Sunday, May 14, 2017

Sunday Book Review Roundup


As everyone's semesters wind down, this week's roundup offers a sampling of reviews.

The Times Literary Supplement has a review of Susan Scott Parrish's The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History

Apropos of modern conservatism and the presidency, The New York Times carries a review of Alvin S. Felzenberg's A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr.   The Times also reviews Pat Buchanan's memoir of the Nixon presidency, Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever (the New Republic's review  rejects the characterization of Buchanan as mere "merry troglodyte"). Finally, the Times reviews Bruce D. Haynes' Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Family (also reviewed in The Washington Post).

In The Washington Post is a review of John Boles' Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty.  Also reviewed is Lynne Olson's Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War.

In The New York Review of Books is an essay reviewing Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, Dava Sobel's The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars, and Nathalia Holt's Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars.  Frank Trentmann's Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First is also reviewed in the magazine.

Slate carries a review of Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.

Jacob Remes' Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era is reviewed on H-Net.  Also on the site is a review of Peter M. Beattie's Punishment in Paradise: Race, Slavery, Human Rights, and a Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Penal Colony.

Finally, NPR reviews Bryan Wagner's The Tar Baby, A Global History.