Rough Diamond

BARNEY BARNATO--Richard Lewinsohn--Button ($3).

U. S. financial history is crowded with accounts of self-made millionaires who never let wealth change their mining-camp habits. How rare they are in the financial annals of other countries was demonstrated last week by the awed fashion in which Richard Lewinsohn (The Profits of War) wrote about the democratic simplicity of Barney Barnato, one of the roughest rough diamonds among South African diamond millionaires.

Born Barney Isaacs in London's Whitechapel, Barnato became a juggler, comedian, boxer, diamond merchant and eventually financial master of the South African mining fields. He was first a rival and then an ally of the imperious, imperialistic Cecil Rhodes. Author Lewinsohn's account makes Barnato out a kindly, comical, shrewd, enterprising fellow whose great achievement was amalgamating scattered mines and who was overshadowed as soon as Rhodes appeared with his bold political adventures and schemes for establishing a diamond monopoly. Sometimes Barnato's democratic traits popped out unexpectedly (when a society lady asked him if he had once been an acrobat, he proved it by walking around the room on his hands), but usually Author Lewinsohn shows Barnato smoothing over diamond diggers Rhodes had antagonized, pacifying the Boers after the abortive Jameson raid, restoring confidence in jittery diamond buyers, until his tireless peacemaking grows wearisome. The big question mark at the end of Barnato's career--why, at the age of 44, with fortune intact and prospects excellent, he killed himself--Author Lewinsohn does not answer.

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