Washington Post Book Reviews
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Saturday October 30, 2010
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SONGS OF BLOOD AND SWORD: A Daughter's Memoir
Fatima Bhutto
Nation
ISBN 978-1-56858-632-8
470 pages
$26.95
Reviewed by Thomas W. Lippman
In the 63 years since Pakistan became an independent country, it has had rulers who were incompetent, corrupt, dictatorial or sometimes all three. Two of those leaders were named Bhutto: Zulfikar Ali, prime minister in the 1970s, deposed in a military coup and later hanged by order of his successor, and his daughter Benazir, prime minister from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996. She was assassinated as she attempted to return to power in 2007. The current president, Asif Zardari, was her husband.
Wealthy, well-educated and deeply political, the Bhuttos have sometimes been described as the Kennedys of Pakistan, complete with Harvard degrees and violent deaths. But they are more like the Borgias, as becomes all too apparent in this intensely personal, vengeful narrative by Fatima Bhutto, granddaughter of Zulfikar, niece of Benazir and daughter of a third slain Bhutto, Benazir's brother Murtaza. Yet another Bhutto, Shahnawaz, younger brother of Murtaza, was poisoned in 1985.
There are really three books within "Songs of Blood and Sword." One is an account of Pakistan's appalling history since the 1950s. One is a young woman's memoir of her family, which has been at the center of that history. The third is a detective story: Who was responsible for the fatal police shooting of Murtaza Bhutto in 1996?
The author's conclusion, reached after interviews with scores of her father's friends, professors and political allies, is that the police shot Murtaza on orders from his sister Benazir. The motivation, according to Fatima Bhutto, was that Murtaza, once released from the jail where Benazir's government had confined him, was challenging Benazir and her husband for control of the Pakistan People's Party and thus posed a threat to the vast wealth they had amassed through spectacular corruption.
"Benazir and her cronies were now backed against a wall," Fatima writes of her father, who to her was the only person in the family who could do no wrong. "Murtaza's threat was manageable for them when he was behind bars and access to him and his ability to speak to the people were restricted. Now that he was free, he was unstoppable."
Fatima Bhutto found no smoking gun, but she unearthed plenty of circumstantial evidence, including the fact that the police took her wounded father to a hospital where they knew no surgeon was on duty, and that the scene of her father's killing was hosed down and cleansed of evidence within a few hours. A tribunal concluded that Murtaza's killing could not have happened without orders from high authority.
She is disgusted that the chain of death in the Bhutto family has resulted in Asif Zardari's becoming president. "This is the legacy Benazir has left behind for Pakistan," her niece writes -- a "saprophytic culture" in which Zardari is the organism that lives off the corpses. Do not invite Fatima Bhutto and Asif Zardari to the same dinner party. She lives in Karachi, but judging by her account of its political environment she might be well advised not to return there after her U.S. book tour.
Fatima Bhutto, a journalist who was educated at Columbia and the University of London -- breaking the family's Harvard tradition -- is not yet 30 years old, and her youth shows in this undisciplined book. It is at least 50 pages too long, larded with self-indulgent emotional outbursts and personality sketches of minor characters, and her reflexive anti-Americanism is tiresome. Her occasional references to U.S. policy sound like snippets of a conversation with Che Guevara, whose poster Murtaza Bhutto mounted in his room at Harvard. She actually believes that U.S. troops herded Vietnamese villagers into urban communities because "that made it much easier for the US army to bomb civilians in their separated enclaves," as if that were the army's objective.
Yet her book will be valuable to readers who want to understand why Pakistan is such an ungovernable mess. In her account, the country's entire political culture is based on corruption, violence, opportunism, mendacity and a feudal economic system. Even the revered Zulfikar, whose mantle everyone in this book tries to claim, tinkered with the constitution to advance his own power. "He was a polarizing figure," his granddaughter writes. "You either loved Zulfikar or hated him." She loved him, but then she used to love her Aunt Benazir too.
Thomas W. Lippman is an adjunct senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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WASHINGTON: A Life
Ron Chernow
Penguin Press
ISBN 978-1-59420-266-7
904 pages
$40
Reviewed by T.J. Stiles
George Washington did not have wooden teeth. He had human teeth, which he bought from slaves, who pulled them from their own mouths. Washington had them fashioned into dentures, anchored with gold wire to his last native tooth. The apparatus distorted his features. Any pressure pained him -- a bite of food, even public speaking. Humiliated, he tried to keep his affliction secret. On top of his increasing deafness, it made him seem aloof.
Ron Chernow describes this dental hell in "Washington," and rarely have missing bicuspids been used to such effect. Here we see the strengths of this biography: the interweaving of the inner and outer man; a sensitivity to the impact of a seemingly minor matter; the juxtaposition of a civic saint with the trade in human flesh (or calcium, in this case). But the very intimacy of the story hints at this book's limitations. Like Washington's teeth, his life as told here is less than fully rooted in its surroundings.
Let's be clear: "Washington" is a true achievement. A reader might agree with my criticisms yet thoroughly enjoy the book. That speaks to the triumph of Chernow's narrative structure, the depth of his research, and how alive he is to the emotional content of dry material. In organically unifying Washington's private and public lives, he accomplishes a feat that eludes many biographers. And he propels readers forward. There were moments on my march to the end of his story on page 817 when I thought he could have shortened the trip, yet I still felt that the writing was purposeful, not merely encyclopedic.
He attains this despite an uneven prose style. At times, cliches and dead phrases rustle noisily on the path. ("Throwing caution to the wind," Washington found the "cards stacked against him" and had to "cool his heels.") Chernow pumps up descriptions as if he were Stan Lee writing about Spider-Man: The "powerfully rough-hewn" Washington's "matchless strength" increases to "superhuman strength" in the same paragraph. The breathlessness becomes counterproductive. An assertion that a wilderness expedition was "incomparably daunting" naturally calls to mind entirely comparable journeys.
But the grand redwood forest of Washington's life draws attention away from the debris underfoot. Chernow builds sympathy for a man born into the ruling class of colonial Virginia, the slave-owning gentry. Desperate for a commission in the king's army, young Washington resented the mildest slight. He stumbled in battle, won glory and learned to discipline himself. When the Revolution came, he was ready to lead. His strength of will and sheer presence helped keep an underequipped and undermanned army in the field for year after shoeless year.
Chernow splendidly describes Washington's troubled relationship with money. The Father of His Country owned a great deal of his country -- tens of thousands of acres -- and scores of slaves. Yet he was constantly in debt, thanks in part to his lavish lifestyle. He even needed a loan to attend his own presidential inauguration. Financial matters eroded his storied self-control; he became by turns inventive, infuriated and self-pitying. Chernow honestly explores Washington's contradictory ideas about slavery, too. He endorsed abolition yet, short of money, drove his slaves hard and secretly pursued runaways during his presidency.
Chernow's goal is to humanize Washington. He succeeds handsomely, depicting an irreducibly complicated figure. Remarkable as Washington was, however, he remained embedded in his times. Unfortunately, Chernow doesn't really engage with the scholarship of Bernard Bailyn, Pauline Maier, Edward Countryman or the many other historians who have revealed so much about 18th-century America.
Take Washington's obsession with appearances, with expensive carriages and fashionable clothes. To understand it, we should know that contemporaries saw social stratification as not only natural, but desirable. In an age of multilayered property requirements for enfranchisement, Americans deferred to the leadership of the wealthy -- specifically, those rich in real estate. In theory, landed gentry passively collected rent and other income, which made them a disinterested elite, equipped to guide the rest of society. To be fully effective as a leader, Washington had to appear to be a man of leisure, rather than the debtor he was, tossed about by financial interests.
Yet the "radicalism of the American Revolution" (to use Gordon Wood's phrase) politicized a broad swath of middling sorts, who are largely absent from this biography. Chernow's account of Alexander Hamilton's struggle with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison naturally tilts toward Hamilton; more seriously, it doesn't capture the extent to which Jeffersonianism went far beyond Jefferson.
Washington and Hamilton sought to direct economic development from above, by, for example, incorporating the Bank of the United States. But Jeffersonians saw corporations as corrupt devices by which the king had granted favors to supporters; Adam Smith himself condemned corporations in "The Wealth of Nations." America's competitive individualism took root in this opposition to elite rule. As historian Joyce Appleby writes, "Smith's invisible hand was warmly clasped by the Republicans." It's worth reading "Washington" alongside "Madison and Jefferson," by Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, two academic historians more sympathetic to the views of Hamilton's foes. (Disclosure: I provided a promotional quote for "Madison and Jefferson.")
By page 817, I shared Chernow's clear-eyed admiration for Washington as a selfless leader of the new republic. But the source of his greatness may have been that he so thoroughly embodied the values of a hierarchical culture that the Revolution fortunately doomed.
T.J. Stiles is the author of "The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt," winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize and 2009 National Book Award.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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