Books

Luther Spoehr, Review of Dan Barry’s “Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball’s Longest Game” (HarperCollins, 2011).

 [Luther Spoehr wrote over 40 biographical essays about baseball players for David L. Porter, ed., Dictionary of American Sports Biography]

Jim Cullen, Review of Sherry Turkle's "Alone Together: Why We Expect More of Technology and Less from Each Other" (Basic, 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. The first installment of his project "Sensing History: Hollywood Actors as Historians"  has just been published as a Kindle Single with the title President Hanks. Cullen blogs at American History Now.]

Jim Cullen, Review of Rob Lowe's "Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography" (Henry 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: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003), among other books. The first installment of his project "Sensing History: Hollywood Actors as Historians" is slated for publication as a Kindle Single this summer with the title "President Hanks." Cullen blogs at American History Now.]Rob Lowe is Forrest Gump with a brain.

Murray Polner Review of Sarah Burns, "The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of a City Wilding" (Knopf 2011)

New York City in the 1980s, the time period for Sarah Burns’ engrossing The Central Park Five,  was suffering from a level of poverty unseen in years, legions of men and women wandering the streets, a plague of drugs, prostitution, petty and major crimes, and deteriorating public venues, all of which added to the frustrations of its citizens and politicians.

Aaron Leonard, Review of Robin Blackburn's "An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln" (Verso, 2011)

One was the founder of communism, the other a pillar of American democracy. That, along with many other things, made them as different as night and day.  Yet they occupied the same historic period and profoundly affected their times.  They both opposed slavery, though perhaps not on the same moral grounds one would wish for by today’s standards.  They also both supported the principle of free labor—a concept that was essential to the emergent industrial economy that would soon transform the world.  The men were Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx.

Doug Ireland, Review of Allan Bérubé's "My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, & Labor History" (UNC Press, 2011)

At the height of World War II in 1943, a couple of soldiers stationed at South Carolina’s Myrtle Beach Bombing Range — Woodie Wilson and a six-foot-four queeny blond MP known as “Sister Kate” — had met so many queers in uniform on other Southern military bases they decided to start a newsletter for them, which they called the Myrtle Beach Bitch.

Jim Cullen, Review of Adam Goodheart's "1861: The Civil War Awakening" (Knopf, 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, and has embarked on a project with the working title of"Sensing History: Hollywood Actors as Historians." He blogs at American History Now.]

Murray Polner: Review of Adam Hochschild's "To End All Wars": A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2011)

Adam Hochschild’s haunting yet illuminating assessment of World War I (mainly concentrating on Great Britain) is a welcome addition to the vast historical and literary output literature of that pointless war. But it is different. By no means a detailed if conventional history of battles and strategies and politicians, it is, firstly, a powerful condemnation of a war that should never have been fought. The battle at Passchendaele (officially, the Third Battle of Ypres) cost the lives of at least 300,000 men.

Jim Cullen, Review of Emory Thomas's' "The Dogs of War 1861" (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, and has embarked on a project with the working title of "Sensing History: Hollywood Actors as Historians." He blogs at American History Now.]

Andrew Feffer: Review of Tony Shaw and Denise J. Youngblood's "Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds (University Press of Kansas, 2010)

Andrew Feffer is Associate Professor of History and co-Director of Film Studies at Union College.

Luther Spoehr, Review of Rodney A. Smolla's "The Constitution Goes to College: Five Constitutional Ideas that Have Shaped the American University" (New York University Press, 2011).

 [Luther Spoehr teaches courses on the history of American higher education at Brown University.]

Jim Cullen, Review of Tim Wu's "The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires" (Knopf, 2010)

[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, and has embarked on a project with the working title of "Sensing History: Hollywood Actors as Historians." He blogs at American History Now.]

Murray Polner: Review of David K. Shipler, " The Rights of the People: How Our Search for Safety Invades Our Liberties" (Knopf 2011)

David Shipler won a Pulitzer Prize for The Working Poor, an exemplary work that explored largely overlooked Americans having a hard time making ends meet. Now Shipler, a former reporter and foreign correspondent for the New York Times, turns his attention to the momentous impact September 11th and the resulting “War on Terror” has had on our personal freedoms.

Luther Spoehr, Review of "Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course on Getting His Kid into College" (Simon & Schuster, 2011).

[Luther Spoehr teaches courses on the history of American higher education at Brown University.] Journalist Andrew Ferguson, senior editor at the Weekly Standard and author of Land of Lincoln, has written a perfect book:  it makes you laugh and makes you think.  His two-year “crash course” ends with his son entering college, but getting there is both all and none of the fun.

Murray Polner: Review of Richard Overy’s 1939: Countdown to War (Viking 2010)

This slender volume by Richard Overy, professor of history at King’s College, London, and author of The Twilight Years: Why the Allies Won is an unflinching and gripping account of the tense ten days before Germany invaded Poland and the British and French then chose to honor its controversial obligation to defend Poland.

Jim Cullen, Review of Eric Felten's "Loyalty: The Vexing Virtue" (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, and has embarked on a project with the working title of "Sensing History: Hollywood Actors as Historians." He blogs at American History Now.]

Megan Brown, Review of Brooke L. Blower's "Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the World Wars," (Oxford, 2011)

Megan Brown is a graduate student in French History at the Graduate Center of City University of New York.

Jim Cullen, Review of John Lockwood and Charles Lockwood's "The Siege of Washington: The Untold Story of the Twelve Days that Shook the Union" (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, and has embarked on a project with the working title of "Sensing History: Hollywood Actors as Historians." He blogs at American History Now.]

Jim Cullen, Review of Christopher McKnight Nichols's "Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age" (Harvard, 2011)

by Jim Cullen

[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, and has embarked on a project with the working title of"Sensing History: Hollywood Actors as Historians." He blogs at American History Now.]

Review of Matthew B. Crawford's "Shop Class as Soulcraft"

by James Livingston

A quietly beautiful and deeply reactionary book.