Sunday, March 8, 2015

Sunday Book Roundup

H-Net adds a review of Roger Daniels's The Japanese American Cases: The Rule of Law in Time of War (University Press of Kansas).
"While his earlier work examines the internment process and events primarily during the Second World War and briefly recalls the redress after the war, Daniels’s most recent work describes in detail Japanese Americans’ legal battles during and after the Second World War and the progression of the Japanese community in American society to the present day."
Also up on H-Net is a review of David La Vere's Tuscarora War: Indians, Settlers, and the Fight for the Carolina Colonies (UNC Press).

Jessica Mathews's "The Road from Westphalia" reviews Henry Kissinger's World Order (Penguin) and Bret Stephens America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Social Disorder (Sentinel) in The New York Review of Books.

The Los Angeles Review of Books reviews Henry A. Giroux's Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education (Haymarket Books).
"HENRY GIROUX correctly sees that universities, at their best, prepare students for a citizen’s role that is informed, critical, and visionary. He views the goal of neoliberalism, by contrast, as cultivating education that prepares the student to be a reflexive supporter of the status quo, take orders uncritically, and accept consumerism as a major desire and goal in public and private life."
There is an excerpt from They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy by Robert Scheer (Nation) in Salon.

Margaret Jacobs discusses her new book, A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Post-War World (University of Nebraska Press), with New Books in American Studies.

The Guardian reviews The End of Apartheid: Diary of a Revolution by Robin Renwick (Biteback).

Seana Shiffrin discusses Speech Matters: On Lying, Morality, and the Law (Princeton University Press) with New Books in Law.

Eric Posner reviews Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law During the Great War by Isabel V. Hull (Cornell University Press) in The New Rambler.
"Hull’s key point is that for all that, governments—or officials within the governments—spent countless hours debating the minutiae of international law. Even the Germans did. Indeed, Hollweg himself acknowledged that Germany had committed an injustice by invading Belgium and announced that Germany would “seek to make [the injustice] good as soon as our military goal is reached.” (p. 44). That these debates frequently occurred in confidential meetings inside governments suggest that officials took the law seriously, and didn’t just trot out arguments to rationalize actions that they had decided on for military reasons."
There are two reviews of Robert Putnam's new book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (Simon & Schuster): one in The Washington Post here, and a second in The New York Times here.

Chen Guangcheng's memoir, The Barefoot Lawyer: A Blind Man's Fight for Justice and Freedom in China (Henry Holt) is reviewed in The Washington Post.

The Nation has a multi-book review titled, "The Great Chastening," reviewing Francis Fukuyama's Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (Farrar Straus Giroux), John Dunn's Breaking Democracy's Spell (Yale University Press), Dan Ernst's Tocqueville's Nightmare (Oxford University Press), and Eric Nelson's The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding (Belknap).