The Fly Swatter

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
Have you ever thought you'd like to write a book about your grandfather, so everyone would know what a terrific person he was? Nicholas Dawidoff, author of The Catcher Was a Spy, has done just that, and it works very well, because his grandfather really was a terrific person -- a famous scholar with an outsize personality who led an exciting life.

Alexander Gerschenkron was born in Odessa. At 16 he and his family made an adventurous escape from the Bolsheviks. In Austria, he learned German from scratch, passed the tough exams for the gymnasium (high school), and fell in love with pretty Erica, the only girl in his class. He eventually studied economics in Vienna but had to escape again, this time from the Nazis, with Erica and their two daughters. After more vicissitudes, he wound up at Harvard, where he taught for 30 years, admired by many but delighting in controversy. He became known for his work on the economics of backwardness, but his interests were wide and deep.

Even at Harvard, Gerschenkron stood out. He was brilliant in his field (and after he was an established professor of economics, Harvard offered him a chair in Slavic languages); he was outspoken and quirky. His loyalty was well known, and so were his feuds. Dawidoff includes lots of amusing anecdotes, as well as insights and praise from Gerschenkron's friends and colleagues, but he also includes criticism of his theories and comments from people who didn't like him at all.

In explaining Gerschenkron's importance in his field, Dawidoff succeeds in making some complicated ideas extremely clear, because he isn't afraid to use words and analogies that speak to the general reader. His book is entertaining and touching, a fine tribute to the grandfather he loved. (Stephanie Martin)

Stephanie Martin lives in Newton Centre, Massachusetts.

Publishers Weekly

"The last man with all known knowledge" is how one former colleague, New Republic editor Martin Peretz, remembers Harvard economist Alexander Gerschenkron (1904-1978) in this lively tribute to Gerschenkron and to a vanished era of scholarly standards that he embodied. Dawidoff (In the Country of Country) was deeply influenced as a child by his grandfather's affectionate, sometimes madcap tutelage ("Once he handed me a copy of Trevelyan's History of England, pulled out a stopwatch, and clocked me to see how many pages a minute I could manage. It is no small trick to acquaint yourself with Ethelred the Unready while... [a] man with a strong Russian accent is shouting out time splits"); he has carefully pieced together Gerschenkron's life through interviews with surviving family members, colleagues and former students. Gerschenkron was one of the most memorable figures on campus during his tenure in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, respected for his breadth of knowledge (an economic historian by training, he was also offered chairs in Italian literature and Slavic studies) and for being a great conversationalist and all-around "character" who battled mercilessly with Nabokov, John Kenneth Galbraith and every guest lecturer with Marxist leanings. Born in Odessa, Gerschenkron fled the Bolsheviks in 1920 and resettled in Vienna, only to flee the Nazis in 1938. It was the trauma of these upheavals, Dawidoff speculates, that made Gerschenkron refuse to talk about his past, even while his European experiences were clearly the driving force behind his scholarly interests and later his bitter opposition to the student protest movements. Indeed, given that those supposedly close to Gerschenkron Isaiah Berlin, physicist Philipp Frank, even Gerschenkron's sister insist that they hardly knew him, it's to Dawidoff's credit that this finely wrought book is not just a collection of amusing Gerschenkron sketches, but movingly conveys something of the man's inner life. (May) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

The biography of an economic historian might not sound like an especially lively read, but the story of Alexander Gerschenkron, written by grandson Dawidoff (The Catcher Was a Spy), is fascinating. Born in Russia in 1904, Gerschenkron fled the Russian Revolution and spent his teens and early twenties in Vienna. He and his wife might have stayed there indefinitely, but the Nazis made that impossible. The couple escaped to the United States in the late 1930s, and Gerschenkron, known by some as "the Great Gerschenkron," ultimately landed a teaching position at Harvard. He became famous on campus for his one-upmanship, his willingness to insult colleagues to their faces, and, most of all, his tireless scholarly habits. In the words of one colleague, "he knew everything, had read everything, and could talk about anything." Dawidoff offers an energetic and balanced study of his grandfather, and his book serves as a wonderful paean to scholarship, teaching, and the life of the mind. Amy Strong, South Portland, ME Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

When writing about family, it pays to have at least one fascinating relative, and Dawidoff hits the jackpot. Alexander Gerschenkron (1904-78) was surely the most unforgettable character Dawidoff (ed., Baseball, p. 156, etc.) ever met. He was also the author's grandfather, born in Odessa, escaped to Vienna when the Russian Revolution struck, and emigrated to the US when the Austrians greeted the Nazis. Gerschenkron-"Shura" to his friends-was a true Russian, an echt Viennese, and then, by natural evolution, a genuine American. His story is characteristic of many histories of successful adaptation by those who once arrived in "places where the languages and the bread were strange." Continental in manner, Shura was the ultimate exemplar of self-assurance, a cool autodidact who, it seems, became adept in several academic disciplines and a score of languages. He was a cheater at lawn croquet, a Red Sox fan, and a voracious reader. Trained as an economist, Shura worked in a WWII shipyard and thence to the Fed. Finally, he landed at his beloved home base, Harvard, where he bared the secrets of bloated Soviet economic claims and where he trained the nation's best economic historians. Shura's impressive mind was, by turns, capable of fierce loyalty and dogged antipathy. Dawidoff details his grandfather's relations with such worthies as John Kenneth Galbraith, Henry Rosovsky, and the late Sir Isaiah Berlin. Among people who knew everything, Shura, the rumpled charmer who never completed a magnum opus, was the ultimate know-it-all. He was certainly a wonderful figure to his grandson, who pays truly affectionate tribute. Readers may forgive minor lapses, like the passing reference to the noted wartimebroadcaster as "Edmund R. Morrow" or acceptance of Shura's dubious etymology for the word "robot." The tale of Gerschenkron, his friends and family, his style and his disputes, amply exhibits the art of biography. A fulsome portrait of a distinctive Harvard savant, nicely painted in full color.