June 21st, 2002

   The Fly Swatter: How My Grandfather Made His Way In the World (Pantheon, 26.00) is Nicholas Dawidoff's third book (The Catcher Was a Spy, In The Country of Country), and it proves what we hoped to believe: Mr. Dawidoff can write a truly great book on any subject. In fact, coming out only a month after Baseball (Penguin, $35), his Library of America compendium of baseball literature, the author is now batting 1000. News that a fine writer has chosen a grandparent as his newest subject is a set-up for disappointment, but, as Dawidoff is no ordinary writer, so was his grandfather no ordinary man.

   Alexander Gershenkron was born in Odessa in 1904, fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution as a teenager to pre-war Vienna, where he made his life over, only to be forced to escape the Nazi occupation of Austria, fleeing, and making his life over once more, to America. An avid reader and student of languages (he was fluent in something like twenty of them), his personal experience in pivotal events of European history provided him an intellectual foundation that eventually led him to the faculty of Harvard as an economic historian and one of the most admired and most colorful teachers in the school's history. From there he befriended, and often unbefriended, some of the era's most influential people, such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Vladimir Nabokov, and claimed to be on personal terms with Ted Williams.

   Though Dawidoff makes clear his love for his grandfather, he conceals no warts. "Such was his passion for writers like Tolstoy and Dickens and Pasternak, I feel sure that if he could have, my grandfather would have invented a great literary character, a Levin, a Copperfield, a Zhivago. But this kind of writing was not his talent, and so he improvised. My grandfather made up such a character all right, and he didn't put him into fiction. He lived him. His life became his stories, and stories were his life," the grandson writes, failing to explain what by this book's end becomes obvious—Dawidoff tells these stories as well as Chekhov or Dickens told theirs. Highly entertaining and deeply revealing, as much about the 20th century, and ourselves, as it is about Gershenkron, The Fly Swatter is an important and accomplished book, one you'd spend your lunch hour reading, rather than getting up and bothering to eat.

There will be a reception and booksigning at 5 p.m. The reading will begin at 5:30. In the unfortunate event you're not able to attend the reading, you can contact us in advance to reserve an autographed or inscribed copy of The Fly Swatter.