THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader 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...
...Michael J. New The Last Alchemist: Count Cagliostro, Master of Magic in the Age of Reason by Iain McCalman (HarperCollins, 272 pp., $25.95...
...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...
...As a pupil, Cagliostro was generally well-behaved, although bad temper, overweening ambitions, and a blasphemous vulgarity frequently proved troublesome...
...Hugh Ormsby-Lennon...
...Reagan's willingness to act gave him the courage both to intervene in Grenada and to launch the Strategic Defense Initiative...
...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...
...McCalman follows their spoor through movies, comic books, and bestselling pulp fiction...
...His earliest versions included "tear down this wall," but the State Department officials raised objections at every turn...
...In this peppy biography, Iain McCal-man breathes new life into Giuseppe Balsamo, a Sicilian thug who began to style himself Count Cagliostro in 1779 at the age of thirty-six...
...In 1795, he died in a papal prison, but his legendary exploits did not die with him...
...Forgiveness is only one of the many lessons that Robinson learned from Ronald Reagan...
...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...
...Robinson was often frustrated with these pragmatists...
...But the ersatz count seems to have had a genuine gift for alternative medicine and a commitment to the mumbo-jumbo that accompanies it...
...Conservatives invest a lot of time trying to convince others of the merits of their ideas...
...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...
...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...
...He was also, however, an uncompromising quack who milked the avidity for magico-mysticism that afflicted all classes during the Enlightenment...
...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...
...Robinson describes the effort that went into the speech...
...Despite a prose that lurches from chatty to wooden to purple, The Last Alchemist offers a narrative that is curious, diverting and instructive...
...By contrast, the king of Poland was charmed...
...Robinson also learned much from Reagan's optimism, his relationship with his wife, and his faith...
...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...
...Reagan's belief in simple policy solutions allowed him to focus on what was important...
...he also touches upon the fascination Cagliostro has exercised over such thinkers as Thomas Carlyle, Walter Benjamin, and Umberto Eco...
...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...
Vol. 9 • September 2003 • No. 1
