Sunday, May 10, 2015

Sunday Book Roundup

The Washington Post has a review of Cokie Roberts's Capital Dames: The Civil War and the Women of Washington, 1848-1868 (Harper).

Charles Murray has a new book out, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission (Crown Forum), and it is reviewed in The Washington Post.

The New York Review of Books has a piece by Jed Rakoff reviewing a report by Oliver Roeder, Lauren-Brooke Eisen, and Julia Bowling, with a foreword by Joseph E. Stiglitz and an executive summary by Inimai Chettiar, "What Caused the Crime Decline?".

The New Books series has an interview with Rebecca Earle, discussing her book, The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race, and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America (Cambridge University Press).

Also interviewed by New Books is Amy Kittelstrom, who discusses her new work, The Religion of Democracy: Seven Liberals and the American Moral Tradition (Penguin).

Karen Paget's Patriotic Betrayal: The Inside Story of the CIA's Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade Against Communism (Yale University Press) is reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

The Nation reviews William Maxwell's F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (Princeton University Press).

Salon supplies us with several excerpts this weekend, including ones from:


H-Net adds a review of Mary K. Trigg's Feminism as Life's Work: Four Modern American Women through Two World Wars (Rutgers University Press).

The New York Times has a review of The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 by Joseph J. Ellis (Knopf).
"When and how did the United States ­become a nation? This question is the core of “The Quartet.” In his customary graceful prose, Joseph J. Ellis, the author of such works of popular history as the prizewinning “Founding Brothers,” argues that the United States did not become a nation with the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Rather, he says, American nationhood resulted from the creation, ­adoption and effectuation of the United States ­Constitution."
Also in the Times is a review of Speak Now: Marriage Equality on Trial: The Story of Hollingsworth v. Perry (Crown) by Kenji Yoshino.

John W. Patty and Elizabeth Maggie Penn's Social Choice and Legitimacy: The Possibilities of Impossibility (Cambridge University Press) is reviewed on The New Rambler.