POWER & GREED

Powerful people have done—and will probably always do—bad things to accumulate more power and riches and opportunities for sex: that’s the not-very-startling thesis of this bite-sized history of the world.

After declaring that history is fun, former Canadian public official, journalist, and academic Gigantès proceeds to prove the opposite as he writes dreary section after dreary section, beginning with Moses and ending with the ongoing “Irish problem.” In what might better have been subtitled World History for Dummies, Gigantès assumes his readers know nothing. He tells us that Jesus was born about 2,000 years ago, that Nero and Caligula were not Boy Scouts, that the historical Richard III does not much resemble Shakespeare’s villain, that Cortés and Pizarro killed lots of innocent people, that the US has not solved its social problems, that Hitler “will be remembered as a monster,” that Communism didn’t work. Worse, he seems unable to find a fresh phrase anywhere. We read of craws with things stuck in them, of nuggets of wisdom, of ticking bombs. Gigantès does try to come up with a catchphrase: “grand acquisator.” He acknowledges that “acquisator” is not really a word, but he likes it, so he uses it throughout to describe the most rapacious of human beings. Among them are Napoleon and Hitler—both of whom, he reveals, launched disastrous invasions of Russia. He also tweaks his American neighbors to the south, reminding us that for all our posturing about human rights, we still have corrosive civil-rights problems of our own, especially with Native Americans and African-Americans. And he believes, as expressed in yet another hackneyed phrase, that the “one faint beacon of hope” for the future is . . . the European Community, which has, he announces, decided that cooperation is better than world war.

Old news in stale language—not a happy combination.