ISSUE: Summer 1991
Frederick Rudolph’s study The American College & University was originally published in 1962 and was one of the first to examine developments in higher education in the context of the social, economic, and political factors shaping the nation at large. Said the Saturday Review of Rudolph’s work: “Atourde force. . . . The general reader . . .will find in it the interesting story of America’s academic life, told with truth and originality.” Georgia has come out with a new edition of this history of American higher education [$35.00 cloth, $15.00 paper]. Georgia has also republished a second edition of A History of Georgia with Kenneth Coleman as general editor. First published in 1977, this work has become the standard history of the state. It ranges from the earliest discoveries of the Spanish to the changes wrought by the civil rights era. The new edition has been revised to include the events of the 1980’s [$35.00 cloth, $25.00 paper]. Collier Books has reprinted George C. Wilson’s Mud Soldiers: Life Inside the New American Army about which there has been new interest sparked by the Gulf War. Kirkus Reviews called Wilson’s book “a candid and impassioned briefing that offers rare and rewarding views of military life” [$9.95], Of Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones’ The CIA & American Democracy, commentator Daniel Schorr had this to say: “I have read many books on the CIA, but none more searching and still dispassionate. . . . Lucid and exciting.” Yale is now offering a paper edition of this book [$14.95, also available in cloth $30.00]. Yale has also brought out a paper edition of Kenneth L. Karst’s Belonging to America; Equal Citizenship and the Constitution [$15.95, also available in cloth $35.00]. A new edition of Andrew Delbanco’s The Puritan Ordeal, winner of Columbia University’s Lionel Trilling Award and a work historian Gordon S. Wood called “a powerfully imaginative and personal book—perhaps as all great American books on the Puritans must be” [$30.00]. Vintage Books has published a new edition of Ivor Noel Hume’s A Guide to Artifacts of Colonial America, an archaeologist’s distillation of 20 years in search of what made the world of our ancestors [$14.95]. First published in 1941 on the eve of this country’s entry into World War II, Margaret Leech’s Reveille in Washington, 1860—1865 went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for history and has been reprinted many times. The latest edition of this work has been published in paper by Carroll & Graf with a new introduction by Civil War historian James M. McPherson [$12.95 paper].
Princeton has published a new edition of Henry D. Thoreau’s Journal, Volume 3: 1848—1851, a work spanning a period of change in Thoreau’s life and literary career, including the publication of his first book and a crisis in his friendship with Emerson. Thoreau produced a journal from 1837 to 1861 [$39.50 cloth]. In Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s opinion, Frank Freidel’s Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny is “the best single-volume biography of our greatest 20th-century president.” Little, Brown has brought out a paper edition of Freidel’s one-volume life of FDR [$15.95], At the time of its publication in 1980, critic Jonathan Yardley had this to say of David Minter’s William Faulkner: His Life and Work: “Any future Faulkner biographer—and there will be others, rest assured of that—will find it difficult to surpass what (Minter) has accomplished.” Minter’s original publisher, Johns Hopkins, recently reprinted his Faulkner biography in a paper edition [$15.95]. Columbia has reprinted respective biographical studies of two giants of post-World War II American diplomacy. The first is Walter L. Hixson’s George F. Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast, co-winner of the 1989 Stuart L. Bernath Memorial Book Competition [$14. 50 paper]. The second is Robert D. Schultzinger’s Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy, an account of Kissinger’s performance during the years 1969—1976 when he rose from National Security Advisor to Secretary of State [$13.95 paper]. Among the new Bison Books from Nebraska is The Benteen-Goldin Letters on Custer and His Last Battle, edited by John M. Carroll. This is the correspondence between two veterans of the Battle of the Little Big Horn exchanged from the fall of 1891 to the summer of 1896, one being Captain Frederick W. Benteen of the Seventh Cavalry who rescued Major Marcus A. Reno’s command and the other being Private Theodore W. Goldin who served with Reno during the battle [$9.95 paper]. Ivan R. Dee has come out with another edition of William M. Clarke’s The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins, which the publisher describes as “the intimate Victorian life of the father of the detective story” [$24.95 cloth]. Quill/ William Morrow is offering a paper edition of Rumer Godden’s A House with Four Rooms, this being the second volume of the noted novelist’s memoirs in which she recounts her life after her return from India to England with her daughters in 1945 [$10.95]. North Point Press has a new edition of David Kline’s Great Possessions: An Amish Farmer’s Journal which The New York Times Book Review lauded as “a quiet paean to things lost, a set of values we’ve put in the attic” [$9.95 paper]. Georgia has issued a paper edition of He Included Me: The Autobiography of Sarah Rice transcribed and edited by Louise Westling, a first-person account of black life in the 20th-century South [$11.95].
Quill/Morrow Books is offering two reprints involving personalities and events of World War II, the first being Hitler’s Generals: Authoritative Portraits of the Men Who Waged Hitler’s War edited by Correlli Barnett, one of the best-known historians of the Second World War [$14.95 paper]. The second is Norman Gelb’s Dunkirk: The Complete Story of the First Step in the Defeat of Hitler, which former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman acclaimed as both “a good adventure read and an instructive case study yielding modern lessons” [$12.00 paper]. Emmet Kennedy’s A Cultural History of the French Revolution covers a wide range of cultural activities— from painting, music, fiction, theater to philosophy, science, education, and religion—and has been reissued by Yale in a paper edition [$18.95, also available in cloth $40.00]. Frederic Morton’s Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914 describes events in the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in those two years before the lights went out all over Europe. Collier Books has come out with a new edition of this chronicle of a tragic period in modern history [$9.95 paper].
In European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, Ernst Robert Curtius (1886—1956), one of the foremost literary scholars of this century, examined the continuity of European literature from Homer to Goethe, with particular emphasis on the Latin Middle Ages. A German scholar, Curtius produced what T.S. Eliot called a “magnificent book” during the Nazi period when he was forced into seclusion. The new edition of Curtius’ survey has been published by Princeton as part of its Bollingen Series with a new afterword by Peter Godman [$19.95 paper]. Other recent Princeton reprints include Wai-chee Dimock’s Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism [$12.95 paper], and David M. Bethea’s The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction [$14.95 paper].
