books

• 
• SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
  7/15/19
  

  ‘The Code’ Review: How Green Was the Valley

  by Randall Stross

  As late as the early 1970s, Northern California seemed a long-shot candidate for the center of the computerized universe. A review of Margaret O’Mara's The Code. 

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  7/14/19
  

  A female historian wrote a book. Two male historians went on NPR to talk about it. They never mentioned her name. It’s Sarah Milov.

  They have tenure. She does not.

• 
• SOURCE: NY Times
  7/9/19
  

  Her Book in Limbo, Naomi Wolf Fights Back

  After her American publisher delayed her new book, “Outrages,” over accuracy concerns, she is responding with a strategy mixing scholarly peer review and damage control.

• 
• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  6/1/19
  

  Robert Caro Reflects on Robert Moses, L.B.J., and His Own Career in Nonfiction

  He’s just published a book called “Working.” It’s a gift, a collection of interviews and essays that talk about the craft of what he does.

• 
• SOURCE: New Yorker
  6/26/19
  

  James Polchin's "Indecent Advances" Reviewed: The Theory That Justified Anti-Gay Crime

  by Caleb Crain

  Fifty years after Stonewall, the gay-panic defense seems absurd. But, for decades, it had the power of law.

• 
• SOURCE: NY Times
  6/12/19
  

  ‘Reckoning’ Follows a 50-Year Road to #MeToo

  A review of Linda Hirshman's Reckoning: The Epic Battle Against Sexual Abuse and Harassment. 

• 
• SOURCE: Before the Quagmire
  6/18/19
  

  New Evidence on the US Response to Decolonization in Indonesia, Southeast Asia

  Written by William J. Rust, The Mask of Neutrality: The United States and Decolonization in Indonesia, 1942–1950 examines three periods of America’s evolving engagement with Indonesia and the groups battling for control there.

• 
• 6/16/19
  

  A Fresh Take on Watergate Illuminates the Present

  by James Thornton Harris

  While Richard Nixon’s rise and fall has been repeatedly examined — there are more than a dozen biographies of him — John Farrell’s book, Richard Nixon, a Life, offers many new insights.

• 
• SOURCE: The Week
  6/9/19
  

  Don't buy your dad the new David McCullough book for Father's Day

  by Neil J. Young

  McCullough appears to have written the perfect dad book, but it's romantic view is the book's danger.

• 
• SOURCE: The American Interest
  6/5/19
  

  Three Recent Books Examine Frederick Douglass' Legacy

  by Allis Radosh

  Frederick Douglass: America’s Prophet by D.H. Dilbeck, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man by Timothy Sandefur, and Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight all offer a different interpretation of Douglass. 

• 
• SOURCE: New Yorker
  5/20/19
  

  The Troubling History of Psychiatry

  Challenges to the legitimacy of the profession have forced it to examine itself, including the fundamental question of what constitutes a mental disorder.

• 
• SOURCE: Daily Mail
  5/19/19
  

  Historian Ben Macintyre reveals the gripping story of the KGB agent who saved us from Armageddon in 1983

  How did double agent Oleg Gordievsky stop Russia launching a nuclear strike on the West?

• 
• SOURCE: Black Perspectives
  5/16/19
  

  Peter Cole's ‘Dockworker Power’ Highlights Transnational Struggles for Justice

  by Ralph Callebert

  There is thus an extensive literature on dockworkers and their activism. Peter Cole’s Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area fits in this tradition.

• 
• 5/19/19
  

  Into the Teeth of the Dragon’s Jaw in Vietnam

  by Erik Moshe

  The Thanh Hoa, or “Dragon’s Jaw” bridge was one tough target to crack for war strategists and military pilots during the Vietnam War. Erik Moshe interviewed the authors of Dragon's Jaw to learn more. 

• 
• SOURCE: AP
  5/15/19
  

  McCullough’s new book on pioneers’ history draws criticism

  With his latest book, “The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West,” McCullough is seeing some of the sharpest criticism of his career.

• 
• SOURCE: NY Times
  5/8/19
  

  Sarah Knott Looks at Pregnancy and Mothering Through the Ages

  Knott, a professor at Indiana University, uses her own path to motherhood, which includes a miscarriage and two successful pregnancies, as the scaffolding for her engaging and pleasingly radical “unconventional history” of this subject. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  Accessed 5/14/19
  

  New Books Showcase Female Spies and Their Secrets

  An old-boy operation was transformed by women during World War II, and at last the unsung upstarts are getting their due.

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  5/3/19
  

  How John and John Quincy Adams predicted the Age of Trump

  by Carol Berkin

  “The Problem of Democracy” offers a final warning to its readers who live in an era of “alternate truths” and blind devotion to charismatic leaders.

• 
• SOURCE: New Yorker
  5/8/19
  

  Brenda Wineapple, Author of a New Book About Andrew Johnson, on the Right Reasons to Impeach a President

  "To reduce the impeachment of Andrew Johnson to a mistaken incident in American history, a bad taste in the collective mouth, disagreeable and embarrassing, is to forget the extent to which slavery and thus the very fate of the nation lay behind Johnson’s impeachment.”

• 
• SOURCE: G&LR
  4/27/19
  

  Historian Marc Stein On The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History

  by Marc Stein

  Why did the Stonewall Riots occur when and where they did?