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The Making of a Scholarly Best-seller
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14600 |
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BOOK WORLD
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5 / 1988 |
6,253 Words |
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Amos Perlmutter
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How is it that a scholarly, hefty tome weighing in at 540 pages, not to mentioned 80 additional pages of footnotes and bibliography, a book that is squarely aimed at an academic audience and written in a predictably flat style, can become a controversial, talked-about, and widely reviewed popular best-seller?
That's exactly what has happened to Paul Kennedy's new book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which appears to have struck a raw nerve not only in intellectuals inclined to accept Kennedy's narrow thesis when it concerns the United States, but also in general readers. This is all passing strange when you consider the work and the author. Kennedy is a professional historian who is on the verge of becoming national celebrity, a familiar face on MacNeil-Lehrer and other political and topical talk shows. Now a Sterling professor of history at Yale, Kennedy had enjoyed a long career as a diplomatic and military historian. He has published Pacific Onslaught, 1941-1943 (1972), and The Samoan Tangle: A Study of Anglo-American Relations, 1878-1900 (1974), neither of which brought him a great deal of fame nor caused any great stir.
His first noticeable success was The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (1976), followed by an even better book, The Origins of Anglo-American Antagonism, 1870-1914, published in 1978. His career has been a steady, academic one, balancing writing and teaching, and has been basically unheralded, but respected. He has been a historian, whose only contact with practical politics was a brief stint as assistant to military intellectual Basil Liddell-Hart, an armchair strategist and military historian. Yet, today, Kennedy, with the publication of his latest effort, is a regular guest on television, opining about everything--U.S. strategy, the future of Europe after denuclearization, and NATO's views on changes in U.S.-Soviet relations.
It is difficult, on the surface, to explain the huge interest the book seems to be generating. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers has not been made easy for the general reader. It is the culmination of twenty years of research, full of names, events, statistics, formulas--and in content and readability, resembles nothing so much as a college textbook.
I am a practicing, teaching professor myself, and it has been my experience that even eventually students show a marked reluctance when assigned reading that is, to use their phrase, "heavy." Yet here is the American public, paying for the privilege (to the tune of $28) of wrestling with what might otherwise be compulsory reading in a college-level class, difficult even for undergraduates in international relations. It is a complex, scholarly book by an obviously learned man, even if his basic premises are open to significant question and serious challenge.
The book has been warmly received and widely praised. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Michael Howard, a military historian and Kennedy's former professor, called the book "a work of almost Toynbeean sweep." Time and Newsweek thereafter issued extensive and positive reviews, and soon after there was Kennedy on CBS's Face the Nation, being asked to give his views on the decline of America.
Hidden messages
Some books, perhaps despite the author's
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