Sunday Book Roundup

The New York Review of Books reviews three books and a film in "He Remade Our World," including George W. Bush's Decision Points (Broadway), Barton Gellman's Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency (Penguin), Dick and Liz Cheney's In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir (Threshold).

Ira Katznelson reviews Gavin Wright's Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South (Harvard University Press) in the NYRB.  Also reviewed is Camilo Jose Vergara's Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto (University of Chicago Press).

An older piece we missed in the NYRB from January is Robert Darton's review of Arlette Farge's The Allure of the Archives (Yale University Press) in a piece titled "The Good Way to Do History."

There are many reviews to highlight on H-Net this week, including a review of the edited volume Reaching a State of Hope: Refugees, Immigrants and the Swedish Welfare State, 1930-2000 (Nordic Academic Press). Another edited volume with a European focus is Thomas Maulucci and Detlef Junker's GIs in Germany: The Social, Economic, Cultural and Political History of the American Military Presence (Cambridge University Press) (reviewed here). And speaking of military history, H-Net also adds a review of Susan Brewer's Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq (Oxford University Press).

Still more reviews from H-Net include a three book review titled "Sammelrez: On the Uses of History in Contemporary American Foreign Policy Debates." Books include Zbigniew Brzezinski's Strategic Vision: American and the Crisis of Global Power (Basic), Robert Kagan's The World America Made (Knopf), and Charles Kupchan's No One's World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn (Oxford). There's also a review of Toyin Falola's The African Diaspora: Slavery, Modernity, and Globalization (Boydell & Brewer), here. Peo Hansen and Sandy Brian Hager's The Politics of European Citizenship: Deepening Contradictions in Social Rights and Migration Policy (Berghahn Books) is also reviewed on H-Net.



One last review from H-Net is that of Iwan Morgan and Philip Davies's edited volume From Sit-ins to SNCC: The Student Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s (University Press of Florida).

"In close detail, From Sit-Ins to SNCC examines specific aspects of the sit-in movement to develop a fuller and more complicated snapshot of SNCC, which had grown out of this early student-driven trend. Contributors track the movement from its first wildfire bursts in 1960 (Morgan); through white segregationists’ ideological, legal, and physical reactions to student protests (John Kirk, George Lewis, Clive Webb); to SNCC’s changing membership, vision of community, and use of Cold War rhetoric (Peter Ling, Joe Street, Simon Hall); before finally crossing the pond to explore the group’s transnational exchange of ideas with student leaders in the United Kingdom and newly emerging African democracies (Stephen Tuck)."

The Federal Lawyer has great reviews this week too. Included is a review by Elizabeth Kelley of Toobin's The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court (Doubleday) and Marcia Coyle's The Roberts Court: The Struggle for the Constitution (Simon & Schuster).  Marianne Wesson's A Death at Crooked Creek: The Case of the Cowboy, the Cigarmaker, and the Love Letter (NYU Press) and Gerard Magliocca's American Founding Son: John Bingham and the Invention of the Fourteenth Amendment (NYU Press) each receive their own reviews. All reviews can be found here.

You'll also find a review of The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (University of Chicago Press) by Fred Turner on the Los Angeles Review of Books.

The Oxonian Review takes a look at Anthony Pagden's The Englightenment: and Why It Still Matters (Oxford University Press) in a piece that asks "Why History, Exactly?", and the Oxonian also reviews John Darwin's Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (Penguin) here.

In the Wall Street Journal Richard A. Epstein's The Classical Liberal Constitution (Harvard University Press) is reviewed.

The New York Times reviews Summer in the City: John Lindsay, New York, and the American Dream (Johns Hopkins University Press) edited by Joseph Viteritti. Richard Steier's Enough Blame to Go Around: The Labor Pains of New York City's Public Employee Unions (SUNY Press) is reviewed here. The Times also adds yet another review of David Brion Davis's The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (Knopf).

And finally, the Washington Post reviews The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur (Basic) by Mark Perry.