ISSUE: Summer 1986
When Margaret Leech’s Reveille in Washington was first published in 1941, the New York Times Book Review commented: “From the beckoning perfection of its first line, it is literary skill of a very high order. . . . A truly living, scholarly book that comes to us with enlightenment and wit, brilliance in scene and universality in insight.” This account of Washington, D.C. during the Civil War later won the Pulitzer Prize for history. Carroll & Graf has reissued the work in a paper edition [$11.95]. Another aspect of the Civil War is examined by Milton F. Perry in Infernal Machines: The Story of Confederate Submarine and Mine Warfare, which Louisiana has reprinted in a paper edition [$8.95]. Oklahoma has come out with a second, revised edition of Thurman Wilkins’ Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People, an account of the events that led to the infamous Trail of Tears [$24.95 cloth]. Massachusetts is offering a revised edition of Lewis M. Killian’s White Southerners, a work originally published in 1970, now containing a new chapter in which Killian reviews the “Carter decade” and considers a new “Solid South” as predominantly Republican despite an increase in Southern black political power [$25.00 cloth, $8.95 paper]. Oxford has published a fifth edition of Henry J. Abraham’s The Judicial Process, a work examining the theory, practice, and people behind the judicial process in the United States, England, and France [$14.95 paper]. Admiral Stansfield Turner served as director of Central Intelligence under President Carter and later recounted his experiences in Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition. Harper & Row has now issued a paper edition as a part of its Perennial Library series [$7.95]. Another Harper & Row paperback is Robert H. Ferrell’s Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1917—1921, a part of The New American Nation Series edited by Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris [$8.95]. Beacon Press has come out with a revised and updated edition of Edgar Bottome’s The Balance of Terror: Nuclear Weapons and the Illusion of Security, 1945—1985, an analysis of the myths and realities behind American involvement in the international arms race [$11.95 paper]. Recent Touchstone Books include Esra Vogel’s Comeback: Building the Resurgence of American Business [$8.95] and G. William Domhoff’s Who Rules America Now?: A View for the ’80s [also $8.95]. An abridged edition of Gary B. Nash’s The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution, which the Journal of American History considered “a major reinterpretation of urban life in 18th-century America,” has been published by Harvard [$9.95 paper]. Cornell is offering a paper edition of Christopher Eaton Gunn’s Workers’ Self-Management in the United States, a study of worker-owned firms in America [$9.95],
James Longstreet (1821—1904) was among the foremost of Lee’s lieutenants, fighting from First Manassas through Appomattox and commanding the First Corps of Lee’s army from its creation in 1862 to surrender in April 1865. To his men he was known as “Old Pete,” and his long life was recounted in James Longstreet: Lee’s War Horse, a biography by H.J. Eckenrode and Bryan Conrad. It was first published by North Carolina in 1934, 30 years after Longstreet’s death, and has now been reprinted by that press with a foreword by Gary W. Gallagher [$19.95 cloth]. Howard M. Feinstein’s Becoming William James received widespread acclaim when first published by Cornell in 1984. Noted biographer Leon Edel, author of the five-volume life of Henry James, called the book on William “the best biographical work I have read on the philosopher and psychologist.” Critic Alfred Kazin found himself “full of admiration for its details, its tone, and above all for its understanding.” Cornell is now offering a paper edition of Feinstein’s study [$10.95]. California has reprinted Alexis de Tocqueville: Selected Letters on Politics and Society, edited by Roger Boesche and translated by James Toupin and Roger Boesche, the first English translation of a broad selection of the Frenchman’s letters emphasizing his role as a political thinker and actor [$10.95 paper]. A portrait of another Frenchman is presented in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Life of Monsieur de Molière, translated by Mirra Ginsburg, completed in 1933 but not published until 1962 and now reissued as a New Directions Paperbook [$8.95]. Oxford is offering a paper edition of Wilfred Owen: Selected Letters, edited by John Bell [$7.95]. Virginia has a paper edition of The Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson, edited by Edwin Morris Betts and James Adam Bear, Jr. [$9.95]. When Edward Crankshaw’s Maria Theresa was originally published in 1969, the London Daily Telegraph had this to say; “She was great and good and beautiful. So is this book.” This account of the Habsburg empress, who was called to the throne in 1740 at the age of 23, is now available as an Atheneum paperback [$10.95]. Touchstone Books has reprinted Justin Kaplan’s Walt Whitman: A Life, which The Boston Globe called a “fine and sensitive biography” [$12.95]. Summit Books has combined Italian Primo Levi’s two classic memoirs of his journey to hell and back in hardcover with a new afterword in which the author replies to his readers’ most frequent questions. Survival in Auschwitz is the story of Levi’s ten months in a death camp. The Reawakening tells the story of Levi’s liberation from Auschwitz in January 1945 by the Red Army and his circuitous journey home by way of the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Rumania [$19.95]. Sterling Seagrave’s The Soong Dynasty, the first behind-the-scenes account of the Soong family, whose wealth and power dominated China, was a national best seller and is again available as a Harper & Row Perennial Library book [$9.95]. Vintage Books has a new edition of Truong Nhu Tang’s A Viet Cong Memoir: An Inside Account of the Vietnam War and its Aftermath, by a former Viet Cong minister of justice [$8.95].
Scribner’s has launched a new series of paperbacks called the Scribner Signature Edition, with the author’s autograph appearing on the cover of the reprint. The first five books in the new series are, respectively, David Bradley’s South Street, a tragicomedy about black America [$6.95]; Mary Lee Settle’s Blood Tie, a novel about expatriates in Turkey and winner of the National Book Award [$7.95]; Joy Williams’ State of Grace, a National Book Award nominee [$6.95]; and two works by Gordon Lish, the novel Dear Mr. Capote [$5.95] and What I Know So Far, a collection of short stories [$4.95], New Directions Paperbooks has reissued Ronald Firbank’s Three More Novels: Vainglory, Inclinations, and Caprice, with an introduction by Ernest Jones [$9.95]. A recent Owl Book is John Edgar Wideman’s Hurry Home, the story of a highly educated, fragmented black caught between two worlds [$6.95]. As a part of its The World’s Classics, Oxford has republished Anthony Trollope’s The Belton Estate, a study of the pathology of desire which was first published in 1865 and now edited with an introduction by John Halperin [$7.95 paper]. Another Trollope novel, Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite, is available in paperback from Dover [$4.95]. A new Bantam Classic is Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Short Fiction, with an introduction by Jayne Anne Phillips [$2.50 paper]. Carroll & Graf has reprinted John O’Hara’s A Rage to Live, which it describes as “the bestselling novel of a woman’s lust for life” [$4.95]. Algonquin Books has a second edition of Sylvia Wilkinson’s Cale, a novel about the South that first appeared in 1970 and is now revised and shortened, with an introduction by Louis D. Rubin, Jr. It is the first book in Algonquin’s Second Edition Series [$21.95 cloth, $11.95 paper]. Recent additions to Harper & Row’s Perennial Library series include novels involving the characters created by E.F. Benson. They are Benson’s own Mapp and Lucia, the fourth volume in the Make Way for Lucia series [$5.95], and Tom Holt’s Lucia in Wartime, which is based on the characters created by Benson [$5.95]. Perennial Library has also reprinted Thomas Wolfe’s novel about a Southerner in New York, The Web and the Rock [$10.95], and Vasily Grossman’s Forever Flowing, a work about a Soviet political prisoner [$6.95]. Louisiana has a new edition of John Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Barn; or, A Sojourn in the Old Dominion, a novel originally published in 1832, revised in 1851, and now with an introduction by Lucinda H. MacKethan [$11.95]. Viking has a new edition of Rebecca West’s Cousin Rosamund, a sequel to her novels, The Fountain Overflows and This Real Night, a trilogy about two young women coming to age in an England shattered by the Great War [$16.95 cloth]. St. Martin’s has republished Harry Stein’s Hoopla, a fictional account of the Chicago “Black Sox” scandal, when eight members of the White Sox ball club were accused of throwing the 1919 World Series [$7.95 paper].
Poems from Italy, edited by William Jay Smith and Dana Gioia, presents seven centuries of Italian poetry, along with verse translations spanning a similar period of the English language. Such giants of Italian literature as Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch are represented, and the translators include such names as Chaucer, Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley. A new edition of this work is available from New Rivers Press [$12.00 paper]. Atheneum has reprinted two works by Nancy Mitford, one being The Water Beetle, a collection of essays [$6.95 paper], and the other being Noblesse Oblige, containing the famous article, “The English Aristocracy,” which introduced the world to a society composed of “U’s” (upper class) and “non-U’s” (no class whatsoever), thereby creating a debate still unresolved [also $6.95 paper]. The Oxford Shakespeare has a new edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, edited by Stanley Wells [$8.95 cloth]. Missouri is offering a new and revised edition of John Milton: Selected Prose, edited by C.A. Patrides [$8.50 paper]. Wisconsin has reprinted Richard Poirier’s A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature [$9.95 paper]. Summit has a paper edition of Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts, edited by Barry W. Holtz [$10.95]. California has recently issued paper editions of these books: Kenneth Lincoln’s Native American Renaissance [$9.95], Louis Crompton’s Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-century England [$10.95], Perry Link’s Roses and Thorns: The Second Blooming of the Hundred Flowers in Chinese Fiction, 1979—80 [$9.95], and William Morris’s The Ideal Book, edited and introduced by William S. Peterson [$15.95]. Recent Cornell Paperbacks include Robert G. Calkins’ Illuminated Books of the Middle Ages [$24.95], Dominick LaCapra’s “Madame Bovary” on Trial [$8.95], Glending Olson’s Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages [$8.95], Tilottama Rajan’s Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism [$8.95], and Peter Steiner’s Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics [$9.95]. Pandora Press has republished Cheris Kramarae and Paula A. Treichler’s A Feminist Dictionary [$28.95 cloth, $12.95 paper]. Harvard has a new edition of Sir Francis Bacon: The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, edited with introduction and commentary by Michael Kiernan [$30.00 cloth].
