Word: sasounian
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...Tooth Merchant, Sulzberger's knowledge is very much in evidence, but so is a distinct sense of humor. He presents a slippery, multilingual Armenian named Kevork Sasounian, who discovers the original dragon's teeth (sacksful of them), which have been lying in a cave in Asia Minor since Cadmus' and Jason's time. What to do? Why, sell them as potential shock troops to the highest bidder in the cold war world of the 1950s...
Sales trips follow, with Sasounian sowing sample teeth and producing angry instant hoplites, to the delight or dismay of the likes of Stalin and Beria, Ben-Gurion, Nasser, SHAPE Commander General Alfred Gruenther in Paris, and Dwight David Eisenhower, who watches the demonstration on a quiet corner of the White House lawn...
...dragon's teeth or not, and why, should stay secret. It is fair to say, though, that Sulzberger offers a fine, new explanation for the moment and method of Joseph Stalin's demise. Another of his best moments is a debate between General Gruenther (a Catholic) and Sasounian about whether or not it would be murder to dump the dragon's teeth into the depths of the North Atlantic...
...author keeps these trips light and fantastic, poking fun at international spy novels as he goes, writing himself into the text (Sasounian gives C.L. Sulzberger $4,000 to try to smuggle his mistress from Istanbul to Paris), and sowing the story with enough hard words to keep most readers within busy reach of a good dictionary. (Samples: congener, metopic, eristic, flocculent, saporous.) Sulzberger's congeners will be pleased to find that The Tooth Merchant, though occasionally eristic, never stoops to flocculence...
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