The Law and Politics Book Review has released its latest issue online. Richard Cosgrove reviews Lawyers, the Law and History: Irish Legal History Society Discourses and Other Papers, 2005-2011 edited by Felix M. Larkin and N.M. Dawson (Four Courts Press). And, G. Alan Tarr reviews Melissa Schwartzberg's Counting the Many: The Origins and Limits of Supermajority Rule (Cambridge University Press).Salon has an excerpt from Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy by Kyle G. Volk (Oxford University Press), titled "Desegregating New York City: The amazing pre-Civil War history of public transit integration in the North."
Mark Boulton's Failing Our Veterans: The GI Bill and the Vietnam Generations (NYU Press) is reviewed on HNN."Mark Boulton’s book “Failing Our Veterans” is a comprehensive and compelling legislative history which skillfully details how ideology, economic and personal and political biases have shaped the way vets have been dealt with from the Revolutionary era to Vietnam."H-Net has a review of Ava Chamberlain's Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle: Marriage, Murder, and Madness in the Family of Jonathan Edwards (NYU Press).
"The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle: Marriage, Murder, and Madness in the Family of Jonathan Edwards is a book that embodies many characterizations. It is a biography of the “crazy” grandmother of the influential theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703-58); a fascinating story of marriage, divorce, and their legal complexities in the colonial United States; a stark reminder that family life “back in the day” (as my students insist on saying) was not all roses and happiness; an argument that gender deviance powerfully affected both men and women in colonial America; a smart and beautifully analyzed insistence that historiography is neither boring nor irrelevant; and, most interesting to me, an example of how historically changing conceptions of madness—as a perhaps sad but routine aspect of human diversity, as deadly but individual deviance, as biological pollution that haunts families across generations—shaped the family stories, the historiography, and the theological interpretations of both Elizabeth Tuttle Edwards and her famed grandson Jonathan Edwards."Also on H-Net is a review of Hal Brands's What Good is Grand Strategy? Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush (Cornell University Press).
