Books

Murray Polner: Review of Donald L. Bartlett's and James B. Steele's "The Betrayal of the American Dream" and Mike Lofgren's "The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted"

Murray Polner is a regular HNN book reviewer.Donald L. Bartlett, James B. Steele, and Mike Lofgren, in their two respective new books, look at the current condition of our country and find it wanting, and deeply so. If they are to be believed, we may be on the road to becoming a plutocracy governed by an oligarchy, administered largely by too many amoral politicians and selfish interests whose ambitions and avarice are fueled by an endless stream of corporate billions which end up abandoning the middle class (and the poor, too); a conclusion, of course, disparaged by those championing a strikingly different set of ideas and conclusions.

Luther Spoehr: Review of Paul Ingrassia's "Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in Fifteen Cars" (Simon & Schuster, 2012)

Luther Spoehr is an HNN Book Editor and Senior Lecturer in Brown University.If this book were one of the cars featured by the author, it would be a 1965 Ford Mustang: stylish, energetic, broadly appealing, but not intended to carry heavy (analytical) loads. Journalist Paul Ingrassia, longtime reporter on the auto industry for the Wall Street Journal and winner of a 1993 Pulitzer Prize, has written a sprightly narrative that includes business history (why General Motors dominated, and then didn’t); the history of automobile design (Harley Earl is already well known, but have you met Zora Arkus-Duntov?); and the large roles that cars have played in social history and popular culture.

Jim Cullen: Review of Kevin Levin's "Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder" (Kentucky 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.

Vaughn Davis Bornet: Review of Clint Hill's and Lisa McCubbin's "Mrs. Kennedy and Me: An Intimate Memoir" (Gallery Books, 2012)

Vaughn Davis Bornet is the author of "The Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson," "Herbert Hoover: President of the United States" (soon to be reissued in paperback), and "Speaking Up for America."Yes, Virginia, other people lead lives sometimes that are amazingly different from ours!It will do most of us in the history profession good to read the intimate details of the lives lived by Jackie Bouvier Kennedy, on the one hand, and Clint Hill, North Dakota’s contribution to the U. S. Secret Service in the early 1960s, on the other. The lives of both are embraced in close detail in Gallery Books’ 343-page book about presidential life, Mrs. Kennedy and Me.

Murray Polner: Review of Miko Peled’s “The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine” (Just World Books, 2012)

Murray Polner is a regular book reviewer for the History News Network.Just by having Alice Walker write the foreword, you know immediately what approach Miko Peled will take in The General’s Son. It was Walker who recently refused to allow an Israeli book publisher to issue a Hebrew language translation of her Pulitzer Prize novel, The Color Purple. In doing so, she compared Israeli treatment of Palestinians under occupation with South African apartheid. In her statement withholding permission to publish her novel, she said, “I grew up under American apartheid and this [treatment of Palestinians] was far worse.”

Eric Laursen: Review of David Goodway's "Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward" (PM Press, 2012)

Eric Laursen is an independent journalist and longtime anarchist activist, writer, and organizer. He is the author of The People's Pension: The Struggle to Defend Social Security Since Reagan (AK Press, 2012) and co-author of Understanding the Crash (Soft Skull Press, 2010).

Jim Cullen: Review of Owen J. Hurd's "After the Fact: The Surprising Fates of American History's Heroes, Villains, and Supporting Characters" (Perigee, 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.A good idea will take you a long way in the publishing business, and Owen J. Hurd has got one here: compiling a list of epilogues to some of the best-known stories in American history. Pocohantas going to London after her marriage to John Rolfe. Paul Revere flubbing an amphibious campaign in Maine during the American Revolution. A drunken Elliot Ness guilty of a hit-and-run in his post-Untouchables career.

Ron Briley: Review of Larry Tye's "Superman: The High-Flying History of America's Most Enduring Hero (New York: Random House, 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.

Andrew Feffer: Review of John Sbardellati's "J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood’s Cold War" (Cornell University Press, 2012)

Andrew Feffer is associate professor of history and co-director of film studies at Union College in Schenectady, New York.One of the big questions in the history of Hollywood is: what difference did the blacklist make? Did the purging by the studios of hundreds of suspected Communists in the 1950s change the character of American film? Or was Tinsel Town’s drift toward vacuous entertainment the inevitable product of America’s post-war prosperity, of consumerism, suburban tract housing, automobile culture, drive-ins and teenage demographics?

Jim Cullen: Review of Robert W. Merry's "Where They Stand: The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians" (Simon & Schuster, 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.It seems that every few years there's a high-profile survey among experts that ranks the presidents, which usually provides cheap content for newspaper stories and radio broadcasts, as well as a source of cocktail party fodder. In this shrewdly conceived and elegantly written short book, Robert W. Merry surveys the surveys and assesses expert as well as voter sagacity in the presidential sweepstakes.

Jim Cullen: Review of Robert Draper's "Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives" (Free 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.Texan Robert Draper is a journalist's journalist. A former reporter for the highly esteemed Texas Monthly, in recent years he's worked as a reporter for GQ and wrote a good history of Rolling Stone magazine that I read on a summer vacation some twenty years ago. Draper hit the bestseller list five years ago for his account of the Bush presidency, Dead Certain. In his latest book, he shifts his gaze to the legislative branch in the Age of Obama.

Robert Parmet: Review of Eric Alterman's and Kevin Mattson's "The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama" (Viking, 2012)

Robert Parmet is professor of history at York College, The City University of New York.For decades conservatives have equated liberalism with weakness in domestic and foreign policy, big government, and heavy taxation. Eric Alterman. a frequent spokesman for American liberalism, argues that identification with it should be a source of pride rather than embarrassment. In collaboration with historian Kevin Mattson, Alterman combines the skills of a historian with those of a journalist to dispute conservative views. He demonstrates that during the past eight decades liberals have done much about which to be proud despite the incessant onslaught from the Right. Yet his book is less a history of liberal ideology than of the liberals themselves from the 1930s to the present.

Ron Briley: Review of Alice Kessler-Harris's "A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman" (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.

Jim Cullen: Review of Michael I. Meyerson's "Endowed By Our Creator: The Birth of Religious Freedom in America" (Yale, 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 Toni Morrison's "Home" (Knopf, 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 Hilary Mantel's "Bring Up the Bodies: A Novel" (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.

Ron Briley: Review of Robert A. Caro's "The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power" (Alfred A. Knopf, 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 the fourth volume of Robert A. Caro’s epic biography of Lyndon Johnson, the author employs over six hundred pages of text to trace Johnson’s life and career from the presidential election of 1960 through the first seven weeks of the Johnson presidency following the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The massive manuscript covering these five years would certainly appeal to Johnson’s Texas-size ego. Nevertheless, Caro’s meticulous research and prose entertain the reader with amusing anecdotes and insightful commentaries which shed considerable light on the enigma that was Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Emily Johnson: Review of Michelle Nickerson's "Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right" (Princeton, 2012)

Emily Johnson is a graduate student at Yale University, where she is completing a dissertation on the role that prominent women played in shaping the politics of the New Christian Right in the 1970s and 1980s.

Murray Polner: Review of James Mann's "The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power" (Viking, 2012)

Murray Polner is a regular HNN book reviewer.James Mann, formerly of the Los Angeles Times and now at Johns Hopkins University, wrote Rise of the Vulcans about George W. Bush’s efforts to reshape foreign policy by relying on six of his closest advisors. Mann has now moved on to the Obama administration with The Obamians, an intelligent and meticulous rendering of Barack Obama and his foreign policy staff. The Bush/Cheney legacy, drawing on neo-conservative fantasies and American exceptionalist dreams of liberating and democratizing real and imagined enemies -- by force, if necessary -- led us into Iraq and Afghanistan and gifted us with a legacy of torture, secret prisons and far too many military and civilian casualties.

Luther Spoehr: Review of Matthew F. Delmont's “The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia” (University of California Press, 2012)

Luther Spoehr, an HNN Book Editor, is Senior Lecturer in the Education Department at Brown University.“[I]n 1957, we were charting new territory,” said “American Bandstand” icon Dick Clark, forty years later. “I don’t think of myself as a hero or civil rights activist for integrating the show; it was simply the right thing to do.”