Books, Arts & Manners: Deformation Professionnelle

The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made, by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas (Simon & Schuster, 853 pp., $22.95)

This is a foolish book pretending to be shrewd. On occasion, it is an informative book. When it discusses personalities and repeats amusing gossip, it is informative. (I didn’t know, for example, that in the fall of 1960, Harriman had called Khrushchev, asking him “to be equally tough on both presidential candidates, lest he help the Republicans by seeming to favor the Democrats.”) When it discusses politics and foreign policy, it is foolish. Its fatal flaw is that its authors simply couldn’t face the implications of their own analysis of what the world was like after World War II and what had to be done to save Western Europe from the spread of Stalinism.

AB

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Arnold Beichman

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The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made, by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas (Simon & Schuster, 853 pp., $22.95)

This is a foolish book pretending to be shrewd. On occasion, it is an informative book. When it discusses personalities and repeats amusing gossip, it is informative. (I didn’t know, for example, that in the fall of 1960, Harriman had called Khrushchev, asking him “to be equally tough on both presidential candidates, lest he help the Republicans by seeming to favor the Democrats.”) When it discusses politics and foreign policy, it is foolish. Its fatal flaw is that its authors simply couldn’t face the implications of their own analysis of what the world was like after World War II and what had to be done to save Western Europe from the spread of Stalinism.