ISSUE: Spring 1991
Even now, more than two decades after his death, Martin Luther King, Jr. inspires and sustains the struggle to achieve racial justice in America and throughout the world. His words and his work truly go marching on, one evidence of this being a new edition of A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., which HarperCollins recently released in paperback. Of King’s writings, the Washington Post observed, they, “. . .reveal an intellectual struggle and growth as fierce and alive as any chronicle of his political life could possibly be” [$16.96]. Rowman & Littlefield has published the 13th edition of Paul C. Bartholomew and Joseph F. Menez’ Summaries of Leading Cases on the Constitution containing such special features as: concise summaries of the most frequently cited cases since the establishment of the U.S. Supreme Court; a complete text of the Constitution of the United States; and a detailed explanation of the organization and functions of the Supreme Court [$19.95 paper]. Minnesota is offering a new edition of Dick Howard’s The Birth of American Political Thought, a work originally published in French in conjunction with the bicentenary of the French Revolution [$45.00 cloth, $14.95 paper]. The Bradley Commission on History in the Schools, created in 1987, examined the inadequacy, in quantity and quality, of the history taught in American classrooms and produced Historical Literacy: The Case for History in American Education, edited by Paul Gagnon. The case is put in essays from America’s leading historians, including Michael Kammen, William McNeill, and Gordon Craig. Houghton Mifflin is now offering a paper edition [$10.95]. Yale has published a new edition of Robert A. Dahl’s After the Revolution?: Authority in a Good Society in which Dahl discusses the problems, strengths, and weaknesses of democracy as a method of decision-making for modern governments [$25. 00 cloth, $9.95 paper]. Cambridge has come out with a paper edition of David Wyatt’s The Fall into Eden: Landscape and Imagination in California, a work which American Literature described as “an elegant, graceful, and moving book, a kind of hymn to California” [$14.95]. Two recent Vintage Books are respectively Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, a controversial account of the lawsuit of convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald against Joe McGinniss, the author of Fatal Vision, a book about the crime [$10.95]; and Ernie’s America: The Best of Ernie Pyle’s 1930’s Travel Dispatches edited with an introduction by David Nichols [$14.95].
A true giant of American thought, Henry Adams also produced one of the most brilliant memoirs ever written by an American, namely The Education of Henry Adams. This classic recently became a part of the Vintage Books/The Library of America series and has been published as a paperback printed on acid-free paper with an introduction by Leon Wieseltier [$14.50]. Another giant of American thought was Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense, The Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason. His life and writings are recounted by the noted British philosopher, the late A.J. Ayer, in Thomas Paine, a new edition of which was recently released by Chicago [$12.95 paper]. Yale has a new edition of Joseph Bergin’s Cardinal Richelieu: Power and the Pursuit of Wealth, an account of the statesman who did more than anyone else to lay the foundations of French hegemony in Europe and of absolute monarchy in his own country. Cardinal Richelieu was also one of the richest men in the entire history of France, and Bergin’s study focuses on his wealth [$37.50 cloth, $16.95 paper]. Of Carolly Erickson’s Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography, Christopher Hibbert, writing in The New York Times Book Review, commented: “In her skillful portrait are the recognizable features both of the romantic hero of Scotland and the bitter, disappointed exile.” Quill Books has come out with a new edition of Bonnie Prince Charlie [$12.95 paper]. Noonday Press has republished Eileen Simpson’s Poets in Their Youth: A Memoir, focusing on poets John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Delmore Schwartz, and a book selected as one of the “Ten Best Nonfiction Books of the 1980—1990 Decade,” by Time magazine [$10.95 paper]. In The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer Tom Dardis examined the effect of liquor on literary creators and produced what Henry Kisor in The Chicago Sun-Times called a “brilliant, richly provocative new critical work.” Ticknor & Fields has a paper edition of this work [$8.95]. Of the writings of world-renowned travel writer Jan Morris, the Christian Science Monitor has concluded, “The splendors of Morris’s prose are like Homer’s sea, simply everywhere.” Those splendors are reflected in Pleasures of a Tangled Life, a memoir now available as a Vintage Book [$12.95].
Vintage International is offering new editions of five of William Faulkner’s novels, including two generally regarded as among the greatest American novels of the 20th century, namely The Sound and the Fury [$8.95], and Absalom, Absalom! [$9.95]. Also available in these Vintage editions are As I Lay Dying [$8.95], Go Down, Moses [$9.95], and Light in August [$9.95]. In addition to the Faulkner reprints, Vintage has new editions of the following novels: Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters [$9.95], Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot [$8.95], Bohumil Hrabal’s I Served the King of England [$10.95], Martha Bergland’s A Farm Under a Lake [$9.95], Thomas McGuane’s Keep the Change [$9.95], Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House [$9.95], and Thomas Sanchez’ Mile Zero [$10.95]. In conjunction with the movie starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, North Point Press has republished Evan S. Connell’s Mr. Bridge [$9.95 paper], and Mrs. Bridge [$9.95 paper], two novels about marriage, family, and middle age in Middle, middle-class America. Vintage Books/The Library of America series is offering a paper edition of Henry James’ Washington Square with an introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick [$8.50]. Also available in this series is Frank Norris’s McTeague with an introduction by Alfred Kazin [$10.50]. Harper Perennial Books has new editions of two novels by Zora Neale Hurston. The two novels are respectively, Moses, Man of the Mountain [$9.95], and Seraph on the Suwanee [$9.95], In its Phoenix Fiction Series, Chicago has republished Jack Fuller’s Convergence, a novel about “the deadly game of espionage” [$12.95]. Another Phoenix Fiction title is Lord Byron’s Doctor by Paul West, a fictional account of Dr. John Polidori’s experiences with one of Romanticism’s rolling stones [12.95]. W. Somerset Maugham was the most prolific and commercially successful novelist, playwright, and short-story writer in the English language. His novel The Explorer has long been unavailable to reading audiences. Now Carroll & Graf has made this early Maugham work set at the height of the British Empire again available in a paper edition [$10.95]. Carroll & Graf has also come out with a paperback version of Elizabeth Taylor’s In a Summer Season [$8.95].
As part of its Loeb Classical Library Series, Harvard has published a new translation of elegies of Propertius, one of Rome’s finest love poets. The elegies of this Latin poet have been edited and translated by G.P. Goold [$14.50 cloth].
