Sunday, May 11, 2014

Sunday Book Roundup


The Washington Independent Review of Books reviews John Paul Stevens's Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution (Little).

Steven Hahn has an interesting review of David Brion Davis's The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (Knopf) in the New Republic.
"Indeed, to say that The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation is less than we might have expected is not to say that it lacks for insights, new material, and a real sense of fulfilling the trilogy as a whole. Like all of Davis’s previous volumes, this one is organized around the large theme of dehumanization and its historical implications: what it meant for societies to deprive people of their humanity, to subject them to animalization. Here Davis is interested in the repercussions for blacks as well as whites, especially as slavery came under growing political attack, and therefore in how the path out of enslavement could be imagined."
The Washington Post has a review of David Kaiser's No End Save Victory: How FDR Led the Nation into War (Basic).

Salon has has an excerpt of Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism by Benjamin Ross (Oxford University Press).

Antionette Burton's Empire in Question: Reading, Wrtiting, and Teaching British Imperialism (Duke University Press) is reviewed on H-Net.

There are two reviews this week of The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas by Anand Giridharadas (Norton). The Salon review is here, and The New York Times review is here.
"This is a book about the many dimensions of America, not the many interpretations of Islam. “The True American” gives you new eyes on your nation, makes you wonder about both the recent South Asian immigrant behind the counter at the food mart and the tattooed white man behind you in line. It reminds you that there are some Americas where mercy flows freely, and other Americas where it has turned to ice."
In The Wall Street Journal there is a review of Bruce Ackerman's The Civil Rights Revolution (Belknap).

And, Beyond Chron has a review of The Streets of San Francisco by Christopher Agee (University of Chicago Press).