ISSUE: Winter 1996
In 1969 Winthrop D. Jordan was the winner of the National Book Award for White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550—1812, a book which also received both the Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians for that year. Now, with American race relations very much involved in the 1996 campaign, North Carolina has brought out a paper edition of White Over Black [$16.95]. Tony Smith’s America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century, a Twentieth Century Fund Book, contends that the worldwide strength of democracy at the end of the 20th century is largely due to the impact of America in international affairs. A paper edition of America’s Mission was recently issued by Princeton [$16.95]. Duke has reprinted Bruce J. Schulman’s From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938—1980, an investigation of the effects of federal policy on the American South examining such projects as the Tennessee Valley Authority and other federal endeavors in Dixie. [$21.95 paper]. Yale has a paper edition of Head Start and Beyond: A National Plan for Extended Childhood Intervention, edited by Edward Zigler and Sally J. Styfco with a chapter by Senator Edward M. Kennedy. [$25 cloth, $12 paper]. In For the Glory, Washington Post sports writer Ken Denlinger examines “college football dreams and realities inside Paterno’s program,” Paterno being Joe Paterno, the long-time coach of the Nittany Lions. A paper edition is now available as a St. Martin’s Griffin book [$12.95]. Another sports book is Jerome Holtzman’s No Cheering in the Press which has been newly revised and expanded and reissued as a Henry Holt Owl book [$14.95 paper]. In its Elephant paperback series, Ivan R. Dee has reprinted Robert Brustein’s Dumbocracy in America: Studies in the Theatre of Guilt, 1987—1994, a collection of essays, reviews, and profiles by one of America’s foremost dramatic critics [$12.95]. Another elephant paperback is Edward Pessen’s Losing Our Smds: The American Experience in the Cold War, an account of what the author describes as “the most unusual war the United States ever fought” [$12.95]. Tennessee has a paper edition of Lewis Perry’s Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought with a new preface. First published in 1973, the book is considered the authoritative work on the various radical movements that grew out of antislavery ideas in the 1840’s and 1850’s [$18]. Georgia has a new edition of Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New “fork City, 1770-1810 which historian Eric Foner lauded as “the most comprehensive account now available of the abolition of slavery in New York City” [$18 paper]. Among recent editions to Nebraska’s Bison Books series are these: Joseph B. Oxendine’s American Indian Sports Heritage with a new afterword by the author [$16.95]; Covered Wagon Women: Diaries and Letters From the Western Trails, 1840—1849 edited and compiled by Kenneth L. Holmes with an introduction by Anne M. Butler [$12]; Francis Paul Prucha’s Broadex and Bayonet: The Role of the United States Army in the Development of the Northwest, 1815—1860 [$12]; John Myers’s Bravos of the West, a history of the development of that area after the Lewis and Clark expedition [$15]; and a revised edition of Edward L. Sabin’s two volume work Kit Carson Days, 1809—1868 [$16 each volume].
Ernest Samuel’s Pulitzer Prize winning multi-volume biography of Henry Adams was recently published as a compact updated one volume biography by Harvard. R.W.B. Lewis, author of a prize-winning biography of Edith Wharton, called Samuel’s account of Adam’s life “one of the most powerful literary-intellectual biographies ever done of an American” [$32.50 cloth, $16.95 paper]. Harvard has also reprinted a paper edition of Gerald Gunther’s Learned Hand: The Man and the Judge which attorney Ronald Dworkin in the New York Review of Books called “a brilliant biography . . .not only comprehensive but penetrating and illuminating as well” [$19.95]. Harvard has also reprinted One Writer’s Beginnings, the 1993 William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization, lectures given by novelist and short story writer Eudora Welty [$10 paper]. George Holbert Tucker’s Jane Austen, The Woman: Some Biographical Insights has been reissued by St. Martin’s as a Griffin paperback [$13.95]. Princeton is offering a paper edition of Thomas J. Knock’s To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order, winner of the Warren F. Kuehl Prize awarded by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations [$18.95 paper]. Playwright Arthur Miller’s autobiography Timebends: A Life is now available as a Penguin Book. It is a book that novelist and essayist Louis Auchincloss deemed “As wise and witty and funny and brave as any of his plays . . . Surely one of the great stories of our time.” [$14.95]. Penguin is also offering The Portable Arthur Miller, a cross section of 60 years of writing from one of the century’s most influential and humane playwrights [$14.95]. Noonday Press has a paper edition of In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles edited by Jeffrey Miller, a collection of correspondence over eight decades from the bestselling author of The Sheltering Sky, a selection from more than 7,000 letters by Bowles’s biographer [$16]. Noonday is also offering a paper reprint of Martha Saxton’s Louisa May Alcott: A Modern Biography [$15] At the outset of his collection Hunting the Whole Way Home, essayist Sidney Lea writes; “I am a man, by turns, in the outdoors with his head full of books and words, and a man in books and words with his head full of the outdoors.” Lea’s essays about the outdoors have been republished in a paper edition by New England [$12.95]. Riverhead Books has issued a paper edition of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s bestselling Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, A Memoir with a new afterword by the author [$12]. North Carolina has a paperback edition of Michihiko Hachiya’s Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 6-September 30, 1945, Fifty Years Later translated and edited by Warner Wells, M.D. with a new foreword by John W. Dower [$14.95]. A recent edition to Nebraska’s Bison Books paperback series is Neil A. Grauer’s Remember Laughter: A Life of James Thurber, the renowned New Yorker writer and cartoonist [$10]. Yale is offering a paper edition of K. M. Elisabeth Murray’s biography Caught in the Web of Words: James A.H. Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary, an account of M.S. Murray’s ancestor, a largely self-educated boy from a small village in Scotland who entered the world of scholarship and became the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary [$16].
John W. Boyer’s Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna: Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848—1897 was called “absolutely essential” to understand Viennese imperial politics in the latter half of the 19th century by Robert Wegs writing in Review of Politics. Chicago recently published a paper edition of Political Radicalism [$24.95]. Norton has issued a paper edition of Charles B. Dew’s Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge, Buffalo Forge being an extensive ironmaking and farming enterprise located near Lexington in the valley of Virginia during the antebellum years [$14]. In its Owl Book paper series, Henry Holt has republished Martin Walker’s The Cold War: A History which the Christian Science Monitor described as “Nothing less than a carefully selective world history during 1944—1992 . . . Walker writes clearly, decisively, alert to the telling phrase” [$14]. The Cold War is also the subject of Jonathan Steele’s Eternal Russia: Yeltsin, Gorbachev, and the Mirage of Democracy, a work David Owen reviewed for the Sunday Times of London and called “an excellent book rooted in history while covering thoroughly the drama of events after 1987.” Harvard has a paper edition of Eternal Russia [$14.95].
William Carlos Williams’s Paterson has long been recognized as a masterpiece of modern American poetry, Paterson being both a place, the New Jersey city near which Williams lived and a man: the symbolic figure in whom the person (the poet’s life) and the public (the history of the region) are combined. Christopher MacGowan has put together a revised edition of Paterson with a wealth of notes and explanatory material. This edition has been published as a New Directions Paperbook [$11.95]. St. Martin’s has published a new edition of Emily Bronte’s Selected Poems, poems not as well known as the author’s one novel Wuthering Heights [$9.95 cloth]. The latest editions to Pocketbooks Everyman’s Library Poetry are respectively Wordsworth [$10.95 cloth]; Auden [$10.95 cloth]; and Hardy [$14.95 cloth]. In its Oxford Poets series, Oxford has republished Thomas Kinsella’s From Centre City, poems of personal poetry about the poet’s home places, the city of Dublin and his new home in County Wicklow [$10.95 paper]. Princeton has a revised edition of George Seferis’s Collected Poems, translated, edited, and introduced by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, a work covering all the poems by the Greek poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963 and who lived from 1900 to 1971 [$39.50 cloth, $14.95 paper]. Farrar, Straus & Giroux is offering a paper edition of Selected Poems by C.K. Williams, a professor of English at George Mason University in Virginia who lives part of the year in Paris. Mr. Williams received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Flesh and Blood published by F, S & G in 1987. Selected Poems is a distillate of Williams’s work [$12]. Knopf is offering paper editions of poems by three of America’s prominent living poets. The collections are respectively: John Updike’s Collected Poems, 1953-1993 [$15]; Tesserae and Other Poems by John Hollander [$12]; Selected Poetry by John Hollander [$15]; and The Invention of the Zero: Poems by Richard Kenney [$12].
Yale recently published a paper edition of Willis Barnstone’s The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice, a volume in which an eminent poet, scholar, and translator explores the history and theory of literary translation as an art form [$35 cloth, $18 paper]. Yale is also offering a paper edition of Richard H. Gaskin’s Burdens of Proof in Modern Discourse, a legal, philosophical, and rhetorical study ranging from constitutional law, scientific inquiry, and moral philosophy to organizational behavior, computer operation, and personal interaction [$40 cloth, $18 paper]. Georgia has reprinted Diane Robert’s Faulkner and Southern Womanhood, a study examining the vexed and contradictory responses of the South’s most famous novelist to the traditional representations of women that were bequeathed to him by his culture [$18]. Harcourt Brace has republished Irving Howe’s A Critic’s Notebook, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year [$14]. Harcourt also has a paper edition of Umberto Eco’s How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays which has been reprinted in its Harvest Book series [$11]. The critic, Peter Shaw, died last summer and his last work Recovering American Literature, a book that Jeffrey Hart, writing in the National Review, called “much more than literary criticism . . . It is a cultural moment,” has been reprinted this fall by Ivan R. Dee in paper [$12.95].
In The Question of Being: A Reversal of Heidegger, philosopher Stanley Rosen enters into a debate with the German philosopher in order to provide a justification of metaphysics. Rosen presents a fresh interpretation of metaphysics that opposes the traditional doctrines attacked by Heidegger on the one hand, and by contemporary philosophers influenced by the German on the other. Yale recently published a paper edition of The Question of Being [$40 cloth, $17 paper]. Yale also has a paper edition of Mary Watkins’s and Susan Fisher’s Talking with Young Children about Adoption in which they discuss how young children can make sense of the fact that they are adopted [$30 cloth, $12 paper]. A third recent Yale paperback is Chris Knight’s Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture, presenting a new theory of the origins of human culture [$17]. Scott Shane’s Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union has been reissued in paper by Ivan R. Dee [$14.95]. Susan Eva Eckstein’s Back From the Future: Cuba Under Castro was selected as one of Choice’s Outstanding Academic Books of 1994. It is now available as a Princeton paperback [$15.95].
