ISSUE: Winter 1984
Bernard DeVoto’s The Course of Empire, originally published in 1952, was lauded by historian Henry Steele Commager at the time of its publication as “the best book that has been written about the West since Webb’s Great Plains.” A new paperback edition of this book has just been published by Nebraska [$12.95]. Also available as a Nebraska paperback is George R. Stewart’s The California Trail, a description of the early wagon trains along the hazardous route to California in the 1840’s [$8.95]. A third Nebraska reprint is Absaraka: Home of the Crows, the experiences of an Army officer’s wife on the plains in the 1860’s, the wife being Margaret Irvin Carrington [$21.50 cloth, $6.95 paper]. Another work involving the opening of the wilderness, in this case the opening of the Appalachian frontier, is Harriette Simpson Arnow’s Seedtime on the Cumberland, a new edition of which is now available from Kentucky, with a foreword by Wilma Dykeman [$28.00 cloth, $13.00 paper]. With an election year upon us, it is scarcely surprising that there should be a new edition of Stephen J. Wayne’s The Road to the White House: The Politics of Presidential Elections, a basic guide to the strategy and tactics of winning the presidency [St. Martin’s, $13.95 cloth]. And with greater interest than ever before in the role of the woman candidate, Beacon Press has issued a reprint of Ruth B. Mandel’s In the Running: The New Woman Candidate, which the Washington Post described as “a fine testimony to a growth industry: women as political partners” [$9.95 paper]. A third book dealing with contemporary politics is Paul C. Light’s The President’s Agenda: Domestic Policy Choice from Kennedy to Carter (with notes on Ronald Reagan), a Johns Hopkins reprint [$20.00 cloth, $8.95 paperback]. Two new Vintage Books are Kevin P. Phillips’ Post-Conservative America: People, Politics, and Ideology in a Time of Crisis [$6. 95] and Albert Murray’s The Omni-Americans: Black Experience and American Culture [$6.95]. Yale has published a paperback edition of John R. Stilgoe’s Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845, a work which received the 1982 Francis Parkman Prize for literary distinction in the writing of history [$12.95]. Touchstone has reprinted Irving Howe’s national best seller, World of Our Fathers, an account of “the journey of the East European Jews to America and the life they found and made” [$12.95]. Other Touchstone reprints include William L. O’Neill’s A Better World, The Great Schism: Stalinism and the American Intellectuals [$9.95], Michael Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism [$9.95], Clarence Darrow’s Attorney for the Damned, a selection of excerpts from the great defense lawyer’s famous cases, edited by Arthur Weinberg [$9.95], and William Broad and Nicholas Wade’s Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science, which Science magazine called “utterly fascinating reading” [$6.95]. Touchstone has also reprinted Norman Podhoretz’ controversial account of Why We Were in Vietnam [$5.95].
Considered one of the finest British biographers of our time, the late Cecil Woodham-Smith won international acclaim for her account of the life of eminent Victorian Florence Nightingale when it first was published in 1951. “No reader will doubt that this is the definitive biography of Florence Nightingale,” declared the Chicago Sunday Tribune at the time. Atheneum has just issued a reprint of what the Atlantic Monthly deemed “a distinguished and fascinating book” [$11.95 paper]. Also available from Atheneum is a new edition of Frederic Morton’s The Rothschilds: A Family Portrait, which the New York Times Book Review called “the epic of the Rothschilds” upon the book’s publication in 1961 [$9.95]. When George F. Kennan published in 1967 the first volume of his memoirs, covering the period of his life from 1925 to 1950, The New Republic predicted the autobiography might prove to be the “single most valuable political book written by an American in the twentieth century.” A second volume, covering the period 1950—63, appeared in 1972, and both volumes have been reissued as paperbacks by Pantheon [Vol. I $8.95 and Vol. II $7.95]. Another Pantheon paperback is Robyn Davidson’s Tracks, the story of one woman’s solo trek across 1,700 miles of Australian outback [$3.95]. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, a biography of one of the giants of contemporary philosophy, won both the 1982 Alfred Harcourt Prize in Biography and Memoirs and the 1982 Kenneth B. Smilen/Present Tense Literary Award in Biography. Yale has now published a paperback edition of this much acclaimed work [$15.95]. One of America’s outstanding experts on China is retired Harvard scholar John King Fairbank, whose Chinabound: A Fifty-Year Memoir has just come out as a Harper Colophon Book [$10.00 paper]. Vintage has reprinted Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black by Harriet E. Wilson [$4.95]. Kent State is offering a paperback edition of Freeman Champney’s Art & Glory: The Story of Elbert Hubbard, pioneer of modern advertising [$7.95]. A new Touchstone Book is Barbara Learning’s Polanski, A Biography: The Filmmaker as Voyeur [$6.95]. A new Bison Book is Philip Durham and Everett L. Jones’ The Negro Cowboys, an account of the 5,000 black cowboys who worked as ranch crews in the cattleman era of the West [Nebraska $7.95 paper].
Vincente Blasco Ibañez’ The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse has gone through 187 printings in hardcover since it first appeared in 1918 as one of the first great works of fiction to come out of the First World War. Now Carroll & Graf have published a paperback edition of this famous novel [$8.95]. Although her life was tragically short—she was only 34 when she died of tuberculosis in France on Jan.8, 1923—Katherine Mansfield has attained a lasting reputation as one of the great short story writers of this century. All 88 of her stories have been collected and published in a single volume in approximately chronological order by Ecco Press [$11.95 paper]. As a part of its Neglected Books of the 20th Century series, Ecco has also reprinted Camilo José Cela’s The Hive, a novel of life in contemporary Madrid [$6.95 paper]. Harper Colophon Books is offering a trio of novels by Aldous Huxley, the trio being Antic Hay [$5.50], After Many a Summer Dies the Swan [$4.95], and Chrome Yellow [$5.95]. Another recent Harper Colophon Book is Bobbie Ann Mason’s highly acclaimed Shiloh and Other Stories, the first published collection of a young American author [$5.95]. Vintage has reprinted V.S. Pritchett’s Collected Stories, a selection of 29 stories by one of the great contemporary British writers [$8.95]. Another Vintage offering is Charles G. Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao, with an introduction by Edward Hoagland [$3.95]. When Alvah Bessie’s Bread and a Stone came out in 1941, the Chicago Daily News called the novel “a powerful book.” This novel about a murder and about an American loser has been reissued by Chandler & Sharp [$7.95 paper]. Godine has come out with a paperback edition of William Maxwell’s Time Will Darken It, one of the earlier novels by the longtime New Yorker editor [$9.95]. Bison Books has reprinted Wallace Stegner’s The Big Rock Candy Mountain, a novel about life in the West in the early 20th century [Nebraska $9.95 paper]. Another new Bison Book is Frederick Manfred’s Scarlet Plume, a novel about the Sioux uprising in Minnesota in 1862 [$8.95 paper]. A recent New Directions Paperbook is poet Dylan Thomas’ romantic adventure story of mid-19th-century Wales, Rebecca’s Daughters [$5.95], A new addition to the Pantheon International Crime series is James McClure’s The Gooseberry Fool [$2.95 paper].
When A. J. P. Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War came out in 1961, it caused a storm of praise and controversy and has since been recognized as a classic: “the first book ever to examine exclusively and in depth the causes of the Second World War and to apportion the responsibility among Allies and Germans alike,” according to one blurb. A new edition of this first revisionist study of the background of the world’s greatest war has been published by Atheneum [$9.95 paper]. Cornell is offering a paperback edition of Joseph F. O’Callaghan’s A History of Medieval Spain [$21.95]. Columbia has reprinted J.M. Thompson’s Louis Napoleon and the Second Empire, a work considered the standard biography of Napoleon III of France [$9.95 paper]. John Lofton’s Denmark Vesey’s Revolt: The Slave Plot that Lit a Fuse to Fort Sumter has been reprinted by Kent State [$7.95 paper]. Grove Press has a new edition of Hitler’s Secret Book, the Nazi dictator’s top-secret blueprint for world conquest, with an introduction by Telford Taylor [$7.95 paper]. Harper Colophon Books has republished Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko’s The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny [$8.95].
Richard Howard’s translation of French poet Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal won an American Book Award and is widely regarded as the definitive translation of the complete text of The Flowers of Evil. Godine has come out with a paperback edition of this work [$13.95]. A recent New Directions Paperbook brings back into print the 1975 Oxford edition of Stevie Smith’s Collected Poems [$11.95]. Johns Hopkins has reprinted John T. Irwin’s American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance [$8.95 paper]. California is offering The Illustrated Pepys, a selection of excerpts from the famous diary, edited by Robert Latham [$15.95 cloth, $9.95 paper]. Macmillan has a paperback edition of The Book of Irish Verse: An Anthology of Irish Poetry from the Sixth Century to the Present, selected and introduced by John Montague [$7.95]. As a Bison Book, Nebraska is offering Ernest Hemingway’s Complete Poems [$5.95 paper]. James L. Kugel’s The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History is now available as a Yale paperback [$10.95]. Two recent Cornell reprints are Gerard Genette’s Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method [$24.50 cloth, $8.95 paper] and Jonathan Culler’s The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction [$7.95 paper]. St. Martin’s has published a new edition of the famous Edward FitzGerald translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám [$8.95 cloth]. Minnesota has come out with a second revised edition of Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism [$29.50 cloth, $12.95 paper]. Among the new Vintage books are works by two contemporary poets, the respective works being C.K. Williams’ Tar [$5.95] and Frank Bidart’s The Sacrifice [$5.95]. Louise Glück’s first collection of poems, First-born, has been reprinted by Ecco Press as a part of its American Poetry Series [$5.95 paper]. California has come out with a new, expanded edition of Czeslaw Milosz’ anthology of Postwar Polish Poetry [$25.00 cloth, $6.95 paper].
For those who love good food, Knopf is offering a banquet, namely, a paperback edition of the two-volume work, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck [$12.95 per volume, $25.95 boxed set]. In the department of trivia, Harper & Row has come out with a reprint of Harry Haun’s The Movie Quote Book [$9.95 paper]. Holt, Rinehart & Winston has published a completely revised edition of Theodore Caplow’s Managing an Organization [$19.95 cloth].
