Books in Brief
How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life by Peter Robinson (HarperCollins, 263 pp., $24.95). Recent years have seen a number of books about the fortieth president, but Peter Robinson’s “How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life” offers something different: Instead of a biography or a conservative call to arms, Robinson gives an analysis of why Reagan was such an effective leader and presents ten life-lessons he learned from the president.
Robinson served as a speechwriter under Reagan and is best known for writing the 1987 Brandenburg Gate speech, in which Reagan asked Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” Robinson describes the effort that went into the speech. His earliest versions included “tear down this wall,” but the State Department officials raised objections at every turn. Robinson was often frustrated with these pragmatists. He says, however, that an important lesson he learned from Reagan was that in order to accomplish anything, one has to be respectful and forgiving of others.
Forgiveness is only one of the many lessons that Robinson learned from Ronald Reagan. Robinson also learned much from Reagan’s optimism, his relationship with his wife, and his faith. Reagan’s belief in simple policy solutions allowed him to focus on what was important. Reagan’s willingness to act gave him the courage both to intervene in Grenada and to launch the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Conservatives invest a lot of time trying to convince others of the merits of their ideas. But Robinson demonstrates that it was not only Reagan’s ideas but also his personal characteristics that enabled him to change policy–and Robinson suggests that all of us can learn from the characteristics that made Reagan’s presidency one of the most successful in history.
–Michael J. New
The Last Alchemist: Count Cagliostro, Master of Magic in the Age of Reason by Iain McCalman (HarperCollins, 272 pp., $25.95). In this peppy biography, Iain McCalman breathes new life into Giuseppe Balsamo, a Sicilian thug who began to style himself Count Cagliostro in 1779 at the age of thirty-six. When he was not in jail or on the run, Cagliostro wined, dined, and copulated with the rich and famous as well as opening pharmacies for the indigent. In 1795, he died in a papal prison, but his legendary exploits did not die with him. McCalman follows their spoor through movies, comic books, and bestselling pulp fiction; he also touches upon the fascination Cagliostro has exercised over such thinkers as Thomas Carlyle, Walter Benjamin, and Umberto Eco.
Cagliostro owed the highs and lows of his international career to the street smarts he acquired in Palermo, to which he added an aptitude for the pharmacology he was taught by Sicilian monks and by the Knights Hospitallers of Saint John in Malta. As a pupil, Cagliostro was generally well-behaved, although bad temper, overweening ambitions, and a blasphemous vulgarity frequently proved troublesome. But the ersatz count seems to have had a genuine gift for alternative medicine and a commitment to the mumbo-jumbo that accompanies it.
He was also, however, an uncompromising quack who milked the avidity for magico-mysticism that afflicted all classes during the Enlightenment. The count peddled an extraordinary farrago that included nostrums, cabalism, alchemy, zoroastrianism, seances, conjuring tricks, mesmerism, and, above all, freemasonry. Catherine the Great proved immediately suspicious. By contrast, the king of Poland was charmed.
Despite a prose that lurches from chatty to wooden to purple, “The Last Alchemist” offers a narrative that is curious, diverting and instructive. McCalman’s handling of the Affair of Queen Marie Antoinette’s Necklace (inevitably, the count managed to get mixed up in one of the century’s great scams) is gripping and his chronicle of Cagliostro’s unusual married life is genuinely touching.
–Hugh Ormsby-Lennon
