'The Nation's Attic'

But that initial impression was not at all good. Oh no. On only the second page of "The Stranger and the Statesman," when Nina Burleigh is describing the removal of the Smithsonian benefactor's body from his grave in Genoa, Italy, in 1903, she commits a quite absurd error: She writes of the city's winds that December being so fierce as to whip the rain "almost vertical" -- a task that is, one would have thought, accomplished with little fuss by gravity alone. Then there are any number of startlingly inelegant sentences, one reading "Gout is a very painful disease directly related to eating and drinking habits that has come to symbolize eighteenth century excess" being among the more egregious. Burleigh is also clearly more than a little bewildered by the nomenclature of aristocracy, and her breathless accounts of the many figures of the British peerage in the story read as though written by some overawed hobbledehoy, someone who fingers the noblemen's lam draperies in envious amazement and wonders how much they would go for at Wal-Mart.

Perhaps most alarming of all, Burleigh's publishers proved either too cheap or incompetent to include an index for a book that, not least because of its immense number of dramatis personae, is badly in need of one. I daresay the author was particularly annoyed by this omission -- and well might she be, because despite my maundering above, she has told a rip-roaring story very well, and but for a few hiccups and throat-clearings which a good editor could have fixed with a salve and a stiff gargle, she has produced a first-rate little book about an extraordinary and all-too-little-known footnote to recent American history.