Books

• 
• 9-26-16
  

  Review of Monique Laney's “German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past During the Civil Rights Era”

  by Robert Huddleston

  "While library shelves are sagging from books covering the Second World War, room must be found for Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie."

• 
• 9-23-16
  

  Review of Kenneth Robert Janken’s “The Wilmington Ten: Violence, Injustice, and the Rise of Black Politics in the 1970s”

  by John L. Godwin

  Kenneth Janken is a distinguished scholar in his field but this book leaves too many topics unexplored and feels strangely stuck in the past.

• 
• 9-14-16
  

  Review of Arkady Ostrovsky’s “The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev’s Freedom to Putin’s War”

  by Walter G. Moss

  After the USSR fell Russia needed an ideology.  Putin settled on patriotism, collectivism, derzhavnost—a tradition of being a great geopolitical state power that commands the attention of other countries—and gosudarstvennichestvo, the primacy of the state.

• 
• 9-9-16
  

  Review of John le Carré's "The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life"

  by Murray Polner

  A memoir that shows the author to great advantage.

• 
• 8-30-16
  

  Review of Jeffrey Rosen's " Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet"

  by Henry D. Fetter

  Today, no one with the high profile, politically engaged and robustly controversial record of Brandeis is likely to be nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court.

• 
• 8-27-16
  

  Review of Howard Means's "67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence"

  by Luther Spoehr

  Clearing the smoke away from 13 fateful seconds.

• 
• 8-11-16
  

  Review of Lloyd C. Gardner's "The War on Leakers: National Security and American Democracy, From Eugene V. Debs to Edward Snowden"

  by Murray Polner

  Obama's blind spot.

• 
• 8-11-16
  

  Review of Michael Leahy's "The Last Innocents: The Collision of the Turbulent Sixties and the Los Angeles Dodgers"

  by Henry D. Fetter

  The unfulfilled ambitions of this book are probably beside the point for most readers who will be much more interested in the compelling baseball stories.

• 
• 7-29-16
  

  Review of Brian J. Snee's "Lincoln Before Lincoln: Early Cinematic Adaptations of the Life of America’s Greatest President "

  by Ron Briley

  There's Spielberg's Lincoln and then there's all the rest.  His featured the Great Emancipator.  The others mostly focused on Lincoln's role as the savior of the Union.

• 
• 7-21-16
  

  Review of Ronald A. Smith’s "Wounded Lions: Joe Paterno, Jerry Sandusky, and the Crisis in Penn State Athletics"

  by Ron Briley

  "Wounded Lions" by Penn State sport historian Ronald Smith makes extensive use of university archives to document how Penn State lost control of its athletic program, and how Paterno played a key role in this process.

• 
• 7-20-16
  

  Review of Laurent Dubois’s “The Banjo: America’s African Instrument”

  by Mark Gamin

  The fascinating story of the banjo.

• 
• 7-20-16
  

  Review of Gary J. Byrne’s "Crisis of Character: A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses his Firsthand Experience with Hillary, Bill, and How They Operate”

  by Vaughn Davis Bornet

  This is a bad book written by an author with an ax to grind.

• 
• 7-19-16
  

  Review of “Democracy for Realists” by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels

  by Ilya Somin

  In "Democracy for Realists," Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels offer a powerful challenge to popular assumptions about democracy.

• 

• Review of Richard Rashke's "Children's Letters To A Holocaust Survivor: Dear Esther"

  by James Winchell

  Good intentions gone awry, says the reviewer, of this volume of letters.  But the author's play, reprinted in the book, is superb.

• 
• 7-14-16
  

  Review of Nancy Isenberg’s “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America”

  by Daniel Lazare

  A well-timed book about the monsters that middle-class America tried to repress.

• 

• Review of Glenn Stout's "The Selling of the Babe: The Deal that Changed Baseball and Created a Legend"

  by Luther Spoehr

  "No, No, Nanette" had nothing to do with it.

• 
• 7-7-16
  

  Review of Ahmed White’s “The Last Great Strike:  Little Steel, the CIO, and the Struggle for Labor Rights in New Deal America”

  by Robert D. Parmet

  Ahmed White’s compels a reevaluation of the Wagner Act and its impact, with the reality being that from its inception its enemies refused to accept it.

• 
• 6-29-16
  

  Review of "Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker: The Miracle of Our Continuance"

  by Tom Cornell

  A coffee-table book for the Catholic Worker movement leader Dorothy Day, the best journalist of her time.

• 
• 6-27-16
  

  “The Terrible Power over Human Lives of Ideological Abstractions”

  by Walter G. Moss

  A review of Aileen Kelly’s "The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen."

• 
• 6-24-16
  

  How Accurate Is the New Movie About the Free State of Jones?

  by Ron Briley

  It’s based on historian Victoria E. Bynum’s “The Free State of Jones: Mississippi's Longest Civil War.”