Harvard tell-all book tells little

In a profession that is no stranger to elaborate ethical elisions -- journalism -- the name Richard Blow is synonymous with a rarefied form of perfidy. As executive editor of George magazine, Blow told staffers not to talk about George founder John F. Kennedy Jr. shortly after the young man's death -- at the request of the family, he later told The New York Times. Blow then turned around and signed a book and TV deal capitalizing on his own friendship with Kennedy.

The resulting ''American Son: A Portrait of John F. Kennedy, Jr." was a No. 1 bestseller, and a touchstone for controversy. ''To call Richard Blow a low-rent opportunist would be unfair," the Hartford Courant opined in 2002. ''To low-rent opportunists, that is."

So when Blow announced he was working on a book about Harvard president Larry Summers, it was an unusual pairing of writer and subject.

Blow -- who has since changed his name to Bradley to escape the pop-culture connotations of his surname -- has completed ''Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World's Most Powerful University." The book is scheduled for publication by HarperCollins in March.

I can see maybe 500 copies sold at the Harvard Bookstore; after that, who knows? Because at this point, who really cares why the well-liked Harvard College dean Harry Lewis lost his job? Who wants to read for the umpteenth time what a terrible tragedy it is that former Harvard professor Cornel West is teaching at Princeton? Who has the time to plow through 25 pages on Harvard's terminally uninteresting curriculum reform?

But I anticipate.

In a nutshell, all the interesting events of the Larry Summers presidency took place during his first year, when he embarrassed himself repeatedly and picked fights with the wrong grandees. Guess what? He got smarter and he got tougher. So Bradley is left with precious little to write about that hasn't already been covered to death in the Globe, The New York Times, the Harvard Crimson, and elsewhere.

It almost goes without saying that Summers didn't cooperate with Bradley. ''We felt it was too early in Larry's tenure to take part in any book," a spokeswoman explains. So we are left with Ken Auletta-like formulations of authority at one remove: ''According to several people familiar with his thinking, Summers . . ."

Of course, there is plenty of gossip. We read some choice, indelicate Anglo-Saxonisms not normally heard in the Fellows' lounge. We learn of Summer's hopping on (and off) the Atkins diet wagon. We read reports of Summers's shockingly bad table manners; he is ''a prodigious and sloppy eater." Summers's girlfriend, English professor Elisa New, is ''a potent mix of sensuality and rigor." During the Cornel West departure brouhaha, Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison offers the opinion that ''Summers has lost his mind."

In passing, Bradley lets slip that some colleagues think Summers has Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism sometimes called ''geek syndrome" or ''little professor syndrome." ''It's not my supposition," Bradley says. ''It's something that people kept raising with me. It reflected a profound confusion about President Summers's behavior. How could a man attain a position of such power with such bad interpersonal skills?"

I told Bradley that I don't think the world wants to read a 300-page book about a man who isn't a leader in higher education and whose grandest ambition -- a laudable one, to be sure -- is to build a world-class biomedical complex in Allston. ''It isn't a book about Larry Summers," Bradley says. ''It's a book about Harvard. And the world cares about Harvard."

Here is my favorite (indirect) quote, reported to Bradley by a student who met with Summers during office hours. The student told Summers ''he was disappointed by how little contact he'd had with most of his professors." In reply, Summers ''basically said that at Harvard, we choose to go only for the best scholars, and that if you wanted somewhere that focused on undergraduate teaching, you should go to a place like Amherst or Swarthmore."

High school seniors, direct your applications accordingly.

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.