Modern History Notes

By consulting different lists, Jennifer Howard,"A Few University-Press Books Hit Mainstream 'Best Of' Lists," CHE, 14 December, gets slightly different results than Mary Dudziak's. Add Gordon S. Woods's Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 and Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Lois More Overbeck, Dan Gunn, and George Craig, eds., The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. 1, 1929-1940 to the short list of books that made it to more than one list of the Best.

David W. Blight,"America's Armageddon Revisited," Slate, 14 December, reviews John Keegan's The American Civil War: A Military History. Blight suggests a different perspective on Ari Kelman's observation that"the normally genial James McPherson" had "savaged" Keegan's book."Some [of Keegan's] chapters cite no sources at all," says Blight,"and many rely heavily on James McPherson's modern narrative history, Battle Cry of Freedom."

Josh Lambert,"Who owns Holocaust history?" Tablet, 14 December, comes up with some surprising answers.

Ronald Hutton,"The saintly Dennis Wheatley," TLS, 9 December, reviews Phil Baker's The Devil is a Gentleman: The life and times of Dennis Wheatley.

Finally, congratulations to Cliopatria's friend, Michael Bérubé, who has been elected president of the Modern Language Association.