20th Century Notes

There's been considerable interest in both Jon Wiener's"Big Tobacco and the Historians," The Nation, 25 February, and the list of historians who have testified in American courts on behalf of tobacco corporations. In his forthcoming book, Golden Holocaust, Robert Proctor will cite more instances of those historians' testimony and the names of additional historians testifying for Big Tobacco.

Elyssa East,"Murder by the Drop," NYT, 25 February, reviews Deborah Blum's The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett reviews Frances Stonor Saunders's The Woman Who Shot Mussolini for the Guardian, 27 February.

Richard Brooks,"The battle of Hastings and Beevor," London's Sunday Times, 28 February, announces new British blockbuster histories of WWII. Henry Holt and Co., the publisher of Charles Pellegrino's The Road from Hiroshima, has announced it is withdrawing the book because of continuing questions about its integrity.

Lawrence D. Freedman,"Frostbitten," Foreign Affairs, March/April, reviews Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War.

Peter Biskind reviews David Thomson's The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder for London's Sunday Times, 28 February.

Robin D. G. Kelley,"Nina Simone, Diva Out of Carolina," NYT, 25 February, and Louis Bayard for the Washington Post, 28 February, review Nadine Cohodas's Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone. Pete Hamill,"Willie Mays, the Say Hey Kid," NYT, 25 February, reviews James S. Hirsch's Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend.

Chris Bray reviews Jim Frederick's Black Hearts: One Platoon's Descent Into Madness in Iraq's Triangle of Death and Cilla McCain's Murder in Baker Company: How Four American Soldiers Killed One of Their Own for the Washington Post, 28 February.

Finally, farewell to two Holocaust scholars, David Bankier and Robert Michael.