title: The Eighth Wonder of the World
author:  Leslie Epstein 
description: Epstein's (<i>King of the Jews</i>; <i>San Remo Drive</i>) ninth book imagines a wisecracking American architectural genius, Amos Prince, who, after fleeing America, wows Mussolini with the design for a mile-high skyscraper. The absurdist encounters between these two menalongside Rome's Arch of Titus or in the staterooms of the <i>Hindenberg</i>read like scenes from an opera buffa, in which Mussolini's barking, self-aggrandizing oratory is hilariously undercut by Amos's sly wordplay. The novel soon focuses on Amos's young Jewish-American acolyte, Maximilian Shabilian, who shares Prince's obsessive dream of completing the tower and becomes entangled with the architect's dysfunctional family (and, predictably, his beautiful daughter). As World War II intensifies, Amos descends into livid anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, while Max launches a tragic attempt to save the Jews of Rome by enlisting them to work on the skyscraper. The complexly structured narrative leaps between a turbulent present-day plane ride, flashbacks to 1930s and '40s Italy and Amos's rambling journal entries. Some readers may feel uneasy at the mixing of farce and tragic fact, and the novel doesn't shy away from unpleasantness; descriptions of violence are unflinching. But artful writing sustains a novel as ambitious as the Babel-like tower it describes. <i>(Oct. 17)</i> <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: Unpopular Philosopher on the Eighth Wonder v. 06.17, www.philaletheians.co.uk, 24 April 2018 
  Page 1 of 6 
  The Eighth Wonder 
  By an unpopular philosopher 
   
   
  
  BLAVATSKY SPEAKS SERIES 
  ON THE EIGHTH WONDER 
  Unpopular Philosopher on the Eighth Wonder v. 06.17, www.philaletheians.co.uk, 24 April 2018 
  Page 2 of 6 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  First published in: Lucifer, Vol. IX, No. 50, October, 1891, pp. 95-99. Republished in: Blavatsky Col-
  lected Writings, (THE EIGHT WONDER) XI pp. 355-62. Article written in 1889
  1 
  Frontispiece: La Tour Eiffel by Robert Delaunay. 
  UST BACK FROM UNDER THE FAR-REACHING SHADOW of the eighth wonder of 
  the World — the gigantic iron carrot that goes by the name of the Eiffel Tower. 
  Child of its country, wondrous in its size, useless in its object, as shaky and 
  vacillating as the Republican soil upon which it is built, it has not one single 
  moral feature of its seven ancestors, not one trait of atavism to boast of. The archi-
  tectural Leviathan of 1889 is not even — 