Sunday, April 5, 2015

Sunday Book Roundup

In The New Rambler, Martha Minow reviews Sherry L. Smith's Hippies, Indians and the Fight for Red Power (Oxford University Press).
"Sherry L. Smith examines another true but unlikely alliance in Hippies, Indians and the Fight for Red Power.  Here, members of the American counterculture during the 1960s and 1970s offered help and collaboration as American Indians struggled for political and legal power and recognition. This nuanced analysis underscores the central role of Indian activists and the often ignorant and inconsistent contributions of non-Indians, but nonetheless shines light on the efforts of hippies, Quakers, and other non-Indians in the uphill struggle for fishing rights, land claims, and self-determination by Indian tribes."
Fareed Zakaria's In Defense of a Liberal Education (Norton) is reviewed at The Daily Beast.

H-Net has a review of James E. David's Spies and Shuttles: NASA's Secret Relationships with the DOD and CIA (University Press of Florida).

An excerpt from American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity by Christian G. Appy (Viking) has been published by Salon, "America's not a force for good."

The Los Angeles Review of Books examines Adam Zamoyski's Phantom Terror: Political Paranoia and the Creation of the Modern State, 1789-1848 (Basic).

Also in the L.A. Review of Books is a review of Katha Pollitt's Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights (Picador).

HNN has a review of Danielle Allen's Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (Liveright).

James Whitman discusses his book, The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern War (Harvard University Press) with New Books in History.

David Garrow reviews Bryan Burrough's Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (Penguin) in The Washington Post.
"Yet Burrough bestows anonymity upon several crucial Weather participants, including a close Dohrn colleague who went on to be a prominent San Francisco lawyer and who spoke to him extensively. Weather veterans who did not cooperate are given no such favor. A one-sentence characterization of one such person does not explicitly name him, but I immediately realized that Burrough was identifying a man who has been a selfless and celebrated Midwest policy advocate for many years now, as well as a valuable mentor to a close family member of mine. Only in the now-digitized newspapers of almost half a century ago can one discover the Weather leadership role he played in 1969-1970 or his indictment as one of 15 accused bombers several years later. (The charges were later dropped on account of government misconduct.) Having visited his home, and having last shared a meal with him only two years ago, I am taken aback by just how easy it is indeed to pal around with terrorists."
The Nation has an adapted excerpt from The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power by Steve Fraser (Little, Brown, and Co.).