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Reprint, Autumn 1997


ISSUE:  Autumn 1997

In his foreword to a new edition of The Journals of Lewis and Clark edited by Bernard DeVoto, Stephen E.Ambrose, author of Undaunted Courage, an account of the Lewis and Clark expedition, makes this comment: “These journals are a national literary treasure . . . the ideal selection for the citizen-reader, an American classic in its own right, a book that will be read as long as the Republic lasts.” The new edition of the journals has been published by Mariner Books [$14 paper]. Of postwar American controversies, few can equal the Hiss Chambers case in drama or length, the case being the allegation by Time editor Whittaker Chambers that Alger Hiss, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a highranking State Department official had served with Chambers in the Communist underground, and one of the most complete accounts of this case/controversy was presented by Allen Weinstein in his book Perjury about which Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.commented: “The most objective and convincing account we have of the most dramatic court case of the century.” Random House has published a paper edition of Perjury[$20]. Princeton has reissued James Quirk and Rodney D.Fort’s Pay Dirt: The Business of Professional Team Sports with an update by the authors in which they examine the record profits, record salaries, and record expansion of professional football, baseball, and basketball teams. They also discuss the cancelled World Series, players suing unions, owners suing leagues, and leagues suing owners in what is no longer a sport but a major industry [$19.95 paper]. Addison-Wesley has issued a paper edition of Michael Lerner’s Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility in an Age of Cynicism with a new epilogue by the author [$13]. Reading the River: A Voyage Down the Yukon is John Hildebrand’s personal account of his summer trip down the great river way of northwestern Canada and Alaska. This memoir of a journey through the wilderness has been reissued in paper by Wisconsin [$17.95]. In 1951 a young African-American journalist from Minneapolis named Carl Rowan journeyed 6,000 miles through the South to report on the reality of everyday life for blacks in the region. He turned his experiences into a book originally published in 1952 entitled South of Freedom. LSU recently came out with a new paper edition of South of Freedom with an introduction by historian Douglas Brinkley [$14.95]. LSU also has a paper edition of Charles W.Ramsdell’s Behind, the Lines in the Southern Confederacy, edited with a foreword by Wendell H.Stephenson [$11.95]. A third LSU paperback reprint is John Maxwell Hamilton and George A. Krimsky’s Hold the Press: The Inside Story on Newspapers, a discussion of the foibles and strengths of America’s fourth estate [$11.95].

LIVES & LETTERS

A native of South Carolina and a journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize as editor of the Arkansas Gazette at the time of the Little Rock integration crisis in 1957, Harry S.Ashmore is the author of more than ten books including An Epitaph for Dixie and Hearts and Minds: The Anatomy of Racism from Roosevelt to Reagan. In 1994 he published Civil Rights and Wrongs: A Memoir of Race and Politics, 1944—1994. Now, the university press of his native state, South Carolina, has issued a revised and expanded edition of Civil Rights and Wrongs with a slightly different sub-title: A Memoir of Race and Politics, 1944—1996 [$19.95]. Another South Carolina paperback reprint is The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, 1739—1762, edited with a new introduction by her descendant, Elise Pinckney, a collection of letters that the South Atlantic Quarterly deemed “tantalizing” [$16.95]. Illinois has paperback reprints of biographies of two important figures in American history, one of the 19th century and the other of the 20th. The first is Robert W.Johannsen’s Stephen A.Douglas an account of the “Little Giant” who took on Abraham Lincoln in the famous debates just before the Civil War. Johannsen’s biography won the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians [$24.95 paper]. The other figure is labor leader Walter Reuther whose life historian Nelson Lichtenstein recounted in Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit [$19.95 paper].

Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky: The Miraculous years, 1865—1871 is the fourth of five planned in Frank’s widely acclaimed biography of the Russian writer and it covers the six most remarkably productive years in the author’s entire career, the years in which Dostoevsky produced three of his greatest novels, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Devils, and two of his best novellas, The Gambler and The Eternal Husband. Winner of Phi Beta Kappa’s Christian Gauss Award, this volume is now available in paper from Princeton [$14.95]. Norton has come out with a third edition of Harold C.Schonberg’s The Lives of the Great Composers, an edition which features a number of significant updates including information on the latest serialists, minimalist composers, and the new tonalists of the 1990’s [$35 cloth]. Norton has also reprinted Jean H.Baker’s The Stevensons: A Biography of an American Family, the most celebrated member of whom was Adlai Ewing Stevenson II (1900—1965) [$16.95 paper]. Riverhead Books has reprinted A.Scott Berg’s Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, a biography which won the National Book Award [$15], Vintage Books has a new edition of the late Anatole Broyard’s Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir of the Village in the late 1940’s [$11]. A Woman’s Life in the Court of the Sun King: Letters of Liselotte von der Pfalz, Elisabeth Charlotte, Duchess d’Orleans, 1652—1722 provides an intimate glimpse of the court of Louis XIV to whose brother, Liselotte was unhappily married, yet for 50 years, she remained in France never far from the center of one of the most glorious courts of Europe. Johns Hopkins has a new paper edition of A Woman’s Life [$16.95]. Famed as a muckraker, Ida M.Tarbell was also a dedicated Lincoln scholar, and the result of this dedication was the publication in 1924 of In the Footsteps of the Lincolns which has been retitled Abraham Lincoln and His Ancestors and reprinted as a Bison Book [$20 paper]. Other recent Bison paperbacks include Linda Simon’s Gertrude Stein Remembered, a collection of memoirs by 20 people who knew Stein well as a writer and woman [$15]; and Loren Eiseley’s The Night Country, an autobiographical account of a famed anthropologist’s life [$13.95].

POETRY

Edwin Rolfe, 1909—54, is best known as the poet laureate of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, the Americans who volunteered to help defend the elected Spanish government during the 1936—39 civil war in Spain. His career began in the revolutionary left of New York in the 1920’s and continued into the 1950’s, when Rolfe wrote searing poetry attacking the McCarthy-era witch-hunt, An edition of Rolfe’s Collected Poems, edited by cary Nelson and Jefferson Hendricks was recently published in paperback by Illinois [$34.95 cloth, $20.95 paper). In its Worlds Classics series, Oxford Paperbacks is offering Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selected Poetry, a selection by a Victorian now recognized as a major poet with striking originality [$8.95]. Oxford Paperbacks also has a second edition of Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry originally published in 1973 and a study of Romantic poets [$11.95]. Fragile Twilight Press has a paper edition of Barbara Truncellito’s In Fragile Twilight [$8.95] as well as David Felder’s Clouds and Numbers By Me[$9.95]. Available for the first time in paperback from Southern Illinois, Six Masters of the Spanish Sonnet is a bilingual collection of 112 sonnets by six Spanish language masters of the form. The translations are by Willis Barnstone, one of the preeminent translators of our day and features poets from the 17th through the 20th century including poets from Spanish America as well as those poets native to Spain [$19.95]. Three Rivers Press has a paper edition of Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge’s Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life With Words, a book of ideas and techniques for people who teach poetry [$13 paper]. St. Martin’s Griffin has reissued in paperback Stephen Dobyns’ Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry, in which Dobyns explains the mystery of poets’ work and the ability of poetry to communicate poets’ thoughts and feelings between the writer and reader [$16.95].

FICTION

Few novels in recent years have generated as much praise and condemnation as Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, a novel for which he was condemned to death by the Iranian ayatollas, but a novel also that the New York Times Book Review compared to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Voltaire’s Candide, and Sterne’s Tristam Shandy saying “Salman Rushdie. . .is very much a latter-day member of their company.” A new edition is now available as an Owl Book paperback [$14]. Owl Books has also republished Rushdie’s novel Shame, which is and is not about Pakistan and was called by The Timesof London “a pitch-black comedy of public life and historical imperatives” [$12]. Johns Hopkins is offering paperback editions of two novels by the French author Michel Tournier, the novels respectviely are Friday, a re-telling of the Robinson Crusoe legend [$14.95] and The Ogre,winner of the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award and the story of a submissive schoolboy during the Nazi era [$15.95 paper]. Lydia Maria Child’s A Romance of the Republic was published in 1867 and was one of the first American novels to advocate interracial marriage as an earnest attempt to foster toleration and communication between the races. Kentucky recently published a paperback edition of Child’s 19th-century work [$19.95]. Originally published in 1878 after Henry Wadsworth Longfellow recommended it to Harper & Brothers, Sherwood Bonner’s Like Unto Like marked the emergence of a feminist critique of Southern society a full generation before the coming of Ellen Glasgow and Kate Chopin. This romance between a free-spirited Southern woman and former abolitionist and Union soldier has been republished by South Carolina with a new introduction by Jane Turner Censer [$14. 95]. Recent editions to Oxford Paperbacks Worlds Classics series include D.H. Lawrence’s The White Peacock, his first novel ($9.95] and Charlotte Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe, first published in 1855 and among the most successful novels of the 19th century [$15.95]. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, Paul Kafka’s novel Love Enter is billed as “a bittersweet romance for the cyberspace age.” A paper edition is available from Mariner Books [$12]. Mariner has also republished Kate Wheeler’s collection of short stories not where I started from [$12].

GENERAL

Richard Overy’s Why the Allies Won was praised by Niall Ferguson in the London Sunday Times as “A masterpiece of analytical history, posing and answering one of the great questions of the century.” Norton now has a paper edition of Overy’s analysis of the Allied victory [$15.95]. Washington has republished Stephen J.Pyne’s World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth, the story of how fire and humans have coevolved [$19.95 paper]. Recent Addison-Wesley paperbacks include Philip M.Dauber and Richard A. Muller’s The Three Bangs: Comet Crashes, Exploding Stars, and the Creation of the Universe[$13]; Rocky Kolb’s Blind Watchers of the Sky: The People and Ideas that Shaped Our View of the Universe [$14]; and Margie Profet’s Pregnancy Sickness: Using Your Body’s Natural Defenses to Protect Your Baby-to-be [$10].

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