Books

Ron Briley: Review of Paul Dickson's "Bill Veeck: Baseball's Greatest Maverick" (Walker & Company, 2012)

Ron Briley is a regular book review for HNN

Jim Cullen: Review of Steven Biel's "Bonnie Parker Writes a Poem: How Two Bungling Psychopaths Became Bonnie and Clyde" (Now and Then, 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 Andrew Delbanco's "College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be" (Princeton University Press, 2012)

Luther Spoehr, an HNN Book Editor, teaches courses on the history of American higher education at Brown University.Andrew Delbanco, an award-winning humanities scholar at Columbia University, is the latest in a long, distinguished, and, alas, largely unsuccessful line of writers who for over a century have opposed the relentless march toward utility at the expense of liberal education on American campuses.  His book is intended for “anyone concerned with what it means, and what it takes, to educate citizens in our republic.”Delbanco knows how hard it is to communicate liberal education’s “value to anyone…who has not personally experienced it.”  And while he says he doesn’t want to write a jeremiad, an elegy, or a call to arms, he admits that he’s probably produced “a messy mixture of them all.”  But it’s no polemic -- more a reasoned cri de coeur.

Robin Lindley: Review of Rachel Maddow's "Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power" (Crown, 2012)

Robin Lindley is a Seattle writer and attorney. He contributes interviews and other writing to the History News Network, Crosscut, Real Change and other publications on history, medicine and science, politics, justice, the media and the arts.Though we are at war, most of us do not see its reality. As a nation, we are more and more distant from the suffering of the men and women who do our fighting and less and less able to influence our leaders, who squander billions of dollars on national security to the detriment of the domestic economy and our democratic institutions -- without making us safer. These are the tenets of Rachel Maddow's new book, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (Random House), which introduces the modern national security state and explains how it imperils America's democratic values, sacrificing real humans, often for unclear or questionable aims.

Jim Cullen, Review of Troy Bickham, "The Weight of Vengeance: The United States, the British Empire, and the War of 1812" (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.

Robert Shaffer: Review of Lawrence S. Wittner's "Working for Peace and Justice: Memoirs of an Activist Intellectual" (Tennessee, 2012)

Robert Shaffer is professor of history at Shippensburg University. His latest publication, in the Winter 2012 “Journal of American Ethnic History,” examines the India League of America during the Cold War

John McAdams: Review of Brian Latell's "Castro's Secrets: The CIA and Cuba's Intelligence Machine" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)

John McAdams teaches American politics, public opinion, and voter behavior at Marquette University. He is the author of "JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy" (Potomac, 2012) To read Brian Latell's response to this review, go here.

Jim Cullen: Review of Bruce Bustard's Attachments: Faces and Stories from America's Gates (D Giles Ltd., 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 Chase Madar’s “The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History” (New York: OR Books, 2012)

Murray Polner is a regular HNN reviewer who wrote No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and co-edited, with Thomas Wood Jr., We Who Dared To Say No To War.

Luther Spoehr: Review of Randal Maurice Jelks's “Benjamin Elijah Mays, Schoolmaster of the Movement: A Biography” (University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

Luther Spoehr (Luther_Spoehr@Brown.edu) teaches "Campus on Fire: American Colleges and Universities in the 1960s," "American Higher Education in Historical Context," and other courses at Brown University.In the portrait on his biography’s cover, seated at his desk, elegantly attired in brown suit and bowtie, Benjamin Mays gazes steadily at the reader:  his eyes are ever-so-slightly narrowed; his eyebrows, raised a bit; there is, perhaps, the trace of a smile on his lips.  His expression is difficult to read.  But he comes across instantly as smart, tough, solid—in a word, formidable. 

Jim Cullen: Review of Patricia Cohen's "In Our Prime: The Invention of Middle Age" (Scribner, 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.The notion that middle age is essentially a cultural construction is not one that will be surprising to historians. But New York Times journalist Patricia Cohen makes this case with breadth and verve. Though it seems to sprawl at times, with a range of opinions that can become tiresome in their predictable diversity -- every opinion about middle age has its rejoinder --  In Our Prime is a serious and useful survey in the subject likely to remain a standard of its kind for some time to come.

Jim Cullen: Review of John B. Thompson's "Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century" (2nd, ed., 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 Thai Jones's "More Powerful than Dynamite; Radicals, Plutocrats, and Progressives in New York's Year of Anarchy" (Walker, 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.I didn't plan to read this book. I'd put it on a pile of forthcoming titles, one I consulted after finishing the last book I reviewed sooner than planned. I thumbed through the first few pages of a couple on that pile and found myself engaged by the portrait of New York City mayor-elect John Purroy Mitchel on New Year's Eve of 1913. Maybe this book about the year 1914 was worth embarking upon after all.

Murray Polner: Review of Tim Wendel's "Summer of '68: The Season that Changed Baseball -- and America -- Forever" (Da Capo, 2012)

Murray Polner, a regular HNN book reviewer, wrote Branch Rickey: A Biography; No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran; and edited with Thomas Wood, Jr. We Who Dared To Say No To War.Tim Wendel has set out to portray the 1968 baseball season against the backdrop of the tumultuous events of that year. 1968 witnessed the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. We seemed to be undergoing a nervous breakdown, with anti-Vietnam dissenters and draft opponents battling the FBI, police forces, the National Guard, pro-war politicians, and, until perhaps 1970, the majority of the American public that still believed in the war.

Jim Cullen, Review of Timothy Noah's "The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It" (Bloomsbury, 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 John Paton Davies, Jr.’s “China Hand: An Autobiography” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012)

Murray Polner, a regular book reviewer for the History News Network, co-edited with Thomas Woods Jr. We Who Dared To Say No To War.If nothing else, this impressive autobiography by a reflective and long forgotten U.S. Foreign Service officer reminds us how the powerful China Lobby, a combination of demagogic politicians, private interests, wealthy businessmen and media giants, backed Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang against a then-popular, pre-authoritarian Communist Party of China. It set off a furious, if one-sided battle that ended in the U.S. firing its China specialists for daring to predict that the Communists would win the civil war against Chiang unless serious reforms were instituted.

Jonathan Carriel: Review of Thomas Fleming's "Liberty Tavern" (E-Book Edition; New Word City, 2012)

Jonathan Carriel is the author of the Thomas Dordrecht Historical Mystery Series, the third volume of which, If Two Are Dead, set in New York in 1762, will shortly be published by iUniverse.Revolutions do not usually come cheap—and certainly the American Revolution did not. The eight-year war that secured it is conservatively estimated to have claimed some 25,000 American lives—the percentage-wise equivalent, today, of 3.1 million citizens. (There was huge carnage for the British, too, of course, plus substantial casualty counts for allied Europeans and Native Americans.) Yet even as we take in these staggering numbers, the true human cost remains a bloodless shadow. As Stalin gruesomely but aptly put it, one death is a tragedy, a million … is a statistic.

Aaron Leonard: Review of Geoffrey Roberts's "Molotov: Stalin's Cold Warrior" (Potomac, 2011)

Aaron Leonard is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to HNN.Geoffrey Roberts introduces us to Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov in 1976, long after he has left power. Molotov tell us, “Not often, but sometimes I dream of Stalin. In extraordinary situations. In a destroyed city. I can’t find a way out. Then I meet him, in a word, strange dreams, very confused.” Such disturbing dreams are not surprising. The twentieth century was, in many ways, the most awful time in human history: two world wars, famines, genocide and, for the latter half of the century, the specter of utter nuclear annihilation. Molotov, as premier of the Soviet Union from 1930 to 1941, Soviet foreign minister from 1939 to 1949 and again from 1953 to 1956, was more times than not at the center of it all.

Jim Cullen, Review of Alasdair Roberts's "America's First Great Depression: Economic Crisis and Political Disorder After the Crisis of 1837" (Cornell, 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.

Lawrence S. Wittner: Review of Michael T. Klare's "The Race for What's Left: The Global Scramble for the World's Last Resources" (Metropolitan Books, 2012)

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).Is it possible to cope with the immense dangers posed by the rapid consumption of the world’s resources? In The Race for What’s Left, Michael Klare claims that it is -- but only through a significant change in behavior.Klare is the author of fourteen books, the most recent of which focus on resources and international conflict. He is also the defense correspondent for The Nation and the director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.