Reviews

The reign of Frank Rizzo was also the era of the rising black political power in Philadelphia. Nowhere was the clash of racial interests more intense than the police department.

Two new biographies reveal that police work is not so simple and straight-forward—cops versus robbers, order versus chaos—as many might think. Those enlisted in the job of enforcing the law are more complicated in their impulses and motivations, more conflicted or contradictory as human beings about the meaning of what they are doing, than partisans of either side willing to concede.

Renegade Dreams aims to uncover the new dreams of a post-industrial, 21st-century urban black community, and in the author’s words, to “reframe” the dreamers apart from the rioters, gangsters or savage youth so often portrayed in the media.

Christian G. Appy argues, unsurprisingly, that the destructive and immoral actions of the United States in Vietnam punctured the myth of American exceptionalism. Yet that same exceptionalism survives largely intact today.

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.