Sunday, July 12, 2009

Sunday book review round-up: books on conservatives, California, Lena Horne, Satchel Page, and more

THE CONSERVATIVES: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History by Patrick Allitt in the Boston Globe by former congressman Mickey Edwards.

Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963 by Kevin Starr is reviewed in the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Civil rights history is a part of Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne by James Gavin, reviewed in the Los Angeles Times. Another civil rights story, SATCHEL: The Life and Times of an American Legend by Larry Tye is taken up in the Washington Post.

DANGEROUS GAMES: The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan is reviewed in the Washington Post.

Still "Ugly" After All These Years, is an essay in the NY Times on William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick’s 1958 novel The Ugly American. And the New York Times remembers Lloyd Gaines, who mysteriously disappeared after winning his civil rights case against the University of Missouri in 1938, a stepping stone to Brown v. Board of Education.