Books

Review of Lesley M.M. Blume's “Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises”

by Robert Huddleston

The story of the novel that made Hemingway's reputation.

Review of Micki McElya's "The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington Cemetery"

by Murray Polner

The fascinating story of the war dead both included and excluded from America’s national war memorial.

Review of Robert A. Rosenstone’s “Adventures of a Postmodern Historian”

by Minsoo Kang

With Robert A. Rosenstone’s fascinating life story, his significant body of work, and his considerable talent as a writer, Adventures of a Postmodern Historian makes an important contribution to the study of the historian in the production of history.

Review of Phil Hall's "In Search of Lost Films"

by Adam Simms

The marvelous and often appalling stories of films lost to history -- and some which were recovered.

Review of Joseph Lelyveld's "His Final Battle: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt"

by Luther Spoehr

In failing health, with trips to take and weighty decisions to make, in his last 18 months Franklin Roosevelt spent remarkably little time in the public eye.

Review of William J. Perry's "My Journey at the Nuclear Brink”

by Bill Griffin

Perry explains how he moved from a Cold Warrior in favor of nuclear weapons to an opponent of them.

Review of Meredith Tax's "A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State"

by Ralph Seliger

The female Syrian-Kurdish fighters who are inspiring a new generation of leftists.

Review of Elizabeth Hinton's "From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime"

by Tony Platt

There can’t possible be anything more to say about this topic? Wrong.

Review of Bruce Springsteen’s "Born to Run"

by John Johnson

Springsteen’s verbal artistry is frequently on display in his autobiography just as in his hundreds of recorded songs.

Review of “ ‘All the Real Indians Died Off’: And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans,” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker

by William Loren Katz

It's a book for our time.

Review of Monique Laney's “German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past During the Civil Rights Era”

by Robert Huddleston

"While library shelves are sagging from books covering the Second World War, room must be found for Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie."

Review of Kenneth Robert Janken’s “The Wilmington Ten: Violence, Injustice, and the Rise of Black Politics in the 1970s”

by John L. Godwin

Kenneth Janken is a distinguished scholar in his field but this book leaves too many topics unexplored and feels strangely stuck in the past.

Review of Arkady Ostrovsky’s “The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev’s Freedom to Putin’s War”

by Walter G. Moss

After the USSR fell Russia needed an ideology.  Putin settled on patriotism, collectivism, derzhavnost—a tradition of being a great geopolitical state power that commands the attention of other countries—and gosudarstvennichestvo, the primacy of the state.

Review of John le Carré's "The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life"

by Murray Polner

A memoir that shows the author to great advantage.

Review of Jeffrey Rosen's " Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet"

by Henry D. Fetter

Today, no one with the high profile, politically engaged and robustly controversial record of Brandeis is likely to be nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court.

Review of Howard Means's "67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence"

by Luther Spoehr

Clearing the smoke away from 13 fateful seconds.

Review of Lloyd C. Gardner's "The War on Leakers: National Security and American Democracy, From Eugene V. Debs to Edward Snowden"

by Murray Polner

Obama's blind spot.

Review of Michael Leahy's "The Last Innocents: The Collision of the Turbulent Sixties and the Los Angeles Dodgers"

by Henry D. Fetter

The unfulfilled ambitions of this book are probably beside the point for most readers who will be much more interested in the compelling baseball stories.

Review of Brian J. Snee's "Lincoln Before Lincoln: Early Cinematic Adaptations of the Life of America’s Greatest President "

by Ron Briley

There's Spielberg's Lincoln and then there's all the rest.  His featured the Great Emancipator.  The others mostly focused on Lincoln's role as the savior of the Union.

Review of Ronald A. Smith’s "Wounded Lions: Joe Paterno, Jerry Sandusky, and the Crisis in Penn State Athletics"

by Ron Briley

"Wounded Lions" by Penn State sport historian Ronald Smith makes extensive use of university archives to document how Penn State lost control of its athletic program, and how Paterno played a key role in this process.