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Book Editors: Ron Briley, Jim Cullen, Murray Polner, Luther Spoehr

This Department features reviews and summaries of new books that link history and current events. From time to time we also feature essays that highlight publishing trends in various fields related to history.

If you would like to tell the editors about a new book (even your own) that addresses the concerns of HNN -- current events and history -- or would like to write a review, please send us an email: editor@historynewsnetwork.org.

Reviews

Marc-William Palen. Review of John Lukacs's "the Legacy of the Second World War" (Yale, 2010)
Jim Cullen, Review of Dick J. Reavis's "Catching Out: The Secret World of Day Laborers" (Simon & Schuster, 2010)
Jim Cullen, Review of Adam Haslett's "Union Atlantic: A Novel" (Doubleday, 2010)
Jim Cullen, Review of Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández's "The Best of the Best: Becoming Elite at an American Boarding School" (Harvard, 2009)
Luther Spoehr, Review of Frank Lambert’s “The Battle of Ole Miss: Civil Rights v. States’ Rights” (Oxford University Press, 2010).
Jim Cullen, Review of Adam Gopnik's "Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life" (Knopf, 2009)
Luther Spoehr, Review of Jonathan R. Cole's "The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National, Why It Must Be Protected" (PublicAffairs, 2010)
Jim Cullen, Review of Randi Hutter Epstein's "Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank" (Norton, 2010)
Jim Cullen, Review of "Rising Road: A True Tale of Love, Race and Religion in America" (Oxford, 2010)
Larry DeWitt, Review of Alan Brinkley's "Franklin Delano Roosevelt" (Oxford, 2010)
Jim Cullen, Review of "Lit: A Memoir," by Mary Karr (Harper, 2009)
Murray Polner. Review of Yehuda Bauer's The Death of the Shtetl (Yale University Press, 2009)
Murray Polner. Review of Stephen J. Taylor, Acts of Conscience: WWII, Mental Institutions and Religious Objectors (Syracuse University Press, 2009)
Jack Ross. Review of Jennifer Burns' Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Jim Cullen, Review of "Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son" (Harper, 2009)
Jim Cullen, Review of "Darker Than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture" by Paul Gilroy (Harvard University Press, 2010)
Ron Briley reviews Robert Cohen's Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Jim Cullen, Review of "Emancipation: How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance" by Michael Goldfarb (Simon & Schuster, 2009)
James G. Ryan. Review of Hirosoki Kuromiya's Voices of the Dead: Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s (Yale University Press, 2007)
Kirk Bane: Review of "The Searchers" by Edward Buscombe (BFI, 2008)

Marc-William Palen. Review of John Lukacs's "the Legacy of the Second World War" (Yale, 2010)

Marc-William Palen is an advanced doctoral student specializing in the history of U.S. foreign relations at the University of Texas at Austin.

“Myths which are believed in tend to become true.” So wrote George Orwell in 1944. Prolific historian John Lukacs, in The Legacy of the Second World War, offers Orwell a corrective. Lukacs attempts to pursue “truth”—a dangerous word in any historian’s lexicon—among the myriad pervasive “untruths” created in the wake of the war. This work, then, is an exploration, an attempt to salvage the remains of historical fact from a global conflict that has since taken on mythic proportions. It is a study about the war, Lukacs warns us in the book’s first line, rather than of it. It is “not an overview or a sketch of global history. It is to assess the historical place, and meaning” of World War Two. In doing so, Lukacs’s book rises above, or at least dovetails around, explicitly dealing with the mass of secondary literature surrounding the conflict, although Lukacs implicitly intonates his intimacy with the subject throughout.

Keep in mind also that Lukacs’s story is predominantly a story of the Western front. Those expecting the timeline to begin with Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria or Italy’s 1935 occupation of Ethiopia are forewarned that it starts instead in 1939 when the mythologized and misnamed “Good War” truly became a “world war” with Hitler’s invasion of Poland. As a caveat to economic historians as well, Lukacs considers the origins of Hitler’s rise to power during the economic depression of the early thirties as “superficial” to his study; the importance here “is not Hitler’s arrival to power but his exercise of it.” Hitler, along with his unique utilization of extreme nationalism and socialism, began the conflict; the Second World War, Lukacs unequivocally states, “was Hitler’s war.”

It is perhaps not all that surprising, then, that Lukacs emphasizes the need to reevaluate Hitler and his historical legacy. Hitler ought to be viewed, Lukacs argues, as the “most extraordinary” person of the twentieth century. More importantly, Lukacs reminds people that Hitler was a calculating statesman more than a madman; hate-filled, not narrow-minded. To imagine him otherwise “absolves him of responsibility for what he did and ordered and said…from thinking about him, by sweeping Hitler under the rug.” Most worrisome, therefore, is how he might be viewed far in the future. At one point, Lukacs even predicts that, “if Western civilization melts away,” Hitler’s reputation may “rise in the minds of some people, as a kind of Diocletian, a last architect of an imperial order; and he might be revered by at least some of the New Barbarians.” Already, Lukacs notes, even amid strict European laws forbidding Nazi symbols and political parties, neo-Nazi elements have once again arisen; and, on a near weekly basis, fresh flowers are secretly placed upon Hitler’s parents’ gravestone in an Austrian cemetery.

Beyond Hitler’s legacy, Lukacs also points to other specific consequences that make the Second World War so singular in its historical significance. One was the noticeable disappearance of rules distinguishing noncombatants from combatants. Civilian deaths outnumbered those of soldiers in the conflict. The Russian rape and plunder of Germany and Central Europe; the bombings of Tokyo, Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki; the internment of Japanese Americans; the Soviet mass deportation of Tartars and Chechens; and of course the German eradication—and eventual extermination—of the Jews of Europe provide some of the most glaring examples of the conflict’s setting of modern precedent. The spread of nationalist fervor, both intentional and unintended, throughout the globe was a further consequence of the war. The end of the European empires—-decolonization-- followed soon thereafter.

Lukacs ends his book with a reassessment of the Second World War’s relationship to the Cold War. Was the Cold War inevitable? Did the cold war mentality play a part in, or result from, the partition of Europe, Germany, and Berlin? Can we find the “symptoms” of the Cold War in World War Two? Lukacs offers complex and ambiguous answers for each. Historians of the Cold War will find much here to debate about his chapter on the code-named Rainbow Five, where he praises the pre-Pearl Harbor prescience of American strategists when they crafted the secret, oft-criticized, two-ocean, two-front war plan, as well as his discussion of the German physicist Werner Heisenberg’s dynamic relationship with the Danish physicist Niels Bohr and their increasingly strained relationship following their disagreement over the atom bomb and the war. But, as for America’s role in the Cold War’s development, Lukacs does state unhesitatingly, in hindsight at least, that Franklin Roosevelt’s “concern with Russia came not too early but too late.”

Seeking truths surrounding the Second World War’s legacy is a daunting task. Yet Lukacs does so with a style and brevity that will make his book broadly accessible to a wide audience. Furthermore, Lukacs’s tantalizing “what ifs,” controversial arguments, and prophetic digressions will doubtless provoke healthy discussion in the undergraduate classroom, as well as a lively response from a variety of historians.

Posted on Tuesday, March 9, 2010 at 12:06 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Jim Cullen, Review of Dick J. Reavis's "Catching Out: The Secret World of Day Laborers" (Simon & Schuster, 2010)

Source: Special to HNN (3-9-10)

[Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of ten books, among them The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003) and Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write, and Think about History (Blackwell-Wiley, 2009). He blogs at American History Now.]

In the introductory chapter of Catching Out, Dick J. Reavis, a veteran Texas journalist who is currently assistant professor of English at North Carolina State University, tells his reader that he turned to day labor to supplement his looming retirement and Social Security income. Given the minimal wages such work generates -- and relatively higher returns that result from having a powerful agent (Esther Newberg) and editor (Alice Mayhew) to steer an account of his experience into print -- this seems like a somewhat disingenuous way to begin. But Reavis has a long track record of living and reporting on those at the margins of the U.S. labor market, and the first-hand experiences that he describes here are vivid and useful in capturing an often shadowy world.

The core of Catching Out consists of fifteen chapters that chronicle the various jobs, which range from a few hours to a few days, that Reavis performed working as a contract laborer for a firm he calls "Labor-4-U" in the months just before the economic downturn of 2008. These tasks included construction, manufacturing, and demolition work, as well as setting up a retail operation and a complicated job assisting in sorting out the effects of a recently deceased man. Each day was, in its way, an adventure, both in never knowing just what would be involved until he arrived on the site, or who he would be working for -- and with. Each of these variables could independently determine whether he had a good or bad day, and Reavis introduces us to a gallery of characters, some recurring, who bring his working world to life. These include figures like "Real Deal," a charismatic felon who tends to capture most of the best jobs in between prison stints, "Carrie," a tiny, arthritic staple of the labor hall, and a pair of sisters who precipitate a series of complications for Reavis when they pay him and a partner in cash rather than working through Labor-4-U, which of course earns a hefty premium on top of what its workers are paid. The agency gets this premium to insulate companies from the wages, insurance, and benefits they would have to pay regular employees they hired themselves.

Reavis also explores the social dimensions of day labor. The term "catching out" refers to getting a ride out to a job, transportation being a crucial factor in landing one (and, for those with transportation, being able to charge other workers for privilege of getting them there). Very often it's in the beat-up cars in which he rides to and from work that he sees his co-workers in all their kindness, cruelty, or self-absorption. He notes that there is relatively little overt racial tension between workers or workers and bosses, except that which tends to be expressed by fellow whites who assume Reavis shares their prejudices. (A fluent speaker of Spanish, he was often adoptively embraced by Latino colleagues.) Nor does Reavis see much in the way of an explicit class consciousness. He encapsulates the view of this particular working class in the assertion that "Some men luck into positions where they can get rich by exploiting the labor of others, and some don't, but if given the chance, even the unlucky would do the same as their lords."

Perhaps surprisingly, physical strength counts for relatively little. Reavis is 63, with a bad knee and chronic pulmonary problems. These issues would occasionally complicate his work life, but more often than not he would resolve them with the help of co-workers or by minimizing his exertion (job security, after all, is a moot point). On the other hand, he was rarely given safety attire like shoes or goggles for protection at dangerous sites, and when backaches or breathing problems acquired on the job put him out of commission, the cost of lost wages was his alone. Naturally, none of the people he worked with received health insurance. In effect, the cost of medical care is borne by workers or paid by taxpayers. Nowhere is the sheer rapaciousness of American capitalism more evident.

The chief strength of Catching Out -- finely detailed reporting -- is also its chief weakness. After reading a few accounts of his various jobs, you get the idea; there's not much in the way of a larger argument or narrative arc. Reavis does conclude with a helpful final chapter that puts the work he describes in a broader statistical and sociological context, noting as he does so that documentation of the day labor scene is sparse both in its sources (workers are moving, taciturn targets) and resources (policymakers and politicians have turned a largely blind eye).

The book that most obviously approximates what Reavis is doing here is Barbara Ehrenreich's already classic Nickel and Dimed (2001), in which she performed stints as a waitress, cleaning lady, and Wal-Mart employee. The jobs Ehrenreich describes there are downright stable compared to those performed by Reavis, and she allowed herself the luxury of a car in getting to work, something Reavis did not. But Ehrenreich's immersion in her project seems more complete, even unsparing, than that of Reavis, and she seems to engage more deeply with her co-workers and the psychic dimensions of menial labor. Perhaps there is a gendered dimension to this observation, both in terms of the work described -- Reavis reports that the people who picked him for the jobs he did tended to discriminate against women -- as well as the way the respective authors reflect on their experiences. As a piece of writing, Nickel and Dimed is a better book. But Catching Out remains a significant, even essential, document of its subject, our time, and the cancer of inequality that is destroying the fabric of American life.

Posted on Tuesday, March 9, 2010 at 10:51 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Jim Cullen, Review of Adam Haslett's "Union Atlantic: A Novel" (Doubleday, 2010)

Source: Special to HNN (3-4-10)

[Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of ten books, among them The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003) and Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write, and Think about History (Blackwell-Wiley, 2009). He blogs at American History Now.]

In 1989, Tom Wolfe published one of his provocative magazine pieces, "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast," in which he took American novelists to task for their insularity and refusal to engage the great social issues of their time in accessible, informed prose. As is often the case with Wolfe, there was an element of self-promotion in his argument, as he had published Bonfire of the Vanities two years earlier, and was repositioning himself from New Journalist master of non-fiction to Balzac-style master of fiction. Wolfe followed up those novels with A Man in Full (1998) and I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004; Wolfe's next novel, tentatively titled Back to Blood, reputedly about immigration and set in Miami, is slated for publication later this year). All through this period, he sustained and even extended his argument, engaging in critical exchanges with prominent figures like John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving (a writer with whom he would seem to have a lot in common).

I myself have long been a fan of Wolfe's work, fiction and non-fiction, even when it has veered toward unintentional self-parody. It's hard not to be seduced by the (sometimes malicious) glee in his work. The exclamatory points! The italicized phrases! The onomatopeeeeeeeia that makes his prose sing!

But if you're looking at a quietly impressive example of the kind of work Wolfe has been championing in the last 20 years, a novel that effectively makes a case for the novel in the 21st century, it would be hard to find a better candidate than Adam Haslett's Union Atlantic. This book, Haslett's second, follows his 2003 National Book Award-nominated collection of stories, You Are Not a Stranger Here, by seeking to capture the zeitgeist of this decade. In Haslett's hands, that zeitgeist is one in which Americans seek to gratify their passions -- money and sex, among others -- in the shadows of distant, but looming, geopolitical and economic upheaval. The shape of dread is more clearly defined for some characters than it is for others, and some manage to find joy and meaning in their lives despite it. But the sense of Edwardian rot that so many social and political observers have been chronicling (Thomas Friedman, Kevin Phillips, et. al) here get embodied in vivid, three-dimensional people whose lives intersect in the fictional town of suburban town of Finden, Massachusetts (think Lincoln or Weston).

The catalytic figure in these intersections is Doug Fanning, whom we meet as a young naval recruit in a 1988 prologue set in the Persian Gulf, where he plays a dubious role in a hushed-up patrolling operation. The main action of the novel then moves to the aftermath of 9/11, when Fanning, now a buccaneering international financier for the Union Atlantic investment bank in Boston, buys himself a McMansion in Finden to salve the wounds of his troubled childhood (his abandoned mother cleaned houses in the town he now inhabits). His neighbor, a WASPish retired high school history teacher named Charlotte Graves, is outraged by the house and everything it represents. She believes the land Fanning's house sits on was sold to him illegally by the town, an assertion that no one -- including her own brother, Henry, president of the New York Federal Reserve -- takes seriously. It turns out that Charlotte has a real case. It also turns out that she is slowly losing her mind. The owner of a Doberman and a Mastiff to keep her company, she hears the former talk to her in the voice of Malcolm X and the latter in that of Cotton Mather. (The literary ventriloquism involved here is one of the book's amusing pleasures.) The lives of Charlotte and Fanning are bridged by a Nate Fuller, bright but rootless gay adolescent who shuttles between the two houses and sharpens the confrontation between two adversaries that will culminate in a conflagration -- and some moments of high humor.

But the brisk narrative pace of Union Atlantic is only one of its pleasures. Perhaps the most impressive, in a Wolfean sense, is the lightly worn sense of authority Haslett demonstrates on topics that range from cutting-edge military hardware to the nuances of the Nikkei. There are times in the book where he sounds like Paul Krugman: "Thus were the monthly payments of the young couples in Arizona and Florida transformed by the alchemy of finance into a haven for domestic liquidity and the Chinese surplus." Haslett knows the precincts of suburban ennui of modern-day teenagers no less than the habitat of mid-twentieth century heroin addicts (Charlotte's one true love is seduced away by the needle). You get the sense in reading this book that he's really taken the time to digest the rhythms of everyday life for a Faulknerian county.

That intimacy extends to the psychological realm as well, where Haslett manages the difficult trick of viewing his characters with empathy and clarity at the same time -- achieving, in the words of Charlotte's lover, "a lucid sympathy." That's as true of the aspiring African American office worker who plays a pivotal role in the plot as it is the world weariness of the immensely powerful Henry Graves. Even when his characters are crazy or repellent, they can nevertheless invite identification. Fanning is amoral at best and reprehensible at worst, but when an over-privileged Volvo-driving woman clogs traffic in the center of town, this naval veteran's less than entirely accurate complaint -- "For you, we killed. For this" -- has a ring of truth. Even as she descends into madness, Charlotte can still serve up zingers that illuminate American fecklessness. "You have no idea what it was like at school at the end," she tells her brother of her teaching career. "How the content remained the same while the meaning of the exercise changed so entirely. From enlightenment to the grooming of pets."

Union Atlantic is a relatively short book, and it betrays little of the sprawl or overt ambition of one on the scale of The Bonfire of the Vanities. But you finish it feeling like you've really lived with these people for a while, and that you understand them in a way you simply could not any other way. Journalism can explain and movies can show, but realistic fiction reveals how it feels to live in a particular time and place in a way that remains both singular and necessary. Haslett doesn't know what's really happening to our country better than anyone else; indeed, much of what he reveals has been described by others in one way or another. But that, in a way, is the value of his work: he captures a shared perception of a time in a way that gives pleasure to those who lived it and a testament for those who will follow. Such is the way history gets made -- and truly learned.

Posted on Thursday, March 4, 2010 at 9:14 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Jim Cullen, Review of Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández's "The Best of the Best: Becoming Elite at an American Boarding School" (Harvard, 2009)

Source: Special to HNN (2-24-10)

[Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of ten books, among them The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003) and Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write, and Think about History (Blackwell-Wiley, 2009). He blogs at American History Now.]

It may well be a universal dilemma for individuals to want the benefits of privilege in a society without the burden of guilt and doubt they engender in oneself, and the skepticism and resentment they engender among others. Whether or not this dilemma is universal, it certainly is widespread in the United States, a nation founded, in part, on the premise that all men are created equal. And nowhere is it more acute than among children of privilege, who almost by definition cannot have earned any benefits they enjoy (any more than children are responsible for the burdens they endure).

But children, no less than adults, are prone to close cognitive dissonances of this type with various strategies of rationalization. Anatomizing them lies at the heart of Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández's The Best of the Best. Gaztambide-Fernández spent two years at the fictively named "Weston School" (reminiscent of Phillips Andover Academy or one of its peers), shadowing its students in an anthropologically-minded piece of field research that included focus groups, surveys, interviews with faculty and staff, and sitting in on classes and other school events. Though his research was commissioned by Weston, the book also grew out of Gaztambide-Fernández's doctoral work at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. While there were inevitably limits on what he could see or say, the book in any case is no unvarnished endorsement.

The key concept in Gaztambide-Fernández's analysis, which he unveils in his introduction, is that of a "discourse of distinction" that shapes the students' view of themselves. As he explains, distinction has two meanings here: a presumably neutral denotation of sorting (as in a group of students who stand separate from a general population) as well as a more normative denotation of ranking (as in those who are distinguished by virtue of particular talents of achievements). Both definitions, however, at least imply a sense of hierarchy, and Weston students apply both to themselves.

In terms of the former, Westonians are collectively defined by their membership in the student body. This membership is understood in five dimensions that Gaztambide-Fernández calls "the five E's: exclusion (in terms of admission); engagement (in terms of rigor); excellence (in terms of talent); entitlement (in terms of privilege); and envisioning (in terms of future prospects). At any given time or in any given way, a Weston student will invoke one or more of these categories to understand their presence at the school. What they tend not to do, the author explains, is reference the class, race, or other forms of privilege that are typically prerequisites for their future achievement, whether in the form of parents who have boarding school backgrounds themselves or the financial resources to underwrite their educations. Very often, he notes, the students assert that the choice to attend was largely theirs.

In any case, this is only part of the discourse of distinction. Another axis is the way the students subdivide themselves once their within "the Weston bubble." Here a series of hierarchies define the students' sense of themselves in domains that Gaztambide-Fernández calls "'the three spheres of experience': the sphere of work, the social sphere, and the sphere of intimacy." It's at this point that we enter a relatively familiar sociological landscape of jocks, beautiful people, nerds, and so on, with the partial qualifier that Weston and its ilk tend to offer more status for intellectual achievement than most schools do (though few students are comfortable defining themselves solely on academic terms). Gaztambide-Fernández literally diagrams the spatial relationships, noting that space itself, literal as well as figurative, is crucial to what it means to have an elite education: there's always something, or somewhere, you can go to find the sense of distinction that you crave.

There is a another dynamic at work here, and that is the way that outside identity politics function as third axis of experience. Financial aid recipients lack the economic resources of their peers, but seek psychic prestige by virtue of their talents. Students of color are seen, and often see themselves, as enriching the social climate of the school -- it's not so much as they experience diversity as it is that they are diversity. Students who depart from gender norms are tolerated, though not embraced. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, for their part, continue to function as the baseline norm. Students alternately uphold and lament these dynamics of their identities, which have tended to remain relatively stable.

Toward the end of the book, Gaztambide-Fernández quotes a student who aptly encapsulates the presumed logical result of this complex process: "You may have been like, the world-class pianist at your last school, but it doesn't matter here, because there's probably another one just like it. And so, when you come out of here, you don't have that special something that, like, distinguishes you from the rest. Yet you know that you're special, just because of everything that you do." You got in because you're special, and you're even more special because you got in (and out).

This is, of course, tautological reasoning. And after a while, it gets tiresome, even in what is a short book. Partly that's because these are adolescents talking, some presumably as young as 14 years old. Gaztambide-Fernández does not really take this developmental vector into account, perhaps because many of these students are articulate even when they're naive. But it's also because the author's frame of reference gets a little too narrow. He listens long and hard to the students' necessarily uninformed speculation as to why they were admitted, for example, but does little -- even with the boilerplate explanations that are surely available -- to explore what the people charged with the responsibility of choosing them have to say on the subject.

Moreover, some of the more striking aspects of the book come less from the author's findings than the fact that he finds them so. Noting the various kinds of social inequality that are reproduced in the school, he asserts that "this unequal distribution of distinction [emphasis his] underscores and perhaps strengthens the status hierarchies in the broader society, pointing to at least one way boarding schools are implicated in the perpetration of social inequality." At least one way? Why would it not be obvious, in institutions that discriminate on the basis of intelligence, wealth, and lineage -- a word we tend not to use but which accurately describes legacy preference -- that there are many ways?

This is not a rhetorical question. Actually, one of the more remarkable aspects of liberal thinking about elite educational institutions is a seemingly widespread assumption that social equality is somehow the goal. But it is not, has never been, nor can such institutions afford -- literally or figuratively -- to ever be, whether or not they're "need blind." It is true that they do offer avenues for advancement for people who could otherwise not attain it through typical channels. But that's less because this is a core mission than because without such hedging the sense of resentment they'd generate would threaten their internal as well as external viability. They want to see themselves, and be seen by others, as creators of opportunity. But they need to be sustainers of a ruling class to maintain their power, partly sustained by limited infusions of outside talent. That talent needs to adopt to the ruling class (even if a healthy ruling class evolves over time), not the other way around. Indeed, successfully grappling with such frictions is part of what defines a talented youth.

Elite students, and the adults who supervise their educations, lose sight of the larger social purpose they serve at their peril, and the peril of the societies over which they preside. Their presence at the Westons of the world is not finally about their "merit" or their comfort. It's about what they will ultimately contribute to the civilization that made them possible: not whether their admission was justified, but whether they will justify their admission. Those who lose sight of this truth will forfeit any legitimacy in their privilege, if not privilege itself, and justly earn the contempt they receive.

Posted on Tuesday, February 23, 2010 at 9:29 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Luther Spoehr, Review of Frank Lambert’s “The Battle of Ole Miss: Civil Rights v. States’ Rights” (Oxford University Press, 2010).

Source: HNN (2-23-10)

[Luther Spoehr is Senior Lecturer in the Education Department at Brown University.]

Sometimes history turns a corner, and nobody notices. But such was certainly not the case in the fall of 1962, when James Meredith’s ultimately successful integration of the University of Mississippi involved a showdown between state and federal authorities, an on-campus riot featuring tear gas and gunfire, the presence of federal marshals and then federal troops, two fatalities and dozens injured. For a variety of reasons, the whole world was watching as President John Kennedy and Governor Ross Barnett jockeyed for position. The stakes for Meredith himself, the Kennedy administration, the burgeoning civil rights movement, and the South’s diehard segregationists couldn’t have been higher.

Posted on Monday, February 22, 2010 at 9:50 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Jim Cullen, Review of Adam Gopnik's "Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life" (Knopf, 2009)

Source: Special to HNN (2-15-10)

Posted on Monday, February 15, 2010 at 3:57 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Luther Spoehr, Review of Jonathan R. Cole's "The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National, Why It Must Be Protected" (PublicAffairs, 2010)

Source: Providence Sunday Journal (2-14-10)

In 1963 Clark Kerr, President of the University of California, delivered three lectures on “The Uses of the University.” Still in print, his incisive, comprehensive presentation traced the evolution of American higher education, from college to university to what he termed the “multiversity.” All in less than 100 pages.

Jonathan Cole, longtime provost at Columbia University, takes over 500 discursive pages to celebrate “The Great American University,” by which he means the great American RESEARCH university. And by “research” he means mainly science and technology. Cole’s narrow focus and lack of pithiness are unfortunate, because his book raises important questions for anyone interested in how well university-based research will continue to propel American economic progress.

Posted on Sunday, February 14, 2010 at 3:15 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Jim Cullen, Review of Randi Hutter Epstein's "Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank" (Norton, 2010)

Source: Special to HNN (2-11-10)

Posted on Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 12:34 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Jim Cullen, Review of "Rising Road: A True Tale of Love, Race and Religion in America" (Oxford, 2010)

Posted on Monday, February 8, 2010 at 2:34 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Larry DeWitt, Review of Alan Brinkley's "Franklin Delano Roosevelt" (Oxford, 2010)

Source: Special to HNN (2-4-10)

[Mr. DeWitt is a public historian and a doctoral student in public policy history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the principal editor of Social Security: A Documentary History (Washington, D. C., Congressional Quarterly Press, 2008)]. This is a surprisingly slight book, especially for a biography of Franklin Roosevelt, whose biographies tend to approach four-digit page lengths. This slim little volume (in a 5” x 8” format) contains fewer than 100 pages (99 to be exact), yet it aspires to survey the entirety of Roosevelt’s life and career. Although I suppose one cannot help but be impressed by a book whose entire table of contents consists of only four entries: Preface; Franklin Delano Roosevelt; Notes; Bibliography.

Slight or not, one might well think that Brinkley has some explaining to do: we might expect some justification for yet another biography of our 32nd president. In a fleeting stroke of understatement, Brinkley says only: “There is no lack of biographies of Roosevelt. At least four have been published in the last five years alone.” (pg. xii) Well yes, and so why a fifth? Brinkley does not say. By the way, I can count at least 15 biographies of FDR published in the last year-and-a-half alone, to join the untold number still in print, plus at least three more that have appeared since he penned his Preface in June of 2009 (not all of them in Brinkley’s league, to be sure, and not all of them comprehensive). His publisher, Oxford University Press, claims it as “the only short biography of FDR on the market” and advises booksellers that: “This title will appeal to individuals with an interest in general and American History, as well as those wishing to compare the achievements of FDR and Obama during their first years in office.” Egad. One can only hope that no actual reader will attempt to use this book in such a puerile way.

The book consists of only a single chapter, subdivided into topical “chapterlets.” There is a two-page intro and a two-page conclusion; sandwiched in between are overviews of: FDR’s early personal life and his marriage to Eleanor; his early career during the Wilson administration; his polio; his emergence in New York state politics; his presidential campaign; the New Deal (three “chapterlets”); World War II (also three “chapterlets”); Roosevelt and Churchill; a section on African Americans, the internments and the problem Jewish refugees (2 pages); and the third-term and his death. All the usual suspects have been rounded up.

There is nothing here that isn’t already well-known to most historians; although some readers may find a few tidbits that they hadn’t known, or had forgotten. I hadn’t known, for example, that while serving as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson that FDR had some role in a covert Navy sting operation designed to ferret out and arrest homosexuals who were cruising in the area around the Newport, Rhode Island naval base. I also didn’t know that the Philadelphia Eagles football team was named the “Eagles” during the New Deal in honor of the blue-eagle symbol of the National Recovery Administration (That tidbit of history might well frost the noses of some of the Philly fans in the stands at Lincoln Financial Field!).

But the chief value of this latest biography of FDR is not that it tells us something new, but mainly that it tells the broad-brush story of FDR’s era in a brief and accessible way. Alan Brinkley is without question a master historian, and one who knows this period (the New Deal) as well as any. His writing is always insightful and deeply informed. But readers accustomed to the kind of complex policy history that one finds in his The End of Reform, or the kind of rich political and intellectual history one finds in his Liberalism and its Discontents, or even the colorful portraiture of interesting political actors and social history one finds in his Voices of Protest, will discover a very different genre being exercised here. Frankly, the book looks and reads more like the publication of an honorary lecture given on some suitable academic occasion.

If there is an overarching theme to Brinkley’s biography, he states it in his second paragraph:

“So powerful was his impact on the world he led through the twentieth century’s darkest years that the literal truth of his life often seemed less important than the powerful image he created . . . Even decades later, public figures across the ideological spectrum try to seize a piece of his legacy—even at times to justify efforts to dismantle it—without much concern about who Roosevelt was or what he actually did. He has become a figure of myth: a man for all seasons, all parties, and all ideologies.” (pg. 2)

Posted on Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 12:06 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Jim Cullen, Review of "Lit: A Memoir," by Mary Karr (Harper, 2009)

Source: Special to HNN (2-2-10)

Posted on Tuesday, February 2, 2010 at 11:02 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Murray Polner. Review of Yehuda Bauer's The Death of the Shtetl (Yale University Press, 2009)

So what was a shtetl? The heartbreaking and exhilarating play “Fiddler on the Roof”? Not according to Yehuda Bauer, who calls the play a “distorted bowderlized” version of a story by the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem. “[I]n this sickeningly sweet, made-up world of Eastern Jewry, all Jews were deeply religious, naïve and clever, and the shtetl was a place where goodness and ethical uprightness ruled”

This fake nostalgia – so warm and fuzzy to the children and grandchildren whose ancestors long ago fled East European shtetlach (plural in Yiddish)--was more realistically portrayed by writers such as Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch and Y.L. Peretz and later, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Their writings depicted the joys of course but also the poverty, misery, superstition, religious fanaticism, as well as sharp class distinctions of Jews and non-Jews alike. Lording over them were malevolent governments and pervasive anti-Semitism.

According to Bauer, one of the preeminent scholars of the mass murder of Polish, Byelorussian and Ukrainian Jews during WWII, professor emeritus of Holocaust studies at Hebrew University and author of “Rethinking the Holocaust” (2001), shtetlach were small townships with 1,000-15,000 Jews, where the Jewish calendar and customs “derived from a traditional interpretation” of Judaism. From these hamlets, villages and small towns sprang the joyous faith of Hasidism and its anti-Orthodox opponents, followers of left and right Zionism and communists, socialists, and secularism, most of whom would die not in German concentration camps but instead were executed by the Germans and their very willing Polish, Baltic. Byelorussian and Ukrainian partners. The fact is, one-third of the three million Jews living in Poland on the eve of the German invasion in 1939 were killed by them.

What Bauer attempts to do and then does exceedingly well, is to try to explain and understand how these Jews in eastern Poland, and western Belorussia and the Ukraine lived before the mass slaughterers arrived and how they reacted in the face of such unprecedented sadism From available documents including Polish and Soviet archives and unpublished Yad Vashem material he examines nine representative shtetlach, where, in 1941-42, about twenty-five percent of all victims of the Holocaust lived and died.

Before the German invasion, Poland’s economy was in a near-ruinous state and its political life dominated by extreme nationalists and a traditionally anti-Semitic Catholic Church—though there was always a minority that rejected the accepted anti-Semitism. Indeed, the Church’s prewar primate and archbishop of Cracow approved the government’s anti-Semitic and ultra-nationalist, pro-fascist policies. So extreme were the nationalists in their views that, coupled with a long-established Polish Catholic Church’s loathing of Jews and Judaism, they came close to mirroring the racism of neighboring Germany, whose Nazis couldn’t abide the Poles. Jews were unable to escape the Eastern European world of ethnic and religious hatreds by acculturating because the overwhelming number of their fellow Poles rejected them. It was no surprise then that soon after the start of WWII, Poles encouraged by the local Catholic clergy, carried out a pogrom in a shtetl called Jedwabne. And after the German armies arrived, it was no different in the Baltic states, Belorussia and the Ukraine, where the local collaborators and executioners thrived.

What sealed their fate and was a central factor in the mass murders, as Bauer writes, was “the attitude of the host populations.” While there were always non-Jews who would not participate in the killings—“there were rescuers even in Jedwabne,” write Bauer. Still, saviors were few and far between. The Baltic nations, so beloved by postwar American cold warriors and their politicized “Captive Nations Week,” generally welcomed the Germans and became fervent collaborators. Ukrainians, many of whom worked with the Nazis, provided huge numbers of police and concentration camp guards and helped carry out the murders.

There were always rescuers, some of whom have been honored by Yad Vashem, the memorial museum in Jerusalem as “truly heroic figures.” Bauer mentions Old Believers and assorted individuals who for many reasons risked their lives and that of their families to shelter Jews, some for money, political beliefs or religious convictions. Bauer, however, offers a caveat: “Lest I give the wrong impression of a multitude of rescuers, let me note that that the number of [shtetl] survivors from Zborow was thirty-three” --of an original several thousand.” And Zborow was no different from other shtetlachs.

Some were saved by erstwhile German Communists who had hidden their party membership and were in the Wehrmacht. Many young Jews saved themselves by fleeing into the forests and joining Soviet partisans, not all of whom welcomed them but needed them, if only temporarily, to kill Germans and their allies. (Soviet anti-Semitism would flourish after the war) Some few managed to live to tell the tale but recognized that it was merely chance that allowed them to live. All came close to death. “Some of them thought it had been the work of God, but most knew better: the same God, if he existed, had failed to protect their loved ones.”

What we now refer to as the Holocaust consumed millions of people, mainly Jews but also gypsies (Roma people), homosexuals, political opponents, and one and a half million children. It is fair to ask why did Nazi racial theory and hatred of Jews lead to such unparalleled mass killings. And who were the responsible parties? The first query is impossible to answer definitively. Since then we have seen mass, directed killings in Cambodia, the Congo and Rwanda and elsewhere. After the war, denials of responsibility came from the enormous number of onetime Nazi loyalists in Austria, Romania,and East Europe. Then was it only Hitler and his inner circle? The fact is, Bauer rightly concludes, “the vast majority of Germans, both in Germany and in the German forces in the USSR, were in agreement with the policies of their government.” In Christopher Browning’s fine work, Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, “ordinary German working men, helped along by ordinary Ukrainians, Belorussians, Baltics and Poles” were the executioners,” --“willing executioners” (to borrow from Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s apt phrase) -- who shot 38,000 Jewish men, women and children and dispatched another 45,000 to Treblinka. Still, and worth remembering, is that “ordinary men” who refused to join Battalion 101 and carry out orders to kill were excused and allowed to return home. In somewhat parallel situations, Danes and Bulgarians who refused to allow the Germans to deport their fellow Jewish citizens to the death camps also went unpunished and are today hailed for their courage.

By July 1944, when the Soviet armies on their way to Berlin arrived, there were pitifully few Jews left alive. The shtetl was dead.

Posted on Sunday, January 31, 2010 at 10:09 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Murray Polner. Review of Stephen J. Taylor, Acts of Conscience: WWII, Mental Institutions and Religious Objectors (Syracuse University Press, 2009)

By 1943, Frank Olmstead of the War Resisters League had turned sharply critical of World War II’s Civilian Public Service Camps and what he contended was the pointless work assigned to Conscientious Objectors. While briefly volunteering in a mental institution he approached a closed door. “I have been in storms at sea, in train wrecks, and in Moscow during the Bolshevik revolution, but I have never had quite the feeling that I had when I turned from that locked door to face three hundred insane incontinents.”

He was not unlike the intrepid 19th Century reporter Nelly Bly who faked her condition and entered a New York City mental institution and then described her experience in her best-selling book Ten Days in a Mad-House. Many decades later, in 1948, Hollywood’s Snake Pit discovered mental institutions when Olivia de Havilland portrayed a wife dispatched into the hell of an asylum. Despite excellent reviews, it did little to change governmental and popular indifference.

To their lasting credit, 3,000 COs also chose to reject what they regarded as senseless work assigned them in CPS and instead work with mentally-ill patients in state asylums (many also opted to serve as human guinea pigs in medical and scientific experiments). “The idea of CPS mental hospital units came from COs at two AFSC Forest Service camps in Massachusetts who wanted to do more socially significant work,” writes Steven J. Taylor, Centennial Professor of Disability Studies at Syracuse University. COs like these were then able to document the wretched conditions they observed, let alone occasional ruthless mistreatment. One photo in the book displays a metal pipe used by non-CO attendants to maintain control of patients.

“Harsh treatment and brutality were commonplace at many mental hospitals and training schools and offended the pacifist sensibilities of many COs,” notes Taylor, a phenomena that ironically “challenged the[ir] pacifist beliefs.” How to control violent mental patients attacking other patients, attendants or even themselves? Some pacifists chose to “turn the other cheek,” but others simply left or “came to a position that distinguished between unacceptable violence, on the one hand, and acceptable force or nonviolent coercion, on the other,” only blurring the distinction. Still, many tried to be true to their nonviolent faith, and as one report put it about those who stayed, “even when dealing with a group of people who were mentally incompetent, the philosophy of love practiced in all human relations, was both practical and achieved the best results”

When COs Philip Steer, Leonard Edelstein, Willard Hetzel and Harold Barton tried to establish an organization to seriously alter the way mentally ill patients were treated it “failed to have a lasting impact on mental health and developmental disabilities,” writes Taylor, just as Snake Pit failed to generate any widespread popular attempt to humanize asylums. Yet the COs were able to pass on what they had seen and learned to Eleanor Roosevelt, who visited CPS mental hospitals and praised and publicized the COs. Albert Deutsch, of the adless leftwing newspaper PM, made the mentally ill his beat and picked up their findings. In article after article he concluded that the CO’s exposes were enormously valuable since they were more interested in underlying causes than headlines. “They rarely concentrate on personal scapegoats. Many put the blame where it rightly belongs—on calloused state executives, penny-pinching legislatures and an apathetic and ill-informed public.”

Steven Taylor has written a seminal book about a subject largely ignored. Acts of Conscience honors these forgotten WWII COs, as much a part of the “Greatest Generation” as anyone else.

Originally published in Fellowship magazine, www.forusa.org

Posted on Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at 11:58 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Jack Ross. Review of Jennifer Burns' Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford University Press, 2009)

[Jack Ross is author of a forthcoming book on American Jewish anti-Zionism]

If the conservative and libertarian intellectual communities are to be believed, we are presently experiencing an Ayn Rand renaissance. The radical socialist (or corporatist, depending on who you ask) agenda of Barack Obama, symbolized by bank bailouts and stimulus bills, has aroused a great populist upsurge in defense of the creative individual – Atlas Shrugged, they say, has finally come to pass. Indeed, it has not been uncommon to see placards at Tea Party protests asking “Who is John Galt?” and other slogans lifted from Rand’s novels. So is the Rand Revolution now coming to pass?

At the very least, it makes extremely timely the new biography of Rand by University of Virginia associate professor Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market. Historically speaking, Professor Burns does a remarkable service by shedding light on Ayn Rand’s long-neglected early career, where under the tutelage of the anti-New Deal columnist Isabel Paterson she became an active booster for Wendell Willkie and aspired to be nothing less than the laissez-faire answer to John Steinbeck. This sets the scene for an Ayn Rand much closer to the political mainstream than her reputation has suggested. She moved on to be equally enthusiastic for Barry Goldwater and, according to Burns, securing the place of modern libertarianism on the American right, as opposed to the radical fringes of left or right.

This thesis of Burns has vast implications for the recent history of American politics, which she only begins to grapple with. Just prior to the rise of the Tea Party movement, libertarianism as an ideology was given its most visible platform yet in the phenomenal presidential campaign of Ron Paul. Yet many self-described libertarians were disquieted by the dramatic rise of Ron Paul, whom they considered a throwback to the retrograde libertarianism of Murray Rothbard, who invariably sought alliances with the new left and with the presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan. Paul, for his part, makes no secret of his strong preference for Rothbard over Rand.

Burns convincingly argues that, historically speaking, Rand’s influence far outweighed that of Rothbard. Even when, to Rothbard’s profound delight, the libertarians of Young Americans for Freedom walked out of the organization over the question of the draft in 1969, they roundly rejected his call to enter the antiwar movement full force and instead looked to Rand, who remained an unbowed Cold War hawk and counseled that the destiny of libertarianism was still tied to the destiny of the Republican Party. Moreover, Burns brings the weight of archival evidence to bear in demonstrating that Rothbard was never considered a serious figure by most other libertarians, and that most references to him were in the form of attacking his views.

This teaches us much about the present political fortunes of libertarianism. The Ron Paul phenomenon was almost entirely attributable to the issue of war and peace, specifically the widespread feeling in the second half of 2007 that the new Democratic congress had betrayed the antiwar sentiment which swept them into office. Since the election of Obama, Rand, not Rothbard, has been the guiding light of right-libertarian protest, and Randian hawkishness has been only too compatible with the feeling of Glenn Beck’s followers that the Muslims are boring from within. If Ron Paul was the Gene McCarthy of the right, then the Tea Parties have been the Days of Rage that followed.

In the promotion of her book, Burns has even said on more than one occasion that the sharp decline of the Christian right in the last five years has augured well for the enduring legacy of Ayn Rand on the American right, with economic arguments now becoming its modus vivendi. But Burns makes no attempt at all to assess the potential pitfalls of this reality. The analogy to the era of the new left is instructive, as the Tea Party movement, if the reputation of its titular leader Sarah Palin is any indication, could prove no less politically toxic to the center of American politics. Writers ranging from Michael Lind to Walter Russell Mead have argued the striking similarities between our own time and the first Nixon Administration, with Lind very plainly declaring that “the teabaggers are the Yippies of the right.”

Conservative boosters in the early weeks of 2010 will no doubt have a simple two-word answer to this warning – Scott Brown. But Brown’s election might well prove to be the most dramatic indicator yet of the analogy between the two eras and the two movements. In 1969, the upset re-election of John Lindsay, who was closely identified with the new left, as Mayor of New York, was seen by liberals as the ultimate repudiation of the notion that Nixon had ushered in a new majority. But this betrayed a gross misreading of the returns: Lindsay had only been elected with a 43% plurality against two conservative Italian Catholics, and moreover was able to keep the increasingly rightward-drifting Jewish vote by running on the Liberal Party line.

In a similar vein, Scott Brown was only able to pull off his upset against a candidate who was both exceptionally hapless and had a remarkably extreme position on abortion in 50% Catholic Massachusetts. But like the Lindsay liberals of 1969, the Republicans give no sign whatsoever that they will learn the right lessons of this victory, convinced that the country is truly in a great popular uproar over health care legislation. Indeed, the Republicans have made the fateful turn of believing their own propaganda in their embrace of the Tea Party movement. In ultimately fooling itself most of all, the American right has been ably assisted by Ayn Rand.

Posted on Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at 8:25 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Jim Cullen, Review of "Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son" (Harper, 2009)

Source: Special to HNN (1-26-10)

Posted on Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 11:17 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Jim Cullen, Review of "Darker Than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture" by Paul Gilroy (Harvard University Press, 2010)

Source: Special to HNN (1-25-10)

[Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of ten books, among them The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (2003). He blogs at American History Now.]

Over the course of the past two decades, Paul Gilroy has emerged as a highly influential international scholar of "the Black Atlantic" -- the title of a landmark study he published in 1995. A product of the Centre for Contemporary Studies at Birmingham University in the UK -- the so-called "Birmingham School" -- Gilroy has become a renowned chronicler of the black diaspora as both a transnational event in the history of racism and an ongoing struggle for post-colonial emancipation. So it seems appropriate that his latest book, Darker than Blue, would be published under the imprimatur of Harvard University Press as part of the university's W.E.B. DuBois Lecture Series. It's in this context that I say the book showcases the impressive strengths of this interdisciplinary discourse as well as some its glaring weaknesses. As an experience in reading, Darker than Blue is perplexingly fragmented: striking insights mingle with inadequately supported assertions, garbled prose and a vision that seems surprisingly parochial.

This decidedly mixed quality is typified by the first of the book's three essays, "Get Free or Die Tryin,'" which tweaks the title Get Rich or Die Tryin,' a 2003 film and album starring 50 Cent. The piece rests on an arresting fact that Gilroy cites but does not document (in footnotes that are often intriguing but not particularly well aligned with the text): that African Americans constitute roughly 12% of the U.S. population but constitute about 30% of the domestic automotive market, spending close to $40 billion annually. This prompts Gilroy to make a cultural excursion on the implications of African Americans' century-long romance with cars. His analysis here is often both nimble and deeply provocative, as he uses figures ranging from bell hooks to Ralph Ellison (and an honorable mention of Rosa Parks and the unsung heroes who ran the driving pool at the Montgomery Bus Boycott) to note both the liberating, but, more decisively, geopolitically problematic, consequences of that obsession in terms of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, climate change, and other issues.

Gilroy makes the shrewd decision here to focus considerable attention on the music of Chuck Berry, whose artistry in capturing the complexity of American automotive culture is unparalleled. He portrays Berry as a proto-Marxist critic in songs like "Maybellene" and "No Money Down," which is fair enough. But he sidesteps the Berry who celebrated the (imperial) joys of the American Century as it crested in songs like "Back in the USA," a (guilty) pleasure if there ever was one: "Did I miss the skyscrapers did I miss the long freeway? . . . I'm so glad I'm livin' in the USA." Berry's deserved reputation rests at least as much on the sensuous joys of the consumerism he celebrates as it does the capitalist ideology he critiques.

Throughout the book, Gilroy expresses dismay that the emancipatory effects of black popular culture have curdled into decadence: "The contemporary contrast between Kanye West's ironic appetite for branded finery and 50 Cent's scarred, muscular Republican frame prompts us to ask: Where can [Curtis] Mayfield's dignity and seriousness have gone?" An interesting question, but a bit problematic for a discourse, which, however stretched and textured, finally rests on a foundation of dialectical materialism. It hardly seems surprising that those who experience any lessening of their oppression would choose to cash in on their freedom, whether it's inside or outside the borders of the American empire.

Such reservations aside, Gilroy is notably informed and insightful in his readings of popular music, which include Bob Marley and Jimi Hendrix. But all too often this book is written in academese that's dense to the point of impenetrable in ways that suggest laziness more than sophistication. I've read it a number of times now, and still can't make sense of this description of a Primo Levi's work: "It [the referent is not clear whether Gilroy is speaking of a specific essay or the book in which it appears] lies at the centre of his exploration of civilisation's inner tensions and the implication of decivilising racial tensions that are not to be dialectically resolved into a reconfigured narrative of progress." Or this passage from the same Gilroy piece on human rights: "the racialisation of war and law is retained as an overspecialized topic relevant only to a few exceptional places characterized by openly racialised polities and forms of citizenship that, in turn, institutionalize the patterns of exclusionary inclusion which race hierarchy facilitates and renders acceptable." At times like these, and there are many of them, one wishes Gilroy would take a page from Marley and write in a vernacular language more redolent of the people for whom he presumes to speak.

This insularity extends to asides and allusions whose meaning and interpretation Gilroy takes for granted. He complains that liberal intellectuals tend to celebrate western European contributions to Human Rights, refusing to consider the colonialism that spread in tandem with this self-congratulatory discourse; he criticizes "scholars worthy of the name [who] would never raise the topic of racism as an object of inquiry." But few liberals I've encountered fail to raise it. Racially-based analysis hardly seems lacking in any number of disciplines in the academy, which in recent decades has also witnessed the growth of Africana studies as a discrete discipline, along with the concomitant appearance of scholars like Michael Eric Dyson and Tricia Rose on cable news programs (not to mention Gilroy's own institutional perches at places like Yale and the London School of Economics, where he currently teaches).

Near the bedrock of this book is a generational lament, "an acute sense of being bereft of responsible troubadours," as Gilroy puts it near the start of the book's final essay. The world has changed, and the issues he cares about are not necessarily as central as they once were, even among blacks who have sold their soul (or chosen a president). Gilroy legitimately criticizes the standard conservative response to anti-racist demands that "we should all become resigned to racial orders because they are natural kinds and therefore a permanent, significant, and immutable aspect of human social and political life." But does he really think that the somewhat diffuse anti-colonial project he advocates will actually bring about an unprecedented world of perfect social justice? No: He does not "argue naively for a world without hierarchy, but practically for a world free of that particular hierarchy which has accomplished untold wrongs." Fair enough. But given that there are manifold others -- hierarchies of gender, and intelligence, and physical appearance and the like that are simultaneously within and beyond the reach of social redress -- it is perhaps not surprising or inappropriate that collective gazes may shift over time.

Nor is it surprising or inappropriate that those gazes linger on approaches other than the one he advocates. The subtitle of this book invokes "the moral economies" of Black Atlantic culture. Though never explicitly explained, the core of that morality is apparently egalitarian, adapted with supple postmodern skill from a notably plastic template of Marxism. Yet Gilroy glancingly at best acknowledges other moral economies, like organized religion, which, like Marxism, have done much evil in the world, but which also have occasionally done an immense amount of good by way of defining egalitarianism in a somewhat different way. Christianity gave the Black Atlantic slavery, but it also gave us King. No Allah, no Malcolm. No Exodus, no Exodus. One could argue that a history without colonialism would have rendered such blessings unnecessary. But the hurts of history are inescapable, and their balm can never be entirely political. Here I would point to the example of Cornel West, who whatever nuances he would surely apply to this observation, is nevertheless more attuned to the spiritual dimension of modern life than Gilroy is.

But as Gilroy suggests in the closing pages of Darker than Blue, such arguments are increasingly beside the point. A millennial wind is blowing, one hard to ignore wherever one stands. Gilroy understandably welcomes the prospect of sunset for Western global hegemony. I'd be interested to know how he regards the moral economies of a Confucian order, and how he imagines the wretched of the earth will fare under it.

Posted on Sunday, January 24, 2010 at 10:14 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Ron Briley reviews Robert Cohen's Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Recent memory of student radicalism in the 1960s tends to focus upon the 1969 split within Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) which led to formation of the Weather Underground. The division within the ranks of the student movement culminated in a Weather Underground bombing campaign and the loss of the high moral ground once occupied by student activists striving for civil rights, participatory democracy, economic justice, and ending the Vietnam War. The Weather Underground was denounced by former SDS leader turned professor Todd Gitlin as well as 2008 Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who attempted to link Barack Obama with former Weather member Bill Ayers and terrorism. Even former Weather leader Mark Rudd issued an apology for the group’s tactics in his recent memoir. But as Robert Cohen reminds us in his fine biography of Mario Savio and history of the University of California, Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM), there is considerably more to the radical legacy of the 1960s than the Weather Underground.
Cohen, who teaches history at New York University and chairs the school’s Steinhardt School of Education, argues that the eloquent Savio framed the rebellion of the 1960s in the broadest of terms with his 2 December 1964 speech, “Bodies Upon the Gears.” Calling upon Berkeley students to engage in acts of civil disobedience by occupying Sproul Hall, Savio urged them to place their sacrifices and struggles within the context of the civil rights movement and those battling for self determination and democracy. Suggesting that the corporate university was part of a bureaucratic state stifling the individual, Savio proclaimed:

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all.

Cohen concludes that the machine speech was “at bottom a passionate moral summons to stop evil” (178-179).
Thus, Cohen argues that Savio was a spokesperson for an idealistic crusade to assure that the promise of American life was available to all citizens. Cohen agrees with Savio’s view that the social movements of the 1960s “championed new freedoms, opening the American mind by pushing it into questioning the racism, sexism, homophobia, and imperialism that had predominated for so long” (12). Although Savio suffered from personal problems which forced him to withdraw from activism for much of the 1970s, Cohen chronicles that in the 1980s and 1990s Savio regained his voice and was championing democratic rights and freedoms when he died from a heart condition in 1996. Accordingly, for Savio and many in his generation the 1960s were “a seedbed for a lifelong commitment to a more democratic and egalitarian social vision and a nonviolent America” (313).
Savio, however, was a strange choice to lead such a crusade at an elite institution such as Berkeley, but his story exemplifies the possibilities of a more egalitarian society. Mario Savio was born 8 December 1942 to a working-class Italian-American family in New York City. Savio’s father pushed his son toward assimilation, while his mother hoped that Mario would become a Catholic priest. Savio was deeply influenced by Catholicism, and he tended to perceive the world in moralistic terms even after he left the faith for its rigidity and dogmatism. As a young man, Savio, noted for his oratory during the 1960s, struggled with stuttering and a speech impediment; perhaps the product of childhood sexual abuse by a family relative which Savio was reluctant to discuss. The essentially shy Savio was no student rebel during his high school days, focusing upon his studies in science and entering the prestigious Westinghouse Science Talent Search.
In the fall of 1960, Savio entered Manhattan College. While his father wished to see Mario become an engineer, the young student was increasingly drawn to the study of Greek philosophy and was restive at a Catholic institution. He transferred to Queens College the following year, and in 1963 he followed his parents to California, enrolling at Berkeley and pursing a major in philosophy. Savio became connected with the activist community at Berkeley and participated in several civil rights demonstrations. His first arrest was during a sit-in protesting the racial hiring practices of the San Francisco Sheraton Palace Hotel. He was especially drawn to the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and Savio volunteered for the 1964 SNCC Freedom Summer project in Mississippi. Savio’s experience registering blacks to vote in Mississippi was crucial to his political development, but Cohen maintains that Savio's commitment to social justice was already well documented before his pilgrimage to the South.
In the fall of 1964, Savio returned to Berkeley determined to complete his degree and work for civil rights in the Bay Area. Little did he realize that efforts by the Berkeley administration to alter the rules by which political advocacy could be disseminated at the Bancroft strip, which was technically viewed as being off campus, fostered a semester of discontent on the campus. Although much of FSM was spontaneous and grass roots-oriented, Savio emerged as a media figure when he climbed atop a police car in Sproul Plaza and urged students to block the arrest of protest leaders. Interestingly enough, Savio’s stuttering seemed to evaporate as he articulated the goals of student protesters against the Berkeley administration. Savio was elected to the FSM Steering and Executive Committees, negotiating with University of California Chancellor Clark Kerr, whom Savio viewed as representing the university as a knowledge factory in service of the corporate state. Although opposed to the cult of personality and advocating democratic leadership, Savio became the public face of the FSM when he was arrested December 7 for attempting to speak at a campus meeting organized by the administration. After finally gaining the support of the faculty, the FSM achieved their speech victory on 8 December 1964. While agreeing with Savio that Kerr often negotiated in bad faith, Cohen laments the growing hostility between liberals and radicals which the right would later exploit.
As for Savio, the triumph of free speech at Berkeley brought troubled times. He was expelled from Berkeley and sentenced to jail for his participation in the Sproul Hall sit-in. Seeking to avoid the glare of publicity, Savio resigned from the FSM, concentrating on his marriage to fellow activist Suzanne Goldberg. As the student movement expanded nationally in response to the escalating Vietnam War, Savio was often silent. While he was opposed to what he considered the imperialistic foreign policy of the United States, Savio was also impatient with the growing dogmatism of the student left. Savio continued to struggle with personal demons, suffering from depression. Drifting from job to job and often hospitalized, his marriage to Goldberg dissolved.
After a season in hell, Savio re-emerged during the 1980s, denouncing the foreign and domestic policies of the Reagan administration. He married again and earned a master’s degree in physics from San Francisco State University. In 1990, he was hired as a lecturer at Sonoma State University. Teaching classes in both the sciences and humanities, Savio also recovered his political voice; opposing state efforts to restrict affirmative action and immigrant rights in California. At the time of his death in 1996, Savio was leading a student revolt against an increase in campus fees. As Cohen notes, Savio died fighting for the democratic and egalitarian values he had championed in the 1960s.
Cohen’s volume is a valuable contribution to the historiography of the 1960s. It restores the voice of Mario Savio to the radical legacy of the 1960s which sought to expand the possibilities of American democracy. The book is well researched in the oral histories of the FSM as well as relying upon insightful interviews conducted by Cohen with Savio’s friends and associates. For access to Savio’s private papers, Cohen enjoyed the cooperation of Savio’s second wife, Lynne Hollander. Cohen also includes a selection of Savio’s speeches and writings from the FSM through his case against Proposition 209 to dismember affirmative action in California. Freedom’s Orator restores Mario Savio to his well deserved place within the political legacy of the 1960s which extends well beyond the exploits of the Weather Underground.

Posted on Sunday, January 24, 2010 at 8:06 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Jim Cullen, Review of "Emancipation: How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance" by Michael Goldfarb (Simon & Schuster, 2009)

Source: Special to HNN (1-19-10)

Posted on Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 10:47 AM | Comments (0) | Top

James G. Ryan. Review of Hirosoki Kuromiya's Voices of the Dead: Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s (Yale University Press, 2007)

[James G. Ryan is professor of history at Texas A&M University at Galveston. Among his books is Earl Browder: The Failure of American Communism (University of Alabama Press).]

“The voices of the dead recovered in this book are,” writes Hiroaki Kuromiya, those of ordinary men and women “who faced unwarranted death in their own desperate ways.” Joseph Stalin, who was certain no one would remember them, condemned them to oblivion. Ironically, his “efforts to extinguish their voices helped preserve them, in the depths of their case files.”

Kuromiya’s book represents a monumental social history achievement. Its methodology will doubtlessly inspire many imitators. The author, a master of many languages, has combed former NKVD (KGB) case files written in Russian and Ukrainian, and different archives compiled in Japanese, German, and English. He notes that we have a fairly accurate picture of the other unnatural deaths of millions during the 1930s in the collectivization of agriculture; dekulakization; famine; and forced labor. The Great Terror of 1937-38, however, has remained “an enigma.” Yet the latter constituted “an extremely concentrated wave of purposeful mass killings” that accounted for “91 percent of all political death sentences handed down between 1921 and 1940.” Stalin “used the Great Terror as a preemptive strike to prepare for war.” He and his close associates “firmly believed until the last days of their lives that the Great Terror was fully justified and that, without it, the Soviet Union would have been beaten in World War II.” The “lives of individuals meant absolutely nothing to Stalin.” Politics and power were absolute; the mass killings of 1937-38 were a purely political expedient.

Kuromiya notes that other authors have attempted to retrieve the voices of the lost. Yet such efforts have invariably related to persons “with at least some degree of fame, who left behind speeches, novels, stories, diaries, and other forms of self-expression.” Because “the vast majority” of Great Terror victims were “utterly unknown,” however, Kuromiya chronicles “workers, peasants, homemakers, teachers, priests, musicians, soldiers, pensioners, ballerinas [and] beggars.” Heretofore these “ordinary” persons had “attracted the attention of no one outside their own families and relatives.”

Only the author’s creative and insightful use of sources makes this book possible. Whereas during the medieval Inquisition “a notary took down nearly everything a defendant might utter during torture,” by contrast, the “records of the Great Terror appear to be little more than stacks of falsification.” An all-night session might produce only a single page of notes. While retrieving the voices of those who stood their ground and refused to confess is easy, admissions of guilt extracted by force require one to face what Kuromiya (and early modern French historian Natalie Zemon Davis) call “fiction in the archives.” Hence one cannot simply take case files and other police documents “at face value.” The author argues that confessions “written by interrogators and signed by the accused under duress” contain “just enough detail to be credible to the unsuspecting reader.”

Since the “slightest doubt about the Soviet system and its leaders constituted a political crime, formulaic remarks” such as “Stalin’s death will save Russia” and “People live better in the West than in the Soviet Union” were “obviously inserted into interrogation records by the police to lend the confessions credibility.” The sheer repetition of such comments in file after file supports Kuromiya’s assertion. He adds that “no attention was paid to consistency in confessions and testimonies,” therefore “contradictions abound.” For the historian, these flaws “provide the key to retrieving the hushed voices of the arrested.”

Kuromiya’s inventive use of sources goes a step further. Painstakingly, he locates differences between the longhand and typed notes of a confession. “The records of interrogations in which the accused denied the charges were not normally typed up afterwards, because they were not useful.” Furthermore, in nearly all cases the bill of indictment was typed, sometimes falsely stating that the accused had confessed. Missing documents mentioned in such bills often concern police informers and provocateurs, a practice used by security agencies around the world. “From dull and vapid files emerge concrete, individual and varied lives that have been condemned to oblivion.”

Kuromiya mined case files from Kiev because “today’s independent Ukraine allows greater access to information than does Russia.” Kiev also had the advantage of being closer to the Polish border and ethnically diverse, factors which always prompted Stalin’s suspicions. The author chooses several dozen cases at random, except when he encounters women’s names. “Given that women were affected by the Great Terror to a much lesser degree than men, and that women were much less likely to be executed,” he contends that such cases are extreme and possibly more revealing.

Still, cases chosen for this book happen to include persons representing most elements of Stalin’s varied paranoias. They include women who had affairs with foreign diplomats (all diplomats must be spies); informers (the KGB made agents out of compromised persons whom it distrusted, such as priests, yet service to the state did not relieve that distrust); monarchists (“the ultimate anathema, signifying the antithesis of the Soviet regime”; beggars (social parasites); Ukrainian peasants and Kulaks (ubiquitous enemies); Ukrainian folk singers (hidden Ukrainian nationalists); Koreans and Chinese (Japanese agents); persons with links to Germany, Latvia, and Romania (enemies on the borderlands); families divided across borders (sources of spies); and spouses who would not divorce persons accused of political crimes (those who valued private life over civic responsibility).

By filling in gaps in the record with penetrating analyses, thoughtful hypotheses, and speculations built logically on the events and beliefs of the times, Kuromiya brings the reader as close to the true lives of these ordinary people as we are ever likely to get. All of the executed (and some who escaped death) were later rehabilitated by the Soviet government. No relatives received apologies, however, much less compensation.

Posted on Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 8:53 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Kirk Bane: Review of "The Searchers" by Edward Buscombe (BFI, 2008)

[Kirk Bane is professor of history at Blinn College in Brenham, Texas.] On May 31, 1956, the Los Angeles Examiner gushed, “The grandeur, the beauty, the sweep and the tragic horror of the newest John Wayne-John Ford classic of the Old West…cannot, with justice, be detailed by mere words. Its scope is simply tremendous. Its motivation spine chillingly grim. Its setting the most starkly beautiful ever seen in a Western film.” Ladies and gentlemen, “The Searchers.” Fifty years on, reviewers and cinephiles still venerate this epic motion picture. In the 2002 Sight and Sound critics’ list of best movies, “The Searchers” ranked number eleven, tied with Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai.” And in his exceptional study The Searchers (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), film historian Edward Buscombe calls it “a touchstone…one of the great masterpieces of American cinema…one of those films by which Hollywood may be measured.”

Director John Ford’s masterwork featured an outstanding cast, including John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, Ward Bond, Natalie Wood, Henry Brandon, Ken Curtis, Harry Carey, Jr., and Hank Worden. Set in the Lone Star State in 1868, the plot concerns an Indian-hating, scalp-taking former Confederate, Ethan Edwards (Wayne), who spends years tracking the Comanche warriors who brutalized and murdered his family and kidnapped his young niece, Debbie (Wood). Joining Ethan on his obsessive quest, which covers hundreds of miles across Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, is mixed-blood youth Marty Pawley (Hunter), the “moral centre of the film, the one who, while all around him are driven by their prejudices, sees clearly that Debbie can and must be saved.” Buscombe contends that “there is a powerful irony in the fact that Marty is the one person in the film of mixed race, a ‘half-breed’ in Ethan’s casually insulting term; worth considering when charges of racism are thrown at Ford—or at the Western generally.”

Ford’s screenwriter, Frank Nugent, based his script on a 1954 Alan LeMay novel, originally published in the Saturday Evening Post as “The Avenging Texan.” LeMay probably used the ordeal of Cynthia Ann Parker, a little girl seized by Comanche raiders on the Texas frontier in 1836, as the inspiration for his story. A novelist, screenwriter, and “something of a Western specialist,” LeMay also authored The Unforgiven and worked for Cecil B. DeMille and Raoul Walsh.

Posted on Saturday, January 16, 2010 at 4:34 PM | Comments (1) | Top

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Marc-William Palen. Review of John Lukacs's "the Legacy of the Second World War" (Yale, 2010)

Jim Cullen, Review of Dick J. Reavis's "Catching Out: The Secret World of Day Laborers" (Simon & Schuster, 2010)

Jim Cullen, Review of Adam Haslett's "Union Atlantic: A Novel" (Doubleday, 2010)

Jim Cullen, Review of Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández's "The Best of the Best: Becoming Elite at an American Boarding School" (Harvard, 2009)

Luther Spoehr, Review of Frank Lambert’s “The Battle of Ole Miss: Civil Rights v. States’ Rights” (Oxford University Press, 2010).

Jim Cullen, Review of Adam Gopnik's "Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life" (Knopf, 2009)

Luther Spoehr, Review of Jonathan R. Cole's "The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National, Why It Must Be Protected" (PublicAffairs, 2010)

Jim Cullen, Review of Randi Hutter Epstein's "Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank" (Norton, 2010)

Jim Cullen, Review of "Rising Road: A True Tale of Love, Race and Religion in America" (Oxford, 2010)

Larry DeWitt, Review of Alan Brinkley's "Franklin Delano Roosevelt" (Oxford, 2010)

Jim Cullen, Review of "Lit: A Memoir," by Mary Karr (Harper, 2009)

Murray Polner. Review of Yehuda Bauer's The Death of the Shtetl (Yale University Press, 2009)

Murray Polner. Review of Stephen J. Taylor, Acts of Conscience: WWII, Mental Institutions and Religious Objectors (Syracuse University Press, 2009)

Jack Ross. Review of Jennifer Burns' Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford University Press, 2009)

Jim Cullen, Review of "Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son" (Harper, 2009)

Jim Cullen, Review of "Darker Than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture" by Paul Gilroy (Harvard University Press, 2010)

Ron Briley reviews Robert Cohen's Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Jim Cullen, Review of "Emancipation: How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance" by Michael Goldfarb (Simon & Schuster, 2009)

James G. Ryan. Review of Hirosoki Kuromiya's Voices of the Dead: Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s (Yale University Press, 2007)

Kirk Bane: Review of "The Searchers" by Edward Buscombe (BFI, 2008)

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