POLITICAL BOOKNOTES

...On this and many other dimensions, John Newhouse has provided an insightful and very readable account...

...It appears that while the authors have spoken to members of Singer’s family, they have not directly interviewed him in any depth...

...SUSAN WATTERS is the Washington bureau chief of W Magazine...

...a divided Britain that has marginalized itself in terms of influence in Europe...

...It is often said that Americans would rather talk about sex than money...

...that 137 Americans have personal fortunes exceeding $1 billion...

...she had houses in Hawaii and a river view apartment at the Watergate...

...Why isn’t there any good fiction written about the post-draft military...

...Denied access to the Muslim inner sanctum, Si.ngh wisely concentrates on charting Farrakhan’s rise to prominence and on explaining his success in attracting :I broad-based, supportive black constituency...

...THOMAS E. RICKS, The Wall Street Journal’s Pentagon correspondent, is the author of Making the Corps, to be published in November...

...Facing Up to FarraEhaA By William L. Van Deburg HE OLD FOLK WISDOM THAT opposites attract would certainly seem to apply to the spate of biographers who have chosen Louis Farrakhan as their subject...

...Some haven’t even been able to wrangle a single fleeting interview out of the elusive Farrakhan...

...military: A huge cultural divide separates the White House yuppies from the uniformed military, and behind it is a growing gap between the military and the nation’s political, intellectual, and economic elites...

...Unfortunatelv...

...Take Morris’s efforts to nail Luce down on the simple matter of her birth date-a predictable obstacle when tackling women of a certain age...

...An examination of what makes Singer tick could have given us a better understanding of computer outlaws in general...

...But they also result from a job market which rewards the talented and fortunate exceedingly well while leaving the less talented and fortunate with meager incomes...

...Maybe someone should sponsor a contest...

...Briefly, the nation-state is being squeezed-pressed to transfer authority both upward and downward...

...Luce, then in her eighties, put her arm on the table, leaned toward the former matinee idol, and in a husky voice whispered, “I’d love to hear your fantasies...

...Certainly, we do not have a complete meritocracy in the United States...

...Ironically, a Europe adrift after the Cold War has increasingly come to value an American anchor...

...he looks for software, reads other people’s e-mail and generally uses each new computer to leapfrog to the next one...

...Newhouse writes: National CdhlreS are being squeezed betvieen a broader popular culture and briskly reviving regional cultures...

...Who are they trying to kid...

...For example, while Newhouse notes a decline in confidence in German institutions, and worries whether the high-cost, metal-bending German economy can adapt to new technologies and global markets, he also quotes Anne-Marie Le Gloanee's sanguine view that "Germany works very well...

...that in the country’s hundred largest law firms, partners typically make $446,000...

...and a France that suffers from high unemployment and a mood of domestic malaise...

...Inside the computer underground, theft is usually justified by arguing that nothing was taken...

...JOHN MARKOFF covers Silicon Valley forThe New York Times...

...At one point, the novel’s lieutenant hero even represents the Joint Chiefs at a key meeting with the No...

...That’s a shame, because Singer’s behavior resembles that of many other computer criminals-like Kevin Mitnick, for example, a notorious computer outlaw who was arrested more than six times over the course of 15 years...

...that in 199S, the paychecks of corporate chairmen averaged 190 times that of a typical worker, up from a ratio of 40 times the wages of a typical worker 20 years ago...

...Although Hacker gives some attention to the underlying reasons for current disparities-and there are some fascinating glimpses of how wealthy individuals justify their very large incomes-in the end the author seems to favor an explanation that emphasizes greed and materialism over talent and energy...

...In the book, you discover just about everything you ever wanted to know about this topic, at a level of detail that would delight any town gossip...

...Vanity Affairs By Susan WaRters REAGAN PALS TELL A STORY about the night Nancy Reagan invited Clare Boothe Luce to dinner in the U‘hite House family quarters...

...After announcing that the date of Luce’s illegitimate birth was March 10,1903, Morris sniffs that the child, “for inscrutable reasons,” was encouraged to celebrate birthdays a month later...

...EMU has been an elite project without broad popular support, and now European voters blame it for efforts to curtail overly generous national welfare and pension plans...

...So much for the other women in the room...

...Western Europe had a good Cold War...

...And while critical of EMU, he believes the progress already made by the EU probably won’t be undone...

...Newhouse is too practiced an observer not to warn that we have been through cycles of Europessimism and Euroweariness before-as recently as a decade ago...

...The threat from the East obliged Western Europeans to huddle together and helped them to break bad habits...

...Morris might want to set aside some time for reflection before moving on to Volume 11...

...A broad, charitable interpretation of the maxim which holds that “those who say they know don’t know and those who know won’t say,” should cause us to conclude that this is all that most “outsiders” can be reasonably expected to accomplish...

...One might scrape up some empathy for the high-handed treatment Morris is said to have suffered at the hands of Madame Luce were it not for the fact that she clearly asked for it...

...It’s a high stakes game in which education is, more than ever, the key to success...

...society in Europe...

...Efforts to meet the strict fiscal criteria established to allow EMU to come into force have helped to depress growth and increase unemployment...

...In fact, by stealing e-mail and software from the computer security community during his four-year electronic joyride, Singer helped undermine-the general safety of the Internet...

...Rather than becoming obsolete as many observers predicted at the beginning of this decade, NATO has become a popular institution that provides a sense of stability...

...Initially, this combative, take-no-prisoners style enlivens his commentary, but even those who agree that it is the scholar’s sworn duty to repudiate Farrakhm for “the bigotry that he evinces and the mmifest injury to racial comity that he causes” will aues...

...But what they don’t mention is that JSZ is the target of an ongoing investigation by United States counterintelligence officials...

...One of the most interesting chap- a ters in the book-is-Newhouse’s descrip- -tion of regionalism within Europe...

...After years of deferring to Luce in exchange for scraps of information, Morris apparently feels it’s her turn to have a say...

...Now in At Large: The Strange Case of the World’s Biggest Internet Invasion, David H. Freedman and Charles C. Mann add the story of an odd young fellow whose life is consumed by the desire to systematically break into thousands of computers via the Internet...

...But this book, like so many others, gives pride of place to the handicaps of race and gender, when the real problem is that children who are born into very disadvantaged families, whatever their other characteristics, have few routes out of poverty...

...Now that threat is gone...

...Public opinion polls suggest that public stinginess about supporting welfare or other social programs is related less to greed than to disappointment about what such programs have been able to accomplish...

...crim@intemet.com by John Markoff IN 1983, THE MOVIE War Games catapulted Matthew Broderick to stardom...

...We’ve had all-volkteer armed services for nearly a quarter-century...

...ISABEL V. SAWHILL is n senior fellow at the Urban Inrtihrte...

...And we have a military that is probably better than it has ever been, yet also more partisan than ever before-and is being used heavily as a tool of foreign policy by an administration it doesn’t really trust What a rich set of ingredients for a fresh, nervy post-Cold War thriller...

...And Morris has managed to amass lots of titillating details about the range of Luce’s sexual conquests...

...These include African-Americans’ cultural conservatism, their frustration over the persistence of racial discrimination, and their mistrust of both mainstream institutions and black political “insiders...

...While they don’t exactly endorse this view, the authors leave the reader with the disarming sense that Singer did little real damage...

...In describing the death of Luce’s jilted lover Donald Freeman, for instance, Morris disputes Luce’s contention that her former Vanity Fair editor committed suicide over her by driving into a tree...

...The result is a unified Germany that has become the largest state but provides little leadership...

...Luce circled the pages in her diary to mark days when their affair was “consumated...

...Morris sees it as a justification to whine...

...Once inside, he doesn’t appear to do very much...

...Instead, Morris peevishly notes, “he might have intended not to kill but merely injure himself in order to elicit sympathy and perhaps rekindle her love...

...Equally priceless is Morris’s account of the ermine toilet seat (complete with paws...

...In the face of these uncertainties, ncluding the problems of disorder in Russia, conflict in the Mediterranean, and change in Central Europe, the role of the United States remains critical in Europe...

...The focus of the book is almost entirely on the unevenness of rewards...

...Farrakhan’s organicist, racially essenti:&t world-view and his unceasing willingness to “give whitey hell” also have encouraged many to accept the 64-year-old former calypso singer’s “self-projection as the autonomous personification of his race’s ‘authentic’ collective interests...

...Here we go again-with the Russians replaced by terrorists, as they generally are in ’90s thrillers: The hero is a very junior officer, in this case an Army lieutenant, who cuts a swath through the Pentagon and ultimately defeats the bad guys running the Defense Department...

...The tale of a bright high school student who brings the world perilously close to World War I11 by breaking into a secret military computer, War Games opened new vistas for adolescent misbehavior and inspired a generation of suburban nerds to cruise the Net in search of similar adventure...

...is the dean of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government...

...If we knew how to improve their life chances-while still preserving the right of families to have and raise their own children-perhaps those greedy billionaires would see the wisdom of sharing more of their wealth with others...

...Vanity Fair editor Francis Crowninshield compared Luce’s effect on Walter Lippmann to that of “a queen cobra on a field mouse...

...On these matters, I found the book disappointing...

...For example, we learn that orthopedic surgeons have an average income of $304,000 a year whereas pediatricians earn only $113,000 a year...

...It is the most stable and democratic...

...If the process were fair and efficient, then the fact that some do very well and others quite badly would presumably be acceptable...

...Rejecting the commonplace notion that Farrakhan’s success is a media-driven phenomenon, Singh skillfully analyzes a wide range of contributing factors...

...At worst (Looking for Farrakhan by Florence Hamlish Levinsohn), they are still remarkably restrained and only occasionally approach the sensationalistic, axegrinding excesses one regularly finds in “unauthorized” celebrity biographies and tabloid journalism...

...Between 1975 and 1995, the income of the top one-fifth grew by 35 percent while the bottom fifth’s inched UD bv a mere one or two percent...

...Recent book-length studies of the controversial Nation of Islam leader have been penned by the American Jewish Committee’s chief legal expert on anti-Semitism, a self-proclaimed “liberal-integrationist-feminist writer and sometimes integrationist and feminist activist,” a Swedish anthropologist of religion, and the author of a guide to “etiquette in other people’s religious ceremonies...

...In considering how she was had, Morris might finally begin to get a glimpse of Lady Luce...

...What emerges is not an insightful account of an influential and controversial woman, but a portrait of an author drowning in details and overwhelmed by her subject...

...Fourteen years later the stories that have emerged are no longer fictional...

...In Newhouse’s view...

...Another Luce devotee was Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, who obligingly shipped Rose and the kids-including 8-yearold Edward Kennedy-home to Massachusetts in anticipation of Luce’s 1940 visit to his country place near Windsor, England...

...And he is too fair-minded not to point out when the glass is half full as well as half empty...

...WILLIAM L. VAN DEBURG, author of Modern Black Nationalism, is a profinor of Afro-American studies at the University of Winconsin-Madison...

...These are just a few of the facts to be gleaned from Andrew Hacker’s new book, Money: Who Has How Much and Why...

...This ability also serves to place Farrakhan high on the list of those whom political historian Richard Hofstadter has described as master practitioners of the “paranoid style” in American politics...

...In Germany, federal spending is declining as state and local spending rises...

...2 officials from the CIA, State Department, and the National Security Council...

...To be sure, these are not exactly Islamic fellow travelers or brothers on the block...

...Oh, sure...

...Bringing down the curtain on the Baruch-Luce liason, she writes, “Deep feminine longings demanded that he bind himself to her by impregnating her...

...Luce, who was feeling lonely and somewhat snubbed by the conservative renaissance, reluctantly agreed...

...Events, not governments, have taken charge...

...Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of Germany, political leaders agreed at Maastricht to intensify European unity as a means of “Gulliverizing” Germany...

...He has no faith in market solutions to the complex question of how much someone is worth, but neither does he have anything better to suggest...

...But this break with the past has not produced a new set of policies for the future...

...The best of these works (Mattias Gardell’s In the Name of Elqah Muhammad), conscientiously seek balance and are based on extensive research in available documentary sources...

...For most biographers, a subject who lies about her age is a challenge to be confronted...

...She then complains of confronting the 82-yearold Luce with the discrepancy and being greeted with evasiveness and vague digressions about Easter Sunday, Good’Friday, and the astrological signs of Aries and Pisces...

...And Morris’s frequent skirmishes with her subject for control of the story quickly evolve from being vaguely amusing to tediously petty...

...But an easy fluency with these issues doesn’t add up to a new paradigm...

...It needs to have a deeper conversation about how to interpret these facts and what to do about them...

...Clifford Stoll’s The Cuckoo’sEgg Michelle Slatella and Joshua Quittner’s Masters of Destruction, and Cyberpunk, which I co-authored with Katie Hafner, all explore the brave new world of young men obsessed with powerful machines and computer networks...

...Morris subsequently spent six years and a good deal of her own money following Luce to Hawaii, London, and Washington, nursing her while she was ill and occasionally bringing her breakfast in bed...

...Although the Matt Singers of the world may have no intention to “rob” in the Willie Sutton sense of the word, the information they trade in the computer underground is remarkably useful to those who are motivated bv more conventional criminal values...

...But his age and family preoccupations made this unlikely...

...Randolph Churchill was another catch...

...But by the end of At Large, Matt Singer is still largely a cipher...

...that Luce fashioned from a hand-me-down coat belonging to her mother-in-law...

...State ofthe Union is not that novel...

...One thing Freedman and Mann do well is to demonstrate how the rapid evolution of electronic crime has left law enforcement choking in dust...

...But the reader never feels outraged by the government’s ineptness because Freedman and Mann offer such a benign view of Singer’s crimes...

...UROPE TODAY HAS BROKEN with the past more completely than at any time since the end of the Thirty Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648,” claims John Newhouse, one of this country’s shrewdest observers of the old continent...

...The Novel That Could Have Been By Thomas E. Ricks HERE IS A GOOD NOVEL TO BE written playing on the friction between- the Clinton administration and the U.S...

...The average household now has an income of $45,000 a year, but the spread between the richest one-fifth (with an average income of $109,000) and the poorest onefifth (with only $8,000 a year) is wider than it has been in the past and wider than it is in other industrialized democracies...

...Political Booknotes Money Matters by Isabel V. Sawhill OVER THE LAST TWO DECADES the distribution of economic rewards in the United States has grown steadily more unequal...

...Space devoted to these barbs could have been used to provide additional information on Farrakhan’s background-covered in a more comprehensive fashion in Arthur J. Magida’s Prophet IfRage-and on the scope, content, and effectiveness of the Nation of Islam’s economic and social action initiatives...

...Luce returned the favor, leaving her husband, media visionary Henry Luce, home in New York...

...Newhouse does not forecast the nd of the nation-state nor the success of secession in Northern Italy or Catlonia...

...So maybe it is not so surprising that even in death, Luce has managed to outwit, outshint:, and undercut her biographer, Sylvia Jukes Morris, author of Rage for Fame: The Ascent of Clare Boothe Luce...

...tion the need to use modifiers such as “demagogic,” “reactionary,” and “pernicious” so frequently...

...And some retreat from the excessive Europhoria at the beginning of the ’90s was inevitable...

...The author (concludes that this rare ability to “cut across intrablack cleavages of social class, gender, age, religion, and region” has created an acute political dilemma for the established national black leadership cohort...

...But he does see a political landcape being redrawn as countries and egions move, like iron filings, toward different magnets...

...flailed for months and ultimately failed to arrest him...

...Much of the investment in infrastructure is being done at regional and local levels, often on a cooperative basis with neighboring region...

...Apart from the salacious segments, which are highly readable, the book is essentially a poorly organized collection of facts...

...Table talk came to a halt when the President, halfway through relating a dream, froze in embarrassment...

...and in her mid-fifties, she painted a picture of a child being thrown into the sea by a Herculean man...

...Comparisons made between .. .. . . . Farrakhan and Joe McCarthy, David Duke, Pat Buchanan, Booker T Washington, Malcolm X, and A1 Sharpton are insightful and make useful contributions to the existing literature...

...This is roughly equivalent to letting an intern run the Senate for the majority leader...

...These growing disparities are partly driven by demographic changes, including more single-parent families at the bottom of the distribution and more two-paycheck families at the top...

...He may also have compromised national security...

...the ,, authors offer little insight into the man they call Matt Singer (his real name is not revealed, presumably because he has never been arrested...

...No one, really...

...National capitals in Europe are losing control of their economies to the parallel processes of globalization and internal regionalism...

...Throughout her illustrious life as a vamp, successful playwright, ambassador, congresswoman, fashion plate, and arch conservative, Luce always got the better of any woman she befriended...

...If lacking certain of the subtleties and nuanced understandings one typically finds in works penned by those with a well-developed sense of empathy for their subject, Singh compensates by offering thought-provoking political analysis and an intriguing conceptual model...

...The prose bounces playfully off the pages, albeit in a tone that leaves little doubt in the reader’s mind about the author’s own ideology...

...It also added the phrase “computer hacker” to the American lexicon...

...Despite her stated belief that subjects ought to “choose their biographers,” Morris set her sights on Luce, and enlisted historian Daniel Boorstein and former Reagan staffer Selwa Roosevelt to help plead her case...

...National capitals emain important, but Brussels and ocal councils have both become more nfluential than in the past...

...Equally important is the process by which some win and some lose in this competition for money...

...So was Wall Street speculator and FDR adviser Bernard Baruch, 32 years her senior...

...For example, despite the fact that it knew Singer’s identity and location, the F.B.I...

...The authors say Singer frequently traded information with a mysterious young Israeli who is identified only by the initials “TSZ...

...Remember the Kevin Costner movie No Wuy Out...

...We learn that he is a troubled individual who has spent time in an Oregon mental hospital...

...Hacker makes the topic of money not only sexy but, wherever possible, titillating...

...Continental Divide By Joseph S. Nye Jr...

...An admirer of Adolph Reed Jr., outspoken author of TheJesse Jackson Phenomenon, Singh displays a similarly unsentimental and ultra-critical sensibility...

...JOSEPH S. NYE JR...

...After recounting an anecdote in which Luce’s father teaches her how to swim by throwing her into deep water, Morris follows up with three unrelated water references: Luce tried out for the 1920 Olympic swim team...

...and that Imelda Marcos has 3,000 pairs of shoes...

...Robert Singh, an Oxford-educated political scientist on the faculty of the University of Edinburgh, contributes importantly to this rapidly expanding body of literature, but his study is marred by excessive name-calling and is made less than comprehensive by the author’s inability to gain access to “insider” data...

...Nevertheless, they profess to know the man well enough to instruct other interested “outsiders” in the workings of contemporary black religious nationalism...

...Instead, it is a tired updating of the same old Washington adventure story...

...The lack of computer security that this book does such a good job of - describing is a cause for serious concern-particularly as the Internet continues to carry more and more of the world’s commerce...

...But the device they chose, European Monetary Union (EMU), has only contributed to the problems...

...She tries her best to be catty throughout the book, and at times she even succeeds in evincing a certain feline wit-as in her devastating description of Luce spiriting sculptor Isamu Noguchi, chisel in hand, into her Manhattan apartment to touch up her marble bust after a secret nose job...

...Despite his explicit request that the book not be read as a plea for more income redistribution, it is hard to read it as anything else...

...What the country needs right now is not just more facts about who makes how much money...

...Although living standards have improved-at least a little-for just about everyone, the incomes of those at the top of the scale have increased much faster than those at the bottom...

...Newhouse rightly concludes that a device designed to unify Europe has proven to be divisive...

...The argument is that stealing software or illicitly looking through someone’s e-mail is OK, because these electronic bits have not been taken away from their original owners...

...Singh‘s characterization of ~ rhe Muslim leader as a “conventional conserva1 tive authoritarian popi ulist” and a “prophet of ~ radical black reaction, propounding a populist right-wing message” uill 1 not sit well with all readers, but the case is ~ strongly argued...

...More broadly, if the Cold War is indeed considered to have been a war, we are in unexplored territory because, for the first time in our nation’s history, we maintain a large military establishment during peacetime...

...The text frequently conjures up the sound of index cards dropping to the table...

...But even in the midst of these juicy tidbits, Morris’s penchant for melodrama bogs the story down in pedantry and blather...

...Yes, too much money is concentrated in too few hands, and too many are mired at the bottom, but this is not news, and hand wringing about the unfairness of it all won’t produce solutions...

...In other words, the situation is dim but not desperate...