Sunday Book Roundup

A new set of book reviews are out in the December issue of The Federal Lawyer including reviews of

• Allan C. Hutchinson's Is Eating People Wrong? Great Legal Cases and How They Shaped the World (Cambridge University Press); 
• Thomas Healy's The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind--and Changed the History of Free Speech in America (Metropolitan Books);  
• Barbara Babcock's Woman Lawyer: The Trials of Clara Foltz (Stanford University Press). 

The Los Angeles Review of Books has a new review of Randall Kennedy's For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law (Pantheon) written by Richard Sander at UCLA Law.

H-Net posted this week a review of a volume edited by Thomas Welskopp and Alan Lessoff, Fractured Modernity: America Confronts Modern Times, 1890s to 1940s (Oldenbourg Verlag). The book includes a piece by Manfred Berg who "presents a convincing argument for the ways that the preponderance of lynching in nineteenth-century America was intertwined--rather than at odds--with the modern civilizing process. In his view, the extralegal punishment that characterized lynch mobs in the American South originated in colonial notions that the community writ large bore the responsibility for the punishment for criminal acts."

Also on H-Net is a review of Thomas Boghardt's The Zimmermann Telegram: Intelligence, Diplomacy, and America's Entry into World War I (Naval Institute Press), as well as a review of José Angel Hernández's Mexican American Colonization during the Nineteenth Century: A History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Cambridge). Reviewer Sterling Evans writes

"Hernández’s conclusion is excellent! Readers get a useful review of the three types of repatriation (private, collective, and government-sponsored), and learn--perhaps a bit late for the book--of the overall significance of the study: an estimated 25 percent of Mexican Americans in these years returned to Mexico. Of course, this shows that a vast majority did not migrate southward, clearly illustrating that Mexican colonization policy more often did not result in the desired end. He then brings some of these findings and arguments to the present to discuss the current situation of México de afuera and the whole discourse of expanded Mexican (cultural, demographic) boundaries. "

Still another thoughtful review on H-Net is that of Kirt Von Daacke's Freedom Has a Face: Race, Identity, and Community in Jefferson's Virginia (Univ. of Virginia Press).

In the latest New York Review of Books Robert Darton reviews The Allure of the Archives by Arlette Farge, translated by Thomas Scott-Railton and forward by Natalie Zemon Davis (Yale Press).

Salon has published both a review of, and excerpt from, Jacqueline Jones's Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's America (Basic Books).

Last week's "Best Books of 2013" post has also been updated.