MONTAGE

ing; one chapter ri!s on the current obses- Napalm, indelibly as- sion with physical self-improvement. In a OPEN BOOK sociated in modern scene where Sophie is asked to contribute memory with the hor- to the school, she becomes a campus celeb- rors of civilians bombed rity by o!ering “Malevolent Makeovers” L i k e G a r l i c o r during the Vietnam War, and a presentation titled “Just Say No to emerged from a Harvard Drab.” When Agatha challenges her, So laboratory as a lauded phie replies, “Isn’t this compassion? Isn’t Burning Matches invention in an earlier this kindness and wisdom? I’m helping con!ict—and then was those who can’t help themselves!” used to incinerate Japa- “So much is based on image,” Chainani nese cities. Robert M. Neer Jr. ’86, an attorney and lecturer at Columbia, has written explains. “It’s such a pervasive, destructive Napalm: An American Biography (Harvard University Press, $29.95). “Napalm was born thing.” a hero but lives a pariah,” he writes. This excerpt, from the introduction to the "rst The fairy tales have roots in Chainani’s section, narrates the gel’s origin. childhood in Key Biscayne, where he grew up in one of the island’s only Indian fami- America’s "rst Independence Day of the lagoon. A wire ran to a control box lies. “I was Agatha,” he says. “I might have World War II was idyllic at Harvard Uni- on dry ground. Firemen and grounds- thought I was Sophie, but Agatha was who versity. On campus tennis courts nestled keepers looked on. Players 50 feet away between the college soccer "eld’s ver- traded forehands. “Maybe my secret goal dant green and the golden dome of the Fieser !ipped a switch. High explosives Business School library, players in whites blasted incendiary white phosphorus is to scare the pink gathered for morning games. They vol- into 45 pounds of jellied gasoline. A spec- leyed as university maintenance workers tacular, billowing 2,100-degree-Farenheit princess out of a lot of armed with shovels arrived, cut into the "re cloud rose over the "eld. Lumps of "eld, and built a circular parapet a foot searing, !aming napalm splashed into the little girls.” tall and 60 yards in diameter. Fire trucks water. Oily smoke "lled the air. Assis- from the City of Cambridge rumbled up, tants plunged into the muck, splashed I really was.” He was devoted to Disney and men !ooded the circle to make a water on burning blobs, and used their animations as well as to Roald Dahl’s sto- wide pool four to nine inches deep. By sticks to submerge and extinguish larger ries (“I had a bit of a dark edge as a kid,” mid morning, all was ready for the arrival gobbets. They noted the location and he says). As an adolescent, he listened to of Sheldon Emery professor of organic size of chunks, and scooped salvageable Madonna incessantly. By the time he ar- chemistry Louis Fieser, one of the uni- jelly into buckets for weighing. Tennis rived at Harvard, Chainani’s fascination versity’s most brilliant scholars and head players scattered.… with fairy tales—and with female villains of “Anonymous Research Project No. 4,” Professor Fieser’s "restorm was over in particular—was entrenched. “A female a top secret war research collaboration in seconds. Hunks of gel hissed, !ickered, villain is infinitely more clever than a between the school and the government. and died. A pungent aroma of phospho- man,” he says. “Her evil relies not on brute Fieser arrived. He was 43 years old, rus, like garlic or burning matches, mixed violence, but on the ability to manipulate, tall, bald, with traces of the Williams with the oily smell of gasoline, hung in seduce, or recruit—in sum, a deeper, more College varsity football lineman he once the air over the !ooded "eld and empty thrilling corruption.” was still present in his bearing. An oc- tennis courts. Napalm bombs had ar- A freshman seminar on the portrayal tet of assistants followed. He equipped rived in the world. of witches in children’s literature, taught four of the young men by Loeb professor of Germanic with boots, buckets, languages and literatures Maria long sticks, and gloves, Tatar, chair of Harvard’s folklore THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD SCIENTIFIC THE and positioned them and mythology program, enliv- around the pool. With ened Chainani’s first year. (Tatar assistance from the became a mentor; commenting others, he gingerly on The School for Good and Evil, lugged a live 70-pound she wrote, “It is not often that napalm bomb, bolted someone comes along who can nose down on a metal reinvent fairy tales and reclaim stand, to the center of their magic.”) Three years later, he wrote a senior English thesis Independence Day, 1942: the !rst !eld test of about the reinvention of wicked napalm, behind Harvard women as fairy-tale villains. His

COURTESY OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS/ LOUIS FIESTER, FIESTER, LOUIS PRESS/ UNIVERSITY HARVARD OF COURTESY Business School academic e!orts earned him a Hoopes Prize, the Le Baron Rus-

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