Steve Goddard's History Wire

FOCUS: American History -- The Last Kind Words Saloon / William Henry Harrison / Brothers Forever

The Last Kind Words Saloon -- a novel by Larry McMurtry, Liveright '14, $24.95, 196 pages, ASIN #0871407868.

I've been told that as a human ages, so does his energy diminish. One could say the same about Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Larry McMurtry as he enters his late 70s. When he wrote his signature work, Lonesome Dove, 30 years ago, he was clearly up to the task of penning a doorstop volume exceeding 1,000 pages. His latest, even with larger type, weighs in at less than 200 pages.

But that doesn't mean that McMurtry has lost anything on his fastball -- not on your life. For the 48-year-old McMurtry couldn't have written The Last Kind Words Saloon; he just didn't have the richness of experience gained from introducing and nurturing a posse of Wild West characters. He now displays that richness as he reintroduces such nonfictional and fictional characters as Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Charlie Goodnight, and Nellie Courtright, in what could be a career curtain call for McMurtry, although he shows no public inclination to call it a literary day.

The Last Kind Words Saloon begins in Long Grass, TX, where we come upon the taciturn Wyatt Earp and his buddy, dentist-turned-gunslinger Doc Holliday ("more adept at poker than extracting teeth.") "Wyatt and Doc are living out the last days of a way of life that is passing into history," writes the author, "two men never more aware of the growing distance between their lives and their legends." Can you see Larry McMurtry wince a bit as the analogy to his own career resonates?

In any event, in Long Grass, we meet such memorable characters as Lord Ernle, an English baron; and the exotic courtesan San Saba, "the most beautiful whore on the plains." But soon it's time to migrate to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in Denver, then on to Mobetie, TX; and finally to Tombstone, AZ, ending with the famed gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

And towards the end, we realize the aging analogies don't end with Earp and Holliday and even McMurtry but with the fading Old West itself. "With the buffalo herds gone, the Comanche defeated, and vast swaths of the Great Plains being enclosed by cattle ranches, Wyatt and Doc live on, even as the storied West that forged their myths disappears," according to McMurtry.

Born and raised in Texas, Larry McMurtry is an award-winning novelist, essayist, Oscar-winning screenwriter, and avid book collector. He lives in Archer City, TX.  

William Henry Harrison and the Conquest of the Ohio Country -- Frontier Fighting in the War of 1812 by David Curtis Skaggs, Johns Hopkins UPress '14, $44.95, 303 pages, ASIN #1421405466. Index, essay on sources, notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

        

 A brief excerpt from the Preface:

"About William Henry Harrison many Americans know only two facts: he campaigned for the presidency under the slogan 'Tippecanoe and Tyler too,' and he was in office the shortest time of any president. While some will tell you that 'Tippecanoe' refers to a battle with the Indians (or was it the British?) fought somewhere in the Midwest, few can list any other episodes in his life, and fewer still recognize his military contributions to the early republic.

"Many others confuse him with his grandson, Benjamin Harrison, and assume he fought in the Civil War and was one of those hard-to-distinguish-between bearded men ascanding to the presidency in its aftermath.

"William Henry Harrison deserves better than this. He is the subject of two biographies that describe his military career but do not analyze it. They also lack the perspective of nearly three-quarters of a century of scholarship and the microfilm publication of the Harrison papers. Recent studies by Robert M.  Owens and Adam Jortner on his dealings with the Indians and Henrdik Booraem's psychological study of his youth and young manhood add significantly to our understanding of an emerging political figure in the Old Northwest. Yet his military career remains little studied."

This deficit historian David Curtis Skaggs sets out to remedy in William Henry Harrison and the Conquest of the Ohio Country. Harrison, the author writes, was of a type -- the citizen-soldier on the Ohio frontier in the days when white men settled on the western side of the Appalachian Mountains at their peril.

Among the military exploits Skaggs limns are the Fallen Timbers campaign in which Harrison served on Major Gen. Anthony Wayne's staff and a description of how in that day, the military and its leaders performed in the age of a small standing army and part-time, Cincinnatus-like forces.

Author David Curtis Skaggs is a professor emeritus of history at Bowling Green State University and is author or co-author of 12 books.

Brothers Forever -- The Enduring Bond Between a Marine and a Navy Seal That Transcended Their Ultimate Sacrifice by Tom Sileo and Col. Tom Manion, USMC (Ret.), foreword by Gen. John Allen, USMC (Ret.). DaCapo Press '14, $25.99, 278 pages, ASIN #0306822377. Index, notes, two groupings of b&w glossy images.

 

Readers may recall President Obama's 2011 Memorial Day address, in which he told the nation that the friendship between U.S. Marine 1st Lt. Travis Manion and U.S. Navy LT (SEAL) Brendan Looney was the embodiment of "brotherhood," "sacrifice," and "love of country."

"In 2007, after Travis was killed while shielding his fellow Marines from enemy fire in Iraq," write the authors, "Brendan, who was training to become a navy SEAL, knew his brother in arms was still there in spirit, watching over him and pushing him to keep going. When Brendan was killed in Afghanistan three years later, both military families came together to lay them side by side and forever preserve their legacy."

About the authors: Tom Sileo, a nationally-syndicated columnist, lives in Marietta, GA. Col. Tom Manion, USMC (Ret.) is chairman emeritus at the Travis Manion Foundation. He lives in Doyleston, PA.

FOCUS: A Little of This, A Little of That -- Enduring Courage / China Dolls / Lex Populi

Enduring Courage -- Ace Pilot Eddie Rickenbacker and the Dawn of the Age of Speed by John F. Ross, St. Martin's Press '14, $27.99, 375 pages, ASIN #1250033772. Index, notes, note to reader, grouping of b&w glossy images.

More than any one invention, what characterized a new America at the outset of the 20th century was what author John F. Ross calls the nation's "love affair with speed," epitomized by two key icons -- the race car driver and the flying ace. Together, they utterly transformed the way Americans thought about time, space, and daring.

"No individual did more to create and intensify these raw new roles," writes Ross, "than the tall, gangly Eddie Rickenbacker, who defied death over and over with such courage and pluck that a generation of Americans came to know his face better than the president's."

Advances in the age of speed came at a cost measured in risk and often in the loss of human life. In the words of Eddie Rickenbacker, "There is no man living who has cheated the Grim Reaper as often as I have." He boasted of surviving eight near-death experiences, including the following:

    *"Atlanta Passenger Airplane Crash. While on a business trip in 1941 during his tenure with Eastern Air Lines, Eddie's plane crashed just outside of Atlanta. Only an instinctive dive to the rear of the airliner saved his life in the terrible crash. He spent an evening with his eye hanging from his cheek and multiple broken bones; indeed, he suffered wounds so grave that rescue workers initially left him for dead."

    *Wing-Stripping Event. On the Western Front in October 1918, Eddie attacked and shot down a German plane in his Nieuport 28, only to find as he sharply pulled up from his dive that the leading edge of his top wing had pulled away and was flapping like a wing. His enemy left him for dead as he struggled in an uncontrolled spin to regain control, only managing to do so at the very last moment before hitting the ground."

    *"Early car race. At the 1906 Vanderbilt Cup Race on Long Island, the 15-year-old Eddie rode as a 'mechanician' beside driver Lee Frayer. During qualifying heats, their brakes abruptly stopped working. Speeding around the track at perilous spoeeds, the duo hit a corner too fast, ran into a ditch and then a dune, at which point the car went airborne and rolled. The pair miraculuously survived, only suffering minor bruising."

Author John F. Ross also wrote War on the Run: The Epic Story of Robert Rogers and the Conquest of America's First Frontier. He has served as executive editor of American Heritage and on the board of directors of Smithsonian magazine.

 

China Dolls -- A Novel by Lisa See, Random House '14, $27, 383 pages, ASIN #B00H6JFJKE.

Acclaimed author Lisa See has built a reputation for deconstructing the intimate relationships of women and "the complex meeting of history and fate." In the book's jacket copy, she sets the table for what is to come:

"San Francisco, 1938: A world's fair is preparing to open on Treasure Island, a war is brewing overseas, and the city is alive with possibilities. Grace, Helen and Ruby, three young women from very different backgrounds, meet by chance at the exclusive and glamorous Forbidden City nightclub.

"Grace Lee, an American-born Chinese girl, has fled the Midwest with nothing but heartaache, talent, and a pair of dancing shoes. Helen Fong lives with her extended family in Chinatown, where her traditional parents insist that she guard her reputation like a piece of jade. The stunning Ruby Tom challenges the boundaries of convention at every turn with her defiant attitude and no-holds-barred ambition.

"The girls become fast friends, relying on one another through unexpected challenges and shifting fortunes. When their dark secrets are exposed and the invisible thread of fate binds them even tighter, they find the strength and resilience to reach for their dreams. But after the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, paranoia and suspicion threaten to destroy their lives, and a shocking act of betrayal changes everything."

Author Lisa See has reached the New York Times bestseller list for several previous books, including the critically acclaimed memoir On Gold Mountain.  The Organization of Chinese American Women named her to 2001 National Woman of the Year. She lives in Los Angeles.

 

Lex Populi -- The Jurisprudence of Popular Culture by William P. MacNeil, Stanford UPress '14, 241 pages, ASIN #0804771715. Index, references, notes, unillustrated.

        

From the dust jacket:

"This is a book about jurisprudence -- or legal philosophy. The legal philosophical texts under consideration are, to say the least, unorthodox. Tolkien, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter, Million Dollar Baby, and other cultural products are all referenced as exemplary instances of what the author calls lex populi -- "people's" or "pop law." There, more than anywhere else, will one find the leading issues of legal philosophy.

"These issues, however, are heavily coded, for few of these pop cultural texts announce themselves as expressly legal. nonetheless, Les Populi reads these texts "jurisprudentially," that is, with an eye to their hidden legal philosophical meanings, enabling connections such as: Tolkien's Ring as Kelsen's grundnorm; vampire slaying as legal language's semiosis; Hogwarts as substantively unjust; and a seriously injured young woman as termination's rights-bearers."

 

FOCUS: For Your Father's Day List -- The Keillor Reader / The Smoke at Dawn / Midnight in Europe

The Keillor Reader by Garrison Keillor, Viking '14, $27.95, ASIN #0670020583. Several b&w images sprinkled through text.

        

"When I was twenty and something of a romantic," writes Garrison Keillor in the Introduction to his new book, "I thought about dying young and becoming immortal like Buddy Holly or James Dean or Janis Joplin and people leaving bouquets on my grave and grieving for my enormous complicated talent lost to the world.

"But I didn't have a complicated talent, nor was it enormous. Some people thought I did because I wrote poems and was shy, didn't make eye contact, kept to myself. (Nowadays they'd say 'high-functioning end of the autism spectrum.")

As the grandpa of an autistic child, I recognize the classic traits of the disorder in listening faithfully to Keillor's Prairie Home Companion every Saturday at suppertime. It heartens me to see that an enormously successful person owes much of his success to a fairly common spectrum disorder. Bodes well for you, Toby, I think.

The person who has maintained a top-rated radio show for four decades and has written 19 books has now penned his latest. Even if Dad is only vaguely familiar with Prairie Home Companion, giving him The Keillor Reader is sure to be a Father's Day hit. With dozens of chapters -- each only 5 to 10 pages -- it's great for him to keep on his bedside table and in his generous moments, to lend to Mom.

A peek at the table of contents hints at the book's tone: Bus Children, Truckstop, Faith, Casey at the Bat (a creative takeoff on the iconic poem), Lonesome Shorty, Your Book Saved My Life, Mister; A Speech to the White House Correspondents' Assn. Dinner, Drowning 1954, and My Stroke (I'm Over it).

Garrison Keillor is founder and host of the Writer's Almanac, the editor of the Good Poems collections, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He spends his time between St. Paul and New York City.

The Smoke at Dawn -- A Novel of the Civil War by Jeff Shaara, Ballantine Books '14, $28, 495 pages, ASIN #0345527410.

Civil War buffs among us may have already read author Jeff Shaara and his series on that conflict that started with A Blaze of Glory and A Chain of Thunder. In his latest, The Smoke at Dawn, the last great push of the Army of the Cumberland sets the stage for a decisive confrontation at Chattanooga that could determine the outcome of the war.

From the dust jacket:

"Summer 1863. The Federal triumph at Vicksburg has secured complete control of the Mississippi River from the Confederacy, cementing the reputation of Ulysses S. Grant. Farther east, the Federal army under the command of William Rosecrans captures the crucial rail hub at Chattanooga. But Rosecrans is careless, and while pursuing the Confederates, the Federal forces are routed in north Georgia at Chickamauga Creek.

"Retreating in a panic back to Chattanooga, Rosecrans is pursued by the Confederate forces under General Braxton Bragg. Penned up, with their supply lines severed, the Federal army seems doomed to the same kind of defeat that plagued the Confederates at Vicksburg. But a disgusted Abraham Lincoln has seen enough of General Rosecrans

"Ulysses Grant is elevated to command of the entire theater of the war, and immediately replaces Rosecrans with General George Thomas. Grant gathers an enormous force, including armies commanded by Joseph Hooker and Grant's friend William T. Sherman. Grant's mission is clear: break the Confederate siege and destroy Bragg's army. Meanwhile Bragg wages war as much with his own subordinates as he does with the Federals, creating dissension and disharmony in the Southern ranks, erasing the Confederate army's superiority at exactly the wrong time."

As momentous as Jeff Shaara's career has been to date, he's just following in his footsteps of his father, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, The Killer Angels. The author was born into a family of Italian immigrants in New Brunswick, N.J., grew up in Florida, and graduated from Florida State University. He lives in Gettysburg.

Midnight in Europe -- A Novel by Alan Furst '14, Random House '14, 271 pages, ASIN #1400069491.

        

Historical spy novelist extraordinaire Alan Furst has written 13 novels, which have been translated into 18 languages. His latest, Midnight in Europe, is set in the runup to World War II. From the front cover:

"Paris, 1938. As the shadow of war darkens Europe, democratic forces on the continent struggle against fascism and communism, while in Spain the war has already begun. Alan Furst, whom Vince Flynn has called 'the most talented espionage novelist of our generation,' now gives us a taut, suspenseful, romantic, and richly rendered novel of spies and secret operatives in Paris and New York, in Warsaw and Odessa, on the eve of World War II.

"Cristian Ferrar, a brilliant and handsome Spanish emigre', is a lawyer in the Paris office of a prestigious international law firm. Ferrar is approached by the embassy of the Spanish Republic and asked to help a clandestine agency trying desperately to supply weapons to the Republic's beleaguered army -- an effort that puts his life at risk in the battle against fascism.

"Joining Ferrar in this mission is a group of unlikely men and women: idealists and gangsters, arms traders and aristocrats. From shady Paris nightclubs to whiteshoe New York law firms, from brothels in Istanbul to the dockyards of Poland, Ferrar and his allies battle the secret agents of Hitler and Franco. And what allies they are: there's Max de Lyon, a former arms merchant now hunted by the Gestapo; the Marquesa Maria Cristina, a beautiful aristocrat with a taste for danger; and the Macedonian Stavros who grew up 'fighting Bulgarian bandits. After that, being a gangster was easy.' Then there is Eileen Moore, the American woman Ferrar could never forget."

FOCUS: Imperial History -- The Last Empire / The Great and Holy War

The Last Empire -- The Final Days of the Soviet Union by Serhii Plokhy, BasicBooks '14, $32, 489 pages, ASIN #0465056962. Index, notes, grouping of b&w glossy images.

Any middle-ager can recall that Christmas Day in 1991 brought America a monumental present -- an American victory in the Cold War. It was marked by an address from President George H. W. Bush and the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev as Soviet president.

As reviewer Anne Applebaum, a Pulitzer prize author, states, "....for the first time, Serhii Plokhy tells the story not just from the point of view of Moscow and not from Washington, but also from Kyiv and the other republics where many of the most important decisions were actually made."

Among the subjects the author discusses and insights he provides are:

    *How the collapse of the USSR had very little to do with US policies -- in fact, until the last minute, the US tried to save the empire.

    *How even after letting the republics go, "Russia dreamed about bringing them back into a Moscow-run sphere of influence. Putin's (current) policy has its roots in 1991."

    *Today's Ukrainian crisis could be just the beginning of the new world wide rivalry with Russia.

    *How what we see in the region today threatens to destroy the world order based on the sanctity of the borders negotiated in 1991 as the Soviet Union was falling apart.

Author Serhii Plokhy is a professor of Ukrainian History and director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.

The Great and Holy War -- How World War I Became a Religious Crusade by Philip Jenkins, HarperOne '14, $29.99, 438 pages, ASIN #0062105094. Index, notes, illustration credits, b&w images sprinkled through text.

        

 "The war was fought by the world's leading Christian nations, who presented the conflict as a holy war. Thanks to the emergence of modern media, a steady stream of patriotic and militaristic rhetoric was given to an unprecedented audience, using language that spoke of holy war and crusade, of apocalypse and Armageddon.

"But this rhetoric was not mere state propaganda. Jenkins reveals how the widespread belief in angels and apparitions, visions and the supernatural, was a driving force throughout the war and shaped all three of the Abrahamic religions -- Christianity, Judaism, and Islam -- paving the way for modern views of religions and violence. The disappointed hopes and moral compromises that followed the war also shaped the political climate of the rest of the century, giving rise to such phenomena as Nazism, totalitarianism, and communism."

Author Philip Jenkins is a professor of history and member of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University. He has written several previous books.

 

FOCUS: A Little of This, A Little of That -- The Histories -- Herodotus / Jack of Spies / Cured

The Histories -- Herodotus by Tom Holland, translator, with an Introduction by Paul Cartledge, Viking '14, $40, 834 pages, ASIN #0670024899. Index, notes, 27 pages of maps.

 

Seasoned readers would agree that learning about their background and early lives illuminates the work of such authors as David McCullough and Philip Roth. So it is striking that we know next to nothing about the fifth-century BC life of Herodotus. Why? Largely because it was he who invented the genres of history and biography. Remarkably, to obtain such basic details of Herodotus's life as the names of his parents we have to draw on an entry under the name Herodotus in a 10th century AD Byzantine dictionary. 

Herodotus of Halicarnassus made such an impact on his time that no less an icon as Cicero called him the "Father of History." "Working in a genre-defining amalgam of rational inqujiry and storytelling in the Homeric tradition," writes translator Tom Holland, "he ambitiously strove to document the limits of human knowledge amid a veritable clash of grand civilizations."

As a result, Herodotus's book The Histories became "the earliest surviving work of nonfiction," working its way from the Trojan War up to its thrilling climax: "an epic narrative account of the war between the Persian empire and the Greek city-states in the fifth century BC.

"Larger-than-life personages like Cyrus Xerxes, Darius and Leonidas stand tall through landmark events that ensured the development of Western culture and still capture our modern imagination," according to Holland, "including the odds-defying victory at Marathon, the heroic stand at Thermopylae and the naval triumph at Salamis."

Translator Tom Holland is the author of Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic, which was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize. Paul Cartledge, who wrote the Introduction to this book, is A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge.

Jack of Spies by David Downing, Soho Crime '14, $27.95, 338 pages, ASIN #1616952687.

Setting the table for his newest espionage work, author David Downing writes, "It is 1913 at the beginning of Jack of Spies....and a globe-trotting luxury automobile salesman named Jack McColl is putting his military background and ear for languages to work for the fledgling Royal Navy Intelligence services. The world is on the brink of calamity, as the UK, Germany, and Europe inch closer to the First World War and Jack is about to find himself a player on the biggest of stages." Soon he'll be off to the races.

We had the rare opportunity to overhear author Downing and his Soho editor, Juliet Grames, in a brief Q&A concerning his writing of Jack of Spies:

Q. Spoiling the plot for the reader as little as possible (I hope): Jack of Spies features some fascinating and important political events that, I think, are often forgotten or overshadowed by World War I: the Irish Republican movement; the Indian independence movement; the Paterson strikes and workers' rights; the Tampico Affair. How did you decide to include these episodes in the plot?

A. Well obviously I needed somewhere to send my hero, and in 1914 there was no shortage of places where the British Empire was being threatened in one way or another. In Jack of Spies he turns up in China, the US, Mexico and Ireland, but it could have been any number of exotic destinations. And my female protagonist, Caitlin, a radical New York journalist, would have been all too aware of the Paterson strike and its aftermath in 1913-14.

Q. In the words of John Le Carre', 'Love is whatever you can still betray.' In part, the character Jack McColl is so eager to be a spy because he doesn't have anything tying him down. Falling in love with Caitlin Hanley compromises not only Jack's ability to be a spy but his loyalty to the same country he had so recently been willing to sacrifice it all for. What are your thoughts on the perfect spy, David? Can he or she have love in their life?"

A. Jack McColl is not so much a spy as an intelligence agent whose job involves some spying, and over he series he'll spend more time foiling plots than collecting information. But to answer your question -- I think a perfect spy would have to be a very imperfect human being, and in the long run at least, not a great bet as a partner in love.

David Downing, who grew up in suburban London, has written six books in the John Russell espionage series, set in WWII--era Berlin. He lives in Guildford, England. 

Cured -- How the Berlin Patients Defeated HIV and Forever Changed Medical Science by Nathalia Holt, Dutton '14, $27.95, 313 pages, ASIN #0525953922. Index, timeline, notes, unillustrated.

        

From the dust cover:

"A Young molecular biologist at the forefront of HIV research, Nathalia Holt tells the historic, multilayered, and deeply compassionate story of two patients -- each known in medical literature as the Berlin Patient -- and their young research-minded doctors. The backdrop is nothing less than a revolution in cultural attitudes and medical thinking.

"These two patients' disparate cures came 12 years apart: the first in 1996 from an experimental cancer drug administered on an unusual schedule, the other in 2008 from a bone marrow transplant of cells with a particular genetic mutation. Nathalia Holt connects the molecular dots of these two cases for the first time, providing insight into one of the most remarkable medical breakthroughs of our generation."

Author Nathalia Holt is an award-winning research scientist specializing in HIV biology. He lives in Boston.

FOCUS: A Little of This, A Little of That -- All the Light We Cannot See / Redeemer / The Scorpion's Sting

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, Scribner '14, $27, 530 pages, ASIN #1476746583.

        

We've written a bit in these pages now and then about the four industry review outlets (Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Kirkus, and Library Journal) that evaluate about-to-be-published books (if they feel they merit evaluation) and give a "starred review" to the best of them. So while reviewers for newspapers and other publications make note that a book has won a starred review, it's nothing that we follow slavishly.

When a new book wins two starred reviews, we tend to take increased interest. And when a new work, such as All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, cops starred reviews from all four outlets, we're sure to take it from the pile to bring home and read.

The much decorated Anthony Doerr's new book is described in short on the dust cover, designed to whet readers' interest:

"Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure's reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum's most valuable and dangerous jewel.

"In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure's converge.

Author Anthohy Doerr has won numerous awards on both sides of the pond, including the O. Henry Prize, three Pushcart Prizes, the Rome Prize, and the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award. He lives in Idaho with his wife and two sons.

Redeemer -- The Life of Jimmy Carter by Randall Balmer, BasicBooks '14, $27.99, 273 pages, ASIN #0465029582. Index, no bibliography, notes, two appendices, unillustrated.

        

The transformation of American religious and political culture was far off when Jimmy Carter first ran for president, even though he has to credit evangelical voters, who had long avoided politics, for his election. In his new book, Randall Balmer -- a Dartmouth professor and episcopal priest -- describes how and why Carter burst upon the scene in 1976.

Among the topics Balmer discusses in his book are race, abortion, the fight for women's rights, economic equality, energy independence, and universal healthcare. He tells "how Carter, who grew up in a racially mixed environment -- and claimed that his childhood was 'shaped by black women' -- pandered to segregationists in his 1970 gubernatorial campaign, telling Vernon Jordan at the time, 'You won't like my campaign but you will like my administration....'

"Though personally opposed to abortion, Carper was publically pro-choice, and most people still believe that this was one of the major reasons evangelicals abandoned him. But it was his support for desegregation that truly riled the leaders of the religious right, who used his stance on abortion to galvanize people at the grassroots level."

Author Randall Balmer is the Mandel Family Professor in the Arts and Sciences at Dartmouth and has written more than a dozen books. He lives in Vermont.

The Scorpion's Sting -- Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War by James Oakes, Norton '14, $23.95, 207 pages, ASIN #0393239934. Index, notes, no bibliography or illustrations.

        

From the front cover:

"Surrounded by a ring of fire, the scorpion stings itself to death. The image, widespread among antislavery leaders before the Civil War, captures their long-standing strategy for peaceful abolition: they would surround the slave states with a cordon of freedom.

"They planned to use federal power wherever they could to establish freedom: the western territories, the District of Columbia, the high seas. By constricting slavery they would induce a crisis: slaves would escape in ever-great numbers, the southern economy would falter, and finally the southern states would abolish the institution themselves. For their part the southern states fuly understood this antislavery strategy. They cited it repeatedly as they adopted secession ordinances in response to Lincoln's election."

Author James Oakes has written several acclaimed books on slavery and the Civil War. He lives in New York City.

FOCUS: American History -- Down to the Last Pitch / Desire and the Divine / Storytelling, History and the Postmodern South

Down to the Last Pitch -- How the 1991 Minnesota Twins and the Atlanta Braves Gave Us The Best World Series Of All Time by Tim Wendel, DaCapo '14, $25.99, 271 pages, ASIN #0306822768. Index, selected bibliography, notes, two appendices, grouping of b&w glossy images.

        

The 2013 "worst to first" campaign by the Boston Red Sox to win its third World Series in a decade will go down in baseball annals as one of the best comebacks ever. But trying to be objective (and for this Sox fan, it ain't easy), it's not easy to rebut Tim Wendel's assertion in his newest book that the 1991 season finale between the 1991 Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves was the "Best World Series of All Time."

Why, you ask? Well, consider that both teams -- not just one -- had been cellar-dwellers the previous season. And as for the series itself....well let the author tell it:

"Five of the seven games were decided by a single run; four games, by the last at bat. It was also the first time in World Series history that three games went into extra innings. But this series' greatness lies deeper than the statistics; it was a series in which both teams took risks, followed their guts, and played, from beginning to end, with integrity and heart."

But another thing, argues Wendel, should mark 1991's as a pivotal Series in Major League baseball: "Baseball was in flux in 1991 due to corporate team ownership and its 'moneyball' mentality, fantasy leagues, and brand new retro ballparks." In total, these factors support Wendel's notion that the 1991 World Series was "the last fine time in Baseball."

Tim Wendel, a founding editor of USA Today Baseball Weekly, has written 10 previous books, including Summer of '68. Now living in Virginia, he is writer-in-residence at Johns Hopkins University.

Desire and the Divine -- Feminine Identity in White Southern Women's Writing by Kathaleen E. Amende, Louisiana State University Press '13, $35, 184 pages, ASIN # 080715038X..

         

From the dust jacket:

 

"In this groundbreaking study, Kathaleen E. Amende explores the works and lives of late 20th century Southern women writers to show how conservative Christian ideals of femininity shaped notions of religion, sexuality, and power in the South. Drawing from the work of authors such as Rosemary Daniell and Connie May Fowler, whose characters -- like the authors themselves -- grow up believing that Jesus should be a girl's first 'boyfriend.' Amende demonstrates many ways in which these writers commingled the sexual and the sacred.

"Amende also looks at the writings of Lee Smith, Sheri Reynolds, Dorothy Allison, and Valerie Martin to discuss how Southern women authors and their characters grappled with opposion cultural expectations. Often in their work, characters mingle spiritual devotion and carnal love, allowing for salvation despite rejecting traditional roles or behaviors.

Author Kathaleen Amende, an associate professor of English at Alabama State University, teaches American, southern, and African American literature.

Storytelling, History, and the Postmodern South, Edited by Jason Phillips, Louisiana State University Press '14, $48, 226 pages, ASIN #0807150347. Contributors, notes follow each essay..

        

 In his new book, editor Jason Phillips has gathered together essays by ten historians and literary scholars to "explore the enduring dynamic between history, literature, and power in the American South. The essay titles hint at the content of Phillips' work. Here are a few:

"Rewriting American Borders: The Southern Gothic, Religion, and U.S. Historical Narrative by Farrell O'Gorman; Poison Stories: A Rereading of Revolutionary Virginia's Baptist 'Revolt' by Jewel Spangler; Abjection and White Trash Autobiography by David A. Davis; Her Life, My Past: Rosina Downs and the Proliferation of Racial Categories after the American Civil War by Jim Downs; and The Professional Southerner and the 21st Century by Robert Jackson."

Editor Jason Phillips, an associate professor of history at Mississippi State University, is the author of Diehard Rebels: The Confederate Culture of Invincibility.

 

FOCUS: A Little of This, A Little of That -- Twentieth-Century Color Photographs / 1954 / The Great and Holy War

Twentieth-Century Color Photographs -- Identification and Care by Sylvie Penichon, Getty Conservation Institute '13 paperback, in oversized format on glossy stock, 344 pages, ASIN #1606061569. Index, illustration credits, bibliography, notes, glossary, three appendices.

         

The introduction of photography in 1839 in France and England was nothing less than transformative. "...For the first time nature could be captured by the sun itself without the hand of man," the author observes. But as amazingly true to life as photographs were, "the lack of natural colors was sourly noted, especially with regard to the daguerreotype." As the editor of the Literary Gazette noted, "The images produced by M. Daguerre are exquisitely correct, but gloomy-looking. They resemble moonlight pictures done in ink."

And so, no sooner than the photographic industry had been created, it was off to the races to discover how we perceive color, how different wavelengths of light cause different colors, and how color photography could be made commercially viable.

This coffee table-sized volume does not use either a few images to enhance the narrative nor does it employ narrative to explain an image-driven book. In fact, both modes of complement one another in equal measure, to provide a rich experience for the reader.

Art conservator Sylvie Penichon has divided her material into nine sections: Color Photography in the Nineteenth Century, Additive Color Screen Processes, Pigment Processes, Dye Imbibition Processes, Dye Coupling Processes, Dye Destruction Processes, Dye Diffusion Processes, Dye Mordanting and Silver Toning Processes, and Preservation and Collection Management. Each section except the last begins with a generous treatment of its history, appropriate for photography specialists but accessible for laypeople as well.

Author Sylvie Penichon is a conservator of photographs at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, TX.

1954 -- The Year Willie Mays and the First Generation of Black Superstars Changed Major League Baseball Forever by Bill Madden, DaCapo '14, $25.99, 290 pages, ASIN #0306823322. Index, bibliography, grouping of b&w glossy images.

        

"Baseball did not truly become our national pastime," writes legendary Yankee manager Joe Torre in a review, "until all the game's diverse talents received the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby. Bill McFadden's 1954 vividly chronicles not only the legendary season of the favorite player of my youth, Willie Mays, and the dawn of the career of Henry Aaron, but also the many hardships that the new generation faced during the game's critical transition to inclusion...."

As the author pens in his jacket copy: "1954: Perhaps no single baseball season has so profoundly changed the game forever. In that year -- the same in which the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled, in the case of Brown vs. Board of Education, that segregation of the races be outlawed in America's public schools -- Larry Doby's Indians won an American League record 111 games, dethroned the five-straight World Series champion Yankees, and went on to play Willie Mays's Giants in the first World Series that featured players of color on both teams."

But Madden's treatment is not a monochromatic tableau -- it is instead a study in black and white, for such is the nature of racial integration. Along with such legendary black and Latino players as Ernie Banks, Sandy Amoros, Satchel Paige, Jackie Robinson and Buck O'Neil are such white figures as Leo Durocher, Mel Allen, Yogi Berra, Carl Erskine, and Casey Stengel.

Author Bill Madden is the author of New York Times bestseller Steinbrenner. For more than 30 years, he has covered baseball for the New York Daily News.

The Great and Holy War -- How World War I Became a Religious Crusade by Philip Jenkins, HarperOne '14, $29.99, 438 pages, ASIN #0062105094. Index, notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

        

From the dust jacket:

"The Great and Holy War offers the first look at how religion created and prolonged the First World War. At the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the war, historian Philip Jenkins reveals the powerful religious dimensions of this modern-day crusade, a period that marked a traumatic crisis for Western civilization, with effects that echoed throughout the rest of the 20th century.

"The war was fought by the world's leading Christian nations, who presented the conflict as a holy war. Thanks to the emergence of modern media, a steady stream of patriotic and militaristic rhetoric was given to an unprecedented audience, using language that spoke of holy war and crusade, of apocalypse and Armageddon.

"But this rhetoric was not mere state propaganda. Jenkins reveals how the widespread belief in angels and apparitions, visions and the supernatural, was a driving force throughout the war and shaped all three of the Abrahamic religions -- Christianity, Judaism, and Islam -- paving the way for modern views of religion and violence."

Philip Jenkins, who has written seven previous books, is a professor of history and member of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University.

FOCUS: American History -- Hitler's Generals in America / New Labor in New York / A Very Principled Boy / The Wives of Los Alamos

Hitler's Generals in America -- Nazi POWs and Allied Military Intelligence by Derek R. Mallett, UKentucky Press '13, $35, 264 pages, ASIN #0813142512. Index, bibliography, notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

        

In his new book, historian Derek R. Mallett relates one of the more bizarre sagas in World War II history. "Plush accommodations, walks in the gardens, and serving staff are not usually considered normal amenities for prisoners of war," he writes. "But for German generals captured by Allied forces and held in British 'camps,' this was exactly what was expected."

"While the British government was housing officers in large country mansions -- even using enlisted German soldiers as servants and orderlies --," according to Mallett, "the Americans were less interested in maintaining the perceived class distinctions between the German officers and their men."

Why such favoritism, you ask, to a military responsible for murdering six million Jews in the Holocaust? "British officials viewed their high-ranking prisoners of war as assets for intelligence gathering, spying on the officers in their custody and sometimes becoming their confidants in order to obtain information," the author says. "Unlike the British, the Americans did not feel compelled to provide their prisoners of war with the extra comforts that the German officers thought entitled by their rank and status."

Author Derek R. Mallett is a World War II historian at the Joint Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Accounting Command.

New Labor in New York -- Precarious Workers and the Future of the Labor Movement, Edited by Ruth Milkman and Ed Ott, Cornell UPress '14 paperback. 352 pages, ASIN #0801479371. Index, bibliography, contributors, notes, b&w images sprinkled sparsely through text.

        

"Obituaries for the U.S. labor movement have been a perennial in both academic and journalistic commentary since the 1970s, when declining union membership first attracted widespread attention," writes sociologist/author Ruth Milkman. "Indeed, union density has been in free fall for decades.

"By 2012, only 11.2 per cent of U.S. wage and salary workers, and 6.6 per cent of those in the private sector. were union members. As recently as 1973, the figures were 24.0 per cent and 24.2 per cent, respectively....already far below the mid-1950s peak of about 33 per cent. In the public sector, union density remains much higher (35.9% in 2012), and has been relatively stable over recent decades, even as the gap between public and private sector unionization rates has widened steadily."

Thanks to the "worker center movement," that trend could be, if not reversed, at least slowed. In their Introduction, the authors cite "two community-based centers in New York (along with three more in other parts of the country) oriented toward recent immigrants employed in the burgeoning nonunion sector of the garment industry." Just as unions did in the early 20th century, they began "to offer nonunion immigrants English classes, skills training, and immigration counseling in the new centers."

The authors break their narrative into four sections, each containing several essays from academics in such fields as history, sociology, political science, anthropology, and labor studies, on such topics as union organizing, immigrant workers, living wage campaigns, street vendors, community action, and domestic workers' bills of rights.

About the authors: Ruth Milkman teaches sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center and is academic director of CUNY's Murphy Labor Institute. Ed Ott lectures at CUNY's Murphy Labor Institute and is former executive director of the New York City Central Labor Council.

A Very Principled Boy -- The Life of Duncan Lee, Red Spy and Cold Warrior by Mark A. Bradley, BasicBooks '14, $29.99, 348 pages, ASIN #0465030092. Index, bibliography, notes, grouping of glossy b&w images.

        

From the dust jacket:

"Duncan Chaplin Lee was a Rhodes Scholar, patriot, and descendant of one of America's most distinguished families -- and possibly the best-placed mole ever to infiltrate U.S. intelligence operations. In A Very Principled Boy, intelligence expert and former CIA officer Mark A. Bradley traces the tangled roots of Lee's betrayal and reveals his harrowing struggle to stay one step ahead of America's spy hunters during and after World War II.

"Exposed to leftist politics while studying at Oxford, Lee became a committed, albeit covert, member of the Communist Party. After following 'Wild Bill' Donovan to the newly-formed Office of Strategic Services, Lee rose quickly through the ranks of the U.S. intelligence service -- and just as quickly gained value as a communist spy. As one of the chief aides to the head of the OSS, Lee was uniquely well placed to pass sensitive information to his Soviet handlers, including the likely timeframe of the D-Day invasion and the names of OSS personnel under investigation for suspected communist affiliations."

Author Mark A. Bradley is a former CIA intelligence officer currently serving as an attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice. He holds an M.A. from Oxford University and a J.D. from the University of Virginia and lives in Arlington, VA.

The Wives of Los Alamos -- A Novel by Tarashea Nesbit, Bloomsbury '14, $25, 233 pages, ASIN #1620405032.

        

 The protagonists in Tarashea Nesbit's new novel are military wives whose husbands have been assigned to posts in New Mexico. They were no strangers to secrecy, but in Los Alamos, their lips were sealed even about what their husbands were doing at the lab.

As their mates worked on construction of what they'd later call the atom bomb, the author writes, "babies were born, friendships were forged, children grew up, and Los Alamos gradually transformed into a real community: one that was strained by what they couldn't say out loud or in letters, and by the freedom they didn't have."

In a brief excerpt of the book, the wives reflect on the intimacies they shared and not only with each other:

"We felt close enough to our maids to make confessions, to tell them things we would not tell one another. We believed our maids felt equally close to us -- we did not think we had disrupted their lives or uprooted them from their homes. We thought the Indians, especially, loved their daily trips to this other world.

"The extra money was more than they had ever had, and with it they could afford new additions to houses, new furniture, and even a few inside bathrooms. Some of our husbands wired the pueblo for electricity, and soon refrigerators and appliances appeared. When we were invited to the pueblo, many of us were still rather shocked to find Grand Rapids furniture, brass bedsteads, soda pop, and ordinary dishes in the Indian houses."

Tarashea Nesbit was born in Dayton, OH, one of the lesser-known Manhattan Project locations. She has a M.F.A. degree from Washington University and teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Denver.

 

FOCUS: A Little of This, A Little of That -- The Greek Vase / A Mad Catastrophe / What is Military History? / Inside the Presidency of George H. W. Bush

The Greek Vase -- Art of the Storyteller by John H. Oakley, Getty Publications '13, in oversized format on glossy stock, 155 pages, ASIN #160606147X. Further reading, scores of color glossy images, some full-page, are scattered through text.

        

"Paintings on vases constitute our primary surviving visual records of ancient Greece," writes author John H. Oakley, "which is why illustrations of vases adorn so many books on that topic."

In his latest book, this Virginia archaeologist reveals the various perspectives which the viewer may use in examining these elegant objects, presenting them "not merely as beautiful vessels for water and wine but also as instruments for storytelling and bearers of meaning."

Key elements of Oakley's book include a discussion of how painters and potters worked together and what the scenes the vases depict, including "the adventures of gods and mythological heroes, scenes of sexual intimaacy, and vignettes of social, family, and domestic life." The author divides his narratives into six chapters devoted to "Fabric, Form and Function, Potters and Painters, Depicting the Devine, Meeting the Myth Makers, A Life Well-Lived, and Seducing the Senses."

Author John H. Oakley is Chancellor Professor at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA. The author of numerous books, Oakley maintains a special interest in Greek vase painting, iconography, and Roman sarcophagi.

A Mad Catastrophe -- The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire by Geoffrey Wawro, BasicBooks '14, $29.99, 440 pages, ASIN #0465028357. Index, bibliography, notes, b&w images, including maps, sprinkled through text.

        

"Vienna is the essential starting point for any inquiry into the origins of the First World War," writes historian Geoffrey Wawro at the outset of his latest book.  "There the fires that consumed Europe and the world were lit, then fanned into a blaze. Both the long and short-term causes of the ruinous conflict can be traced back to the Habsburgs' peculiar worldview and fractious central European holdings.

"The short-term cause of the conflict, all agree, was the July Crisis of 1914, which followed the assassination of Habsburg archduke Franz Ferdinand in June by a Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip. The escalating tensions in July, driven by the suspicion that the Russian-backed Serbian government had aided the assassination plot, exploded into war in August.

"The war's long-term causes included imperialism: the competition among the European great powers, the United States, and Japan for new markets, raw materials, and naval bases, chiefly in Africa and Asia. Another long-term cause of the Great War was the existence of contending alliance systems: the Anglo-French-Russian Triple Entente and the German-Austrian-Italian Triple Alliance."

Author Geoffrey Wawro studied at Brown and Yale and is a professor of history and director of the Military History Center at the University of North Texas. He has written five previous books and lives in Dallas.

What is Military History? Second Edition, revised and updated by Stephen Morillo with Michael F. Pavkovic, Polity '13 paperback. 165 pages,      

ASIN #45 633919. Index, further reading, notes, unillustrated.

From the back cover:

"This clear, readable introduction to the popular field of military history shows that....(it) encompasses not just accounts of campaigns and battles but includes a wide range of perspectives on all aspects of past military organization and activity.

"In concise chapters it explains the fundamental features of the field, including: The history of military history, showing how it has developed from ancient times to the present; The key ideas and concepts that shape analysis of military activity; The current controversies about which military historians argue, and why they are important; A survey of who does military history, where it is taught and published, and how it is practiced; and A look a where military history is headed in the future.

About the authors: Stephen Morillo is chair of the Social Sciences Division at Wabash College. Michael F. Pavkovic is a professor at the U.S. Naval War College.

Inside the Presidency of George H. W. Bush, Edited by Michael Nelson and Barbara A. Perry, Cornell UPress '14 paperback. $19.95, 280 pages, ASIN #0801479274.

        

 "Although it lasted only a single term," write authors Michael Nelson and Barbara A. Perry, "the presidency of George H.W. Bush was an unusually eventful one, encompassing the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, the dissolution of the Societ Union, the invasion of Panama, the Persian Gulf War, and contentious confirmation hearings over Clarence Thomas and John Tower."

As sources for their conclusions, the authors draw on interviews with senior White House and Cabinet officials, conducted under the auspices of the Bush Oral History Project. "Typically," they write, "interviews explored officials' memories of their service with President Bush and their careers prior to joining the administration. Interviews also offer political and leadership lessons they had gleaned as eyewitnesses to and shapers of history."

About the authors: Michael Nelson is the Fulmer Professor of Political Science at Rhodes College and a Senior Fellow at the University of Virginia's Miller Center. Barbara A. Perry is a Senior Fellow in the Miller Center's Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia. Both authors have written and/or edited numerous previous books.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FOCUS: A Potpourri -- Collecting Shakespeare / Maya Lords and Lordship / Shotgun Lovesongs

Collecting Shakespeare -- The Story of Henry and Emily Folger by Stephen H. Grant, Johns Hopkins UPress '14, $29.95, 244 pages, ASIN #1421411873. Index, bibliography, notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

        

"The story of the Folgers is a double love story," writes author Stephen H. Grant in his Prologue: "first, about the love between Henry (1857-1930) and Emily (1858-1936) Folger and, second, about their common love of Shakespeare and his writings. Their story displays a rare single-mindedness of purpose. Early in their married life, they were particularly attracted to Shakespeare (1564-1616) and his time....

"In every phase of developing the collection the couple worked as a team. They remained childless throughout their marriage. A journalist reported that Henry Folger referred to his books as 'the boys.' The Folgers knew that their collecting obsession turned them into recluses. Such is the price to pay for the enterprise and its lofty goal. They established limits to the time they could spare for family visits. They opened their doors only twice a year, on Thanksgiving and New Year's. Nieces and nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews described with awe and delight these rare occasions."

Today, the Folgers' library houses 82 First Folios, 275,000 books, and 60,000 manuscripts and welcomes more than 100,000 visitors a year. How did the Folgers afford to support their hobby, you ask?  It helped that Henry for many years was president of Standard Oil Company of New York, "where he was a trusted associate of John D. Rockefeller, Sr."

Author Stephen H. Grant is a senior fellow at the Association of Diplomatic Studies and Training and author of a biography of Peter Strickland.

Maya Lords and Lordship -- The Formation of Colonial Society in Yucatan, 1360-1600 by Sergio Quezada, translated by Terry Rugeley, Oklahoma UP '14, $34.95,  248 pages, ASIN #080614422X. Index, bibliography, notes, glossary, four appendices, b&w images sprinkled through text.

        

"Interest in understanding the lords and lordships of indigenous Meso-America is as old as the conquest itself," writes author Sergio Quezada in his Introduction. "The long list of individuals contributing to this elusive field of knowledge includes Spaniards: conquistadors, tribute-holders, friars, and royal functionaries who composed chronicles, memoirs, accounts, orders, and vocabularyists, among other documents.

"So, too, there were the Indian peoples themselves: those nobels of commoners who by means of their colonial codices, books, lawsuits, and legal depositions left testimony of their ancestors and their ancient privileges. Many years later, in the contemporary period, a veritable army of researchers has concerned itself with studying indigenous lords through the theories and methods of their specific disciplines, creating in the process an impressive and almost overwhelming body of articles, monographs, and primary sources."

Sergio Quezada is a research professor at the Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan and a member of the Mexican Academy of History. Terry Rugeley is professor of Mexican and Latin American history at the University of Oklahoma. 

Shotgun Lovesongs by Nicholas Butler, Dunne/St. Martin's Press '14, $25.99, 306 pages, ASIN #1250039819.

        

 From the dust jacket:

"Welcome to Little Wing. It's a place like hundreds of others, nothing special, really. But for four friends -- all born and raised in this small Wisconsin town -- it is home. And now they are men, coming into their own or struggling to do so.

"One of them never left, still working the family farm that has been tilled for generations. But others felt the need to move on, with varying degrees of success. One trades commodities, another took to the rodeo circuit, and one of them even hit it big as a rock star. And then there's Beth, a woman who has meant something special in each of their lives.

"Now all four are brought together for a wedding. Little Wing seems even smaller than before. While lifelong bonds are still strong, there are stresses -- among the friends, between husbands and wives. There will be heartbreak, but there will also be hope, healing, even heroism as these memorable people learn the true meaning of adult friendship and love."

Author Nickolas Butler was raised in Eau Claire, WI. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, and he is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

FOCUS: A Potpourri -- Vikings -- Life and Legend / Imagined Civilizations / The Twenty-Fifth Amendment

 

Vikings -- Life and Legend, Edited by Gareth Williams, Peter Pentz, Matthias Wemhoff, Cornell UPress '14 sturdy paperback, with fold-in front and back covers, in oversized format on glossy stock. 288 pages, ASIN #0801479428. Index, illustration credits, timeline of the Viking Age, list of exhibits, list of lenders, bibliography, notes, scores of color and b&w glossy images, some full-page..

           

Bookshelves are groaning under the weight of scores of volumes about the Vikings, their history, culture, and their legends. But few can surpass the detail and imagery of this new volume published by Cornell University Press.

"The word 'Viking' is used to mean a variety of different things," writes Editor Gareth Williams in his Introduction. "In old Norse, the words vikingr and viking had quite specific meanings relating to raiding and piracy...., but 'Viking' is also widely used today to refer to the peoples and culture of Scandinavia in the 'Viking Age' (800-1050), and sometimes even as an ethnic label." He goes on to suggest the term may have originated with pirates who frequented inlets from which they emerged to attack passing ships or may refer to inhabitants of one particular bay.

The editors have divided their narrative into five sections: 1) Contacts & Exchange, 2) Warfare and Military Expansion, 3) Power & Aristocracy, 4) Belief and Ritual, and 5) Ships & the Vikings, each containing several illustrated essays on subjects ranging from a map of the Viking world to the way of the warrior, from great halls and palaces to the custom of ritual burial.

About the Editors: Gareth Williams is Curator of Early Medieval Coins at the British Museum. Peter Pentz is a Curator of Danish Prehistory at the National Museum of Denmark. Matthias Wemhoff is Director of the Museum fur Vor-und Fruhgeschichte, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

Imagined Civilizations -- China, the West, and their First Encounter by Roger Hart, Johns Hopkins UPress '13, 374 pages, ASIN #1421406063. Index, bibliography, three appendices, footnotes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

        

What, you ask, is an imagined civilization? Well, to the rescue comes author Roger Hart, whose Introduction holds the answer. "'Civilizations' are no less imagined than 'nations,' he writes. "During the later decades of the 20th century, the term 'imagined communities' gained considerable prominence through critical studies of various forms of nationalism. Yet many of these same critical studies reinforced the assumed reality of 'the West.'"

"This book proposes to extend the approach taken in critical studies of nations by applying the term 'imagined' to civilizations, in a similarly critical fashion. To say that civilizations, such as 'China' and 'the West,' are imagined is not to dismiss them as somehow merely fictive and therefore without significance, but rather to suggest an alternative starting point for historical inquiry."

The book's back cover expands upon the definition:

"Accounts of the 17th century Jesuit Mission to China have often celebrated it as the great encounter of two civilizations. The Jesuits portrayed themselves as wise men from the West who used mathematics and science in service of their mission. Chinese literati-official Xu Guangqi (1562-1633), who collaborated with the Italizn Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) to translate Euclid's Elements into Chinese, reportedly recognized the superiority of Western mathematics and science and converted to Christianity. Most narratives relegate Xu and the Chinese to subsidiary roles as the Jesuits' translators, followers, and converts. Imagined Civilizations tells the story from the Chinese point of view.

Autohor Roger Hart is director of the Confucius Institute and an associate professor of history at Texas Southern University.

The Twenty-Fifth Amendment: Its Complete History and Applications, Fordham UPress ''14, $30, 424 pages, ASIN #0823252019. Index, bibiography, notes, ten appendices, b&w images sprinkled through text.

        

A brief summary from the rear cover:

"This new edition of The Twenty-Fifth Amendment: Its Complete History and Applications updates John Feerick's landmark study with the Amendment's uses in the past 20 years and how those uses (along with new legal scholarship) have changed the Amendment and perceptions of presidential disability in general.

"In its formulation, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment was criticized as vague and undemocratic, but it has made possible swift and orderly successions to the highest offices in the U.S. government during some of the most extraordinary events in American history.

"The extent of its authority has been tested over the years: During the Watergate crisis, it was proposed that the Amendment might afforda means by which a President could transfer presidential power during an impeachment proceeding, and it was also suggested that the Amendment could authorize a Vice President and Cabinet to suspend a President during a Senate impeachment trial. Where once presidential disability was stigmatizd, today a president under general anesthesia cedes presidential authority for the length of the procedure with little controversy."

Author John D. Ferrick is Professor at and former Dean of Fordham Law School. In 1964 he was a member of the American Bar Association Conference on Presidential Inability and Vice Presidential Vacancy, the recommendations of which helped shape the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

 

 

 

FOCUS: A Potpourri -- Body Counts / The Haunted Life / Rewiring the Real

Body Counts -- A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival by Sean Strub, Scribner '14, $30, 420 pages, ASIN #1451661959. Index, b&w images sprinkled through text, no notes or bibliography.

      

A brief excerpt:

December 1989 New York City: I am nervously sitting in a pew near the front of St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York where John Cardinal O'Connor is about to celebrate Mass. It has been years since I attended a Catholic Mass and even longer since I took communion, the holiest of sacraments, but that is why I am here. Looking up at the cathedral's soaring nave, I remember the awe I felt as an altar boy at St. Mary's in Iowa City and, later, the anger when the Church betrayed me.

"It is bitterly cold, a near record low. Many parishoners wear heavy coats as they hold hymnals in gloved hands. Slush-covered boots have left a wet trail down the long center aisle. There's a puddle under my pew. The mood in the church is tense -- nothing like the droning boredom of the Masses of my youth. As the minutes pass, I think of the Jesuits who taught me as a child that a good Catholic acts upon the church's social teachings, even if that means confronting the church. My hands are trembling with the cold, my apprehension and other feelings too deep to name.

"Outside St. Patrick's, forty-five hundred angry men and women have assembled, packing Fifth Avenue and changing and waving placards that read 'Curb Your Dogma,' 'Papal Bull,' and 'Condoms Not Coffins.' Fists pump the air, bullhorns blare. ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, is almost carnival-like spirit to the demonstration with ACT UP affinity groups, such as Church Ladies for Choice, the Hail Marys, and Speaking in Tongues, performing their protests.

"In ACT UP, high camp and high seriousness are uniquely compatible. An artist named Ray Navarro is dressed as Jesus Christ, swathed in a white shroud, carrying a large wooden cross over his near-skeletal shoulder. His bearded face is gaunt, and he wears a crown of thorns over his long, thinning hair. Despite the cold, Ray looks beatific. He will be dead in less than a year. Keith Haring is there, too, in a knitted cap with a long hand-knitted scarf wrapped around his slender neck. He has two months left."

Author Sean Strub is an activist, writer, and executive director of the Sero Project, which combats the criminalization of people with HIV/AIDS.

The Haunted Life and Other Writings by Jack Kerouac, Edited by Todd F. Tietchen, DaCapo '14, $24.99, 193 pages, ASIN #0306823047.

         

A brief excerpt from The Haunted Life and Other Writings:

"Peter got up off his knees and stood surveying his room, idly lighting a fresh cigarette. It was a small but useful room, useful in the sense that it fitted his personality. Peter was the 'den-type.' He wanted a place to retreat to, a place -- a room -- containing certain necessities which he felt, as perhaps an Alaskan trapper might feel, would be near at hand in an emergency unpredictable in length.

"Here were stored his rations of the spirit....books, a typewriter, paper, pencils and pens, envelopes, old letters, recent letters, mementoes of childhood and boyhood, scrapbooks containing pertinent clippings and notebooks containing impertinent remarks, culsters of junk bearing no relation to one another and long out of purpose -- pieces of colored crayon and chalk, marbles and mugs, buttons, Yale locks, rolls of tape and string, seashore rocks and shells, matchbooks filled with assortments of tacks and small magnets and bottle caps, pieces of elastic and bunting, empty inkbottles, old keys, all the minutiae a lad collects and, when he is fortunate enough, keeps, as a trinket-link with the always golden past."

Author Jack Kerouac was born in 1922 in Lowell, MA. The best-known of his many works, On the Road, published in 1957, was an international bestseller. He died at age 47.

Editor Todd F. Tietchen is an assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, where he teaches courses in Beat writing and contemporary American lierature.

Rewiring the Real -- In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo. Columbia UPress '14, 322 pages, ASIN #0231160402. Index, notes, several groupings of b&w glossy images..

        

Most readers will recognize and, perhaps, have read at least one of the four authors in the title. As author Mark C. Taylor writes in his introduction, "William Gaddis is arguably the most underappreciated major 20th century novelist.  One of the reasons for this is that his most important works -- The Recognitions and JR -- are long and difficult.....

A brief excerpt:

"All of Richard Powers's novels take as their point of departure a scientific theory or technological innovation. Powers immerses himself in scientific literature and keeps himself informed about the current state of technology: he is the rare novelist who actually understands the science and technology about which he writes....

"Mark Danielewski's style is always indirect -- in the world his work portrays nothing is ever certain, and everything is subject to endless revision. Dennis Potter's singing Detective might well have been describing House of Leaves when he repeats again and again, 'All clues, no solutions.'...."

"DeLillo picks up where Gaddis leaves off. By the last decade of the 20th century, counterfeits of counterfeits have become the currency of the realm, and JR has grown up to become a confidence man trading virtual securities that are anything but secure."

Author Mark C. Taylor is professor of religion, chair of the Department of Religion, and codirector of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University. He has written more than 25 books.

 

FOCUS: Memoirs -- A Farm Dies Once a Year / Under Magnolia

 

A Farm Dies Once a Year -- A Memoir by Arlo Crawford, Henry Holt '14, $25, 158 pages, ASIN #080509816X. Unillustrated.

        

A brief excerpt from the book's first chapter:

"When I was thirty-one years old, I went home to spend a summer with my mother and father on the farm in Pennsylvania where I grew up. I left Massachusetts in late morning, drove the last part of the turnpike in the early dusk, and left the pavement in full dark. The sign for Anderson Hollow Road was chest deep in trumpet vine and stinging nettle. A rabbit skittered out across the dirt, frantic in the bright headlights and the rising dust.

"Beyond the trees that lined the road, the gentle fields rolled off toward the creek, and the insects crawled in the grass, and the deer grazed silently in the low places, and the fish swam among the water weeds. At the end, my parent's farm was asleep in the dark hollow, breathing deep breaths, everything growing and dying at once.

"Everytime I'd come back to the farm as an adult, during holidays or just to see my parents, I'd always just been a visitor. I'd never had any interest in being a farmer, and I'd never wanted to live there. From a very young age,  I'd been eager to live in cities and around other people, so I'd left the farm when I was sixteen, first for boarding school, then college, then New York, and eventually Massachusetts.

I went home for longer periods sometimes in those years, but just to stay a few months and earn enough money to move on to something else. The place had always made me a little anxious. It was so isolated and lonely, the work there was so intense."

Author Arlo Crawford grew up on New GLory Farm, his family's farm in rural Pennsylvania. He has contributed pieces to newspapers and magazines and lives in San Francisco.

Under Magnolia -- A Southern Memoir by Frances Mayes, Crown '14, $26, 293 pages, ASIN #0307885917. Notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

        

Any of the many admirers of Frances Mayes's Under the Tuscan Sun will welcome her latest work, a coming-of-age memoir set in the deep South, "her decision to leave it behind to explore the world and her return there to start a new life."

In a brief Q&A, Mayes discusses the writing of Under Magnolia -- A Southern Memoir:

Q. As a child, you were filled with curiosity and a sense of discovery -- always reading under the covers and searching for secrets. How did your upbringing in Fitzgerald, GA, instill in you this sense of wonder and adventure?

A. Families all over have secrets and weird people and foibles, and mine did  too. Beyond that, most of my wonder and adventure came from two sources, books and the place itself. I read my way around the library as many writers have. At first I thought writers were all dead but when I learned that you could be a live writer, I got the idea that writing was the best thing one could do. When I was nine, I started a novel called Girl of the Highways. It was about a runaway -- which I longed to be. But the place! I loved the moss-hung swamps with cypress trees growing out of the black water. I loved the hot fields, the big smeary sunsets, the springs and brown rivers, the great shade trees, the short history of my town and how it came to overlay the land.

Q. In your chapter about Randolph Macon you vividly give a portrait of life at a southern girl's school. Did you enjoy your experience there?

A. Mixed. Many of the seminal experiences of my youth took place there. It's where I awakened to the wide world and to the shocking idea of intellectual rigor. I met many fabulous friends. Even in the sixties, it was almost comically repressed. I tried to write it truly and with humor and affection. But some who went there will not be amused.

Author Frances Mayes's diverse literary production includes memoirs, a novel, and five books of poetry. Her books have been translated into more than 50 languages. She divides her time between Tuscany and North Carolina.

FOCUS: A Little of This / A Little of That -- The Wherewithal

The Wherewithal -- A Novel in Verse by Philip Schultz, Norton '14, $25.95, ASIN #0393240940.

        

A novel in verse may be a literary genre new to many readers. In his new book, Pulitzer Prize-winner Philip Schultz recounts the story of a traumatized young man dodging the Vietnam War's draft and, as such, is an astonishing meditation on the nature of evil and the destructivity of war.

"The Wherewithal opens in the San Francisco of 1968, a time and place both freewheeling and out of control," writes Philip Schultz. "Henryk Wyrzkowski, the troubled, haunted narrator of the book, works in the basement office of the city's welfare department, watching the bottom of the world from his window and shuffling papers for the least fortunate of the city's citizenry.

"Henryk is also hiding from a very dark past, and he busies himself in the basement with translating his mother's diaries from the Polish. The diaries recount the horrifying history witnessed by Henryk's mother as she tries to hide Jews in her town -- former friends, neighbors, school mates -- from her fellow Polish neighbors who slaughtered them for their property during World War II."

Author Philip Schultz has written seven collections of poetry. He is the founder and director of the Writers Studio and lives in East Hampton, N.Y.