Journal

Nightingales

Gillian Gill's Nightingales, while flawed, gives a remarkable picture of Florence Nightingale.  I never thought I'd sit still for psychological speculation by a biographer, but Gill's description of Nightingale's habit of day dreaming is fascinating.  The best part of the book, though, is Gill's paragraph where Nightingale returns to her parents' home in England after 21 months in the army hospitals of the Crimean War -- FN has become a superstar in England, and there are to be vast celebrations on her return.  But she sneaks back into England to avoid the celebrations and arrives at the train station near her rural home.  There FN "confided her luggage to the stationmaster, and walked across the fields to Lea Hurst.  The Nightingales' housekeeper, chancing to look out the window, saw her entering through the back gate.  And in this way, in her thirty-seventh year, Florence Nightingale moved decisively off the stage and into the wings of Victorian history."  Sentences don't come better than that.   

Engaging India

I read Strobe Talbot's Engaging India on the way home from the L.A. Triathlon. I've liked each of the several books by Talbott I've read, especially The Master of the Game, but this book is a disappointment. It's interesting that it has sunk without a trace in D.C. Talbott's account of his dealings with India after the 1998 nuclear tests is fun to read, but the State Department's hand wringing is hard to take, even 6 years later. What a mess, and Talbott's little tete-a-tetes with Jaswant Singh are an unsatisfying substitute for a coherent foreign policy. I was surprised by the reports that Feith's policy group at DoD has 1,500 people. (This was reported in connection with the investigation of disclosures to Israel.) 1,500 people! But if Talbott's book is a fair reflection of State's level of effectiveness and focus, you can't blame DoD for getting into the game.

P. G. Wodehouse

"'It all comes down to this,' said the Biscuit, summing up. 'If England wants a happy, well-fed aristocracy, she musn't have wars. She can't have it both ways.'" Big Money (1931)

The Mold in Dr. Florey's Coat

Eric Lax's The Mold in Dr. Florey's Coat, about the development of penicillin, is that rare book that would have been better if it had been longer. He attempts to describe the development of penicillin without more than skating over the science. This could have been a better book if he had taken the time to explain, e.g., the implications of the sulfur for the chemical structure of penicillin. And it's never clear exactly what contribution was made by Ernst Chain, because we spend so much time on his difficult personality and notes between Florey husband & wife. I suppose when your previous book was a biography of Woody Allen it's tough to shift gears.

Alexander Hamilton

It's probably a literary impossibility to write a boring biography of Hamilton -- Nevis, the fight with Washington on the staircase, Yorktown, Secretary of the Treasury, Maria Reynolds, and the duel with Burr -- what a story! Chernow, though, has taken a stab at writing a dull biography of Hamilton. He makes Hamilton come off as a superlatively good clerk, or chief of staff. There are long mini-biographies of Jefferson, Adams, and Burr built in to this 730-page edifice. (Hello, Ron, we know who they were and what they did.) Some review (I can't recall where -- the Journal, maybe?) commented that Chernow paid little attention to the details of Hamilton's economic policies as Treasury Secretary, which I think is a fair point. Also, Chernow discusses only a handfull -- maybe three? -- of Hamilton's legal cases, and then only in passing. Yet his law practice was a major part of his adult life, and his economic policies were his most important accomplishment -- much more important than, say, the Federalist Papers, which today are used only for Law Office history. Two of the major reviews both quoted Chernow's quip that Hamilton "must have produced the maximum number of words that a human being can scratch out in forty-nine years" -- which appears on page 5. I haven't seen anyone mention the tantalizing remark in the Acknowledgements (page 735, for those still standing) that Chernow "offered to pay for the genetic testing of any direct Hamilton descendants. The results are pending." Pending? These tests take an afternoon, if, of course, you can put your hands on the direct descendants. Bottom line: a failed book.

Lucy Grealy

When the NYTimes reviewed Ann Patchett's Truth & Beauty: a Friendship on Thursday, I abandoned Alexander Hamilton in mid-Federalist papers in a boat cabin on the Hudson River. I didn't even bother with Amazon; the Borders on L St. had 34 copies, and instead of heading down 18th St. that afternoon on my run toward the Mall, I tucked $30 in the waistband of my running shorts and headed up to Borders. Then I hid my copy in some Azaleas at the Federal Reserve and picked it up again after my loop around the Mall. This morning the Times & Joyce Carol Oates put the final rivet into the success of this book; Oates said it is 'riveting.' It takes all of 2 hours to read and suffers from the usual problems of the magazine-essay-that's-so-good-it's-turned-into-a-book. (Patchett published an essay about Lucy in New York Magazine not long after Lucy, poor thing, died in December 2002.) Still, it's a very fine book about an unusual and fascinating person. I never met Lucy and had never heard of her (I think) until NPR reported her death, but if I'd read Autobiography of a Face while she was alive I probably would have left to go find her the moment I finished her book. Autobiography never explained why she kept having surgery on her face; I finished it and thought 'forget these stupid surgeries.' Patchett, though, explains: Lucy could eat only with difficulty, which she never mentioned in Autobiography.

The Red Tsar

Sebag Montefiore's Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar is a superbly written and morbidly fascinating account of Stalin's life in the last two decades of his life, with side glances at the thugs around him. It's easy to say that Stalin was an unhinged monster, but Montefiore goes further to show how he manipulated (and often murdered) the senior Party members around him. It's a chilling story. One reviewer said that Montefiore pays no attention to the larger issues of collectivization, or the Terror, or WWII, which is true, but Montefiore's focus is to show the military-religious nature of Stalin's circle. His description of the murder of whole families is so calm and understated that it perfectly conveys the bureaucratic evil of the Terror. A great book.

Arrowsmith (1924)

In 1968, my first year of college, Robert Knox (who was assigned the job of teaching me American literature and who probably would have preferred to eat a frog) asked what my favorite novel was, and I without hesitating replied, "Arrowsmith." Knox said, "Well, you're immature." I think I read Arrowsmith three times in high school and loved it. It's very interesting to read again now; it's a flat book. Even the plague scenes in St. Hubert are not compelling, and the ending with Terry Wickett is just a mess. Why did I like it so much 40 years ago? Gottlieb is a well-done character. My plans to become a physician/scientist all date back to Gottlieb, but thankfully my parents stepped in and pushed me into another profession where at least I couldn't harm anyone. The first five paragraphs of Arrowsmith, ending with "That was the great-grandmother of Martin Arrowsmith," are justly famous. Maybe it's a good book not because of itself, but because of when it was written.

The Great Influenza

I read John Barry's The Great Influenza because I liked Rising Tide, but Influenza is a disappointment. The semi-mystical parts about the scientific process are plain awful, and the science is not explained well -- just compare Barry's account of the biochemistry of immunity, or Avery's work on DNA, with Judson's explanation of the same subjects in The Eighth Day of Creation. The most interesting (but very brief) part of the book to me was something I'd never heard before -- the possibility that Paul Lewis of the Rockefeller died of yellow fever by smoking a cigarette contaminated with the pathogen -- three years after Sinclair Lewis (no relation) published Arrowsmith, one of my favorite books when I was a teenager. (Barry apparently is implying that Paul Lewis committed suicide by deliberately contracting yellow fever, which I think is improbable.) In Arrowsmith, Leora dies from a contaminated cigarette, and the McGurk Institute is the fictional Rockefeller. I'm going to read Arrowsmith again, which I haven't opened for probably 30 years.

City Room

Arthur Gelb's City Room is 600-plus pages. Where was his editor? Gelb is a great journalist, and his stories are delightful -- especially his run-in with William Shawn, the 'Iron Mouse' (Lucette Lagnado had a good piece about this in the Wall St. Journal) -- but 600 pages? One great story is that a press agent once complained to George S. Kaufman 'How am I expected to get the name of the actress I represent into The Times?' "Shoot her," Kaufman suggested.

New York Times Letter 2-27-04

To the Editor:

In his Feb. 25 column, "Calling the Kettle Black," Nicholas D. Kristof puts his finger on a key obstacle to peace in the Mideast: the perception in Muslim countries that the United States applies a double standard to Israel and its neighbors.

The security fence is an important piece of that double standard, but nuclear weapons may be more important.

We look the other way when it comes to Israel's nuclear program (at least in public), while elsewhere in the region we take aggressive military and diplomatic steps to prevent development of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

This double standard destabilizes the Middle East and undermines the credibility of our efforts to limit these weapons.

Israel is the dominant conventional military force in the region, except for the United States itself. Retention of its nuclear option serves no legitimate strategic objective.

To achieve peace, we must apply a single standard prohibiting any Mideast state from possessing nuclear weapons, with no exceptions.

JAMES DABNEY MILLER
Washington, Feb. 25, 2004

•

Robert Kaplan in The Atlantic

The most striking point about Robert Kaplan's profile of Col. Tom Wilhelm in Mongolia in The Atlantic (March '04) is the leader that describes Wilhelm as a "soldier-diplomat." (Are the leaders in the Atlantic written by the article's author?) I'm always suspicious of these admiring profiles in the first place, but where is the State Department? The reason a U.S. colonel is in Mongolia isn't revealed until the end of the profile, when Kaplan notes that Mongolia's eastern border is 500 miles from North Korea, and "an air base here could be an important asset." (A very questionable idea, incidentally.) Although Kaplan doesn't mention it, his profile shows the extent to which foreign policy is run by the Defense Department, not State. Of course, State, to some extent, self-inflicted this wound -- when you spend several decades frittering away your time on migratory bird treaties, Congress gradually gives you smaller budgets.

The Week's Quotes

This week's issue has two wonderful quotes: "The less one has to do the less time one finds to do it in." (Lord Chesterfield). "Money can't buy friends but you get a better class of enemy." (Spike Mulligan)

NYTimes on Amy Chua

Emily Eakin's "On the Dark Side of Democracy" in this morning's Times is an excellent survey of the markets-and-democracy issue; Eakin did a good job of touching all the right intellectual bases, especially Amy Chua. I wrote just for myself a review of World on Fire in mid-2003, after hearing Chua speak at the law school, but I didn't try to publish it because I kept thinking of the advice from my philosophy professor, Gresham Riley, who said, "Don't conduct your philosophical education in public!" I know so little about this area that I thought I should keep quiet. I didn't agree with the view that, according to Eakin, is expressed by Thomas Carothers, that Chua has set-up a straw man because we're not forcing democracy on other countries. Her point, I think, is almost more that we're forcing wide-open markets on other countries, without recognizing that, in our own case, we have gradually developed restrictions and social nets around our markets.

The Yom Kippur War

Abraham Rabinovich, in The Yom Kippur War, quotes Gen. David Elazar (Meir's chief of staff) as saying on Rosh Hashana eve, "We'll have 100 tanks [on Golan] against their 800. That ought to be enough." Why this very good book has attracted zero attention is a mystery to me. It's the best piece on the intelligence failures before the war I've read.

Two Laps of Bermuda

Having promised myself after Dallas in December '02 never to run another marathon, I decided on impulse last week to run the Bermuda marathon -- with no training or preparation, other than eating too much over Christmas. Saturday, the day before the marathon, was an awful day in Bermuda: rain, cold, strong winds. Sunday morning, though, was perfect, with a spectacular sunrise over Hamilton harbor for the start. A tiny marathon: the Royal Gazette Monday morning listed only 379 finishers (though there was a larger half marathon that started together with the full marathon). The course was two laps to Harrington Sound from Hamilton along South Road and then back along North Road (which is uphill all the way from Flatts). My slowest run ever, by about 14 minutes: I finished 112th in 4:39:48, but there was no chip, so I lost a minute or so at the start. It says something about Bermuda that, with this time, I was still 7th in the 50-59 age group.

Israel's Nuclear Weapon

The Economist for January 3 proposes that Israel, in light of Libya's acceptance of IAEA inspections, bargain away its nuclear weapons for Arab (primitive) chemical and biological weapons. The Economist notes the implications of Pakistan's nuclear weapons for such a deal. This is an important subject, which is widely discussed in Washington. The Economist points out, correctly, that Israel was 'allowed' to build nuclear weapons, and even test them secretly in the (French) Pacific, only because the Arab countries threatened to destroy Israel with apparently (then, at least) superior conventional forces. (Avner Cohen's 1998 Israel and the Bomb is an excellent, and courageous, account of Israel's nuclear program, especially France's role.) The Arabs no longer threaten Israel (except, as The Economist notes, for Iran), and there is no cogent rationale now for Israel to have nuclear weapons or to remain outside the NPT. Our acquiescence in Israel's possession of nuclear weapons undercuts our support of the NPT. In Pakistan, for example, our efforts are essentially non-starters because of our position vis-avis Israel. My own view is that resolving Israel's nuclear weapons, and bringing Israel into the NPT, would go a surprisingly long way toward fixing our issues with the Arab world. I had lunch with Paul Nitze a few years ago, and he said that he would favor discarding all our nuclear weapons. I asked why, and he said, "Because there's no circumstance in which we would use them." That fits Israel now.

Castles of Steel/Dreanought

At page 271 of Castles of Steel, I abandoned ship and went looking for a copy of Dreadnought. I started Castles of Steel only because The Economist selected it as one of the best books of '03 (along with World on Fire, and The Majesty of the Law, both excellent, relatively unnoticed books). Why does WWI attract writers of long books? After starting Castles of Steel, I discovered that Massie assumes knowledge of Dreadnought. Dreadnought, though, turns out to be an absorbing book. Massie sees history as driven by personalities -- not for him the dry interest rates of Niall Ferguson (although The Pity of War is an excellent book). Whether or not Dreadnought is good history, it is great reading! On Salisbury: "Lord Salisbury was the father of ten. He treated his children like small foreign powers: not often noticed, but when recognized, regarded with unfailing politeness." He also says that Salibury "knew Jane Austen's six novels almost by heart." Six? Almost by heart? My real problem is that Arthur Gelb's City Room (a Christmas present to one of my sons) is sitting unread on the sideboard in the hallway whispering, 'read me instead. I'm not about WWI.'

ICTY

Guy Lesser's footnoted Harper's article on the ICTY -- the 'International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991' (Whew!) -- is subtitled "What the US Could Learn from the Milosevic Trial," but I bet this is an editor's creation, since Lesser draws no lessons for the US from his account of the ICTY. He says (in a footnote, of course) that it will cost $1.5 billion over 18 years to try 100 defendants before the ICTY. The ICTY has a staff of 1,300. Is this worth the money, or, more precisely, is this the best way for the UN to spend $1.5 billion? It's interesting that Lesser doesn't offer any defense to the criticism (which he notes) that the ICTY trials take too long. I question the (apparent) premise of the whole enterprise that the existence of IHL courts will deter future war crimes. It's just an unlikely idea. I heard Pat Wald (one of the ICTY judges) speak at the DC Circuit Judicial Conference in '02, and she said she was struck by how many of the lawyers from countries other than the US were multilingual, while the US lawyers spoke only -- English.

Wildflower

Last August, as I was wading into the freezing Russian River in Sonoma just past dawn, in a light rain, wearing a ridiculous pink bathing cap -- required to show my age group -- I promised myself I'd never do another triathlon. I just decided to do the Wildflower at Lake San Antonio in Monterey in May. I don't mind the swim or the run, but the bicycle is my downfall -- literally -- and this bike course sounds bad: "At mile 34, follow Nacimiento Road left up 'Nasty Grade,' a nearly 5 mile grade which climbs 1,000 feet from bottom to top." There's also this bit about people at the start using magic markers to write information on my arms and legs (age, number, etc.) -- not my cup of tea. I'm going to get a decent time in this race and then go back to tennis for good. There are a lot of bad things to say about my tennis game, but at least there are no magic markers in that sport.

Pakistan

Mary Anne Weaver's Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad & Afghanistan was first published in 2002 and then in 2003 with a new afterword dated April 2003. She met the head of one of Pakistan's madrasah and asked him, "What do you think of Osama bin Laden?" He replied, "What do you think of Abraham Lincoln?" In her chapter on the (incredibily weird) houbara bustard hunts in the desert, she asked to me with a Saudi prince who was in Pakistan for the hunt. "Impossible," she was told, "The prince doesn't wans to meet any women." "I'm not a woman," Weaver said, "I'm a journalist." He shrugged. "It's all the same." I loved Pakistan, or at least the Hindu Kush, the single time I was there 30 years ago, so I'm biased, but this is a very fine book. She's written a book about Egypt, which I'm going to find.

Kitchen Cabinet

I liked Lily Malcom's comment about the end of Ang Lee's film version of Sense & Sensibility: "A dive-for-the-Kleenex moment."

South Africa Constitutional Court -- Justice Sachs

Justice Sachs, in his article in the Green Bag (Autumn '03), which is based on his talk at HLS in April '00, makes two points that are interesting to me. First, he says our judicial approach is to assume that movement away from the status quo must has to be justified, while in SA the assumption is that the status quo is unjust and should be changed. He doesn't discuss Bickel's criticism of this idea as counter-majoritarian. Second, he emphasizes SA's use of international and foreign precedent, while US adjudication is "most often self-contained and self-referential." (This must have been written before the Lawrence decision.) He compliments us: "The U.S. is great in terms of the brightness of its judicial language, the use of the pungent phrase, the presentation of the sharply-posed issue." That's a great sentence; it's a good article.

Love for Sale

The first sentence of Rebecca Mead's New Yorker (Nov. 24) book review -- "The notion that dating, mating, and marriage take place within a marketplace is a conceit universally observed by writers of comedic-dramatic television comedies in Hollywood, and authors of 'chick-lit' novels loosely based on plots from Jane Austen or Edith Wharton" -- reminds me strongly of the famous opening sentence of Pride & Prejudice. Mead's use of "conceit" interested me and sent me to the dictionary -- she must mean "a fancy or whim; a fanciful notion"?

The Great Fire

I just read Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire, which I finished only because I was locked on an airplane and didn't feel like working. I don't see the qualities that the reviewers have described. It's a slight book. The nuggets of wisdom about women, marriage, etc., that are cited in the reviews didn't stike me as particularly perceptive.

Leo Frank

Steve Oney's 'And the Dead Shall Rise,' about the trial and lynching of Leo Frank in Georgia in 1915, is one of the most interesting books I've read recently. At page 649, the end of the book, my first question was, "Where was this guy's editor?" But I started thinking about what Oney was trying to accomplish in this unusual, detailed, and flat narrative. If Oney so much as hints at his own opinion about anything, I don't recall it -- the tone is, "This happened, and I'm reporting it." This isn't a passionate defense of Frank's complete innocence, or guilt. The central figure is almost less Leo Frank than Tom Watson, one of the most tragic figures in U.S. politics, and the subject of C. Vann Woodward's great 1938 biography. Watson in the 1890's was on track to be a contender for the presidency, and if he had . . . well, we're now on Niall Ferguson's 'what if' territory. But Watson in the 1890's was a remarkably prescient progressive, and failing as a progressive he taught Richard Russell, another tragic figure, exactly the wrong lesson.

Lani Guinier

I heard Lani Guinier's Thomas Lecture at YLS Friday afternoon. She's a delightful speaker: clear, articulate, passionate. (I overlapped with her for two years but didn't know her.) Her subject was higher education admissions decisions, and her view is completely statist (she would say 'public'). Her talk apparently is drawn from an article she is publishing in the HLR. She took the 'mission statements' off the websites of several prominent universities and law schools and read excerpts, which were high-flown, humorous and intended to support her view that universities, whehter public or private, have a public (or statist) function. Ironically, the YLS mission statement (of which she read part) doesn't support her view -- she said the YLS statement is "coy." (Our statement turns out to be flat and common-sense.) She focuses on a statistic (I may have the numbers wrong) that three-quarters of the students at the selective US universities are from the top one-quarter of the households by income, but she ignores social & economic mobility. Still, she's interesting and provocative.

Risky Business (1983)

Porsche has been running print ads with the tag line 'Porsche. There is no substitute.' This, of course, is Joel Goodson's line after he, Lana, and Rutherford (who has a trig mid-term the next morning) in a 928 manage to escape Guido the killer pimp. (The copyright discussions probably were interesting.) The better line, though, comes after the 928 falls into Lake Michigan. The kids are sitting in the showroom of the Porsche dealership where the 928 has been hauled, and the service manager emerges and asks, "Who's the u-boat commander?"

Marathon

I met my older brother at the 20 mile mark of the Marine Corp Marathon in Washington today and ran with him to the finish at the Iwo Jima Memorial. He finished in a hair under 5 hours. I decided to quit marathons after Dallas in '02, but it was frustrating simply to stand by the course waiting for him to jog past. After the finish, I ran back to the office across the Memorial Bridge and then down the alley of trees beside the Reflecting Pool (drained now, because of the WWII memorial construction), where I haven't run for years. The trees are changing color, I was alone on the alley, and it was quieter than I can recall in DC.

24 Days

Jonathan Knee's review of "24 Days" in the NYTimes Book Review this morning was consistent with my own reaction, although I haven't read the book to which he compared it ("The Smartest Guys in the Room"). The WStJ reporters who wrote "24 Days" have some interesting things to say, and they're candid in admitting they didn't understand some accounting/disclosure issues raised by their reporting, still it's not an easy book to like. I'm looking forward to reading "And the Dead Shall Rise" about the Leo Frank lynching, although Warren Goldstein's review is luke-warm. Goldstein says that Oney has developed a "full list" of those involved in the lynching.

Old T-Shirts in Africa

George Packer's article on the export of used clothes from the U.S. to Africa in the October 4 The Week apparently ran in the NYTimes Magazine in 2002 (at least that's the copyright The Week shows), but I didn't see it there. Paul Theroux in Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town (2003) mentions the clothes trade repeatedly, although now, two months after reading Dark Star, I can't easily locate these mentions. All the pages where I've turned down the corners (a bad habit) seem to be for words I don't know and mean to look up ("priapic," for example, on page 34. It means 'exaggerately concerned with masculinity.")

Italian Ships

"I take care to travel only on Italian ships because, in the event of disaster, there is none of that nonsense about women and children first." Noel Coward, quoted in The Week

Columbia Suttle (2)

Because of William Lancewiesche's interesting Atlantic article, I read v. 1 of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board report this weekend. The three most interesting points are the compromises made in designing the Shuttle compared to NASA's original goals, the pressure to keep shuttle flights on schedule to meet a '04 goal of completing part of the space station, and the decision not to image the shuttle in orbit using national intelligence assets. On this last point, my favorite sentence in the report is: "Program leaders spent at least as much time making sure hierarchical rules and processes were followed as they did trying to establish why anyone would want a picture of the Orbiter." There's some hindsight at work in the report; in particular, I'd like to know more about the other safety issues that were on the table during the flight and how the managers ranked those issues by safety significance. The CAIB gives glimpses, for example, of a 150 pound 'overweight' issue during orbit (i.e., the shuttle was too heavy).

Working

"If you're working on things that everyone accepts, you're not working on anything." Alan Snyder, in The Week's 'Wit & Wisdom' column.

The End of Detroit

Mikki Maynard's The End of Detroit received a strong review in the October 11 Economist ("digs out the the underlying story:" "valuable analysis"), but it's a weak book. (One Amazon reviewer lists a series of errors, although I don't know enough to tell if he's right.) The real problem is that she thinks the auto market is driven by the personalities of auto executives. She does, especially at the end, discuss briefly the structural disadvantages the big three have in the U.S., such as union work rules and health care costs, but her real interest is executives, and especially celebrity executives. Maynard does tell the story of the major Japanese manufacturers, which helped me, since other than Honda I could never keep them straight in my mind.

Columbia Shuttle

"[T]hey received word that the Merritt Island radar, in Florida, which should by now have started tracking the inbound craft, was picking up only false targets. Shuttles arrive on time, or they don't arrive at all." William Lancewiesche, in The Atlantic.

Jazz

"A jazz band is playing, quite well -- a detail that immediately awakened my suspicions, given that the whole point of student jazz, then as now, is that it should sound like two cats beating up a goose." Anthony Lane in The New Yorker.

Paracosm

I was reading Adam Gopnik's essay "Bumping into Mr. Ravioli" and found a new word for me -- "paracosm," which means an imaginary country or society created by a child. For years, we had in our household the country 'Anholt,' created by our older son. (Anholt is an actual island in the Baltic, but everything else was imaginary.) Anholt's history, government, and culture, and its frequent wars (all successful) against Estonia and other, real (and larger) countries, were staples of our dinnertable conversation for years. We would even argue over, e.g., which king of Anholt started the first (and very successful) war against Estonia. Then, one day, for no apparent reason, Anholt disappeared.