Book review: 'Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City' by Russell Shorto
One of the best-known fables about the Dutch is the story of the boy who wards off disaster by putting his finger in a leaking dike.
by Russell Shorto
Doubleday
4 stars
Janet Maslin
One of the best-known fables about the Dutch is the story of the boy who wards off disaster by putting his finger in a leaking dike. As Russell Shorto points out in his new history of Amsterdam, this tale was made up by an American (Mary Mapes Dodge, who had never been to the country when she wrote her 1865 book, Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates, in which the account of the boy's wondrous feat appears). And it is a nonsensical story in the Netherlands, where heroism is often a communal effort.
It's fitting that Shorto uses Amsterdam's water problems as a prime example of what co-operative effort can accomplish. About 1,000 years ago, inhabitants of the region began building dikes to keep out the sea and cut water channels into peat bogs. They "thus set off a never-ending struggle against nature, one that continues today".
This book's story of how Amsterdam became an ascendant port city leads naturally into accounts of the Dutch East India Company's thriving global trade and the city's development of an early stock exchange as an offshoot of its new wealth.
There is a chronology of the Netherlands' rulers and military commanders, such as William the Silent. There is the 80-year-war with Spain, and the burst of growth that followed.
There is the legacy of religious persecution that may have made Amsterdam so famously tolerant, although that argument hits a snag when it comes to Nazi occupation. Shorto, who also has an eye for striking statistics, points out the wide margin by which the country led Europe in the percentage of its Jews killed.