WHITTIER WAS RIGHT. Book Review No. 32 is What Might Have Been, which was the least wise expenditure of ten pounds at Blackwell's last fall. Don't be fooled by the cover, which suggests Wernher von Braun and his team landed a German astronaut on the Moon. No such story is between the covers.

The introduction proposes a serious purpose: to offer an alternative to Marxian and Whiggish approaches to doing history that view past events through a lens of class struggle or greater enlightenment. Their approach is the construction of counterfactuals to illustrate the path-dependency or state-contingency of pivotal events, primarily battles and elections. That is serious work but it requires serious and careful execution. Unfortunately, proposing that Napoleon's republic becomes an 1840s version of the 2003 European Union, Lenin is shot by a Balt called Lev Harveivic Osvalt who is himself murdered two days later by someone with mob ties, Stalin is betrayed by his bodyguard Tengiz Fiktionashvili, and following all that by asking President Bush's speechwriter David Frum to envision President Gore holding a September 11 crisis session with National Security Advisor Leon Fuerth and Secretary of Defense Wesley Clark, an exercise that plays on the fears many red-state voters have about the Democrats has its entertainment value at the expense of serious considerations of counterfactuals.