Also no longer behind paywall is Jeremy Waldron's "It's All for Your Own Good," a review of two Cass Sunstein books: Why Nudge? The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism (Yale University Press) and Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas (Simon & Schuster).
Not enough Cass Sunstein? He reviews Richard J. Evan's Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History (Brandeis University Press) for the New Republic."To those who enjoy such speculation, Evans will seem a bit of a killjoy, and he seems to be fascinated, perhaps in spite of himself, by the subject. His exploration of counterfactual history is in part a history of the topic. In his account, one of the noteworthy early publications was Louis Geoffrey’s Napoleon and the Conquest of the World, in 1836, which offers a narrative in which Napoleon ultimately conquers China, Japan, and the United States, and is deemed “Ruler of the World.” Geoffrey much admired Napoleon, and as the example suggests, much writing in this vein tends to reflect wishful thinking (and to be self-consciously whimsical)."The Los Angeles Review of Books takes a look at Erwin Chemerinsky's The Case Against the Supreme Court (Viking).
Law & Politics Book Review has released September's Book Notices, a "brief summary of the contents of recent reference works, anthologies of previously published materials, textbooks and collected readings designed for students, casebooks designed for undergraduate and law school use, later editions of books previously reviewed in this journal, and other specialized publications."
New Books in Law adds an interview with Guy Chet about his work, The Ocean is a Wilderness: Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State Authority (University of Massachusetts Press).
And, New Books in History has an interview with Todd Henry who discusses Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Spaces in Colonial Korea (University of California Press).The Washington Post reviews Landslide: LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America by Jonathan Darman (Random House).
H-Net also has several new reviews of note--especially in the fields of gender and sexuality. The first is Karsonya Wise Whitehead's Notes from a Colored Girl: The Civil War Pocket Diaries of Emilie Frances Davis (University of South Carolina Press).
"Karsonya Wise Whitehead provides readers with a transcription of and a history about the diaries of Emilie Frances Davis, a free woman of color who lived and worked in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Whitehead relates the fascinating way she went about reading and understanding Davis’s diaries. Readers of Whitehead’s volume will be pleased with the text; moreover, scholars will be inspired to pursue new research projects thanks to Whitehead’s excellent transcription, outstanding contextualization, and generous observations."There is also a review of an edited volume, Sex and Disability (Duke University Press), edited by Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow.
"Sex has, sometimes, been a topic of disability activists and scholars who challenged the notion of the desexualized disabled subject. While disability has, to a much lesser extent, been discussed in queer studies, scholars of disability studies and especially disability theory have increasingly pointed to the intersections or analogies of sex and disability, of queer theory and disability theory, and of compulsory heterosexuality and able-bodiedness. With Sex and Disability, Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow present an anthology that takes up these strands."And lastly, H-Net as a review of Mira Lloyd Dock and the Progressive Era Conservation Movement (Penn State University Press) by Susan Rimby.
