Page by Page: Book Reviews

At long last, here is a book specialists in British, French, Spanish, Italian, and, yes, U.S. Civil War history will all find new ideas to explore and new contentions with which to grapple.

Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune presents a wonderfully vivid depiction of the Paris Commune that alternates deftly between humor and heartbreak.

Yong Zhao analyzes the origins, strengths, and failures of the Chinese educational system with an emphasis on its authoritarian nature. He may ease the concerns of other countries, who may feel pressured to follow the Chinese model, but he also demonstrates how problematic comparisons can be.

Zink’s narrative raises great questions about the nature and credibility of people on all sides of environmental matters—and the ways that language may be used to cloud rather than to clarify core issues.

The children’s book Loretta Mason Potts glosses over the emotional and logistical implications of its circumstances for a fantasy story where the impact of events become a very distant second to the events themselves.

Like an amusement park, Believe It or Not was a cheap thrill but it also brought together a community of seekers who sought their faith through the excess of the unusual.

Friedman’s skill in populating her chapters with not only intriguing protagonists but a full cast of supporting characters results in an engrossingly textured account of the early Cold War. Freeing the era from the straightjacket of conformity to which it has been confined by hindsight and historiography, Citizenship in Cold War America reveals a society more fractious than anxious.

Rough Country clearly shows the sociological function of religion in Texas and, as a consequence, its political leanings and influence on the rest of the United States.

Lydia Denworth in her book I Can Hear You Whisper restores one’s awe at the amazing feat that is communication. As a scientific journalist, she dissects the process of language acquisition from auditory comprehension to speech production, but her quest for understanding is personal. Denworth’s third son, Alex, was born hearing-impaired.

Americans were more fully aware that modern life, urban life in the late nineteenth century, made heat more unbearable than ever. As Salvatore Basile writes in Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything: “America was realizing that a heat wave was much more unpleasant in cities than in rural areas: the larger the city, the more brick and stone and human bodies, the more hellishly hot it felt.” A man-made heat was being created that could only be controlled, ultimately, by man-made cooling. Slowly, inchoately, but tenaciously, the quest for coolth had begun.