Better a good comedy with a bad title, wrote the 18th-century German critic Lessing, than the reverse. And this work indeed has an ingenious and apposite main title. Sadly, the content does not measure up to it, nor to the extravagant praise lavished by (solicited?) testimonials on the dust jacket. Phyllis Keller starts off from the novel thesis that 'adult political dispositions have their roots in childhood and adolescent family relationships.' Armed with this principle, she traces in extenso the paternity, origins and adventures of three eminent German-American intellectuals. and analyses the inevitably anguished 'multiple loyalties' they experienced in their adopted new land. The details of her portraits of this ex-Teutonic triumvirate are well-etched and interesting enough in themselves , but the totality offers little that is unexpected or exciting. And the conclusions – that German-Americans 'could preserve their place in American life only at the cost of their group identity' – are hardly calculated to raise a gasp of astonishment.

On occasion, the authoress falls victim to the temptation of substituting the ringing phrase for the meaningful utterance; as here, where Hagedorn , the poet of the trio, is castigated for his moral turpitude: 'These psychic needs underlay their dramatically