The Chancellor
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5 Ianuarius 2023
In the wee hours of the morning today I finished reading Kati Marton's highly acclaimed biography of Angela Merkel, The Chancellor. It was, however, a book long puff piece in the vein of books I read as a boy about Washington, Jefferson, etc. Is Merkel anything other than an ideal human? You won't find out in this book. The high level political history of Merkel's ascent and chancellorship is there, but not in much detail either. The book is mainly organized in chapters around her relationships with other world leaders. I would recommend it to a 5th or 6th grader.
On a more personal note, I found it irksome that Marton kept mentioning that she'd been married to Richard Holbrooke as if that gave her some special cache as a diplomat's wife. He was her third husband after news anchor Peter Jennings and they weren't married until after his brief stint as US ambassador to Germany. I just remember that Holbrooke was on the AIG board that submarined the company and sent my dad into early retirement. Marton's repeated name-dropping managed to cheapen further an already cheap work.
