Books

Jim Cullen: Review of Jason Heller's "Taft: A Novel" (Quirk, 2012)

Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is completing a study of Hollywood actors as historians slated for publication by Oxford University Press later this year. Cullen blogs at American History Now.

Murray Polner: Review of Louisa Thomas’s “Conscience: Two Soldiers, Two Pacifists, One Family—A Test of Will and Faith in World War I” (Penguin Press, 2011)

“Socialism” has been redefined, praised and denigrated by free marketeers, assorted liberals and conservatives, pandering politicians and Obama-haters.  But in the end, it never took hold in this country because of governmental persecution, corporate opposition, recurring internal divisions, the New Deal, and perhaps above all the “American Dream,” which led American workers to support capitalism.

Jim Cullen: Review of Greil Marcus's "The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years" (Public Affairs, 2011)

Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN and the author of Born in the USA: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition (1997, 2005).  He is completing a study of Hollywood actors as historians slated for publication by Oxford University Press later this year. Cullen blogs at American History Now.Greil Marcus is the Ernest Hemingway of cultural criticism. I don't mean that in terms of style -- Hemingway's laconic prose is light years away from that of the effusive, endlessly analogizing Marcus -- but rather that Marcus, in a manner perhaps only paralleled by Pauline Kael, has inspired a generation of bad imitators. Myself among them.

Jim Cullen: Review of Stephen Greenblatt's "The Swerve: How the World Became Modern" (Norton 2011)

Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is completing a study of Hollywood actors as historians slated for publication by Oxford University Press later this year. Cullen blogs at American History Now.

Jim Cullen: Review of Steven J. Ross's "Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics" (Oxford, 2011)

Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, among other books. He is completing a study of Hollywood actors as historians slated for publication by Oxford University Press next year. Cullen blogs at American History Now.

Thomas Fleming: Review of Richard Borkow's "George Washington’s Westchester Gamble, The Encampment on the Hudson and the Trapping of Cornwallis" (The History Press, 2011)

Thomas Fleming is a former president of the Society of American Historians and is on the advisory board of HNN.New Yorkers—and many other people—are likely to find this brief briskly written book a fascinating read.  It combines the story of Westchester County in the Revolution and its climax—General Washington’s decision to march south from his encampment at Dobbs Ferry and nearby towns to trap Charles, Lord Cornwallis, at Yorktown.The author does an excellent job of describing the war in Westchester, including the crucial Battle of Stony Point.  But he naturally focuses most of the book on the fighting that accompanied the creation of an encampment for the French and American armies in 1781 as they debated whether to attack British occupied New York.

Luther Spoehr: Review of Steven M. Gillon’s “Pearl Harbor: FDR Leads the Nation into War” (Basic Books, 2011)

Luther Spoehr, an HNN Book Editor, teaches at Brown University.One of the most difficult tasks when “thinking historically” is to avoid presentism and instead see the world as it looked at the time through the eyes of participants who acted on the basis of incomplete or inaccurate information and couldn’t know for sure how their decisions would turn out.  Steven Gillon, a historian at the University of Oklahoma and author of (among other books) The Kennedy Assassination—24 Hours After,  is up to it.  He vividly recreates and interprets President Franklin Roosevelt’s activities in the 24 hours after the Japanese attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, famously designated by FDR as “a date which will live in infamy.”

Murray Polner: Review of Anna Reid’s “Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944” (Walker, 2011)

Murray Polner is the author of numerous books, the former editor of Present Tense, and a book review editor for the History News Network.Not since Harrison Salisbury’s book The 900 Days appeared in 1969,has an English-language book devoted to the German siege of Leningrad (now renamed back to St. Petersburg) appeared. The longest blockade in recorded history, it consumed 1.5 million people, half of them civilians, many of them children. In merciless, unvarnished detail, Anna Reid’s Leningrad is filled with searing images of starvation, cannibalism, corruption and death in that most Westernized and striking of Russia’s cities.The siege has essentially been overlooked in the West.  But then, too, we’ve ignored the enormous sacrifices of the Russian people and its military forces in defeating Nazi Germany and its allies.

Jim Cullen: Review of Russell Banks's, "Lost Memory of Skin" (Ecco, 2011)

Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, among other books. He is completing a study of Hollywood actors as historians slated for publication by Oxford University Press next year. Cullen blogs at American History Now.

Jim Cullen, Review of Craig Marks's and Ron Tannenbaum's "I Want My TV: The Uncensored History of the Music Video Revolution" (Dutton, 2011)

Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of The American Dream: Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, among other books. He is completing a study of Hollywood actors as historians slated for publication by Oxford University Press next year. Cullen blogs at American History Now.Before there was Facebook, before there were iPhones, there was MTV. After an unprepossessing launch in 1981, the cable network became a powerful force in American popular culture, exerting a much-noted impact not only on the music and television industries, but also on film, fashion, and even politics. Some of the attention MTV got was celebratory; some of it highly critical (from a variety of directions). About the only thing more striking than the network's dramatic impact is the degree it has receded since its first decade of cultural dominance. So the time seems right for an assessment of its trajectory.

Murray Polner: Review of Thomas A. Kohut’s “A German Generation: An Experiential History of the Twentieth Century" (Yale, 2011)

Murray Polner is the author of numerous books, the former editor of Past Tense, and a book review editor for the History News Network.Reviewing Ian Kershaw’s The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s German, 1944-45 in the New York Times, James J. Sheehan wondered why everyday Germans, facing imminent defeat in mid-1945, “continued to obey a government that had nothing left to offer them but death and destruction.”  That’s not an easy question.  Why did they and their fellow Germans blindly follow murderers and thugs they had once hailed and faithfully served?  Could it have been simply obedience to leaders?  Or was it, Thomas A. Kohut asks, a tribal tendency to “belong and, consequently to exclude?”  Kohut, professor of history at Williams College and author of Wilhelm II and the Germans: A Study in Leadership, has no definitive answer –nor does the vast literature about the subject.  The virtue of this book is that he does try to see that blood-spattered era through the eyes of individuals, rather than politicians, generals and others justifying what they did and didn’t do.

Mel Ayton: Review of John McAdams's "JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think About Claims of Conspiracy" (Potomac Books, 2011)

Mel Ayton is author of The JFK Assassination—Dispelling The Myths (2002), A Racial Crime—James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr (2005) and The Forgotten Terrorist—Sirhan Sirhan and the Assassination of Robert F Kennedy (2007).  His latest book about racist killer Joseph Paul Franklin, Dark Soul of the South, was published in May 2011.  Readers can access his online HNN articles here.Every now and then a JFK assassination book comes along that bristles with erudition and common sense, providing the reader with rational answers to anomalous pieces of evidence in the case that have been exaggerated beyond belief by bogus historians cashing in on the public’s desire for drama and intrigue.In the 1970s, Priscilla Johnson McMillan’s Marina and Lee, a book which could be characterized as ‘Marina Oswald’s Memoirs, gave the American public an insight into the mind and character of JFK’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, an enigmatic  young man who had  remained a puzzle to the American people since the November 1963 assassination.

Jim Cullen: Review of "Remixing the Civil War: Meditations on the Sesquicentennial," edited by Thomas J. Brown (Johns Hopkins, 2011)

Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of The American Dream: Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, among other books. He is completing a study of Hollywood actors as historians slated for publication by Oxford University Press next year. Cullen blogs at American History Now.

Ron Briley: Review of Richard White's "Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America" (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011)

Ron Briley is a history teacher and an assistant headmaster at Sandia Preparatory School in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Aaron Leonard: Review of Frank Dikötter's "Mao’s Great Famine" (Walker & Company, 2010)

Aaron Leonard is a freelance journalist based in New York. He is regular contributor to the History News Network, truthout, rabble.ca, and PhysicsWorld.com. His writings can be found at www.aaronleonard.net.When Mao Tse-Tung was alive he was cast alternately as bandit, communist leader, ruthless dictator, elder statesman, and mass murderer. Since his death the characterization has been less ambivalent: hedonistic despot, reckless utopian, unbridled monster. The change is anchored in the twists and turns of history. The unfettering of capitalism in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s manic opening to Western capitalism has no interest in seeing Mao in shades of grey. He is part of the troika of twentieth century “Evil:” Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung.

Jim Cullen: Review of Jeffrey Eugenides's "The Marriage Plot" (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2011)

Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of The American Dream: Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003), among other books. He is completing a book currently titled The Arc of American History: What Hollywood Actors Tell Us about Ourselves. Cullen blogs at American History Now.Is it possible to write a successful novel with unappealing characters? I don't mean a novel in which a protagonist is repellent in an avowedly provocative way, like the unnamed narrator of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (1864). I mean people who it appears an author really wants us to like, but who we find tiresome. This is the question I found myself asking while reading Jeffrey Eugenides's latest novel, The Marriage Plot. My answer, finally, was no: you can't really write a compelling novel this way. But as failures go, his is an interesting one.

Jim Cullen, Review of Denis Lacorne's "Religion in America: A Political History" (Columbia, 2011)

 Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of The American Dream: Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003), among other books. His work in progress is currently titled "The Arc of American History: What Hollywood Actors Tell Us about Ourselves." Cullen blogs at American History Now.]This little book manages to do a lot in the space of 170 pages. First published in France in 2007, with an evocative introduction by the late Tony Judt, it surveys its subject with grace and insight, as well as a lot of information.

Luther Spoehr: Review of John J. Miller’s “The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football” (Harper, 2011)

Luther Spoehr, a Senior Lecturer at Brown University and an HNN Book Editor, co-teaches a course on the history of intercollegiate athletics.Long, long ago—before the Big Ten had 12 teams and the Big Twelve had 10; back when Knute Rockne was still learning to drop-kick—college football was in crisis.  The crisis had many parts:  already professionalism and commercialism had made inroads into the supposedly “amateur” game.  Players were getting money and perks, coaches were being overpaid (in 1905 Bill Reid, Harvard’s coach, made more than any professor on campus and almost as much as President Charles William Eliot), and rules about everything from how the game could be played to player eligibility ranged from ill-defined to non-existent.  Six-year varsity careers were not unheard of.  Sometimes those careers were compiled at several schools.  In 1896 the great Fielding Yost, enrolled West Virginia University, transferred to Lafayette in time to help the Leopards snap the University of Pennsylvania’s 36-game winning streak, then transferred right back.

Jim Cullen, Review of Dorothee Kocks's "The Glass Harmonica" (Rosa Mira, 2011)

Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of The American Dream: Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003), among other books. He is also the author of the recently published Kindle Single e-book President Hanks, part of a larger project with the working title "Bodies of Work: Hollywood Actors and the Master Narratives of American History." Cullen blogs at American History Now.

Jim Cullen, Review of Zoe Burkholder's "Color in the Classroom; How American Schools Taught Race" (Oxford, 2011)

Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. He is the author of The American Dream: Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2003), among other books. He is also the author of the recently published Kindle Single e-book President Hanks. Cullen blogs at American History Now.In the liberal imagination -- and in more than a little Civil Rights scholarship -- the story of race relations in the first half of the twentieth century is a long arc that bends toward justice. It is a progressive tale, one in which belief in the power of ideas to shape society gets battered, but ultimately affirmed, as evidenced by the most cherished dimensions of the welfare state, among them the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But for many, the keystone of this arch is the Supreme Court Decision of Brown v. Board (1954), upon which rested hopes for future generations.