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Reprint, Autumn 1996


ISSUE:  Autumn 1996

David Fromkin’s In the Time of the Americans: FDR, Truman, Elsenhower, Marshall, MacArthur is the story of the generation that changed America’s role in the world, the generation that saw this country through the Depression, the greatest world war in the history of humanity, and the beginning of the Cold War. Fromkin’s work was praised as “A fascinating narrative history” by the Wall Street Journal. It is now available as a Vintage Book [$16]. Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World is a series of essays about the heart of Manhattan edited with an introduction by William R. Taylor. It has sections devoted to “structural changes, entertainment and commerce, commercial aesthetics, and boundaries of respectability.” Hopkins recently published a paper edition of this book [$19.95]. Hopkins has also reprinted Elizabeth Kytle’s Home on the Canal, a history of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal from its origins in George Washington’s decision to link the nation’s new capital with the Western frontier through the beginning of construction in 1828 to the completion of the project in 1840 [$18.95 paper], St. Martin’s is offering a paper edition of Allen Abie’s Flatbush Odyssey; A Journey Through the Heart of Brooklyn, an account of a Flatbush native’s project to rediscover the borough of his childhood and thereby produce a portrait of Brooklyn [$14.95]. Syracuse is offering a new edition of Stephen Birmingham’s Life at the Dakota: New York’s Most Unusual Address, the story of a Manhattan apartment house daringly erected in 1884 “too far up and on the wrong side of town.” Its tenants have included such luminaries as Judy Holliday, Leonard Bernstein, and Lauren Bacall [$13.95 paper]. Yale is out with a revised and updated edition of Stanley B. Greenberg’s Middle Class Dreams: The Politics and Power of the New American Majority [$15 paper]. A recent addition to Nebraska’s Bison Books series is John Bratt’s Trails of Yesterday, first published in 1921 and ranked with the best first-hand accounts of ranching on the northern Great Plains in the 1870’s and 1880’s [$12 paper], Addison-Wesley has a new edition of Wendy Kaminer’s It’s All the Rage: Crime and Culture which the Detroit News described as “a good book about crime to throw at people who clamor to throw the book at criminals” [$13 paper]. Addison-Wesley has also reprinted Thomas Childers’ Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down Over Germany in World War II [$12 paper]. Chicago is offering a paper edition of Houston A. Baker, Jr.’s Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy [$9.95]. John B. Boles’ The Great Revival: Beginnings of the Bible Belt is again available as a Kentucky paper edition [$15.95], Also another recent Kentucky paper edition is Larry Gara’s The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad [$13.95].

LIVES AND LETTERS

In Patriotic Gore, his study of Civil War literature, Edmund Wilson called Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant “the most remarkable work of its kind since the Commentaries of Julius Caesar. . . . A unique expression of the national character.” Grant’s account of the great battles of the Civil War including Shiloh, Vicksburg, and the Wilderness is again available in a one-volume edition from Nebraska in its Bison Books series [$25 paper]. The Civil War is also the subject of two other recent Bison Books, one being Charles A. Dana’s Recollections of the Civil War [$12.95 paper] and the other being John Bell Hood’s Advance and Retreat: Personal Experiences in the United States and Confederate States Armies [$15 paper]. Bison Books is also offering a new edition of Covered Wagon Women: Diaries and Letters From the Western Trails, 1850 edited and compiled by Kenneth L. Holmes [$13 paper]. Christopher Hibbert’s Nelson: A Personal History is a biography of Great Britain’s most famous seaman, Horatio Nelson, who gained immortality at the Battle of Trafalgar in which he lost his life. Addison-Wesley recently issued a paper edition of Hibbert’s biography [$16 paper], Addison-Wesley has also republished Karen Lindsey’s Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII [$13 paper] and Susan Quinn’s Marie Curie: A Life [$16 paper]. When William C. Davis’ Jefferson Dams: The Man and His Hour originally came out in 1991, historian David Herbert Donald called it “the fullest and best biography yet written, a work that will remain a standard authoritative account of the life of the Confederate President.” A new edition of the Davis’ biography is now available as a LSU paperback [$19.95]. Another recent LSU paperback about the Civil War is Admiral Raphael Semmes’ Memoirs of Service Afloat During the War Between the States, Semmes having been the captain of the famous Confederate raider CSS Alabama [$19.95]. A major Union general is the subject of Stephen E. Ambrose’s Halleck: Lincoln’s Chief of Staff, a biography of Henry Wager Halleck originally published in 1962 and now reprinted by LSU [$11.95 paper]. Stephen E. Ambrose also did the foreword for another recent LSU paperback, this one being about the greatest invasion in military history, namely the Normandy invasion of June 6th, 1944, the book being Voices of D-Day: The Story of the Allied Invasion Told by Those Who Were There, edited by Ronald J. Drez [$12.95 paper], LSU has also reprinted Thadious M. Davis’ Nella Larsen: Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, A Woman’s Life Unveiled [$17.95 paper]. South Carolina is offering a paper edition of A Plantation Mistress on the Eve of the Civil War: The Diary of Keziah Goodwyn Hopkins Brevard, 1860—1861 edited by John Hammond Moore [$12.95]. Yale is out with a second edition of Robin W. Winks’ Cloak & Crown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939—1961 [$22.50 paper]. Lyndall Gordon’s Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life won the 1994 British Cheltenham prize for outstanding contribution to literature. The biography is now available as a Norton paperback [$17], The air war over Europe in World War II is the subject of two recent Kentucky paperbacks, the first being William R. Dunn’s Fighter Pilot: The First American Ace of World War H [$14.95 paper] and the second being Philip Ardery’s Bomber Pilot: A Memoir of World War II [$14.95 paper], Kentucky has also republished H. Edward Richardson’s Cassius Marcellus Clay: Firebrand of Freedom, a biography of one of Kentucky’s most famous sons [$12.95 paper]. Recent Vintage books include Michael Ryan’s Secret Life: An Autobiography [$14]; John Hildebrand’s Mapping the Farm: The Chronicle of a Family [$13]; Mark Salzman’s Lost in Place: Growing Up Absurd in Suburbia [$12]; Garrett Kongo’s Volcano: A Memoir of Hawaii [$14]; and Richard Holmes’ Dr. Johnson if Mr. Savage [$13], Random House has reprinted Marshall Frady’s Wallace, a work considered the classic portrait of Alabama governor George Wallace [$15 paper].

LITERATURE IN GENERAL

When David Laskin’s A Common Life: Four Generations of American Literary Friendship and Influence was first published in 1994, novelist Louis Auchincloss called it “a delightful, unusual and often illuminating study of influences wrought on eight famous American writers by their intimate friendships with each other,” the eight writers being Melville and Hawthorne, James and Wharton, Porter and Welty, Bishop and Lowell. New England now has a paper edition of A Common Life [$17.95]. In Speak the Speech: The Shakespeare Quotation Book, Louis Marder has arranged under 500 easy-to-look-up topics, the most accessible source for every speaker, student, and writer. A new edition of Speak the Speech was recently published by HarperCollins [$25 cloth]. Oxford has a new edition of Richard Wall’s A Dictionary and Glossary for the Irish Literary Revival [$29.95 cloth]. As an edition to its Library of Conservative Thought, a series edited by Milton Hindus, Transaction is offering a paper edition of Whittaker Chambers’ Ghosts on the Roof: Collected Essays edited by Terry Teachout with a new introduction by Mr. Hindus [$22.95]. Johns Hopkins has issued an expanded edition of John T. Irwin’s Doubling and Incest, Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner [$15.95 paper]. Syracuse is offering a paper edition of William York Tindall’s A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake in which Professor Tindall explores and analyzes James Joyce’s vast collection of poems, allusions, and word plays in his complicated novel [$16.95 paper], Georgia has republished Linda Tate’s A Southern Weave of Women: Fiction of the Contemporary South, the Southern women writers include Jill McCorkle, Ellen Douglas, Alice Walker, and Bobbie Ann Mason [$16.95 paper], Norton has a paper edition of The Stories That Shape Us: Contemporary Women Write About the West, edited by Teresa Jordan & James Hepworth [$14], Cornell has republished Jeffrey G. Nealon’s Double Reading: Postmodernism After Deconstruction [$14.95 paper].

GENERAL

The MIT Press has reprinted Joseph E. Stiglitz’s Whither Socialism? [$15 paper]. New England has a new edition of Colin Spencer’s The Heretic’s Feast:’ A History of Vegetarianism in which Spencer traces the long and dramatic history of the vegetarian impulse from ancient times to the present and reveals the surprisingly consistent association of a meatless diet with a range of other radical social ideologies [$18.95 paper]. Johns Hopkins is out with a second edition of Stephen J. Whitfield’s The Culture of the Cold War in which Whitfield explores the years when American power and paranoia reached new heights, namely the 1950’s [$38.50 cloth, $13.95 paper]. Transaction has a new edition of French scholar Raymond Aron’s In Defense of Decadent Europe with a new introduction by Daniel J. Mahoney and Brian C. Anderson [$24.95 paper]. Noonday has reprinted Dating Your Mom, a collection of humorous essays by lan Frazier, ranging in ways you might begin a romance with your mother to a parody that features Samuel Beckett as an airline pilot giving an in-flight speech to the passengers [$9 paper]. A new edition to Graywolfs Rediscovery series is Peter Conrad’s A Song of Love and Death: The Meaning of Opera [$16 paper], A recent Vintage book is J. William Langston, M.D. and John Palfreman’s The Case of the Frozen Addicts; Working at the Edge of the Mysteries of the Human Brain [$13].

FICTION

Mary Lee Settle’s five-volume historical series of novels about West Virginia actually begins during the English civil war and ends in the modern day Mountaineer state. South Carolina has now republished a paper edition of the five volume Beulah quintet. The volumes are respectively: Prisons about a young Englishman who serves in Cromwell’s parliamentary army [$12.95]; O Beulah Land, a story set in the back country of Virginia on the eve of the American Revolution [$14.95]; Know Nothing, a novel set in the decades preceding the Civil War [$14.95]; The Scapegoat, set in 1912 involving the mine wars of West Virginia [$12.95]; and The Killing Ground, the final volume in which protagonist Hannah McKarkle returns to her hometown, Canona, West Virginia, to remove the shroud of mystery surrounding her brother’s death nearly two decades earlier [$12.95]. As a part of its Voices From the South series, LSU has added three novels by 20th-century Southern writers. The novels are respectively Evelyn Scott’s The Wave, first published in 1929 and a forerunner of Gone With the Wind [$14.95 paper]; Sheilah Bosworth’s Almost Innocent, a novel about the New Orleans of the 1950’s [$11.95 paper]; and William Humphrey’s Home From the Hill, a novel set in Texas on the eve of the second world war [$12.95 paper]. Noonday Press is offering reprints of two novels by Madeleine L’Engle, the first being The Small Rain [$13] and the second A Severed Wasp [$13], Berkeley Books has a reprint of Anchee Min’s Katherine, a novel set in the China of the cultural revolution [$6.99]. Boon Island, an account of the wreck of the Nottingham galley off the coast of Maine in December 1710, was the last novel of the great historical novelist Kenneth Roberts. It was published in 1956 and has now been made available in a paper edition from New England with contemporary accounts of the wreck of the galley with Jack Bales and Richard Warner as editors [$15.95 paper]. HarperPerennial Books is out with a paper edition of The Summer Before the Summer of Love, a collection of short stories by Marly Swick [$12 paper]. In the Vintage Crime series are two offerings by mystery writer Ross MacDonald, the novels being The Chill [$11] and The Drowning Pool [$11]. Recent Vintage books include Richard Ford’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel Independence Day [$13]; Nora Ephron’s Heartburn [$11]; Peter Mayle’s A Dog’s Life [$11]; and John Berger’s To the Wedding [$11].

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