Hair-Drying Review: "Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy"

I don't have a lot of time to read for pleasure. If I'm reading, I should be reading a case -- or the tax code.

But once every two days or so, I find five minutes to crawl through a book for pleasure as I blow-dry my hair.

My latest crawl is through "Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in Diplomacy" by Michael Soussan. It was a Christmas present from my dad. "This will make me righteously indignant," I joked when he gave it to me. I was right, but for the wrong reasons.

The book is an insider's look at the UN Oil-for-Food Program in Iraq. As we all know, the program turned out to be rife with corruption. I thought I would feel indignant as the good name of the UN, an organization I have a soft spot for after years of high school Model United Nations simulations, would be callously -- if justly -- dragged through the mud.

Well, I'm righteous. And I'm indignant. But mostly because Michael Soussan got to publish a book. He gets to teach international affairs. And yet he -- and his editors -- let mistakes like this get by all of them:

"[On Kofi Annan's 'Hammarskjold moment'] in reference to the first secretary general of the United Nations, who, for lack of a more brilliant successor, remains venerated to this day" (p. 161).

I would like to spend a moment on the factual and stylistic inaccuracies of that statement. There are at least three.

1. Dag Hammarskjold was the second United Nations Secretary-General. There have only been eight in all; if Soussan had learned the name of one Secretary-General each year he worked at the UN, he would probably know them all.
2. Secretary-General is written using a hyphen.
3. Perhaps Hammarskjold received the Nobel Peace Prize, the only one ever given posthumously, simply for lack of a more brilliant successor. When JFK called Hammarskjold "the greatest statesman of our century," he meant to say "he'll do until someone else comes along." It's hard to believe that Hammarskjold died on a UN mission in Northern Rhodesia, serving out his second term as the most active Secretary-General ever, only to be relegated to a snarky punch line in a book like this.

"Father Benjamin thought that the most proper way to proceed would be to involve Pope Jean Paul II himself in their scheme" (p. 176).

I thought that this was certainly a typo. But there he was again, further down the page, "Pope Jean Paul II," and finally, in the index: "Jean Paul II (pope)."

C'est la vie.