There's a wide array of book reviews on offer for legal historians this week:
In The New York Times is a review of Edward Luce's sobering transnational treatise The Retreat of Western Liberalism. Also in the Times is Eric Foner's review of Fred Kaplan's Lincoln and the Abolitionists: John Quincy Adams, Slavery, and the Civil War. Finally, the Times reviews Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.
NPR carries a review of Nancy MacLean's just-released Democracy in Chains The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America. In The Washington Post is a review of Meredith Waldman's The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease. Also reviewed in the Post is Mark Bowden's Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam.
In The New York Review of Books is a wide-ranging review essay on recent scholarship and writing on the Six-Day War and its legacies. Also reviewed in the NYRB is Marjorie Perloff's Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire. Christopher de Bellaigue's The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times and Wael Abu-‘Uksa's Freedom in the Arab World: Concepts and Ideologies in Arabic Thought in the Nineteenth Century are also reviewed in the publication.
Additionally, the NYRB carries a review Karissa Haugeberg's Women against Abortion: Inside the Largest Moral Reform Movement of the Twentieth Century and Carol Sanger's About Abortion: Terminating Pregnancy in Twenty-First-Century America. Behind a paywall (ironically?) is an essay on America's "Forgotten Poor" that features reviews of Jonathan Morduch and Rachel Schneider's The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty and Carol Graham's Happiness for All?: Unequal Hopes and Lives in Pursuit of the American Dream.
In the Chicago Tribune is a review of From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, 1920-1965 by Jon K. Lauck. Also reviewed in the Tribune is Bruce Lawrence's The Koran in English: A Biography.
Reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books is Heather Ann Thompson's Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. Also reviewed is Alvin Felzenberg's A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr. Finally, LARB carries a review of Frances FitzGerald's The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America.
The New Republic has a review of Yascha Mounk's The Age of Responsibility: Luck, Choice, and the Welfare State. Also reviewed in the New Republic is Fred Kaplan's Lincoln and the Abolitionists: John Quincy Adams, Slavery, and the Civil War. The review notes that in documenting Lincoln's racial politics, the book "covers well-worn territory" but that it does so in service of tracing the persistence of "the nation's race problem."
At Public Books is provocative review essay based on Alex Soojung-Kim Pang's Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, Daniel Fridman's Freedom from Work: Embracing Financial Self Help in the United States and Argentina, and Rutgers historian James Livingston's No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea. Christina Lupton concludes her essay by encouraging readers to indulge in the postwork imaginary and imagine what they might do if their incomes were taken care of. (As an aside, her question prompted me to ask what sort of research we might expect to be produced if a universal basic income had been or were to be realized in the States? Conversely, what kind of research might we expect to be produced with the further adjunctification of the American academy?)At the New Books Network, Josh Chafetz is interviewed about his Congress's Constitution Legislative Authority and the Separation of Powers.
Finally, in the New Rambler Review is an understandably Trump era-inflected review of Reuel Schiller's narrative of postwar liberalism's dissolution in his monograph Forging Rivals: Race, Class, Law, and the Collapse of Postwar.
