book reviews

• 
• SOURCE: Foreign Affairs
  Accessed 12/5/19
  

  Foreign Affairs Reviews James Banner's Presidential Misconduct: From George Washington to Today

  Banner describes the book as an exercise of “historians’ civic office.”

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  10/24/19
  

  ‘Cabinets of Curiosities’ delves into the history of collectors and their stunning, strange acquisitions

  In “Cabinets of Curiosities,” Patrick Mauriès tells the history of some truly awesome collectors.

• 
• 10/27/19
  

  New Jim Mattis Memoir Avoids Criticizing Trump, Instead Lashes Bush, Obama, and Others

  by Jeffrey J. Matthews

  With consequential elections forthcoming now is the time for Mattis to tell voters the unvarnished truth about Donald Trump.     

• 

• ‘Return to the Reich’ Review: Refugee Redux

  The true story of a Jewish boy from Freiburg who escaped Nazi Germany only to return as an American commando on a secret mission.

• 
• 10/13/19
  

  The Original War on Terror

  by Eric Laursen

  A review of Nunzio Pernicone and Fraser M. Ottanelli, Assassins against the Old Order: Italian Anarchist Violence in Fin de Siècle Europe.

• 
• 10/13/19
  

  Author Christian Di Spigna Is On a Mission to Honor a Revolutionary War Hero

  by Michael McQuillan

  A review of Founding Martyr: The Life and Death of Dr. Joseph Warren, the American Revolution’s Lost Hero.

• 
• 10/13/19
  

  The Moral Compass of America’s Most Distinguished Soldier and Statesman

  by James Thornton Harris

  George Marshall’s honesty and modesty were a key to his success.

• 
• 9/29/19
  

  Myth vs History: A Study of Vietnam War Stories and Journalism

  by Jerry Lembcke 

  Australia’s Vietnam by Mark Dapin is important for the rectification it brings to public memory of Vietnam War homecomings.

• 
• SOURCE: Jewish Currents
  9/23/19
  

  Judith Butler Discusses History of Anti-Semitism in Review of Bari Weiss's How to Fight Anti-Semitism

  by Judith Butler

  "A lack of historical analysis...afflicts this impassioned book."

• 
• 9/22/19
  

  A Family History of the Red Scare

  by David L. O'Connor

  A review of David Maraniss' A Good American Family: My Father and the Red Scare.

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Monthly
  Accessed 9/19/19
  

  Allen C. Guelzo Reviews Sidney Blumenthal's Latest Installment of His Biography of Lincoln

  by Allen C. Guelzo

  "Blumenthal never allows the intensity of Lincoln’s story to flag for a moment."

• 
• SOURCE: Not Even Past
  9/4/19
  

  Reviewing Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive by Marisa Fuentes (2016)

  by Tiana Wilson

  Fuentes’ work contributes to the historical knowledge of early America through her focus on violence and how it operated during slavery and continues today through archives. 

• 
• SOURCE: University of Arkansas News
  9/4/19
  

  Historian Caree Banton Publishes New Book on Race and Identity in Atlantic World

  Banton closely examines the Afro-Barbadians and provides a transatlantic approach to understanding the political and sociocultural consequences of their migration and settlement in Africa.

• 
• SOURCE: AP
  9/1/19
  

  Jeffrey Ostler's "Surviving Genocide" argues that the emergence of American democracy depended on the taking of Native lands

  The book comes as scholars and writers are challenging narratives around American history and how it hurt people of color.

• 
• SOURCE: Tablet
  8/14/19
  

  Is the U.S. Constitution Pro-Slavery?

  A review of Sean Wilentz's No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding. 

• 
• SOURCE: The New Republic
  8/16/19
  

  Brenda Wineapple Reviews WOMEN’S WAR: FIGHTING AND SURVIVING THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR 
by Stephanie McCurry

  Who wrote women out of Civil War history?

• 
• SOURCE: New Yorker
  8/12/19
  

  Kendi's "How to Be an AntiRacist" and the Fight to Redefine Racism

  by Kalefa Sanneh

  In “How to Be an Antiracist,” Ibram X. Kendi argues that we should think of “racist” not as a pejorative but as a simple, widely encompassing term of description.

• 
• SOURCE: Good to Go
  7/16/19
  

  Tony Platt Reviews Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age

  by Tony Platt

  I’m encouraged that Schama thinks crime and punishment is a sufficiently important topic to bookend his 700-page tome.

• 
• 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.

• 
• 4/19/19
  

  The Coming of American Fascism, 1920–1940

  by Chris Wright

  Michael Joseph Roberto's The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920–1940 is particularly timely, as the old structures of American fascism have deepened in the last generation and colonized much of the world.