Steve Goddard's History Wire

FOCUS: A Little of This, A Little of That -- Gruesome Spectacles / Near and Distant Neighbors / Alfred Wallis

Gruesome Spectacles -- Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty by Austin Sarat, Stanford Law Books '14, 273 pages, ASIN #0804789169. Index, notes, two appendices, unillustrated.   

"On September 28, 1900, the state of North Carolina hanged Art Kinsauls for a murder committed in Sampson County. Born in that county in 1865, Kinsauls had lived there his entire life, marrying a local girl, Posunnie Gibsy Bass, in 1896. Even though Art weighed only 110 pounds, he was said to be 'tough as iron.' He had the unfortunate habit of getting into violent arguments and carried on a long running feud with John C. Herring, his neighbor.

"One night when Kinsauls was in Art Vann's Store at Beaman's Crossroad, an argument began and then a fight broke out. 'Kinsauls reached into the meat box and got a sharp butcher knife and stabbed young Herring to such an extent that he died during the    night.

"Kinsauls was arrested a few days after Herring's death and taken to the county jail in Clinton. With the help of a group of his friends, he soon escaped, and avoided capture for nine months. The sheriff and a posse only recaptured him after a gunfight at his farm, which left him seriously wounded. Brought to trial in October 1899, Kinsauls was found guilty of murder and was sentenced to hang."

Author Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science and Associate Dean of the Faculty at Amherst College. He has written numerous previous books and has also written for academic and trade publications.

Near and Distant Neighbors -- A New History of Soviet Intelligence by Jonathan Haslam, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux 15, $30, 366 pages, ASIN #0374219907. Index, bibliography, notes, two appendices, unillustrated except for two maps.

 From the dust jacket:

"A uniquely comprehensive and rich account of the Soviet intelligence services, Jonathan Haslam's Near and Distant Neighbors charts the labyrinthine story of Soviet intelligence from the October Revolution to the end of the Cold War.

"Previous histories have focused on the KGB, leaving military intelligence and the special service -- which focused on codes and ciphers -- lurking in the shadows. Drawing on previously neglected Russian sources, Haslam reveals how both were in fact crucial to the survival of the Soviet state.

"This was especially true after Stalin's death in 1953, as the Cold War heated up and dedicated Communist agents the regime had relied upon -- Klaus Fuchs, the Rosenbergs, Donald Maclean -- were betrayed. In the wake of these failures, Nikita Khrushchev and his successors discarded ideological recruitment in favor of blackmail and bribery. The tactical turn was so successful that we can draw only one conclusion: the West ultimately triumphed despite, not because of, the espionage war."

Author Jonathan Haslam is the George F. Kennan Professor at the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. he is also a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and a professor emeritus of Cambridge University.

Alfred Wallis -- Cornish Primitive Painter by Edwin Mullins, Unicorn Press Ltd. '15 paperback, in oversized format on glossy stock, $25.95, 112 pages, ASIN #1906509891. Footnotes, dozens of color images, some full-page.

"Alfred Wallis (1855-1942) was a semiliterate Cornish fisherman who was nearly deaf and in fragile mental health," writes author Edwin Mullins in his latest book on the field of art. "Yet when he took up painting at the age of 70, with no prior instruction, he quickly made a name for himself. He attracted a number of distinguished patrons and collectors, who grew to prize his paintings, even though he sold them for only a few pence to anyone who wanted them.

"Wallis mostly worked on oddly shaped scraps of cardboard, given to him by the local grocer, and he covered them in ship's paint, a medium he knew well from his fishing days. Using very few colors, he depicted the sea, boats, and other aspects of life as a fisherman, images that let him celebrate his memories.

"This book presents the story of Wallis's life and work alongside beautiful full-color reproductions of nearly 100 of his paintings. Rounding out the volume are transcripts of Wallis's own anecdotes, recorded by his doctor, which bring Wallis's artistic idiosyncrasies to life."

Author Edwin Mullins is an author and broadcaster who has served as the art critic for the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph.

FOCUS: American History -- Man of Destiny / The Cherokee Kid / The Conversion of Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg

Man of Destiny -- FDR and the Making of the American Century by Alonzo Hamby, BasicBooks '15, $35, 500 pages, ASIN #0465028608. Index, notes, unillustrated.

From the dust jacket:

"No president looms larger in 20th century American history than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and few life stories can match his for sheer drama. Following in the footsteps of his Republican cousin, President Theodore Roosevelt, FDR devoted himself to politics as a Democrat and a true man of the people. Eventually setting his sights on the presidency, he was elected to office in 1932 by a nation mired in the Great Depression and desperate for revival.

"As the distinguished historian, Alonzo Hamby argues in this authoritative biography, FDR's record as president was more mixed than we are often led to believe. The New Deal provided much-needed assistance to millions of Americans, but failed to restore prosperity, and while FDR became an outstanding commander-in-chief during World War II, his plans for the postwar world were seriously flawed.

"No less perceptive is Hamby's account of FDR's private life, which explores the dynamics of his marriage and his romance with his wife's secretary, Lucy Mercer. Hamby documents FDR's final months in intimate detail, claiming that his perseverance, despite his serious illness, not only shaped his presidency, but must be counted as one of the 20th century's great feats of endurance."

Author Alonzo Hamby is Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at Ohio University. He is the author of Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman, among other books. He lives in Athens, OH.

Cherokee Kid -- Will Rogers, Tribal Identity, and the Making of an American Icon by Amy M. Ware, UKansas Press '15, 317 pages, ASIN #0700621008. Index, bibliography, notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

 

 

"Was Will Rogers Really an Indian?

"This, the most common question I am asked in regard to my research, elucidates in a variety of ways why this book is important to the study of American Indian celebrity," writes author Amy M. Ware in her new work. "The comedian, actor, journalist and political pundit was indeed American Indian, as most books on Rogers mention, however briefly. What distinguishes this book from most other texts on Rogers is my attempt to show -- that is, to deepen, refine, contextualize, and interrogate -- what those ties meant to Rogers, why they were significant to U.S. popular culture during his lifetime, and how they demonstrate the importance of tribal specificity in the study of Native and American cultural histories.

"The rub is this: Rogers wasn't only an American Indian; he was also a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. My exploration of the complex interplay of this distinction -- between American Indian and Cherokee, in this case -- reveals still-common assumptions regarding Native authenticity in the history of American popular culture.

"These tenacious expectations, which persist despite significant academic clamoring, have denied Rogers's full inclusion in the canon of Native history. He simply didn't act the part. My approach to Rogers, I hope, exemplifies one way scholars might use tribal histories and cultures to broaden and more deeply understand Native American influence on U.S. popular culture."

Author Amy M. Ware holds her M.A. in American Indian Studies from UCLA and her Ph.D. in American Studies from The University of Texas at Austin.

The Conversion of Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg: From Isolation to International Engagement by Lawrence S. Kaplan, UKentucky Press '15, $45. 312 pages, ASIN #0813160553. Index, bibliography, notes, two appendices, Grouping of b&w images.

From the back cover:

"A staunch Republican, U.S. Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg (1884-1951) was known in his early career for his fervent anti-interventionism. After World War II., however, he joined statesmen such as George Kennan, Dean Acheson, and John Foster Dulles in promoting and defining a new internationalist foreign policy under President Harry S. Truman. Vandenberg became a key player in the development of the United Nations and NATO as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during 1947 and 1948. He also helped rally support for the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, and his leadership contributed to a short lived era of congressional bipartartisanship regarding international relations.

"In The Conversion of Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, Lawrence S. Kaplan offers the first critical biography of this important but understudied figure, exploring his crucial role in moving the nation from an isolationist past to an internationalist future in the 20th century. He demonstrates how Vandenberg's story provides a window on the political and cultural changes taking place in America as the country assumed a radically different role in the world, and makes a seminal contribution to the history of U.S. foreign policy during the initial years of the Cold War.

Author Lawrence S. Kaplan is emeritus director of the Lyman L. Lemniztzer Center for NATO and European Union Studies at Kent State University and a professorial lecturer in history at Georgetown University. He has written or edited more than two dozen books.

 

FOCUS: A Potpourri -- One Man Against the World / The Rise of Germany

One Man Against the World -- The Tragedy of Richard Nixon by Tim Weiner by Henry Holt '15, $30, 369 pages, ASIN #1627790837. Index, notes, judgments, unillustrated.

"Richard Nixon saw himself as a great statesman, a giant for the ages, a general who could command the globe, a master of war, not merely the leader of the free world but 'the world leader," writes author Tim Weiner in Chapter One of his latest work. "Yet he was addicted to the gutter politics that ruined him. He was -- as an English earl once said of the warlord Oliver Cromwell -- 'a great, bad man.'

"In Nixon's first State of the Union speech, he said that he was possessed by 'an indefinable spirit -- the lift of a driving dream which has made America, from its beginning, the hope of the world.' He promised the American people 'the best chance since World War II to enjoy a generation of uninterrupted peace.'

"But Richard Nixon was never at peace. A darker spirit animated him -- malevolent and violent, driven by anger and an insatiable appetite for revenge. At his worst he stood on the brink of madness. He thought the world was against him. He saw enemies everywhere. His greatness became an arrogant grandeur."

Author Tim Weiner has written five books, including Legacy of Ashes, his history of the CIA, which won the National Book Award. His journalism on secret government programs received the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.

The Rise of Germany -- 1939--1941, The War in the West, Volume l by James Holland, Grove Atlantic '15, $30, 692 pages, ASIN #080212397X. Index, selected sources, notes, timeline, appendices, glossary, several groupings of b&w and color glossy images.

In a brief Q&A, author James Holland discusses the writing of his new book:

Q.. MYTH: We already know everything there is to know about this conflict. With so many books, films and documentaries on World War II, why do we need another general history?

A. The answer is simple: because for the past few decades, our understanding of the war has followed an old and tired narrative that no longer stacks up. The reality of World War II is far more nuanced, more interesting and even dramatic than most might think.

Q. MYTH: Hitler was a military genius.

A. He was not. He was a gambler. He bet big with the invasions of Poland and France and won, but then was driven to bet again. His greatest gamble loomed, Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Author James Holland is a historian, writer, and broadcaster. Besides his bestselling nonfiction narratives, he has also written many works of historical fiction. He has his own collection at the Imperial War Museum.

FOCUS: A Potpourri -- Juvenile Justice in Global Perspective / Contraband / Death Watch

Juvenile Justice in Global Perspective, Edited by Franklin E. Zimring, Maximo Langer & David S. Tanenhaus, New York UPress '15, $49, 434 pages, ASIN #1479826537. Index, contributors, references, notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

"Juvenile courts are both a very recent  legal invention and an almost ubiquitous presence in modern nations," write the editors at the outset of this consequential volume, which analyses juvenile justice systems throughout the world.

"The first juvenile court was established by statute in Illinois in 1899 and quickly spread to other American states and to a number of other nations. Both the jurisdictional features and policy ambitions of the Illinois juvenile court were widely emulated in the systems that were established worldwide in the first half of the 20th century. And there is one important feature of every juvenile court's delinquency jurisdiction that complicates the task of creating a comparative law of juvenile courts.

"When juvenile courts are introduced in a legal system, they remove a segment of young offenders that had been traditionally the responsibility of criminal courts. So every juvenile court becomes part of a dual legal system of responding to criminal offenses -- a juvenile court for young offenders and a criminal court for adult offenders.

"One critical dimension of every nation's juvenile court system is the differences in outcome, process and philosophy between juvenile and criminal courts. This means that the comparative law of juvenile justice is best regarded as a process of double comparison in which juvenile justice systems are compared both to the juvenile systems of other places and to the criminal courts that they coexist with."

About the editors:

Franklin E. Zimring is William G. Simon Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. He is the author of several books, most recently The City That Became Safe: New York's Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control (2012). Maximo Langer is Professor of Law at UCLA, author of numerous articles and book chapters on comparative and international criminal justice, and co-editor of Crime, Procedure and Evidence in a Comparative and International Context (2008). David S. Tanenhaus is Professor of History and James E. Rogers Professor of History and Law at the William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.; He is the author of The Constitutional Rights of Children: In re Gault and Juvenile Justice (2011).

Contraband -- Smuggling and the Birth of the American Century by Andrew Wender Cohen, Norton '15, stated  First Edition, First Printing, $27.95, 402 pages, ASIN #0393065332. Index, notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

From the dust jacket:

"In the frigid winter of 1875, Charles L. Lawrence made international headlines when he was arrested for smuggling silk worth $60 million into the United States," writes historian Andrew Wender Cohen in his provocative new book. 'An intimate of Boss Tweed, gloriously dubbed 'The Prince of Smugglers,' and the head of a network spanning four continents and lasting half a decade, Lawrence scandalized a nation whose founders themselves had once dabbled in contraband.

"Since the Revolution itself, smuggling had tested the patriotism of the American people. Distrusting foreign goods, Congress instituted high tariffs on most imports. Protecting the nation was the custom house, which waged a 'war on smuggling,' inspecting every traveler for illicitly important silk, opium, tobacco, sugar, diamonds and art.

"The Civil War's blockade of the Confederacy heightened the obsession with contraband, but smuggling entered its prime during the Gilded Age, when characters like assassin Louis Bieral, economist 'The Parsee Merchant,' Congressman Ben Butler, and actress Rose Eytinge tempted consumers with illicit foreign luxuries. Only as the United States became a global power with World War I did smuggling lose its scurvy romance."

Author Andrew Wender Cohen is associate professor of history at Syracuse University. He lives with his family in central New York.

Deathwatch -- American Film, Technology, and The End of Life by C. Scott Combs, Columbia UPress '15 paperback. 276 pages, ASIN #0231163479. Index, bibliography, notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

From the back cover:

"The first book to analyze American cinema's long history of representing death on screen, Deathwatch considers movie sequences in which the process of dying becomes an exercise in legibility and exploration for the camera. Through readings of attractions-based cinema, narrative films, early sound cinema, and films using voice-over or images of medical technology, C. Scott Combs connects the slow or static process of dying to formal film innovation throughout the 20th century.

"He looks at Thomas Edison's Electrocuting an Elephant (1903), D.W. Griffith's The Country Doctor (1909), John Ford's How Green was My Valley (1941), Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and Clint Eastwood's Mllion Dollar Baby (2004), among other films, to argue against the notion that film cannot capture the end of life. Instead, he shows how the act of dying in film occurs more than once and in more than one place, understanding death in cinema as constantly in flux, wedged between technological precision and embodied perception."

Author C. Scott Combs is associate professor of English at St. John's University in New York City.

 

FOCUS: A Little of This, A Little of That -- Treason -- Nixon and the 1968 Election / The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife, and the Missing Corpse / The German War

Treason --Nixon and the 1968 Election by Don Fulsom, Pelican '15, 320 pages, ASIN #1455619493. Index, notes, appendix, b&w images sprinkled through text.

 

 

"Few figures in U.S history have proven as brilliant at high-stakes power-wielding and brokering as Lyndon B. Johnson," writes political expert Don Fulsom in his new book. "The same could be said of Richard Nixon, his political rival, but according to former White House correspondent for the Baltimore Sun Muriel Dobbin, 'Nixon was different, and I think you have to be careful to draw the difference. Johnson was ruthless and probably terrifying. But...there was nothing (Nixon) would not do...As the 1968 election approached, these two giants clashed in a high-stakes political battle royale, one of the nation's most dramatic and important little-known events.

'As we are only now grasping, the Johnson-Nixon showdown involved a potential national security crime of the highest magnitude--an unpatriotic act so extreme that it challenged the legitimacy of the election. Johnson caught Nixon embroiled in a clandestine attempt to torpedo United States-sponsored peace negotiations in Paris by manipulating the Vietnam War for his own political ends and by portraying himself as a dove in hawk's clothing. Nixon's moves were designed to bolster his own chances of defeating Democratic nominee Hubert H. Humphrey, Johnson's vice president.

"Most of the information President Johnson uncovered came from unimpeachable intelligence sources. It was considered so shocking by the president and his advisors that Johnson took it with him when he left the White House in 1969. This evidence was turned over to the LBJ Library, where it was placed in what came to be known as the 'X Envelope.' The envelope was sealed and was not supposed to be opened for 50 years. This book will fully examine and analyze this evidence, which Johnson's national security advisor Walt Rostow eventually came to believe should be made public much earlier than its originally prescribed release date."

Author Don Fulsom is an adjunct professor of government at American University, where his courses include Watergate: A Constitutional Crisis and Who Killed JFK? Born in Buffalo, N.Y., he earned his degree in history from Syracuse University. His impressive journalism career spanned five presidencies and sweeping global changes. Fulsom now lives in Washington, D.C.

The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife, and the Missing Corpse -- An Extraordinary Edwardian Case of Deception and Intrigue by Piu Marie Eatwell, Liveright '15, $27.95, 338 pages, ASIN #1631491237. Picture credits, notes, select bibliography, grouping of b&w glossy images.

 

From the dust jacket:

"In 1898, an elderly widow, Anna Maria Druce, came to the British court with an astonishing request. She stood among the overflowing pews of St. Paul's Cathedral claiming that the merchant T.C. Druce, her late father-in-law, had in truth been a secret identity for none other than the deceased and enormously wealthy 5th Duke of Portland.

"Maintaining her composure amid growing agitation from the clutch of lawyers, journalists, and curious onlookers crowded into the church, Mrs. Druce claimed that Druce had been the duke's alter ego and that the Duke had, in 1864, faked the death of his middle-class doppelganger when he grew tired of the ruse. Mrs. Druce wanted the tomb unlocked and her father-in-law's coffin exhumed, adamant that it would lie empty, proving the falsehood and leaving her son to inherit the vast Portland estate. From that fateful afternoon, the lurid details of the Druce-Portland case spilled forth, seizing the attention of the British public for over a decade."

"As the Victorian era gave way to the Edwardian, the rise of sensationalist media blurred every fact into fiction, and family secrets and fluid identities pushed class anxieties to new heights. The 5th Duke of Portland had long been the victim of suspicion and scandalous rumors; an odd man with a fervent penchant for privacy, he lived his days in precisely coordinated isolation in the dilapidated Welbeck Abbey estate. He constructed elaborate underground passageways from one end of his home to the other and communicated with his household staff through letters."

Author Piu Marie Eatwell is an Oxford University graduate and has produced and researched historical documentaries for the BBC. She divides her time between Paris and London with her husband and three children.

The German War -- A Nation Under Arms, 1939--1945 -- Citizens and Soldiers by Nicholas Stargardt. BasicBooks '15, $35, 704 pages, ASIN #0465018998. Index, bibliography, notes, list of illustrations, three groupings of b&w glossy images and numerous b&w maps.

 

"The Second World War was a German war like no other," writes historian Nicholas Stargardt in the Introduction to his latest work. "The Nazi regime turned the conflict which it had started into the most horrific war in European history, resorting to genocidal methods well before building the first gas chambers in occupied Poland. The Third Reich was also unique in enacting its own 'total defeat' in 1945, in the process expending and exhausting all the moral and physical reserves of German society.

"Even the Japanese did not fight to the gates of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo as the Germans fought for the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. To wage a war on this scale the Nazis had to harness levels of social mobilization and personal commitment which went far deeper than anything they had tried to achieve in the pre-war period. Yet, seventy years on, despite whole libraries of books about the war's origins, course and atrocities -- we still do not know what Germans thought they were fighting for or how they managed to continue their war until the bitter end.

"This book is about how the German people experienced and sustained this war."

Author Nicholas Stargardt is Professor of Modern European History at Magdalen College, Oxford. He has written widely on 19th and 20th century German history. For 20 years, he has studied the experience of children and adults living under German rule in the Second World War. Stargardt lives in Oxford, England.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

sme could be said of Richard Nixon, his political rival

FOCUS: A Potpourri -- The Baron's Cloak / Memory and Complicity / Freedom and the Self

The Baron's Cloak -- A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution by Willard Sunderland, Cornell UPress '14, $35, 344 pages, ASIN #0801452708. Index, bibliography, notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

"On either Sept. 15 or 16, 1921, Ungern took off his cloak. Or perhaps someone took it from him. Shortly after that he was shot." So historian Willard Sunderland writes at the outset of his latest book.

"The cloak, technically speaking, is a deel, the traditional dress of Mongolian nomads. With a wide base and narrow collar, it runs about four feet from top to bottom, with two broad sleeves almost as long as the garment itself hanging from the sides. We can tell that this particular deel belonged to someone important because of the color, a rich shade of orangey-gold usually reserved for nobles, and the fact that it is made of silk rather than more ordinary wool or cotton.

"The embroidered roundels running across the front and back suggest a certain refinement. Yet for all this, only one thing about the cloak is truly unusual. Sewn to the shoulders are two faded gray-green European-style army epaulettes. They seem out of place, as if stitched on after the fact. Each bears the mark of two small stars and the initials 'A.S.' in Cyrillic lettering."

Author Willard Sunderland is Associate Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati. He has written or edited three previous books.

Memory and Complicity:Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance by Debarati Sanyal, Fordham UPress '15 paperback, $35, 341 pages, ASIN #082326548X. Index, notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

"Since World War II, French and Francophone literature and film have repeatedly sought not to singularlize the Holocaust as the paradigm of historical trauma but rather to connect its memory with other memories of violence, namely that of colonialism," writes author Debarati Sanyal in her latest work. "These works produced what Debarati Sanyal calls a 'memory-in-complicity' attuned to the gray zones that implicate different regimes of violence across history as well as those of different subject-positions such as victim, perpetrator, witness, and reader/spectator.

"Examining a range of works from Albert Camus, Primo Levi, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Paul Sartre to Jonathan Littell, Assia Djebar, Giorgio Agamben, and Boualem Sansal, Memory and Complicity develops an inquiry into the political force and ethical dangers of such implications, contrasting them with contemporary models for thinking about trauma and violence and offering an extended meditation on the role of aesthetic form, especially allegory, within acts of transhistorical remembrance."

Scholar Debarati Sanyal is Professor of French at the University of California,Berkeley.

Freedom and the Self -- Essays on the Philosophy of David Foster Wallace, Edited by Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert, Columbia UPress '15 paperback. $25, 192 pages, ASIN #0231161530. Index, contributors, references and notes follow easy essay, unillustrated.

 

From the Introduction:

"Like Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans, better known as George Eliot, who translated Spinoza's monumental Ethica, Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata, and T.X. Eliot, who was offered a faculty position in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University, David Foster Wallace (1962--2008) was a major literary figure who also excelled in philosophy.

"The son of the noted philosopher James D. Wallace, who taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, David Foster Wallace, like his father, graduated from Amherst College, receiving a BA degree summa cum laude in 1985 with majors in English and philosophy.

"His honors thesis in English was published two years later as his first novel, The Broom of the System; his honors thesis in philosophy, titled "Richard Taylor's 'Fatalism' and the Semantics of Physical Modality" was published in 2011 by Columbia University Press as the centerpiece of a collection we edited titled Fate, Time, and Language."

Editor Steven M. Cahn is professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Editor Maureen Eckert is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. With Stephen M. Cahn, she edited Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will."

 

FOCUS: Cultural History -- Introducing the Ancient Greeks / Medieval Exegesis / All That Followed

Introducing the Ancient Greeks, from Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind, by Edith Hall, $16.95, 303 pages, ASIN #0393351165. Index, suggestions for further reading, b&w images sprinkled through text.

"Between 800 and 300 BC, people who spoke Greek made a rapid series of intellectual discoveries that propelled the Mediterranean world to a new level of civilization," writes author Edith Hall in the preface of her compelling new book. "This process of self-education was much admired by the Greeks and Romans of the centuries that followed. As this book explains, however, the history of the ancient Greeks began 800 years before this period of accelerated progress, and survived for at least seven centuries afterward. When the texts and artworks of classical Greece were rediscovered in the European Renaissance, they changed the world for a second time.

"The phenomenon has been called the Greek 'miracle,' as well as the 'glory' or 'wonder' that was Greece. Many books have been entitled The Greek Genius, The Greek Triumph, The Greek Enlightenment, the Greek Experiment, The Greek Idea, and even The Greek Ideal. But over the last two decades the notion that the Greeks were exceptional has been questioned.

"It has been stressed that the Greeks were, after all, just one of many ethnic and linguistic groups in the ancient Mediterranean world. Long before the Greeks appeared in the historical record, several complicated civilizations had arisen- the Mesopotamians and Egyptians, the Hattians and Hittites. Other peoples provided the Greeks with crucial technological advances; they learned the phoenetic alphabet from the Phoenicians and how to mint coins from the Lydians. they may have learned how to compose elaborate cult hymns from the Luwians. During the period when the Greeks invented rational philosophy and science, after 600 BC, their horizons were opened up by the expansion of the Persian Empire.

Author Edith Hall is one of Britain's foremost classicists, having held posts at the universities at Cambridge, Durham, Reading and Oxford. She has written or edited more than a dozen works.

Medieval Exegesis & Religious Difference -- Commentary, Conflict, and Community in the Premodern Mediterranean, Edited by Ryan Szpiech, Fordham UPress '15, $55, 329 pages, ASIN #0823264629. Index, contributors, bibliography, notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

From the dust jacket:

"Jews, Christians, and Muslims all have a common belief in the sanctity of a core holy scripture, and commentary on scripture (exegesis) was at the heart of all three traditions in the Middle Ages. At the same time, because it dealt with issues such as the nature of the canon, the limits of acceptable interpretation, and the meaning of salvation history from the perspective of faith, exegesis was elaborated in the Middle Ages along the  faultlines of interconfessional disputation and polemical conflict.

"This collection of 13 essays by world-renowned scholars of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam explores the nature of exegesis during the High and especially the Late Middle Ages as a discourse of cross-cultural and interreligious conflict, paying particular attention to the commentaries of scholars in the western and southern Mediterranean from Iberia and Italy to Morocco and Egypt."

Editor Ryan Szpiech is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has written or edited numerous books and is currently editor-in-chief of the journal Medieval Encounters.

All That Followed -- A Novel by Gabriel Urza, Henry Holt '15, $25, 256 pages, ASIN #1627792430.

In a brief Q&A with the author, Gabriel Urza discusses the writing of his new book:

Q. You were born in the United States but come from Basque heritage. Did you always want to write in a Basque setting or about Basque culture?

A. I was initially very resistant to writing about the Basque Country; the political situation there is so complicated and divisive, but so much of my own experience and identity comes from my ties to the Basque Country and my experience there. As I was writing the book, I came across an interview with Tobias Wolff in The Paris Review, where Wolff says that 'The most radical political writing of all is that which makes you aware of the reality of another human being.'

'That line was really crucial for me -- it told me not to worry about trying to explain the complexities of a historical or political situation. Ultimately, I felt the freedom to write an early draft when I realized that it wasn't a political book, but rather a book about the individual characters -- the political identities and actions were dictated by the characters, rather than vice versa."

Q. All That Followed is based loosely on several political kidnappings and killings that occurred in the 1990s in the Basque Country. What kind of research did you do?

A. The most obvious parallels are to the assassination of Miguel Angel Blanco, a young politician who was killed near San Sebastian in 1997. I was 19 years old when I arrived in San Sebastian a week or two after Blanco's death, and the reaction to the killing was something I'll never forget -- massive protests all across Spain, daily rallies denouncing the killing but also in favor of Basque independence. I tried to incorporate my memories of this time into the novel, and read up on some newspaper reports from the Basque Country from that time."

Author Gabriel Urza, whose family is from the Basque region of Spain, received his MFA from the Ohio State University. His short fiction and essays have been published in numerous magazines and journals. He also has a degree in law from the University of Notre Damn and has spent several years as a public defender in Reno, NV.

 

FOCUS: A Potpourri -- Sick in the Head / Dark Places of the Earth / Hit the Target

Sick in the Head by Judd Apatow -- Conversations about Life and Comedy, Random House '15, $27, 489 pages, ASIN #1421414651. Grouping of color glossy images. Otherwise unillustrated.

"How did I start interviewing comedians? That's a good question. I was always a fan of comedy and....okay, I have been completely obsessed with comedy for about as long as I can remember," writes author Judd Apatow in his latest thigh-slapping book. "I blame my dad. My dad was not a comedian, but he may have secretly longed to be one. When I was a kid, he would play us Bill Cosby records and even took me to see him perform at Hofstra University for my birthday when I was in fifth grade."

Sick in the Head is comprised of several dozen interviews with such comedians as Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, Jay Leno, Jeffy Seinfeld, Jimmy Fallon, Martin Short, Mel Brooks, Mike Nichols, Stephen Colbert, Steve Allen and Steve Martin.

Here's a sampling from Judd's interview with Sarah Silverman:

Judd: What drew you to try comedy? Why did you like it so much?

Sarah: My dad taught me swears when I was a toddler and I saw, at a really early age, that if I shocked people, I would get approval, and it made my arms itch with glee. I got addicted to it. It became this source of power in a totally powerless life.

Judd: Did your dad get a kick out of it?

Sarah: He thought it was funny to teach his three-year-old daughter swears.

Judd: Do you like trace your sensibility to anything specific specific other than your dad being amused by watching you shock people?

Sarah: I never consciously set out to talk about taboos or anything like that. That was just what the household I grew up in was like. There weren't any boundaries or a sense of, like "Maybe let's not say that in front of the kids." It was all out there, you know, and I didn't know better. I mean, honestly, a lot of the human etiquette I learned in life I learned from, like, thank-you notes and dating Jimmy Kimmel...."

Author Judd Apatow wrote and directed the films The 40-year-old Virgin, Knocked Up, Funny People and This is 40. He is the executive producer of HBO's Girls. His latest film is Trainwreck. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Leslie Mann, and their family.

Dark Places of the Earth -- The Voyage of the Slave Ship Antelope by Jonathan M. Bryant, Liveright '15, $28.95, 376 pages, ASIN #0871406756. Index, credits, notes, grouping of b&w images, otherwise unillustrated.

 

"On the morning of February 28, 1825, attorney John Macpherson Berrien prepared to open his case," writes author Jonathan Bryant in his new book. "This was the second of what would be five days of argument before the United States Supreme Court, and Berrien faced a formidable challenge.

"Just two days earlier, on Saturday, Francis Scott Key had opened for the federal government in the case of the Antelope. Key had not yet been relegated to textbooks as the pious author of 'The Star-Spangled Banner.' In 1825 he was a lawyer at his peak: rich, well connected, and influential. He was also a superb speaker -- some put him on a par with Daniel Webster. Key had unleashed all of his rhetorical weapons on Saturday; this was a case he believed in and had worked personally to bring before the Supreme Court.

"The Antelope was a Spanish slave ship that had been captured by privateers and then seized by a United States Revenue Marine cutter off the coast of Florida. Using clear precedent, poetic language, and appeals to morality, Francis Scott Key argued that the hundreds of African captives found aboard the Antelope should be returned to Africa and freedom. United States law demanded it, he said. The law of nations demanded it, he said. Even the law of nature demanded it. Key looked into the eyes of the six justices sitting for the case, four of whom were slave owners, and announced that 'by the law of nature, all men are free.'"

Author Jonathan M. Bryant is professor of history at Georgia Southern University. He specializes in slavery, emancipation, and constitutional law. He lives in Statesboro, GA.

Hit the Target -- Eight Men Who Led the Eighth Air Force to Victory over the Luftwaffe by Bill Yenne, NAL Caliber '15, $26.95, 369 pages, ASIN #0425274179. Index, selected acronyms, selected bibliography, grouping of b&w glossy images, otherwise unillustrated.

 

From the dust jacket:

"Less than a month after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Army formed its first air force designated to operate overseas, the Eighth. Within four months, they had set up base in England. Three months later, they were bombing German targets in occupied Europe.

"The Eighth was the first bomber command on either side to commit strategic daylight bombing. It was a major change in tactics -- and the men of the Eighth paid the price in both lives and blood. But it was that very sacrifice that led the Allies to victory.

"Hit the Target introduces readers to those who made the Eighth Air Force the formidable juggernaut it soon became. Men of all ranks, from General Tooey Spaatz, the hard driving founding commander, to Colonel Jimmy Doolittle, the hero who led the first air raid on Japan, to Maynard 'Snuffy' Smith, the irascible first airman in Europe to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, and Robert 'Rosie' Rosenthal, who survived his time with the 'Bloody Hundredth,' which lost airmen at a horrifying rate, and who went on to serve as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials."

Author Bill Yenne has written more than three dozen nonfiction books, especially on aviation and military history. He lives and works in San Francisco, CA.

 

 

 

 

FOCUS: A Potpourri -- Independence Lost / Beyond / The French Historical Revolution

Independence Lost -- Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution by Kathleen DuVal, Random House '15, $28, 435 pages, ASIN #1400068959. Index, notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

"As the sky lightened in the early morning hours of March 9, 1781, British sailors on a frigate floating at the mouth of Pensacola Bay spotted a fleet heading straight for them," writes historian Kathleen DuVal in her latest book. "One sailor scrambled high on the mast, straining to see the flag flying over the lead ship. Hoping to see the red, white, and blue of the Union Jack, instead the lookout recognized the bold red and gold stripes of the Spanish King Carlos III's naval flag. The British frigate fired seven shots, whose thunderous sound warned the people of Pensacola of imminent invasion.

"These sailors were not surprised at the Spanish invasion -- Pensacola was the capital of British West Florida and the last line of defense against Spanish conquest of the entire colony. The sailors had only hoped that the Spanish would not arrive before reinforcements. However, readers today might be surprised by this North American battle adjacent to battles of a better-known war -- the American Revolution.

"While histories of the American Revolution include the Marquis de Lafayette and the French fleet at Yorktown, most Americans and even many historians do not know that the Spanish were fighting their own battles against the British at the same time. As Britain tried to put down the rebellion in 13 of its colonies, it was also defending its other 13 colonies on the North American mainland and in the West Indies against the Spanish and the French."

Author Kathleen DuVal teaches Early American history and American Indian history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is the author of numerous previous books.

Beyond -- Our Future in Space by Chris Impey, Norton '15, $27.95, 321 pages, ASIN #0393239306. Index, credits, notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

"Space is inhuman," writes astronomy scholar Chris Impey. "We can't survive unprotected in a pure vacuum for more than a minute. Going there involves being strapped to a barely controlled chemical explosion. Low Earth orbit is equivalent to half an hour's drive straight up, but it's insanely expensive to get there. The set of people who have experienced zero gravity is one of the most exclusive clubs in history. Yet space travel is an expression of a fundamental human trait: the desire to explore.

"This book is an exploration of the past, present, and future of space travel. We're on the cusp of an important transition, where diverse technologies have matured to the point where space travel could be routine. A cadre of innovators and entrepreneurs is about to deliver space travel that's not just for astronauts and the super-rich. It will happen sooner than you think.

"Each of the four parts of this book is preceded by a fictional vignette delivering us into the world of a young pioneer about to undertake a journey to the stars. First, we look at the 'past' to learn about our genetic proclivity for exploration and our progress with rocketry that let us leave the Earth for the first time in the mid-20th century....Then, in the 'Present,' we see that the malaise of the space program will be cured by a new generation of entrepreneurs who are transforming our potential to leave the planet....

"Peering into the 'Future,' we look at how we can travel to the Moon and Mars, and we investigate the technologies needed to establish colonies there....Finally, we speculate 'Beyond' our current capabilities to the time when we can travel to the stars and become citizens of the Milky Way."

Author Chris Impey is a professor at the University of Arizona. He has written numerous critically acclaimed books, including two astronomy textbooks. He lives in Tucson, AZ.

The French Historical Revolution -- The Annales School, 1929--2014 by Peter Burke, Revised and updated second edition. Stanford UPress '15 paperback. 198 pages, ASIN #0804718377.

From the back cover:

"This book provides a critical history of the movement associated with the French journal Annales, from its foundation in 1929 to the present. This movement has been the single most important force in the development of what is sometimes called 'the new history.'

"In the 20th century, historians began arguing for new ways of doing history. This 'new history' movement called for a total history open to exploring every human activity. Instead of concentrating on the great deeds of statesmen and generals, new history considered the views and experiences of ordinary people. Instead of limiting themselves to official documents, new historians examined a greater variety of evidence, collaborating with sociologists, anthropologists, economists, linguists, and psychologists. Instead of traditional narratives, new history examined structures. And instead of claiming objective truth, new history acknowledged the prejudices associated with color, creed, or gender."

Author Peter Burke is Emeritus Professor of Cultural History at the University of Cambridge.

 

FOCUS: A Little of This, A Little of That -- Faxed / Grace of Monaco / Leon Trotsky

Faxed -- The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine by Jonathan Coopersmith, Johns Hopkins UPress '15, $54.95, 308 pages, ASIN #1421415917. Index, note on sources, notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

"In an age of instantaneous information and images, it is hard to appreciate the magic that millions in the 1930s experienced upon seeing photographs of distant disasters appear the new day in their newspapers, or the excitement in the 1980s of watching an exact copy of a letter emerge line by line from a machine connected to the telephone network," writes historian Jonathan Coopersmith in his latest work.

"By accomplishing these contemporary miracles, the fax machine helped create the accelerated communications, information flow, and vibrant visual culture that characterize our contemporary world. Most people assume that the fax machine originated in the computer and electronics revolution of the 1980s, but it has actually evolved, albeit unsteadily, since the 1840s. This book tells the multigenerational, multinational story of that device from its origins and describes how it changed the world, even through its decline in the 21st century.

"The basic concept of a facsimile, or fax machine -- a machine that electrically transmits an image -- has not changed since 1843. The three main components were, and remain, the scanner-transmitter, the transmitting medium, and the receiver-recorder. What changed greatly were the enabling and supporting technologies, the competing technologies and services, the social and economic environment, and the expectations and assumptions of promoters, patrons, observers, and users about markets and applications."

Historian Jonathan Coopersmith is an associate professor of history at Texas A&M University and is the author of The Electrification of Russia, 1880-1926.

Grace of Monaco -- The True Story by Jeffrey Robinson, DaCapo '14 paperback, $15.99, 340 pages, ASIN #1602862419. Index, two groupings of b&w images.

"In one of the most famous romances of the 20th century, Europe's most eligible bachelor, Prince Rainier of Monaco, and America's most beautiful movie star, the Academy Award-winning Grace Kelly, fell in Love and married against the backdrop of the closest thing the modern world has to a magical kingdom, the French Riviera's Principality of Monaco," writes author Jeffrey Robinson in his new book.

"Told with affection and humor, and written with the unprecedented cooperation of Prince Rainier III and his children, Prince Albert, Princess Caroline, and Princess Stephanie; Grace of Monaco takes readers beneath the surface glitz and glamour of Monte Carlo for a never-to-be-forgotten portrait of the House of Grimaldi."

Author Jeffrey Robinson lived in the South of France for a dozen years and got to know Princess Grace and her family. Prince Rainier's only stipulation to him was, "Tell the truth."

Leon Trotsky by Paul Le Blanc, University of Chicago Press, '15 paperback. $16.95, 224 pages, 1780234309. Index, further reading, b&w images sprinkled through text.

From the back cover:

"There are few more divisive names in modern history than that of the diehard revolutionary Leon Trotsky. To some he was a hypocritical totalitarian, while to many others he was a revolutionary liberator, an idealist determined to crush an outdated, oppressive dynasty in order to replace it with a proletarian socialist commonwealth. But one thing is agreed: his impact as a leader in the Russian Revolution and his widely read polemical books and articles make Trotsky one of the most influential political figures of the 20th century.

"In this book, Paul LeBlanc delves deep into Trotsky's life and his social, sexual, and political relationships to both criticize and defend the distinctive actions and opinions this complex character generated. He shows how the hero leader of the Red Army in the Revolution found himself in a losing struggle in the 1920s in his efforts to revitalize the revolutionary wing of the labour movement.

"Gradually marginalized by ideological opponents within the Soviet bureaucracy, notably Stalin, Trotsky was exiled to Central Asia in 1928. The following year he was banished from the USSR. What followed was a series of makeshift homes with his family circle. First on an island near Istanbul, then in France, then Norway until in 1937, Trotsky, his family and close supporters settled in Mexico, where he was murdered by a Stalinist agent three years later.

Author Paul LeBlanc is Professor of History at LaRoche College, Pittsburgh, PA. He is the author of Unfinished Leninism and co-editor of Trotsky's Writings from Exile.

 

FOCUS: Wartime History -- Men of War / Too Bad to Die / Co. "Aytch"

Men of War -- The American Soldier in Combat at Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, and Iwo Jima by Alexander Rose, Random House '15, $30, 480 pages, ASIN #0553805185. Index, bibliography, notes, b&w images (including maps) sprinkled through text.

"A simple question lies at the heart of this book," writes Alexander Rose at the outset of his riveting new work. 'What's it like being in a battle?'

"It's one I've been asking myself since I was an undergraduate, when I discovered, in the university bookstore, a copy of John Keegan's The Face of Battle, a book published just a few years after I was born. I still have it, nearly a quarter of a century later. Cheaply bound and badly printed, the old paperback sits on a shelf in my study, but such are the times that I now also own a digital version that is duplicated on a variety of electronic devices as well as a Folio Society limited edition. I can legitimately say that, as priests and Puritans once did with their Bibles, I carry my Keegan with me everywhere.

"To those unfamiliar with The Face of Battle, let me explalin. Keegan, who died in 2012, investigated the experience of the common British soldier -- what he felt, heard, and saw -- in three epic battles: Agincourt in 1415, Waterloo in 1815, and the Somme in 1916. Keegan also discussed the mechanics of fighting -- for instance, the means by which King Henry V's longbowmen demolished the French cavalry -- as well as the historiography of warfare (how we write about battles over time). His book can justly lay claim to being one of the finest works of history, military or otherwise, of the 20th century."

Author Alexander Rose wrote Washington's Spies: The Story of America's First Spy Ring, which inspired the AMC original series. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and other publications.

Too Bad to Die by Francine Mathews, Riverhead Books '15, stated First Printing. $27.95, 348 pages, ASIN #1594631794.

From the dust cover:

November 1943. Weary of his deskbound status in the Royal Navy, intelligence officer Ian Fleming spends his spare time spinning stories in his head that are much more exciting than his own life....until the critical Tehran Conference, where Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin meet to finalize plans for the D-day invasion.

With the Big Three in one place, Fleming is tipped off that Adolf Hitler's top assassin has infiltrated the meeting. Seizing his chance to play a part on a real-life action story, Fleming goes undercover to stop the killer. Between martinis with beautiful women, he survives brutal attacks and meets a seductive Soviet spy who may know more than he realizes. As Fleming works to reveal the truth and expose the assassin, he is forced to accept that betrayal sometimes comes from the most unexpected quarters -- and that one's literary creations may prove eerily close to one's own life.

Author Francine Mathews is the author of Jack 1939 and more than 20 oither novels of mystery, history, and suspense. She is a graduate of Princeton and Stanford and lives and works in Colorado.

Co. "Aytch" -- The First Tennessee Regiment or a Side Show to the Big Show by Sam Watkins, the Complete Illustrated Edition. Zenith Press '15, in oversized format on glossy stock, stated First Printing. $35, 256 pages, ASIN #0760347751. Index, image credits, contributors, bibliography, color glossy images (some full-page) scattered throughout text.

 

While this Civil Rights memoir is full of text, it is generously interspersed with scores of color photos, which add dimension to the tale Sam Watkins tells. From the back cover:

"Simply written yet beautifully told, Co. 'Aytch' reveals both the terrors of war and the humor and adventure in a soldier's life. Through Sam Watkins' stories, a unique history of the American Civil War comes to life, as do his valor, kindness, and wit. This new full-color edition is like no other Civil War memoir ever published.

"The history of the war is presented in vivid detail with more than 100 photographs, paintings, letters, maps, artifacts, and more than complement Watkins' words. In addition, commentary from the great leaders of the time -- Abraham Lincoln, William T. Sherman, James Longstreet -- and famous historians past and present -- James M. McPherson, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Bruce Catton, Allan Nevins -- provides an experience of the war like never before in this beautiful, comprehensive volume."

Samuel Rush Watkins (June 26, 1839 -- July 20, 1901) was an American writer and humorist. The memoir Co. "Aytch" is the work for which he is best known. Originally published as a serial newspaper column from 1881 to 1882 in the Columbia, TN, Herald, his stories were collected and printed in book form in 1882.

 

FOCUS: A Potpourri -- The Ingenious Mr. Pyke / The Story of Science / The Best War Ever

The Ingenious Mr. Pyke by Henry Hemming, PublicAffairs '15, $26.99, 500 pages, ASIN #1610395778. Index, notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

"In the World War II era, Geoffrey Pyke was described as one of the world's great minds -- to rank alongside Einstein," writes veteran author Henry Hemming in his latest work. "Pyke was an inventor, adventurer, polymath, and unlikely hero of both world wars.

"He earned a fortune on the stock market, founded an influential pre-school, wrote a bestseller, and came up with the idea for the U.S. and Canadian Special Forces. In 1942, he convinced Winston Churchill to build an aircraft carrier out of reinforced ice.

"Pyke escaped from a German WWI prison camp, devised an ingenious plan to help the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and launched a private attempt to avert the outbreak of the Second World War by sending into Nazi Germany a group of pollsters disguised as golfers.

"And he may have been a Russian spy."

Author Henry Hemming has written four previous works of nonfiction, including Misadventure in the Middle East. His writings have appeared in leading magazines and newspapers. He lives in London with his wife and daughter.

The Story of Science from the Writings of Aristotle to the Big Bang Theory by Susan Wise Bauer, Norton '15, stated First Edition, First Printing. $26.95, 316 pages, ASIN #0393243265. Index, works cited, notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

"This is not a history of science," author Susan Wise Bauer writes straightforwardly at the outset of her latest work. 'Histories of science have been written, in great numbers (and at great length), by many other writers. They abound: studies of Greek science, Renaissance science, Enlightenment science, Victorian science, modern science, science and society, science and philosophy, science and religion, science and 'the people.'

"Of course these histories have value. But somehow, the nature of science itself seems to get lost in the details. Most 'people,' regular citizens who have no professional training in the sciences, still have no clear view of what science does -- or what it means.

"Most of us are fed science in news reports, interactive graphs, and sound bites. These may give us a fuzzy and incomplete glimpse of the facts involved, but the ongoing science battles of the 21st century show that the facts aren't enough. Decisions that affect stem cell research, global warming, the teaching of evolution in elementary schools -- these are being made by voters (or, independently, by their theoretical representatives) who don't actually understand why biologists think stem cells are important or how environmental scientists came to the conclusion that the earth is warming or what the Big Bang actually is...."

"So this is a slightly different kind of history. It traces the development of great science writing -- the essays and books that have most directly affected and changed the course of scientific investigation. It is intended for the interested and intelligent nonspecialist."

Author Susan Wise Bauer is the best-selling author of the Story of the World series and The Well-Trained Mind, among other works. She lives in Virginia.

The Best War Ever -- America and World War II, Second Edition by Michael C.C. Adams, Johns Hopkins UPress '15 paperback. $24.95, 184 pages, 3 b&w photos, 3 b&w illustrations, 3 maps, ASIN #1801846978, Index, references.

From the back cover:

"Was World War II such a 'good war'? Popular memory insists that it was, in fact, 'the best war ever. But according to historian Michael C.C. Adams, our memory of the war era as a golden age badly distorts the record. Disputing many common assumptions about the period, Adams argues in The Best War Ever that our celebratory perception of World War II must also include dark and sordid realities.

"Adams challenges various stereotypes to present a view of World War II that avoids the simplistic extremes of both glorification and vilification. The Best War Ever charts the complex diplomatic problems of the 1930s and reveals the realities of ground combat. Adams exposes the myth that the home front was fully united behind the war effort, demonstrating how class, race, gender, and age divisions split Americans."

Author Michael C.C. Adams is Regents Professor of History Emeritus at Northern Kentucky University and author of two books on American wars.

FOCUS: A Saul Bellow Festival -- The Life of Saul Bellow / There is Simply Too Much to Think About / Why the Amish Sing

Without a doubt, Saul Bellow already ranks in the first rank of American writers of the 20th century. "There have been three previous biographies of Bellow, published in 1980, 1991, and 2000," writes author Zachary Leader, "but it wasn't until 2006 that the Bellow estate added roughly 150 boxes of papers to the University of Chicago's Bellow Archive, nearly doubling its size. Now the hour is at hand when the literary world can welcome the definitive Bellow biography of all time.

The Life of Saul Bellow -- To Fame and Fortune, 1915--1964 by Zachary Leader, Knopf '15, $40, 812 pages, ASIN #0307268837. Index, notes, a note on sources, a grouping of b&w images and other b&w images sprinkled through text.

"The biography will be published in two volumes," explains author Zachary Leader. "The first volume, To Fame and Fortune: 1915--1964, traces Bellow's Russian roots; his birth and early childhood in Quebec; his years in Chicago; his travels in Mexico, Europe, and Israel; the first three of his five marriages; and the novels from Dangling Man and The Adventures of Augie March to the best-selling Herzog.

"New light is shed on Bellow's fellow writers, including Ralph Ellison, John Berryman, Lionel Trilling, and Philip Roth, and on his turbulent and influential life away from the desk, which was as full of incident as his fiction. Bellow emerges as a compelling character, and Leader's powerful accounts of his writings, published and unpublished, forward the case for his being, as the critic James Wood puts it, 'the Greatest of American prose stylists in the 20th century.'"

Author Zachary Leader is professor of English literature at the University of Roehampton in London. An American citizen, he has lived in Britain for more than 40 years. He has written nine previous books and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Saul Bellow -- There is Simply Too Much to Think About, Edited by Benjamin Taylor, collected nonfiction, Viking '15, $35, 532 pages, ASIN #0670016691, index, unillustrated.

The great Saul Bellow is certainly best known for his fiction, but editor Benjamin Taylor is turning a spotlight on Bellow's contributions to non-fiction for nearly a half-century in his compelling new work, one of two to celebrate the centennial of one of America's leading writers of all time.

The editor divides his (that is, Bellow's) material into five sections, each embodying a transformative decade in the author's life:

    *The Fifties and Before, including writings on such notables as Sholom Alecheim, entitled "Laughter in the Ghetto," Ralph Ellison, entitled "Man Underground," Ben Hecht, entitled "The 1,000 Afternoons," and Philip Roth, entitled "The Swamp of Prosperity," among others.

    The Sixties, surveying such topics as Jewish Storytelling, the Future of Fiction, Shakespeare's Sonnets, the Writer as Moralist, the Six-Day War, and Skepticism and the Depth of Life.

    The Seventies, examining, among other things, Literature in the Age of Technology, a World Too Much With Us, and Americans Who Are Also Jews: Upon Receiving the Democratic Legacy Award of the Anti-Defamation League.

    The Eighties, including such topics as "The Days of Mr. Roosevelt, Reflections on Alexis de Tocqueville: A Seminar at the University of Chicago; My Paris; Chicago: The City That Was, the City That Is;" and The Civilized Barbarian Reader.

    The Nineties and After, beginning with echoing the book's title: "There is Simply too Much to Think About," (INDEED!), Ralph Ellison in Tivoli, Papuans and Zulus, Winter in Tuscany, "I Got a Scheme!", with Philip Roth; and Vermont: The Good Place.

Editor Benjamin Taylor is the author of Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay, named a Best Book of 2012 by The New Yorker, and of two award-winning novels, Tales Out of School and The Book of Getting Even. He is a faculty member in The New School's Graduate School of Writing.

Why the Amish Sing -- Songs of Solidarity & Identity by D. Rose Elder, foreword by Terry E. Miller, Johns Hopkins UPress '14, $39.95, 193 pages, ASIN #1421414651. Index, bibliography, notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

From the dust jacket:

"Singing occurs in nearly every setting of Amish life. It is a sanctioned pleasure that frames all Amish rituals and one that enlivens and sanctifies both routine and special events, from household chores, road trips by buggy, and family prayer to baptisms, youth group gatherings, weddings and 'single girl' sings.

"But because Amish worship is performed in private homes instead of public churches, few outsiders get the chance to hear Amish people sing. Amish music also remains largely unexplored in the field of ethnomusicology. In Why the Amish Sing, D. Rose Elder introduces readers to the ways that Amish music both reinforces and advances spiritual life, delving deep into the Ausbund, the oldest hymnal in continuous use."

Author D. Rose Elder is an associate professor of ethnomusicology and rural sociology and coordinator of humanities and social sciences at the Ohio State University Agricultural Technical Institute.

FOCUS: A Potpourri -- The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot / A Dangerous Place / The Looting Machine

The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot -- The True Story of the Tyrant Who Created North Korea and the Young Lieutenant Who Stole His Way to Freedom,by Blaine Harden et al, Viking '15, $27.95, 290 pages, ASIN #0670016578. Index, bibliography, notes, timeline, grouping of b&w glossy images.

In a brief Q&A, author Blaine Harden and Ken Rowe (formerly North Korean fighter pilot No Kum Sok) discuss the writing of this book:

Q. Why read a book about North Korea to the 1950s?

A. Because North Korea is frozen in time. In fundamental ways, it is still the 1950s in North Korea. The same family is in charge. The same dictatorial rules are in place. The same gulag enslaves citizens. The Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, invented North Korea in the 1950s as a family dictatorship and then succeeded in doing what no other totalitarian leader has done. He stopped time itself. His son and his grandson have presided over the world's longest-lasting totalitarian state. By understanding who Kim Il Sung was and how he invented North Korea, with the help of Stalin and Mao, readers can easily grasp why the current leader (Kim Jong Un, the thirty-something grandson) behaves the way he does. The belligerence, the paranoia, the nukes, the human rights horrors -- it all snaps into place, if you read The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot.

Q. Why is North Korea still so nutty over all these years? Why is it so wildly angry at the United States.

A. Two reasons. First, every dictator needs a Great Enemy. He needs to frighten his people with the specter of a powerful, relentless and blood-thirsty boogeyman. And he needs to stage an endless drama, one that shows him protecting the innocence, goodness and purity of his people from that enemy. For the health and longevity of Kim family dictatorship, that enemy is the United States. A permanent life-and-death struggle against the Americans justifies the family's existence. It also gives them a perfect excuse for the rottenness of life in North Korea -- the lack of food, the lack of electricity, the lack of freedom. Simply put: it's all the Americans' fault.

Author Blaine Harden formerly served as The Washington Post's bureau chief in East Asia and Africa and was the Post's bureau chief in Warsaw during the collapse of Communism and the breakup of Yugoslavia and in Nairobi, where he covered sub-Saharan Africa. He lives in Seattle.

A Dangerous Place by Jacqueline Winspear -- A Maisie Dobbs Novel, Harper '15, $26.99, 309 pages, ASIN #0062220551.

 

 From the dust jacket:

"Spring 1937. In the four years since she left England, Maisie Dobbs has experienced love, contentment, stability -- and the deepest tragedy a woman can endure. Now, all she wants is the peace she believes she might find by returning to India. But her sojourn in the hills of Darjeeling is cut short when her stepmother summons her home to England: her aging father, Frankie Dobbs, is not getting any younger.

"On a ship bound for England, Maisie realizes she isn't ready to return. Against the wishes of the captain who warns her, 'You will be alone in a most  dangerous place,' she disembarks in Gibraltar. Though she is on her own, Maisie is far from alone: the British garrison town is teeming with refugees freeing a brutal civil war across the border in Spain."

Author Jacqueline Winspear has written numerous novels, including four bestselling Maisie Dobbs novels. The first book in that series, Maisie Dobbs, was also nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel and was a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in California.

The Looting Machine by Tom Burgis, PublicAffairs '15, $21.16, 352 pages, ASIN #1610394399.

 

"Opposite the New York Stock Exchange, at what the tourist information sign calls the 'financial crossroads of the world,' the stately stone façade of 23 Wall Street evokes the might of the man whose bank it was built to house in 1913: J.P. Morgan, America's capitalist titan," writes author Tom Burgis in his new book. "The exterior is popular with Hollywood -- it doubled as the Gotham City stock exchange in the 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises -- but when I visited in late 2013 the red carpet lay grubby and sodden in the drizzle blowing in off the Atlantic. Through the smeared glass in the shuttered metal gates, all that was visible in the gutted interior where once a vast chandelier glittered were a few strip lights, stairways covered in plywood, and a glowing red 'EXIT' sign.

"Despite its disrepair, 23 Wall Street remains an emblem of the elite, a trophy in the changing game of global commerce. The address of the current owners is an office on the 10th floor of a Hong Kong skyscraper. Formerly the site of a British army barracks, 88 Queensway has been transformed into the mirrored towers of Pacific Place, blazing reflected sunlight onto the financial district. The sumptuous mall at street level, air conditioned against the dripping humidity outside, is lined with designer boutiques: Armani, Prada, Chanel, Dior. The Shangri La Hotel, which occupies the top floors of the second Pacific Place, seven towers, offers suites at $10,000 a night."

Author Tom Burgis has been reporting for the Financial Times for eight years, including as a correspondent in Johannesburg and Lagos, and won the FT's 2013 Jones-Mauthner Memorial Prize for his exposes on corruption.

FOCUS: A Little of This, A Little of That -- Wreck of the Whale Ship Essex / Beale Street Dynasty / It's What I Do

Wreck of the Whale Ship Essex -- The Extraordinary and Distressing Memoir that Inspired Herman Melville's Moby Dick by Owen Chase, Introduction by Gilbert King, Zenith Press '15, in oversized format on glossy stock, $35, 195 pages, ASIN #076034812X. Index, photo credits, supplement, scores of color glossy images, some of them full-page.

"July of 1852, a 32-year-old novelist named Herman Melville had high hopes for his new novel, Moby-Dick; or, /The Whale, despite the book's mixed reviews and tepid sales," writes journalist Gilbert King in his Introduction. "That month he took a steamer to Nantucket for his first visit to the Massachusetts island, home port of his novel's mythic protagonist, Captain Ahab, and his ship, the Pequod. Like a tourist, Melville met local dignitaries, dined out, and took in the sights of the village he had previously only imagined.

"And on his last day on Nantucket, he met the broken-down 60 year-old man who had captained the Essex, the ship that had been attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in an 1820 incident that had inspired Melville's novel. Captain George Pollard, Jr. was just 29 years old when the Essex went down, and he survived and returned to Nantucket to captain a second whaling ship, Two Brothers.

"But when that ship wrecked on a coral reef two years later, the captain was marked as unlucky at sea -- a 'Jonah' -- and no owner would trust a ship to him again. Pollard lived out his remaining years on land, as the village night watchman."

Author Owen Chase was first mate of the whale ship Essex when it was struck and sunk by a sperm whale on Nov. 20, 1820. Chase published his tale, originally titled Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex, in 1821, and the story would inspire Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick. 

Beale Street Dynasty -- Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis by Preston Lauterbach, Norton '15, $26.95, 352 pages, ASIN #0393082571. Index, notes, grouping of b&w glossy images.

In his review of Beale Street Dynasty, acclaimed author Hampton Sides writes, "Lauterbach gives us Beale in its heyday -- the chitlin' joints, the rough-and-tumble politics, the fecund music-- and deftly paints a portrait of the one improbable millionaire who towered over this vibrant world. Read Beale Street Dynasty and you begin to feel like you're communing with ghosts."

From the dust jacket:

"Following the Civil War, Beale Street in Memphis, TN, thrived as a cauldron of sex and song, violence and passion. But out of his turmoil emerged a center of black progress, optimism, and cultural ferment. Preston Lauterbach tells this vivid, fascinating story through the multi-generational saga of a family whose ambition, race pride, and moral complexity indelibly shaped the city that would loom so large in American life.

"Robert Church, who would become 'the South's first black millionaire,' was a mulatto slave owned by his white father. Having survived a deadly race riot in 1866, Church constructed an empire of vice in the booming river town. He made a fortune with saloons, gambling, and -- shockingly -- white prostitution. But he also nurtured the militant journalism of Ida B. Wells and helped revolutionize American music through the work of composer W.C. Handy, the man who claimed to have invented the blues."

Author Preston Lauterbach's first book, The Chitlin' Circuit: And the Road to Rock 'n' Roll was named the best book of the year by the Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and NPR. He lives in Virginia.

It's What I Do -- A Photographer's Life of Love and War by Lynsey Addario, Penguin Press '15 on glossy stock, $29.95, 357 pages, ASIN #159420537X. Index, dozens of color glossy photos, some full-page.

"In the perfect light of a crystal-clear morning, I stood outside a putty-colored cement hospital near Ajdabiya, a small city on Libya's northern coast, more than 500 miles east of Tripoli," writes author Lynsey Addario in her new book. "Several other journalists and I were looking at a car that had been hit during a morning air strike.

"Its back window had been blown out, and human remains were splattered all over the backseat. There was part of a brain on the passenger seat; shards of skull were embedded in the rear parcel shelf. Hospital employees in white medical uniforms carefully picked up the pieces and placed them in a bag. I picked up my camera to shoot what I had shot so many times before, then put it back down, sweeping aside to let the other photographers have their turn. I couldn't do it that day.

"It was March 20ll, the beginning of the Arab Spring. After Tunisia and Egypt erupted into unexpectedly euphoric and triumphant revolutions against their longtime dictators -- millions of ordinary people shouting and dancing in the streets in celebration of their newfound freedom -- Libyans revolted against their own homegrown tyrant, Muammar el-Qaddafi. He had been in power for more than 40 years, funding terrorist groups across the world while he tortured, killed, and disappeared his fellow Libyans. Qaddafi was a maniac."

Author Lynsey Addario is an American photojournalist whose work appears regularly in The New York Times, National Geographic, and Time magazine. Among numerous awards, she has received the MacArthur Genius Grant and the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting.