Books

Jim Cullen: Review of J.K. Rowling's "The Casual Vacancy: A Novel" (Little, Brown, 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.

Doug Ireland: Review of Emily Bernard's "Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White" (Yale, 2012)

Doug Ireland is an American journalist and blogger who writes about politics, power, media, and also about gay issues.Can a white person ever truly know what black life and black culture are all about? Is it possible to bridge the complexities that both divide and unite black and white Americans? In a year when the Republicans are waging a thinly veiled racist campaign against America’s first black president -- and the institutional gay movement seems to so ignore the needs and preoccupations of queers of color -- these are questions of burning immediacy and ones gay Americans urgently need to confront.

Jim Cullen: Review of Paul Boyer's "American History: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford, 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.As anyone who teaches a survey knows, textbooks are big, beautiful, and expensive. And, for the most part, boring. Despite the impressive talents that go into them from editorial to design elements, they always seem, well, flat. Part of the reason is that they're relentless in purveying conventional wisdom. This is not merely a matter of pandering to state governments or appealing to the lowest common denominator of readers, but something intrinsic to the genre.

Murray Polner: Review of Allan A. Ryan’s “Yamashita’s Ghost: War Crimes, MacArthur’s Justice, and Command Accountability” (Kansas, 2012)

Murray Polner is a book review editor for HNNIn October 1944, General Tomoyuki Yamashita was assigned to lead the Japanese forces in the Philippines. Ten days later U.S. army units began landing in Luzon and Leyte to open the campaign to liberate the Philippines. Before and after Yamashita’s arrival the Japanese had carried out the identical brutality they had too often meted out to civilians and POWs throughout Asia and elsewhere. Filipinos and foreigners living in the islands were singled out, especially in Manila, where a bloodbath was carried out.

Jim Cullen: Review of Andrew Delbanco's "College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be" (Princeton, 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 Seth Rosenfeld’s “Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).

 [Luther Spoehr is an HNN Book Editor and Senior Lecturer at Brown University.]For aficionados of the abuse of power, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI is a gift that keeps on giving.  Every time it seems that there can’t be anything left to reveal, somebody turns over a rock and out crawls another law-breaking, ethics-ignoring, ignominious episode.  Seth Rosenfeld, a prize-winning investigative reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle, has turned over a quarry-full of rocks and uncovered an appalling amount of sleazy behavior in post-war California, particularly in the turbulent 1960s.

Jim Cullen: Review of Louis P. Masur's "Lincoln Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union" (Oxford, 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.

Patrick Henry: Review of Shawn Francis Peters's "The Catonsville Nine: A Story of Faith and Resistance in the Vietnam Era" (Oxford, 2012)

Patrick Henry is Cushing Eells Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Literature at Whitman College.

Jim Cullen: Review of Julie Levinson's "The American Success Myth on Film" (Palgrave, 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, is slated for publication by Oxford University Press later this year. Cullen blogs at American History Now.

Murray Polner: Review of Steve Hochstadt's "Exodus to Shanghai: Stories of Escape from the Third Reich" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)

Murray Polner is a regular book reviewer for the History News NetworkDeftly weaving in the personal and political, Steve Hochstadt, who teaches history at Illinois College, tells an absorbing story of some 16,000 Central European Jewish refugees who fled the Nazis, helped in part by the heroism of Feng Shan Ho, the Chinese Consul-General in Vienna who handed out Chinese visas to Jews desperately trying to escape. (Yad Vashem, the Jewish memorial to Jewish victims and non-Jewish rescuers has honored Feng Shan Ho).

Lawrence S. Wittner: Review of Richard Falk's and David Krieger's "The Path to Zero: Dialogues on Nuclear Dangers" (Paradigm, 2012)

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).About a third of the way through The Path to Zero, David Krieger, one of the authors, suggests a Zen koan -- a mind-bending riddle designed to foster enlightenment -- that runs as follows: “What casts a dark shadow when dormant and a fiery cloud of death when brought to life?” The answer is nuclear weapons, the subject of this book.

Jim Cullen: Review of Mike Rose's "Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education" (New Press, 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, is slated for publication by Oxford University Press later this year. Cullen blogs at American History Now.

Luther Spoehr: Review of James H. Capshew's "Herman B Wells: The Promise of the American University" (Indiana, 2012)

Luther Spoehr, an HNN book editor, teaches courses on the history of American higher education at Brown University.The stereotypical Midwesterner: unpretentious, practical, hard-working, reliable, tough-minded, respectable, egalitarian, discreet. Positive adjectives, all of them -- at least at first glance. As we will see, however, discretion, at least, can be a mixed blessing, when practiced by both a subject and his biographer. 

Ron Briley: Review of Lois Banner's "Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox" (Bloomsbury, 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.

Robert D. Parmet: Review of Eric Laursen's "The People's Pension: The Struggle to Defend Social Security Since Reagan" (AK Press, 2012)

Robert D. Parmet is professor of history at York College of the City University of New York.In 1964 Barry Goldwater discovered that suggestions to reduce or replace Social Security can be politically hazardous. Twelve years later Ronald Reagan lost the Republican presidential primary election in Florida in part because he attacked Social Security. Nevertheless, the assaults persisted, and since Reagan’s election in 1980 have become increasingly sophisticated and intense. In more than seven hundred pages of text, Eric Laursen describes these efforts in great detail, presenting the provisions of proposed legislation, the campaigns to substitute alternate retirement schemes, and the coalitions of politicians, businessmen, and financiers who to the present day have sought to subvert the landmark social legislation of the New Deal. With Social Security and Medicare major issues in this presidential year, this book provides the background for anyone who wishes to be well-informed.

Murray Polner: Review of Roger Peace's "A Call to Conscience: The Anti-Contra War Campaign" (Massachusetts, 2012)

Murray Polner is a regular book reviewer for HNN.What Roger Peace, adjunct professor of history at Tallahassee Community College, does very well in A Call to Conscience is remind Americans about a largely forgotten past when antiwar religious and secular groups, despite their many differences, dared challenge the Reagan administration’s proxy war in Nicaragua aimed at defeating a left-wing government.

Jim Cullen: Review of John Kelly's "The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People" (Holt, 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, is slated for publication by Oxford University Press later this year. Cullen blogs at American History Now.

Jim Cullen: Review of James Rice's "Tales from a Revolution: Bacon's Rebellion and the Transformation of Colonial Virginia" (Oxford, 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, is slated for publication by Oxford University Press later this year. Cullen blogs at American History Now.

Jim Cullen: Review of Peter Heather's "Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe" (Oxford, 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, is slated for publication by Oxford University Press later this year. Cullen blogs at American History Now.

Antonio Ramirez: Review of Natalie Hopkinson's "Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City" (Duke, 2012)

Antonio Ramirez is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Michigan.When I felt a deep rumbling and heard muffled shouts from a microphone, I guessed it was a political rally. Recently arrived in Washington D.C., I was wandering the U Street neighborhood, taking in the city’s distinct rowhouses and sweating in the intense mid-Atlantic heat. But as I approached the intersection of 7th and T Streets, the crowd came into focus: it was hundreds of people, almost all black men and women, dancing in the street.