Legal historians, enjoy these book reviews and have a happy Father's Day. The NY Times provides Three Books on Puerto Rico’s Statehood vs. Independence Debate, including Puerto Rico: The Trials of the Oldest Colony in the World by José Trias Monge and Requiem of the Cerro Maravilla: The Police Murders in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Government Coverup by Manuel Suarez. Last week, the Times had a similar roundup of books about the gay rights/marriage movement.
Garret M. Graff doesn't mince words when it comes to titles. The Times also published a review of Graff’s Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself — While the Rest of Us Die. The book, a history of the government’s often-botched efforts at nuclear defense preparation, “shows how, again and again, technocratic efforts to prepare for governing after a nuclear attack have collided with the reality that doing so would almost certainly prove impossible.”
The Washington Post reviews He Calls Me By Lightning: The Life of Caliph Washington and the forgotten Saga of Jim Crow, Southern Justice, and the Death Penalty, by S. Jonathan Bass, which uses the thirteen year “legal saga” of Caliph Washington to paint a “picture of how Jim Crow legal systems operated at the local and state level.”
The Guardian has a short review of Britain’s Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation by Brendan Simms, who argues that Brexit is “neither inevitable nor an accident”.
In the LA Review of Books, Eric D’Amato’s Getting Europe’s Right Wrong covers Far-Right Politics in Europe by Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, and Mastering the Past: Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and the Rise of Illiberalism by Ellen Hinsey. The former book is ultimately more satisfying, he argues, although it still does not contend with the diversity of Europe’s far right, which is “above all defined by its heterogeneity, decentralism, and ideological adaptability.” The Nation’s review of Christos Efstathiou’s E.P. Thompson: A Twentieth-Century Romantic may be inspiring to legal historians seeking a political reputation. It notes that: Thompson was “so prominent” in anti-nuclear activism that “polls placed him high in the ranks of the most admired, trailing only the ‘first women’ of the nation: [Margaret] Thatcher, Queen Elizabeth, and the Queen Mother.” The review also contrasts Thompson’s ability to find “agency” in his historical actors with the exacting standards to which he held his activist contemporaries. Those interested in biographies of historians may also enjoy this review of Ernst Kantorowicz: A Life by Robert E. Lerner, which seeks to revive the Medievalist’s reputation after Norman Cantor’s 1963 “hatchet job”.
Also in The Nation, Sophie Pinkham reviews Lenin on the Train by Catherine Merridale, The Russian Revolution: A New History by Sean McMeekin, and Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890–1928 by S.A. Smith, arguing that “how historians narrate the story of the Russian Revolution tells us much about their philosophy of history, as well as about their attitude toward the revolutionary project and the politics of the left.”
The New York Review of Books has several essays of historical-inclination, not all of which have can be viewed without a subscription. These include:
- Marcia Angell on Women Against Abortion: Inside the Largest Moral Reform Movement of the Twentieth Century by Karissa Haugeberg and Carol Sanger’s About Abortion: Terminating Pregnancy in Twenty-First-Century America;
- Malise Ruthven on The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Time by Christopher de Bellaigue and Freedom in the Arab World: Concepts and Ideologies in Arabic Thought in the Nineteenth Century by Wael Abu-‘Uksa;
- David Cole on Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration—and How to Achieve Real Reform by John F. Pfaff and Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Forman Jr.
- David Schulman on The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East by Guy Laron, The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine by Nathan Thrall, In Search of Modern Palestinian Nationhood by Matti Steinberg, Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman and A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the World’s Most Intractable Conflict by Gershon Shafir
- David S. Reynolds on This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy by Matthew Karp, and
In the London Review of Books, Alex de Waal of the World Peace Foundation makes a case for criminalizing famine in international law, but also invokes some historical examples, drawing on The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food by Lizzie Collingham and Poverty and Famine by Amartya Sen. In the same publication, Sadiah Qureshi reviews Black and British: A Forgotten History by David Olusoga, a “remarkable book” that “shows that people racialised as black have been in Britain for more than two thousand years.”
As always, the New Books Network provides recorded interviews with the authors of academic titles, including Gary Kulik on his War Stories: False Atrocity Tales, Swift Boaters, and Winter Soldiers--What Really Happened in Vietnam; Andrew Boyd on The Royal Navy in Eastern Waters The Linchpin of Victory, 1935-1942; and Tom Adam Davies on Mainstreaming Black Power
