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Reprint, Autumn 1983


ISSUE:  Autumn 1983

In Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South, Bertram Wyatt-Brown asserts that honor was the animating force in the antebellum South and presents a wide-ranging examination of pre-Civil War Southern culture. “This book,” declared Harper’s magazine, “represents an enormous academic accomplishment” [Oxford $9.95 paper]. Oxford has also issued a paperback fourth edition of a two-volume selection of readings in American history entitled American Vistas and edited by Leonard Dinnerstein and Kenneth T. Jackson. Volume 1 covers the period 1607 to 1877, and volume 2 goes from 1877 to the present [$7.95 and $8.95, respectively]. Two recent Vintage Books are Gore Vidal’s The Second American Revolution and Other Essays, 1976—1982 and Alan M. Dershowitz’ The Best Defense, a study of criminal law [$5.95 and $4.95, respectively]. Touchstone Books is offering an edition of Peter Davis’ Hometown: A Portrait of an American Community, the community being Hamilton, Ohio, which was also the locale for a six-part PBS series called Middletown [$6.95], Another Touchstone Book is J. S. Holiday’s The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience, an account of the 1849 gold rush that many consider a classic history of the greatest search for wealth in the American experience [$9.95]. Pantheon has issued a paperback edition of Walter and Miriam Schneir’s Invitation to an Inquest, a study of the Rosenberg treason case updated with three totally new chapters, including the latest revelations from once-secret FBI files [$8.95]. William C. Widenor won the prestigious Frederick Jackson Turner Award in 1981 for his diplomatic and intellectual history, Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy, and a paper edition is now being offered by California [$8.95, also available in cloth at $24.50]. Columbia has reprinted Meyer Berger’s The Eight Million: Journal of a New York Correspondent, a collection of the New York Times reporter’s stories about the Big Apple of the 1930’s, which was first published in 1942 [$25.00 cloth, $7.95 paper]. Illinois has brought out a paper edition of Mari Jo Buhle’s Women and American Socialism, 1870—1920 [$9.95]. A paper edition of Kenneth W. Thompson’s American Diplomacy and Emergent Patterns is a recent offering of the University Press of America [$11.50],

FICTION

The two latest additions to California’s Mark Twain Library concern one of the humorist’s most famous characters, namely, Tom Sawyer. His escapades are recounted in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer [$12.95 cloth, $2.95 paper] and Tom Sawyer Abroad—Tom Sawyer, Detective [also $12.95 cloth, $2.95 paper]. The Modern Library has recently republished a series of famous works by American and foreign novelists, all in cloth editions. The novels are, respectively, Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo [$8.95], Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot [$10.95], Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady [$8.95], Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird [$6.95], D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover [$7.95], and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer [$7.95]. Massachusetts is offering a cloth edition of The Ten Thousand Things, a novel set in the Moluccas written by Maria Dermoût and translated by Hans Koning. When the work first appeared in 1958, Time magazine hailed it as “an uncommon reading experience, an offbeat narrative that has the timeless tone of legend [Library of the Indies series $19.00]. Pantheon is offering a paperback edition of a Mary Renault novel which is not about the ancient world of Greece. Rather, the novel, entitled The Charioteer, is a portrayal of a modern homosexual relationship set in the Britain of the Second World War [$3.95], The latest addition to Penguin’s Contemporary American Fiction Series is T. Coraghessan Boyle’s Water Music, which won the 1980 St. Lawrence Award for Short Fiction and was called a “hilarious, language-intoxicated, exotic and original novel” by the Los Angeles Times [$6.95]. Carroll & Graf has issued a paper edition of Peter Taylor’s latest group of stories, In the Miro District, a collection of eight stories described as being “of high distinction and originality” by Robert Penn Warren [$7.95]. Houghton Mifflin has published a paper edition of Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark, a novel about a woman’s struggle to escape the conventional world into which she was born, first published in 1915 [$8.95]. North Point Press has published a new edition of Herman Broch’s The Death of Virgil, originally published in 1945 and unavailable in America for many years. Begun by Broch in a concentration camp, the book describes the final eighteen hours of Virgil’s life in a fictional form that lies between an historical novel and a prose poem [$15.50 paper]. A recent Bison Book is George R. Stewart’s Storm, a fictional account of a natural disturbance, with a foreword by Wallace Stegner [$8.95],

LIVES & LETTERS

North Point Press has come out with a one-volume paperback edition of The Paris and New York Diaries of Ned Rorem, 1951—1961, a self-portrait of the artist as a young man that the New York Times Book Review described as a diary “that begins to read like a novel” [$15.00]. One of the most controversial American labor leaders of the 20th century was John L. Lewis, who ruled the United Mine Workers from 1919 until his death in 1960. John L. Lewis: A Biography by eminent labor historians Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine was originally published by Quadrangle in 1977 and has now been reissued in a new cloth edition and distributed by Illinois [$20.00]. South African newspaperman Donald Woods made international headlines in 1977 when, under penalty of death, he fled his country disguised as a priest. This fifthgeneration white South African tells why he had to leave his native land in his autobiography, Asking for Trouble: The Education of a White African, and it is available as a Beacon Press paperback [$9.50]. Beacon has also published a paperback edition of Sketches from Life: The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford, the Early Years, a candid account of the formative period of one of America’s most original thinkers [$12.95]. Vintage Books has recently brought out Go East, Young Man: The Early Years, volume 1 of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas’s Autobiography, which the Washington Post deemed “one of the frankest and most valuable books to come from a public figure in years” [$7.95]. Another new Vintage Book is Eileen Simpson’s Poets in Their Youth: A Memoir, in which the author recounts her reminiscences about such poets as John Berryman (whom she married in 1942), Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, and Robert Lowell [$5.95]. A third Vintage Book is Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa’s Something Like an Autobiography [$6.95]. In 1946 Japanese-American citizen Mine Okubo published Citizen 13660, an account of her life in “protective custody” after she was interned by the American government shortly after Pearl Harbor. A new edition of this memoir with a new preface by the author was recently published by Washington [$8.95 paper].

LITERATURE IN GENERAL

Among works of literary criticism, few are as broad in scope or as diverse in subject as René Wellek’s A History of Modern Criticism, 1750—1950. This encyclopedic history ranges across a vast material of critical writing from England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia, and the United States. Its four volumes are entitled, respectively, The Later Eighteenth Century, The Romantic Age, The Age of Transition, and The Later Nineteenth Century. All four volumes are now available in paper from Cambridge [volumes 1 through 3 $14.95 each, volume 4, $17.95]. One of the more innovative literary critics of this century was Georg Lukács, who died in 1971, but two of his many critical works have recently appeared in paperback from two different publishers. MIT has reprinted Lukács’ Essays on Realism as edited by Rodney Livingston [$9.95], and Nebraska has reprinted The Historical Novel, with a preface by Fredric Jameson [$8.95]. Cornell has a new edition of Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism [$8.95 paper, also in cloth at $2—2. 50], Cambridge has brought out a paper edition of J. L. Styan’s The Shakespeare Revolution: Criticism and Performance in the Twentieth Century [$8.95], Recent California paperbacks include K. K. Ruthven’s A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Personae (1926; [$7.95], Thomas G. Rosenmeyer’s The Art of Aeschylus [$12.95], and Boris Uspensky’s A Poetics of Composition [$7.95]. Colophon Books has brought out a new edition of the Poems and Sketches of E. B. White [$5.95]. A new addition to the New Directions Paperbook series is Denise Levertov’s Poems 1960—1967 [$6.25].

GENERAL

Princeton/Bollingen Paperbacks has come out with a new edition of Indianist Heinrich Zimmer’s two-volume study of The Art of Indian Asia, a comprehensive view of Indian art spanning the centuries from 3000 B. C. to our own time in an area from Afghanistan to Bali [$32.50, also available in cloth at $100]. Vintage books has reissued in two volumes Alan Moorehead’s classic study of the search for the source of the Nile, as recounted in The White Nile and The Blue Nile [$12.95 each]. Schocken Books is offering a paperback edition of Adam Garbicz and Jacek Klinowski’s Cinema, the Magic Vehicle: A Guide to its Achievement, with volume 1 covering The Cinema through 1949 and volume 2 discussing The Cinema in the Fifties [$12.50 each]. As part of its Past and Present Publications series, Cambridge has issued a new edition of R. H. Hilton’s A Medieval Society: The West Midlands at the End of the Thirteenth Century [$39.50 cloth]. Recent Cambridge Paperbacks include Mark A. Kishlansky’s The Rise of the New Model Army [$14.95] and John Dunn’s The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the “Two Treatises of Government” [$12.95]. Touchstone Books has come out with a revised and updated edition of Jude Wanniski’s The Way the World Works, a work widely acclaimed as the clearest and most provocative explanation of supply-side economics [$7.95]. A new Beacon Press book is Ruth Sidel and Victor W. Sidel’s The Health of China [$7.95]. Lester K. Little’s Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe has been reissued by Cornell [$8.95 paper]. California has a new edition of Gene A. Brucker’s Renaissance Florence [$30.00 cloth, $7.95 paper]. Colophon Books has reprinted Paul Hollander’s Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba [$8.95]. A new Pilgrim Press paperback is Paul Harrison’s The Third World Tomorrow, “ a report from the battlefront in the war against poverty,” based on the author’s travels through Asia, Africa, and Latin America [$7.95]. Called “the best image of the Middle Ages that is available” by one critic, Charles T. Wood’s The Quest for Eternity: Manners and Morals in the Age of Chivalry has been reissued in paperback by New England [$7.95], Cornell has issued a paper edition of John S. Henderson’s The World of the Ancient Maya, which Choice magazine termed “the best full-length, up-to-date overview of Maya archaeology available today” [$12.95]. Another recent Cornell paperback is Richard Sorabji’s Necessity, Cause, and Blame: Perspectives on Aristotle’s Theory [$12.95], Touchstone Books has reprinted Michael Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, a work the Wall Street Journal described as “the most remarkable and original treatise on the roots of modern capitalism to be published in many years” [$9.95]. Another Touchstone Book is André Emmerich’s Art before Columbus [$8.95].

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