The Dictionary of Global Culture.

The Dictionary of Global Culture, by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates (Knopf, 717 pp., $35)

Mr. Gelernter is a computer-science professor at Yale, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of 1939: The Lost World of the Fair (Free Press).

THIS book, by Professors Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates of Harvard University -- that's Harvard, H-a-r-v-a-r-d, a school that is said to be one of the greatest in the Boston area -- roars past in a blur and leaves you suspecting you've been had, but too confused to know for sure. Eccentric dic- tionaries are a valuable genre, and this one is plenty eccentric. But what sort of items does a "dictionary of culture" discuss? Is that "culture" as in "twentieth-century popular"? Unlikely; there are no entries for John Lennon or Bob Dylan, Glenn Miller or John Wayne. Culture as in "high"? But there is nothing on such shadowy figures as Wordsworth or Coleridge, Keats or Twain, Frost, Stevens, or Auden. Is science part of culture? Joseph Lister and Edward Jenner make the cut, but not von Neumann, Heisenberg, or Godel. What about politics? John Kennedy is in, but Disraeli, Lloyd George, LBJ, and Margaret Thatcher are out.

Granted these names are all Western, but so am I; to judge the work as a whole I have to stand on (what is to me) solid ground, from which viewpoint the book flunks. I don't have the vaguest idea what principles underlie the selections, or what Appiah and Gates mean by "culture." Why should I trust them to teach me about China or Indonesia if they haven't got Europe and America straight?

The assumptions underlying the project are never spelled out clearly. To the extent you can guess what they are, many of them seem to be wrong. Perhaps they aren't, but I can't tell and I don't see how any reader could. Here is the key text, the authors explaining their method: "We asked academic experts in universities in many countries to suggest around fifty of the most important cultural contributions from the region in which they are expert. We collated their suggestions, producing for each region a master list of the top fifty or so topics" -- and evidently this master list dictated the contents of the dictionary. What "regions" were included? "China to Chile," say the authors; that's it. How was a "region" defined? They don't say. How many regions are there? They don't say. The jacket reports "more than 1,200 entries," so I assume there are more than 24 regions, at fifty entries per. Why is this a good idea in the first place? That's a tough one.

This is an American book for American readers, and the general premise is sound: We ought to know more about the world at large. The project aims to bring us up to speed on non-American, non-European cultures. It's mildly con- fusing that, notwithstanding, the authors include entries on Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln -- but no one (take my word for it) will ever turn to this book for information about Thomas Jefferson. Granting, however, that Americans are badly informed about the world's non-American "regions," why should they want to hear about every region's top-fifty hit parade of "con- tributions"? Culturally speaking, China is a lot more important than Chile. By settling on each region's top fifty, the authors acknowledge that some con- tributions are more important than others; if you can rank people within regions, why not across regions? Why can't you rank the regions themselves? If Chile and China deserve equal representation, why don't Thomas Jefferson and Phil Donahue? Even if we stipulate that importance is uniformly distributed across all human beings, there are a lot more Chinese than Chileans, and China has a longer history. You might as well organize an encyclopedia on the prin- ciple that each letter gets five hundred pages. That way you are fair to the whole alphabet.

None of this would matter if the entries were worth reading. (On my desk I have at the moment, for example, a paperback copy of David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film, the 1994 Third Edition. Thomson commits such appalling errors as leaving out Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore, Joan Les- lie, Betsy Drake, and Vera-Ellen, and on page 498 he inexplicably refers to Constance Dowling as Virginia Mayo. What can you say about such a misbegotten book? That it has great style and panache, reads beautifully, and is indispensable.) But The Dictionary of Global Culture is so badly written it sets your teeth on edge.

The authors have an unusual flair for writing sentences that read like New Yorker newsbreaks. "Explaining that he did not feel comfortable among people he felt contempt for, Wittgenstein left Cambridge." (Good explanation. He wasn't a great philosopher for nothing.) Picasso "settled on the Left Bank in 1903, and his work was immediately recognized." (By an old family friend, who gave it a dollar and sent it home.) "Usually bold, abstract forms, Matisse's sculpture exhibits the influence of French sculptor Auguste Rodin," in snazzy glass display cases of fauve design? "Socrates was born to well-off Athenians, which allowed him to serve in several military campaigns" -- and which also, no doubt, bragged endlessly about their gifted son. "Parker remains respected in both literary and social circles, having left behind countless anecdotes . . ." and forgotten to come pick them up. At times the authors express simple thoughts in amazingly perverse ways. "But no analogy is ever perfect (that is what makes it an analogy, after all!) . . ." Its imperfection makes it an analogy? When I tell someone, "That's a perfect analogy," what do I mean, if anything? If I were Appiah or Gates, I would sue my editors for negligence, and no doubt I would clean up.

The whole enterprise raises questions about global culture that the authors ought to have addressed but didn't. The "global system of culture," they say, "is increasingly less dominated by the West, less Eurocentric, if you like." How do they know? Western culture is on the retreat in Muslim theocracies. But Asia is increasingly keen on such Western ideas as free-market capitalism, and is getting rich peddling Western technologies from cars to TVs to memory chips. Eastern Europe is replacing one Western idea (Marxism) with another (democratic capitalism), and in Russia a different Western idea (Christianity) is undergoing a modest revival. How does it all balance out, and what does it mean? The authors lay down their bland, trite assertions and move on. The whole world, they observe, uses Western year-numbers nowadays, pegged to the birth of a certain Jew whose career means nothing except to Christians, and in a secondary way to Jews and Muslims. This observation leads them nowhere, except to the obvious fact of Western colonialism. Does the Western sense of time play any role? What about the small but fascinating fact that Europe alone developed modern escapement-based clocks? Why did Europeans happen to colonize the world, anyway? Why didn't the world colonize them? All these questions bear on the meaning of "global culture," but the authors don't touch them.

The book has its points. It is a pleasure to come across such great but (some- what) neglected composers as Dvorak and Sibelius, although it's clear that they were admitted only on an affirmative-action basis -- hailing as they do from musically under-represented regions. The authors have tried hard to transcend their political prejudices. They sometimes fail -- look up "Columbus" or "Hiroshima." But after blasting the evils of European colonialism, they urge us to "take pleasure in the benefits of the creation of a global culture under the steam of the economic, technological, religious, and cultural ideas of Europe and her heirs." Whatever --you get the general idea. The results of this exercise in political neutrality are mixed, but the attempt shows integrity.

Still, you are left in the end puzzling over those wild and crazy selections. The Dictionary reads like a gross parody of every race-and sex-based "diver- sity" program ever conceived. Why is it a bad idea to substitute "diversity" for merit? Because you wind up with Amy Lowell and not Robert Lowell. With Joe Louis but not Jonas Salk or Alexander the Great. With Villa-Lobos but not Ger- shwin. With Lillian Hellman, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and mate (a South American beverage that is evidently delicious "with sugar, milk, or lemon juice"), but not Wordsworth. Then again, what does Wordsworth really amount to when you stack him up against Lillian Hellman?