cover image Nicholas Miraculous: The Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler

Nicholas Miraculous: The Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler

Michael Rosenthal, . . Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30 (528pp) ISBN 978-0-374-29994-1

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. (Jan.)