Reprints & New Editions

AMERICANA

Rowman and Littlefield has published a sixth edition, revised, of Edward F. Cooke’s A Detailed Analysis of the Constitution, one in which the U.S. Constitution and its amendments are explained phrase by phrase, with expositions on the history and principles of constitutionalism [$17.95 paper]. Congressional Quarterly Press is offering a second edition of Sidney M. Milkis’s and Michael Nelson’s The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776-1993, a work which won the 1991 Benjamin Franklin Award for History, Politics, and Philosophy and was the first comprehensive one-volume history of the presidency to be written by political scientists in more than 50 years. In a second edition the authors further explore the historical origins and modern development of the presidency through the beginning of the Clinton administration [$25.95 paper]. Johns Hopkins has published a paper edition of The Tuesday Club: A Shorter Edition of “The History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club” by Dr. Alexander Hamilton who founded the club in Annapolis in 1745. The shorter edition is edited by Robert Micklus [$48.50 cloth, $16.95 paper]. Hopkins has also reprinted America’s Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War and After by Thomas J. McCormick [$38.95 cloth, $13.95 paper]. Clark Kerr’s The Uses of the University was the subject of the Godkin Lectures at Harvard in 1963 and later published as a book which Christopher Jencks called “the finest introduction available to one of America’s most remarkable and least understood inventions: the research university.” Harvard has now published a fourth edition of Kerr’s seminal work with 1994 commentaries on past developments and future prospects [$15.95 paper].

LIVES & LETTERS

A Life in Letters: F. Scott Fitzgerald, a new collection edited and annotated by Mathhew J. Bruccoli, offers a portrait of one of the most important writers of the 20th century through a selection of his letters, a third of which are published for the first time in this new paperback edition. A Life in Letters provides a vivid evocation of life during the jazz age and the Depression. The new edition is available as a Touchstone book [$16]. When the late T. Harry Williams’s P.G.T. Beauregard: Napoleon in Gray was first published in 1955, it was acclaimed by the New York Times as “a Pulitzer Prize-caliber biography of the Confederacy’s most controversial beau sabreur.” Williams’s biography was also deemed a “model military biography” by the American Scholar. A new paper edition of the Beauregard work was recently published by Louisiana, its original publisher 40 years ago [$14.95]. James Blair Lovell’s Anastasia-.The Lost Princess is yet another biography of the woman who claimed to be the youngest daughter of the last Russian czar but who has now proven to be only a Polish peasant. St. Martin’s has published a paper edition of this account [$15.95]. One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream is Tom Wicker’s account of the controversial career of the only U.S. president ever to resign office in disgrace. Of the liberal retired New York Times columnist’s portrayal, the Boston Globe concluded, “Wicker gives Nixon a ‘fair’ shake.” Random House now has a paper edition available with a new introduction by the author [$16]. Times Books has reprinted Brooke Kroeger’s biography of Nellie Bly, the reporter, daredevil, and feminist who became a master of the front-page, sensational newspaper story. Nellie Bly was named a “Fresh Air” best book of the year [$16 paper]. Not only was Anthony Trollope one of the most prolific and beloved writers of the 19th century; he was also an insatiably curious traveler. Selections of his travel writings are available in Trollope, The Traveller edited by Graham Handley, and now available as an Ivan R. Dee paper edition [$14.95]. Dee is also offering a paper edition of Gertrude Him-melfarb’s Victorian Minds: A Study of Intellectuals in Crisis and Ideaologies in Transition in which the noted Victorian scholar presents a series of essays to dispel some of the myths of “Victorianism” [$16.95], Vintage Books has reprinted Nathan McCall’s national bestseller Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America, a blistering memoir chronicling a black American’s passage from the street to the prison yard to the newsroom of The Washington Post, where he is now a respected journalist [$12], Missouri has reissued William H. Rolling’s The Osage: An Ethnohistorical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains examining a tribe of native Americans who lived in the prairies and plains of present-day Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arkansas [$17.95 paper]. Recent Bison Books include Mildred R. Bennett’s The World of Willa Cather in which Cather’s Nebraska years are recounted [$12]; Donald Honig’s The Man in the Dugout in which 15 big league managers speak their minds [$14.95]; and Charles C. Alexander’s John McGraw, a biography of the legendary baseball manager who was part of the national pastime between 1890 and 1930 [$12.95].

LITERATURE

Irving Babbitt’s Character and Culture: Essays on East and West was first published posthumously in 1940 under the misleading title “Spanish Character.” These essays by the leader of the intellectual and cultural movement called American humanism or the New Humanism discuss a variety of topics including such writers as Matthew Arnold, George Sand, and Flaubert as well as a discussion of Rousseau and religion. Transaction Books has published a paper edition of Character and Culture [$21.95], Princeton is offering a new edition of Ruth Padel’s In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self which focuses on the relation between madness and divinity and explores how Greek tragic literature shaped how we speak about our inner selves today [$12.95]. Columbia has republished Eugene Good-heart’s Desire and Its Discontents, a critique of much of the conventional wisdom regarding the nature and value of desire [$16]. Yale has a paper edition of Jan Ned-erveen Pieterse’s White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture, an illustrated history of the development of European and American stero-types of black people over the last 200 years [$37.50 cloth, $18 paper]. In 1957 and 1958 William Faulkner was a writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia, during which time he held 37 conferences and answered more than 2000 questions on a wide range of concerns. Almost every word was recorded on tape and edited by Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner and published under the title Faulkner in the University in 1959. It is now available for the first time from Virginia in a paperback edition with an introduction by Faulkner scholar, Douglas Day [$14.95]. Michael Dorris’s collection of essays Paper Trail was deemed “charming, provocative, impassioned [and] deeply moving” by the New York Times Book Review when the collection was published in 1994 by HarperCollins. A new edition is available by HarperPerennial [$12]. Chicago recently reprinted Richard H. Brodhead’s Culture of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteeth-Century America in which the author discusses social life in the America of the last century and how it affected such writers as Stowe, Hawthorne, and Alcott [$15.95]. Another recent Chicago reprint is John Guillory’s Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation in which Guillory examines how and why literary canons are formed [$16.95].

POETRY

The Metamorphoses of Ovid, translated by Allen Mandelbaum, offers a treasury of classical myths, filtered through the far from reverent sensibility of the Roman poet Ovid (43 B.C.-A.D. 17). A new edition of The Metamorphoses has been published by Harcourt Brace in its Harvest Book series [$15]. HarperPerennial has published new editions of two works by Allen Ginsberg, the first being the original draft facsimile, transcript, and variant versions of Howl, fully annotated by the author [$17.50] and the second being Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems, 1986-1992 [$12]. Vintage Books has republished Sandra Cis-neros’s Loose Woman, a book of poems by a gifted Mexican-American poet [$10], Vintage also has a new edition of Leonard Cohen’s Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs [$13].

FICTION

Otto Penzler’s Classic American Mystery Library seeks to make available in affordable paper editions detective stories of often hard-to-find vintage gems. Two recent gems are respectively Ellery Queen’s The French Powder Mystery [$7] and Baker Street Studies, a series of essays about the great Sherlock Holmes, edited by H.W. Bell, and including such luminaries as Dorothy L. Sayers and Ronald A. Knox [$8], Ivan R. Dee is offering paper editions of two novels by B. Traven, one The Cotton-Pickers, a story set in Mexico in the 1920’s [$12.95] and the other General from the Jungle, the sixth and last of Traven’s legendary jungle novels, a fictional epic of the birth of the Mexican Revolution [$13.95]. Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun is a novel by an Egyptian journalist that offers an intimate look into the often hidden lives of Arab women today, telling the story of Asya, a brilliant young Egyptian woman who marries a Westernized husband and is caught up in the struggle between ties to her traditions and a desire for independence. Vintage Books has reprinted this Egyptian novel [$15].

HISTORY

R.R. Palmer’s and Joel Colton’s A History of the Modern World came out originally in 1950 and has now become a classic account of the rise of modern Europe. Knopf has now issued an eighth edition of the Palmer-Colton history which takes into account such recent momentous events as the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, and the reunification of Germany. A History of the Modern World is considered an essential resource for scholars and laymen alike [$65 cloth]. Jaroslav Pelikan’s Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism was first presented as the prestigious Gifford lectures at the University of Aberdeen in 1992 and 1993. The lectures were subsequently published by Yale where Pelikan is a Sterling Professor of History. Yale has now issued a paper edition of Christianity and Classical Culture [$42.50 cloth, $17 paper]. Johns Hopkins has published a paperback edition of Peter G. Hugill’s World Trade Since 1431: Geography, Technology, and Capitalism, a work a reviewer for this journal considered “a first rate historical study in the genre of world history” [$24.95].

GENERAL

Yale is offering paper editions of two books in which architecture is the major subject of discussion. The first is Massimo Cacciari’s Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture, a book introducing the writings of one of the most influential social philosophers in Italy today to an English speaking audience [$37.50 cloth, $17 paper]. The second work is Jennifer Bloomer’s Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi, in which Ms. Bloomer addresses philosophical questions concerning the relation between writing and architecture [$35 cloth, $15 paper].