RULES OF ENGAGEMENT.(Malraux: A Life)(Book Review)

"Success has always been the greatest liar," Nietzsche wrote. " 'Great men' as they are venerated are subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction." Andre Malraux tended to venerate, often uncritically, the colossi he met in the course of a glorious career as a writer and statesman (de Gaulle, Mao, Trotsky, Nehru, Senghor, Kennedy, Le Corbusier, Picasso--his enthusiasms were catholic), and, while he is best known for his Byronic exploits and his epic novels "Man's Fate" and "Man's Hope" (about the Chinese Revolution and the Spanish Civil War), one of his specialties was the funeral oration, preferably declaimed in a stirring tremolo from a podium at the Pantheon, where he, ...