ISSUE: Autumn 1988
Sean Dennis Cashman’s America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt is described by its publisher as “the only comprehensive survey of the entire period.” New York University recently issued a second edition of Cashman’s history, expanded and with additional illustrations [$40.00 cloth, $17.50 paper]. A recent addition to Harper & Row’s Perennial Library is The Republic of Reason: The Personal Philosophies of the Founding Fathers, selected, edited, and with commentary by Norman Cousins, former editor of The Saturday Review [$10.95]. There is a foreword by Richard B. Morris, author of Witnesses at the Creation. Perennial Books has also issued a revised edition of Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought which was originally titled American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century, Edited with introductions by William F. Buckley, Jr., and Charles R. Kesler, the book contains the writings by such American conservatives as Russell Kirk, Milton Friedman, and Thomas Sowell [$15.95]. A third Perennial Library offering is Patricia Penton Leimbach’s Harvest of Bittersweet, a collection of essays celebrating the joys and trials of farm living, which Booklist called “the rural answer to Erma Bombeck” [$6.95]. When Duncan Emrich’s Folklore on the American Land was published in 1972, The Christian Science Monitor has this reaction to the book: “an utterly enthralling love affair with the vast and inexhaustible beauties of American folklore. For sheer, unadulterated joy of reading, this book cannot be too highly recommended.” Now Little, Brown has come out with a paper edition of Folklore on the American Land [$12.95]. The folklore of a more specific area is examined in Up Cutshin & Down Greasy: Folkways of a Kentucky Mountain Family by Leonard W. Roberts. Along the isolated headwaters of the Kentucky River—Cutshin and Greasy Creeks—Roberts found the Couches, a mountain family who had preserved the traditional ways of their forebears, and he describes their lives [$16.00 cloth, $8.00 paper]. Bison Books has published a new paper edition of Jon Tuska’s The American West in Film: Critical Approaches to the Western. Among the directors discussed by Tuska are John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Sam Peckinpah [$10.95], Another recent Bison Paperback is Enos A. Mills’s Wild Life on the Rockies, with an introduction and notes by James H. Pickering. Mills spent three successive winters beginning in 1902 traversing the upper slopes of the Rockies to report to the government on weather and topography. He became known as the “Father of Rocky Mountain National Park,” and his book about life in the great mountains was originally published in 1909 [$27.95 cloth, $8.95 paper]. Bison has also reissued Carrie Adell Strahorn’s two-volume work, Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage, with Volume I covering the years 1877—1880, and Volume II 1880—1898. Originally published in 1911 and now reprinted for the first time in more than 70 years, Fifteen Thousand Miles is an account of the 30 years Robert and Carrie Adell Strahorn spent traveling by coach, saddle, and railroad car in the service of the Union Pacific Railroad [Volume I, $28.85 cloth, $9.95 paper; Volume II, $26.95 cloth, $8.95 paper].
Born in Kenya, Beryl Markham made history in 1936 as the first person ever to fly the Atlantic solo from England to North America. Her 1942 memoir, West with the Night, was republished in 1983 and received worldwide literary acclaim. Four years later Mary S. Lovell published Straight on till Morning: The Biography of Beryl Markham, and it became an international best seller. A new paper edition was recently issued by Vermilion Books, a subsidiary of St. Martin’s [$10.95]. MIT Press has made available a paper edition of George Santayana’s Persons and Places, a new edition of his autobiography, edited by William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. This new edition of the life of the Spanish philosopher, poet, critic, and novelist, restores passages that were deleted in the original book because of the publisher’s sensitivities about lawsuits [$12.50]. In Berlin Diary, first published to great acclaim in 1941, journalist and CBS correspondent William L. Shirer described his years (1934—1941) in Nazi Germany. Shirer offered a firsthand view of life in the Third Reich through daily entries to his diary, entries which touched upon the megalomania of Hitler, the rise of the military, ordinary German citizens, and the persecution of Jews. Little Brown recently reissued this account of life under a totalitarian regime in paperback for the first time [$12.95], Georgia has reprinted a paper edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson: New Questions, New Answers, edited by John A. Vanee. The book brings together the most recent and lively assessments of the literary merit and historical accuracy of Boswell’s biography [$15.00]. In its ongoing history of the West, Bison Books is continuing to publish biographies and autobiographies of figures who made life along the vanishing frontier so fascinating to posterity. Among the most famous is, of course, General George Armstrong Custer, and his life was recounted by Frederic F. Van de Water in Glory-Hunter; A Life of General Custer, first published in 1934. A Bison Book edition of this biography, with an introduction by Paul Andrew Hutton, is now available. Glory-Hunter was the first biography to depict Custer in unheroic terms [$10.95]. Another recent Bison Book is Dean F. Krakel’s The Saga of Tom Horn: The Story of a Cattleman’s War, one which broke out in southern Wyoming in the 1890’s after an epidemic of cattle rustling [$22.95 cloth, $8.95 paper]. A third Bison reprint is Joe Mills’ A Mountain Boyhood with an introduction and notes by James H. Pickering, dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, University of Houston [$27.95 cloth, $9.95 paper]. Other recent Bison Books include William Francis Hooker’s The Bullwhacker: Adventures of a Frontier Freighter, who came west from Wisconsin to Wyoming Territory in the early 1870’s and began hauling supplies for army posts and Indian reservations far from the railroad [$5.95]; Hudson Stuck’s Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled: A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska, an account of a series of winter journeys made by the Episcopal archdeacon of the Yukon between 1905 and 1910 [$32.50 cloth, $11.95 paper]; and The Killing of Chief Crazy Horse, as viewed from three widely different perspectives, edited and with an introduction by Robert A. Clark and commentary by Carroll Friswold [$16.96 cloth, $5.95 paper].
Frederick R. Karl’s Modern and Modernism: The Sovereignty of the Artist 1885—1925 was originally published in 1985 and hailed by Publishers Weekly as a “brilliant, dense cultural history.” A new paper edition of Modern and Modernism has been published by Atheneum [$14.95]. Collier Books is offering a new edition of Hugh Ford’s Published in Paris: A Literary Chronicle of Paris in the 1920’s and 1930’s, with a foreword by the late New Yorker writer, Janet Planner [$14.95]. To its Perennial Library, Harper & Row has added a 3rd edition of Clifton Fadiman’s The Lifetime Reading Plan, an introduction to more than 100 classics of Western literature and thought and “the start of a lifetime of conversation with some of the liveliest thinkers of our civilization [$7.95]. Methuen has come out with a new edition of Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality. Among other things, Ms. Garber examines why writers as different as Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx have been haunted by certain events and figures in Shakespeare’s plays [$42.50 cloth, $14.95 paper]. Renaissance Historicism: Selections from English Literary Renaissance, edited by Arthur F. Kinney and Dan S. Collins reprints some of the best essays that have appeared in Renaissance Historicism, essays that “illustrate all the major traditional methods of historical literary criticism as well as the wide range of new critical perspectives by established authorities and important new voices” [$12.95]. Verso Books, a subsidiary of Methuen, has reprinted Margaret and Michael Rustin’s Narratives of Love and Loss: Studies in Modern Children’s Fiction, in which the authors address this question: why do some stories written for children have so powerful an emotional resonance for both child and adult readers? [$40.00 cloth, $13.95 paper]. Dell Books is offering a paper edition of Leonard Rosen’s The Everyday English Handbook in which tips are given about English grammar, punctuation and word usage, clarity and style, as well as about how to write effective reports, essays, and letters [$4.50].
Ninety-Three was Victor Hugo’s last novel, and it recounts the events of the year 1793 in which a new and terrible phase of the French Revolution got underway in the era of “Madame” Guillotine. Carroll & Graf has reprinted a paper edition of the novel [$8.95]. As a part of its Shoreline Books paperback series, Norton has reprinted Francine du Plessix Gray’s Lovers and Tyrants, which the publisher describes as “at once an erotic, urgent, and beautifully written novel.” [$7.95]. Godine has republished Arthur A. Cohen’s An Admirable Woman, written as the first-person memoir of Erika Hertz, a magnetic German-Jewish intellectual driven from Germany by the Nazis who becomes a legend in America. The novel received the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction in 1984 [$8.95]. Southern Methodist is offering a new edition of Clay Reynold’s The Vigil, a first novel described as “a skillful and absorbing blend of mystery story, psychological thriller, and fascinating character study,” with a new afterword by the author [$8.95]. Carroll & Graf has a new edition of Nancy Mitford’s Highland Fling, a look at the changing of the guard between World Wars I and II, which The Times lauded as “a delightful comedy of manners” [$3.95]. The Collier Fiction Paperback Series includes three new editions: Charles Dickinson’s With or Without, a selection of 11 short stories [$7.95]; Caryl Phillips’ A State of Independence, a novel about a Caribbean homecoming [$6.95]; and Peter Handke’s Slow; Homecoming, a suite of three interrelated fictions [$8.95]. Atheneum has published new editions of two novels by Ishmael Reed, the novels being respectively Reckless Eyeballing, the story of a black playwright who has been “sex-listed” [$7.95], and The Terrible Twos, a novel about an all-too-believable future where mankind’s fate depends upon a jolly old gent named St. Nicholas [$8.95]. Scribner’s has reprinted Stephen Wright’s Meditations in Green, a novel of Vietnam, as a part of its Signature Edition series [$8.95].
Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene was the first epic in English and established the possibility of heroic poetry in the English tradition. A new edition of Spenser’s masterpiece has been published as part of the Penguin Classics series [$12.95]. Another Penguin Classic is Lord Byron’s Don Juan [$8.95]. Penguin is also offering a paper edition of The Penguin Book of Spanish Verse, edited by J.M. Cohen, with parallel text edition. This is the third edition of this anthology [$8.95]. Touchstone Books has reprinted Steve Mason’s Johnny’s Song, a collection of verse by a former Army captain and decorated Vietnam combat veteran [$6.95].
