These days, a nonfiction book’s subject tends to be broken into pieces to cater to the short attention spans of the screen-addled. In biographies, this can manifest as an alternation between individuals. The format has been prevalent for some time, at least since Deborah Scroggins’s “Wanted Women” (2012) toggled between the life of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and that of a Pakistani terrorist. The latest H.W. Brands biography toggles between John Brown and Abraham Lincoln.
What happens when a prosopographist uses this method? That interesting word crops up in “WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy.” Originally a term applied to scholars of the Roman Empire’s ruling class, it denotes researching a group of people with common characteristics. Michael Knox Beran’s prosopography can be overwhelming. It moves among veins of interconnected White Anglo-Saxon Protestants – what used to be thought of as our ruling class – at a pace that feels like narrative fracking. The shards that fly at the reader sometimes enlighten; sometimes they even thrill. Frequent breaks will be needed to cope with this dizzying array of oligarchs, Brahmins, and Anglo-Dutch patroons.
