Please excuse three straight posts bashing various Chronicle articles, but this Chronicle/Allan Turner reads like a press release from Rice University regarding the institution’s hiring of former Tulane University history professor, Douglas Brinkley:
The man who once took a busload of college students on a madcap tour of the nation’s historic and natural wonders, including the Grand Canyon and author Ken Kesey’s farm, may be just what Rice University’s austere public policy think tank needs to make itself a household name.
That, at least, was the hope on Thursday as university officials explored the possible benefits of their latest faculty hire ó New Orleans superstar historian Douglas Brinkley ó might bring to Rice and its Baker Institute of Public Policy.
A protege of best-selling historian Stephen Ambrose and a regular commentator for CBS News, Brinkley is renowned for his ability to make complex ideas understandable. He is a prolific author, and his 700-plus page tome chronicling Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast will receive the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Book Award later this month.
Brinkley, said Baker founding director Edward Djerejian, could be “a bridge between the world of ideas and action,” helping the institute spread its policy recommendations to the general public.
“He’s going to bring us a huge amount of visibility,” added Rice humanities dean Gary Wihl.
“Superstar historian”? That characterization of Brinkley is certainly not shared by all in the academic community, as noted in this earlier post regarding this William McCrary review of Brinkley’s Hurricane Katrina book:
Let me confess that I haven’t read all of the writings of Douglas Brinkley. I doubt that anyone — perhaps not even Mr. Brinkley himself — has ever done that. He is a veritable … deluge of literary productivity, with books to his credit on a dizzying array of subjects, ranging from Beat poetry to Jimmy Carter, and from Henry Ford to, most recently, the failed Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Indeed, the range of his literary productions is so wide as to seem indiscriminate. But his bestknown writings seem to have three things in common.
First and foremost is their relentless mediocrity. I cannot think of a historian or public intellectual who has managed to make himself so prominent in American public life without having put forward a single memorable idea, a single original analysis, or a single lapidary phrase — let alone without publishing a book that has had any discernable impact. Mr. Brinkley is, to use Daniel Boorstin’s famous words, a historian famous for being well-known.
For what it’s worth, I have read both Brinkley’s book on Hurricane Katrina and Jed Horne’s Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great Ameican City (Random House 2006). Horne’s book is a good read and far superior to Brinkley’s book, which is borderline unreadable.
Moreover, this skeptical view of Brinkley’s academic talent is not new. Back in 1999, Slate’s David Platz penned this well-know article about Brinkley taking advantage of his friendship with John F. Kennedy, Jr. to publicize himself after Kennedy’s death in a plane crash:
According to the Washington Post, Brinkley cut a $10,000 deal with NBC for a week of exclusive Kennedy commentary, but then agreed to provide it pro bono. Editors at George [Kennedy’s magazine] are reportedly so annoyed about Brinkley’s death punditry that they have dropped him from the masthead.
Even amid this week’s staggering hyperbole, Brinkley’s emotional profligacy has distinguished him. He is, as he rarely fails to remind his audience, 38 years old like Kennedy, a vegetarian like Kennedy, and a Sagittarius like Kennedy. That identification with Kennedy accounts in part for Brinkley’s tenuous proposition: that Kennedy’s death is the signal event of his generation, the moment Gen X lost its innocence. In the opening paragraph of his New York Times op-ed, Brinkley opined: “It’s as if suddenly, an entire generation’s optimism is deflated, and all that is left is the limp reality of growing old.” Kennedy’s death may have affected his friend Brinkley this way. I am not sure anyone else outside Kennedy’s circle was so moved.[ . . .]
Brinkley’s sunniness and ardor are appealing, but his public history has its shortcomings. His idols, Ambrose and Schlesinger, have won the admiration of the academy and the public. Brinkley has won the public but has not wowed the academy. Some of his colleagues’ dismay is simply jealousy of his entrepreneurship, but some is more substantive. His books read like good journalism–and that’s no insult–but they are not great history. “He has made no analytical contribution at all,” says one Ivy League historian who professes to like Brinkley.
I am glad that the Chronicle considers Rice’s hiring of a history professor is newsworthy. However, for the Chron article not even to mention the well-known doubts about the academic merit of Brinkley’s work is the type of cheerleading usually reserved for the Chronicle sportspage.
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