Roundup: Books

Jack Rakove: Review of Michael Lind's "Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States"

Jack Rakove teaches history and political science at Stanford University.Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United Statesby Michael LindHarper, 592 pp., $29.99

Colin Fleming: Review of Robert Santelli's "This Land Is Your Land: Woody Guthrie and the Journey of an American Folk Song"

Colin Fleming’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and the Times Literary Supplement. His first book, Between Cloud and Horizon: A Relationship Casebook in Stories, is forthcoming.In the history of American popular songwriting, few composers have better blended hope and scorn than Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie (1912–67), an artist who seemed to believe that you couldn’t have the one without the other. His acolyte, Bob Dylan, certainly has a way with a vituperative turn of phrase, but anger never sounded so righteous nor so proudly optimistic as when Guthrie sang “This Land Is Your Land,” a folk song that is both a paean to the country he loved and a critical broadside launched on behalf of all those—dreamers, migrant workers, poets, or anyone else—who ever felt that their vision of America had been compromised.We encounter “This Land Is Your Land” so often in its myriad forms—as a jokey aside in a Simpsons episode, or as a grammar school memory, or as a sonic backdrop to the latest political rally—that sometimes Guthrie’s defiance gets lost. Most of us remember those bright opening lines:

James Fallows: Review of David Maraniss's "Barack Obama: The Story"

James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and the author, most recently, of “China Airborne.”During his 2008 campaign, Barack Obama so often stressed the improbability of his story that we have grown inured to how unlikely it really is. Everyone knows that his name, along with his inexperience, was an electoral handicap; that his mixed-race background made his victory historic; and that his transformation within five years from local Illinois politician to the most famous person on earth (and first incumbent president since Woodrow Wilson to win the Nobel Peace Prize) has no obvious parallel. The great virtue of David Maraniss’s huge and absorbing new biography is to demonstrate that Obama’s saga in its full and previously unexplored detail is more surprising and gripping than the version the world is familiar with.

Eric Rauchway: Review of Eric Alterman's and Kevin Mattson's "The Cause" and Michael Kazin's "American Dreamers"

The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism From Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama By Eric Alterman and Kevin Mattson • Viking • 2012 • 562 pages • $32.95 American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation By Michael Kazin • Knopf • 2011 • 330 pages • $27.95The single moment that made postwar liberalism feel most like a cause worth fighting for came in the darkness of April 4, 1968, when an Indianapolis crowd, assembled to hear Robert F. Kennedy campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, instead met a man obliged to tell them that Martin Luther King Jr. had been murdered. When Kennedy broke the news, a desperate wail burst from the throats of those gathered, a sound unlike any other, bespeaking the tide of anguish and anger about to rush over the republic, sweeping reason before it—but not yet, or not here, not if Kennedy had his way.

Kim Phillips-Fein: Review of Geoffrey Kabaservice's "Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party"

Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party By Geoffrey Kabaservice • Oxford University Press • 2012 • 504 pages • $29.95A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Newt Gingrich was a moderate Republican. Few remember today that back in 1968 he campaigned in the South for none other than New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. In his first bids for electoral office, Gingrich was twice defeated as the moderate challenger to a segregationist Democrat. Once in Congress, he helped found the Conservative Opportunity Society, but he still portrayed himself as a “Theodore Roosevelt Republican,” never quite renouncing his academic background in favor of a down-and-dirty populism. When he ascended to the leadership of the House in the late 1980s, he did so by courting the support of party moderates. “There’s no question that I would not be House Republican whip if activists in the moderate wing had not supported me,” he reflected after his election. Even in 1989, after shifting to the right, he continued to identify with “the classic moderate wing of the party, where, as a former Rockefeller state chairman, I’ve spent most of my life.”

Michael S. Roth: Review of Andrew Delbanco's "College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be"

Michael S. Roth is the president of Wesleyan University. His most recent book is “Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living With the Past.”Andrew Delbanco must be a great teacher. A longtime faculty member at Columbia, he is devoted to the development of his students as individuals, and recognizes that their time in college should be formative: “They may still be deterred from sheer self-interest toward a life of enlarged sympathy and civic responsibility.” Like most professors devoted to teaching, he has no interest in telling undergraduates what to think, but he does want to draw them toward a sense of skepticism about the status quo and to a feeling of wonder about the natural world. College, he tells us, is a time to learn to “make connections among seemingly disparate phenomena,” to see things from another’s point of view and to develop a sense of ethical responsibility. At a time when many are trying to reduce the college years to a training period for economic competition, Delbanco reminds readers of the ideal of democratic education.

Donna Rifkind: Review of Alice Kessler-Harris's "A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman"

Donna Rifkind has written for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and other publications.During the great performance that was her life, Lillian Hellman always addressed the 20th century from center stage. While she defended many causes — justice, loyalty, American civil liberties, anti-fascism and Soviet-style Communism among them — what she represented most staunchly was herself, and what she believed in most fiercely was her own unassailability.

David Oshinsky: Review of "Fenway Park: 100 Years -- The Official, Definitive History of America’s Most Beloved Ballpark"

David Oshinsky, a frequent contributor to the Book Review, teaches history at the University of Texas and New York University.No ballpark, with the exception of Wrigley Field in Chicago, is so closely linked to heartache. What rabid Red Sox fan of middle age doesn’t flash back to 1975, when Tony Perez of the Cincinnati Reds helped decide Game 7 of the World Series by blasting Bill (Spaceman) Lee’s absurd blooper pitch into orbit? Or to Bucky Dent’s pennant-crushing, wall-scraping homer three years later? But the fact remains that such moments are not limited to Fenway Park. Take 1946, when Johnny Pesky held on to the ball while Enos (Country) Slaughter scored the winning run in Game 7 of that World Series. The place: Sportsman’s Park, St. Louis. And let’s not forget the ultimate nightmare — Shea Stadium, 1986 — when Bill Buckner opened his legs too wide. Statistics show that the Sox have done well over the years in their hitter-friendly ballpark, largely because they would pack their lineup with lead-footed sluggers. Trouble has come mostly on the road....

Alan Riding: Review of Valérie Bajou's "Versailles"

Alan Riding is a former European cultural correspondent for The Times. His most recent book is “And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris.”The Palace of Versailles served as France’s seat of government for just a century: Louis XIV moved his court there in 1682, there was a short break during Louis XV’s childhood and, in 1789, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were driven out by the swelling revolution. Yet ever since, in its various guises of museum, ceremonial court and tourist attraction, the palace — the French call it a chateau, although it is not a fortified castle — has remained a symbol of French grandeur. Today’s elected governments see no contradiction in spending heavily to conserve this monument to absolute power.And let’s face it, it is impressive. Even if acres of Baroque decoration are not to the taste of all six million annual visitors, its breathtaking scale is soon achingly felt by anyone on an official tour. This is still more apparent when the palace is viewed from the perspective of magnificent gardens more than twice the size of Central Park. In any event, no one can aspire to see it all. In fact, I’d wager that the Sun King himself could not have found his way around the place. Not that he needed to: people came to him....

Fred Andrews: Review of Arthur Herman's "Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II"

Fred Andrews writes for the New York Times.ARTHUR HERMAN has set out to right an injustice: the loss, down history’s memory hole, of the epic achievements of American business in helping the United States and its allies win World War II.Dr. Herman, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and a writer of popular histories, says he believes that American business has never gotten its due. He contends that it won the war but lost “the narrative.” Business was denigrated by envious New Dealers, he says, and upstaged by the Keynesian focus on the war years’ $300 billion in deficit spending that finally ended the Great Depression.

Paul Harvey: Review of Warren Throckmorton's and Michael Coulter's "Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims About Our Third President"

Paul Harvey runs the blog Religion in American History and teaches history at the University of Colorado.When all the trees fall in David Barton’s historical forest and no one hears it, did they really fall? If we get history “right” but do so only by playing a game set by rigged rules, and engaging in debates with those whose projects are basically political and entrepreneurial rather than intellectual, do we feed the very beast we are trying to tame? I pondered these questions while reading Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter’s excellent, blow-by-blow refutation of David Barton’s take on Jefferson, Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims About Our Third President. 

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

Jeff Shesol, the author of “Supreme ­Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court,” was a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton....Enter Eric Alterman, defiant to the last. In 2008, this columnist and media critic published a handbook called “Why We’re Liberals,” a crisply written and emphatically argued retort to the Coulters, Hannitys and others for whom liberalism is a strain of fascism, totalitarianism, socialism and overmothering (why choose?). Alterman’s new book, “The Cause,” written with an assist from the historian Kevin Mattson, is something of a companion volume: a history of liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to the present. (Mattson’s role is a bit ambiguous; in the book’s acknowledgments, Alterman credits him with providing “raw material.”)...

Garry Wills: Review of Robert Caro's "The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson" (Knopf, 2012)

Garry Wills is Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern. His most recent book, Font of Life: Ambrose, Augustine, and the Mystery of Baptism, was published in April 2012.Robert Caro’s epic biography of Lyndon Johnson—this is the fourth volume of a planned five—was originally conceived and has been largely executed as a study of power. But this volume has been overtaken by a more pressing theme. It is a study in hate. The book’s impressive architectonics come from the way everything is structured around two poles or pillars—Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy, radiating reciprocal hostilities at every step of the story. Caro calls it “perhaps the greatest blood feud of American politics in the twentieth century.” With some reservations about the word “blood,” one has to concede that Caro makes good his claim for this dynamic in the tale he has to tell.

Adam Hochschild: Review of Paul Preston's "The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain"

Adam Hochschild is the author, most recently, of “To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918.” He is writing a book about Americans in the Spanish Civil War.In “Homage to Catalonia,” his memoir of the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell remarks that Francisco Franco’s military uprising against Spain’s elected government “was an attempt not so much to impose fascism as to restore feudalism.” Paul Preston’s magisterial account of the bloodshed of that era bears this out. Fascism may belong to the 20th century, but Franco’s grab for power evokes earlier times: the parading soldiers who flourished enemy ears and noses on their bayonets, the mass public executions carried out in bullrings or with band music and onlookers dancing in the victims’ blood. One of Franco’s top aides talked of democratically chosen politicians as “cloven-hoofed beasts,” and anything that smacked of modernity — Rotary Clubs, Montessori schools — seemed to draw the regime’s violent wrath. Echoing the Inquisition, Franco ordered particularly despised foes put to death with the garrote, in which the executioner tightens an iron collar around a person’s neck.

Janet Maslin: Review of Geoffrey C. Ward's "A Disposition to Be Rich: How a Small-Town Pastor’s Son Ruined an American President, Brought on a Wall Street Crash, and Made Himself the Best-Hated Man in the United States"

Janet Maslin writes for the New York Times.After Ferdinand De Wilton Ward Jr. became notorious as a Gilded Age financial schemer of rare weaselly ingenuity, his picture appeared in a manual of phrenology. The shape of his “low-top head, very broad from side to side,” was said to explain why Ward had shown the “Secretiveness, Cunning, Acquisitiveness, Destructiveness” to bilk investors, shame and bankrupt a former president and try to kidnap his own son.Within the large Ward clan Ferdinand remains “the family sociopath,” although each of his parents was a candidate for that distinction. It took a great-grandson of Ferdinand’s, the prizewinning historian Geoffrey C. Ward, to write the scandal-filled but eminently fair book that airs this dirty laundry.

Timothy Snyder: Review of Lizzie Collingham's "The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food"

Timothy Snyder is the Housum professor of history at Yale University and the author of “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.” Most recently he helped Tony Judt to write “Thinking the Twentieth Century.”Calories were made to be counted, but they have generally been counted for two very different reasons. We associate calories with excess, but for most of its history this little unit of energy was linked to shortage. The years since World War II have been a time of cheap and plentiful food, and of obese and sick citizens. Since our own daily struggle is fought against fat, we fail to see that many of the conflicts of the past were wars against hunger. Just as obesity leads to diabetes and human blindness, so plentiful food leads to decadent forms of history and social blindness. We are fortunate to have a bracing book like “The Taste of War,” which does much to correct understanding of the causes of armed conflict and mass murder.

William Poundstone: Review of George Dyson's "Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe"

William Poundstone’s latest book is “Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?”It’s anyone’s guess whether our digital world ends with a bang, a whimper or a singularity. One thing’s for sure: It began with a double entendre.The digital age can be traced to a machine built circa 1951 in Princeton, N.J. That machine was given the bureaucratic-­sounding name the Mathematical and Numerical Integrator and Computer, and was known by the acronym Maniac, meaning something wild and uncontrollable — which it proved to be. But the crucial double entendre was contained in the computer’s memory. For the first time, numbers could mean numbers or instructions. Data could be a noun or a verb.That turned out to be incredibly important, as George Dyson makes clear in his latest book, “Turing’s Cathedral,” a groundbreaking history of the Princeton computer. Though the English mathematician Alan Turing gets title billing, Dyson’s true protagonist is the Hungarian-­American John von Neumann, presented here as the Steve Jobs of early computers — a man who invented almost nothing, yet whose vision changed the world.

Richard Evans: Review of David Stahel's "Kiev 1941: Hitler's Battle for Supremacy in the East"

Richard Evans is Regius Professor of History and President of Wolfson College at Cambridge University, and author of The Third Reich at War, published by the Penguin Press in 2009....The story of the Battle of Kiev has been told many times, but seldom in such detail as it is in David Stahel’s book. Relying mainly on German sources, he brings new evidence to bear on the conflict with the official war diaries of German divisions, as well as making good use of published editions of the private field-post letters and diaries of German soldiers of all ranks. This is emphatically a military history, replete with complex (and not always easily decipherable) maps of troop movements and dispositions, technical terms, titles and abbreviations, and full names for all the troop units involved. Some of this impedes readability (particularly irritating is the use of Roman numerals, as in “the XXXXVII Panzer Corps”), but overall Stahel conveys extremely complex military action with exemplary clarity.

Holly Morris: Review of Hugh Brewster's "Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic’s First-Class Passengers and Their World" and Andrew Wilson's "Shadow of the Titanic: The Extraordinary Stories of Those Who Survived"

Holly Morris is a presenter on the PBS series “Globe Trekker” and the author of “Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for a New Kind of Heroine.”...The Canadian Hugh Brewster joined the committed ranks of Titanic-philes in the mid-1980s, when he spent a year creating a book from images and data of Robert Ballard’s discovery of the wreck. In Brewster’s new book, “Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage,” he revisits the ill-fated trans-­Atlantic crossing as experienced by the “rare gathering” of famous and affluent among the approximately 1,500 who died and the 705 who survived.

Geoffrey Kabaservice: Review of Michael Kranish's and Scott Helman's "The Real Romney"

Geoffrey Kabaservice’s latest book is “Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party.”It’s unlikely that Mitt Romney saw the film “The Graduate” when it appeared in 1967. He was a 20-year-old Mormon missionary in France at the time, isolated from the cultural influences that shaped most Americans of the baby-boom generation, and his taste in movies ran to more wholesome fare like “The Sound of Music.” If he had seen it, though, one doubts that he would have scoffed along with his contemporaries during the scene in which a smarmy businessman declares that the key to the future is “plastics.” He might have considered it useful career advice.