We've mentioned reviews of Jill Leovy's Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America (Speigel & Grau) in previous weeks. This week there is a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books and another review in The Washington Post.Fittingly, the Los Angeles Review of Books reviews William J. Mann's Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (Harper).
Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism (Allen Lane) is reviewed in The Oxonian Review.
In administrative law you can find a comprehensive review by Jon D. Michaels of Nicholas Parrillo's Against the Profit Motive (Yale University Press) in the Harvard Law Review (available here).
There's also a review in The New Rambler of Daniel R. Ernst's Tocqueville's Nightmare: The Administrative State Emerges in America, 1900-1940 (Oxford University Press).
"Ernst’s narrative is highly readable and strikes just the right balance among the historian’s love of detail, the lawyer’s need for conceptual organization, and the political theorist’s addiction to high-level principles."NPR reviews David Graeber's The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Melville House).
There are two reviews this week of Rachel Holmes's Eleanor Marx: A Life (Bloomsbury), one in the Los Angeles Times and a second in the The Washington Post.
The Daily Beast reviews Julian Zelizer's The Fierce Urgency of Now.
H-Net adds a review of Timothy Nels Thurber's Republicans and Race: The GOP's Frayed Relationship with African Americans, 1945-1974 (University Press of Kansas).
Other H-Net postings include a review of Tribal Worlds: Critical Studies in American Indian Nation Building edited by Brian Hosmer and Larry Nesper (SUNY Press) and a review of Ravi Malhotra and Morgan Rowe's Exploring Disability Identity and Disability Rights through Narratives: Finding a Voice of Their Own (Routledge)"Thurber sets out to challenge both liberal arguments that the “Party of Lincoln” abandoned its long-standing commitment to civil rights during the 1960s, embracing a racially reactionary politics for electoral gain in the post-civil rights era, as well as conservative arguments that attempt to paint the GOP as a kind of forgotten champion of civil rights. Instead, Thurber attempts to cut a middle path between these rhetorical poles. He argues that, indeed, the Republican Party’s relationship was much more complicated than often admitted and that “Republicans exerted considerable influence over the timing and content of racial policy” throughout this period (p. 3). "
Salon reviews Ed Larson's The Return of George Washington: 1783-1789 (William Morrow) in an article titled, "You have George Washington all wrong: Why he was more like Reagan or Clinton than you think."Earlier this week we noted the release of Madison's Music: On Reading the First Amendment by Burt Neuborne (New Press). There's an excerpt from the book available now in Salon, "The First Amendment as we know it today didn't exist until the '60s."
If you can't get enough of the founders this weekend, you can find a review of David O. Stewart's Madison's Gift: Five Partnerships that Built America (Simon & Schuster) in The Washington Post.
New Books in Law has a conversation with J. Douglas Smith about his book, On Democracy's Doorstep: The Inside Story of How the Supreme Court Brought "One Person, One Vote" to the United States (Hill and Wang).
They also posted an interview with Joseph M. Gabriel in which they discuss Medical Monopoly: Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutical Industry (University of Chicago Press).
The Nation reviews Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala by Kirsten Weld (Duke University Press).
In other book news:
- The New Statesman celebrates the fortieth anniversary of the Feminist Library in London.
- NPR has published a book list for Black History Month, "How Black Lives Have Always Mattered: A Reading List."
- The New Yorker has this new guide on reading posture.
