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Reprint, Winter 1987


ISSUE:  Winter 1987

While Henry Adams is best known today for his autobiographical Education, he was also the author of the monumental History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson, first published in nine volumes from 1889 to 91. Judged one of the great historical works in English—and yet out of print for several decades—the complete history is now available in two volumes as part of The Library of America series. Edited by Earl N. Harbert, a professor at Northeastern University and Adams authority, the history traces the development of American nationality through Jefferson’s two terms and to the War of 1812. With access to hitherto secret archives in Europe, Adams was able to infuse his history with scenes of intimacy as no previous historian had done. The Library of America presents the collected works of America’s foremost authors in a uniform cloth series, and the Adams volumes are a handsome addition to this series [$27.50 per volume]. The early history of this country is also the subject of Catherine Drinker Bowen’s Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention, May to September 1787, a classic recounting of the stormy, dramatic session that produced the most enduring of political documents—and whose 200th anniversary is being celebrated this year. First published in 1966, the new edition of historian Bowen’s work has a foreword by former Chief Justice Warren E. Burger [Atlantic-Little Brown $8.95 paper]. A more tragic era of this nation’s history is described in John Richard Dennett’s The South As It Is, 1865—1866, a collection of articles that first appeared in the pages of The Nation. Dennett’s first dispatch was written from Richmond only three months after Lee’s surrender, and in the months that followed he traveled throughout the ravaged South. Georgia has reprinted his reports in a new edition with an introduction by Henry M. Christman [$12. 50 paper]. Georgia also has a new edition of Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies Among the Georgia Coastal Negroes, a work first put together by the Savannah unit of the Georgia Writers’ Project of the Work Projects Administration during the Great Depression. With a new introduction by folklore specialist Charles Joyner, Drums and Shadows traces the persistence of African heritage in the culture of blacks living on the Georgia coast in the 1930’s [$25.00 cloth, $9.95 paper). An earlier—and quite different— aspect of Southern society is recounted by Daniel Blake Smith in Inside the Great House: Planter Family Life in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Society, a new edition of which has been published by Cornell [S10.95 paper]. Two recent Bison Books are respectively. Dee Brown’s. The Galvanized Yankees, an account of the Confederate soldiers who were recruited from Union prison camps to serve in the Union army in the West [$7.95 paper] : and Catherine Gibson Fougera’s With Custer’s Cavalry, an army wife’s description of life in the West before and after General George A. Custer’s famous last stand [$29.95 cloth, $7.95 paper]. A recent addition to Harper & How’s Perennial Library series is a revised and enlarged edition of John F. Kennedy’s A Nation of Immigrants, an essay on the immigrant experience in America. It was written while Kennedy was president and ultimately led to the Immigration Bill of 1965. The new edition has a preface by John P. Roche. Kennedy’s colleague and longtime friend [$5.95]. Perennial Library has also reprinted two enduring popular histories by journalist and editor Frederick Lewis Allen, being respectively . Since Yesterday: The 1930’s in America, covering the period from Sept.3, 1929 to Sept.3.1939 ($7.95). and The Big Change: America Transforms Itself, 1900—1950 [$6.95]. A new Vintage Book is J. Anthony Lukas’ Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, an account of the school integration controversy in Boston, which won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize [$9.95]. Recent Touchstone Books include these: The Progressive Movement, 1900—1915, a collection of documents from the period, edited and with an introduction by Richard Hofstadter [$6.95]; William J. Broad’s Star Warriors: A Penetrating Look into the Lives of the Young Scientists behind Our Space Age Weaponry, a work which won a 1985 Pulitzer Prize for journalism [$8.95]; Leon Litwack’s The American Labor Movement, a history of a prime force for change in 20th-century America [$6.95]; Lester C. Thurow’s The Zero Sum Solution: An Economic and Political Agenda for the 80’s, a prescription for what the U.S. must do to remain a world-class economy [$8.95] and Daniel Ford’s Melt-Down, a revised and updated edition of The Cult of the Atom, a history—and an indictment—of the nuclear power industry [$6.95].

LIVES AND LETTERS

Ernest Hemingway was probably the most influential American author of the 20th century, and his life was a fascinating combination of triumph and tragedy. The triumph and tragedy is recounted in vivid detail by Jeffrey Meyers in his Hemingway: A Biography, which the Atlanta Journal and Constitution hailed as “the best portrait of the artist by far.” The biography is now available as a volume in Harper & Row’s Perennial Library [$9.95 paper]. Last year was the 200th anniversary of legendary folk hero David Crockett’s birth, and to honor the occasion North Carolina reprinted James Atkins Shackford’s David Crockett: The Man and the Legend, a biography first published in 1956, with a new introduction by Michael A. Lofaro [$10.95 paper]. Another almost legendary figure in America’s early history is Benjamin Franklin and his life was recounted in noted historian Catherine Drinker Bowen’s last work, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Scenes from the Life of Benjamin Franklin, which is again available as an Atlantic Monthly Press book [$8.95 paper]. Harvard has a new edition of A Lion for Love: A Critical Biography of Stendhal, written by Robert Alter with the collaboration of his wife, Carol Cosman, a work which often acerbic critic John Simon deemed as “fine, perceptive, concise . . .written with a clarity and good sense worthy of its subject” [$8.95 paper]. Late in life, noted French film director Marcel Pagnol set out to evoke his childhood memories of Provence and the result was My Father’s Glory and My Mother’s Castle: Memories of Childhood. Pagnol’s much acclaimed recollections are now available in a new edition from North Point Press [$9.95 paper]. Atheneum is offering a paper edition of James Lehrer’s We Were Dreamers, a memoir by the coanchor of The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour [$6.95]. British author, C.S. Lewis, maintained a lifelong correspondence with Arthur Greeves, his greatest friend and that correspondence was collected and edited by Walter Hooper, Lewis’s last personal secretary. The result was The Letters of C, S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves, 1914—1963, a work originally published in 1979 and now reprinted by Collier Books [$12.95 paper]. Collier Books is also offering a paper edition of French author Colette’s Recollections, including two earlier volumes of memoirs Journey for Myself and The Evening Star [$8.95 paper]. Touchstone Books has reprinted Wilfred Sheed’s Frank & Maisie: A Memoir with Parents, a distinguished writer’s evocation of his parents’ lives and his growth into manhood [$7.95]. A recent New Directions Paperbook is Henri Michaux’s A Barbarian in Asia, a great French poet and painter’s recollections of his travels through the Far East as a youth translated by Sylvia Beach [$7.95].

HISTORY

“Heaven sent!” This was the reaction of the Los Angeles Times to the Macmillan Concise Dictionary of World History when it was first published in 1983. Compiled by Bruce Wetterau, a professional reference book editor, the history contains 10,000 often encountered historical names, events, terms, and places, plus 7,000 chronological entries and thus has been described by one critic as “a trivia buff’s boon.” Collier Books recently published the first paperback release of this history [$18.95]. British history is the subject of two recent paperback reprints from Thames and Hudson. The first is the late H.H. Scullard’s Roman Britain: Outpost of the Empire, which Classical Review called “a brief and engagingly written history for general readers and students” [$10.95]. The second work is Charles Ross’s The Wars of the Roses: A Concise History, which History Today considers “the best survey of the Wars of the Roses now available to the general public” [$10.95]. The last days of Czarist Russia are the subject of two volumes now available in Princeton’s Limited Paperback Editions (LPEs) series. One is Roberta Thompson Manning’s The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia: Gentry and Government, in which Professor Manning focuses on the role of the landowning gentry in the First Russian Revolution of 1905—1907 [$19.95]. The other is Walter Sablinsky’s The Road to Bloody Sunday, an account of the events leading to the massacre of unarmed workers by Russian officials in St. Petersburg on Jan.9, 1905 [$16.50]. The final years of the old order in Russia are also described in a recent Touchstone Book, namely W. Bruce Lincoln’s In War’s Dark Shadow. The Russians before the Great War, a history described by Chicago Tribune Bookworld as “a vivid, dramatic and authoritative account of the societal clashes and contradictions that made the revolution of 1917 inevitable” [$10.95]. When Chester Wilmot’s Struggle for Europe was first published in 1952, it was hailed by the Yale Review as being “by far the best history of the war in Western Europe yet published.” Both a detailed history of World War II in Europe and an essay on the grand strategy of statesmanship, Wilmot’s work is available in a new Carroll & Graf paper edition [$14.95]. The prelude to World War II is the subject of Theodore Abel’s Why Hitler Came into Power, which Harvard has reissued in paperback with a new foreword by Thomas Childers [$8.95. also available in cloth for S35.00].

LITERATURE IN GENERAL

The Literary South, compiled and edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., offers the general reader access to Southern writers, ranging from Captain John Smith in the 17th century, to William Styron in the 20th. Divided into five sections—Colonial, Old South, Post Civil War, Renascence, and Post Renascence or Contemporary—the anthology includes poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and drama and was recently reprinted by Lousiana [$16.95 paper]. Cambridge has come out with a paper edition of John P. McWilliams Jr.’s Hawthorne, Melville, and the American Character: A Looking-Glass business, a book which considers the portrayal of national character in the writings of two great novelists of America’s formative years [$12.95]. North Point Press has published a new edition of The Noise of Time. The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, translated with Critical Essays by Clarence Brown [$14.95 paper]. Boris Pasternak’s The Voice of Prose: Early Prose and Autobiography, is the first volume of a projected two-volume collection of the prose of the great Russian writer. The collection will be part of Grove Press’s Evergreen Book series [S9.95 paper]. Ohio University has reprinted Christa Kamenetsky’s Children’s Literature in Hitler’s Germany: The Cultural Policy of National Socialism [$12.95 paper). Four recent Harvard paperbacks are respectively, Nina Anerbach’s Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction [$7.95. also available in cloth for $15.00]; Victor Brombert’s Victor Hugo and the Visisionary Novel [88.95. also available in cloth $20.00]; T. S. Eliot’s The Use of Poetry & The Use of Criticism [$4.95], and Alexander Welsh’s The City of Dickens, the city, of course, being Victorian London [$8.95]. Cornell has paper editions of Jeffrey Burton Russell’s Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages [$12.95], and Benjamin Bennett’s Modern Drama & German Classicism; Renaissance from Lessing to Brecht [$12.95]. James C. McKusick’s Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language is a new addition to the Yale Studies in English series [$15,95 paper].

FICTION

Oxford began The Clarendon Dickens series in 1966 and last year published the seventh volume of that handsome series, this being Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers. The novel joined the series at the 100th anniversary of its first publication, the then 23-year-old Dickens having created The Pickwick Club early in 1836. The latest edition of the now world-famous Papers was edited by James Kinsley [$110.00 cloth]. Random House, which published the first legally printed edition of Ulysses in any English-speaking country, has now come out with a trade edition of the newly corrected text of one of the most important novels of the 20th century. This text was produced, beginning in 1974, by an international team of scholars headed by Professor Hans Gabler, and a three-volume, extensively annotated edition was published in 1984. The new trade edition has an introduction by the distinguished Joyce scholar, Richard Ellmann, and an afterword by Gabler [$12.95]. Carroll & Graf has published with a paper edition of The Great Short Novels of Henry James, a collection of 10 short novels by the most gifted practitioner of the novella in English, including The Turn of the Screw, Daisy Miller, and The Aspern Papers [$12.95]. Kentucky has a new edition of Harriette Simpson Arnow’s Hunter’s Horn, a story rooted among the Kentucky mountains and people that this American novelist made distinctively her own [$24.00 cloth]. North Point Press has reprinted Paula Fox’s The Widow’s Children, the story of five members of a Spanish family in New York [$9.95 paper]. Now available in Harper & Row’s Perennial Library series are three novels by British author Barbara Pym: An Unsuitable Attachment, Quartet in Autumn, and A Few Green Leaves [all $6.95]. Other novels recently reprinted as part of the Perennial Fiction Library include Richard Bradford’s Red Sky at Morning [$6.95], Carolos Fuentes’ The Old Gringo [$5.95], Marguerite Duras’ The Sea Wall [$6.95], and Hugh Nissenson’s The Tree of Life [$6.95]. Two new additions to the Vintage Contemporaries series are Ann Beattie’s Love Always [$5.95], and Richard Russo’s Mohawk [$6.95]. New volumes in Scribner’s Signature Edition series include Don Pearce’s Cool Hand Luke [$6.95], Ann Bernays’ Growing Up Rich [$6.95], and two early novels by Mary Lee Settle, The Love Eaters [$6.95], and The Kiss of Kin [$5.95]. Holt has added John Edgar Wideman’s The Lynchers [$7.95] and Rose Tremain’s The Swimming Pool Season [$7.95] to its Owl Book series. A recent King Penguin is a collection of stories by Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley, entitled Woman in a Lampshade [$6.95].

GENERAL

Ernest Hemingway called Spain “the country that I loved more than any other except my own,” and in 1959 he returned to his beloved country to write a short article on bullfighting for Life magazine. He turned in the article to Life, and it was published shortly before his death, but he left behind a book-length manuscript which did not see the light of print until 1985. Published by Scribner’s and entitled The Dangerous Summer, the book is a chronicle of a brutal season of bullfights, featuring two matadors, Antonio Ordóñez and Luis Miguel Dominguín. Scribner’s has now published a paper edition [$9.95].

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