ISSUE: Autumn 1998
When Stephen W. Sears’ Chancellorsville was first published in 1996, it was acclaimed by Library Journal as “a tour de force in military history.” Sears’ account of Robert E. Lee’s military masterpiece was also selected as one of Publishers Weekly’s best books of the year and was a History Book Club main selection. A paper edition is now available as a Mariner Book [$16]. Mariner Books is also offering a paper edition of Walter A. McDougall’s Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776, a work which won the Pulitzer Prize for history and was deemed “a rich study of the American experience” by the Los Angeles Times [$15]. Syracuse is out with a reprint of They’re Off! Horse Racing at Saratoga by Edward Hotaling [$29.95 paper]. Transaction Books has reissued B.A. Botkin’s The American People; Stories, Legends, Tales, Traditions, and Songs with a new introduction by Louis Filler [$22.95 paper]. Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals: How Politics has Corrupted Our Higher Education first appeared in 1990 and has since achieved a reputation as the leading critique of the ways in which the humanities are taught and studied at American universities. Ivan R. Dee has issued a revised edition with a new introduction by the author as an Elephant paperback [$12.95]. Philip Van Munching’s Beer Blast offers a behind-the-scenes report of the battles among beer manufactures and is now available as a Times Books paperback [$14]. American Academic: Culture in Transformation: Fifty years, Four Disciplines, edited by Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske, presents essays by leading scholars on the changes in American academia ín the years since World War II. Princeton recently republished American Academic Culture with a foreword by Stephen R. Graubard [$16.95 paper]. Originally published in 1983, Fred Hobson’s Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain was lauded by the New Yorker as “a lively and original study” and hailed by the National Review as “splendidly written,. . .a freewheeling and eloquent survey,” This work, which established Hobson as a premier interpreter of Southern literary culture, is again available in a paperback edition from Louisiana [$16.95], Another recent Louisiana paper reprint is J. William Harris’ Plain Folk and Gentry in a Slave Society: White Liberty and Mack Slavery in Augusta’s Hinterlands, Augusta being Augusta, Georgia [$14.95]. Abigail A, Van Slyck’s Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 1890—1920 discusses the impact of Andrew Carnegie’s plan to place public libraries in cities and towns across America, A new edition is available as a Chicago paperback [$16]. Chicago has also reprinted Alan Wolfe’s Marginalized in the Middle, an examination of the ills of American society in the 1990’s [$15 paper]. Johns Hopkins has reissued George Green Shackleford’s Thomas Jefferson’s Travels in Europe, 1784—1789 which the Times Literary Supplement deemed a “splendid account of Jefferson abroad” [$18.95 paper]. Recent Vintage books include Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory: A Voyage Down the Mississippi [$14] and Pauline Maier’s American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence [$14], A third Vintage reprint is Bernard Lefkowitz’ Our Guys, an account of the gang rape of a retarded girl by teenage boys in Glenridge, New Jersey in March 1989 [$15]. Richard Gid Powers’ Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism recounts the struggle against Communism in American life before and during the Cold War. Yale is now offering a paper edition [$18]. Another recent Yale paperback is Mona Domosh’s Invented Cities: The Creation of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century New York and Boston [$40 cloth, $16 paper],
James R. Mellow’s Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times is considered the magisterial biography of the New England writer. Deemed “fluent and colorful” by John Updike in The New Yorker, Mellow’s account of Hawthorne’s life won the 1983 National Book Award. A paper edition is now available from Johns Hopkins [$19.95]. David B. Mattern’s Benjamin Lincoln and the American Revolution is a definitive biography of one of America’s most important but least known Revolutionary War generals, a general who served as Washington’s second in command at Yorktown and as Secretary of War from 1781 to 1783. South Carolina recently published a paper edition of this biography [$14.95]. Another recent South Carolina paperback is Richard Knowles Morris’ John P. Holland, 1841—1914: Inventor of the Modern Submarine, a story of a self-trained inventor engineer who revolutionized Naval architecture [$16.95]. Mariner Books has a paper edition of Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath by Anne Stevenson with a new preface by the author discussing Plath’s husband Ted Hughes’ account of their stormy marriage in Birthday Letters [$15]. Mariner also has a new edition of Shirley Abbott’s Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South with a new introduction by the author [$12]. A recent HarperPerenial paperback is Daniel Pool’s Dickens’ Fur Coat and Charlotte’s Unanswered Letters: The Rows and Romances of England’s Great Victorian Novelists [$14]. In Profiles, the late British critic Kenneth Tynan offered 50 essay profiles of what he called “high definition performances.” His subjects ranged from Greta Garbo to Miles Davis, from Dame Edith Evans to Mel Brooks. Considered one of the most brilliant biting critics of his time, Tynan’s Profiles has been reprinted in a paper edition by Random House [$20]. In The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785—1800, Conor Cruise O’Brien took a critical look at Jefferson’s role in the Revolution both in France and in his own country. This revisionary interpretation of Jefferson is now available as a Chicago paperback [$25]. Also available in paper from Chicago is Anthony Alofsin’s Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Years, 1920—1922, A Study of Influence [$35]. Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, a monumental work of journalism, recounting the criminal career of Gary Mark Gilmore who sought to die the way other men fight to stay alive has been reprinted by Vintage Books [$15], Another Vintage Book now available is Colin Fletcher’s River: One Man’s Journey Down the Colorado, Source to Sea [$16].
Oxford has published a third edition of the critically acclaimed A Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory by Jeremy Hawthorn. The glossary has been revised and expanded to include many of the new terms in this volatile and fast changing field. A substantial number of new entries come from the increasingly influential area of post-colonialism (e.g. neo-Tarzanism, mediascape, and nativism) [$65 cloth]. Yale has republished George Steiner’s No Passion Spent in which one of the preeminent essayists and literary thinkers of our era addresses issues of language and the relation of language to literature and to religion [$35 cloth, $16 paper]. Mariner Books is out with paper editions of Worlds of Childhood: The Art and Craft of Writing for Children edited by William Zinsser and Inventing the Truth: The An and Craft of Memoir, expanded with a new introduction also edited by William Zinsser [$13 each]. Nebraska has published a paper edition of Lynn A. Higgins’ New Novel, New Wave, New Politics: Fiction and the Representation of History in Post-war France [$15]. A recent Wisconsin paperback is Denis E. Cosgrove’s Socail Formation and Symbolic Landscape with a new introduction by the author [$16.95]. Johns Hopkins has published a new and corrected edition of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in which Derrida’s theories are given a new translation and a new text [$19.95 paper]. In Southern Writers and Their Worlds five historians and literary critics explore the many ways that Southern writers influence and are influenced by their region. Edited by Christopher Morris and Steven G. Reinhardt with an introduction by Michael O’Brien, a new paper edition of Southern Writers was recently issued by Louisiana [$11.95].
Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown is the first volume of the acclaimed The Raj Quartet, a four-volume account of the last days of British rule in India. Jewel opens in 1942 as the British fear both Japanese invasion and Indian demands for self rule. Chicago has begun a republication of the Raj Quartet in paper with Jewel being the first to appear [$16], Elias Canetti won the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature and two of his prize winning works have recently been reprinted in paper by the Noonday Press. They are respectively Crowds and Power translated by Carol Stewart and Auto-Da-Fe translated by Joachim Neugroschel [$17 each]. Norton has a paper edition of Barry Unsworth’s After Hannibal, a novel about a British expatriot in Italy which won Britain’s Booker Prize for Literature [$13]. Georgia has come out with a new edition of Eugenia J. Bacon’s Lyddy: A Tale of the Old South, a fictional reconstruction of antebellum life in Georgia orginally published in 1898, that through the eyes of a white plantation mistress looks at marriage, slave life, and the destruction of a plantation economy when Sherman’s army marched through Georgia. The new edition has an introduction by North Carolina State scholar Lucinda H. MacKethan [$17 paper]. Recent additions to Louisiana’s Voices of the South series include Kelly Cherry’s Augusta Played [$14.95]; Sheila Bosworth’s Slow Poison [$14.95]; David Bottoms’ Easter Weekend [$12.95]; and Walter White’s Flight [$14.95].
David Remnick’s Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia was described by the Chicago Tribune as having “the feel of describing vast, historical change even as it is happening.” Written by the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning Lenin’s Tomb, Resurrection was recently issued as a Vintage Book with a new afterword by the author [$15]. Vintage has also reprinted Sherwin B. Nuland’s How We Live which Time calls “An anatomy of human life, vividly illustrated. . . .” Written by the bestselling author of the National Book Award winning How We Die, How We Live is filled with fascinating medical case histories [$14]. Yale has a second edition of John Wago’s Our Children’s Toxic Legacy: How Science and Law Fail to Protect Us From Pesticides which Steve Heilig in the San Francisco Chronicle called “a Silent Spring for the 90’s” [$35 cloth, $18 paper]. Another Yale paperback is Tamara Plakins Thornton’s Handwriting in America: A Cultural History [$35 cloth, $15 paper]. Georgia is offering a paper edition of Tom Athanasiou’s Divided Planet, the ecology of the rich and poor which The Nation considers “the single most accessible presentation of what is known as “social ecology” that has yet been written” [$16.95]. Bison Books has reprinted The Genteel Tradition, nine essays by George Santayana edited with an introduction by Douglas L. Wilson and a Bison Books introduction by Robert Dawidoff [$14]. Riverhead Books has a paper edition of Susan Blind Morrow’s The Names of Things: Life, Language, and Beginnings in the Egyptian Desert which the Baltimore Sun described as “simply and eloquently—magic” [$13 paper]. Mariner Books has a paper edition of Tyler Stovall’s Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light [$15].
