History | Books reviewed in The Atlantic in 2008

Books reviewed in The Atlantic in 2008
Fiction | Biography | Current Events | History | Society & Culture

Sin in the Second City, by Karen Abbott (Random House)
"Cover to Cover," March 2008)

"If any American bordello achieved high repute, it was the luxurious Everleigh Club in Chicago at the turn of the last century. Abbott tells her story with just the right mix of relish and restraint, providing a piquant guide to a world of sexuality neatly wrapped in just enough respectability to not merely survive but flourish until the Mann Act finally led to its closure in 1911."

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Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours, by Noga Airkha (Ecco)
"Cover to Cover," January/February 2008)

"The historian Arikha traces the humoral doctrine through the ages, exploring the intersection of folk wisdom and state-of-the-art science, and provocatively argues that the basic model continues to inform science in surprising ways."

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Birth of the Cool, by Elizabeth Armstrong (Prestel Publishing)
Reviewed by Benjamin Schwarz ("California Cool," March 2008)

"The first book to connect the various artistic forms that modernism took in the region is the unusually intelligent and lavishly illustrated Birth of the Cool, by Elizabeth Armstrong, with essays by six prominent art critics (the eponymous art exhibition is currently touring the country). More important, the book provocatively suggests that a common sensibility animated all those forms. It thereby illuminates the substance of style—that is, how an aesthetic both shapes and is shaped by viewpoint and temperament, proclivities and prejudices."

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A Summer of Hummingbirds, by Christopher Benfey (Penguin Press)
"Cover to Cover," July/August 2008)

"For the past quarter century, readers have been learning through myriad accounts about the frenetic whirl of sexual activity that surrounded—and even occasionally took place within—the hothouse world of Emily Dickinson. A professor of English at Dickinson’s alma mater, Mount Holyoke College, Benfey knows this terrain—geographical as well as atmospheric—and visits it anew."

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Boxing: A Cultural History, by Kasia Boddy (Reaktion)
"Cover to Cover," June 2008)

"Boddy, a British academic, intelligently takes up—via art, literature, film, and the media—the many issues that have historically veined the sport: 'nationality, class, race, ethnicity, religion, politics, and different versions of masculinity,' plus dialectics like 'brawn versus brains, boastfulness versus modesty, youth versus experience.'"

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Europe Between the Oceans, by Barry Cunliffe (Yale)
Reviewed by Benjamin Schwarz ("The Reel Things," November 2008)

"Europe Between the Oceans, at once compelling and judicious, is an extraordinary book. I can’t think of a better gift this year for the historically minded reader. No book so well exemplifies what Cunliffe joyously calls 'the vibrancy of archaeology.'"

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Prague in Danger: The Years of German Occupation, 1939–45, by Peter Demetz (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
"Cover to Cover," June 2008)

"A new look into a neglected corner of life in the Third Reich, this book—which elucidates the extraordinary hubbub of activity in theaters, film studios, and other artistic realms—reminds us that even in the darkest periods of history, there are unexpected shafts of light."

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The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy since 1796, by Christopher Duggan (Houghton Mifflin)
"Cover to Cover," July/August 2008)

"This is the story of how Italy came to be; it’s also the scarcely less colorful story of its monarchy and descent into Fascism and (eventually) its turbulent but nonetheless enduring democracy."

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Cold War at 30,000 Feet, by Jeffrey A. Engel (Harvard)
"Cover to Cover," October 2008)

"With a cast of colorful characters—among them Ernest Bevin, Dean Acheson, and John Maynard Keynes—and acute glimpses into how things worked in postwar Washington, this chronicle of an intense commercial struggle gives readers a fascinating glimpse into a forgotten cranny of history."

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Nuns: A History of Convent Life, 1450–1700, by Silvia Evangelisti (Oxford)
"Cover to Cover," April 2008)

"Although the author is sympathetic to the security and the spiritual and intellectual opportunities that cloistered life held for women during this era, she doesn’t ignore the costs of withdrawal and isolation. Evengelisti is particularly wastute in describing the many and varied contributions the members of religious orders made to the fine arts."

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The Warmest Room in the House: How the Kitchen Became the Heart of the Twentieth-Century American Home, by Steven Gdula (Bloomsbury)
"Cover to Cover," January/February 2008)

"The decade-by-decade survey he serves up is a delight, rich but restrained."

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David and Winston, by Robert Lloyd George (Overlook)
"Cover to Cover," May 2008)

"Robert Lloyd George’s argument that his great-grandfather enduringly influenced Churchill becomes a little thin in the 1930s and 1940s, when the two men clashed over the policy toward Nazi Germany and a host of domestic issues. Nonetheless, his book illuminates the lasting personal relationship between them."

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Blood Sport: Hunting in Britain since 1066, by Emma Griffin (Yale)
"Cover to Cover," June 2008)

"Griffin focuses on foxhunting through the ages, and she ends with an account of how 'the view that there might be something wrong in making sport out of killing animals steadily drifted from the fringes to the mainstream throughout the twentieth century.'"

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Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America, by Allen C. Guelzo (Simon & Schuster)
"Cover to Cover," April 2008)

"While Guelzo holds Lincoln and Douglas to strict account, he also delivers what may well be the deepest, most instructive study yet of how on-the-ground politics actually worked just before the Civil War and how ordinary people involved themselves with the nation’s most fateful political question, the future of slavery."

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The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, by David Halberstam (Hyperion)
"Cover to Cover," January/February 2008)

"Much of what Halberstam says in this work, completed just before his death last April, is astonishingly off. He argues, for instance, that the furious outcry that followed President Truman’s firing of General Douglas MacArthur in 1951 'was a kind of giant antiwar rally, not just anti–Korean War, but probably anti–Cold War as well.' If you can say that the anger at the removal of an iconic figure of total warfare is an antiwar emotion, then why should anyone trust anything else you say?"

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In Search of the Blues, by Marybeth Hamilton (Basic)
"Cover to Cover," February 2008)

"Unrepentantly revisionist and fiercely declarative, this account is less concerned with appreciation than with authentication. Hamilton offers here what amounts to myth-busting: Delta blues didn’t exist, she contends…In spite of her near-heretical thesis (or perhaps because of it), Hamilton writes with restraint and sensitivity. This is a graceful work."

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Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire, by Judith Herrin (Princeton)
"Cover to Cover," May 2008)

"'Endless books are written on Byzantine history,' writes Herrin, 'too many to count and most too long to read.' Hers, though, takes an innovative approach—28 short chapters, roughly chronological, that produce a linear mosaic of some 1,100 years, from the reign of Constantine to the triumph of the Ottomans in 1461."

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Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip Through the Land Art of the American West, by Erin Hogan (Chicago)
"Cover to Cover," May 2008)

"Casually scrutinizing the artistic works Sun Tunnels, Double Negative, Roden Crater, and Lightening Field while gamely playing up her fish-out-of-water status, Hogan delivers an ingenuously engaging travelogue-cum-art history."

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Austerity Britain 1945-1951, by David Kynaston (Walker and Company)
Reviewed by Benjamin Schwarz ("Waste Not, Want Everything," June 2008)

"With wit and ingenuity, Kynaston mines opinion surveys, radio shows, advertising slogans, parliamentary reports, and above all, letters, diaries, and memoirs to evoke the gray tinge that permeated postwar life—the shabby frocks, the sallow faces, the grubby train compartments, the dreary meals ('all winter greens and root vegetables and hamburgers made of grated potato and just a little meat,' the food writer Marguerite Patten recalled)."

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History: Lili Marlene: The Soldiers’ Song of World War II, by Liel Leibovitz and Matthew Miller (Norton)
"Cover to Cover," September 2008)

"Lively and well-informed, this book tells it all, with lots of attention to the travails of those involved. Here the sentiments are unobjectionable and universal, just made for a time when the shadow of the barracks gate was bound to heighten romance under lamplight for a world at war."

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Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat, by John Lukacs (Basic)
to Cover," December 2008)

"Often clumsy (Lukacs has never overcome his middle-European prose style), sometimes simplistically argued, the book is nevertheless an achievement of history through synecdoche: by shining a light in this corner, the author shows Winston Churchill at a truly pivotal point in history."

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History: Miami and the Siege of Chicago, by Norman Mailer (New York Review Books)
Reviewed by Christopher Hitchens ("Master of Conventions," September 2008)

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Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis, by George Makari (HarperCollins)
"Cover to Cover," May 2008)

"Makari concocts a tripartite ordering—Freud’s synthesis of existing strains of science, medicine, and philosophy; the spread of Freudianism and its schismatic discontents (think Jung, Adler, Bleuler, et. A;.); the post-World War I re-formation and reconstitution of this pluralistic community—as he conducts a 'historical examination of the core questions at the heart of the most influential theory of human inner life.'"

The Russian Civil War, by Evan Mawdsley (Pegasus)
"Cover to Cover," September 2008)

"Mawdsley skillfully boils down complex situations without oversimplifying them, and his vivid, readable account of this savage war is now the most authoritative in English."

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Wreck of the Medusa: Mutiny, Murder, and Survival on the High Seas, by Alexander McKee (Skyhorse)
"Cover to Cover," March 2008)

"The strangely uneven tone here—alternately poetic and prosaic (sometimes from sentence to sentence)—is occasionally confounding. McKee does best when he contextualizes the disaster, showing how the recently felled French Empire “was reflected in miniature aboard the Medusa,” and how the whole episode was a profound allegory for post-Napoleonic collapse."

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Diamonds, Gold and War: The British, The Boers and the Making of South Africa, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs)
"Cover to Cover," February 2008)

"The story of how the discovery of gemstones and gold blew apart the agrarian Afrikaner paradise of the two all-white oligarchic Boer republics has never been told with more verve, clarity, and sound judgment than here."

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The Wreck of the Medusa: The Most Famous Sea Disaster of the Nineteenth Century, by Jonathan Miles (Grove/Atlantic)
"Cover to Cover," January/February 2008)

"The story is riveting enough on its own macabre merits, but Miles makes it more gripping still, chiefly through his deft reconstruction using scattered accounts and conflicting records."

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Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922, by Giles Milton (Basic)
"Cover to Cover," October 2008)

"In a few terrible days at the conclusion of the Greco-Turkish War, in 1922, victorious Turkish troops burned the city [of Smyrna], killing more than 100,000 non-Muslim civilians. Milton tells his story with a precision that coolly elucidates the enormity of this event, witnessed by American and European naval forces operating under strict nonintervention orders."

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Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, by Rick Perlstein (FSG)
Reviewed by Ross Douthat ("E Pluribus Nixon," May 2008)

"Perlstein has the rare gift of being able to weave social, political, and cultural history into a single seamless narrative, linking backroom political negotiations to suburban protests over sex education in schools to the premiere of Bonnie and Clyde. And he has the eye of a great documentarian, fastening not only on the obvious historical set pieces (Kent State, Watts, Attica), but on the not-so-obvious ones as well."

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The Bolsheviks in Power, by Alexander Rabinowitch (Indiana)
to Cover," December 2008)

"Based on extensive research in newly released Russian archives, this briskly written, often riveting study of the evolution of Bolshevik authoritarianism, just issued in paperback, provides a salutary corrective to the school of historiography that views Soviet communism as totalitarian by nature."

The World on Fire: 1919 and the Battle with Bolshevism, by Anthony Read (Norton)
"Cover to Cover," June 2008)

"Given the ferocity and hydra-headedness of the phenomenon Read describes, its ascendency in so few places suggests that all those anti-Red efforts were not quite for naught."

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Westward: The Course of Empire, by Mark Ruwedel (Yale)
"Cover to Cover," November 2008)

"The cuts and grades, tunnels and trestles that mark the terrain in these starkly beautiful photographs seem like the North American equivalent of ruined Greek temples and Roman viaducts."

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The Raj Quartet: The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence, A Division of the Spoils, by Paul Scott (Everyman's Library)
Reviewed by Christopher Hitchens ("Victoria's Secret," January/February 2008)

"Scott’s work on India, which is really a quintet given the coda Staying On, is tense and beautiful in a way that E.M. Forster’s is not, because it understands that Fabian utilitarianism has its limits, too. The novels also possess a dimension of historical irony, because they understand that the British stayed too long and left too soon."

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The House That George Built, by Wilfrid Sheed (Random House)
"Cover to Cover," February 2008)

"This isn’t an indispensable history or scholarly work, something it doesn’t set out to be. But it is an indispensable book about loving songs—and one that brings alive what too many people think of as a dead language."

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The Enlightenment and the Book, by Richard B. Sher (Chicago)
Reviewed by Corby Kummer ("Torch Song," November 2008)

"Discerningly illustrated, at once scholarly and accessible, this is an essential addition not only to 18th-century studies but also to the history of the book—a poignant subject in our post-book age."

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History: For the Love of Animals: The Rise of the Animal Protection Movement, by Kathryn Shevelow (Henry Holt)
"Cover to Cover," October 2008)

"This tome is a carefully constructed history, a sometimes shocking social narrative (veined with unexpected, though welcome, humor), and a heartfelt encomium to a once-radical movement’s principles. Ultimately, and essentially, though, it’s a warm-blooded, well-reasoned plea for humaneness."

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The First Day of the Blitz, by Peter Stansky (Yale University Press)
Reviewed by Benjamin Schwarz ("Black Saturday," April 2008)

"In The First Day of the Blitz, the Stanford historian Peter Stansky fluently chronicles the day’s events, placing them in the wider context of Britain’s home front and the history of the Blitz. No matter how smooth his storytelling, though, this book can’t help but be largely superfluous. Still, Stansky’s approach has its rewards. By focusing primarily on the opening of the struggle, the book illuminates the ironies, paradoxes, and unintended consequences that marked the Blitz—and reminds us that those elements always lie at the heart of history."

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Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce, by Sarah Abrevaya Stein (Yale)
to Cover," December 2008)

"To her credit, the mix of religion, colonialism, persecution, and plumage never becomes dizzying. Nor does the style stray: Stein eschews both portentousness and glibness."

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The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentacostalism in the American South, by Randall J. Stephens (Harvard)
"Cover to Cover," May 2008)

"Stephens’s masterful account of how the South nurtured and altered a once-marginalized religious movement—and how that religion influenced the region—is the most fluent and authoritative synthesis of a complex and controversial subject."

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The Invention of Scotland, by Hugh Trevor-Roper (Yale)
"Cover to Cover," November 2008)

"The result of more than a decade of thought and research, this book, written with his customary brio, demolishes what to him was a mendacious, pointless, and destructive enterprise."