Roundup: Books

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Review of Richard Aldous's "Reagan and Thatcher"

Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s books include “The Controversy of Zion,” “The Strange Death of Tory England” and “Yo, Blair!”In 1950, a 24-year-old industrial research chemist named Margaret Roberts stood unsuccessfully as a Conservative candidate in the British general election. “We believe in the democratic way of life,” she told the voters. “If we serve the idea faithfully, with tenacity of purpose, we have nothing to fear from Russian Communism.”At the time, Ronald Reagan was a modestly successful movie actor serving as president of the Screen Actors Guild, and a Democrat. After working in television he moved into politics, now a Republican, establishing his national reputation with a speech during the 1964 presidential campaign, much as Barack Obama did with a convention speech 40 years later. He was elected governor of California in 1966, nearly wrested the Republican presidential nomination in 1976, gained it four years later and was elected president.

Steve Hahn: Review of Manning Marable's "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention"

Steve Hahn teaches history at the University of Pennsylvania and is the author, most recently, of The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Harvard University Press). This article appeared in the April 19, 2012 issue of the magazine.Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention By Manning Marable (Viking Press, 594 pp., $30)I.When Malcolm X died in a hail of assassin’s gunfire at the Audubon Ballroom in February 1965, the mainstream media in the United States was quick to suggest that he reaped the harvest of bloodshed he had brazenly sown. Calling him an “extremist,” “a demagogue,” a “racist,” and a “spiritual desperado,” commentators often insisted that Malcolm advocated the use of violence, regarded whites as “devils,” and was an embodiment—as a television series on the Nation of Islam had put it in 1959—of the “hate that hate produced.” At best, the press acknowledged Malcolm’s oratorical skills and razor-sharp intelligence, and found him to be personally impressive but politically misguided; at worst, they regarded him as an opportunist and religious zealot intent on stirring the cauldron of racial conflict, the polar opposite of the increasingly admired Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

Timothy Snyder: Review of Paul Preston's "The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisiton and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain"

Timothy Snyder is Housum Professor of History at Yale University and the author of the award-winning Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books). The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain By Paul Preston (W.W. Norton, 700 pp., $35) 

Vivian Gornick: Review of John Matteson's "The Lives of Margaret Fuller"

Vivian Gornick is an essayist and critic. Her biography of Emma Goldman is forthcoming from Yale.The Lives of Margaret Fuller A Biography. By John Matteson.

Michael Miner: Review of Max Holland's "Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat" (Kansas, 2012)

Michael Miner has been a Chicago journalist since 1970. After eight years as a Sun-Times reporter and several months traveling in Europe, he joined the Reader as a writer and editor in 1979, yet his connection with this paper goes back to 1971, when he contributed an article to its first issue. At the Reader, Miner has won three Lisagor Awards from the Chicago Headline Club for his media criticism.

Diane Ravitch: Review of Pasi Sahlberg's "Finnish Lessons" (Teachers College Press, 2012) and Wendy Kopp's "A Chance to Make History" (PublicAffairs, 2012)

Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? by Pasi Sahlberg Teachers College Press, 167 pp., $34.95 (paper)                                                  

Review of Richard Aldous's "Reagan and Thatcher" (Norton, 2012)

Mr. Roberts, the author of "The Storm of War," is a trustee of the Margaret Thatcher Archive Trust.Reagan and ThatcherBy Richard AldousNorton, 342 pages, $27.95How genuinely close were Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher? In the popular imagination, of course, they were as close as were Churchill and Roosevelt, or Kennedy and Macmillan, or George W. Bush and Tony Blair—possibly even closer since their political ideologies coincided as well. Yet as Richard Aldous shows in "Reagan and Thatcher," a well-researched, well-written and revisionist double portrait, very often the day-to-day policies they pursued diverged significantly. The result was "a more complex, testier relationship" than we might hitherto have thought.It is clear from the outset that Mr. Aldous, a distinguished British-born professor of history and literature at Bard College, is not some ax-grinding academic with an animus for the two greatest giants of postwar Western statesmanship. He obviously admires both leaders but merely wishes to point out, often through the use of recently declassified documents, that theirs was on occasion "a fractious alliance" rather than what Mr. Aldous calls "the merely love-struck political marriage of contemporary myth."

Tom Carson: Review of Jean Edward Smith's "Eisenhower in War and Peace" (Random House, 2012)

Tom Carson won two National Magazine Awards during his stint as Esquire's "Screen" columnist and has been nominated twice more as GQ's movie reviewer. Formerly a staff writer at LA Weekly and The Village Voice, he is the author of Gilligan's Wake (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 2003) and Daisy Buchanan's Daughter....[T]o U.S. liberals at the time, [Dwight Eisenhower] was merely an ineffectual, smiling bumbler: "The Great Golfer," as Gore Vidal called him. Later generations have simply forgotten him, which is a willful lacuna on the now-radicalized GOP's part (the last thing its neo-Bolsheviki want to celebrate is the bland Kerensky who succeeded) but otherwise just symptomatic of his low entertainment value. Unlike JFK or FDR, he was resolutely unexciting, and never mind that being the boring center of the volcanic 1950s was his political genius. It would be nice if Jean Edward Smith's fine new biography, Eisenhower in War and Peace, were to provoke a reassessment in both camps.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.: Review of Brion McClanahan's "The Founding Fathers Guide to the Constitution" (Regnery, 2012)

Thomas E. Woods Jr. is the New York Times bestselling author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and ten other books.The two key arguments against bothering with constitutional restraints on government are “who knows” and “who cares”: we can’t know what the Constitution means, and we shouldn’t care even if we did.In The Founding Fathers Guide to the Constitution, historian Brion McClanahan addresses the “who knows” argument, the claim that the Constitution and the intentions behind it are too inscrutable to be any kind of guide. McClanahan, who is following up his Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers, was the last doctoral student of the recently retired Clyde Wilson, professor of history at the University of South Carolina, editor of the Papers of John C. Calhoun, and, according to Eugene Genovese, one of the ten top Southern historians in America.

Andrew J. Nathan: Review of Ezra F. Vogel's "Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China" (Belknap, 2012)

Andrew J. Nathan is the author, with Andrew Scobell, of China’s Search for Security, forthcoming from Columbia University Press.Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China By Ezra F. Vogel (Belknap Press, 876 pp., $39.95) Revolutionaries get all the attention, but reform is much harder. A reformer has to reshape a rigid structure without breaking it. Before Deng Xiaoping, only Kemal Atatürk in the twentieth century managed to do this. Others, like Nasser and the Shah of Iran, left key parts of the old system intact, or, like Gorbachev, destroyed the regime in trying to save it.

David A. Bell: Review of Jean-Vincent Blanchard's "Eminence: Cardinal Richelieu and the Rise of France" (Walker, 2011)

David A. Bell is Professor of History at Princeton University.Armand-Jean du Plessis, better known to history as Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642), spent most of his career contending for and then exercising control over a deeply divided, indebted, and dysfunctional superpower. His country’s politics were vicious, and its government paralyzingly complex. In short, if he were dropped into Washington today, he might feel right at home.French historians have long hailed Richelieu as the architect of the absolute monarchy that dominated Europe throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Henry Kissinger, in Diplomacy, dubbed him “the father of the modern European state system.” Even critics, such as Alexandre Dumas, who made him the villain of The Three Musketeers, often cannot help admiring Richelieu’s icy savoir-faire, which is captured in the famous portrait by Philippe de Champaigne that adorns the cover of Jean-Vincent Blanchard’s new biography. As Richelieu intended, it shows a master political player with the ruthlessness necessary to achieve his goals, chief among them raising France to greatness.

Malia Boyd: Review of Julia Flynn Siler's "Lost Kingdom: Hawaii's Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America's First Imperial Adventure" (Atlantic Monthy Press, 2012)

Malia Boyd, a native of Honolulu, has written for Travel & Leisure, Food & Wine and other publications.LOST KINGDOMHawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial AdventureBy Julia Flynn SilerIllustrated. 415 pp. Atlantic Monthly Press. $30.Until about 30 years ago, most schoolchildren in Hawaii learned a version of the state’s history that went something like this: Christian missionaries came over in the early 1800s and handed the Hawaiians a single god, a written language and their very first muumuus. Later, American officials supported a group of well-intentioned gentlemen, many of them descendants of those missionaries, who replaced the monarchy with a democratic system. Eventually, the United States magnanimously annexed the tiny island republic. Sure, native Hawaiians gave the world entertaining things like the hula and surfboards. But really, they were the luckier ones, receiving the trifecta of monotheism, democracy and American appropriation.

Liesl Schillinger: Review of Anne Sebba's "That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor" (St. Martin's, 2012)

Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the NYT Book Review.THAT WOMANThe Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of WindsorBy Anne SebbaIllustrated. 344 pp. St. Martin’s Press. $27.99.Seventy-five years ago, Edward VIII swapped his kingdom for a divorcée, the American-born Wallis Warfield Simpson. At this advanced date, could there possibly be anything new to add to the mountain of autobiographies, biographies, memoirs, novels and films that have accreted on this subject? The answer, surprisingly, is yes. In “That Woman,” Anne Sebba boldly recasts the relationship that was once considered the “most romantic love story of the last century” as “a tale of gothic darkness with a Faustian pact at its core.” The king, in Sebba’s telling, emerges as a man who today might be looked on as something of a stalker.On Dec. 11, 1936, the day after Edward VIII signed away his rights to the British crown, he announced on a BBC broadcast that he had abdicated for love of a woman whom he wished to marry, but could not marry as king. The object of his ardor was herself married at the time, to her second husband, Ernest Simpson.

Louisa Thomas: Review of Eyal Press's "Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times" (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2012)

Louisa Thomas is the author of “Conscience: Two Soldiers, Two Pacifists, One Family — a Test of Will and Faith in World War I.”BEAUTIFUL SOULS: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark TimesBy Eyal Press196 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24.Paul Grüninger, a Swiss police commander, had a simple explanation for why he broke the law to help Jewish refugees flee Austria in 1938. His daughter remembered that he would repeat the words “I could do nothing else.” It is a humble answer, as if to say that anyone would have done the same.Except that most Swiss police officers didn’t: they turned the refugees away, as the law required. Grüninger made a choice, and it was certainly not the expected one. He did not fit the image of a resister. He was not a political activist and did not have a history of rebellion. He had a family to protect and provide for. He had taken an oath to uphold the law, and he considered himself faithful to his country. When the authorities discovered that he had falsified the documents of Jews, he became a pariah. So why did he disobey his orders?

Richard J. Tofel: Review of Max Holland's "Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat" (Kansas, 2012)

Mr. Tofel is general manager of ProPublica, an investigative journalism organization.Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat By Max Holland (Kansas, 285 pages, $29.95)When we think of J. Edgar Hoover in his heyday, it is as a powerful figure of the 1950s and early 1960s. Clint Eastwood's recent biopic, for instance, leaves the impression that Hoover died shortly after Richard Nixon became president in 1969. In fact, Hoover's fatal heart attack did not come until May 1972, when Nixon had been president for more than three years and Hoover was approaching a half-century as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.More to the point, Hoover's death came just a few weeks before burglars, acting on behalf of Nixon's re-election committee, were caught breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington. Max Holland's "Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat" strongly implies that if Hoover had lived just another three or four months, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein would have been denied their key source—whom they labeled Deep Throat in "All the President's Men" (1974)—and the received history of the Watergate scandal might have been quite different.

David A. Bell: Review of Jonathan I. Israel's "Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750-1790" (Oxford, 2012)

David A. Bell is Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor of History at Princeton, and a contributing editor for The New Republic. This article appeared in the March 1, 2012 issue of the magazine.Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750-1790 By Jonathan I. Israel (Oxford University Press, 1,066 pp., $45)I.