ISSUE: Summer 1993
When Harvard published Bruce Ackerman’s We The People, volume one of a work entitled Foundations, it captured instant acclaim. Writing in The New Republic, for example, Cass R. Sunstein observed, “This book is one of the most important contributions to American constitutional thought in the last half-century.” More than a decade in the making and the first of three volumes, We The People is now available in a paper edition [$9. 95]. Harvard has also reprinted a paper edition of Earl Black and Merle Black’s The Vital South: How Presidents Are Elected which takes on a new relevance now that a Southern governor has shown the Democrats the road to the White House [$14. 95]. Houghton Mifflin has brought out a paper edition of Franklin Burroughs’ The River Home: A Return to the Carolina Low Country, the river in this case being the Waccamaw [$9. 95]. Norton has printed a second edition, revised and expanded, of Walter LaFeber’s Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America, the first edition of which was published ten years ago, was widely hailed, and quickly became a best seller [$12. 95 paper]. Vintage Books has a new edition of what has now become a classic work on urban America, namely Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which The New fork Times Book Review has deemed “perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning” [$12. 00]. Another recent Vintage publication is Alec Wilkinson’s The Riverkeeper, a narrative about men and women who rely upon the water ranging from the Portuguese-Americans who fish off Cape Cod to the Indians of Alaska [$11. 00]. To its Civil War Library Series Vintage has added Charles Royster’s The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans, a work which won the coveted Bancroft Prize in American History [$15. 00]. Recent additions to the Bison Book Series include three works about the Civil War, one about the American Revolution, and one about the opening of the West. The Civil War volumes are, respectively, Clifford Dowdey’s Lee’s Last Campaign: The Story of Lee and His Men against Grant—1864 [$14. 95], Dowdey’s The Seven Days: The Emergence of Lee [$12. 95], and Edward G. Longacre’s The Cavalry at Gettysburg: A Tactical Study of Mounted Operations during the Civil War’s Pivotal Campaign, June 9-July 14 1863 [$12. 95]. The Revolution is given full coverage in Piers Mackesy’s The War for America 1775—1783 [$16. 95]. The Old West comes alive anew in Leroy R. Hafen & Ann W. Hafen’s Old Spanish Trail: Santa Fe to Los Angeles [$12. 95].
William Henry Welch was the first fulltime faculty member at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and he went on to become undisputed leader of American scientific medicine and the foremost shaping force in American medical education. Herbert Hoover called him “our greatest statesman in the field of public health.” By the time Simon Flexner and James Thomas Flexner’s William Henry Welch and the Heroic Age of American Medicine was published in 1941, Welch— who died in 1934 at age 84—was already a legend. The legend lives anew in Hopkins’ new edition of the Flexners’ work [$29. 95 cloth]. Penguin Books is out with a new edition of Blanche Wiesen Cook’s Eleanor Roosevelt: Vol. 1: 1884—1933, a book which became a national best seller when it first appeared in 1992. Ms. Cook’s account of Mrs. Roosevelt’s life goes from her unhappy childhood to her emergence as First Lady [$14. 00]. The life of another great American public figure is recounted in full in August Heckscher’s Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, which Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. lauded as “splendid,” and which was listed as a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. A new paper edition is available from Collier Books [$22. 95]. Graham Creene once observed that “There is no novelist of this century more likely to live than Ford Madox Ford,” an author who wrote nearly everyday of his life from adolescence onward, produced 82 books, and championed such writers as Lawrence, Pound, Joyce, and Hemingway. The life of this extraordinary Englishman was recounted in Alan Judd’s Ford Madox Ford, originally published by Harvard in 1990. Harvard recently issued a paper edition [$14. 95]. Soho Press has a paper edition of Nora Wain’s The Approaching Storm: One Woman’s Story of Germany 1934—1938, a personal account of the birth of the Third Reich [$14. 00]. Marian Anderson died last spring, but her life lives on in her autobiography My Lord, What a Morning which has been reprinted with a new introduction by Nellie Y. McKay by Wisconsin [$37. 50 cloth; $12. 95 paper]. Robert B. Westbrook’s John Dewey and American Democracy is a comprehensive intellectual account of the life and work of a great democratic theorist and activist, an American whose influence on our educational system is still felt. Cornell recently published a paper edition of Westbrook’s biography [$16. 95]. Princeton is offering a new—and the fifth edition—of Walter Harding’s The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography, a book which first appeared in 1962 and was reprinted in 1964, 1965, and 1982. This is the first time Harding’s biography has appeared in paperback, and it has a new afterword by the author [$9. 95]. Princeton has also come out with a revised paper edition of Barry Millington’s Wagner, a biography of one of the most controversial composers [$12. 95]. Vintage Books is out with a new edition of Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale’s The Divine Sarah: A Life of Sarah Bernhardt as well as their Misia: The Life of Misia Sert, respective biographies of two of the great feminine figure Fig 1. . 00 each]. Other recent Vintage Books include Eddy L. Harris’s Native Stranger: A Black American’s Journey into the Heart of Africa [$12. 00]; Claire Tomalin’s The Invisible Woman: The Story of Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan [$13. 00]; and Narrative of Sojourner Truth edited with an introduction by Margaret Washington [$9. 00].
Penguin has put together in one volume three earlier works of the poet John Ashbery and placed them under the title Three Books. The three books are, respectively, Houseboat Days, first published in 1977, Shadow Train, originally out in 1981, and A Wave, initially issued in 1984 [$17. 00]. Penguin also has a new edition of Alfred Corn’s Autobiographies, a collection that Viking Penguin earlier published in 1992 [$10. 00]. As part of its Penguin Classic Series, the paper publishing house has a new edition of The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Bronte, the first major edition of her poetry to appear for half a century, edited with an introduction by Janet Gezari [$10. 95]. As an addition to its Poetry Library, Penguin is offering William Wordsworth: Selected Poetry edited with an introduction by Nicholas Roe [$8. 00]. In its International Poets Series Penguin has The Poetry of Survival: Post-War Poets of Central and Eastern Europe edited by Daniel Weissbort [$12. 00]. Princeton has a revised edition of C. P. Cavafy’s Collected Poems translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard and edited by George Savidis, with Cavafy now regarded as the most important figure in 20th century Greek poetry [$39. 50 cloth; $12. 95 paper]. North-western has reprinted Boris Pasternak’s My Sister—Life translated by Mark Rudman with Bohdan Boychuk [$12. 95 paper]. A New Directions Paperbook is Denise Levertov’s Evening Train, the 21st collection by the American poet [$8. 95]. Bonnie Costello’s Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery is now available in paperback from Harvard [$14. 95]. California has republished Sappho’s Lyre: Archaic Lyric and Women Poets of Ancient Greece translated by Diane J. Rayor [$35. 00 cloth; $10. 95 paper].
Willa Cather said of O Pioneers!, that it was her first authentic novel, “the first time I walked off on my own feet, everything before was half real and half an imitation of writers whom I admired.” Published in 1913, Cather’s novel of life on the Nebraska frontier has long stood as an American classic. Nebraska recently published a scholarly edition of O Pioneers! edited by Susan J. Rosowski and Charles W. Mignon with Kathleen Danker and including an historical essay and explanatory notes by David Stouck [$45. 00 cloth]. O Pioneers! is also available in a Vintage Classics Edition [$9. 00], as are Willa Catha’s Collected Stories [$14. 00]. Vintage is also offering reprints of four of William Stryon’s works including the 25th anniversary edition of The Confessions of Nat Turner with a new afterword by the author [$12. 00]. The other Styron novels are The Long March and in the Clap Shack [$11. 00], and Set This House on Fire [$12. 00]. Vintage further has an edition of a nonfiction work by Styron, This Quiet Dust and Other Writings Including 6 Previously Uncollected Essays [$12. 00]. Another recent Vintage publication is The Complete Collected Stories of V. S. Pritchett, stories spanning 60 years and every tread in the stairway of English society, a collection embodying the career of a writer who, in William Trevor’s words, “has done more for the English short story in his lifetime than anyone since Joyce or Chekhov.” [$20. 00]. Further Vintage publications include three works by James Baldwin, they being, respectively, a novel Another Country [$12. 00], and two collections of essays: Nobody Knows My Name [$10. 00] and The Fire Next Time [$8. 00]. Also available from Vintage is Cormac McCarthy’s first novel The Orchard Keeper [$11. 00], Nicholas Mosley’s Hopeful Monsters [$13. 00], and Caryl Phillips’ Cambridge [$10. 00]. Carroll & Graf is offering a new paper edition of John O’Hara’s From the Terrace with a new introduction by Budd Schulberg, a novel The New York Times considered, “O’Hara’s best—a tremendous story” [$7. 95].
Harvard has come out with a paper edition of volume two of A History of Private Life: Revelations of the Medieval World, edited by Philippe Aries and Georges Duby in which 14 different French historians reconstruct a picture of peasant and patrician life in the llth to 15th centuries [$18. 95]. Oxford has a second edition of Discoveries: Fifty Stories of the Quest edited by Harold Schechter and Jonna Gormely Semeiks, an anthology in which a variety of writers examine the successive stages of humanity’s most durable myth, the hero quest [$22. 00]. Yale has republished Max Oelschlaeger’s The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology in which the author examines how the concept of wild nature has changed over the millennia, and what have been the environmental consequences of these changes [$18. 00 paper]. Philosopher Immanuel Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties is available in a new edition from Nebraska with translation and introduction by Mary J. Gregor [$12. 95 paper]. Geoffrey Gait Harpham examines The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism in a recent Chicago paperback [$17. 95]. Norton published a new and expanded edition of Robert Jastrow’s God and the Astronomers in which the author discusses the relationship between science and God [$18. 95 cloth].
