City Life and Civil War

W. V. Harris,"Noisy, smelly, excavated Pompeii," TLS, 17 December, reviews Mary Beard's Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town.

Rosemary Ashton,"Surveying London," TLS, 10 December, reviews Ben Weinreb, Christopher Hibbert, Julia Keay and John Keay, eds., The London Encyclopaedia, revised 3rd edition.

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro,"In Congo Square: Colonial New Orleans," The Nation, 10 December, reviews Shannon Lee Dawdy's Building the Devil's Empire: French Colonial New Orleans and Ned Sublette's The World That Made New Orleans From Spanish Silver to Congo Square.

Thomas Laqueur,"Among the Graves," LRB, 18 December, reviews Mark Neely's The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction and Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.

Dinitia Smith,"The Perils of Comrade Snowfox, Girl Bolshevik," NYT, 17 December, reviews Sashenka, a novel of the Russian Revolution by historian Simon Montefiore.

Scott McLemee,"Becoming Susan Sontag," IHE, 17 December, reviews Sontag's Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963.