Sunday Book Roundup

Having taken last week off, there's a long list of book reviews to cover this week.

From H-Net, we've already noted Sara Mayeux's review of Felice Batlan's Women and Justice for the Poor: A History of Legal Aid, 1863-1945 (Cambridge University Press).

Also up on H-Net is a review of the volume, The Future of Social Movement Research: Dynamics, Mechanisms, and Processes, edited by Jacquelien van Stekelenburg, Conny Roggeband, and Bert Klandermans (University of Minnesota Press).

Jennifer Thigpen's Island Queens and Mission Wives: How Gender and Empire Remade Hawai'i's Pacific World (UNC Press) is reviewed here.

And, Vincent J. Intondi's African Americans against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement (Stanford University Press), is also reviewed.

From Salon comes an excerpt of Engines of Liberty: The Power of Citizen Activists to Make Constitutional Law by David Cole (Basic). A review of the book is in The Washington Post, too. From the excerpt:

"There  is no precise way to measure the effects of these wide-ranging efforts. But nearly all of the advocates, lawyers, and activists with whom I spoke agreed that each of the developments summarized here provided an important foundation for the marriage equality campaign. They helped make it possible for Evan Wolfson to write his law school paper, and for the many initiatives that would be necessary, inside and outside of courts, before the right to marriage equality that Wolfson envisioned could be realized."

Also from Salon is a review of Adam Cohen's Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck (Penguin). There's also a review of Cohen's book in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

A third contribution from Salon is an excerpt from Adultery: Infidelity and the Law by Deborah Rhode (Harvard University Press).

"This is in keeping with public attitudes. Only a third of Americans believe that adultery should be a crime. Given these views, it is somewhat surprising that so many statutes remain on the books and that several have survived recent attempts at repeal. No one thinks the fight to preserve these statutes has much practical significance: the issue is symbolic. As Thurman W. Arnold observed three-quarters of a century ago, “Most unenforced criminal laws survive in order to satisfy moral objections to our established modes of conduct. They are unenforced because we want to continue our conduct, and unrepealed because we want to preserve our morals.”"

Dead Presidents: An American Adventure into the Strange Deaths and Surprising Afterlives of Our Nation's Leaders by Brady Carlson (Norton & Co.) is reviewed in the Washington Independent Review of Books.

HNN has a review of Kevin Kruse's One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (Basic).

"The 2016 annual meeting for the Organization of American Historians (OAH) will feature a session focusing upon the provocative book One Nation Under God by Princeton history professor Keven M. Kruse. In One Nation Under God, Kruse argues that the idea of the United States as a Christian nation does not find its origins with the founding of the United States or the writing of the Constitution. Rather, the notion of America as specifically consecrated by God to be a beacon for liberty was the work of corporate and religious figures opposed to New Deal statism and interference with free enterprise."

Larry Cuban's Teaching History Then and Now: A Story of Stability and Change in Schools (Harvard Education Press) is also reviewed on HNN.

The New Books Network has posted two interviews since the last roundup: Nathan Perl-Rosenthal discusses Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution (Harvard University Press), and Daniel K. Williams discusses Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade (Oxford University Press).

The New York Times has a review of The King and Queen of Malibu: The True Story of the Battle for Paradise by David K. Randall (Norton & Co.).

Last but not least, the latest issue of The Federal Lawyer is out, with reviews of Roger Lowenstein's America's Bank: The Epic Struggle To Create the Federal Reserve (Penguin), Jeffrey Amestoy's Slavish Shore: The Odyssey of Richard Henry Dana Jr. (Harvard University Press), and Dina Gold's Stolen Legacy: Nazi Theft and the Quest for Justice as Krausenstrasse 17/18 Berlin (ABA Publishing). All reviews can be found here.