Sunday Book Roundup

n+1 has a review of Bryan Burrough's Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (Penguin).

"Against these odds, Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage, a narrative history of America’s “forgotten age of revolutionary violence” released last April, is worth reading. For one thing, it draws on a large number of interviews with veteran radicals and the law enforcement agents who tracked them, most of whom have never spoken on record before. New information is a good reason to write a book, especially when the topic is criminal activity recent enough that it remains shrouded in alibis."

From H-Net is a review of The Life and Death of Gus Reed: A Story of Race and Justice in Illinois during the Civil War and Reconstruction by Thomas Bahde (Ohio University Press).

And Public Books has a multi-book review, "Waste, Value, and Environmental Racism in the Southwest," that includes Traci Brynne Voyles's Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country (University of Minnesota Press) and Andrew Needham's Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton University Press).

"In her recent book on the uranium economy in the Navajo Nation, Traci Brynne Voyles brings into focus the flip side of value-making, what she calls “wastelanding.” Wastelanding refers to patterns of words and actions that, as Voyles states it, “render certain bodies and landscapes pollutable.” This happens in two stages. First comes “the assumption that nonwhite lands are valueless, or valuable only for what can be mined from beneath them,” then comes “the subsequent devastation of these very environs by polluting industries.”"

Weavers of Dreams, Unite!: Actors' Unionism in Early Twentieth-Century America by Sean P. Holmes (University of Illinois Press) is reviewed on H-Net.

The New York Review of Books has a multi-book review, "The Cops and Race and Gangs--and Murder," including Vigilance: My Life Serving America and Protecting Its Empire City by Ray Kelly
(Hachette); Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing by Joe Domanick
(Simon and Schuster), Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Levy (Spiegel and Grau).

From The Washington Post comes a review of Douglas Brinkley's Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America (Harper).

"Brinkley styles “Rightful Heritage” as a sequel to “The Wilderness Warrior,” his account of Theodore Roosevelt’s equally stellar environmental record. In the new book, Brinkley can be superficial when it comes to legal issues — it’s not always clear what authority FDR is drawing on when he takes a pro-environmental stance. And it’s misleading to say, as Brinkley does, that Missouri was “a Confederate state during the Civil War.” Missouri had its share of Confederate sympathizers, but the state never seceded from the Union."

Also from The Washington Post is a review by Michelle Alexander of Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World by Baz Dreisinger (Other).

And, from The New York Times comes another double review, including Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck by Adam Cohen (Penguin), and Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era by Thomas C. Leonard (Princeton University Press).