Reprint, Spring 1998

Brenda E. Stevenson’s Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South offers a portrait of family and community life in the American South presenting the personal stories of planters and slaves, of free blacks and poor-to-middling whites into a portrait of Southern society from the mid-18th century to the Civil War with the focus on Loudoun County, Virginia and the surrounding vicinity. The Journal of American History says Black and White is “well written and interesting . . .valuable and rewarding.” Oxford recently published a paper edition [$16.95]. Yale describes Robert Alan Goldberg’s Barry Goldwater as “the most up-to-date and balanced biography of Barry Goldwater ever written.” Yale is now offering a paper edition of this account of the life of the former Arizona senator known as “Mr. Conservative” [$35 cloth, $16 paper]. Another recent Yale paperback reprint is Eric Sams’ The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, 1564-1594 [$40 cloth, $17 paper]. A.G. Mojtabai’s Blessed Assurance: At Home with the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas is an account of life at Pantex, the final assembly plant for all nuclear weapons in the United States. Syracuse is out with a paper edition of Blessed Assurance [$17.95], Margaret Sams’ Forbidden Family: A Wartime Memoir of the Philippines, 1941—45 is an account of her ordeal in a Japanese prison camp where she fell in love with a married man and started a secret family. Her first husband, also a Japanese prisoner, was killed by American bombs in 1944 during the liberation of the Philippines and she subsequently married Jerry Sams with whom she has lived ever since. Wisconsin recently reprinted Forbidden Family originally published in 1989 [$12.95 paper]. From her 11th year to the month of her death at age 55, Little Women author Louisa May Alcott kept copious journals. These journals were selected and edited by Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy with Madeleine B. Stern as associate editor, and they provide a lively portrait of life in 19th-century New England. Georgia recently published the first paperback edition of the Alcott journals [$21.95]. Georgia has also reprinted Kenneth E. Morris’ Jimmy Carter: American Moralist, the first full-scale biography of the former president from Georgia since 1980 [$19.95 paper], A native of Australia and a physician, Helen Caldicott has been described as “first lady of the Nuclear Freeze Movement in the 1980’s” by Senator Edward M. Kennedy. Caldicott’s account of her efforts to put a stop to nuclear weapons is described in her autobiography, A Desperate Passion which Norton recently reprinted in a paper edition [$13.95]. Penguin is offering a reprint of Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, an account of Karr’s calamitous childhood in east Texas, a book which won the Texas Institute of Letters Prize for Best Nonfiction and a work selected as one of the best books of 1995 by People, Time, The New Yorker, and Entertainment Weekly [$11.95], A 1996 New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Le Anne Schreiber’s Light Years: A Memoir is an autobiographical account of life on an isolated country farm in upstate New York [$11]. The Noonday Press of Farrar, Straus & Giroux has reprinted James Lord’s Giacometti: A Biography, a life of the Italian artist who attained international acclaim during the 50’s and 60’s [$20 paper]. Johns Hopkins has a paperback edition of David Minter’s William Faulkner: His Life and Work with a new preface by the author. Critic Jonathan Yardley commented about the book: “Any future Faulkner biographer—and there will be others, rest assured of that—will find it difficult to surpass what Minter has accomplished” [$15.95], Another recent Hopkins paperback reprint is Brenda Wineapple’s Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein, a biographical account of the famed American feminine expatriate and her brother in Paris during the 1920’s and 30’s [$24.95],

Recent additions to Everyman’s Library of Pocket Poets include Coleridge, the master impresario of English Romanticism [$12.50 cloth], and The Roman Poets, both urban and pastoral poetry ranging from Virgil to Ovid [$12.50 cloth]. Illinois has reprinted two volumes of poetry by Robert Wrigley in one paperback volume, the respective volumes being Moon in a Mason Jar and What My Father Believed [$16.95 paper]. A recent addition to the Penguin Classics series is The Penguin Book of Restoration Verse edited with an introduction by Harold Love and including poems by John Vaughan, John Milton, and Andrew Marvell [$14.95].

Former New York Times associate editor, Tom Wicker, is a prolific author of many works of fiction and nonfiction, one of which was his critically acclaimed novel Unto This Hour described by Georgia, the publisher of a new edition, as “A Civil War novel in the tradition of War and Peace.” Unto This Hour is a monumental recounting of the five long days in Virginia in August 1862 when the Confederate army dealt a devastating defeat to Union forces at the Battle of Second Manassas or Second Bull Run [$24.95 paper]. A recent addition to Knopfs Everyman’s Library is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera, a novel by one of the most acclaimed authors of our time [$20 cloth]. Recent Penguin Books include John Dos Passos’ World War I novel, Three Soldiers with an introduction and notes by Townsend Ludington [$9.95]; L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between edited by Douglas Brooks-Davies [$12.95]; and Sigrid Undset’s Kristen Lavransdatter, I: The Wreath, the first volume of the Norwegian’s trilogy about 14th-century Norway, translated with an introduction and notes by Tiina Nunnally [$11.95]. In its Penguin Classics series, the paperback publisher is offering a new edition of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, first published in 1881 [$8.95]. Scribner Paperback Fiction has issued a new edition of Ernest Hill’s Satisfied with Nothin’, the story of Jamie Ray Griffin, a young black man who by virtue of his talent in football is suddenly thrust into a white world full of privilege and possibility [$11], As part of its Voices of the South series, Louisiana has reprinted Doris Betts’ The Gentle Insurrection and Other Stories, the first collection by a prolific Southern author [$14.95 paper] and Donald Hays’ The Dixie Association, an account of a colorful and crazy Arkansas minor league baseball team [$14.95 paper]. Voices of the South is also offering Joan Williams’ The Wintering, the author’s third novel and a roman a clef of her relationship with William Faulkner [$14.95].

Thomas DaCosta Kaufman’s Court, Cloister and City: The Art and Culture of Central Europe, 1450—1800 chronicles more than 300 years of painting, sculpture and architecture in Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, Ukraine, Lithuania, and western parts of the Russian Federation. Kaufman surveys art and artifacts resulting from the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Thirty Years War and the Enlightenment. Chicago recently published a paper edition of Court, Cloister and City [$24.95], Princeton has reprinted Allan Young’s The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in which Young traces a malady particularly suffered by Vietnam veterans [$18.95 paper]. Harvard has a paper edition of Creating Modern Capitalism: How Entrepreneurs, Companies, and Countries Triumphed in Three Industrial Revolutions, the first book to explain to a general audience interconnections among technological innovation, management science, the power of entrepreneurship, and national economic growth. The editor is the Pulitzer Prize winning historian, Thomas K. McCraw [$59.95 cloth, $29.95 paper]. Now available as a Yale paperback is Michael Baxandall’s Shadows and Enlightenment, a discussion of the nature and qualities of shadows as reflected in painting [$35 cloth, $20 paper]. Verso books has a new edition of Christopher Hitchens’ Hostage to History: Cyprus From the Ottomans to Kissinger, with a new afterword by the author [$18 paper]. Oxford has published a revised and an enlarged version of Bryan Magee’s widely praised The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, containing a brief biography of the philosopher, a systematic exposition of his thought, and a critical discussion of the problems to which it gives rise and its influence on a wide range of thinkers and artists [$16.95 paper]. Transaction is offering a new edition of Friedrich Meinecke’s Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’Etat and Its Place in Modern History, with an introduction by Werner Stark [$27.95]. Another recent Transaction paperback is Richard Hoggart’s The Tyranny of Relativism: Culture and Politics in Contemporary English Society with a new introduction by the author [$21.95].