In the Texas Law Review, Aziz Rana reviews Robert L. Tsai's America's Forgotten Constitutions (Harvard University Press).
H-Net has a review of Banning the Bang or the Bomb?: Negotiating the Nuclear Test Ban Regime edited by William Hartman, Mordechai Melamud, and Paul Meerts (Cambridge University Press).
Barry Eichengeren's Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, The Great Recession, and the Uses--and Misuses--of History (Oxford University Press) is reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
"But a closer look paints a much more complex story. Along with similarities and parallels, there are also important differences between the two crises. In addition, the Great Depression offered many more vital lessons than the ones that were “learned” — and selective and self-serving attentiveness to those lessons has contributed mightily to our current troubles. Clearly, more than hand-waving invocation of the Great Depression analogy is necessary, and Hall of Mirrors rises to that challenge."
Salon has an excerpt from 13 Ways of Looking at the Death Penalty by Mario Marazziti (Seven Stories Press).
The Washington Independent Review of Books has a review of King John and the Road to Magna Carta by Stephen Church (Basic Books).
The Federal Lawyer has a new set of reviews out for May. Online, there is a review of Tomaz Jardim's The Mauthausen Trial: American Military Justice in Germany (Harvard University Press).
HNN has a review of The History Manifesto by Jo Guldi and David Armitage (Cambridge University Press).
New Books has several interviews this week. Andrew Needham is interviewed by New Books about his new book, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton University Press).
The authors of American Conspiracies Theories (Oxford University Press), Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent, are interviewed on New Books.
Thomas Kemple is also interviewed by New Books about Intellectual Work and the Spirit of Capitalism: Weber's Calling (Palsgrave MacMillan).Also interviewed by New Books is Ellen Boucher, who discusses her new book, Empire's Children: Child Emigration, Welfare, and the Decline of the British World: 1869-1967 (Cambridge University Press).
In The New York Review of Books Elizabeth Drew reviews two works, Democracy and Justice: Collected Writings edited by Desiree Ramos Reiner, Jim Lyons, Erik Opal, Mikayla Terrell, and Lena Glaser (Brennan Center) and The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown by Richard L. Hasen (Yale University Press).
The Washington Post has a review of The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America's Only Family Internment by Jan Jarboe Russell (Scribner).
Also in The Washington Post is a review of Kevin Kruse's One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (Basic).
For The New York Times Emily Bazelon reviews Jon Krakauer's Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town (Doubleday).
"Krakauer set out to educate himself about rape, especially when it is committed by someone the victim knows, looking for survivors who would tell him their stories. He focused on why many don’t go to the police as he tried “to comprehend the repercussions of sexual assault from the perspective of those who have been victimized.” The result is “Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town,” which has more in common with “Under the Banner of Heaven,” Krakauer’s depiction of the evils of Mormon fundamentalism, than with his morally complex tales of misadventure, “Into the Wild” and “Into Thin Air.”"
