “sword and sandal” film extravaganzas. While many scholars build careers through increasingly elaborate reconstructions of the ancient world, Beard consistently stresses the limits of our knowledge, the precariousness of our constructs and the ambiguity or contradiction inherent in many of our sources. “There is hardly a shred of evidence for any of it” serves as her battle cry, and it’s a noble one.

The overarching notion she combats here is that when Pompeii was buried by volcanic debris from Vesuvius in the great eruption of A.D. 79, it became a city “ ‘frozen in time,’ as so many guidebooks and tourist brochures claim,” a pristine Roman town just waiting to be discovered. In fact, Beard points out that Pompeii, “disrupted and disturbed, evacuated and pillaged, . . . bears the marks (and the scars) of all kinds of different histories.”

Those scars didn’t begin with the eruption — there was a devastating earthquake 17 years earlier — and didn’t end with it. Ancient scavengers, looters of all eras and “the rough and ready approach” of early excavators have all severely damaged the site, making it much harder to reconstruct an accurate building history. For good measure, Pompeii was heavily bombed by the Allies in World War II; as Beard wryly notes, most visitors are not aware that many of the houses they pass through, now expertly restored, have in essence been destroyed twice.

A disheartening aspect of the book is the great number of paintings and painted signs, mentioned by Beard in passing throughout the text, that were recovered only to fade or vanish entirely, reminiscent of the subway-excavation scene in “Fellini’s Roma.” These have been as elaborate as a series of bright murals from the amphitheater’s curtain wall, destroyed by frost in the year after their discovery in 1815, or as homey as the sign “Women” over their separate entrance to one of the town’s sets of public baths.

If Pompeii is no time capsule, however, it is as close as we are likely to come on such a scale. Together with its lesser-known sister city Herculaneum, it is a place crucial to our conception of Roman art, domestic architecture and daily life. Beard leads a fine tour and lives up to her promise of surprises around every corner. She walks down the sewerless town’s streets (“a smelly mixture of animal dung, . . . rotting vegetables and human excrement — which was, just to complete the picture, no doubt covered in flies”); looks into houses (those empty atriums with the misleadingly modernist aesthetic would have been hung with gaudy curtains and stuffed with wooden furniture, storage cupboards, looms and whatnot); saunters into the baths (despite their hygienic reputation, in the days before chlorination, they were filthy); steps up to the bar (the big, unglazed jars set into the counter were for dry foodstuffs, not for doling out the hot stew of our fantasies); and ventures into the brothel (there were probably far fewer than is often supposed, and the one clear example, whatever it was in 79, is a cramped, grim place today, Beard says: average tourist visit, three minutes).

Over all, Pompeii was “an assault on the visual senses,” to use Beard’s phrase, not least for the range of art, public and private, it contained. For one thing, much of the art is highly eroticized, even when not bluntly pornographic. Much else can only strike the modern viewer as bizarre — something out of Petronius or Apuleius rather than Cicero or Horace — like a fresco of the Judgment of Solomon story enacted by pygmies. And under both headings fall the phalluses. There seem to be phalluses everywhere. Enormous ones, tiny ones, doubles, singles; attached to men, gods or satyrs in every medium, or in disembodied splendor; over doors, carved into the pavement, on chains and serving trays, turned into lamps, winged like birds, with bells on. Even some of the phalluses have phalluses. If they were good luck charms, as is sometimes thought, it obviously didn’t work.

Aside from the melodramatic and misleading American title (there’s a minimum of volcanology or disaster drama; in Britain, the title is aptly “Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town”), this is a wonderful book, for the impressive depth of information it comfortably embraces, for its easygoing erudition and, not least, for its chatty, personable style. Perhaps it’s no surprisethat Beard, who certainly can’t be accused of ivory-­towerism, writes an appealing blog for The Times of London, “A Don’s Life.” (She is also the classics editor for The Times Literary Supplement.)

If anything disappoints about “The Fires of Vesuvius” it’s that the mostly black-and-white photographs fall well short of conveying the sensual assault that Beard so skillfully evokes in her text. For that, we can turn to another general-interest book on the subject, THE COMPLETE POMPEII, by Joanne Berry (Thames & Hudson, $40). Berry, who teaches ancient history and archaeology at Swansea University in Wales, packs her magazine-style pages with large-format color photographs of the art, artifacts and buildings of the town, and the result is suitably dazzling.

Beard’s mild but persistent polemical tone — another mark of the successful blogger? — is a dynamic means of structuring her writing, but it often has the effect of casting a Yeats-like shadow over the mass of her fellow scholars: “All wear the carpet with their shoes; / All think what other people think.” One longs to leap up and shout, “Not all!” Berry, for example, has a drier style and makes no special effort to project a personality onto the page. But she seems no less critical of the evidence than Beard and discredits many of the same “myths.”

Both of these books, which make excellent companions, remind us that there will be more to look forward to: after 1,930 years, a quarter of Pompeii remains unexcavated. "




THE FIRES OF VESUVIUS
Pompeii Lost and Found
By Mary Beard
Illustrated. 360 pp. The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. $26.95

Read More......

'Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East,' by Rashid Khalidi

"Had the White House aides who scripted Barack Obama’s remarks to Al Arabiya television in January consulted Rashid Khalidi’s latest work beforehand, the president might not have so blithely vowed to restore the “respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago.” In “Sowing Crisis,” Khalidi, who holds the Edward Said chair of Arab studies at Columbia and is a major pro-Palestinian voice in American scholarship, argues that Washington’s drive for hegemonic control over the geostrategic and oil-rich axis of the Middle East stretches back three-quarters of a century, and has continued unabated to this day.



Khalidi’s central argument is that the Bush administration’s interventionist posture toward the Middle East is no mere post-9/11 aberration, but represents an especially bellicose expression of a longstanding campaign. Today’s enemy is terrorism; yesterday’s was Communism. And just as the threat of Communism was wildly exaggerated 50 years ago, so, these days, “the global war on terror is in practice an American war in the Middle East against a largely imaginary set of enemies.” ­Khalidi’s point is not that American policy toward the Middle East has been consistently hys­terical; rather, he says, it has been consis­tently cynical, exploiting an apocalyptic sense of threat in order to achieve the kind of dominance to which great powers, what­ever their rhetoric, aspire.

Most histories of America’s role in the Middle East, like Michael B. Oren’s Power, Faith and Fantasy,” focus on the naïveté and misguided idealism of a nation much given to moral crusades. Khalidi ­looks to interests rather than principles. His ­story of America’s active role in the Middle East begins in 1933, when the consortium known as Aramco signed an exclusive oil deal with Ibn Saud, the king of Saudi Arabia. Khalidi reminds us of familiar if ­squalid acts of American intervention, like the role of the C.I.A. in the 1953 overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh, the prime minister of Iran, who had championed the nationalization of his ­country’s oil industry. Khalidi also describes lesser-known ones, including the delivery of “briefcases full of cash” to Lebanon’s pro-Western president Camille Chamoun in order to help Chamoun rig the 1957 parliamentary election.

This brute meddling, Khalidi argues, not only kept the pot of civil conflict ­boiling in many already weak states, but also “profoundly undermined whatever limited pos­sibility there might have been of estab­lishing any kind of democratic govern­ance in a range of Middle Eastern countries.” That carefully hedged sentence shows that Khalidi is no conspiracy theorist, and recognizes the complicity of Arab regimes in their own predicament. And the Soviets occasionally play the ­heavy as well, ­though Khalidi sees the cold war as a very un­equal battle between a world-girdling United ­States and a defensive and fearful Russia.

“Sowing Crisis” vividly reminds us what it is like to be on the receiving end of American power. But it often reads like a polemic rather than a work of history. Khalidi’s sense of American motives and strategy seems flattened by his own preconceptions. God knows the United States has a great deal to answer for in the Middle East. But is it true, as Khalidi al­leges, that President Truman favored Israel, and ultimately agreed to recognize the country, because he had more pro-­Jewish than Arab voters to answer to? Only by check­ing a footnote does the reader learn that this comment, which Khalidi quotes twice, comes from an American diplomat who may not have been in the room when Truman is said to have uttered it.

But the most pressing question “Sowing Crisis raises is not whether American behavior in the Middle East has been consistently self-serving and expansionist. It is whether Arab failure is, at bottom, a consequence of that behavior. Another way of putting this is: can the problems of the region be reversed by a fundamental change in American policy?

If American policy were chiefly responsible for the Middle East’s difficulties, then the Arab world would scarcely be the only victim. It is hard to argue that the proxy battles of the cold war did more damage to the Middle East than to, say, Southeast Asia. Yet Vietnam is a stable auto­cracy experiencing rapid growth, and Thailand is a shaky and semiprosperous democracy. American policy makers were far more cavalier about the sovereignty of Latin American states than of Arab ones, yet Latin America is a largely democratic zone with both deeply impoverished and middle-range countries.

Why has the Arab world remained ­largely on the sidelines of globalization? There are, of course, many explanations offered. One of the most striking comes from the United Nations’ Arab Human Development Report, written by a group of Arab scholars in 2002. They concluded that Arab nations suffer from a “freedom deficit,” from pervasive gender inequality, from a weak commitment to education and from the widespread denial of human rights. They might have added that the experiences of colonialism and of the cold war have left much of the Arab world with the deeply ingrained habit of blaming its problems on outsiders.

Since Khalidi inadvertently caused Barack Obama some grief during the presidential campaign when it came out that Obama attended a party in 2003 for a man some Republicans called a “ter­rorist professor,”the president is un­likely to dis­play this book in public. But he ­should read it, not so much to chasten his sunny view of our recent past in the Middle East as to be reminded how very hard it is to make progress in a region where memories are long, and practically everything is blamed on the United States (or Israel). "




SOWING CRISIS
The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East
By Rashid Khalidi
308 pp. Beacon Press. $25.95

Read More......

'Giordano Bruno: Philosopher, Heretic,' by Ingrid D. Rowland

"It has become an overused word, but Giordano Bruno may justly be described as a maverick. Burned at the stake in Rome on Ash Wednesday in 1600, he seems to have been an unclassifiable mixture of foul-mouthed Neapolitan mountebank, loquacious poet, religious reformer, scholastic philosopher and slightly wacky astronomer. His version of Christianity is impossible to label. Educated by the Dominicans — the guardians of Catholic orthodoxy in those days — he revered certain scriptures and the writings of St. Augustine, always doubted the divinity of Jesus and flirted with dangerous new ideas of Protestantism, and yet hoped that the pope himself would clear him of heresy.

Bruno was a martyr to something, but four centuries after his immolation it is still not clear what. It doesn’t help that the full records of his 16 interrogations in the prisons of the Roman Inquisition have been lost or destroyed. The enigma of Bruno runs deeper than that, as Ingrid Rowland, a scholar of the Renaissance who teaches in Rome, makes clear in her rich new biography, “Giordano Bruno.” Was he some sort of scientific pioneer, to be compared with Galileo, whose milder encounter with the Roman Inquisition — indeed, with the same inquisitor, Cardinal Bellarmine — followed not long afterward? Like Galileo, Bruno rejected the earth-centered cosmology and Aristotelian physics endorsed by the church. In the 19th century, historians of science saw him as an early proponent of atomic theory and the infinite universe.

Or was Bruno an occultist dreamer, more magician than mathematician, as the renowned historian Frances Yates influentially argued in the 1960s? Either way, Bruno suffered for speaking his mind, though he also had a lot of bad luck, some of which he brought upon himself.

His story begins in Nola, a small city to the east of Naples. Bruno referred to himself as “il Nolano,” and Rowland echoes this, calling him “the Nolan” and frequently speaking of the “Nolan philosophy.” (This moniker may be harmless in America today, but it has awkward connotations for those who remember the Nolans of the 1970s and 1980s European pop scene, and their biggest hit, “I’m in the Mood for Dancing.”) The son of a well-connected professional soldier, Bruno entered the Neapolitan convent of San Domenico Maggiore at the age of 14 and was quickly noticed for two things. First, there was his prodigious memory: as a 20-year-old he was sent to perform his feats of recall before the pope. The ancient art of enhanced memorization was what he was best known for in his own time, and teaching it to others was his most marketable skill. Mnemonic feats were not only a practically useful party trick, but were often held to enable a practitioner to arrive at a systematic understanding of the world. Second, there was his religious unorthodoxy. As a boy, he removed all pictures from his convent cell, keeping only a crucifix, and he scoffed at a fellow novice for reading a devotional poem about the Virgin.

Although he was ordained a priest in 1572 and licensed to teach theology three years later, he was soon under investigation by the local head of the Dominicans for his irregular and outspoken views. By 1576 he had fled to Genoa and abandoned his clerical garb, teaching astronomy and Latin in a nearby town. The next 15 years were spent wandering through Europe on a hunt for patrons and professorships. First came Venice, then Padua, then Lyons, then a copy-editing job in Calvinist Geneva, where he was jailed and excommunicated for publishing an attack on a local philosopher. After two years of lecturing in Toulouse on Aristotle and astronomy, he had some success in Paris teaching the art of memory, with Henry III as royal patron. It was in Paris that he published a long philosophical drama, “The Candlemaker,” which Rowland implausibly suggests can be staged successfully, despite its five-hour running time. Its title page names the author as “Bruno the Nolan, the Academic of no Academy; nicknamed the exasperated.”

In 1583 Bruno joined the household of the French ambassador in London, where he published his major philosophical works, all dialogues, in which he espoused an infinite universe teeming with life. The timing was bad for such unorthodox cosmology. A century earlier, a German cardinal and mathematician, Nicholas of Cusa, made similar suggestions; but back then the church was not yet threatened by Protestant heresy and took a more relaxed attitude to strange views. A century later, a book by a writer of the early French Enlightenment, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle,popularized the same idea. (Though technically banned by the church, Fontenelle’s “Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds” was a literary sensation.) Bruno was both too late and too early to paint a universe in which man and his planet were not the center of a cozy domain.

In 1591 Bruno returned to Italy, where the real trouble began. A Venetian grandee, Giovanni Mocenigo, invited Bruno to teach him the art of memory, and Bruno moved into the family’s palazzo on the Grand Canal. After seven or eight months, relations between the two men began to cool (there are also suggestions that relations between Bruno and Mocenigo’s wife heated up), and the Venetian denounced him. Among the many unacceptable things Mocenigo claimed to have heard Bruno say, listed in a letter to the Inquisition in May 1592, were that Christ was a wretch and a magician, that the world is eternal but divine punishment is not, that bread does not turn into flesh in the Eucharist, that the Virgin cannot have given birth and that all friars are asses.

Bruno made a few unwise admissions to his Inquisitors, but denied most of the accusations. One informant was not enough for a conviction — a second witness was needed — and Bruno was willing to repent in order to gain release. The matter could have ended there, but the Roman Inquisition asked for Bruno’s extradition, and Venice, after months of negotiations, complied. The Romans interviewed many of Bruno’s old cellmates from Venice, and found one — an unstable Capuchin friar, himself later burned at the stake — who falsely believed that Bruno had denounced him and decided to return the favor.

Even with this second witness, it took the Roman Inquisition nearly seven years to bring the case to its sorry conclusion, and it managed to do so only when the Jesuit cardinal Robert Bellarmine took charge. Rowland quotes Bellarmine as once saying that “I hardly ever read a book without wanting to give it a good censoring.”Bruno’s fate was sealed when he unsuccessfully attempted to appeal over the heads of the Inquisition to the pope himself.

Though it can be hard to follow the story line in Rowland’s early chapters, where the background to Bruno’s later work is jumbled in with biographical fact, her telling of his end is gripping. As an intellectual biography, however, the book has too little examination of his ideas. Although Rowland would like us to see Bruno as a martyr to science, his work comes across more as theologically inspired science fiction. He was a poetic speculator, not an empirical or systematic investigator. Thus it is still not clear what the great master of memory should be remembered for."

GIORDANO BRUNO
Philosopher, Heretic
By Ingrid D. Rowland
335 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27




Read More......

'The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch,' by Michael Wolff

"With continent-spanning business successes, multiple marriages and generational strife roiling beneath him, Rupert Murdoch would seem to be a perfect running story for a tabloid, but the man who owns the means of production rarely becomes grist for his own mill.

As proprietor of The New York Post, Murdoch is — in Michael Wolff’s new book — “the man who owns the news.” Murdoch has made some as well, upending the television business by creating Fox News and more recently stalking The Wall Street Journal — a newspaper that was not for sale — with the relentlessness of Ahab, but with the wrinkle of ultimate triumph.

That hunt and capture serves as the backdrop for Wolff’s portrait of Murdoch. The book is a strangely alluring artifact, with huge gaps in execution and stylistic tics that border on parody; it will nonetheless provide a deeply satisfying experience for the ­media-interested.

They are a pair, these two. Both adore gossip and revel in their unpleasantness, and neither gives a rip what anyone else thinks of him. Murdoch has achieved improbable business success, and Wolff has made no secret that he covets same. In a hybrid career that continues to this day — Wolff is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a founder of a news aggregator called Newser — he has somehow managed to both float above a demimonde of wealthy titans and seek to enter at every opportunity.

His chronicle of Murdoch’s purchase of The Wall Street Journal from the Bancroft family last year — this tale constitutes the narrative armature of the book — is full of the kind of detailed ticktock that makes business seem brutally exciting, but in general, Wolff has never distinguished himself as a reporter. Over the years, he has succeeded in cutting through the clutter by being far less circumspect — and sometimes more vicious — than other journalists, whom he views as archaic losers about to go the way of the Walkman.

“The Man Who Owns the News” attacks its subject with casual delight, but contains shockingly few actual quotations from Murdoch himself: a snippet here and there, nothing more. He remains disconcertingly spectral, even though Wolff spoke with him for many hours over many months.

Wolff drops a prophylactic mention of Murdoch’s conversational shortcomings, saying he is “not good at explaining himself and gets annoyed and frustrated when he’s asked to do so,” adding later that “he grips and clutches and descends into muttering and murmuring when forced to talk about himself.”

That may explain Murdoch’s unwillingness to sit on his own couch or one of Wolff’s making, but it does not excuse the general failure to give the reader, as the subtitle promises, a look “inside the secret world of Rupert Murdoch.”

Instead, we get Wolff’s own ineffable takes on how Murdoch became Murdoch: “He tends to create a disturbance, or pick up the tremulous motion of a disturbance, that in the chaotic motion of the atmosphere becomes amplified, eventually leading to large-scale atmospheric ­changes . . . or some such.”

This sort of protective irony, walking slowly up to a conclusion and then summarily dropping it, is mannered to the point where you can almost visualize Wolff licking his paws between sentences. But he’s smart, a wiseguy really, and often wanders his way toward insight. In the same passage, he observes that Murdoch possesses “the business equivalent of superb hand-eye coordination — of knowing when the opportunity presents itself and how to snatch it.”

Murdoch, for all his lack of an inner life, at least in this book, is an extremely engaging man to listen to. At investor conferences where other media titans drone on defensively, he is far and away the most fearless and factual. But not here. Wolff, who has the columnist’s tic of being far too struck by the fragrance of his own prose, draws attention to the Boswell at the expense of the Johnson.

“They are the substantial historical personages in the room; everybody else is . . . well, everybody else,” he says at one point. At another he writes, “He’s almost never there — except when he is, overwhelmingly, there.”

But the moment the reader is tempted to leave Wolff to marvel at his own de­vices, the author steps in and reminds us that his primary value is to speak the unspeakable. As he did in his delicious and prescient “Burn Rate,” an early book about the dot-com fantasia, he often just says it: “Every second working for Murdoch is a second spent thinking about what Murdoch wants. He inhabits you.”


And more substantively, Wolff makes it clear that as Murdoch woos the Bancrofts with negotiations over guarantees of editorial freedom for The Wall Street Journal, his cynicism is without bottom: “Murdoch is amazed these people are actually taking this seriously. Really, given everything — not least of all his own well-known history — it is preposterous that they would.”

Much was made of Wolff’s alliance with Murdoch, that it would lead to complicity and sycophancy, but Wolff remains true to his nature, which is joyously nasty. It is a baked-in reflex of a kind that Trollope described: “His satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives.”

Wolff takes no specific offense at Murdoch’s willingness to use his media properties to cold business ends, but depicts him as a cranky, monomaniacal newspaper hack, a con man with bad hearing, no interest in new media paradigms and no real friends to speak of. It is also pointed out that he is “a good family man — even if he has three of them.” Like the man he writes about, Wolff is a gossip who is very skilled at extracting information and sensing weakness.

The rest of the gang at Murdoch’s News Corporation fares no better. According to the book, Bill O’Reilly “talked dirty to underlings” and is loathed by everyone, including Murdoch. Wolff writes that Richard Johnson, the Page Six editor of The New York Post, “took money from sources.”

And Roger Ailes, the ferocious creator of Fox News, is feared by all, even Murdoch himself.

All of which makes the reader wonder why Murdoch would, in practical terms, drop a hungry ferret down his own trousers. Wolff, a guy with a lot of theories, has one about that: “Possibly his willingness had something to do with his perception that I regarded many of his enemies — particularly the journalistic priesthood — with some of the same contempt with which he regarded them.”

More broadly, Murdoch would clearly like his legacy to be cleansed by his acquisition of The Journal. That story, told with a mixture of contempt and awe, is rendered through the prism of family fecklessness and brute business tactics. It makes Murdoch’s globe-trotting history of buying tabloids and collecting politicians with equal facility seem a little beside the point, which might have been the gesture to begin with.

Characters in the Journal saga are quickly introduced and put in a riveting, ­present-tense motion. Richard Zannino, then the chief executive of Dow Jones & Company, decides to put a toe in the water next to Murdoch and soon finds himself soaked from head to foot. Andy Steginsky, a money manager and “a Rupert Murdoch groupie,” is the Zelig-like figure putting an arm on the Bancrofts, who are played like patsies from the jump. “They seemed like fools even to themselves,” Wolff writes.

A lot of people come off as fools and flunkies, including me: “New York Times media writer David Carr censoriously opined during the takeover that Murdoch ‘has demonstrated a habit over time of using his media properties to advance the business interests of his organization.’ Then, with the takeover completed, Carr pronounced him one of the most admired figures of the new media class precisely because he integrated all his business interests.” It’s much more complicated than that, but subtext is always missed when you’re the one being gored, no?

Historically, one of the problems with Wolff’s omniscience is that while he may know all, he gets some of it wrong. He opens Chapter 12 with a lovely set piece about John Lippman, a Journal reporter who wrote rugged articles about both Murdoch and his third wife, Wendi Deng, running for his life as the deal is about to be consummated in June 2007.

“Not a bad indicator of which way the deal will go is that John Lippman writes his last piece for The Wall Street Journal on June 22 and will shortly head for The Los Angeles Times,” Wolff writes, adding later on the same page, “His long-term paper is being pursued by a man whom he has written about in derisive, cruel, scathing, innuendo-laden terms.”

Lippman left The Journal in June 2006 and soon after went to work for Sitrick & Company, a public relations firm. It’s true he had a byline in The Journal on June 22, 2007, but it was atop a freelance review of a book by Jack Valenti, the longtime chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America. Lippman has since gone to work at The Los Angeles Times.

And Wolff also writes that The New York Times canceled a series on Murdoch after two articles were attacked by News Corp. Only two articles were scheduled, and none were canceled, according to the paper’s editors. Wolff prefers the purity of his constructs — one of which is that The Times is a deeply flawed artifact that is doomed to be crushed by the more nimble, less morally constricted Murdoch.

Obsessed by newsprint and digitally clueless, Murdoch is depicted as a remarkable modern figure. The issue of succession is dealt with in the book as it is at the company: people either put their fingers in their ears or cross them in hopes that Murdoch, who was born in Australia in 1931, will live forever. His unusual relationship with a crew of very talented, able children — pull them close in business matters and then humiliate them — is artfully described in the book, as is his somewhat henpecked relationship with his third wife, who reads his e-mail messages after business hours because he doesn’t use a computer.

Should I/we/you feel dirty for enjoying a little quality time with a man who believes that giving the impression of morals is better than actually having them and whose atavistic corporate impulses are put to contemporary, acquisitive ends? Probably not. Many before us have covered their eyes and waited for Rupert Murdoch to go away. Rupert Murdoch does not go away."

THE MAN WHO OWNS THE NEWS

Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch

By Michael Wolff

446 pp. Broadway Books. $29.95.

Read More......

'Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity,' by Michael Lewis

"For the past two decades, Michael Lewis, the most charming and one of the shrewdest guides to America’s raucous money culture, has displayed a knack for being at the right place at the right time. He was a young trader on the Salomon Brothers bond desk during the 1987 crash; the experience led to “Liar’s Poker.” His boss at Salomon, John Meriwether, a decade later became a central figure in the downfall of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management. Lewis spent a chunk of the 1990s in Silicon Valley, where he profiled the serial entrepreneur Jim Clark in “The New New Thing” and happened on to his next great subject, the Oakland A’s (“Moneyball”). Now, just in time for the Great Credit Debacle of 2008, Lewis has curated “Panic,” a prose exhibition on the past 20 years of monetary madness.

The new book, Lewis writes, is an effort “to recreate the more recent financial panics, in an attempt to show how financial markets now operate.” Of course, after reading this lively, frequently fine collection of newspaper articles, magazine features, academic post-mortems and the odd blog entry, you’ll find the markets are still something of a mystery. The volatility and gut-wrenching jolts seem to defy any rational expectation. “The bottom line is, no one knows,” the economist Franklin Edwards wrote in his introduction to a collection of studies on the crash of 1987.

Still, paging through “Panic” is like wandering through an eclectic museum that houses old masters (Nobel laureates like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz), but also folk artists (the satirist Dave Barry), artisans (beat reporters) and figurative painters (magazine writers like Lewis, John Cassidy and Roger Lowenstein).

“Panic” covers four major episodes: the 1987 United States stock market crash, the 1997-98 emerging-market bust-ups (called “Foreigners Gone Wild”), the dot-com meltdown and the current housing/credit/stock market collapse. Each is a triptych — the first panel is a brief essay by Lewis, the second is filled with contemporaneous newspaper or magazine articles that set up the boom, and the third presents sober analysis of why it happened. While being anthologized is usually a badge of honor for writers, some of the articles were plainly chosen for the way in which they typified the dangerous pre-panic zeitgeist, capturing “the feeling in the air immediately before things went wrong,” as Lewis puts it. I suspect the authors of the Time article from July 1987 on how individual investors were riding the bull market, and of the January 1996 New York Times article extolling emerging market mutual funds, now regard these works the way my brothers and I regard bell-bottom pants — signs of youthful indiscretion that are best forgotten.

But there are plenty of gems, especially involving the 1987 crash, which now seems quaint. An excerpt from a book by the former Wall Street Journal reporter Tim Metz sheds light on the chaos in the markets then. More broadly, the entries remind us that before CNBC, Yahoo Finance and E*Trade, those not sufficiently with it to possess a hand-held Quotron had to visit brokerage offices to check stock quotes.

What else is noteworthy? Paul Krugman’s dissection in Fortune of what went wrong in Asia in 1998, a Jeffrey Sachs interview on what went wrong in Russia. The Wall Street Journal’s 1998 article on how the stock of the second-tier book retailer Books-A-Million went on a wild rise after the company introduced its new Web site and Katharine Mieszkowski’s May 2000 Salon account on dot-coms’ blowing millions of dollars on Super Bowl advertisements don’t taste as good as Proust’s madeleine. But they sure take you back. Mark Gimein’s July 2000 Fortune article on AllAdvantage, which paid people 53 cents an hour to surf the Net with a special advertising bar on their screens, is a howler. The headline: “Meet the Dumbest Dot-Com in the World.”

The most recent episode, which Lewis calls “The People’s Panic,” is less funny — it’s too close, it roped in many more people, and the costs to the public are likely to be huge. The bailouts are especially galling given the ample warnings, like those sounded by John Cassidy of The New Yorker, who warned in November 2002 that housing would be the next crash. A single entry from the Irvine Housing Blog, which shows how a person in January 2005 bought a $1.157 million house with $270 down, refinanced with a funky teaser-rate mortgage and then proceeded to open up a $491,000 home equity line of credit by 2007, neatly encapsulates the lunacy.

Some of the best entries are Lewis’s own, including his January 1999 New York Times Magazine article on the failed hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management. The quantitative geniuses who designed this vehicle had a tough time grappling with the fact that their model had failed. “It is interesting to see how people respond when the assumptions that get them out of bed in the morning are declared ridiculous by the wider world,” Lewis writes. In each of the episodes, the bottom fell out because a bedrock belief held by many participants — smart professionals, not the perennially stupid individual investor — suddenly evaporated. “Panic” is to a large degree a chronicle of the capacity of highly paid professionals for self-delusion.

This volume could just as easily have been titled “Complacency.” As Lewis shows, there’s something distinctly Ameri­can in our propensity to blow bubbles until they pop, spend a few months licking our wounds and then hit replay. “Yuppies’ Last Rites Readied,” declared the headline on a New York Times article of Oct. 21, 1987, which documented how the stock market crash was causing materialist, money-soaked urban dwellers to reduce conspicuous consumption and focus more on human relationships. Of course, that moral awakening lasted only as long as the downturn. And the same business publications that do such a great job of dissecting the bubbles once they’ve popped are the same ones that help promote and sustain the next one. What drives this? It’s not simply greed, or stupidity, but a kind of learned naïveté. We convince ourselves, over and over again, that nothing can go wrong, and that even if it does the smart ones among us will be insulated from any ill effects. Despite Suze Orman’s pleas, as financial beings we lack self-awareness and irony. In October 2000, Jerry Useem of Fortune called prominent players and asked what they had learned from the dot-com bust. James Cramer, hedge fund manager, media personality and founder of TheStreet.com, declared the Internet over and spoke of spending his time coaching soccer. “I’m done with the material stuff.” Riiight.

In these times, $27.95 may seem a steep price to pay for a collection of articles, many of which can be found online. But there are good reasons to splurge. The book’s profits are going to charity. And as of mid-December, used copies were trading hands on the secondary market (Amazon) for $13. In other words, after a few weeks of ownership, this book still retains about half its value. Which is more than can be said for Citigroup stock."

PANIC

The Story of Modern Financial Insanity

Edited by Michael Lewis

391 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $27.95

Read More......

'The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World,' by Niall Ferguson

"Niall Ferguson, it is fair to say, is a one-man book factory. In fact, if the American economy cranked out goods as prolifically as Ferguson does histories, we might not be in half the fix we are in right now. But then Ferguson wouldn’t have nearly as much to write about. The onetime enfant terrible of the Oxbridge historical establishment, Ferguson specializes in finding fault with great powers, especially the way they mismanage their empires. Ferguson first came to notice a decade ago with “The Pity of War,” a revisionist tour de force arguing that Britain made a world-historical error by entering World War I (and thereby destroying its empire) when it should have simply waited out the swift German conquest of Europe and remained a superpower, with Europe the better for it. More recently the Scottish-born Ferguson, who now spends half the year teaching at Harvard and the other half at Oxford, has turned his attention to the prodigal young heir to the British imperial crown, the United States. In “The Cash Nexus” (2001) and “Colossus” (2004), he urged Americans to emerge from their self-denial and fulfill their obvious destiny as the next “liberal” empire spreading the light of democracy and Anglo-­Saxon legalism across the globe. “The greatest disappointment facing the world in the 21st century,” Ferguson concluded in “The Cash Nexus” (published in the opening months of the Bush presidency), is that “the leaders of the one state with the economic resources to make the world a better place lack the guts to do it.” Ferguson later supported the Iraq war as evidence that Washington had finally gotten up its courage, imperially speaking.

Whatever one thinks of his arguments, it’s impossible to ignore Niall Ferguson. He’s like the brightest kid in the debating club, the one who pulls all-nighters in the library and ferrets out facts no one thought to uncover. And in his latest book, “The Ascent of Money” — humbly subtitled “A Financial History of the World” — Ferguson takes us on an often enlightening and enjoyable spelunking tour through the underside of great events, a lesson in how the most successful great powers have always been underpinned by smart money. “The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man,” he writes, making a conscious reference to the BBC production he loved as a boy, Jacob Bronowski’s “Ascent of Man.” (In fact, like Ferguson’s three previous books, “Colossus,” “Empire” and “The War of the World,” “The Ascent of Money” was written as a companion to a TV documentary series.)

“Behind each great historical phenomenon there lies a financial secret,” Ferguson says. He goes into fascinating detail about how “it was Nathan Roth­schild as much as the Duke of Wellington who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo” by selling bonds and stockpiling gold for the British Army. The richest bankers on the Continent in the 19th century, the Rothschilds became known as die Finanzbonaparten (the Bonapartes of finance). And, as Ferguson argues, they also played a crucial part in the South’s defeat in the Civil War by declining to invest in Confederate cotton-­collateralized bonds. Imperial Spain amassed vast amounts of bullion from the New World, but it faded as a power while the British and Dutch empires prospered because they had sophisticated banking systems and Spain did not. Similarly, the French Revolution was made all but inevitable by the machinations of an unscrupulous Scotsman named John Law, whom the deeply indebted French monarchy recklessly placed in charge of public finance. “It was as if one man was simultaneously running all 500 of the top U.S. corporations, the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve System,” Ferguson writes. Law proceeded to single-handedly create the subprime mortgage bubble of his day. When it collapsed, the fallout “fatally set back France’s financial development, putting Frenchmen off paper money and stock markets for generations.”

Wilhelmine Germany, meanwhile, came up short in World War I because it “did not have access to the international bond market,” Ferguson writes. Every one of these episodes sounds like a warning shot: Will America be the next great power to fall because of unsound finance?
The question is particularly pressing in the midst of what is widely seen as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. And Ferguson’s conclusions are troubling. Only a few years after accusing Washington of “imperial understretch” for failing to flex its muscles — and without any hint of irony — Ferguson now argues that the United States may be succumbing to financial overstretch. Deeply in debt to the rest of the world, it has become part of a “dual country” that he calls “Chimerica.” “In effect, the People’s Republic of China has become banker to the United States of America,” he writes. Until the current global financial crisis, this seemed to be a fairly reliable relationship. American consumers over-bought goods and over-borrowed from China, and the Chinese in turn accumulated huge dollar surpluses that they plowed back into Wall Street investments, thereby supplying profligate Americans with the financing we needed to consume and sustain ourselves as the lone superpower. “For a time it seemed like a marriage made in heaven,” Ferguson writes. “The East Chimericans did the saving. The West Chimericans did the spending.”

Suddenly, however, it’s looking more like a marriage made in hell. According to Ferguson, much of the current crisis stems from this increasingly uneasy symbiosis. It turns out “there was a catch. The more China was willing to lend to the United States, the more Americans were willing to borrow.” This cascade of easy money, he argues, “was the underlying cause of the surge in bank lending, bond issuance and new derivative contracts that Planet Finance witnessed after 2000. . . . And Chimerica — or the Asian ‘savings glut,’ as Ben Bernanke called it — was the underlying reason why the U.S. mortgage market was so awash with cash in 2006 that you could get a 100 percent mortgage with no income, no job or assets.” Going forward, the system seems likely to be increasingly unstable, as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson suggested recently when he warned that unless fundamental changes are made, “the pressure from global imbalances will simply build up again until it finds another outlet.”

Previous periods of global stability and peace had relied on judicious mechanisms like the Congress of Vienna or the Bretton Woods agreements. Now the international system — and America’s position within it — has come to depend on what looks more like a global Rube Goldberg machine running on hot money. And though Ferguson doesn’t come out and say it, the Chinese may now have the upper hand in this chimerical Chimerica. While so far it’s worked in Beijing’s interest to under­write America’s rampant consumerism — because we buy so many of their goods — the Chinese also have the option of recycling some of their surplus billions into their own huge population. We, on the other hand, don’t have the option not to borrow from them. Indeed, it’s no secret on Wall Street and in Washington that the real targets of President Bush’s $700 billion bailout plan were the foreign funds, including “sovereign wealth funds,” that keep America’s financial system afloat. Unless these foreign financiers — principally China and Japan — get reassurance that the global financial system can function properly again, Ameri­ca’s long period of growth and power may be coming to a close.

Perhaps, then, the conclusion should be that Americans need to flex our muscles less as an empire and fight a little harder for fiscal sobriety and balance in our foreign policy. To be fair, Ferguson was early in seeing that America’s fiscal problems were serious. In “Colossus,” he warned presciently of America’s increasing reliance on Chinese capital, although he argued then that we should be mainly worried about domestic entitlements like Medicare and Social Security — indicating that he, like the Bush administration, seriously underestimated the ultimate cost of the Iraq war.

As with Ferguson’s three previous documentary efforts, “The Ascent of Money” sometimes feels as if it were laid out like a shooting script. Ferguson will depart from an exegesis on the 17th century or the Great Depression to pop up in post-Katrina New Orleans or Memphis (for a report on bankruptcies), and we surmise it’s to record another on-scener for PBS. The book, whose main text comprises a scant 360 pages (a light effort for Ferguson, especially considering the ambitious subtitle), is also reductionist at times. Is it really fair to say Chimerica is mainly at the root of our current problems? (A lack of oversight and regulation of the subprime mortgage market here at home had a lot to do with it as well.) China’s backwardness between the 1700s and 1970s was largely due to its dearth of financial innovation, he suggests, but other historians have pointed equally to the absence of technological innovation of the kind that arose in Europe’s close-quartered patchwork of states because of repeated wars.

And in the end, as Ferguson himself seems to acknowledge, the scope of the financial crisis that is plaguing the world today calls into question the book’s premise — that the “trajectory” of finance through history, while “jagged and irregular,” is “unquestionably upwards.” Our increasingly sophisticated finance clearly contains self-destructive tendencies, and its very complexity may have become our undoing. Ferguson wonders whether the cruel realities of biological evolution are the model for what is happening now. Contemplating the financial Armageddon that has devastated Wall Street and set back globalization, he asks: “Are we on the brink of a ‘great dying’ in the financial world — one of those mass extinctions of species that have occurred periodically, like the end-Cambrian extinction that killed off 90 percent of Earth’s species, or the Cretaceous-Tertiary catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs?” Here we thought we were making all this progress as a species, and suddenly we find our supposed innovations lumped with Tyrannosaurus rex. Doesn’t sound like much of an ascent to me."

THE ASCENT OF MONEY

A Financial History of the World

By Niall Ferguson

Illustrated. 442 pp. The Penguin Press. $29.95

Read More......

'The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It,' by Tilar J. Mazzeo

“The Widow Clicquot,” Tilar J. Mazzeo’s sweeping oenobiography of Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin, is the story of a woman who was a smashing success long before anyone conceptualized the glass ceiling. Her destiny was formed in the wake of the French Revolution when, Mazzeo suggests, “modern society — with its emphasis on commerce and the freedom of the individual — was invented.” Barbe-Nicole, daughter of a successful textile maker turned Jacobin, is portrayed as someone whose way of doing business helped define the next century.

Fate cursed or blessed her with the mantle of early widowhood. Her husband, a winemaker from whom she learned the craft, died when she was 27, leaving her a single mother — the veuve (widow) Clicquot. Officially, the cause of François Clicquot’s death was typhoid, which was then commonly treated by feeding the patient Champagne, believed to strengthen the body against what was known as malignant fever. “To think that a bottle of his own sparkling wine might have saved François!” Mazzeo writes, going on to speculate that it is also possible he killed himself because business wasn’t good.

Already savvy about winemaking, Barbe­-Nicole plunged into a new life. Despite contemporary mores and the Napoleonic Code, which emphasized a woman’s role at home, she was not alone. She saw the success of such wine merchants as the widow Germon, the widow Robert and the widow Blanc, and understood that widows were the “only women granted the social freedom to run their own affairs.” With the gate open, she was off and running with spectacular results.
What a prescient entrepreneur she was, with a business outlook that sounds more 21st century than 19th. Toward the end of her life, in the 1860s, she wrote to a great-grandchild: “The world is in perpetual motion, and we must invent the things of tomorrow. One must go before others, be determined and exacting, and let your intelligence direct your life. Act with audacity.”

Her audacity was unleashed at the right time. Napoleon’s abdication in 1814 was cause for toasts among both the British and Russians. “Champagne,” Mazzeo writes, “was on its way to becoming another word for mass-culture celebration.” While the war’s naval blockade still paralyzed commercial shipping, Mme. Clicquot conspired to sneak a boat around the armada, delivering 10,000 bottles of high-proof, cork-popping 1811 cuvée Veuve Clicquot to Königsberg, where it sold for the equivalent of $100 per bottle. When the powerhouse 1811 reached St. Petersburg, Czar Alexander declared he would drink nothing else. Within two years the widow Clicquot was “at the helm of an internationally renowned commercial empire — and she was one of the first women in modern history to do it.” People said she had conquered Russia with Champagne; soon, London clubgoers simply asked for a bottle of “the Widow.”

As much about Champagne itself as about the woman who helped elevate it to celebrity status, “The Widow Clicquot” reveals that the wine’s history is as filled with faux folklore as a glass of it is with tiny bubbles. For one thing, Dom Pierre Pérignon did not invent it. The oft-told fable is that Dom Pérignon, the cellar master at the Hautvillers abbey, took a first sip and cried out to his fellow monks: “Come quickly! I am drinking the stars!” A charming tale, but bogus. Mazzeo says that for a decade after 1660, when Dom Pérignon gained fame as a master blender, he steadfastly worked at ways to prevent wine from developing bubbles. “In the 17th century,” she reports, “winemakers were anything but delighted by the voluntary sparkle that developed in their casks come spring.” Champagne did not even originate in France. While Dom Pérignon was struggling to stamp out bubbles, British oenophiles already were drinking sparkling wine made from Champagne grapes. Why? Customers rich enough to buy whole barrels realized they had to do something to keep their prize from turning to vinegar. They put still wine from Champagne into sturdy British bottles, sometimes with a little brandy to act as a preservative. At some point, somebody realized that sugar bottled with the wine would start a secondary fermentation, creating Champagne. Bubbly was not invented; it was discovered by accident.

At its beginning, Champagne scarcely resembled the dry, fine-fizzed champers we know today. Whereas a modern demi sec might contain 20 grams of sugar per bottle, the Champagne of Mme. Clicquot’s time held 10 or 15 times that much and was served as icy as a Slurpee. Nor did the original stuff have elegant little bubbles to tickle your nose. Veuve Clicquot customers complained about bubbles so big and gassy that they left the wine topped with a beery foam.

Madame Clicquot disparagingly called the unwelcome froth “toad’s eyes,” and was determined to make better bubbles. Although she was head of the company, her devotion to the craft of wine making never wavered; she worked with her cellar master to devise a riddling rack to facilitate remuage, the process by which sediment is drawn from the liquid to the bottle’s neck. Her obsession with creating a beverage as clear as a flawless diamond may well have been her most important achievement. Without it, Mazzeo writes, “Champagne could never have become the world’s most famous wine.”

THE WIDOW CLICQUOT

The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It

By Tilar J. Mazzeo

265 pp. Collins/HarperCollins Publishers. $25.95

Read More......

'Shakespeare and Modern Culture,' by Marjorie Garber

"Although women did not begin performing in his plays until several decades after the playwright’s death, it is hardly surprising to encounter a quotation from an actress in a scholarly volume on Shakespeare. Ellen Terry conducted a lively debate with Shaw over her interpretations of various characters. Sarah Bernhardt was among the many women who have taken on the role of Hamlet, making up, after a fashion, for female forebears denied the chance to play even Rosalind or Viola or Lady M.

But you certainly don’t expect to hear from Ali MacGraw. I wouldn’t want to classify this placid movie star of the 1960s and ’70s as the very last actress I would expect to be offering insights on Shakespeare — Jessica Simpson would come a lot farther down the list — but still, the inclusion of a quotation from MacGraw in Marjorie Garber’s new book, “Shakespeare and Modern Culture,” drew a raised eyebrow.

A smile, too. There is much heady scholarship in Garber’s wide-ranging survey of the ways in which “the timelessness of Shakespeare is achieved by his recurrent timeliness.” MacGraw, the “Love Story” star, is in the impressive company of gleamingly illustrious intellectual eminences like Freud and Marx, not to mention respected literary critics from Hazlitt to Foucault. But the book is as much about the uses (and abuses) to which Shakespeare has been put in the last few centuries, with a concentration on the one just past, as it is about the plays themselves. So Garber’s range of references encompasses a dizzyingly diverse cast of characters, from political pundits to gurus of the business world, from theoreticians known mostly to academics to the British rock band Dire Straits.

This capacious reach is actually the book’s signal achievement and its primary flaw. That’s a fat paradox, I know, but I’m playing Garber’s own game. “Shakespeare and Modern Culture” is founded on proving the truth of a mind-bending formulation, that “Shakespeare makes modern culture and modern culture makes Shakespeare.” The history of the plays as they have been performed and debated across the centuries is “the story of a set of mutual crossings and recrossings across genres, times and modes.” The book’s overarching idea derives from the rhetorical device known as chiasmus, or “crossing of words” — the theoretical two-way street illustrated by that phrase about Shakespeare both making and being made. “The structure of thinking exemplified by chiasmus,” Garber writes, “works both structurally and symbolically: the productive confusion between art and life, inside and outside, container and contained was essential to both the stability and the destabilization of Shakespearean theater.” Seemingly opposed ideas — or chronologically distant phenomena — are made to converse, and the conversation often brings forth bright streams of revelation, if also the occasional banality.

We seem to have strayed a long way from Ali MacGraw, but it should be emphasized that Garber — a Harvard literature professor and the author of “Shakespeare After All,” a big, terrific study of the whole canon, as well as several other books on varied subjects (real estate, transvestism, dogs) — writes mostly lucid, engaging prose that requires little recourse to a Glossary of Academic Literary Jargon. Following her along the many intellectual crosswalks of the book will pose no major obstacles for the general reader.

“Shakespeare and Modern Culture” is devoted to 10 major plays; the non-­hilarious “Merchant of Venice” is the only comedy among them. I wish Garber had included at least one of the lighter comedies, or addressed the question of why none were deemed worthy of attention. I also wish the inappropriately dreary, subtitle-ish title had been appended to something more pithy: “Enter, Fleeing,” perhaps, a frequent Shakespearean stage direction that set Walter Benjamin musing profitably, as Garber notes.

Each chapter explores a single play and various cultural responses to it over the years — in particular, how it relates to one of “the central concepts and topics of literary and cultural investigation for the past hundred-plus years.” “Hamlet” is discussed in concert with changing ideas about “character,” both literary and personal. “Macbeth,” with its fatally misleading prophecies, is investigated through the prism of “the necessity of ­interpretation.”

So far, so good. It is only when we come to the other major structural formula — linking each play not just with an idea but with at least one modern genre — that things occasionally go awry. When Garber examines the plays through their impact on intrinsically interesting samples of 20th-century culture, the reading is wonderful in its depth of insight and flexible toggling between the Shakespeare texts and the later works. When it is viewed in the light of less rich fare — the pep-speak of business-advice books, or glib media coverage of politicians, sometimes even the movie versions of the plays — the inspiration dries up.

The culminating chapter, titled “ ‘King Lear’: The Dream of Sublimity,” displays Garber at her best, and brings the book to an aptly sublime conclusion. She fruitfully traces the play’s rise to the top spot in the canon during the course of the 20th century, as a work that seemed both to prefigure the horrors of that blood-soaked era and to offer endless stimulation to the thinkers and writers born into it. Garber discusses Samuel Beckett and Jan Kott (who linked Beckett’s “Endgame” and “Lear” in his seminal book “Shakespeare Our Contemporary”) and offers provocative digressions about Albert Camus and many others. Her elucidation of the relationship between zero and nothingness is occasionally marked by “leaps” — to use a term she also dissects brilliantly — that don’t land her anywhere much. The intellectual hopscotching, though, is ultimately an example of lit-crit pattern­making that has the beauty and intricacy of fine lace.

But when Garber spends a few pages of her chapter on “Henry V” analyzing the many ways in which Shakespeare’s characters, especially that rousing leader of the battle-waging “band of brothers,” have been stripped of their ambiguity to serve as exemplars of leadership qualities and modern management techniques, the mind shuts down. As she herself writes at the conclusion of this section: “This kind of work is not useful in illuminating, analyzing or interpreting Shakespeare. It uses Shakespeare, but the use is not commutative. It does not go both ways.” Precisely. So why not spare us?

The paradox I referred to above — the book’s inclusivity as both an asset and a problem — derives from the issue Garber cogently describes here. I can’t argue with her when she includes a list of occasions on which comparisons to Lady Macbeth have been used to demonize women politicians. But the point will be obvious to anybody paying attention to the currents of popular culture. Similarly, in the chapter about “Richard III,” centered on the elusiveness of “fact,” Garber provides a long list of recent examples of “the temptations to rewrite history”: the weapons of mass destruction argument for waging war on Iraq, the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman stories, and (yawn) even James Frey. These digressions are time wasters, and have a Google-searchy quality that detracts from the far more edifying work Garber does elsewhere in exploring Shakespeare’s impact on modern art and thought. (She’s particularly astute on Freud.)

In the end, the nourishing material far outweighs the thinner gruel. And Garber’s aim, to encourage a deep engagement with the plays by emphasizing their ubiquity in modern culture, is so exemplary that the book’s occasional descent from the stimulating to the trite is forgivable. A fierce devotion to Shakespeare shines forth from every page. And, really, to corrupt a phrase made famous by Ali MacGraw, loving Shakespeare means never having to say you’re sorry."

SHAKESPEARE AND MODERN CULTURE

By Marjorie Garber

Illustrated. 326 pp. Pantheon Books. $30

Read More......

'The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War,' by Alexander Waugh

“A tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses,” a wag once observed. Well, when it comes to dysfunction, the Wittgensteins of Vienna could give the Oedipuses a run for their money. The tyrannical family patriarch was Karl Wittgenstein (1847-1913), a steel, banking and arms magnate. He and his timorous wife, Leopoldine, brought nine children into the world. Of the five boys, three certainly or probably committed suicide and two were plagued by suicidal impulses throughout their lives. Of the three daughters who survived into adulthood, two got married; both husbands ended up insane and one died by his own hand. Even by the morbid standards of late Hapsburg Vienna these are impressive numbers. But tense and peculiar as the Wittgensteins were, the family also had a strain of genius. Of the two sons who didn’t kill themselves, one, Paul (1887-1961), managed to become an internationally celebrated concert pianist despite the loss of his right arm in World War I. The other, Ludwig (1889-1951), was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century.

Who better to chronicle such a clan than Alexander Waugh, himself the scion of a distinguished and colorful family? In his previous book, “Fathers and Sons,” Waugh wrote with a fine comic touch about his grandfather Evelyn and his father, Auberon. Here he moves from a farcical to a tragic vein. Yet the Wittgensteins, for all their Sturm und Drang, can be as funny as the Waughs. We are told, for example, that the first spoken word of one of the Wittgenstein boys was “Oedipus.”

The author brings another advantage to his subject: he is a music critic (and sometime composer), and the Wittgensteins were the musical family par excellence. Their palatial residence in Vienna contained seven grand pianos, including two Bösendorfer Imperials. Among the guests at their home concerts, which took place in a special Musiksaal adorned with a marble statue of the nude Beethoven squatting and glowering atop a high plinth, were Brahms, Richard Strauss, Schoenberg and Mahler. All the Wittgensteins, parents and children alike, were prodigiously talented musicians. They “pursued music with an enthusiasm that, at times, bordered on the pathological,” Waugh writes. Concertizing together seems to have been for them a wordless medium of communication, affording a respite from the usual family tension and bickering.

It was apparently not enough of a respite for the eldest son, Hans, who fled the household and disappeared into America, where he ended his life under mysterious circumstances, possibly by drowning himself in Lake Okeechobee. Nor was it enough for his brother Rudi, a closeted homo­sexual (like Hans), who killed himself by drinking a cyanide-laced glass of milk at a restaurant bar in Berlin. The only Wittgenstein brother who came close to having a sunny disposition, Kurt, shot himself in the head on the battlefield, perhaps to avoid being taken prisoner, while fighting for the Austro-­Hungarian monarchy in World War I.

That leaves the two youngest sons. Paul, who made his debut as a concert pianist on the eve of the war (the conductor, to be sure, went on to commit suicide), showed great bravery as an Austrian soldier. After a bullet shattered his right elbow, the arm was amputated and he was taken prisoner by the Russians. Yet he was determined to stick with his pianistic career. Confined to the invalid ward of a Siberian P.O.W. camp under the most miserable of conditions, Paul set about solving a puzzle: how could a single hand play both melody and accompaniment? Obsessively tapping out a memorized Chopin piece with his freezing fingers on a wooden box and imagining the music, he began to develop an ingenious bag of tricks that would fool even the sharpest ear. “His most far-reaching innovation,” Waugh writes, “was a combined pedaling and hand-movement technique that allowed him to sound chords that were strictly impossible for a five-fingered pianist to play.”

As for Ludwig, the baby of the family, he seems to have had a sense of his genius from an early age. After finishing high school (where one of his classmates was Adolf Hitler), he decided to find a fellow genius who might serve as his mentor. His first choice was the great physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, but Boltzmann hanged himself before Wittgenstein could meet him. In 1911, Wittgenstein sought out Bertrand Russell in Cambridge. Russell was initially wary of the strange (and startlingly handsome) young Viennese, who would show up in his rooms late at night to stutter out philosophical monologues, pacing “like a caged tiger” and threatening to kill himself if Russell turned him out. Before long, though, the older philosopher succumbed, writing to his mistress, Lady Ottoline Morrell, that Wittgenstein “has pure intellectual passion in the highest degree; it makes me love him.” Returning to Vienna, Wittgenstein volunteered for the Austrian Army in World War I, insisting, out of spiritual motives, that he be assigned to the most dangerous missions. It was during the war that he produced his first philosophical work (the only one to be published in his lifetime), the “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” which opens with the arresting proposition, “The world is all that is the case.”

Ludwig’s subsequent career, familiar from numerous biographies and memoirs, is briskly told here. Renouncing his share of the family fortune (among the largest of war-ruined Europe, thanks to the Wittgensteins’ shrewd American investments), he pursued self-mortification as a schoolteacher in an impoverished Alpine village. But his pedagogical methods included slapping the children rather violently, and he got run out of town. Turning to architecture, he designed an austere cubical house, now regarded as a modernist masterpiece, for one of his sisters in Vienna. Most of the rest of his life was spent in Cambridge, where he developed a radically new vision of philosophy, one that marked a decisive break with his early work. As for his sex life, Waugh notes that at least one of the several relationships Ludwig had with adoring young men was frankly physical, but he is agnostic about whether the philosopher pursued rough trade in public parks. (When that claim was made in a scandalous 1973 biography, Wittgenstein’s outraged nephew announced his readiness to vomit on the hat of the publisher — surely one of the most inspired threats of all time.)

Ludwig may be the famous Wittgenstein today, but it’s the now forgotten Paul who looms largest in this book. Having perfected his piano technique between the wars, he thrilled concert audiences (especially women — he was something of a lady-killer), who delighted in the spectacle of this one-arm wonder pounding out fortissimos. “The sheer speed at which he was able to move his fingers across the keyboard was breathtaking,” Waugh writes. Backed by the Wittgenstein family fortune, Paul set about commissioning piano concertos for the left hand from the leading composers of the day. His dealings with them proved comically tempestuous. He rejected Hindemith’s composition as unplayable and wrote to Prokofiev, “Thank you for your concerto, but I do not understand a single note and I shall not play it.” He accused Benjamin Britten and Richard Strauss of over-orchestrating — “How can I with my one poor hand hope to compete with a quadruple orchestra?” — and made an enemy of Ravel by altering the composer’s Concerto for the Left Hand to suit his own taste.

Paul’s quarrels with his own family were equally fierce. He got out of Austria just after the Anschluss in 1938, ending up in New York (where he initially lived at the Webster Hotel on West 45th Street and gave lessons on the bar piano). His three sisters, who remained in Vienna, were astonished to discover that, despite having grown up Catholics, they were deemed Jews under the Nuremberg laws, since they had three Jewish grandparents. The only thing standing between them and the camps was the hoard of gold the Wittgenstein family had stashed away in Switzerland, which the Nazis were eager to get their hands on. The legal wrangling over the fortune among Paul, his sisters and the Reichsbank lawyers, and the arrest and imprisonment of the sisters for passport fraud, culminate in dramatic fashion with Hitler himself granting a humiliating but life-sparing change in status to the family — from Volljuden (“full Jews”) to Mischling (“half breed”).

“The House of Wittgenstein,” entertainingly told throughout, ends on an elegiac note, with the deaths of the still mutually alienated siblings: Ludwig in Cambridge, Paul (survived by his wife and three children) on Long Island, and the sisters in Vienna, where the Palais Wittgenstein, damaged by an American bomb near the end of the war, was finally demolished by a developer. The author does not care to raise Paul Wittgenstein’s posthumous reputation as a pianist, observing that his performances now strike the ear as “harsh and ham-fisted” (a judgment born out by a recording I found on the Internet of Paul Wittgenstein playing the Ravel concerto in 1937 with Bruno Walter and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra).

My only serious complaint about the book concerns Waugh’s glancing treatment of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philo­sophical work. He dismisses it as “incomprehensible” and attributes Wittgenstein’s influence to his “striking looks, manner and extraordinarily persuasive personality.” His view of Wittgenstein is substantially the same as the one taken in Derek Jarman’s 1993 film, “Wittgenstein,” to which Terry Eagleton contributed the script. In both cases, Wittgenstein is depicted as a gurulike source of gnomic utterances. Jarman’s attitude toward this caricature is solemnly reverential, whereas Waugh’s is mocking and somewhat philistine. But Ludwig Wittgenstein was not a guru; he was a supremely rigorous thinker who, by paying minute attention to the structure and limits of language, sought to clear away the conceptual confusions that plague philosophy. Waugh is not obliged to give the reader an understanding of his accomplishment — there are plenty of books that do that pretty well — but he should not be positively misleading.

For all their quarreling, madness and self-destruction, the Wittgensteins were at least spared one sort of dysfunction: there is no trace of incestuous impulses among them. The same, alas, cannot be said of the author’s own family. Evelyn Waugh freely avowed feelings of more than paternal tenderness for his daughter Meg. When she announced her intention to wed a young man, her father sadly wrote to a friend, “She wants children, and that is a thing I can’t decently provide for her.” Even Oedipus would blush."

THE HOUSE OF WITTGENSTEIN

A Family at War

By Alexander Waugh

Illustrated. 333 pp. Doubleday. $28.95

Read More......