Books

Jim Cullen: Review of Andrew Piper's "Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times" (Chicago, 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, has just been published by Oxford University Press. Cullen blogs at American History Now.

Ron Briley: Review of Robert O. Self's "All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s" (Hill and Wang, 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.

Ron Briley: Review of Martin Duberman’s "Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left" (New Press, 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.

Jim Cullen: Review of Kevin Phillips's "1775: A Good Year for Revolution" (Viking, 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, has just been published by Oxford University Press. Cullen blogs at American History Now.

Ron Briley: Review of Joseph McCartin's "Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America" (Oxford, 2011)

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 December 2012, the state of Michigan, long a bastion for organized labor, enacted right-to-work legislation; following the examples of neighboring Midwestern states Wisconsin and Ohio, which placed limitations on the collective bargaining rights of public unions -- albeit the Ohio legislation was overturned in a state referendum. To provide some historical perspective on the difficulties confronting public unions and the labor movement in general, one would do well to consult Joseph A. McCartin’s Collision Course, chronicling the rise of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) and its demise in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan fired striking members of the union.

Luther Spoehr: Review of Dennis Drabelle's "The Great American Railroad War: How Ambrose Bierce and Frank Norris Took on the Notorious Central Pacific Railroad" (St. Martin's Press, 2012)

Luther Spoehr is an HNN book editor and senior lecturer at Brown University.For readers still digesting Richard White’s remarkable (and remarkably long and controversial) Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (2012), Dennis Drabelle’s The Great American Railroad War can serve as an appealing dessert. Those still thinking about reading White’s book will find The Great American Railroad War a stimulating appetizer.

Lawrence S. Wittner: Review of "The United States and the Second World War," edited by G. Kurt Piehler and Sidney Pash (Fordham, 2010)

Lawrence S. Wittner is Professor of History emeritus at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Working for Peace and Justice: Memoirs of an Activist Intellectual (Tennessee).

Murray Polner: Review of William Thomas Allison's "My Lai: An American Atrocity in the Vietnam War" (Johns Hopkins, 2012)

Murray Polner is a regular HNN book reviewer.The My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians on March 16, 1968, is symbol of the moral morass of the Vietnam War. Elderly men, women, and children, were slaughtered by rampaging U.S. soldiers of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade of the Americal Division. The intrepid Seymour Hersh first broke the story for the Dispatch News Service, hardly a major news network. Though My Lai has since become synonomous with Vietnam War-era atrocities, it by no means the only murder of civilians in that brutal war; the South Koreans and both the North and South Vietnamese were especially brutal.

W.F. Burke: Review of H.W. Brands's "The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace" (Doubleday 2012)

W. F. Burke is a freelance book reviewer H.W. Brands, professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, has followed his magisterial work on Franklin D. Roosevelt, A Traitor to His Class (2008) with an equally majestic The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace.The first hundred pages of Brands's book covers the life of "Ulys" from childhood days in Ohio to his days clerking in his father's store in Galena, Illinois, where Grant, age thirty-eight, returned to the army after the outbreak of the Civil War. Over the subsequent 300 pages Brands offers a stirring recapitulation of the Civil War, told with such aplomb that the next chapter in Grant's life -- the presidency -- could not be other than anti-climactic.

Jim Cullen: Review of Elton Trueblood's "Abraham Lincoln: Lessons in Spiritual Leadership" (HarperOne, 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, will be published by Oxford University Press in January. Cullen blogs at American History Now.

Lawrence S. Wittner: Review of Edward Wilson’s "The Midnight Swimmer" (Arcadia Books, 2011)

Dr. Lawrence S. Wittner is Professor of History emeritus at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Working for Peace and Justice: Memoirs of an Activist Intellectual (University of Tennessee Press).Can fiction enhance our understanding of the past? In his latest novel, Edward Wilson -- a U.S. Special Forces officer in the Vietnam War who subsequently became an expatriate, a British citizen, and a teacher in the UK -- does help to illuminate the Cold War crisis of the early 1960s.

Murray Polner: Review of Melinda L. Pash’s "In the Shadow of the Greatest Generation: The Americans Who Fought the Korean War" (NYU Press, 2012)

Murray Polner is a History News Network book review editor.

Jeremy Kuzmarov: Review of Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick's "The Untold History of the United States" (Gallery Books, 2012)

Jeremy Kuzmarov is J.P. Walker assistant professor of history at the University of Tulsa and author of “The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs.” Oliver Stone has gained international fame for films such as Platoon, Wall Street, Nixon, JFK and W. exposing the underside of American politics and life. The Academy Award-winning director has now produced a history of the “American century” with historian Peter Kuznick, that challenges triumphalist narratives rendering “Americans incapable of understanding the way much of the rest of the world looks at the United States,” and “unable to act effectively to change the world for the better.”

Jim Cullen: Review of Jon Wiener's "How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey Across America" (California, 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, will be published by Oxford University Press in January. Cullen blogs at American History Now.

Luther Spoehr: Review of Hal Holbrook's “Harold: The Boy Who Became Mark Twain” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011)

Luther Spoehr is an HNN book editor and a senior lecturer at Brown University.At age 87, Hal Holbrook has been Mark Twain longer than Sam Clemens was. For over half a century, his one-man show, “Mark Twain Tonight!,” has been packing them in. For someone like me, who saw him in the early ‘60s (when I was in high school), bought the recordings, saw the 1967 television special, then saw him again in person in 1984 and again in 2009, his presence has been as constant and welcome as Twain’s books. It was always reassuring to learn the lengths to which Holbrook went to make his performance authentic, from getting the “look” just right (it took three hours to get the make-up on when Holbrook was a young man) to his faithfulness to the texts. It would probably satisfy him to know that when I read the first pages of Huckleberry Finn or many of the other pieces of Twainiana he employs, it’s his voice that I hear.

Murray Polner: Review of Marguerite Guzman Bouvard's "The Invisible Wounds of War: Coming Home from Iraq and Afghanistan" (Prometheus, 2012)

Murray Polner is an HNN book review editor and most recently editor, with Thomas Woods Jr., of We Who Dared Say No to War (Basic Books).Five days before Veterans Day 2012 the New York Times, to its credit, published “Names of the Dead,” a sidebar listing seven more service members killed in Afghanistan. It is a regular death list begun during our dirty war in Iraq, a war for which no American policymaker has ever been held accountable, and which now includes the forever war in Afghanistan. A lot of Americans barely give these mini-obituaries any notice, least of all most of the candidates who ran for presidential or congressional seats. As Juliette Kayyam, a Harvard Kennedy School of Government lecturer and Boston Globe columnist commented, the political campaign that has just mercifully ended “left service members by the wayside.” Even those ubiquitous pro-war “Support Our Troops” bumper stickers have disappeared.

Patrick Henry: Review of "Rape: Weapon of War and Genocide," edited by John K. Roth and Carol Rittner

Patrick Henry is Cushing Eells Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Literature at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA. His recent book, We Only Know Men: The Rescue of Jews in France during the Holocaust (Catholic University of America Press, 2007) appeared in French as La montagne des justes (Editions Privat, 2010). He is the editor of the forthcoming Jewish Resistance to the Nazis (Catholic University of America Press, 2013).

Jim Cullen: Review of Peter Ames Carlin's "Bruce" (Touchstone, 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, will be published by Oxford University Press in January. Cullen blogs at American History Now.

Murray Polner: Review of "Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press, Parts 1 and 2," edited by Ken Wachsberger

Murray Polner is a book review editor for HNNWe can’t seem to shake the 1960s. It haunts our politics and presidential campaigns. It’s echoed in ideological battles in the Weekly Standard, National Review, New York Review of Books and The Nation, and in countless websites and blogs. The issues raised by the sixties always reappear when we engage in wars and then clash over the meaning of American exceptionalism and its imperial stretch.We have always had underground papers, both legal and illegal. William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist “The Liberator,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s and Susan B. Anthony’s early feminist “The Revolution” and Ida B. Wells’ anti-lynching “Free Speech” stand out but there were also anti-slavery, anarchist, trade union and a variety of socialist papers. And preceding the sixties presses there were the above-ground trouble-makers such as the Village Voice, Paul Krassner's The Realist, and Bobby Seale’s The Black Panther.

Ron Briley: Review of "I Told You So: Gore Vidal Talks Politics -- Interviews with Jon Wiener" (OR Books, 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.Readers of this brief book will lament the lack of wit and astute commentary which characterizes contemporary political debate. Gore Vidal, who died last July, was one of the last public intellectuals in American public life. Current viewers of our television wasteland may be shocked to learn that writers such as Vidal were once frequent guests on late-night TV like the Dick Cavett Show. Vidal represents an era when the intersection among politics, literature, art, history, and entertaining conversation mattered.  With the advent of 24-hour cable news channels, the quantity of political chatter has increased, but reading Vidal reminds us of how much the quality of political discourse has deteriorated. It is not so much that one will always agree with Vidal’s conclusions, but that we are missing a witty and healthy irreverence for power which Vidal at his best represents.