ISSUE: Spring 1983
When E. B. White’s collection of essays entitled One Man’s Meat was first published some 40 years ago, the New York Times commented: “One Man’s Meat should be any man’s meat. It has all the vitamins. It also tastes good.” A new cloth edition of this collection on subjects ranging from the IN basket to a coon hunt was recently published by Harper & Row [$14.95]. With yet another presidential campaign already in the making, Americans may well wonder if the quest for the White House is unending. That question is the subject of Sidney Blumenthal’s The Permanent Campaign, in which he focuses on the power of political consultants in shaping the nation’s politics today [Touchstone Books $6.95]. Religious fanatics have been a part of the American landscape ever since the Pilgrims disembarked at Plymouth Rock. In recent years, however, as exemplified by the massacre perpetrated by cult leader Jim Jones, such fanaticism has gone from the bizarre to outright bedlam. “The great American cult scare” is the subject of David G. Bromley and Anson D. Shupe, Jr.’s Strange Gods, a work Kirkus Reviews deemed “a first-rate study, probably the best in its class.” It is now available as a Beacon paperback [$6.95]. Two recent McGraw-Hill paperbacks, respectively, concern subjects of great national popularity. The first is Katharine David Fishman’s The Computer Establishment, an “inside story of America’s most dynamic industry,” which The New Yorker lauded as “a splendid study” [$7.95]. The second is J. Robert Moskin’s The U. S. Marine Corps Story about which Battle Cry author Leon Uris could only say, “It is a hell of a piece of work” [$12.95]. Yale has issued a paperback edition of Richard Neely’s How Courts Govern America, a study of our judicial system deemed “must reading for any student of government” by Washington Monthly editor Charles Peters [$7.95]. The bloodiest single day in American history occurred on Sept. 17, 1862, when Confederate and Union forces clashed at the little creek outside Sharpsburg, Maryland called Antietam. The gore and glory of that battle are recaptured in William A. Frassanito’s Antietam: The Photographic Legacy of America’s Bloodiest Day, now out as a Scribner’s paperback [$11.95]. Two new Vintage Books are Colin Fletcher’s The Man from the Cave, an account of an isolated cave discovered in the Nevada desert in 1968 [$6.95] and a revised edition of Great Issues in American History: From Reconstruction to the Present Day, 1864—1981, edited by Richard Hofstadter and Beatrice K. Hofstadter [$5.95].
Of all the countless personal accounts of the American Civil War, the one most likely to endure was not by a Union or Confederate combatant or a statesman on either side, but rather by a South Carolina plantation mistress who abhorred slavery as much as she championed the Confederate cause. The diaries she kept during the war and then rewrote and revised 20 years after the events she described had occurred were scrupulously and eloquently edited by the noted historian C. Vann Woodward and published by Yale under the title Mary Chesnut’s Civil War in 1981. This edition later won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize in History. While the cloth edition is still available [$35.00], Yale has now published a paper edition as well [$14.95]. Yale has also brought out a paperback edition of Ernst Cassirer’s Kant’s Life and Thought, translated by James Haden with an introduction by Stephan Körner. It is the first English translation of a 60-year-old intellectual biography of one of the West’s foremost philosophers [$11.95], A third Yale paperback is Robert Lyons Danly’s In the Shade of Spring Leaves: The Life and Writings of Higuchi Ichiyo, A Woman of Letters of Meiji Japan. [$10.95].
