There is a terrific array of reviews this Memorial Day weekend:In the Boston Review is an excerpt from Andrew Kahrl's Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline.
Liza's Featherstone's Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation is reviewed at Public Books. Also on the site is an interview with Keisha Blain, author of the recently released Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom.
At Common-Place is a review of Indians in the Family: Adoption and the Politics of Antebellum Expansion by Dawn Peterson.
The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison Promiscuous Women by Scott W. Stern is reviewed in The New Republic.
Maya Jasanoff's The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World is reviewed in The Nation.
At Books and Ideas is a review essay that takes up Cul de Sac: Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue by Paul Cheney and The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica by Trevor Burnard and John Garragus.
Among the content of interest in the New York Review of Books is a review of Till Time's Last Sand: A History of the Bank of England 1694-2013 by David Kynaston. Also in the NYRB is a review of Joan Wallach Scott's Sex and Secularism and R. Marie Griffith's Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics. Odd Arne Westad's The Cold War: A World History and Ben Steil's The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War are reviewed as well. Finally, in the NYRB is a review of Jörg Rüpke's Pantheon: A New History of Roman Religion and Harriet Flower's The Dancing Lares and the Serpent in the Garden: Religion at the Roman Street Corner.
In the New York Times Sean Wilentz reviews The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels by Jon Meachan. Also in the paper is a review of Samuel Moyn's Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World.
Interviews at the New Books Network include: Matthew R. Pembleton discusses his Containing Addiction: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the Origins of America's Global Drug War; Elaine Fisher speaks about her Hindu Pluralism: Religion and the Public Sphere in Early Modern South India; Tarak Barkawi introduces his Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II; Ethan Menchinger speaks about his The First of the Modern Ottomans: The Intellectual History of Ahmed Vasif; Simeon Mann discusses his Soldiering Through Empire Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific; John Munro talks about his The Anticolonial Front The African-American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonization; and Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts discuss their Denmark Vesey's Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy Legal historians studying empire may be interested in this review of Empires and Bureaucracy in World History: From Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century, edited by Peter Crooks and Timothy H. Parsons.
