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Reprint, Autumn 1991


ISSUE:  Autumn 1991

In Springfield, Illinois on June 16, 1858, Abraham Lincoln declared, “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half-slave and half-free.” The famous House Divided speech was the opening salvo in what is now regarded as the classic political debate of our history between Lincoln and his senatorial opponent Stephen A. Douglas. Douglas won the Senate seat that year, but the debates set the stage for Lincoln to be nominated as the Republican candidate for president two years later. A new edition of the debates was recently published by Chicago, edited with an introduction by Paul M. Angle, a noted Lincoln scholar [$17.95 paper]. New York University has reissued Paul D. Erickson’s The Poetry of Events: Daniel Webster’s Rhetoric of the Constitution and Union, a study of the oratory of a statesman who preceded Lincoln on the political scene [$12.00 paper]. New York is also offering another work by Erickson, Reagan Speaks: The Making of an American Myth, an examination of Reagan’s ability to grasp American hearts and minds [$12.95 paper]. Illinois has a new edition of David C. Littlefield’s Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina, an investigation of South Carolinians’ preference for some African ethnic groups over others as slaves [$11.95 paper]. Two recent Wisconsin reprints are William Vance Trollinger, Jr.’s God’s Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism [$37.50 cloth, $14.95 paper], and Holly Cowan Shulman’s The Voice of America: Propaganda and Democracy, 1941—1945 [$37.50 cloth, $12.95 paper]. Katie Letcher Lyle’s Scalded to Death By the Steam was originally published by Algonquin Books in its first list of books in 1983. Algonquin has now reissued this study of railroad disasters that produced such songs as “The Wreck of the Old 97” in a paperback format [$12.95]. Yale is offering a new edition of Jeannie Oakes and Martin Lipton’s Making the Best of Schools: A Handbook for Parents, Teachers, and Policymakers, a book which Parents Magazine felt “. . .will give adults confidence in themselves as reformers and in their children as scholars.” [$25.00 cloth, $11.00 paper]. Johns Hopkins has a new edition of Randy Roberts and James Olson’s Winning is the Only Thing: Sports in America since 1945 [$18.00 cloth, $11.95 paper].

LIVES AND LETTERS

J. G. Randall and Richard N. Current’s Lincoln the President: Last Full Measure was originally published in 1955 as the fourth volume of a four-volume work chronicling the life of Abraham Lincoln and was the winner of the Bancroft Prize. Illinois is now offering a reprint of Lincoln the President with a new introduction by Richard N. Current [$39.95 cloth]. Georgia has published a revised edition of Joan Givner’s Katherine Anne Porter: A Life, which one scholar called “the only definitive work on Porter’s life.” [$45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper]. Quill Books has a new edition of Ted Morgan’s An Uncertain Hour: The French, the Germans, the Jews, the Klaus Barbie Trial, and the City of Lyon, 1940—1945, which Kirkus Reviews deemed “a vivid and chilling look at how the ordinary citizen suffered under extraordinary evil.” [$13.00 paper]. Available as a Quill paperback is Willard Sterne Randall’s A Little Revenge: Benjamin Franklin at War with His Son [$15.00]. Chicago has reprinted Maurice Cranston’s Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712—1754, which The Economist hailed as “the definitive biography, as scholarly as it is entertaining.” [$17.95 paper]. North Point has reprinted Four Lives in Paris, with a foreword by Glenway Wescott, the four lives being George Antheil, Kay Boyle, Harold Stearns, and Margaret Anderson [$12.95 paper]. Vintage has a new edition of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England 1650—1750 [$11.00 paper]. Yale has reissued The House of Si Abd Allah: The Oral History of a Moroccan Family recorded, translated, and edited by Henry Munson, Jr. [$35.00 paper, $14.95 paper]. Wisconsin has republished Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography: The Chapters from the North American Review with an introduction and notes by Michael J. Kiskis [$25.00 cloth, $12.95 paper]. Carroll & Graf has a paper edition of Arnold C. Brackman’s The Last Emperor, a biography of China’s last emperor, P’u Yi, who was at the center of Far Eastern political events from his enthronement as a child in 1908 until his death in Communist Peking in 1967 [$10.95].

POETRY

Vintage International has assembled and published W.H. Auden’s Collected Poems. Edited by Edward Mendelson, the collection presents all the poems that Auden wished to preserve in the text that received his final approval. It includes full contents of his previous collected editions along with all the later volumes of the shorter poems. It is a collection of one of the great poets of the 20th century [$22.50 paper]. HarperCollins has a HarperPerennial edition of Robert Ely’s American Poetry, a collection of the articles, reviews, and polemics of a poet who has published ten collections [$9.95 paper]. Ruth Whitman’s Laughing Gas: Poems New é- Selected 1963—1990 has been reissued by Wayne State [$34.95 cloth, $19.95 paper]. Yale has republished Types of Shape, a collection of pattern poems by the poet and critic John Hollander, which was first published in 1969. The new edition has been expanded to include ten new poems plus an introduction in which Hollander reflects on what shape poems are and how and why he wrote them [$25.00 cloth, $10.95 paper].

FICTION

Oxford has republished the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Woman Writers. Among the volumes, all in cloth editions, are these: The Collected Works of Olivia Ward Bush-Banks [$32.50], Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett [$32.50], Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimke [$35.00], Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Bondswoman of Olden Time, With a History of Her Labors and Correspondence Drawn from Her “Book of Life” [$27.00], Eliza Potter’s A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life [$29.25], and The Works of Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman [$32.50]. Whatever his subsequent reputation as a novelist, it seems certain that Ernest Hemingway’s stature will long endure as a short story writer. All the stories he wrote, both published and previously unpublished, have been collected in the Finca Vigia Edition under the title The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway and are available in paper from Collier Books [$16.95]. Scribners’ is offering a new edition of The Selected Short Stones of Edith Wharton introduced and edited by R.W.B. Lewis, Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize-Winning biographer [$24.95 cloth]. Considered the outstanding novel of the Russian Village Prose school, Vaneltin Rasputin’s Farewell to Matyora decries the loss of Russian peasant culture in the soulless march of progress. Published in Russian in 1976, the novel describes the last months of the village of Matyora, located on an island in the Angara River in Siberia. A new edition of Rasputin’s novel is available from Northwestern [$12.95 paper]. An addition to the Norton Paperback Fiction Series is Rick DeMarinis’ The Coming Triumph of the Free World: Stories [$7.95]. A recent HarperPerennial is Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams, a novel about Arizona [$10.95]. Plume Books has come out with a paper edition of Edna O’Brien’s short story collection, Lantern Slides, winner of the 1990 Los Angeles Times Book Review Prize for Fiction [$8.95 paper].

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