Nicholas Miraculous
The Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler
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- 32,99 €
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- 32,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
To those who loved him, like Teddy Roosevelt, he was "Nicholas Miraculous," the fabled educator who had a hand in everything; to those who did not, like Upton Sinclair, he was "the intellectual leader of the American plutocracy," a champion of "false and cruel ideals." Ezra Pound branded him "one of the more loathsome figures" of the age. Whether celebrated or despised, Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) was undeniably an irresistible force who helped shape American history.
With wit and irony, Michael Rosenthal traces Butler's rise to prominence as president of Columbia University, which he presided over for forty-four years and developed into one of the world's most distinguished institutions of research and teaching. Butler also won the Nobel Peace Prize and headed both the Carnegie Endowment and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among innumerable other organizations. In 1920, he sought the Republican nomination for president, managing to garner more votes on the first ballot than the eventual winner, Warren Harding. Rosenthal's richly detailed, elegantly crafted narrative captures the mania and genius that propelled Butler to these extraordinary achievements and more. Thick with social, cultural, and political history, Nicholas Miraculous recreates Butler's prodigious career and the dynamic age that nourished him.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Butler (1862 1947), one newspaper commented three years before he received the Nobel Prize (1931), was "the most lavishly decorated member of the human race." Upon his death, the New York Times described him as "one of the best known Americans of his generation the world over." However, many of Butler's projects such as the College Entrance Examination Board are as familiar as he is now forgotten. As president of Columbia University from 1902 to 1945, Butler nurtured the school's growth from small college to major research institution. His involvement in Republican politics brought the friendship (and later the enmity) of several presidents, and as president of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace (1925 1945), his international stature grew. Although Rosenthal, a former Columbia dean of students, attends to the personal affairs of this man absorbed by institutions, Butler's life remains one of meetings, memos and minutes. The author uses an abundance of archival and published material judiciously; his style is felicitous, and the tale is enlivened by in-fighting and occasional scandal. Manipulator? Manager? Opportunist? Idealist? Sycophant? Pioneer? Rosenthal's skill in rendering a complex life in an absorbing fashion reveals them all. 16 b&w illus., 13 political cartoons.
