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Recent Reviews
Cate Lineberry
Positive The Dallas Morning News Cate Lineberry has done readers and history a good turn by chronicling the life of a man who led one of the most daring escapes from American slavery during the Civil War ... Lineberry's biography is a solid retelling of his life. Some readers, however, may be put off by the considerable amount of conjecture ... Those objections aside, Be Free or Die joins a series of works in recent years that have contributed to a more accurate representation of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ed. Anne Margaret Daniel
Rave The Dallas Morning News Part of the charm of this anthology is that the stories appear without the censorship to which they might have been subjected to in his time. The tales assembled here by editor Anne Margaret Daniel, a professor of literature at New York City's New School, are about divorce and despair, teenagers struggling during the Great Depression, war, sex and New York City's vitality and poverty. ‘They show him,’ Daniel writes, ‘not as a 'sad young man' growing old, and trapped in the golden days of his own recent past, but in the fore of Modern Literature, in all experimentalism and developing complexities.’
Michael Kazin
Rave The Washington Independent Review of Books Michael Kazin’s War Against War confirms his stature as one of the most astute historians of American 19th- and 20th-century social movements. Equally significant to readers is that the lessons contained in his new book are presciently relevant ... The one weakness of Kazin’s book is that his four figures come and go, like actors on a stage, leaving the reader wanting to know more about the personal or inner lives of these figures. But that may be too much to ask in a history of this kind ... Kazin does not end his valuable book with the collapse of the movement. Rather, he reports how both country and government turned against these activists. Free speech was repressed without compunction and prison terms freely handed out to those activists who refused to cease opposing the war ... Offering a lesson for today, Kazin says that peace movements are unlike other efforts at social change. They must grow quickly and lure leaders from other movements if they are to succeed, as did the World War I anti-war forces for 51 months until events undid their work. But Kazin’s book should not be seen merely as the tale of the work and ultimate failure of peace activists. This was the most consequential of debates in the 20th century. Since then, every one of the numerous entries of the United States into war has raised the question that this struggle first brought up.
Elaine Showalter
Positive The Dallas Morning News As an accomplished critic, Showalter finds it hard to resist pausing in her story to offer analyses of Howe’s work and conjecture about things unknown...The reader who overlooks these minor complaints will find an engaging and, at times, moving account of a woman who used the power of her pen to win a modicum of freedom in an age when women were permitted little.