Sunday, November 13, 2016

Sunday Book Review Roundup


In The New York Times Douglas Brinkley reviews Peter Cozzens' The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West.  Esther Schor's Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language is also reviewed in the NYT.  Finally, The New York Times offers a roundup of new works in military history (including among others David Silverman's Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America, Malcolm Lambert's God's Armies: Crusade and Jihad: Origins, History, Aftermath, and Susan Carruthers' The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace).

In The Washington Post Beverly Gage reviews H.W. Brands' The General vs. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War.  Also reviewed in The Washington Post is Kathryn Smith's The Gatekeeper: Missy LeHand, FDR, and the Untold Story of the Partnership That Defined a Presidency.  Robert O’Harrow Jr.'s The Quartermaster: Montgomery C. Meigs, Lincoln’s General, Master Builder of the Union Army is also reviewed in the newspaper.

Nicholas Syrett's American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States is reviewed at Slate.

Public Books carries an essay that reviews Marcia Chatelain's South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration, LaKisha Michelle Simmons' Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans, and Aimee Meredith Cox's Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship.  Also at Public Books is a review of Benjamin Peters' How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet.

A Fiery and Furious People: a History of Violence in England by James Sharpe is reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman.

Mary Beard discusses her SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Cornelia Hughes Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger's Robert Love's Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston is reviewed at H-Net.

An essay at Books and Ideas includes a review of Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

The Federal Lawyer's monthly reviews are out.  Among the books reviewed this month are Melvin Urofsky's Dissent and the Supreme Court: Its Role in the Court's History and the Nation's Constitutional Dialogue and Nick Bunker's An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America.  

There are a number of relevant interviews at the New Books Network this week. LaShawn Harris speaks about her Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City's Underground Economy.  Susan Greenbaum discusses her Blaming the Poor: The Long Shadow of the Moynihan Report on Cruel Images about Poverty.   J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht are interviewed about their Counting Women's Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage through the New Deal.  Patrick Wolfe speaks about his Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race.  Orna Ophir talks about her Psychosis, Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry in Postwar USA: On the Borderland of Madness.  Finally, George T. Díaz discusses his Border Contraband: A History of Smuggling across the Rio Grande.