Books

Jack Ross: Review of Michael Kazin’s "American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation" (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011)

Jack Ross wrote "Rabbi Outcast: Elmer Berger and American Jewish Anti-Zionism" and is now writing a history of the Socialist Party of America.The years since the election of Barack Obama have not been kind to the reputation of idealism, to say nothing of the ancient bugaboo of socialism.  A small literature has thus inevitably cropped up to defend the honor of the historic Left against the rhetorical onslaught of a Right which, in sharp contrast to the Right of just a generation ago, does not even seem to know or care what socialism is.  The S Word by John Nichols provided a competent basic retort to those who would slander the legacy of American socialism, but especially to anyone wishing to understand why the American Left still matters a generation after the fall of communism and now in the age of Obama and the Tea Party.

Jim Cullen, Review of Cameron McWhirter's "Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America" (Holt, 2011)

[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 The American Dream: Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003), among other books. He is also the author of the recently published Kindle Single e-book President Hanks. Cullen blogs at American History Now.]

Luther Spoehr, Review of Jim Lehrer's "Tension City: Inside the Presidential Debates, from Kennedy-Nixon to McCain-Obama" (Random House, 2011).

Luther Spoehr is an HNN Book Editor and a Senior Lecturer at Brown University.Richard Nixon’s pallor contrasting with John F. Kennedy’s “vigah” in 1960.Jerry Ford momentarily forgetting about the Iron Curtain when facing Jimmy Carter in 1976.Ronald Reagan pinning Jimmy Carter like a butterfly in 1980:  “There you go again.”Al Gore sighing as George W. Bush speaks in 2000.John McCain avoiding eye contact with Barack Obama in 2008.Every presidential debate seems to have a signature moment or situation that eclipses—or perhaps encapsulates—everything else that happens in it.  Jim Lehrer of the PBS NewsHour, moderator for eleven debates, takes the reader back and behind the scenes to those he moderated and some he didn’t, as he captures what it’s like “walking down the blade of a sharp knife [where] one little false move can affect the outcome of a presidential election.”

Lawrence Wittner, Review of "Mohamed ElBaradei’s The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times" (Metropolitan Books, 2011)

Dr. Lawrence Wittner is Professor of History emeritus at the State University of New York/Albany.  His latest book is "Confronting the Bomb:  A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement" (Stanford University Press).Can international diplomacy cope with the nuclear dangers that now threaten global survival?  In The Age of Deception, Mohamed ElBaradei makes the case that it can—if only national governments would make a good faith effort to support it.ElBaradei is a former international civil servant who once headed the Egyptian Bar Association, taught courses on international law at NYU Law School, and, from 1997 to 2009, served as Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations entity charged with preventing the use of nuclear energy for military purposes.  It is also worth noting that he and the IAEA shared the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize and that he was a leader in the recent pro-democracy uprising in Egypt.

Matt Pembleton, Review of Eric C. Schneider's "Smack: Heroin and the American City" (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)

Matt Pembleton is a PhD candidate at American University, currently writing a dissertation on the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and U.S. national security.Smack: Heroin and the American City is an urban history of heroin.  But author Eric C. Schneider is interested in more than just narcotics; he recreates the environments which have shaped heroin use in America to demonstrate the importance of the “social setting” in understanding drug abuse.  Complaining that too often the city is seen as “only a backdrop against which events occurred, rather than a primary shaper of those events,” Schneider highlights what he describes as “the spatial dimension of heroin use,” to illustrate the relationship between social groups, in this case drug-using subcultures, and the physical spaces that harbor them.  Schneider believes that understanding the link between drug use and social setting is the key to any successful policy response.

Murray Polner, Review of Peter Van Buren’s “We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle For the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People” (Metropolitan Books, 2011)

Murray Polner is a book review editor for HNN.This book by a State Department insider and eyewitness turned whistle-blower is about our misadventures in Iraq.  Andrew Bacevich, the prescient author of the recently published Washington Rules,shrewdly noted that years after the self-serving memoirs (mainly ghost-written) by the major actors in the invasion and occupation “are consigned to some landfill,” Peter Van Buren’s sensible, funny, and ultimately sad portrait of  failed nation-building will need to be resurrected and read and re-read, especially in our schools and media offices, the latter because so many publications and TV commentators were cheerleaders for the invasion.

Aaron Leonard: Review of Carlos Ulises Decena's "Tacit Subjects: Belonging and Same-Sex Desire among Dominican Immigrant Men" (Duke, 2011)

Aaron Leonard is a freelance journalist.One learns many things in Carlos Decena’s book, Tacit Subjects, but the most revealing perhaps is that gay men living in the Dominican Republic tend to stay in the closet.  There are many reasons for this, but the greatest is because the culture of that country—it is macho in a most awful way.  What does that mean?  As one of Decenas’ informants (the men he interviewed for the book) put it, quoting his father, “If you turn out to be a faggot I’ll kill you.”

Jim Cullen, Review of Sylvia Nasar's "Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius" (Simon & Schuster, 2011)

[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 The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003), among other books. He is also the author of the recently published Kindle Single e-book President Hanks. Cullen blogs at American History Now.]

Eric Laursen, Review of Bernard E. Harcourt's "The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order" (Harvard University Press, 2011)

Eric Laursen is an independent journalist living in western Massachusetts. He is co-author of Understanding the Crash (Soft Skull Press/Counterpoint, 2010) and author of the forthcoming The People’s Pension: The War Against Social Security from Reagan to Obama (AK Press, Spring, 2012). Last December, Wall Street's leading banks were fighting tooth-and-nail to keep federal regulators from setting rules governing the vast market in financial derivatives contracts – the market that helped turn the 2008 mortgage-backed securities meltdown into a global catastrophe. The regulators were developing rules to implement the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill – rules that, among other things, were supposed to make the derivatives market more transparent.Then an article appeared in the New York Times that seemed to blur the outline of this reform scenario. Titled “A Secretive Banking Elite Rules Derivatives Trading,” the article, by Louise Story, detailed how nine big banks had virtually captured the new regulatory regime before it even got started. One of Dodd-Frank's provisions called for most derivatives to be traded via clearinghouses, putting buyers and sellers in closer touch with each other and cutting out middlemen.

Jim Cullen: Review of John Marsh's "Class Dismissed: Why We Can't Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality" (Monthly Review Press, 2011)

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 The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003), among other books. He is also the author of the recently published Kindle Single e-book President Hanks. Cullen blogs at American History Now.In general, college professors are not particularly well-regarded as political analysts (the noun "academic" is a term of unvarnished contempt in precincts like FOX news). But there is a special circle of irrelevance reserved for English professors, who are not typically known for their quantitative acumen -- or, for that matter, their ability to write in a language the rest of us understand. So it was with some trepidation that I picked up this book by John Marsh, who teaches at the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana. Amazingly, I encountered a work of deft econometrics. Even more amazing, it's clear, lively, and realistic.

Luther Spoehr, Review of Shamus Rahman Khan’s “Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School” (Princeton University Press, 2011).

[Luther Spoehr, an HNN Book Editor, is Senior Lecturer in the Education Department at Brown University.]Nearly 30 years ago, when Sara Lawrence Lightfoot wrote The Good High School (1984), she subtitled her book “Portraits of Character and Culture.”  One of the six schools she portrayed was St. Paul’s, the exclusive boarding school—one of the so-called “St. Grottlesex” group—located in Concord, New Hampshire.   In a chapter called “Certainty, Privilege, and the Imprint of History,” she limned students, faculty, and administration, and concluded that the school was characterized by an “Eriksonian emphasis” on “trust, industry, and economy.”

Marjorie Cohn: Review of Deepak Tripathi, "Breeding Ground: Afghanistan and the Origins of Islamist Terrorism" (Potomac Books, Inc., 2011)

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School, past president of the National Lawyers Guild, and editor, most recently, of The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse (NYU Press) After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the Bush administration rolled out its “Global War on Terror.”  Although the Obama White House doesn’t use that moniker, many of its policies are indistinguishable from those of its predecessor.  Both administrations have focused on combating the symptoms of terrorism rather than grappling with its root causes.  Longtime BBC correspondent Deepak Tripathi was based in Kabul, Afghanistan for 15 months in the early 1990s, where he gained a unique perspective about the genesis of terrorism from his access to Afghan leaders and citizens during the civil war following the expulsion of the communist regime there.Breeding Ground makes a significant contribution toward understanding the origins and triggers of terrorism.  Tripathi traces the development of a ‘culture of violence’ in Afghanistan—largely due to resistance against foreign invasion—from the “U.S.-led proxy war” against the USSR to the current U.S. war.  Without such historical insight, efforts to make us safe from acts of terror will prove futile.

Ron Briley: Review of "The Cambridge Companion to Baseball," edited by Leonard Cassuto and Stephen Partridge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Ron Briley is a history teacher and an assistant headmaster at Sandia Preparatory School in Albuquerque, New Mexico.Both the casual fan and baseball scholar should find The Cambridge Companion to Baseball a delightful read and companion for their enjoyment of a popular sport whose claim to be the national pastime is, nevertheless, somewhat dubious for this modern age.  Editors Leonard Cassuto and Stephen Partridge have compiled fifteen essays, along with interchapters focusing upon important baseball personalities, prepared primarily by academics.  The essays are well-written and cover a wide range of issues from literature, film, and material culture to history, economics, race relations, and international development of the game, which is also a business.  The editors assert, “The story of baseball is, in an important way, the story of the interaction between the myth of the national pastime and the reality of the baseball business.  The tension between these two is what drives this book” (2). 

Alan Singer, Review of Daniel Rasmussen's "American Uprising, The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt" (HarperCollins, 2011)

Alan Singer is a historian and Professor of Secondary Education at Hofstra University, author of New York and Slavery: Time to Teach the Truth (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008), and editor of the New York and Slavery: Complicity and Resistance curriculum that received the 2005 National Council for the Social Studies program of excellence award. We are now in the middle of the sesquicentennial (150th) anniversary commemoration of the American Civil War, the tenth anniversary of 9/11, and the 2012 Tea Party/presidential election campaign, and everything about the American past is politicized. In an earlier article posted on the History News Network, I discussed how presidential candidate Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota) was creating her own version of the history of the nation’s founders and of nineteenth century abolitionists to support her belief in the specialness of the United States as a place where the inherent faith of the founders in liberty allowed the nation to eliminate the stain of slavery.  In the article, I pointed out that in a sense Bachmann was half right.  While Washington and Jefferson supported the enslavement of Africans in the United States, many of the nation’s founders from New York State were opponents of slavery and did work to bring it to an end.

Jim Cullen, Review of Richard Miles's "Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization" (Viking, 2011)

[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 The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003), among other books. He is also the author of the recently published Kindle Single e-book President Hanks. Cullen blogs at American History Now.]

Murray Polner: Review of David A. Ansell, MD’s, “County: Life, Death and Politics at Chicago’s Public Hospital” (Academy Chicago Publishers, 2011)

Not long ago I was hospitalized for ten days.  Insurance paid for most of my expenses. The doctors, nurses and facilities were outstanding as was my post-hospitalization follow-ups by visiting RNs.  Now compare my experience with Dr. David Ansell’s County, about the seventeen years he worked at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital, a safety net hospital dubbed “County” by the poor and largely uninsured people of color it served.  It had once been praised for establishing the nation’s first blood bank and trauma unit.  By 1995, however, when Ansell left, it had become a dumping ground for the poorest of the poor, as he describes it in his gripping, angry and ultimately very sad chronicle.

Jim Cullen: Review of Peter Heather's "Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe" (Oxford, 2012)

Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. His new book, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions, is slated for publication by Oxford University Press later this year. Cullen blogs at American History Now.

Luther Spoehr, Review of John Patrick Diggins, “Why Niebuhr Now?” (University of Chicago Press, 2011).

[Luther Spoehr is an HNN Book Editor and  Senior Lecturer in Education and History at Brown University.]For the past 40 years or so, religious voices raised in public debate—think Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and the like--have mainly occupied the conservative side of the political spectrum.  (Indeed, as I write, a number of Tea Partiers who oppose raising the debt ceiling because God told them to, seem to be on the verge of falling off the end of that spectrum entirely.)  It was not always thus, of course.  Martin Luther King, Jr., was only the most prominent ministerial civil rights advocate in the 1960s, and the movement opposing the Vietnam War found much of its rationale from clergy such as William Sloane Coffin and the Berrigan brothers.  But before all of them, with writings and lectures that wove philosophical thought and religious conviction as organically and eloquently as any of them, there was Niebuhr.

Jim Cullen, Review of James T. Sparrow's "Warfare State: World War II and the Age of Big Government (Oxford, 2011)

[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 The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003), among other books. He is also the author of the recently published Kindle Single e-book President Hanks. Cullen blogs at American History Now.]

Jim Cullen, Review of Terry H. Anderson's "Bush's Wars" (Oxford, 2011)

[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 The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003), among other books. He is also the author of the recently published Kindle Single e-book President Hanks. Cullen blogs at American History Now.]It is often said that journalism is the first draft of history. Bush's Wars is presented as the first major comprehensive study of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, an effort to weigh the foreign policy legacy of President George W. Bush. This is how the blurbs and publicity for the book position it, and the way Terry H. Anderson puts it in his introduction: "to 'figure out,' in Bush's words, the history of the defining policies of his presidency -- and to do it during his lifetime."