ISSUE: Autumn 1989
Lewis Perry’s Intellectual Life in America: A History traces American intellectuals for every period, examining who they were, how important they were, and how they saw themselves in relation to their countrymen. He also examines the openness of intellectual circles to women, blacks, southerners, and other groups. Chicago is offering a paper edition of Perry’s book [$14.95]. Earl and Merle Black’s Politics and Society in the South, originally published by Harvard in 1987, was the recipient of the Ralph J. Bunche Award of the American Political Science Association. Harvard has published a paper edition of the Blacks’ work [$10.95; also available in cloth $25.00]. The South is also the subject of Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N. Still, Jr.’s The Elements of Confederate Defeat: Nationalism, War Aims, and Religion. This is an abridged edition of the four historians’ Why the South Lost the Civil War in which they consider the dominant explanations of Southern defeat. Their conclusion was that states’ rights disputes, the Union blockade, and inadequate Southern forces did not fully account for Appomattox. Rather, they concluded, the South lacked the will to win. The abridged account is roughly one-half the size of its parent study but retains all the essential arguments of the earlier edition. It has been reprinted by Georgia [$30.00 cloth, $15.00 paper]. Vintage Books has republished Daniel J. Boorstin’s Hidden History: Exploring our Secret Past, a collection of 24 essays in which the Pulitzer Prize-winning author explores areas of the American experience overlooked by most historians and presents intimate portraits of such figures as Paul Revere, Abigail Adams, and Thomas Jefferson [$9.95], Ticknor & Fields is offering a paper edition of Tom Horton’s Bay Country: Reflections on the Chesapeake, a winner of the 1988 John Burroughs Medal and a portrait of the places and people on what is perhaps America’s most famous bay [$7.95]. Bison Books has reprinted Paul Russell Cutright’s Lewis & Clark: Pioneering Naturalists, a comprehensive account of the scientific studies carried out by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark during their overland expedition of the Pacific Northwest and back in 1804—6 [$14.95 paper].
When Joseph Frazier Wall’s big (more than 1,000 pages) biography of American empire-builder and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie was originally published in 1970, The New Yorker described the book as “remarkably well conceived and well written—brisk (and sometimes wry), vivid, and evocative in narrative and description . . . [Wall’s] view of his subject is just and sympathetic but far from uncritical.” Pittsburgh has a new edition of the Carnegie biography [$49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper]. Originally published in 1957, Attorney for the Damned: Clarence Darrow in the Courtroom, was a presentation of the most celebrated pleas of America’s most famous defense attorney, edited by Arthur Weinberg. Chicago is offering a paper edition of Attorney for the Damned [$14.95 paper]. As part of its Radcliffe Biography Series, Addison Wesley has a paper edition of Robert Coles’ Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion, in which the eminent Harvard psychiatrist presents an intellectual and psychological portrait of a New York intellectual who became a Catholic convert and remained an inspiring and controversial figure until her death in 1980 [$9.95]. Two recent Harvard paperback reprints are respectively Robert C. Ritchie’s Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates, a study of 17th-century buccaneers and of the shadowy, myth-laden figures of William Kidd [$11.95], and Robert Chadwell Williams’ Klaus Fuchs: Atom Spy, an account of the career of the spy who betrayed American and British atomic secrets to the Soviet Union [$12. 95]. Carroll & Graf is offering a new edition of Alex De Jonge’s The Life and Times of Grigorii Rasputin, a biography of the illiterate Siberian peasant who penetrated the highest circles of Czar Nicholas’ doomed empire and helped bring about its downfall [$10.95 paper]. Margaret Thatcher’s government was recently defeated in its attempt to ban the publication of Anthony Cave Brown’s C: The Secret Life of Sir Stewart Menzies, Spymaster to Winston Churchill, a detailed portrait of the man who, more than any other, dictated the course of events in Allied World War II intelligence. Brown’s chronicle of the career of Stewart Graham Menzies is available as a Collier Books paperback [$14.95]. Touchstone Books is offering a new edition of Stuart Brent’s The Seven Stairs: An Adventure of the Heart, the story of an ex-GI who turned his passion for reading into a bookstore that became a mecca for book lovers across America [$9.95]. Harper & Row has a new edition of C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, a deeply personal odyssey of grief caused by the death of Lewis’s wife, American-born poet Joy Davidman. [$10.95 cloth].
Hugh Kenner, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University, is a polished and prolific author. Among his many books are three now available as Johns Hopkins paperbacks. The first is A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers, the second is A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers, and the third is A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers [$12.95 each]. Chicago has a new edition of Leah S. Marcus’s The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes, an interpretation of art and life, poetry and its political milieu in 17th-century England [$15. 95 paper]. William Empson’s The Structure of Complex Words, with a foreword by Jonathan Culler, is available in a new edition from Harvard. Originally published in 1951, Empson’s study of the complex play of words in social situations and in literature is now considered a classic [$22.50 cloth, $12.95 paper].
Edward Taylor is now considered America’s foremost colonial poet, but he was virtually unknown until some of his poems were discovered in the Yale library and published in 1937. His poetical meditations led critics to compare him to John Donne and George Herbert, and his poems are ranked now as one of the great achievements in American devotional literature. North Carolina has published a new edition of The Poems of Edward Taylor, edited and with a new preface by Donald E. Stanford, Alumni Professor Emeritus at Louisiana State [$14.95 paper]. Harvard has come out with a new edition of The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself, edited by Stanley Burnshaw, T. Carmi, and Ezra Spicehandler, in which the English-speaking reader is offered the opportunity to experience modern Hebrew poetry as presented by 24 past and present Hebrew poets [$14.95 paper]. A recent addition to the Penguin Poetry Library is a collection of 175 poems by D.H. Lawrence, as selected and introduced by Keith Sagar [$4.95]. Another addition to the Penguin Poetry Library is Edward Fitzgerald’s famous Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, probably the most popular book of poetry ever to appear in English [$4.95]. In its International Poet Series, Penguin is offering The Selected Poems of Anna Akhmatova (1889—1966), who is considered Russia’s finest woman poet. The selected poems were translated by noted novelist D.M. Thomas [$7.95 paper].
