ISSUE: Spring 1989
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s The Age of Jackson was written in 1944, the year of D-Day and Roosevelt’s election to an unprecedented fourth term as president. Published in 1945, this wide-ranging description of the United States during the years our seventh president was in office won the Pulitzer Prize for history and was called “an original, brilliant and monumentally massive historical work” by the New York Times. Now Little Brown has reissued this classic study in a new edition [$22.50 cloth, $10.95 paper]. Until its death in 1966, the New York Herald Tribune was one of the giants of American journalism, and its colorful history was recounted by Richard Kluger (author of Simple Justice) in The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune, which journalist Anthony Lukas, writing in the Boston Globe, considered “probably the best book ever written about an American newspaper.” Vintage Books is offering a new edition of this piece of social history [$16.95]. Perhaps the classic contemporary work of political reporting is the late Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President 1960: A Narrative History of American Politics in Action. First published in late 1961, White’s account of the campaign that made John F. Kennedy the nation’s youngest elected president has been republished in a new edition by Atheneum, with an introduction by James Reston in which the New York Times pundit says of White’s work “it is simply still the best account we have of the tactics and strategy, the mysteries, trickeries, and accidents of American presidential elections.” [$14.95 paper]. If The Making of a President described the Kennedy triumph, William Manchester’s The Death of a President: November 1963 recounted the crowning tragedy of the brief Kennedy years. Recently reissued by Harper & Row on the 25th anniversary of Kennedy’s death, Manchester’s work was praised by Richard Rovere in The New Yorker for making “an American contribution to the great literature on the death of kings.” [$22.95 cloth, $10.95 paper]. As a Perennial Book, Harper & Row is also offering Barrington Boardman’s Flapper, Bootleggers, “Typhoid Mary” & the Bomb: An Anecdotal History of the United States 1923—1945, originally published as From Hording to Hiroshima [$7.95]. Henry J. Abraham’s Freedom and the Court: Civil Rights and Liberties in the United States first appeared in 1967 and is again available in a fifth edition from Oxford. The new edition has been completely updated to encompass the myriad changes in the Supreme Court and its jurisprudence over the last six years [$16.96 paper]. Verso Books is offering a paper edition of Alexander Cockburn’s Corruptions of Empire: Life Studies & the Reagan Era, a series of polemic essays on various aspects of the Reagan years by a radical reporter whose columns have appeared in journals as varied as The Nation and The Wall Street Journal [$13.95]. Recent Touchstone Books include Max Hastings’ The Korean War, which Time correspondent Hugh Sidey deemed “a top-drawer book by a splendid historian” [$10.95]; Jonathan Kwitny’s The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA, which reveals how an obscure Australian bank came to occupy the central position in a vast network of corrupt operations [$7.95]; and Andrew Billingsley’s Black Families in White America, the 20th-Anniversary Edition of a modern classic by a preeminent Afro-American sociologist [$8.95].
One of the great literary biographers of our time was the late Richard Ellmann, a scholar who specialized in recounting the lives of such Irish giants as William Butler Yeats and James Joyce. Ellmann’s last biography was Oscar Wilde, about whom the author commented in his introduction “among the writers identified with the 1890’s, Wilde is the only one whom anyone still reads.” Vintage Books recently published a new edition of the Wilde biography about which Time commented, “It is difficult to imagine a more comprehensive, measured and fascinating account” [$11.95]. Vintage has also reprinted Barrie Penrose and Simon Freeman’s Conspiracy of Silence: The Secret Life of Anthony Blunt, who won a knighthood for his work as an art historian while also serving as a longtime agent of the KGB [$10.95]. A third Vintage Book is Jonathan D. Spence’s Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K’anghsi, an account in his own words of the Emperor who served China from 1661 to 1722, as translated and edited by Spence [$8.95]. Lyndall Gordon’s Virginia Woolf: A Writers Life received the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Book Prize for biography and has been reprinted by Norton [$8.95 paper]. Quill Books has republished Carol Easton’s The Search for Sam Goldwyn: A Biography, an account of the Hollywood giant whose career spanned almost the entire history of the film industry, beginning with his first film The Squaw Man in 1913, and ending in 1974 with his death at the age of 91 [$12.95]. Collier Books has brought out a new edition of Joseph E. Persico’s My Enemy, My Brother: Men and Days of Gettysburg, a documentary account of the greatest conflict of the Civil War re-created by the men who fought and died in it [$9.95]. Collier Books is also offering a new edition of Ronald Sukenick’s Down and In: Life in the Underground, the story of the avantgarde in America as it grew out of the old Greenwich Village [$10.95], A recent Evergreen Book is Tobias Schneebaum’s Keep the River on Your Right, the Brooklyn-born painter’s account of his trek into the jungles of Peru in search of a tribe of cannibals [$7.95]. Bison Books has republished two works of nonfiction by Willa Gather, one being Willa Gather in Europe: Her Own Story of the First Journey, which she made in the summer of 1902 at age 28 [$7.50]; and the other being Not Under Forty, a collection of essays first published in 1936 which Miss Gather felt anyone under forty would not be interested in reading [$6.95].
J. R. Ackerley’s We Think the World of You was described by the author as a “fairy tale for adults.” It is the story of Frank, a cultivated middle-aged civil servant who becomes involved with a working class family and is both a study in jealousy and frustration and a witty examination of working class mores. Ackerley’s novel, first published in 1960, is again available from Poseidon Press [$7.95 paper]. Perennial Books has reprinted Ethan Canin’s collection of short stories, Emperor of the Air, a collection which Walker Percy described as “at times breathtaking, at other times heartbreaking” [$7.95]. A recent New Directions Paperbook is Nayantara Sahgal’s Rich Like Us, a novel about India spanning four generations and chiefly set in the darkening universe of New Delhi during Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s 1976—77 Emergency [$8.95]. Evergreen is offering a new edition of Gustavo Sainz’s The Princess of the Iron Palace, the story of a salesgirl in the Bloomingdale’s of Mexico by day who becomes a modern Scheherazade by night [$9.95]. Touchstone Books has republished Rachel Ingall’s The Pearl Killers, a collection of four stories mixing reality and fantasy [$6.95]. Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond tells the story of three English eccentrics, all bound for Turkey, supposedly to set up a religious mission there and what happens after they actually arrive. Called “an utter delight” by the New York Times, the novel is available in a new paper edition from Carroll & Graf [$8.95]. Carroll & Graf has also reprinted John Wainwright’s All On A Summer’s Day, an account of what happens during a 24—hour period in a police department in the north of England [$3.95]. Atheneum is offering paper editions of two works by Ishmael Reed, the first being The Free-Lance Pallbearers [$7.95], and second being Mumbo Jumbo [$9.95]. Collier Books has republished Peter Handke’s 3 x Handke [$8.95], and Jay Cantor’s Krazy Kat [$7.95], Recent works of fiction reprinted by Vintage Books include these: Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective [$6.95] and Blackeyes [6.95]; John Edgar Wideman’s Hiding Place [$6.95] and Damballach [$6.95]; Richard Ford’s Rock Springs, a collection of stories [$6.95]; and Christopher Coe’s I Look Divine [$5.95].
The latest offerings from Penguin Books include A Book of English Poetry, collected by G.H. Harrison and containing 200 poems by more than 60 poets from the 14th to the 19th century [$5.95]; The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, edited by Irving Howe, Ruth R. Wisse, and Khone Shmeruk, with 39 poets represented using a poetic form that has developed only over the last 150 years [$14.95]; and, in the Penguin Classics Series, Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid and Other Poems by a Scotsman now recognized as the greatest Scottish poet before Burns [$4.95]. California has published a new and revised edition of Contemporary Irish Poetry, edited with an Introduction and Headnotes by Anthony Bradley, which The Georgia Review described as “a truly excellent anthology” [$12.95]. Touchstone Books is offering a new edition of The Poem Itself, edited and with an Introduction by Stanley Burnshaw, in which 150 of the greatest modern French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian poems appear in their original languages illuminated by English commentaries [$10.95]. Copper Canyon Press has reprinted Pablo Neruda’s The Sea and the Bells, translated by William O’Daly, which originally appeared in 1973 [$9.00].
Vintage Books has reprinted Paul Kennedy’s historical best seller, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, in which Kennedy described the ascent and decline of such great powers as Spain, France, and England. In so doing, said Newsweek, “Kennedy gives epic meaning to the nation’s relative economic and industrial decline.” [$12.95], Vintage also has a new edition of Midge MacKenzie’s Shoulder to Shoulder, a history of the Militant Suffragettes in England who rocked foundations of British society as they sought to give women the right to vote. The book is the basis for the public television series by the same name [$15.95]. Yale has brought out a paper edition of John Prest’s The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and Re-Creation of Paradise, a book which explores the development of the botanic garden in Europe and shows how the famous early gardens in Paris, Oxford, Padua, Leyden, and Uppsala sought to re-create the Garden of Eden [$14.95], MIT has reissued The Genius of Place: The English Landscape Garden, 1620—1820, edited by John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis, showing how English landscape gardening was gradually transformed over two centuries into an art that has been widely imitated throughout Europe and North America [$13.95]. Collier Books has reprinted David Rains Wallace’s The Untamed Garden and Other Personal Essays in which the author celebrates the strength and complexity of nature and glories in its discovery [$9.95], Among the recent books issued by Touchstone are these: Flora Lewis’s Europe: A Tapestry of Nations, in which the noted New York Times correspondent presents a guide to countries ranging from Austria to Yugoslavia [$10.95]; Stephen E. Ambrose’s Pegasis Bridge: June 6, 1944, in which the Eisenhower biographer recounts how a small detachment of British airborne troops paved the way for the Allied invasion of Europe [$7.95]; and Francine du Plessix Gray’s Adam & Eve and the City: Selected Nonfiction, a collection of essays ranging from the Klaus Barbie case to an address at Bryn Mawr [$12.95].
