HUGH BARNES
The Stolen Prince: Gannibal, Adopted Son of Peter the Great, Great-Grandfather of Alexander Pushkin, and Europe’s First Black Intellectual

There is much to recommend the story of an Abyssinian slave rescued from the Sultan’s seraglio to become the confidant of Peter the Great. If the exotic wunderkind is also a master soldier, cryptographer, engineer, and intellectual, all the better. But the life story of Abram Petrovich Gannibal 1696–1781) comes with curious baggage. This “Blackamoor of Peter the Great” (as the poet Alexander Pushkin famously named him), has spent centuries obscured in the limelight of his biographers. Now the British journalist Hugh Barnes delivers Gannibal from some of Russia’s most celebrated men of letters.

As Gannibal’s great-grandson and first publicist, Pushkin approached his family history defensively, for Russia was, and is, xenophobic. In the poet’s refashioning, Gannibal became a Negro prince, the paramour of Paris, and a despised and unhappy phantom of Shakespeare’s own Moor. With his unfinished novella, Pushkin both immortalized and buried his accomplished African ancestor. Secured in the annals of Russian literature, Gannibal was consigned to a fairytale.

Vladimir Nabokov launched an assault on the fairytale in an appendix to his 1956 translation of Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin.” His quarrelsome 60-page essay lamented the sloppy state of the chronicles of Gannibal, finding gross inaccuracies, muddled dates, and, most troubling to the exacting linguist, appalling grammar. His revelations went a long way toward establishing the mysterious African as inspiration for Onegin’s brooding isolation, but did not do justice to Gannibal’s remarkable history.

In “The Stolen Prince” (Ecco, 300 pages, $27.95) Mr. Barnes liberates his subject from Pushkinology by placing him on a larger stage. Born in the final years of the 17th century and adopted as a youth by the Russian emperor, the Abram Petrovich Mr. Barnes introduces is the human embodiment of Petrine reform. “Saint Petersburg and the freed slave grew up side by side,” he notes, and the stamp of their Western-oriented sire is evident on both their brows. Mr. Barnes proceeds with a reminder that Peter’s progressive zeal accompanied a deep fascination with the freakish. From the “cabinet of curiosities” of physical deformities that the tsar proudly displayed to the “Most Drunken Synod of Jesters and Fools” which he tasked with irreverence and ribaldry, the court of Peter the Great was weaned on shock value. “Into this menagerie,” Mr. Barnes writes, “stepped Gannibal.”

Mr. Barnes’s investigative method is to use Gannibal as both quarry and decoy. In tracking the inconsistencies and uncertainties of an ill-documented life, Mr. Barnes allows Gannibal to remain elusive, even as he brings a dazzling array of orbital material into focus. In his retelling, Gannibal is muse not just of Peter’s peccadilloes, but also of the intrigues of the Bourbon Court (which he infiltrated as Peter’s spy) and of the brutalities of the Sublime Porte of the Grand Vizier (a description of which, girdled with the shrunken heads of unfortunate foes, the African may have provided his friend Voltaire for use in “Candide”).

Tracking his subject from Africa to Istanbul to Siberia (and sparing no shoe leather in the endeavor), Mr. Barnes succeeds in a conceit that would fail most biographers: He puts Gannibal squarely at the axis of history on three distinct continents. His suggestion is that Abram Petrovich Gannibal was far more significant than we ever supposed and that his life can be found in weird cosmic confluence in and out of chronology, foreshadowed by the bards who preceded him and celebrated by those who came later.

– Elizabeth Kiem

TED STEINBERG
American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn

One of the best things about summer is the smell of cut grass, the Adirondack chair, a big frosty glass of lemonade, and a view out over the lawn. It is an immense pleasure. In my vision, my lawn is a lush and perfect blanket of deep green-blue — but a vision is all I have. I don’t own an Adirondack chair, and my real lawn is weedy and splotchy, irregularly shorn and shaggy around the edges. But because I’m a country boy at heart, I can’t bring myself to wage war against crabgrass, and I rather like thistle and clover flowers.

Most Americans harbor impossible ideals for the sheets of turf outside their doors. This is old news; the suburban pursuit of golf-course-quality grass is well known and the butt of many jokes. But Ted Steinberg has documented in “American Green” (Norton, 296 pages, $24.95) a level of insanity, risk, and preoccupation I would never have guessed.

“American Green” is an excellent addition to the small canon of lively catalogs that document just how crazy Americans can be. Jerry Tucker, for instance, built a replica of the famous 12th hole at Augusta National in his back yard. And then there are lawn mower races. Folks having fun with their lawns or their lawn equipment is only a small part of the book, however.

Abe Levitt “and his sons, William and Alfred, built more than seventeen thousand homes on the potato fields that once dominated a large flat section of Long Island. And every last one of them had a lawn to mow.” This was very much on purpose. Mr. Steinberg quotes Abe Levitt as having written that “No single feature of a suburban residential community contributes as much to the charm and beauty of the individual home and the locality as well-kept lawns.”

It has been downhill ever since. Mr. Steinberg quotes Kenneth Jackson: “Without porches or stoops, the front yard … had no real utility. … It evolved into something for show, into a reflection of personal identity.” Mr. Steinberg writes: “Everywhere development went, land used to grow crops gave way to the new money-centered lawn aesthetic.”

Indeed, there is big money to be made from mowers, trimmers, edgers, weed wackers, lawn care teams, pesticides, and fertilizers. And most of it is made recklessly, and at great cost to something, or someone’s health or future. Lawn additives such as Ironite, for instance, do not disclose on the bag that the “product contains ingredients mined in Humboldt, Arizona, from a proposed Superfund site.”

Once Steinberg is done tallying the corrosive fertilizers, the hazardous equipment, the water waste, and the general depravity (cloak, dagger, and otherwise) that surrounds lawn care, my weedy, brown, clover-ridden lawn no longer looks neglected. It looks responsible. And, I’m sure not to get a visit from the Anarchist’s Golfing Association, with its trademark calling cards: the A monogrammed golf ball.

– Max Watman