ISSUE: Winter 1997
Numan V. Bartley’s The New South, 1945—1980 is an account of one of the most tumultuous eras in Southern history, the era in which Dixie finally shed Jim Crow and Martin Luther King, Jr. led a peaceful revolution against segregation. A volume in Louisiana’s History of the South series, The New South is now available in a paperback edition [$17.95]. Louisiana has also published a revised edition of Eric Foner’s Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Office-holders During Reconstruction [$19.95 paper]. Addison-Wesley is offering a paper reprint of David C. Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle’s The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools which the Denver Post said should be “required reading for anyone who has the urge to complain about American education” [$15]. Missouri has issued reprints of books about that state’s most famous son, Harry S. Truman. The first is Robert J. Donovan’s Tumultuous years: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1949—1953 [$19.95 paper]. The second is Monte M. Poen’s Harry S. Truman Versus the Medical Lobby: The Genesis of Medicare [$16.95 paper]. Iowa has a new and expanded edition of Osha Gray Davidson’s Broken Heartland; The Rise of America’s Rural Ghetto in which Davidson examines people down and out in the rural landscape [$13.95 paper]. Charles Royster’s A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army & American Character, 1775—1783 won the 1979 John D. Rockefeller III Award, the 1981 Francis Parkman Prize, and the 1981 National Historical Society Book Prize. A new paper edition has been published by North Carolina [$17.95]. As an introduction to its new series, Religion in the South, Kentucky has reissued Patsy Sims’ Can Somebody Shout Amen!: Inside the Tents and Tabernacles of American Revivalists [$17.95 paper]. Bruce C. Daniel’s Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England is now available as a St. Martin’s Griffin paperback [$14.95]. In its paperback Bison Book series, Nebraska has recently republished these respective volumes: David F. Trask’s The War With Spain in 1898 [$29.95]; Sallie Brock Putnam’s Richmond During the War: Four Years of Personal Observation with an introduction by Virginia Scharff [$16.95]; Francis Parkman’s Pioneers of France in the New World with an introduction by Colin G. Galloway [$20]; Elliott West’s The Saloon on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier [$12]; and John Hoyt Williams’ A Great and Shining Road: The Epic Story of the Transcontinental Railroad [$17.50].
When Frederick Brown’s Zola: A Life, a biography of the famous French novelist was originally published by Farrar, Straus in 1995, it was acclaimed by The New Yorker as “a magnificent biography, at once definitive and fascinating” and called “enormously readable” by the Wall Street Journal. A new paperback edition of this biography has been issued by Johns Hopkins [$24.95 paper]. Hopkins is also out with paper reprints of five books by Baltimore’s most famous and certainly most prolific son, H.L. Mencken. The three volume autobiography reprinted in paper editions includes: Happy Days: 1880—1892; Newspaper Days: 1899—1906; and Heathen Days: 1890—1936 [$15.95 each]. Hopkins has also reprinted Mencken’s famous Prejudices: A Selection, selected and with an introduction by James T. Farrell [$15.95 paper]; and On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe [$15.95 paper]. As part of its American History Through Literature series, M.E. Sharpe is offering a new edition of Mason Locke Weems’ famous and/or infamous The Life of Washington with primary documents and an introduction by historian Peter S. Onuf, Weems’ Life of Washington being one of the great bestsellers in American literature [$54.95 cloth, $15.95 paper]. In its Elephant paperback series, Ivan R. Dee is offering Philip Callow’s From Noon to Starry Night: A Life of Walt Whitman who has been called America’s “first genuine voice” [$14.95]. Wisconsin has reissued Robert Peters’ For You, Lili Marlene: A Memoir of World War II by a devout young Lutheran who was shocked by dirty jokes and ribbed for his innocence [$10.95 paper]. A recent St. Martin’s Griffin book is Edith Wharton Abroad: Selected Travel Writings, 1888-1920 edited by Sarah Bird Wright with a preface by Shari Benstock [$14.95 paper with 20 b/w illustrations]. Mary Beth Norton’s Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750—1800 is again available as a Cornell paperback [$16.95]. Kentucky has republished Frank E. Walton’s Once They Were Eagles: The Men of the Black Sheep Squadron, the squadron being the Marine Corps Fighter Squadron 214 which became famous under the leadership of swashbuckling “Pappy” Boyington [$14.95 paper]. New in Nebraska’s Bison Book paperback series are Robert Wooster’s Nelson A. Miles & the Twilight of the Frontier Army [$18]; Covered Wagon Women: Diaries and Letters From the Western Trails, 1851 edited and compiled by Kenneth L. Holmes with an introduction by Susan Armitage [$13]; George Bird Grinnell’s Two Great Scouts and Their Pawnee Battalion: The Experiences of Frank J. North and Luther H. North [$12]; James Chisholm’s South Pass, 1868: James Chisholm’s Journal of the Wyoming Gold Rush [$12]; and Stephen Fireovid and Mark Winegardner’s The 26th Man; One Minor League Pitcher’s Pursuit of a Dream [$12.95],
Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance & Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization was the winner of the Heldt Prize for the Best Book by a woman in Slavic Studies which Kirkus Reviews considered “A must for students of Soviet, or social history.” The book portrays collective farm life in the Soviet Union in the 1930’s from the perspective of the peasantry. Oxford is now offering a paper edition of Stalin’s Peasants [$18.95]. Toronto has published a revised paper edition of Jean Barman’s The West Beyond the West: A History of British Columbia [$21.95]. Norton has issued a revised and expanded edition of John P. Eaton and Charles A. Haas’ Titanic: Destination Diaster, the Legends and the Reality, a new account of the world’s most famous ship disaster [$15.95 paper]. Between 1869 and 1907, William F. Howe and Abraham F. Hummel were the most notorious practicing lawyers in the New York City firm of Howe & Hummel. In addition to bribing juries and fabricating evidence, they are perhaps the only lawyers on record representing both the plaintiff and the defendant in the same case. Richard Rovere chronicled these unscrupulous attorneys in Howe & Hummel: Their True and Scandalous History, which was originally published in 1947 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. A new edition of Howe & Hummel is now available as a Syracuse paperback [$13.95], Washington has a new edition of Making Alternative Histories: The Practice of Archaeology and History in Non-Western Settings edited by Peter R. Schmidt and Thomas C. Patterson [$40 cloth, $18 paper]. Johns Hopkins offers a new edition of Mary Hollingsworth’s Patronage in Renaissance Italy: From 1400 to the Early Sixteenth Century [$19.95 paper],
Penguin’s Nineteenth-Century American Poetry edited with an introduction and notes by William C. Spengemann with Jessica F. Roberts runs the gamut of American poets from Joel Barlow to Edwin Arlington Robinson by way of Bryant, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Poe, Holmes, Dickinson, Lowell, and Lanier [$14.95 paper]. Iowa has published a paper edition of George Mackay Brown’s Selected Poems, 1954—1992 [$12.95 paper]. As part of its Ezra Pound Scholarship series, the National Poetry Foundation at the University of Maine has come out with a new edition of Terri Brint Joseph’s Ezra Pound’s Epic Variations: “The Cantos” and Major Long Poems [$19.95 cloth, $12.95 paper]. Harcourt Brace has a sixth edition of B.C. Southam’s A Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot [$13 paper]. Abrahams has issued an expanded edition of Sixty Years of American Poetry, Celebrating the Anniversary of the Academy of American Poets. The new edition has an introduction by Robert Penn Warren, a preface by Richard Wilbur, and wood engravings by Barry Moser [$35 cloth].
