ISSUE: Summer 1983
Joseph C. Goulden’s Korea; The Untold Story of the War is described as the fruit of five years of research and writing and was praised at the time of its publication in 1982 as a “sound history of Korea” by Army Magazine. McGraw-Hill has now issued a paperback edition of this story of America’s first no-win, limited, undeclared war, a war described by the late Gen. Omar Bradley as “the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong enemy” [$12.95]. Pantheon is out with a paperback edition of Ronald Brownstein and Nina Easton’s Reagan’s Ruling Class, which contains portraits of the president’s top 100 officials and an introduction by consumer protection advocate Ralph Nader [$9.95]. In American Journey political commentator Richard Reeves retraced the famous trip of Alexis de Tocqueville which resulted in the classic, Democracy in America. Reeves sought to discover what had happened to the American dream in the 150 years after de Tocqueville, and his findings have now been published in paperback by Touchstone Books [$7.95]. The American Revolution and its aftermath are the subjects of three works reprinted by Northeastern University Press. The first is Merrill Jensen’s The New Nation: A History of the United States during the Confederation, 1781—1789, a work which first appeared in 1950 [$24.95 cloth, $9.95 paper]. North-eastern has also reprinted Richard B. Morris’s The Peacemakers: The Great Powers and American Independence, lauded by C. Vann Woodward as “a new and absorbing story of an old subject” [$24.95 cloth, $9.95 paper]. The third Northeastern publication is The American Revolution: Changing Perspectives, an anthology edited by William M. Fowler and Wallace Coyle [$24.95 cloth, and $9.95 paper]. Moving into the 19th century, Northeastern has reissued Carl N. Degler’s The Other South: Southern Dissenters in the Nineteenth Century, which The New Yorker described as “a deft, discriminating, intellectually refined account of several generations of Southern minorities” [$24.95 cloth, $9.95 paper]. Princeton has come out with a paperback edition of William H. Goetzmann and Kay Sloan’s Looking Far North: The Harriman Expedition to Alaska, 1899, an account of one of the last great oceanic exploring cruises [$8.95]. Who Owns America?: A New Declaration of Independence was a collection of essays edited by Herbert Agar and Allen Tate, which appeared in 1936. It is now available as a University Press of America paperback [$12.75].
With the publication of Mr.Clemons and Mark Twain, Justin Kaplan established a reputation as one of America’s leading biographers. His portrait of Mark Twain and his richly drawn background of the Gilded Age brought Kaplan both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. This major book about a major American literary figure has been reissued in paperback as a Touchstone Book [$8.95]. Another Pulitzer Prize-winning biography was the late Samuel Eliot Morison’s Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus, which the New York Times acclaimed as “a splendid achievement and a lasting monument of American scholarship.” Northeastern has brought out a paperback edition of the work [$10.95], Northeastern has also come out with a new edition of the Letters of H. L. Mencken, selected and annotated by Guy J. Forgue [$20.95 cloth, $10.95 paper]. With the movie Gandhi dominating the 1983 Academy Awards, the publishing industry has also taken note of the revived public interest in the great Indian leader. Among the reissued paperbacks about Gandhi are Louis Fischer’s The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, which appeared 30 years ago and is still considered one of the best Gandhi biographies [Colophon Books $8.95] and Gandhi: An Autobiography, subtitled “The Story of My Experiments With Truth,” a work which first appeared in two volumes, Vol. I in 1927 and Vol. II in 1929 [Beacon Books $8.95]. California has brought out a lavishly illustrated selection of excepts from the famous Diary of Samuel Pepys, entitled The Illustrated Pepys. The selections were chosen and edited by Cambridge scholar Robert Latham, joint editor with the late Professor William Matthews of California’s new eleven-volume edition of the complete Pepys. The Illustrated Pepys is available in cloth [$15.95]. The MIT Press is offering a paperback edition of Wyn Wachhorst’s Thomas Alva Edison: An American Myth, which Choice magazine selected as the outstanding book of 1981 [$8.95]. A recent Vintage Book is Marina Warner’s Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, a work deemed by the Philadelphia Inquirer as “a rare jewel in the realm of historical research.” Different sections of this much-praised book are devoted to each of the various roles Mary has assumed in history—Virgin, Queen, Bride, Mother, Intercessor [$9.95]. Two giants among 20th-century leaders were Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill, and, with equally giant egos, theirs was one of the stormier relationships of our time. This relationship is chronicled by François Kersaudy, whose Churchill and de Gaulle was recently reprinted in paperback by Atheneum [$11.95]. Beryl Markham, who was born in England in 1902 and raised in East Africa, was not only one of the first women pilots in that area, flying mail and supplies by small plane to the remote corners of the Sudan, Kenya, and Rhodesia in the early 1930’s. She also, in September 1936, became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west, taking off from England and crash-landing in Nova Scotia 21 hours, 25 minutes later. In 1942 she published her memoirs in a work entitled West with the Night, which Hemingway recommended to Malcolm Cowley as “a bloody, wonderful book.” A new edition has been published in paperback by North Point Press [$12.50]. As part of its Modern Dramatists series, Grove Press has issued a paperback edition of Normand Berlin’s Eugene O’Neill, a study of the major plays and the development of one of the leading dramatists of the 20th century [$9.95].
Alfred Kazin achieved almost instant fame as a major American literary critic when his book, On Native Grounds, came out in 1942, Writing at that time, Mr. Kazin pointed out that modern American literature was not simply an outgrowth of the revolt against Victorian gentility but represented a moral transformation of our entire society under the impact of industrialization and science. A 40th-anniversary edition of this classic, with a new preface, has been reprinted as a Harvest/HBJ paperback [$9.95]. Another classic literary study is H. W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, a book which has made the name Fowler a household word in all English-speaking countries. Now, for the first time, Oxford is offering a paperback edition of the work simply known as “Fowler’s,” an edition revised and edited by Sir Ernest Gowers [$8.95]. Another ground-breaking work of literary criticism is Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction, a book which has become one of the most widely used texts in fiction courses. Chicago is offering a second edition of this work, in paperback [$9.95]. Routledge & Kegan Paul is out with a new edition of Frank Kermode’s Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays, a book the author described as representing “one man’s persistent efforts to understand English poetry in its greatest years” [$18.95 cloth]. Two recent Johns Hopkins reprints are, respectively, The Representation of Women in Fiction, edited by Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Margaret R. Higonnet [$16.50 cloth, $6.95 paper], and an Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language by Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov, translated by Catherine Porter [$24.50 cloth, $10.95 paper]. California has published a second edition of William H. Rueckert’s Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations [$18.95 cloth]. A new Princeton reprint is Bram Dijkstra’s Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams: The Hieroglyphics of a New Speech [$20.00 cloth, $5.95 paper]. One of the classic historical works of the 19th century is Jacob Burckhardt’s The Age of Constantine the Great. This study of the last phase of paganism has recently been reprinted in paperback by California [$7,95]. Two other recent California paperbacks are Robert Ricard’s The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico, first published in 1933 and long considered a standard work [$9.95], and William M. Johnston’s The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848—1938, winner of the 1971 Austrian History Award [$47.50 cloth, $10.95 paper]. Johns Hopkins has brought out a new edition of Richard A. Goldthwaite’s The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History [$29.50 cloth, $10.95 paper]. Two new Cambridge paperbacks are J. W. Burrow’s A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past [$14.95] and Stefan Collini’s Liberalism and Sociology: L. T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in England, 1880—1914 [$14.95].
Under the general title Mustian, Atheneum has reprinted three works of Reynolds Price, all of which involve the Mustian family. Included are Price’s first novel, A Long and Happy Life; a short story, “A Chain of Love,” and the novel, A Generous Man [$14.95 cloth]. Viking is offering two fictional recollections of Ivan Turgenev, First Love & A Fire at Sea, in one volume [$14.75 cloth]. Three recent Vintage Books include two by Doris Lessing. They are The Summer Before the Dark [$3.95] and The Making of the Representative for Planet Eight [$4.95]. The third Vintage Book is John O’Hara’s classic Pal Joey [$3.95]. California has published a new edition of Joaquim M. Machado de Assis’ Counselor Ayres’ Memorial, translated, with an introduction by Helen Caldwell [$19.95 cloth, $5.95 paper]. After an absence of almost 30 years, SMU Press has put back in print Mody C. Boatright’s Tall Tales from Texas Cow Camps, with a preface by J. Frank Dobie [$8.95].
Scribner’s has published a paperback edition of William D. Griffin’s A Portrait of the Irish in America, containing 377 illustrations and text [$14.95]. Lois Wheeler Snow, the widow of journalist Edgar Snow, compiled her late husband’s account of the Chinese Revolution and published it as Edgar Snow’s China in 1981. It is now available in paperback as a Vintage Book [$11.95]. Atheneum is out with a paperback edition of St. Petersburg: A Travellers’ Companion, with the selections about the city now known as Leningrad picked and introduced by Laurence Kelly [$7.95], Touchstone Books has reprinted Robert Jastrow’s The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe, an investigation into the evolution of intelligence on earth [$6.95]. Another work involving the universe, also published by Touchstone, is Paul Davies’ The Edge of Infinity, in which the author speculates about where the universe came from and how it will end [$6.95], St. Martin’s has reprinted Lawrence Freedman’s The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy in paperback as the 20th volume of its Studies in International Security series [$10.95]. A paperback edition of E. Badian’s Publicans and Sinners: Private Enterprise in the Service of the Roman Republic is available from Cornell [$5.95].
