Conor: A Biography of Conor Cruise o'Brien by Donald Harman AkensonReview by: Fritz SternForeign Affairs, Vol. 74, No. 4 (Jul. - Aug., 1995), pp. 143-144Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20047247 .

Accessed: 16/06/2014 08:53

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Council on Foreign Relations is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to ForeignAffairs.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.129 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 08:53:23 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Recent Books

apparent belief that he could reconcile

these contradictions through personal

diplomacy with Stalin remains the prin

cipal enigma of the whole story.

Western Europe FRITZ STERN

Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the

Death of the First Italian Republic. BY ALEXANDER STILLE. New York

Pantheon Books, 1995, 467 pp. $27.50. A riveting account of the often obstructed

fight against the Sicilian Mafia and its

system of corruption and drug trade, a

system enforced by terror and murder, with tentacles abroad and links to Italian

politics. By tenacious use of interviews

and public accounts, Alexander Stille, a

young and very able investigative reporter,

pieces together the story and puts it in the

context of post-Cold War Italian politics and the recent efforts to bring to justice a

political class guilty of routine corruption. The willingness of Mafiosi to talk?at

first only two of them and then an ever

widening stream?informed prosecutors in both Italy and the United States. The book has its heroes: judge Giovanni Fal cone and prosecutor Paolo Borsellino,

who finally and against huge odds uncov

ered the structure of the Cosa Nostra

crime network and set in motion the first

effective struggle against the criminals.

The Mafia killed them both, but their deaths aroused an Italian public at last to

press for a radical cleansing of this moral

and financial morass. A fervently, lucidly written work of great importance.

The European Sisyphus: Essays on

Europe,

I964-I994. BY STANLEY HOFFMANN.

Boulder: Westview Press, 1995,326 pp.

$69.95 (paper, $19.95). A master analyst of contemporary

Europe, a veteran observer of French

affairs has collected some of his essays written in the last three decades, dealing with the state of Europe from de Gaulle

to Gorbachev. The tone belies the title,

though Hoffmann emphasizes the hard

constraints on policies leading to Euro

pean integration and in the end con

cludes that today's European Union is

an incomplete construction without his

torical analogue. Throughout he

assesses Americas presence, now weak

ening, as well.

Unlike many of his academic col

leauges, he has a clear sense of the

importance of personal-cultural factors

in international affairs; he is very good on the qualities of leadership needed?

and all too often lacking. The essays reflect Hoffmanns changing views; the

repetition of some themes is inevitable

in an unrevised collection. Erudite,

skeptical, ever-stimulating, affecting

detachment, Hoffmann is deeply

engag?, as was his great model,

Raymond Aron.

Conor: A Biography of Conor Cruise

O'Brien, by donald harman

akenson. Montreal: McGill-Queens

University Press, 1994, 573 pp. $34.95. An authorized but quite independent biography of an Irish phenomenon, writ

ten by a Canadian historian of things Irish. O'Briens life encompassed Irish

politics, a major stint at the United

To order any book reviewed or advertised in Foreign Affairs, fax 1-203-966-4329.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS-July/August 199s [143]

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.129 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 08:53:23 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Recent Books

Nations under the much-respected secre

tary general, Dag Hammarskj?ld, an aca

demic career in New York (a sojourn in the 1960s among its intellectuals and the

anti-Vietnam stance that he embraced), and a return to Irish politics and his fight against Irish Republican Army terrorism.

Finally, O'Brien, the writer, recently

completed a biography of a fellow Irish

man, Edmund Burke. A life-and-times

biography, candid and admiringly critical, an entertaining appraisal of a

boisterously controversial figure.

German Nationalism and Religious

Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics,

1870-1914. BY HELMUT WALSER

smith. Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1995, 271 pp. $39.50. An important study, widely researched,

of the continuing conflict between

Protestants and Catholics in unified

Germany, a central but much-neglected theme of modern German history.

Smith, a young American historian,

describes the cultural and political expressions of this conflict to the very eve of the Great War and suggests that

the confessional groups developed their

own variety of national consciousness.

The book is novel in substance and

interpretation: Smith shows that the

religious antagonisms often sprang from

below and that the major Protestant

organization was pushed ever-closer to a

radical right-wing nationalism. He dis

covered that German Catholics?with

Vatican support?tried to weaken Polish

Catholicism. The book has obvious

implications for Weimar and reminds us

that one of the most important changes of post-1945 Germany has been the

attenuation, almost the end, of the reli

gious conflict. By virtue of its breadth

and rich intelligence the book

exemplifies the true potential of the aca

demic monograph.

Turning Points in Modern Times: Essays on German and European History. by Karl bracher. Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1995,338 pp.

$49.95 (paper, $24.95). Nineteen essays by the distinguished German scholar whose entire work

exemplifies the unity of humanistic study. At once a historian and a political scien

tist, with a trained philosophic bent, Bracher has done more than any other

German?and started earlier?to expli cate the history and meaning of National

Socialism. In these new essays he returns

to an analysis of totalitarianism, to the

challenges that faced democracy in the interwar years, and to the problems and

possibilities of a democratic renaissance

in Europe after 1989. A valuable work for

an understanding in-depth of thought and politics in our century.

Germany, Hitler, and World War II.

BY GERHARD WEINBERG. New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1995,

357 pp. $27.95. A collection of essays and lectures by a

leading expert on the global character of

World War II. The text focuses on Hitler and the Germans, stressing that the for

mer had planned for a gigantic war as

early as the late 1920s and that the latter,

partially deceived, supported him. Shrewd and incisive, most of these essays are based on archival research?an expe rience that leads Weinberg to end with a

[144] FOREIGN AFFAIRS Volume74No.4

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.129 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 08:53:23 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions