ISSUE: Summer 1989
Reviewing Michael S. Sherry’s The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon in the Autumn 1988 issue of VQR, Berkeley Professor Eric J. Sundquist concluded: “Sherry’s history is rich and brilliantly detailed in its combination of military, political, and social concerns. No account of contemporary strategy in the age of Armageddon can afford to ignore this provocative study of the rise to dominance of air power in America.” Sherry’s account of air power’s rise received the 1987 Bancroft Prize in History. A paper edition of this book is now available from Yale, its original publisher [$14.95]. Another recent Yale reprint is Albert Furtwangler’s American Silhouettes: Rhetorical Identities of the Founders, in which Furtwangler looks at such founders as John Adams, Washington, Jefferson, and Marshall, examining a document or a telling incident in their lives to determine what was distinctive and unique about these individuals [$10.95 paper]. A third Yale reprint is Martin Cherniack’s The Hawk’s Nest Incident: America’s Worst Industrial Disaster, one which occurred nearly fifty years ago when hundreds of men died and more than 1,000 fell ill from acute silicosis contracted during the building of Union Carbide’s Hawk’s Nest Tunnel through Gauley Mountain in West Virginia [$10.95 paper]. Yale has also reprinted Philip B. Heymann’s The Politics of Public Management, which examines how political appointees chosen to head government agencies deal with the powerful political forces surrounding these agencies [$9.95 paper]. Pittsburgh has republished two works dealing with the American steel industry and the men who made it. The first is Kenneth Warren’s The American Steel Industry, 1850—1970: A Geographical Interpretation, which examines the steel industry’s initial take-off after 1850, its massive expansion before World War I, the interwar years and the post-World War II reorganization (to 1970) [$34. 95 cloth]. The second reprint, part of the Pittsburgh Series in Social and Labor History, is John A. Fitch’s The Steel Workers, a classic account of the worker in the steel industry during the early years of the 20th century based on interviews Fitch had in Pittsburgh in 1907—08 [$39.95 cloth, $14.95 paper]. Johns Hopkins has republished Susan J. Douglas’s Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899—1922, an account of the communications revolution that so profoundly altered American life in this century [$45.00 cloth, $14.95 paper]. Georgia has reprinted Georgia Governors in an Age of Change: From Ellis Arnall to George Busbee, edited by Harold P. Henderson and Gary L. Roberts, in which former Georgia governors and Georgia political commentators describe the conflict and change which led Georgia from a bastion of Southern provincialism to a state some now consider the epitome of the New South. [$25.00 cloth, $10.00 paper]. LSU has a new edition of Florence Mars’s Witness in Philadelphia, an eyewitness account of the troubled summer of 1964, when three young civil rights workers were murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi, with a foreword by former New York Times man Turner Catledge [$9.95 paper]. Bison Books has a new edition of E.A. Brininstool’s Troopers with Custer: Historic Incidents of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, a book originally published in 1925 and long recognized as classic Custeriana [$9.95 paper].
The Cambridge Edition of The Letters of D.H. Lawrence: Volume I, 1901—13, edited by James T. Boulton, offers the first 580 letters in the series and covers the period September 1901 to May 1913, the time of Lawrence’s youth in Eastwood, as a teacher in Croydon, and his first year out of England—in Italy with Frieda—to the publication of Sons and Lovers. During this period, Lawrence was also welcomed into the literary world by editors such as Ford Madox Ford, and he met Pound and other writers, as well as Frieda, with whom he eloped. By the end of this volume he is established as a writer. The Letters will form companion volumes—seven of text and one of index—to the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Lawrence, which began publication in 1980. Seven volumes of The Letters are planned, with the first being a $65.00 cloth edition. Osa Johnson’s I Married Adventure: The Lives and Adventures of Martin and Osa Johnson was published to popular acclaim in 1940 and told the true story of two Midwestern Americans who traveled throughout the world photographing safaris. Morrow has a new edition of this account of their lives and adventures [$19.95 cloth]. When James Woodress’s Willa Gather: A Literary Life was first published by Nebraska in 1987, the New York Times Book Review called it “the most cogent, balanced biography of cather to date, one that explores her many dimensions as a journalist, magazine editor, and novelist. . . .altogether this smoothly written, richly detailed biography augments Willa Gather’s claims to literary greatness.” Nebraska is now offering a paper edition of this cather biography [$14.95]. As part of its Bison Book Series, Nebraska has reprinted John Bakeless’s Daniel Boone: Master of the Wilderness, with an introduction by Michael A. Lofaro, originally published 50 years ago and still considered the classic account of the life of a national hero [$12.95 paper]. Don Gaspar de Guzman, Count-Duke of Olivares (1587—1645) was the principal minister and favorite of Philip IV of Spain, and for two decades he guided the destinies of a country that was still one of the world’s great powers. J.H. Elliott’s The Count-Duke of Olivares: The Statesman in an Age of Decline recounts the life of this Spanish statesman and received the distinguished Wolfson Literary Award for History in 1986. Yale is now offering a paper edition of Elliott’s biography [$19.95]. Yale has also reprinted Joyce Antler’s Lucy Sprague Mitchell: The Making of a Modern Woman, a biography of the founder of the Bank Street College of Education and one of the first women to attempt combining a career with marriage and motherhood [$16.95 paper]. J.P. Nettl’s Rosa Luxemburg, with a classic introductory essay by Hannah Arendt, is considered the classic biography of one of the most important and controversial revolutionists of 20th century Europe and it was called “a book of the highest distinction” by English historian A.J.P. Taylor. Schocken Books has reprinted Nettl’s biography [$15.95 paper]. As part of its Civil War Library Series, Vintage Books has republished Nancy Scott Anderson’s and Dwight Anderson’s The Generals: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, a dual biography of the two great Civil War generals [$12.95]. Vintage is also offering a new edition of Lawrence Wright’s In the New World: Growing Up with America From the Sixties to the Eighties, a widely acclaimed memoir of one man’s coming of age in 1960s Dallas and an account, at the same time, of the end of American innocence [$8.95]. Cornell Paperbacks is offering, respectively, Alfred Kazin’s Starting Out in the Thirties, the autobiographical account of life in New York during the Great Depression by one of America’s most influential literary critics [$6.95], and Alexander Pasternak’s A Vanished Present, an account of life in pre-Marxist Russia by Boris Pasternak’s younger brother [$9.95].
As Volume 8 of the Iowa-California Edition of the Works of Mark Twain, California is offering Twain’s classic, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, edited by Walter Blair and Victor Fischer, with the assistance of Dahlia Armón and Harriet Elinor Smith, a novel Twain completed writing in 1883 and one written entirely in literary dialect. This is a critical edition of Mark Twain’s masterpiece, including the original illustrations, a wealth of new documentation, and the accurate and complete text [$65. 00 cloth]. North Point Press has reprinted James Salter’s Dusk and Other Stories, a work which Publishers Weekly acclaimed for attaining “a new height of grace and breathtaking virtuosity” [$7.95 paper]. To its Perennial Fiction Library, Harper & Row has added three novels by British writer Penelope Lively, the novels being Moon Tiger (winner of the prestigious Booker Prize), According to Mark, and Judgment Day [$7.95 each]. Two other additions to the Perennial Fiction Library are, respectively, Mary Beckett’s Give Them Stones, a novel the Dublin Sunday Independent called “clearly the best novel written about [Northern Ireland] over the past twenty years” [$6.95], and Bobbie Ann Mason’s Spence & Lila, which Newsday critic Ellen Feldman praised as “a spare, unsentimental and deeply moving portrait of a wife and husband facing death” [$6.95].”
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, who was born in 1647 and died in 1680, lived a short, disgraceful, and dissipated life, which may be one reason his poems have been often neglected. On the other hand they have also been acclaimed as works of genius, and they are now available from Blackwell in a new edition, The Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, edited by Keith Walker [$14.95 paper, also available in cloth but price N/A]. Yale has published The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, the first comprehensive edition of Spenser’s shorter poems since the Variorum Minor Poems published in the 1940’s [$55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper]. Penguin Classics is offering a new edition of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude: A Parallel Text, edited by J.C. Maxwell, a volume containing the 1805—6 and the 1850 versions of the poems, presented in parallel text for the first time in a paperback edition [$8.95]. Also available as a Penguin Classic is Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems, the first paper edition to make Wyatt’s poetry fully available to the modern reader [$7.95]. Penguin is also offering a new edition of The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry, edited by Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier, with 67 poets and 23 African countries represented in this third edition [$7.95].
With the publication of Reynolds Price’s A Common Room: Essays 1954—87, the Chicago Tribune commented: “unlike most academics, Price has a lively prose style, a healthy scorn for academic criticism, and a ferocious wit, which he doesn’t hesitate to direct at himself. He has such vast and humbling intellectual resources that they inspire . . .admiration and awe.” Atheneum is now offering a paper edition of this collection of the North Carolina writer and critic’s essays [$11.95]. A recent offering in Simon & Schuster’s Fireside Book paperback series is Linda Wolfe’s The Literary Gourmet: Menus from Masterpieces, a collection of unforgettable meals from world literature with recipes and little-known culinary facts, the masterpieces including Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Jane Austen’s Emma, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and Proust’s Swann’s Way [$10.95]. As a part of its Revived Modern Classic Series, New Directions has reprinted Kenneth Rexroth’s More Classics Revisited, a succinct analyses of some of the key documents in literary history by the late poet and polymath [$21.95 cloth]. Yale is offering Ruth B. Bottigheimer’s Grimms’ Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the “Tales”, the first work in more than 50 years to treat the entire body of Grimms’ Tales [$10.95 paper]. Chicago has reprinted Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature: An Institutional History, a study Jonathan Culler of Cornell University considered “indispensable to anyone reflecting on the future of literary studies in America” [$11.95 paper].
