Roundup: Books

Marcy J. Dinius: Review of Lara Langer Cohen's "The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture"

Marcy J. Dinius is assistant professor of English at DePaul University and the author of The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype (2012).

Alison Games: Review of Elaine Forman Crane's "Witches, Wife Beaters, & Whores: Common Law and Common Folk in Early America"

Alison Games is the Dorothy M. Brown Distinguished Professor of History at Georgetown University. Her most recent book is Witchcraft in Early North America (2010).When Thomas Harris's ghost appeared to his childhood friend William Briggs across a field one March morning in 1792, he set in motion a chain of events that produced a lawsuit. It is easy to understand why Harris's spirit was unable to settle down for eternity. Harris had left four illegitimate children as a result of a long-time connection with a woman named Ann Goldsborough. Eager to provide for their future, Harris instructed his brother James to sell his land and to use the proceeds to support the children. James sold the land, but pocketed the earnings, and Harris's enraged ghost set to work to solve the problem. Six visits persuaded Briggs that this apparition was indeed the specter of his old friend, and Briggs in turn used the information the ghost provided to pressure the living to follow the wishes of the deceased. Like any good friend seeking to redress a grievance in a world saturated with legal knowledge and with relatively easy access to courts, he filed suit in Queen Anne's County, Maryland, in 1796-1797.

Rachel Wheeler: Review of Adam Jortner's "The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier"

Rachel Wheeler is associate professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis and is Senior Fulbright Scholar in American Studies at the Universities of Mainz and Heidelberg during the 2011-12 year. She is the author of To Live upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast (2008).I wanted to like this book. I really did. But Jortner lost me pretty early on. The premise appeared promising. He would show how two religious cultures—Indian nativism and Anglo-American deism—clashed and led to the dramatic battle at Tippecanoe, where the nativist Shawnee Prophet (Tenskwatawa) and his brother Tecumseh faced off against deist William Henry Harrison, who later became our nation's oldest (until Reagan) and shortest-serving president. My initial misgivings—prompted by the "holy war" in the title—soon grew into more serious reservations.

Brendan Simms: Review of Victoria Schofield's "Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire. 1714-1783"

Mr. Simms is the author of "Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714-1783." In "Witness to History," Victoria Schofield remarks that her biographical subject, the British historian John Wheeler-Bennett (1902-75), was "never a household name" but that, by the mid-20th century, "he knew virtually everyone who was." And so it seems. He knew the Nazi-era German diplomat Adam von Trott, who was later executed for conspiring against Hitler. He knew Franklin Roosevelt, whose 57th birthday party he attended in 1939. He was in regular contact with British statesmen, especially Harold Macmillan and Anthony Eden. For good measure, he supervised John F. Kennedy's undergraduate thesis at Harvard. He met with several Bolshevik leaders, too. There are not many men who could tell an undergraduate who was undecided between Jesus Christ and Leon Trotsky that, although he himself had never met our Lord, he "did have a long talk with Trotsky and I don't think I should advise you to follow him."

Randy Boyagoda: Review of Katherine Frank's "Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of a Myth"

Randy Boyagoda’s latest novel, “Beggar’s Feast,” set mainly in Sri Lanka, will be published this month.“Each historical era and every culture has appropriated ‘Crusoe’ for its own purposes,” Katherine Frank announces at the start of her ambitious new book about “Robinson Crusoe,” Daniel Defoe and the obscure Englishman who might have been a significant inspiration for one of literature’s most famous characters. Before setting out her case for an unexpected original behind the original, Frank catalogs Crusoe’s latter-day incarnations, which have included “a hero of Romantic individualism, of Victorian Empire or 20th-century capitalism, an explorer, an inventor, the embodiment of radical or conservative ideologies, an evangelist, a prophet of positive psychology and the gospel of prosperity, even an antihero.” Surveying this long and varied afterlife, she declares, “You name it and someone has probably thought and said Crusoe has been it. That’s his secret: Crusoe is Anyone and Everyone. He is you and he is me.”...

Alexander Rose: Review of Ben Macintyre's "Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies"

Alexander Rose is the author of “Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring” and “American Rifle: A Biography.”Ben Macintyre is the leading practitioner of oddball-powered history. A connoisseur and celebrant of eccentricity, he specializes in often hilarious, sometimes tragic, but always fizzily exhilarating tales of madcap exploits and bizarre adventures.His first book, “Forgotten Fatherland,” excavated the story of Nietzsche’s sister and her founding of Nueva Germania, a racially pure colony of vegetarian anti-Semites in Paraguay. Macintyre then went on to Adam Worth, the master thief who inspired Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation of the Holmesian supervillain Professor Moriarty....

Barry Gewen: Review of George Orwell's "Diaries"

Barry Gewen is an editor at the Book Review.Christopher Hitchens’s introduction to George Orwell’s “Diaries,” among the last things he wrote before his death, is meant as a tribute to one of the writers he most admired, but it can also be taken as a warning. “Read with care, these diaries . . . can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmitted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.” Read with care? What is Hitchens trying to tell us with that phrase? A few sentences later we have: “This diary is not by any means a ‘straight’ guide or a trove of clues and cross-references.” About the creative process that went into constructing one of the novels, Hitchens says Orwell “gives us little or no insight.” Most tellingly, he refers to the entries as “meticulous and occasionally laborious jottings.” Read with care, Hitchens’s introduction alerts Orwell devotees that they should not expect the same pleasures from this book that they get from other of his writings.

Jackson Lears: Review of Christopher McKnight Nichols's "Promise and Peril America at the Dawn of a Global Age"

Jackson Lears teaches American history at Rutgers University. He is the editor of Raritan: A Quarterly Review and the author, most recently, of "Rebirth of a Nation."Within the Washington political consensus, “isolationist” has long been a synonym for naïve, scared, xenophobic—or all three. No politician who wants to be taken seriously at the national level can afford to be tarred with that brush. From the left, isolationism exudes the sickly-sweet smell of sentimental pacifism; from the right, the acrid aroma of ethnocentric nationalism. Either way, it leaves a stench in the halls of the foreign policy establishment. Isolationism is a bipartisan epithet that gets deployed on Capitol Hill whenever cuts in military spending are contemplated or critiques of overseas intervention are voiced....

H.W. Brands: Review of Robert Caro's "The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power"

H.W. Brands is Dickson Allen Andersen Centennial Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin.The fourth installment in a planned five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson is vintage Robert Caro: enormously detailed, personality driven, power obsessed. The book begins with Johnson riding high as majority leader in the U.S. Senate during the 1950s, then follows him as he crashes to earth as vice president, shorn of power and, in power's absence, self-respect. Caro lingers on every embarrassment of the vice presidency, a period of humiliation for Johnson that ended only when President John F. Kennedy was killed and Johnson ascended to the Oval Office.

Marian Scott: Review of Peter Gossage's and Jack Little's "An Illustrated History of Quebec"

Marian Scott writes for the Montreal Gazette.Did the British Conquest benefit the 70,000 inhabitants of New France, or impede their “normal” political development to nationhood?Did the defeat of the 1837-38 Rebellions thwart the dream of a French-Canadian state, or protect the French fact in North America from being absorbed into the American melting-pot?Such fundamental debates at the heart of Quebec’s history get a fresh and even-handed treatment in An Illustrated History of Quebec, by historians Peter Gossage of Concordia University and Jack Little of Simon Fraser University. Rather than focusing on the usual dualities ­— French vs. English, Catholic vs. Protestant, nationalist vs. federalist — Gossage and Little have chosen a different lens through which to view the evolution of Quebec: the struggle between tradition and modernity....

James Traub: Review of David Crist's "The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict With Iran"

James Traub writes a weekly column, Terms of Engagement, at foreignpolicy.com.Revolutionary regimes, in the grip of a universalist faith, are often prepared to use violence to export their ideology. France did so after 1789, Russia after 1917 and Cuba after 1959. Only one revolutionary state currently poses a serious threat to world order: Iran. Like 18th-century France and 20th-century Russia, Iran has fused the expansionary impulse of an imperial power with an ideological attack on the status quo. But that only makes Iran harder to deal with, above all for the United States, the chief pillar of that status quo.

Elizabeth D. Samet: Review of Brian Castner "The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows"

Elizabeth D. Samet is the author of “Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point.”...In fact, the average life expectancy of an officer in a British bomb disposal unit at the time [London, 1940] was 10 weeks. Spectacular failure was a common outcome of a technician’s encounter with a bomb. Yet the Royal Engineers remained undaunted. This was “the Heroic Age of bomb disposal,” declares Maj. A. B. Hartley, the historian of the bomb units and one of the service’s veterans, “a period of individual prowess when urgency and a lack of knowledge and equipment led to the taking of fantastic risks, to fantastic escapes, and to many, many deaths.”...This period was also, explains Brian Castner in “The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows,” the first of two instances in “modern war” during which “the bomb technician found himself a historic fulcrum.” The second was the Iraq war — Castner’s war. A former Air Force officer, Castner commanded an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (E.O.D.) unit in Iraq. Later, as a civilian contractor, he conducted predeployment training in tactical bomb disposal for the military.

Josef Joffe: Review of Jonathan Fenby's "The General: Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved"

Josef Joffe is the editor of Die Zeit in Hamburg and a fellow at the Freeman-Spogli Institute and the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford. He is completing a book on the false prophecies of America’s decline.Dare I call a 707-page biography a page turner? For once, the fake enthusiasm of blurb prose rings true. I did “finish the book in one sitting,” as another chestnut has it, though the sitting was a very long flight of 16 hours. And why? Because Jonathan Fenby, a former editor of The Observer of London and a prolific author, knows how to turn breadth and depth into enthrallment. ­Academic historians tend to shy away from the grand sweep, while journalists like to stick to the chatty and topical. Fenby has blended the best of both crafts — the historian’s gravitas, the journalist’s feel for drama — into a magnificent book that will rank alongside a classic like Jean Lacouture’s multi­volume biography of Charles de Gaulle.

Richard A. Posner: Review of Robert and Edward Skidelsky's "How Much is Enough? Money and the Good Life"

Richard A. Posner is a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.Robert Skidelsky is a historian best known for his definitive three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes; his son Edward Skidelsky is a philosopher. They have collaborated on a book arguing that people in wealthy countries like Britain and the United States work too hard and by doing so miss out on the “good life” — an ethical concept of a life as “worthy of desire, not just one that is widely desired.”

Dwight Garner: Review of David M. Halperin's "How to Be Gay"

Dwight Garner writes for the New York Times.The four most overrated things in life, Christopher Hitchens once said, are “Champagne, lobsters, anal sex and picnics.” This remark was repeated at his memorial service this past April in New York City. The next speaker was the British comic Stephen Fry, who is out and proud. “Well,” he commented, “three out of four isn’t bad.”In his new book, “How to Be Gay,” David M. Halperin agrees, at least on one unlikely level, with Hitchens. Mr. Halperin, a professor of the history and theory of sexuality at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, provocatively argues that when it comes to defining what it means to be a homosexual man, sex is overrated. Culture matters more.

Joseph Berger: Review of Richard Zacks's "Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt’s Doomed Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York"

Joseph Berger is a metropolitan reporter for The Times.Before there was Rudy Giuliani, there was Teddy Roosevelt.In the 1990s, Giuliani was New York’s dogged crime fighter in chief, but just about 100 years earlier, Roose­velt had donned that mantle as a police commissioner and president of what was then the city’s four-man, bipartisan Police Board. His campaign to wipe out every­day vice and corruption gained him a national reputation, one that, in contrast to Giuliani’s, actually led to the White House.Roosevelt needed no broken-windows theory to drive his crusade, just an outraged silk-stocking moralism, and fin de siècle New York City gave him plenty to be outraged about. The number of brothels in Manhattan was legion, dotting not just the notorious Tenderloin district, and the number of prostitutes was estimated at more than 30,000. Casinos and opium dens were commonplace, and saloons stayed open on Sundays in brazen disregard of state laws. The police not only tolerated pleasure domes but skimmed the earnings, with payoffs to the beat cop filtering up to the precinct captains and the police chief....

Eric Foner: Review of Robert W. Merry's "Where They Stand: The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians"

Eric Foner is the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. His most recent book, “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery,” was awarded the Bancroft Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2011.Historians are not generally considered playful sorts. But they seem to enjoy one diversion — ranking the presidents. Ever since Arthur Schlesinger Sr. began this pastime in 1948 in a poll published in Life magazine, numerous such rankings have been issued. In “Where They Stand,” Robert W. Merry, a longtime Washington journalist and biographer of one of our less-prominent chief executives, James K. Polk, examines seven such surveys, beginning with Schlesinger’s, and what they tell us about how presidents succeed or fail.

Russell Jacoby: Review of David Gelernter's "America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats)"

Russell Jacoby is a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles.Are conservative intellectuals anti-intellectual? The short answer must be no. Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Harvey Mansfield, Wilfred M. McClay—conservative thinkers have championed scholarship, learning, and history. The long answer, however, is more ambiguous. Confronted by social upheavals, conservative intellectuals tend to blame other intellectuals—socialist, liberal, secular—as the cause. They perceive political unrest as rooted in fallacious ideas advanced by misguided thinkers and indict the educational system for inculcating subversion. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke denounced lawyers and writers—whom he called "these professors of the rights of man"—for their dangerous ideas.A new book, America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats) (Encounter), by David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, affords an occasion to revisit the issue: Do contemporary American conservatives scapegoat intellectuals and teachers? If so, they can claim an all-American pedigree....

Chris Matthews: Review of Douglas Brinkley's "Cronkite"

Chris Matthews is the host of “Hardball” on MSNBC and “The Chris Matthews Show” on NBC. His most recent book is “Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero.”“From Dallas, Texas.... ” The haggard newsman has just been handed wire copy. He removes his glasses. He looks into the camera and gives us the first hard news that our young president will never grow old. He marks the time of death on the newsroom clock and holds a moment of silence.This was Walter Cronkite on Nov. 22, 1963, announcing the death of John F. Kennedy.It was consummate Cronkite — unscripted, authentic and heartfelt. For 19 years, the anchor of “The CBS Evening News” shared in our public grief and celebration. He was one of us, and Douglas Brinkley’s “Cronkite” is a majestic biography of America’s greatest and most beloved broadcast journalist.“He was reassuringly permanent when so much was in flux,” writes Brinkley, a historian and contributing editor at Vanity Fair. “Even when he was announcing tragic news, he was himself a reminder that America would persevere.”...

Jacob Heilbrunn: Review of David B. Frisk's "If Not Us, Who?: William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement"

Jacob Heilbrunn, a regular contributor to the Book Review, is a senior editor at The National Interest.On Oct. 8, 1961, a small group of conservative activists, businessmen and lawyers met in a seedy motel on South Michigan Avenue in Chicago. The meeting was assembled by three men — F. Clifton White, John Ashbrook and William A. Rusher — to develop a plan to draft the Arizona senator and stalwart conservative Barry Goldwater for the Republican nomination in 1964. As the group strategized, Frank Whetstone, a newspaper publisher from Montana, stood up and said while he trusted White (a resolute insurgent who masterminded Goldwater’s nomination), he wondered “where the rest of you s.o.b.’s will be when we get down to that final ballot.” It was a valid question. A previous attempt to get Goldwater the nomination, in 1960, had been a flop. This time the campaign would be serious. The men in the room, David B. Frisk reports in “If Not Us, Who?,” “pledged to stick with their comrades, whatever pressures might be brought.”