Steve Goddard's History Wire

Book Alert / My Name is Iran -- A Memoir

My Name is Iran -- A Memoir by Davar Ardalan, Holt '07, $24, 323 pages, ISBN #0-8050-7920-3. Bibliography, source notes, no index, b&w images sprinkled through text.

Davar Ardalan's life is the stuff of novels. Still a child when the Islamic Revolution began to sweep across Iran, Davar fled to the United States to preserve her freedom, seeking sanctuary in the prosperous Boston suburb of Brookline, MA. But at age 18, the desire for her mother, who had remained in Iran with her brother, proved too much, and Davar returned to her homeland, realizing she would have to live as a strict Muslim.

To deepen the contrast between her two lives, consider that Davar -- a stunningly pretty woman -- had done some modeling in America for Calvin Klein jeans, in which she posed as a fetching teenager with long hair billowing about her face. Now that hair, along with most of her face, would be covered by a black chador.

Reading Davar's memoir is like peeling an onion, since one remarkable transformation seems to follow another in her family, going back generations to when her Idaho grandmother married an Iranian physician, moved to Iran and built a hospital there, until political upheaval led her to return to America. Davar's mother grew up in Washington, D.C., married an Iranian-American architect, later divorced him and ultimately returned to Iran. Davar is now a senior producer with NPR News.

Sign of the Times: Technology Squeezes Out AT&T's Time-of-Day Service

The Los Angeles Times:

"It's the end of time, at least as far as AT&T is concerned. The brief note in customers' bills hardly does justice to the momentousness of the decision. 'Service withdrawal,' it blandly declares. 'Effective September 2007, Time of Day information service will be discontinued.'

"What that means is that people throughout Southern California will no longer be able to call 853-1212 to hear a woman's recorded voice state that 'at the tone, Pacific Daylight Time will be . . .' with the recording automatically updating at 10-second intervals.

"'Times change,' said John Britton, an AT&T spokesman. 'In today's world, there are just too many other ways to get this information. You can look at your cellphone or your computer. You no longer have to pick up the telephone.' Indeed, time already has stopped in 48 other states, he said. California and Nevada are the two remaining holdouts."

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    EDITOR's NOTE: Here in Hartford, CT, we dialed our trusty (860) 524-8123 and, notwithstanding the above story, AT&T still gave us the time of day. Try your own numbers to compare.

Forensics Expert Fingers Doctor He Says Killed Beethoven

The Hartford Courant:

"Vienna, Austria - Did someone kill Beethoven? A Viennese pathologist claims the composer's physician did - inadvertently overdosing him with lead in a case of a cure that went wrong.
Other researchers are not convinced, but there is no controversy about one fact: The master had been a very sick man years before his death in 1827.

"Previous research determined that Ludwig von Beethoven had suffered from lead poisoning, first detecting toxic levels of the metal in his hair and then, two years ago, in bone fragments. Those findings strengthened the belief that lead poisoning may have contributed - and ultimately led - to his death at age 57.

"But Viennese forensic expert Christian Reiter claims to know more after months of painstaking work applying CSI-like methods to strands of Beethoven's hair. He said his analysis, published last week in the Beethoven Journal, shows that in the final months of the composer's life, lead concentrations in his body spiked every time he was treated by his doctor, Andreas Wawruch, for fluid inside the abdomen. Those lethal doses permeated Beethoven's ailing liver, ultimately killing him, Reiter told the AP."

Book Alert / The Most Noble Adventure

The Most Noble Adventure  -- The Marshall Plan and the Time When America Helped Save
Europe, Free Press '07, $27, 448 pages, ISBN #07432-8263-9. Index, bibliography, source notes, grouping of b&w glossy images.

There is a school of thought that holds that President Harry Truman, knowing the crying need for a historic reconstruction of Europe and also how unpopular he was as president, pushed war hero George Catlett Marshall out front and called his proposal the Marshall Plan, knowing that a Truman Plan would go down to defeat in Congress.

Greg Behrman, Henry Kissinger Fellow for Foreign Policy at the Aspen Institute, clearly doesn't share that view. While he credits Truman for helping sell Congress on the plan, he says its devisers and implementers included Marshall, along with Will Clayton, Arthur Vandenberg, Richard Bissell, Paul Hoffman and W. Averill Harriman. But clearly primus inter pares was Marshall, who announced it in an electrifying speech 60 years ago this month at Harvard University.

Make no mistake about it, had the Soviet Union not threatened to become Europe's sole superpower, the shape of the Marshall Plan would not have been as formidable. And Soviet Leader Joseph Stalin knew full well that America wasn't simply making a kind gesture to the ravaged nations of Western Europe. He deemed it, correctly, as "a dagger pointed at the heart of Moscow."

Behrman's book is meticulously researched and engagingly written. It has received starred reviews from both Publishers Weekly and Kirkus.

Book Alert / On The Road

On The Road -- 50th Anniversary Edition by Jack Kerouac, Viking '07, $24.95, 307 pages, ISBN #0670063266.

For some of us, this 50th anniversary edition triggers a "where were you?" moment, as in "where were you when you first became aware of Jack Kerouac?" I was a high school senior and a cute classmate handed it to me, as if it were contraband, while we were working on putting out the school yearbook. It was wild and crazy, a feeling magnified because our lives then were so deadly dull.

So understandably, I guess, it seems a tad puerile to us worldly sophisticates, who have now been knocking about, succeeding and failing, for a half century. It made me wonder whether young people would pick it up today or would find it hopelessly dated. The fact that Jack's first hitchhiking trip from the East Coast to Denver -- a meandering journey of at least several days -- cost him $50 made me wonder whether this would trigger a disconnect in young minds, who are used to paying that for a pair of sunglasases.

And yet, the publisher says that On the Road manages to sell 100,000 copies a year, adding to its total sales of four million worldwide, so the young must still dig it. It still speaks to the questing of youth, the rubbing up against harsh adult realities, and the discovery that many of your cherished ideals are laughed at by the adult world. How would Jack Kerouac and his pal, Dean Moriarty, feel to know their saga remains fresh 50 years on? Here's to the publication of a centennial edition to be enjoyed by my grandchildren.

Leading Liberal Muslim Scholar Dies Unnoticed

The Weekly Standard:

Muhsin Mahdi, the world's foremost scholar of medieval Arabic and Islamic political philosophy, died last month at the age of 81. Not a single national publication has seen fit to print an obituary of Mahdi. This failure to do justice to a rare scholar, teacher, and human being underscores how little attention is being paid to something we are in dire need of today: the liberalizing and humanizing strands within the Islamic tradition, the topic to which Mahdi devoted his scholarly career.

Mahdi was born and reared in Iraq. After a sterling undergraduate career at the American University in Beirut, he was awarded a scholarship to study economics at the University of Chicago. Under the influence of gifted teachers like Nadia Abbott and Leo Strauss, he turned to philosophy and eventually to the study of Islamic political philosophy. He entered the Committee on Social Thought and earned his doctorate in 1954. His masterful dissertation was published in 1957 as Ibn Khaldun's Philosophy of History: A Study in the Philosophical Foundation of the Science of Culture.

Mahdi's academic career was spent at Chicago (1957-69) and at Harvard (1969-96), where he held the James Richard Jewett Professorship in Arabic. He was an enormously influential teacher, and one who inspired great loyalty from his students. Some of us who took only a single course from Mahdi--typically, at Harvard, his survey of medieval political philosophy--found our lives markedly touched by his influence. (For a sense of Mahdi's teaching, see the impressive 1992 festschrift, The Political Aspects of Islamic Philosophy, edited by one of his closest students, Charles Butterworth.)

Jefferson's Winey Monologues Enough To Bore Adams

The New Yorker:

"The most expensive bottle of wine ever sold at auction was offered at Christie’s in London, on December 5, 1985. The bottle was handblown dark-green glass and capped with a nubby seal of thick black wax. It had no label, but etched into the glass in a spindly hand was the year 1787, the word 'Lafitte,' and the letters 'Th.J.'

"The bottle came from a collection of wine that had reportedly been discovered behind a bricked-up cellar wall in an old building in Paris. The wines bore the names of top vineyards—along with Lafitte (which is now spelled 'Lafite'), there were bottles from Châteaux d’Yquem, Mouton, and Margaux—and those initials, 'Th.J.' According to the catalogue, evidence suggested that the wine had belonged to Thomas Jefferson, and that the bottle at auction could 'rightly be considered one of the world’s greatest rarities.' The level of the wine was 'exceptionally high' for such an old bottle—just half an inch below the cork—and the color “remarkably deep for its age.” The wine’s value was listed as 'inestimable.'

"Before auctioning the wine, Michael Broadbent, the head of Christie’s wine department, consulted with the auction house’s glass experts, who confirmed that both the bottle and the engraving were in the eighteenth-century French style. Jefferson had served as America’s Minister to France between 1785 and the outbreak of the French Revolution, and had developed a fascination with French wine.

"Upon his return to America, he continued to order large quantities of Bordeaux for himself and for George Washington, and stipulated in one 1790 letter that their respective shipments should be marked with their initials. During his first term as President, Jefferson spent seventy-five hundred dollars—roughly a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in today’s currency—on wine, and he is generally regarded as America’s first great wine connoisseur. (He may also have been America’s first great wine bore. 'There was, as usual, a dissertation upon wines,' John Quincy Adams noted in his diary after dining with Jefferson in 1807. 'Not very edifying.')

Book Alert / Seizing Destiny

Seizing Destiny -- How America Grew From Sea to Shining Sea by Richard Kluger, Knopf '07, $35, 647 pages, ISBN #0375413413. Index, bibliographic notes, sparsely illustrated.

Some nonfiction writers are known for carving out specialties and publishing a series of works in their narrow fields -- take Jonathan Kozol on education, for example. Others -- the late lamented David Halberstam comes to mind -- loved to scan the landscape and touch down when something interested them. Halberstam, we recall, wrote prize-winning works on subjects as varied as Vietnam, baseball, the civil rights movement, and the automobile industry.

Put Richard Kluger in the latter category. He began his career with an examination of Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling outlawing school segregation; then moved on to a recounting of the compelling saga of the life and death of the New York Herald Tribune, and finally took apart the tobacco industry in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Ashes to Ashes. Now Kluger's back to an oft-covered subject -- America's western and southern expansion.

Don't expect a flag-waving jingoistic take, particularly in this cynical age. Kluger describes how the impulse of greed was present back to the founding of the republic, although perhaps not given a suitable name until New York journalist John Sullivan wrote of what he considered America's God-given "Manifest Destiny," a mandate that the nation expand all the way to its Pacific border.

Kluger traces Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase and the subsequent Lewis & Clark expedition west, the annexation of the Texas Republic and the Mexican War, Congressional subsidies  to the nation's railroads to carve up the west into new states and to make a pile in the process, both for the railroads and the legislators. Don't look for many heroes in Kluger's story, puncutated by broken treaties, land grabs, and unconstitutional acts. Interestingly, he praises Presidents Grover Cleveland for his refusal to agree to an American coup in Hawaii and Jimmy Carter for returning the Panama Canal to the Panamanian people.

Book Alert / The Price of Liberty

The Price of Liberty -- Paying for America's Wars by Robert D. Hormats, Times Books '07, $27.50, 344 pages, ISBN #0-8050-8253-0. Index, bibliography, source notes, unillustrated.

Few men have been closer to the pulse of the federal government than Robert D. Hormats, now vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International and the veteran of service in several presidential administrations, serving in the state department, as a member of the National Security Council, and as deputy U.S. trade representative. So Hormats, a figure trusted by the establishment, isn't one to trash administration policies willy-nilly.

But in his new book, Hormats argues that the Bush Administration's "rampant borrowing" to finance the Iraq war and tax cuts made early in his administration threaten to endanger America's fiscal security, without which the nation cannot have true national security. As such, he says its policies are a sharp break with a fiscal tradition going back to Alexander Hamilton, America's first treasury secretary.

Hamilton, he recounts, worried that the Revolutionary War debt would place such financial stresses on the new nation as to make it vulnerable to France and Britain, the heavyweight powers of the day. It was with this in mind that Hamilton created enduring financial principles to insure the nation's solvency and, thereby, its ability to generate funds, especially for such emergency needs as a war or an economic downturn.

Hamilton's principles, Hormats argues, have been honored and expanded by presidents since, who have adopted creative strategies to keep the nation solvent in good times and bad, such as adoption of a progressive income tax in 1913, Victory Bond drives in World War II, and cost-sharing with other nations of military maneuvers such as was done in the first Gulf War. One avenue considered and rejected by George W. Bush in the early days of the Iraqi War was shared sacrifice, which helped balance America's books in World War II and unified the nation behind a common purpose at the same time.

Classics Rule The Boards On London's Summer Stage

The New York Times:

"It is high whingeing season here, a time when complaints — in the papers, on the telly, in the streets, at the dinner table — are as unavoidable as the rain that is, of course, spoiling everybody’s summer holiday.

"The weather? It’s either too hot or too cool, too bright or too gray, all conditions portending imminent climatic meltdown. Transportation? Trains, planes, the underground are in a state of ominous dysfunction. Society? The class wars have resumed. And the West End theater, that lustrous cynosure of London culture? Better not to ask. As Michael Billington, the eminent critic for The Guardian, grumbles, it is 'living on borrowed time.'

"So you wouldn’t have thought that a visitor from New York who had been submerged in this summer of British discontent for several weeks would have been all that pleased to meet the unhappy Bessemenov clan, who spent nearly three hours griping about their lives, their dying civilization and the world at large, weather and the theater included. Life, as the daughter of the house said in a relatively upbeat moment, 'is a big, murky ooze, slugging monotonously onwards.'

"And yet a smile of bone-deep contentment seldom left my face as I watched the National Theater’s production of 'Philistines,' a seldom-seen play by Maxim Gorky from 1902. What was onstage was much like life as I was experiencing it in London, but reflected in a mirror that magnified and illuminated. Theater had entered and elevated a city’s daily conversation. Theater, at that moment, seemed triumphantly alive."

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