ISSUE: Winter 1990
America’s troubled, turbulent, and tragic relationship with Iran is the subject of James A. Bill’s The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations, a book which examines this country’s relationship with Iran in the 1940’s through the Iran-Contra Affair and its aftermath. Bill, a well-known authority on the Middle East, not only lived in Iran but was also a close observer of our policy toward that Middle Eastern nation. Yale is offering a paper edition of this work [$13.95]. Cornell has a revised and updated edition of William E. Leuchtenburg’s In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan in which the American historian contends that a ghost has inhabited the Oval Office since 1945—the ghost of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. [$34.95 cloth, $8.95 paper]. Cornell has also republished Andrew J. Rotter’s The Path to Vietnam: Origins of the American Commitment to Southeast Asia [$9.95 paper]. Johns Hopkins has published a paperback edition, with a new postscript, of John Higham’s History of Professional Scholarship in America, an analysis of the conceptual frameworks that have shaped the writing of American history during the past century [$12.95]. Harvard has a new edition of Myra Jehlen’s American Incarnation: The Individual, The Nation, and The Continent in which Jehlen examines some of the central problems of the American legal tradition and explores what constitutes America and the American in contrast to the Europe from which this continent’s first settlers came [$22.50 cloth, $12.95 paper]. Collier Books has reprinted Michael Parfit’s Chasing the Glory: Travels Across America which The New York Times Book Review described as “An elegy for what has been lost and a celebration of what remains unspoiled in America—both in the land and in the people. It is also a pleasure to read” [$8.95 paper]. Vintage Books has new editions of two works by American iconoclast Hunter S. Thompson. They are respectively Generation of Swine: Gonzo Papers Vol. 2: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ‘80’s [$8.95] and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream [$7.95]. Vintage Books is also offering a paper edition of Nelson W. Aldridge Jr.’s Old Money: The Mythology of America’s Upper Class a work The Atlantic said “may be the best nonfiction book about the American upper class by one of its members since Henry Adams’ Education” [$8.95].
Georgia has published a trilogy The Journalist’s Lincoln edited by Herbert Mitgang, cultural correspondent of The New York Times. The trilogy consists of these works: Noah Brooks’ Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s Time: A Memoir of the Civil War Era by the Newspaperman Who Knew Lincoln Best [$14.95 paper]; Abraham Lincoln: A Press Portrait, an account of his life and times from the original documents of the Union, the Confederacy, and Europe [$17.95 paper], and Edward Dicey’s Spectator of America, billed as “a classic document about Lincoln and Civil War America by a contemporary English Correspondent” [$14.95 paper]. St. Martin’s is offering a paper edition of Robert Lewis Taylor’s W.C. Fields: His Follies and Fortunes, a biography first published in 1949 and long out of print which recounts the pitfalls and prejudices of one of America’s most cantankerous wits [$9.95 paper]. Shortly after Yale first published James Anderson Winn’s John Dryden and His World in 1987, novelist and essayist Anthony Burgess in an Atlantic review commented: “Winn’s book is admirably comprehensive, and it undoubtedly will, as he hopes, send lovers of fine craft and high art back to John Dryden.” Winn’s biography of the poet, dramatist, critic, translator, adaptor and professional who dominated English literature for 40 years later received in 1988 British Council Prize in the Humanities awarded by the North American Conference on British Studies. Yale now has a new paper edition of John Dryden and His World [$19.95]. Cornell has reprinted Deborah Epstein Nord’s The Apprenticeship of Beatrice Webb, an account of the early life of the Fabian Socialist who with her husband, Sidney, helped establish the London School of Economics and did much to inform Victorians about the victims of England’s era of rampant capitalism [$10.95 paper]. Cornell also has a new edition of R.J.M. Blackett’s Beating against the Barriers: The Lives of Six Nineteenth-Century Afro-Americans all of whom were active in the effort to abolish slavery in America [$12.95 paper]. A recent addition to Nebraska’s Bison Books Series is John Burke’s The Legend of Baby Doe: The Life and Times of the Silver Queen of the West, a biography of a Colorado woman who became one of the great legends of the American West [$8.95 paper]. Pittsburgh has a new edition of Kathleen Brady’s Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker, a biography of one of the most powerful women of her time in the United States and author of the History of the Standard Oil Company, which shook the Rockefeller interests, causing a national outrage, and led the Supreme Court to fragment the giant monopoly into several corporations, one of which survives today as Exxon, after it was published in 1904 [$12.95 paper]. Shortly after David S. Reynolds’ Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville appeared in 1988, Yale scholar Alan Trachtenberg said of the book: “One of the most powerful pieces of scholarship and criticism on American literature in a very long time . . .[It exhibits] wonderful range, insight, verve, and critical sophistication. This is a most welcome and timely book; it helps set a new agenda for American literary and cultural studies.” Reynolds’ study of the American Renaissance was the recipient of the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa. Harvard, the book’s original publisher, now has a paper edition available [$14.95]
Harvard has republished Thomas G. Pavel’s Fictional Worlds, a work The Boston Globe described as “an eloquent statement of one of the purposes of fiction: to allow the reader into a “made-up” world so that the reader is allowed to invent that world himself” [$22.00 cloth $8.95 paper]. Yale has a paper edition of Richard H. Weisberg’s The Failure of the Word: The Protagonist as Lawyer in Modern Fiction, with a new preface addressing the recent debate on law and literature [$10.95]. Another Yale paperback is James W. Flannery’s W. B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre: The Early Abby Theatre in Theory and Practice, Flannery being a scholar with an international reputation as a specialist in the dramatic work of Yeats and founder of the Yeats Drama Foundation [$19.95]. A recent Chicago reprint is Literature and Social Practice edited by Philippe Desan, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, and Wendy Griswold, a collection of essays which originally appeared in the spring 1988 issue of Critical Inquiry on the “Sociology of Literature,” which received the 1988 Best Special Issue Award of the Conference of Editors of Learned Journals [$30.00 cloth $13.50 paper]. Cornell has reprinted James Joyce’s The Critical Writings edited by Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann with a new foreword by Guy Davenport. It is a collection of essays, lectures, book reviews, newspaper articles, letters to the editor, and poems written over a lifetime by the author of Ulysses [$9.95 paper]. Kentucky has a second edition of Raman Selden’s A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory which has been described as “the ideal crash course, or even refresher course, for readers seeking the most condensed presentation of current theories. . . .” [$9.00 paper].
