Page by Page: Book Reviews

Rocky Marciano’s fights were wars of attrition, not tactical contests. This meant that he was a gate attraction even for people who were not fans of boxing.

To seek a more cautious understanding of fascism through scholarly literature, there is probably no place to start more respected than Robert O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism, now more than a decade old.

All in all, Roberts and Smith have offered us popular, rather than scholarly, history. Reading about Mantle and the Yankees is a pleasant exercise for anyone who likes baseball, and particularly for those who enjoyed some of those 1950s seasons.

It will take some patience, concentration, and interest to ferret out and connect the pieces of this pugilistic pie, but it is worth the effort.

Hitchcock’s biography imparts a great deal of information about Ike and his times, enough so that the reader can make his or her own judgment about his career. One of the work’s weaknesses is that it does not set Eisenhower’s presidential choices within the context of the times, namely public opinion.

What the Eyes Don’t See is a deeply-readable tale of science, public health sleuthing, and a fight for social justice for some of America’s most disfranchised citizens.

Rich manages to capture the messiness of the human experience, having his characters live in the gray moral reality rather than the black-and-white dichotomies presented in the abstract.

We residents of the St. Louis area know the importance of rivers, but we can learn a lot more from Martin Doyle’s The Source.

McRae’s book insists that the story of racist massive resistance, much of it historically led and sustained by women, was always much more than simply a Southern or a Jim Crow phenomenon, and that it was always about much more than school segregation.

Journalism has changed in this internet age, and Hersh is here to tell how it used to be. One cannot help but think today’s world of instant information may not be an improvement for democracy.