Books

Lawrence S. Wittner: Review of Joel Shatzky's "Option Three: A Novel About the University" (Blue Thread, 2012)

To what extent is education corrupted when it becomes intertwined with profit-making businesses?

Murray Polner: Review of Richard Breitman and Allan Lichtman's "FDR and the Jews" (Belknap, 2013)

Years after World War II ended I often visited Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, nicknamed the “Fourth Reich” because of its large number of Central European Jews who had escaped the Nazis, the Kissinger family among them. Whether they were eligible to vote or not, they overwhelmingly supported FDR, grateful for having been welcomed into the country. Nearby, a goodly number of them lived on the Upper West Side, all well-served by German-Jewish cultural and social societies and Aufbau, a literate, once-thriving German language Jewish newspaper.

Jim Cullen: Review of George Packer's "The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013)

Coming in at over 400 hefty pages, The Unwinding offers a granular, empirical confirmation, at the level of lived experience, of what many of us experience as the defining perception of our time. And that is that we are moving backward, that the hard-won gains of the welfare state -- a story whose lineaments Richard Hofstadter sketched in The Age of Reform (1955) and whose trajectory extended into the Great Society -- are unraveling at an accelerating rate.

Murray Polner: Review of Kenneth T. MacLeish’s "Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community" (Princeton, 2013)

Fort Hood, in Texas, is named after Confederate General John Bell Hood, who lost his arm and leg at Gettysburg and Chickamauga but was defeated at Nashville and Franklin, Tennessee. It employs 50,000 troops and civilian employees and is close by the city of Killeen, population 130,000, and which, like most military satellite cities and towns, thrives because of its location, selling food, goods of all sorts, housing, and loans, some no doubt predatory. In fact, as Kenneth T. MacLeish writes, Killeen is “more prosperous than Austin, the state capital, home to a large university and a booming tech sector.” 

Luther Spoehr: Review of David L. Kirp’s “Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America’s Schools” (Oxford, 2013)

David Kirp, professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and a longtime observer of American education, has written an invaluable book that is remarkable for its good sense and insight, and even more remarkable for appearing in the midst of an ongoing educational conversation that has long been marked by an almost willful air of unreality. 

Steve Hochstadt: Review of Lawrence S. Wittner's "What's Going On at UAardvark?" (Solidarity Press, 2013)

Steve Hochstadt teaches at Illinois College and blogs for HNN.What if the trend toward commercialization of higher education continued and accelerated? What would the fully commercial university look like? Lawrence Wittner presents UAardvark: every building named after a corporation; TV sets that can’t be turned off, broadcasting commercials in classrooms, dorms, and offices; and a president negotiating to store radioactive waste in the New Technology Center.Wittner taught history for thirty-six years at the State University of New York at Albany, and has widely published on peace movements and nuclear disarmament. His recent memoir, Working for Peace and Justice, identifies him as an activist intellectual; he serves on the national board of Peace Action. This is his first novel.

Jim Cullen: Review of Jeffrey Selingo's "College (Un)Bound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students" (New Harvest, 2013)

Jim Cullen teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York. His last book, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions, was published earlier this year by Oxford University Press. His next book, A Brief History of the Modern Media, will be published next year by Wiley-Blackwell.

Ron Briley: Review of David Simonelli's "Working Class Heroes: Rock Music and British Society in the 1960s and 1970s" (Lexington Books, 2013)

Ron Briley reviews books for the History News Network and is a history teacher and an assistant headmaster at Sandia Preparatory School, Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is the author of "The Politics of Baseball: Essays on the Pastime and Power at Home and Abroad."For anyone coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s, Working Class Heroes will evoke the rock soundtrack of youthful rebellion. But unlike the many memoirs by musicians which tend to dominate rock music literature, awash with accounts of sex and drugs, David Simonelli, associate professor of history at Youngstown State University, employs the British rock scene from the Beatles to the Sex Pistols to make important observations on the politics, economics, and social class attitudes of Britain during the 1960s and 1970s.

Bernard von Bothmer: Review of Harold Holzer's "The Civil War in 50 Objects" (Viking, 2013)

Bernard von Bothmer is an adjunct professor of history at the University of San Francisco and Dominican University of California. He is the author of "Framing the Sixties: The Use and Abuse of a Decade from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush" (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010). The Civil War, the nation’s most important event, is the subject of seemingly endless fascination. This majestic compilation of objects from the era reminds us why.

Jeffrey Aaron Snyder: Review of James Patterson's "The Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Changed America" (Basic Books, 2012)

Jeffrey Aaron Snyder is a historian of education who writes about the twentieth-century United States.  He teaches at Carleton College.When did “the Sixties” begin? The answer, James Patterson says, is 1965, after which “life in the United States would never be the same again.” When President Lyndon Baines Johnson lit the national Christmas tree in December of 1964, he declared that “these are the most hopeful times in all the years since Christ was born in Bethlehem.” One year later, Watts was still smoldering while thousands of demonstrators gathered in front of the White House to chant “Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids have you killed today?” The Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Changed America tells the absorbing story of how we got from the promise of Bethlehem to the nightmares of Vietnam and race riots.

Luther Spoehr: Review of Jill Lepore’s “The Story of America: Essays on Origins” (Princeton, 2012)

Luther Spoehr is an HNN book editor and a senior lecturer at Brown University.

Murray Polner: Review of Edward Achorn's "The Summer of Beer and Whiskey" (PublicAffairs, 2013)

Murray Polner wrote “Branch Rickey: A Biography.”

Jim Cullen: Review of Michael J. Gerhardt's "The Forgotten Presidents: Their Untold Constitutional Legacy" (Oxford, 2013)

Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. His latest book, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions, was recently published by Oxford University Press. Cullen blogs at American History Now.

Review of Andrei Lankov's "The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia" (Oxford, 2013)

by David Austin Walsh

North Korea is a laughingstock in the United States. But it's actually a tragedy.

Bernard von Bothmer: Review of Ron Reagan's "My Father at 100" (Viking Penguin, 2011)

Bernard von Bothmer is an adjunct professor of history at the University of San Francisco and Dominican University. He is the author of "Framing the Sixties: The Use and Abuse of a Decade from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush" (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010).Ron Reagan, one of only twenty-seven living children of American presidents, has written a fascinating portrait of the nation’s fortieth president. My Father at 100 is a moving tribute to the eternal, and complicated, bonds between fathers and sons and between children and aging or deceased parents. It also offers detailed insight into the character and personality of the enigmatic Ronald Reagan.

Jim Cullen: Review of Alex Sayf Cummings's "Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century" (Oxford, 2013)

Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. His latest book, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions, was recently published by Oxford University Press. Cullen blogs at American History Now.

Murray Polner: Review of Richard Rashke's "Useful Enemies: John Demjanjuk and America's Open-Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals" (Delphinium, 2013)

Murray Polner, a regular HNN book reviewer, wrote No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and When Can We Come Home, about Vietnam War resisters.

Robert D. Parmet: Review of Lisa Phillips's "A Renegade Union: Interracial Organizing and Labor Radicalism" (Illinois, 2012)

Robert D. Parmet is Professor of History at York College of The City of New York and author of The Master of Seventh Avenue: David Dubinsky and the American Labor Movement.

Ron Briley: Review of David W. Noble's "Debating the End of History" (Minnesota, 2012)

Ron Briley reviews books for the History News Network and is a history teacher and an assistant headmaster at Sandia Preparatory School, Albuquerque, New Mexico.In Debating the End of History, distinguished scholar David W. Noble, professor emeritus of American studies at the University of Minnesota, asks difficult but essential questions which must be addressed if we are to forge a sustainable future in the age of climate change. Noble challenges the conventional wisdom of perpetual economic growth upon which bourgeois culture is founded. He asks how it is possible to have continuous growth within a finite earth. In seeking an answer to this inquiry, Noble examines the evolution of his academic career within the historical and cultural context of a growing discourse on the feasibility of continuous economic growth.

Jim Cullen: Review of Nate Silver's "The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail -- But Some Don't" (Penguin, 2012)

Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. His new book, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions, was recently published by Oxford University Press. Cullen blogs at American History Now.