Many times each year the reviewer is called upon to answer the question “Do we really need yet another book about the Civil War?” Surprisingly often the answer is a tentative “Yes!” Considerable stores of new information are assembled into...
In her highly acclaimed first book, Praying for Sheetrock, Melissa Fay Greene focused on a little known patch of the large and complex quilt that is the Southern civil rights movement. She peopled it with characters who were both courageous...
The first reaction of the educated public to a new volume of political memoirs is one of wariness. Will this be another pièce justicatif — or an example of Establishment iconography aimed at glorifying distinguished pomposity—or both...
“Nineteen men in two distinct groups rode forward from the coalescing Confederate lines west of Chancellors-ville at about 9:00 p. m. on May 2, 1863. Only seven of the nineteen came back untouched, man or horse . . . Major General A.P. Hill...
On Oct. 19, 1865, the day after he finished the “Jumping Frog” story, Sam Clemens wrote to his brother and sister-in-law that he had at last found his vocation—”seriously scribbling to excite the laughter of God’s creatures.” Written across...
Readers will not be disappointed with the wealth of material covered. Entries on individual artists are logically arranged to include information on his or her life and works; working methods and techniques, writings (if any), character and...
Grant Webster provides a detailed account of the New Critics and the New York Intellectuals; and he supplements these central sections of his book by analyzing the nature of critical schools and by supplying an excellent bibliography and...
Do read it. It’s fun, oftentimes enlightening, once in a while quite irritating, highly readable. After all, Dwight, in single combat, grappled with most issues of the last century, from the Depression to the nuclear arms race, socialism to...
