For Schlafly, Trump, as a personality, is clearly a break from the moderately conservative Republican nominees of the last few elections like Romney and McCain, which is part of Trump’s appeal. His crudity, his bluntness, and his bouts of incoherence are signs of authenticity, of an utter refusal to submit to the sensibilities of liberal/leftist zeitgeist.
Alone atop the Hill affords a unique look into the life and times of Alice Dunnigan, an African American pioneer of journalism in an age spanning Jim Crow to the beginnings of the civil rights movement.
When we read a book about a place, be it a city, a state, a country, or a less geo-politically oriented “region,” we ideally want a convincing case for what exactly makes the area in question compelling, or at least a definite idea from the authors what about that place attracts them. While reading this book I found myself wondering who the intended or imagined reader might be.
Peter Baldwin’s The Copyright Wars explores the roles and histories of technological innovations, culture, political and legal institutions on incentives influencing writers, publishers, and audiences. However, his analysis is not always consistent or rigorous.
In striking a balance between the drearier and more inspirational aspects of their tale, the co-authors of Radicals in America: The U.S. Left Since the Second World War, tend, on balance, to emphasize the positive. As they argue in their introduction, although the “radical left has always been a minority current” in the United States, it has “propelled major changes and frequently given shape to what Americans broadly take as the nation’s core traditions.”
In There Goes My Social Life Dash believes she can see outside herself because she has placed herself outside the mainstream of her racial group by being a conservative Republican. But this move has given her distance, not perspective.
What rings clear throughout Szwed’s otherwise perplexing archive of a complex life, is the “consistency and taste” Billie Holiday “brought to nearly every performance” under all kinds of material, physical, and emotional circumstances.
In a finely drawn outline of a life that was filled with activity, with meetings, with far-reaching observations and brilliant imaginings, Andrea Wulf has made a wonderful contribution to the record of Humboldt’s life and work.
Despite the recent trend in American scholarship emphasizing the transnational and cross-cultural dimensions of American culture, Victor Séjour is rarely mentioned. Elèna Mortara’s Writing For Justice: Victor Séjour, the Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara in the Age of Transatlantic Emancipations addresses this gap.
The magic trick that Chast performs in her cartoons is to make laughter out of the dirty secret of life: it is an alternately stressful and humdrum affair, and then it is over.
