Skip to main content

Reprint, Autumn 1990


ISSUE:  Autumn 1990

To conclude his three-volume history The American Experiment—the earlier volumes being The Vineyard of Liberty and The Workshop of Democracy, respectively—James MacGregor Burns, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, examines America in the last half century from Roosevelt to Reagan in a book entitled The Crosswinds of Freedom. His field of inquiry includes the tumultuous years between the Great Depression and the 1980’s, and his work has been acclaimed as “a magisterial history” by The New York Times. Vintage Books is offering a new edition of Burns’ final volume in The American Experiment [$16.95]. Another recent Vintage Book is David H. Bennett’s The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History, which The Journal of Southern History deemed “the best account we have of the Far Right in American History” [$16.95 paper]. Pittsburgh is offering a new edition of Michael Fitzgibbon Holt’s Forging A Majority: The Formation of the Republican Party in Pittsburgh, 1848—1860, a work originally published by Yale in 1969 [$29.95 cloth]. Another Pittsburgh reprint is Max Hall’s Benjamin Franklin & Polly Baker: The History of a Literary Deception in which Franklin created the eloquent and feisty Polly Baker on trial for fornication after the birth of her fifth child out of wedlock [$9.95 paper]. California has reprinted Eric H. Monkkonen’s America Becomes Urban: The Development of U.S. Cities if Towns 1780—1980 [$12.95 paper].

Kentucky has republished William H. Townsend’s Lincoln and the Bluegrass: Slavery and Civil War in Kentucky, a work originally published in 1955 [$30.00 cloth, $7.00 paper]. Recent Bison Books from Nebraska are Gerald D. Nash’s The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War [$12.50 paper], Colonel Homer W. Wheeler’s Buffalo Days: The Personal Narrative of a Cattleman, Indian Fighter & Army Officer [$11. 95 paper], and Gregory J.W. Urwin’s Custer Victorious: The Civil War Battles of General George Armstrong Custer [$9.95 paper].

LIVES AND LETTERS

Reviewing Henry James: Selected Letters, edited by noted James biographer, Leon Edel, for The Wall Street Journal, critic Richard Locke observed: “This splendid new collection of letters makes it easier than ever before to feel the super-abundant intelligence, passion and variety of James’ intense personal life. . . . James has an immense capacity for friendship and a voracious appetite for social experience. The array of famous men and women who appear in these letters suggests some historical pageant.” Harvard recently published a paper edition of the Selected Letters [$14.95]. Virginia is offering a new edition of William H. Harbaugh’s Lawyer’s Lawyer: The Life of John W. Davis, a biography of one of the most celebrated attorneys of the 20th century and the Democratic candidate for president against Calvin Coolidge [$17.95 paper]. As an addition to the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, Oxford Paperbacks has republished Six Women’s Slave Narratives, with an introduction by William L. Andrews and beginning with the first female slave narrative from the Americas, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (1831) [$9.95]. Farrar, Straus & Giroux has a new edition of Francois Truffaut’s Correspondence 1945—1984, a collection of 500 letters by one of the giants of French cinema [$50.00 cloth, $19.95 paper]. Houghton Mifflin has reissued Anne Stevenson’s Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath, which poet W.S. Merwin called “the most comprehensive, balanced, and perceptive work on Sylvia Plath’s life and death and writing” [$10.95 paper]. Georgia has issued a paper edition of Ely: An Autobiography, the memoir of Ely Green, son of a former Confederate officer whose mother was a housemaid, the daughter of a former slave. The late Walker Percy said this autobiography presented in a microcosm “all that was (and is) right about the South and wrong about the South, and the U.S. in its treatment of the Negro” [$14.95]. A recent Collier Book is Eva Jane Price’s China Journal 1889—1900: An American Missionary Family During the Boxer Rebellion, with a foreword by Harrison E. Salisbury [$9.95]. Collier Books has also republished Mark Mathabane’s Kaffir Boy in America, the story of a South African youth who escaped to the United States [$8.95], Bison Books has a new edition of Robertas Love’s The Rise and Fall of Jesse James, with an introduction by Michael Fellman, a work originally published in 1925 [$11.95], Bison has also reprinted Willa Cather in Person: Interviews, Speeches, and Letters selected and edited by L. Brent Bohlke [$8.95]. Antonia Fraser’s The Warrior Queens: The Legends and the Lives of the Women Who Have Led Their Nations in War is now available as a Vintage Book [$12.95]. Touchstone Books has a new edition of Ariel Sharon’s Warrior: An Autobiography by one of Israel’s most successful and controversial military leaders [$14.95].

LITERATURE IN GENERAL

Between 1927 and 1951, the Nonesuch Press published a series of 15 titles of works by great British writers. The None-such Press, now revived, has undertaken a detailed study of each volume and, in response to popular demand, is making certain titles available once more. Among the first three are these: John Hayward’s edition of Swift: Gulliver’s Travels & Selected Writings in Prose & Verse, which first appeared in the 1930’s [$35.00 cloth]; The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll, with an introduction by Alexander Woollcott and illustrations by John Tenniel [$35.00 cloth]; and The Complete Prose & Poetry of William Blake edited by Geoffrey Keynes [$35.00 cloth]. Stanford is offering a new edition of Richard Poirier’s Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing, with a new foreword and afterword by John Hollander, a work first published in 1977 that is considered the finest critical study of the American poet [$42.50 cloth, $12.95 paper]. Cambridge has a paper edition of Daniel Gunn’s Psychoanalysis and Fiction: An Exploration of Literary and Psychoanalytic Borders [$15.95]. English Renaissance Poetry: A Collection of Shorter Poems from Skelton to Jonson, edited by John Williams, was first published more than 25 years ago and remains a valuable introductory anthology of short poems from our first nearly modern poetry. A new edition of this work was recently published by Arkansas [$26.95 cloth]. Harvard has published a new edition of Judge Richard A. Posner’s Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation, a study of what literature has to teach about the law and the methods of legal argument, by a distinguished member of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit [$25.00 cloth, $12.95 paper]. Cornell has reissued Leon Chai’s The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance [$12.95 paper].

FICTION

The winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Oscar Hijuelos’ novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love was described by People Magazine as “one lush, tipsy, allnight mambo of a novel about Cuban musicians in strange places like New York City.” It is now a recent addition to the Perennial Library [$9.95]. Perennial has also reprinted James Wilcox’s Sort of Rich, a story about a New York woman who marries a widower from Tula Springs, Louisiana by an author The Los Angeles Times considers “One of the most promising fiction writers on the national scene” [$8.95]. Two other recent Perennial Books are Jane LeCompte’s Moon Passage [$8.95] and Barbara Kingsolver’s Homeland and Other Stories [$8.95].

0 Comments

CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.

Recommended Reading