martyrdom in islam - by david cook

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AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST

Martyrdom in Islam. By David Cook. (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press,2007. Pp. xiv, 206. $75.00.)

The role of martyrdom in Islam has taken center stage in recent years due to theburgeoning terrorist tactic of “self-designated martyrdoms,” often referred to as“suicide attacks.” Current popular portrayals of martyrdom operations suggestthat martyrdom has always played a pivotal role in Islam and is more pronouncedin Islam than in other religious traditions. David Cook counters this popularimage by demonstrating that martyrdom historically has not played a prominentrole in Islamic thought and practice, outside of the Shii tradition.

Cook ambitiously seeks to provide a broad vision of martyrdom and itsmeaning and practice in the Islamic tradition, combining historical analysis,global coverage ranging from Africa to Southeast Asia, and a thematic approachto the definition of the martyr in the Sunni, Shia, and Sufi traditions in order tolocate martyrdom both within Islam and in comparison to other religious tradi-tions, notably Judaism and Christianity. Cook’s analysis is based largely on Arabiclanguage sources and translations of primary materials, permitting inclusion ofshort excerpts from various pieces so as to allow the reader direct experience ofthe primary sources; this is sure to appeal to historians. The writing is engaging,and Cook cleverly chooses his excerpted tidbits for their dramatic impact. At thesame time, the analysis is frequently piecemeal, rather than systematic, oftencovering major thinkers or sources in a few paragraphs. Examples include dis-cussion of Sayyid Qutb’s understandings of jihad and martyrdom in a mere threeparagraphs, despite Qutb’s status as “the living embodiment of radical Islamicmartyrdom,” and rapid coverage of Quranic references to martyrs and martyr-dom in less than three pages (138, 139, 31–33).

The major contributions of this book are many. The author provides a discus-sion of the classical definition of who qualifies as a martyr according to Islamicsources, which includes not only those who are killed in religious warfare, but alsoextends to women in childbirth, non-Muslims who befriend and protect Muslims,and those who die from plague. This is followed by discussion of how thesecategories were further expanded during the medieval period. There is also ananalysis of the “martyrs of love” from both Islamic literature and the Sufitradition. Cook discusses variations in understandings and prevalence of martyrsregionally, particularly noting the paucity of martyrs in Southeast Asia andoffering possible reasons for this. He also provides analysis of the question of

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intent with respect to martyrdom—when does martyrdom become suicide and isthis ever legally permissible? This last issue, a topic of major historical debate thatis scattered throughout the book, has undergone significant transformation in thecontemporary era. It deserved a chapter of its own.

If there is any fault with the book, it is that it is too short for the scope of itssubject matter. It is best understood as a teaser—an introduction to the topic thatdemonstrates the multitude of material ready and waiting for more comprehensiveand systematic analysis. Rather than being the final word, this book suggestsavenues for further inquiry.

Boston College Natana J. DeLong-Bas

Darfur’s Sorrow: A History of Destruction and Genocide. By M. W. Daly. (Cam-bridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xix, 368. $22.99.)

The appearance of the Darfur crisis in news reports around the world has actedas a catalyst for a number of studies trying to explain the massive human rightsviolations that have occurred in what was “one of the least known places in theworld” (1). Few provide the depth of historical analysis presented in this book. M.W. Daly is an expert on the history of the Sudan and Egypt and so is ideally placedto put recent events into a proper perspective. His research is a most importantcontribution to bettering our understanding of Darfur and it should be read byanyone attempting to comprehend recent events.

The book is divided into twelve chapters that take the reader from the foundingof the Fur state to the 2006 Darfur Peace Agreement. They are structured to reflectmajor political changes in the history of Sudan, including the creation of the FurSultanate, the annexation by Egypt, the Mahdiyya, Anglo-Egyptian rule, thepost-Independence era, the “May Regime,” and rule by the National Islamic Front(NIF). The final chapter offers a penetrating examination of the destruction ofDarfur. The author believes that genocide is the correct term to apply to the massmurder that has taken place and cannot hide his disappointment at the weakinternational responses to the crimes that have taken place there.

When placed in the broader historical context the story of Darfur becomesone of complexity, fluidity, and change. Daly characterizes this as “chaotic nor-mality” (84). However, several themes do emerge. One is weak governments thatare not interested in the needs of the local population. Throughout the wholeperiod under study, Darfur has suffered from social and economic underdevel-opment, especially in the areas of education, communications, and water supply.Another theme is escalating problems with drought, famine, overgrazing, and

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desertification causing migration and clashes over land ownership. The bookalso points out the ability of outsiders to conquer but not rule the region. At theregional level a porous border has led to an intermeshing of conflicts in Darfurwith those in Chad.

These are some of the underlying causes of the first genocide of the twenty-firstcentury. The more immediate factors, Daly believes, can be found in the nature ofthe NIF regime. Their strong Arabist-Islamic ideology led them to support out-siders who were seizing land from local farmers. Because of this, Daly believesviolence in Darfur took on a jihadist character. As the insecurity and resentmentof the varied indigenous peoples increased, it was only a matter of time beforeserious violence erupted. The response of the NIF was to allow the janjawid toimplement a policy of ethnic cleansing that by 2006 had left 3.5 million peoplein need of assistance (315). Eventually the government did sign the Darfur PeaceAgreement, which is where this book ends. Daly believes that Khartoum never hadany intention of implementing it and notes that the NIF is used to playing the roleof international pariah. Recent developments seem to confirm that this was thecorrect interpretation.

University of Ulster Stephen Ryan

Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present. ByMichael B. Oren. (New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton & Co., 2007. Pp. xxi, 737.$29.95.)

Israeli scholar Michael B. Oren has a Ph.D. in history and is a fellow at the ShalemInstitute in Jerusalem, a conservative think tank backed by William Kristol. Thissweeping account of America and the Middle East has all the trappings ofscholarship, including one hundred twenty-seven pages of footnotes and bibliog-raphy. But despite the author’s often brilliant prose and occasionally balancedcomments, his ultimate goal is to persuade American readers that support forIsrael should be a paramount concern now and in the future as it was in the past.The Puritans backed a Jewish return to Zion as did a midnineteenth-centurypreacher named George Bush, ancestor of the American presidents. The corollaryof this argument for support of Israel, supported by misrepresentations of sources,is that Arabs who oppose Zionism only understand force and that military actionwas and still is the only way to resolve issues in the Middle East.

Oren uses the Barbary wars of the late eighteenth century, when North Africanrulers preyed on shipping of many nations and held captive sailors for ransom,to establish a recurrent motif of an America threatened by Arabs and Islam.


Quotations abound, providing American impressions of Arab treachery and theuselessness of negotiating with the deys of Algiers unless backed by force. Theauthor provides reality, as opposed to fantasies about harems and desert romance.The “shrewd and hard-nosed” American negotiator remarked that “Islamism. . . requires little instruction . . . [and] seems peculiarly adapted to the concep-tions of a barbarous people” whose piracy, for Oren, “had threatened America’ssurvival” (74–75).

Beliefs to the contrary are the “fantasy” in the title that must be countered by“power” and Christian “faith.” Oren condemns the Eisenhower administrationfor opposing the Israeli-French-British joint attack that sought to depose Egypt’sGamal Abd al-Nasser in the 1956 Suez crisis: “[S]purred by romantic notions ofMiddle Eastern nationalisms [fantasy] and an anticolonialist creed, the UnitedStates had banded together with its perennial Soviet enemy against its Europeanfriends and saved an Egyptian dictator whom [Secretary of State John Foster]Dulles had planned to depose” (516). Oren makes no mention of Israel’s con-tributions to Egyptian-Israeli tensions, nor does he explain how, in the midstof nationalist liberation movements against European colonialism, Britain andFrance remained “the two powers most capable of safeguarding the Middle East”(515). His comments suggest sympathy for Western imperialism in the region thenand now.

America’s misguided actions at Suez were encouraged by the Foreign Serviceofficers interpreting the region who were “Arabists.” For Oren, Arabists arepeople who continually questioned Israel’s role as a stabilizing force in the MiddleEast; he fails to note that they critically analyzed Arab policies as well. Orencontrasts these Arabists with the original nineteenth-century American negotia-tors, many of whom were Jews, and returns to this theme in interpreting contem-porary developments in the region.

Ultimately, Oren applies his Barbary pirate metaphor to the al-Qaida attackson the United States of 9/11, 2001. At the turn of this century, “the threat of amajor [Islamist] terrorist strike within the United States went largely unnoticed,”as opposed to “[b]ack in 1789 [when] the fear of attacks by Middle-Easternpirates on the new nation’s shores prodded Americans to ratify their Constitutionand unite” (581). Really? This reviewer had no idea that a North-African invasionof America was imminent in 1788–1789. Oren’s discussion mentions that the onlymotive for the colonists uniting was the need to create a navy to protect Americanshipping in the Mediterranean (28–30)!

A limited review cannot do justice to the full nature of Oren’s effort to depicta set of relationships with little resemblance to historical reality. He ultimately


casts American Middle East specialists as romantics who have fully embracedEdward Said’s Orientalism [1978], meaning that they “identified . . . whole-heartedly with the Arabs.” This slur, never uttered by Said, cannot be found inany source Oren provides, but serves as a contrast to the “urbane and elegant”Bernard Lewis, identified as a British Jew and Princeton scholar who was,certainly for Said, the epitome of an Orientalist (543). Oren pursues thisdichotomy further, depicting most American Middle East specialists as “rearedon multiculturalism and postcolonial theories,” as opposed to the ubiquitousBernard Lewis, who called for close ties with Israel and saw America as theMiddle East’s only hope for “democratic change” (572–3). Oren makes nomention of Lewis’s role in pushing for an attack on Iraq and his closeness toneoconservatives in and out of the Bush administration, one of whom is Oren’sown patron, William Kristol.

Examples of true scholarly analysis can be found in this book, includingreferences to an Israel that disputed sound American advice. But they are rare andare overwhelmed by Oren’s admittedly brilliant schemata where American powerand Christian faith can and should counter the often pervasive fantasy of a MiddleEast whose Muslim inhabitants can be trusted. Oren embodied this message inMarch 2007 when he stood at the podium of the AIPAC conference with abeaming Reverend James Hagee, head of Christians United for Israel, who callsfor fulfillment of the Old Testament by Israel’s retention of the West Bank. Asreported, “Israeli historian Michael Oren set the stage for Hagee’s talk,” declaringthat the roots of American support for Israel dated to the colonial era andProtestants who embraced the idea of a return to Zion. Photographs of the twowere taken with Oren holding a copy of this book.

Power, Faith, and Fantasy is ultimately a work of propaganda, a model of howa book’s scholarly apparatus can deceive, serving to promote contemporarypolitical objectives rather than to illustrate a historical process.

University of Arizona Charles D. Smith

Postal Systems in the Pre-Modern Islamic World. By Adam J. Silverstein. (New York,N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 214. $95.00.)

Who would want to read a book on postal systems in the premodern Islamicworld? Anyone who has heretofore taken postal systems for granted on theone hand, and everyone interested in the mechanics of state formation andmaintenance on the other would. Adam J. Silverstein argues that postal systems(barid in Arabic) contributed indispensably to the creation and maintenance of


geographically vast states in the premodern Islamic world. By “premodern,” hemeans before the use of modern telecommunications and before privatization.The term “postal” refers to people and riding mounts being posted at convenientintervals along a network of land-based routes, serving to transport people,objects, official decrees, and intelligence reports. With few exceptions, these postalsystems were reserved for the use of ruling authorities. He describes in detail howthe postal systems worked: routes, distances between posts, speed, messengers,mounts, administration, and associated means of communication like carrierpigeons and beacons.

Silverstein bases his conclusions on three categories of sources. The first ofthese is etymology. He describes the transfer of terminology from one postalsystem to another, although “linguisitic continuity can . . . attest to the deliberateassociation of one institution with another but not to the existence of identicalinstitutions” (86). The second is Arabic sources. The author draws from severalwell-known medieval Arab writers and from at least one “new source,” theSiyasat al-Muluk. The third category is secondary sources, which in Silverstein’sbibliography are vast and very rich. He admits that there are wide gaps in hisinformation and that he must, in some cases, make long leaps to arrive at certainconclusions. Nonetheless, the author is aware of the risks and tries to preemptcriticism by saying “some readers will deem my use and analysis of the sourcesto be unduly naïve or skeptical, or otherwise misguided. My approach has been toquote the sources extensively, which should allow readers to make up their ownminds on points of detail” (6).

Most readers will not be so well equipped to make up their own minds andwould do well to trust Silverstein, who has clearly studied a vast quantity andvariety of sources and thus makes those long leaps with confidence. What is notsufficiently explained is why the barid declined in the late Umayyad period, orwhy it was virtually nonexistent under the Seljuks. The latter is especially puzzlingin view of the excellent network of roads and commercial caravanserais that theSeljuks reputedly maintained.

The style is concise and precise. Each section ends with a series of clearly statedconclusions. Silverstein regularly says things like “On the whole, the case isconvincing, with three important caveats: first . . . second . . . third” (165).

The greatest value of this work to scholars and students interested in thepremodern Islamic world is that Silverstein places this detailed description ofpostal systems into the broader picture of the political traditions of particulardynasties and rulers, notably the pre-Umayyads, Umayyads, Abbasids, Samanids,Ghaznavids, Fatimids, Seljuks, Il-Khanids, and Mamluks. He raises the question,


“What makes Islamic postal systems ‘Islamic’?” and proposes two answers, onemore confidently than the other.

In his conclusion, Silverstein notes that, in stark contrast to the West (RomanEmpire) where nomadic conquerors disrupted the postal system, nomadic con-querors in the Islamic world adopted and adapted preexisting postal systems, anddeveloped them to unprecedented levels of sophistication, which were far superiorto anything in medieval Europe.

Vanderbilt University Ronald A. Messier

A Tribal Order: Politics and Law in the Mountains of Yemen. By Shelagh Weir.(Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2007. Pp. xi, xv, 390. $50.00.)

This author’s detailed ethnography describes the political and legal life of thesmall tribes of the Rezih region in northwest Yemen over the last four centuries.Without resorting to economic or ecological determinism, she argues that thefertile and productive mountainous terrain of the Razih region, and its place on animportant trade route, has meant that Razih has been under nominal control bysome form of state entity for centuries; however, these well-armed, geographicallystable tribes were always able to maintain a substantial degree of autonomy.Drawing on her anthropological field research in the region, as well as historicaland legal documents, Shelagh Weir presents a persuasive account of intratribaland intertribal relations, as well as relations with the Imamate state, and, after1962, the Republican state. The historical depth combined with the ethnographicdetail make this book a distinctive and valuable contribution to the literature onYemen.

Weir pays close attention to how changes in infrastructure, transportation, andweaponry have transformed state–tribe relationships, particularly in the Repub-lican period. Equally, she keeps in the forefront the tenacity of tribal customs overtime. Her account notably undermines stereotypes of constantly warring tribes bygiving a thorough account of the “principles, rules, and sanctions” that underpintribal governance and dispute resolution. She describes how dispute resolution ismost often about avoiding rather than inciting conflict and about the importanceof persuasive words over brute force. One can see the imprint of Weir’s formercareer as a museum curator in her close attention to material objects like maleheadgear, daggers, and sacrificial animals. These things are intertwined withwords in the process of dispute resolution: both a verbal admission of guilt and theslaughter of a beast at the scene of the offense are essential elements of preventinga conflict from escalating.


Weir offers a fascinating discussion of hospitality and its role in both main-taining cordial relationships and mediating hostile ones. While acknowledging theway in which a man’s prestige (or that of his family or tribe) is created throughthe generous offering of hospitality, Weir’s analysis includes as well a thoroughconsideration of coercive manipulations of the hospitality code. When an indi-vidual refuses to pay compensation owed according to the legal obligations of thetribe, the tribal guarantors of these collective obligations descend on the offender,who is obliged to offer them expensive hospitality until he pays his dues. A similarprocess, called tanfidh, is employed by the state. Armed policemen do not arresta miscreant, but rather ensconce themselves at his house, forcing him to feed themuntil he finally agrees to comply with the law (188).

This is a beautifully produced book, with some marvelous color plate photos,capturing Yemen’s captivating landscape, distinctive architecture, and confidentpeople. It is of considerable relevance to anthropologists interested in theories ofsegmentation, tribalism, and legal anthropology. It is a must for all scholars ofYemen, graduate students and professionals alike, as well as for historians inter-ested in tribal histories in the Middle East.

Trent University Anne Meneley

THE AMERICAS

The Devil of Great Island: Witchcraft and Conflict in Early New England. By EmersonW. Baker. (New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Pp. xiv, 233. $24.95.)

Witchcraft studies often fall prey to two temptations: one is to construct anoverarching theory that will account for the notable outbreaks of witch prosecu-tion between c. 1500 and c. 1800; the other is to look for “rational” explanationsthat will chime with prevailing modern sociological and largely nonreligioustheories. Microhistories can perform a very useful function, one among several, inbringing the reader face to face with the details of people living in the day-by-day,month-by-month experience of the events being described. Thus, in careful hands,they can act as a correction and counterbalance to the eagerness to constructcategories, apply formulae, and “explain,” or rather explain away, beliefs, atti-tudes, and modes of behavior different from ours and regarded as unsophisticated,somewhat ridiculous, or politically incorrect.

Emerson W. Baker tells a fascinating story of intrigue, neighborly quarrels, landdisputes, local wars, religious abrasiveness between communities, and uneasypolitical relations between New England and the governments in London, all


interesting enough in themselves, but essential to an appreciation and understand-ing of stone throwing by the Devil throughout the summer of 1682 in GreatIsland, New Hampshire. Hundreds of stones were thrown inside and outside atavern belonging to George and Alice Walton, yet not one thrower was everobserved. Other phenomena attended these outbreaks, including the disappear-ance and reappearance of domestic objects, mysterious destruction of corn andfarm implements, and eerie sounds that seemed to come out of nowhere. Theincident became famous, partly through published accounts by Increase Matherand an eyewitness, Richard Chamberlain, and partly via extensive networks ofcorrespondence by whose means news of all kinds traveled remarkably far afield.Baker successfully shows that there was contact between some of those involvedin or tangential to this 1682 incident and to the more famous witchcraft trials inSalem in 1692. Salem was not, therefore, an isolated occurrence, however majorin its scope and impact, but had distinct parallels with the earlier episode.

Indeed, Baker is at his best when he is engaged in telling his Great Islandnarrative and when he is drawing these comparisons with Salem, and this is wherehis impulse to “explain” is legitimately and successfully realized. For the mostpart, then, he has given the reader an enthralling microhistory of his chosensubject. There are occasional weaknesses when he offers redundant and pointlessnudges to his audience—“As twentieth-century observers, we know that witch-craft does not exist”—and when he tries to “rationalize” some of the phenomenahe is describing, such as explaining the behavior of Joseph Ring, who felt he wasunder attack by witches, by surmising he may have been suffering from posttrau-matic stress disorder as a result of his experiences in the local wars with theWakanabi and the French (98, 194). Baker is also weak in his (relatively few)observations on witchcraft in Europe, because he relies on generalizing theoriesthat are both mistaken and well out of date. But these cavils aside, Baker’swelcome account throws a strong light on an American witchcraft episode thathas not hitherto received the attention it clearly deserves.

University of St. Andrews P. G. Maxwell-Stuart

The Work of the Heart: Young Women and Emotion, 1780–1830. By MarthaTomhave Blauvelt. (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 2007. Pp. 275.$39.50.)

If diarists are chroniclers of history, then The Work of the Heart is an invaluablestudy of what the author classifies as “emotion history” (2).


Focusing on several diaries, the author presents a compelling sample ofwhite, Protestant young women of means and the challenging “emotion work”contained in their diaries. The result of that “work,” as Martha TomhaveBlauvelt notes, is the evolving task of maturing and adapting to society’sstandards.

Those private, often secret, and even “therapeutic” diaries are artifacts fromwhich a social and cultural period emerges. They are a genre, often addingfootnotes to history and providing, as the author implies, a foundation forsignificant historical study of young women’s emotional evolution from theirteenage years to adulthood and marriage. Blauvelt provides insights into thediarists’ private reflections and their contrasting public voices that conformed tosocial expectations (190).

Within this historical and cultural landscape, Blauvelt’s diarists were chal-lenged to conform to the ways in which “society shapes people’s feelings” (3). Asa result, the “work” recorded in these diaries reveals a complex, often conflictingstruggle in which these women shape and reshape their feelings to accommodatethemselves to assigned roles.

Respected historical and social research is prominent in this book, and Blauveltquotes from it liberally, weaving it through the emotional struggles that the diariesilluminate. Although she does not attempt to generalize her study to all women ofthe period, the author does note that the social standards of the era affected mostwomen—to a greater and lesser degree—regardless of social, ethnic, or economicstatus.

Most of the young women in this sample boarded in private homes andattended the prestigious Litchfield Women’s Academy in Connecticut. Theirdiaries reveal the complexities involved as they worked to fulfill rigorous academicrequirements, define their religious lives, and maintain courtesy and sympathyin their relationships. The sentiments in their diary entries display their effortsto conform to the standards prescribed to women, which the author notes werefrequently at odds with their feelings and aspirations.

Following a comprehensive introduction, the author divides her work into fivechapters: “The Work of the Heart,” “Schooling the Heart,” “Discerning theHeart,” “Losing It,” and “Reconstructing the Heart.” Each of these chaptersdefines changes in experience and emotion as these young women matured—fromtheir reflections on popular fiction; to their admiration for, and grievances with,friends and teachers; and ultimately to the challenges of courtship and marriage.The author insightfully places these changes within their historical and socialcontexts.


Blauvelt provides a window into the past through the often vexing “work” ofexpressing feelings and meeting society’s expectations. Her extensive notes, bib-liography, and index are invaluable for researchers as well as courses in women’sstudies and the history of this era. The general reader with interest in this subjectmay also find the book engaging. Of significance is a vivid record of these youngwomen through their diaries within the context of the times in which they lived.The Work of the Heart is a vehicle from which the reader can travel from theseearly American women’s diaries to the sentiments, expectations, and roles ofAmerican women today.

California Lutheran University Marsha C. Markman

Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age. By Susan K. Cahn. (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. 375. $29.95.)

In this study, the author traces the history of Southern adolescent girls’ sexualityfrom the 1920s through the beginnings of the modern Civil Rights Movement,exploring ideas about—and, where possible, the lived experiences of—flappers,delinquents, the feebleminded, pick-up girls, and teenagers. Throughout the study,Susan K. Cahn argues that concerns about what young girls, both black andwhite, were doing with their bodies mattered, as these both reflected largerconcerns about social change and, more importantly, represented fissures in theedifice of white supremacy supported in large part by ideas about virtuous whitewomen. When young white girls seemed no longer interested in being virtuous,this called into question all forms of white privilege largely based on the sexualpolitics of race. Cahn simultaneously examines corresponding changes amongAfrican American girls, showing their ambivalent interactions with dominantattitudes and behaviors.

By showing how the seemingly irrelevant antics of youth threatened thesocial order, Cahn makes scrutable why something as innocuous as integratinghigh schools could throw Southern whites into a violent panic. High schoolexperience in the 1950s, she argues, revolved around heterosexual romance.Teens met their mates in high school. It is no wonder that the presence ofAfrican Americans in classrooms suffused with teen romance would raise fearsof racial amalgamation.

Cahn in many ways brings together several decades of research on changingideas of sexual expression in the twentieth-century South. And some of herarguments are familiar. Historians know about working-class heterosocialculture, and exploring gender and compulsory sterilization is fairly well-trod


ground. But Cahn uses these aspects of sexual history to make a larger point aboutthe role that teenage sexuality and experimentation played in scientific, political,and economic debates in the South. She is able to bring to life the lived experienceof girls in the past. Her chapter on the African American girls’ sexuality in the1930s is fresh and fascinating, using a set of interviews about sexual behavior thatexpose the calculations black girls made with their sexuality. Respectability didnot necessarily buy security as it was supposed to for white girls and AfricanAmericans adjusted their standards accordingly.

Cahn later explores the experience of white teenagers in the romantic cultureof high schools after World War II. This reviewer would like to have seen her fleshout her arguments with a larger source base, moving the focus beyond one highschool and one set of yearbooks. Nevertheless, she largely confirms what mosthistorians have suspected about teen culture at midcentury. Ultimately, her analy-sis of experience does indeed show how Southern girls “navigat[ed] between hardreality and imagined possibility” (307). Although the reviewer still wonders if itis possible to write a book about gender in the 1950s South and avoid having itdevolve to a narrative of the Civil Rights Movement, Cahn shows that it isimpossible to avoid race (and class) when discussing gender. On the whole, this isa compelling book.

University of Alabama Lisa Lindquist Dorr

Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life. Vol. 1. The Public Years. By CharlesCapper. (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xxi, 649. $40.00.)

Although Margaret Fuller’s life was very short, it overflowed with learning,thinking, writing, teaching, travel, and social and political engagement. As ayoung child, Fuller studied classical languages and literature. She taught herselfFrench and German in order to read the latest European literature and philoso-phy. In her twenties, she edited the New England transcendentalists’ journal,taught in Bronson Alcott’s Temple School and at a girls’ academy, and ledConversations for the elite women of Boston and Cambridge. A vacation led toher first book, Summer on the Lakes in 1843. Her second book, Woman in theNineteenth Century, developed an androgynous vision of freedom for womenand men. As an editor on the New York Tribune, she dared readers to engagewith Romantic literature on its own terms and to address the social injustices intheir burgeoning city. She became America’s first foreign correspondent, cover-ing the Roman revolution with ever-growing passionate engagement. She gavebirth to a son in 1848 and witnessed the siege and bombardment of the Roman


republic in 1849. Then, while returning to America in 1850, Fuller and herfamily drowned in a violent storm. Her brief forty years were indeed full.

To write a biography of such a rich life requires capacious knowledgerivaling Fuller’s own. Charles Capper meets this monumental challenge. Thissecond of two volumes explores Fuller’s “public years,” from her editorship ofthe Transcendentalists’ journal through New York to Europe. Capper placesFuller’s life and work in their historical, philosophical, and literary contexts,and judges them within those contexts. He treats Fuller’s personal struggles ina balanced manner, drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, and especiallypsychoanalysis, without allowing them to overwhelm his nineteenth-centurysources.

In examining Fuller’s close, intense, and often vexed relationship with RalphWaldo Emerson, for example, Capper concludes that what Fuller “seems tohave wanted (to translate her Romantic idiom into a psychoanalytic one) wasto transfer her blocked childhood need for loving acceptance onto him, ‘as afather,’ so that she might cease mourning for it” (29). This created an insuper-able problem for them: “Emerson’s marriage, their monogamous beliefs, Emer-son’s discomfort with bodies, both his and others’, obviously precluded thephysical. In any case, in their letters they said nothing more about it. To twenty-first-century observers, that move might seem a gross evasion of the clear eroticissue between them. However, it evidently did not seem so to them” (28). Nego-tiating between nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourses, Capper managesto illuminate both.

As the biography’s subtitle, “An American Romantic Life,” suggests, the focusis clearly on Fuller’s Romanticism. Yet it does not privilege her early Transcen-dentalist days; more than three hundred pages trace her activist years in New Yorkand Europe. Fuller’s expansive feminist vision is an important theme in thisvolume, although not quite as central as in other recent biographies of Fuller. ForCapper, Fuller’s “two primary intellectual constructs of formalist-organicist criti-cism and rights-minded androgyny” both supported her fundamental Romantic“cosmopolitan literary patriotism” (520). In this portrait, Margaret Fuller is firstand foremost an intellectual, firmly rooted in Romantic literature and philosophy.Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life gives readers a coherent, judicious,richly contextualized interpretation of a fascinating American Romantic intellec-tual devoted, above all else, to the life of the mind.

San Diego State University Eve Kornfeld


Voices from an American Convent: Marie Madeleine Hachard and the New OrleansUrsulines, 1727–1760. Edited by Emily Clark. (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana StateUniversity Press, 2007. Pp. x, 138. $25.00.)

The editor of this book is one among only a handful of recent historians com-mitted to the study of colonial Louisiana. Standing on the exceptional shouldersof Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and Daniel Usner, Emily Clark proves that the study ofFrench and Spanish Louisiana can be as innovative and brilliant as the volumi-nous canon of works related to British North America and the SouthwesternBorderlands. Her acclaimed previous work stands as a guide for all those whowish to comprehend the cultural complexity of a place at the geographic nexus ofFrench, Spanish, British, and American colonialism. This book is a smaller part ofthe editor’s larger interest in understanding the intersection of religion, race, andgender in the lives of Ursuline nuns in colonial New Orleans. As a collection ofthree sets of primary sources, Clark’s short but insightful book is a useful intro-duction to the history of French Louisiana and the women who contributed to itsfoundation.

Clark wants nothing more than to “offer rare female perspectives on earlyAmerican life” and to show women crossing “the boundary between the OldWorld and the new” during the early modern period (4, 5). She achieves thesegoals by editing the letters of Marie Madeleine Hachard, the youngest of thefirst twelve Ursulines to arrive at New Orleans in 1727, as well as the obituariesof six founding sisters and an account of the first public Eucharistic processionthrough the streets of the Crescent City. After providing a nice summary of thepolitical, economic, and ecclesiastical history of the Lower Mississippi RiverValley, Clark allows the words of the Ursulines to “reveal that the well-knownPuritan women of New England had equally pious Catholic counterparts inLouisiana” (19).

It is obvious in the “Introduction” that Clark has lived with her subjects forquite some time and has developed a tempered level of admiration for theFrench women religious of New Orleans. Clark’s selection of primary sourcesexhibits the idea that “such women represented a paradox” because of theiraversion to “the roles of wife and mother that essentially defined their genderand eluded the male authority to which those roles were subject,” that in turncreated an “alternative femininity” with roots in the monastic tradition ofseventeenth-century France (5). The primary sources also provide great insightinto the racial complexities of Louisiana and the resultant complicity ofEuropean Catholic men and women in the enslavement of Africans and the


dispossession of Native Americans. Voices from an Early American Conventwill leave most readers wanting to know more about the religious, racial, andgendered dimensions of life in colonial Louisiana. By “flesh[ing] out and com-plicat[ing] our portrait of early America,” Clark has done a great service to thefuture study of women in the Atlantic world (19).

Florida State University Michael Pasquier

Family Life in 20th-Century America. By Marilyn Coleman, Lawrence H. Ganong,and Kelly Warznik. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007. Pp. xvii, 326.$65.00.)

This study uses a topical approach to cover the most salient of the broadchanges affecting family life in twentieth-century America. There are chapterson “family transitions” (courtship, marriage, divorce, remarriage, and bereave-ment), family life, work, rituals, mothers and motherhood, men in families,children and adolescents, abuse and neglect, and alternative family forms. Eachof the chapters is a broad general summary of a fairly limited selection of recentsecondary literature on family life and history. Consequently, this volume servesmore as a desk reference than a major contribution to the history of Americanfamilies. As the authors are all specialists in human development, the focus ofthe work is primarily on the study of families by social scientists. Critics of“family experts,” such as Christopher Lasch and this reviewer, do not evenappear in the bibliography.

Historians who are substantially ignorant of the history of families in theUnited States in the twentieth century might find this slim volume a usefulintroduction to the field, or at least to the thinking of specialists in humandevelopment. They might be better advised, however, to consult Steven Mintz andSusan Kellogg’s Domestic Revolutions [1988] or Mintz’s Huck’s Raft [2004].Missing from this volume are the stories of family life that are found in countlessmemoirs, autobiographies, and biographies. As this material is “anecdotal” ratherthan reliable, it finds little place in this volume. But this omission is unfortunatebecause this volume presents the dry facts about families with little sense of howfamilies actually operated.

Family Life in 20th-Century America is a convenient summary of the study offamilies through survey research and other instrumentalities of social scienceresearch and as such is invaluable for those readers who need a quick survey ofthis field. The volume is a part of the “Family Life through History” seriespublished by Greenwood, but it owes more to the social science side of historical


study than to the humanistic side. To be fair, finding out what the internaldynamics of families both past and present were like is extraordinarily difficultif not impossible. Scholars who seek to learn about such matters would do well toground themselves thoroughly in the anecdotal literature as well as in the materialculture of family life (and their limitations), and then recognize that painstakinguse of these materials can yield important insights about how families lived andfamily dynamics. The work of historian John Demos in A Little Commonwealth[1970] and in Past, Present, and Personal [1988] illustrates what might be doneusing such sources. A useful reference or textbook, this book does not fully live upto the scope of its title.

University of Memphis Joseph M. Hawes

Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power. By Robert Dallek. (New York, N.Y.:HarperCollins, 2007. Pp. xii, 740. $32.50.)

The author of this book, a renowned biographer of John F. Kennedy and LyndonB. Johnson, has turned his attention to the next president, Richard M. Nixon.Robert Dallek’s latest book, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, differssomewhat from his earlier presidential biographies. He presents a study of thepresident’s foreign policy rather than a full-blown biography, and he has electedto include Henry Kissinger, who was Nixon’s principal foreign policy lieutenant,as a coprotagonist. Both are good choices. Most of the interest in Nixon is in hisconduct of foreign affairs and Watergate. It is impossible to write about Nixonand foreign affairs without putting the Nixon-Kissinger relationship front andcenter. The result is a superior book, which is substantial and detailed but notoverwhelming.

Dallek writes with his customary grace and maintains control over what isprobably the richest lode of documentary material of any presidency. There arethe White House tapes, Kissinger’s transcripts of his telephone conversations, theextensive notes that Nixon’s chief of staff H. R. Haldeman took on every meet-ing he attended with the president, and millions of pages of the administration’sofficial memoranda.

The picture that emerges, more clearly than in the many previous biographiesand memoirs, is an administration in constant turmoil, often teetering into chaos.Nixon felt threatened by a variety of enemies: real and imagined, Democrats,Congress, the bureaucracy, the press, and what he constantly belittled as “theelites” or “the establishment.” Kissinger was his own bundle of insecurities; as a


German-Jewish refugee, unsure of his place in U.S. society, he swallowed Nixon’sincessant anti-Semitic remarks. He told his staff and favored journalists that heworked in a madhouse.

Dallek is at his best when writing about Nixon’s severely suspicious personal-ity. He tried to obtain Nixon’s medical records as he had done in the case of hisKennedy biography. The son of Nixon’s doctor was not as forthcoming asKennedy’s physicians, but Dallek received enough information to describeNixon’s deteriorating state of mind as the Watergate scandal unfolded in 1973and 1974.

Dallek’s assessment of Nixon’s success and failure in foreign policy is in themainstream. The opening to China is Nixon’s enduring achievement. Détente withthe Soviet Union diminished the dangers of nuclear war. But détente could havebeen more successful had Nixon and Kissinger made use of expert advice ratherthan continuously denigrating it. Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy after the 1973Yom Kippur War set in motion the long, tortuous peace process between Israeland its neighbors. Although shuttle diplomacy was a personal triumph for Kiss-inger, it came after years of neglect in the early days of the administration. Duringthe Yom Kippur War itself, the U.S. government did not function at all. Nixon,who became disoriented by Watergate, and often inebriated, left decisions toKissinger. Nixon’s and Kissinger’s conduct of the Vietnam War, was, as Dallekwrites, an almost complete failure.

Nixon and Kissinger were talented, knowledgeable, and experienced men.They were also suspicious, demanded total control, and worked in secret. Dallekappropriately calls their collaboration “a cautionary tale,” which “suggests thatno one has a monopoly on wisdom” (623).

University of Colorado, Boulder Robert D. Schulzinger

Slavery, Emancipation, and Freedom: Comparative Perspectives. By Stanley L. Enger-man. (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Pp. x, 114.$25.00.)

Historians, especially those trained in the 1970s, identify Stanley L. Engermanas the coauthor with Robert W. Fogel of the controversial “econometric” two-volume Time on the Cross [1974]. Specialists on the history of slavery, however,know Engerman as the prolific author of numerous pathbreaking and authorita-tive books and articles on slave demography and fertility, economic adjustmentsand change, and comparative slavery and emancipation. In 2005, Engerman


delivered the distinguished Walter L. Fleming Lectures in Southern History atLouisiana State University. These revised lectures provide the basis for Engerman’scogent Slavery, Emancipation, and Freedom: Comparative Perspectives.

In “Slavery in World Perspective,” Engerman argues that, all rhetoric aside,African-American slavery never was a “peculiar institution.” Rather, “[s]laverywas obviously not unique to the American South, but it was clearly among themost ubiquitous and long-standing of all human institutions influencing popu-lation and labor supply” (12). Having said this, however, Engerman notes that,unlike other slave societies, the antebellum South was exceptional becauseof its extraordinarily high rate of slave fertility, a condition that obviated theimportation of African slaves. “The high share of those native-born in the slavepopulation in the United States relative to elsewhere in the Americas,” Enger-man explains, “is important for analyzing differences in slave culture, the natureof slave revolts and resistance, and the question of African survivals” (34).For example, the high ratio of creole slaves in North America led to relativelystable slave family structures. According to Engerman, “some combination ofbetter nutrition, lesser work demands, and a more favorable disease environ-ment . . . influenced the demographic differences between U.S. and Caribbeanslaves” (35).

In “Emancipation in World Perspective,” Engerman maintains that NorthAmerican emancipation differed from most cases worldwide because it was imme-diate, because manumission resulted from military action, and because Southernslaveholders never received compensation. U.S. emancipation was unique, Enger-man continues, “in the greater rights given ex-slaves upon their liberation, in itshigher subsequent levels of income and more rapid rates of income growth, andin the marked political changes in the initial decades after emancipation” (59).Engerman notes that despite the significant gains of the freed people and theirdescendants, seemingly unanswerable moral, political, and practical questionshave blocked the payment of reparations to the relatives of America’s formerslaves. “While the claim for reparations serves as an important rhetorical devicein arguing for redistributive policies, difficulties of implementation have probablymade it uncertain as a specific policy measure today,” he writes (71).

Engerman concludes his book with a postscript on “Slavery and Its Continu-ities in the Modern World.” Noting modern language that utilizes slavery as ananalogy for all manner of evil, he observes “that the use of slavery as a metaphormay sometimes have unexpected effects for understanding the historical andcontemporary record, even while it is clearly crucial for seeking current-dayreforms” (92).


Students of slavery and emancipation will find Engerman’s concise book atimely, original, and lucid work of informed synthesis, penetrating insight, andincisive analysis.

University of North Carolina, Charlotte John David Smith

Havana: Autobiography of a City. By Alfredo José Estrada. (New York, N.Y.: PalgraveMacmillan, 2007. Pp. x, 277. $24.95.)

This author joins hundreds of travelers who over the years have penned theirimpressions of Cuba and its capital city of Havana. A cursory “subject heading”search of the online catalog of the United States Library of Congress lists over fivehundred books on the topic. The voluminous subject list includes such intellectualluminaries as scientist Alexander von Humboldt, suffragette Julia Ward Howe,and existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. What does Alfredo José Estradabring that is new to the literature? For historians, political scientists, and sociolo-gists, the answer is nothing at all from empirical and analytical perspectives. This,however, should not be the only criterion for evaluating the book. For scholarsinterested in how Cubans born on the island and then raised and educated outsideof Cuba remember, represent, and, most of all, seek to have their country of birthportrayed to an English-speaking audience, the author offers an entertainingassessment of Cuban history.

The title and subtitle of the book are both accurate and misleading. The bookis not just a traveler’s account of Havana; Estrada also includes other cities andregions of the island, which enables the reader to learn much more about Cubathan just its capital. The subtitle is accurate in that it is autobiographical, but notfrom the perspective of the residents of Havana, and it is not “an autobiography,if you will, told from the city’s point of view,” despite the authors claim (17).Rather, it is most definitely Estrada’s autobiographical perspective that frames thebook. The author left Cuba in 1961 and then returned several times during the1990s and 2000s. The major theme that runs through the book is the author’sprocess of Cuban discovery and rediscovery through history, travel, and writingthat resulted in his own reaffirmation of cubanidad (Cuban identity or Cuban-ness). Given that the author made several trips to Havana, he falls short inconveying what Havana means to the residents of the city. There is very littleinformation either in quoted, anecdotal, or interview format from average haban-eros (residents of Havana). Instead Estrada tells readers much more about pastforeign visitors to the island such as Winston Churchill and Ernest Hemingway,


and well-known characters from Cuban history such as José Marti, FulgencioBatista, and Fidel Castro.

The book is artfully written, and Estrada has a gift for striking the rightadjective to get at the emotion that Havana often elicits from its residents andtravelers. One of the major strengths of the book is that it does not dwelldisproportionately on Fidel Castro and the 1959 Revolution to the neglect ofeverything else that makes the history of Cuba, and Havana in particular, such afascinating topic of study. His account of Cuba covers the Conquest, pirate raidsby Drake, the English occupation in the eighteenth century, and the expansion ofslavery and struggle for independence in the nineteenth century. When Estradadoes deal with the Cuban Revolution, he does a judicious job of presenting theradical event as a product of history, even if he seems to have nostalgic memoriesfor the prerevolutionary era.

For scholars interested in studies of Havana for their own research or forrecommending titles to students in their classes, Antoni Kapcia’s Havana: TheMaking of Cuban Culture [2005] and Joseph L. Scarpaci, Roberto Segre, andMario Coyula’s Havana: Two Faces of the Antillean Metropolis [rev. ed., 2002]would be much better choices. But if one is looking for a book to recommend toa friend who is traveling to Havana or just curious about Cubans, Cuban-Americans, and Cuban history, and is not concerned about errors of dates andfacts, or that names of historical figures change from one chapter to the next andoften do not match the entry in the index, Alfredo José Estrada’s Havana may bethe right book.

University of South Carolina Matt D. Childs

James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years. By Wayne Franklin. (New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. xxxiv, 708. $40.00.)

This year’s much anticipated publication of the first volume of Wayne Franklin’sbiography of James Fenimore Cooper, covering the author’s life to the eve ofhis six-year sojourn to Europe in 1826, marks an annus mirabilis for students ofCooper and early American culture alike. Enlisting for the first time the full rangeof the extant Cooper archive, Franklin’s authoritative biography offers a richlycrafted narrative of Cooper’s life and times while providing a major revaluationof his literary and historical significance.

Such a revaluation, Franklin understands, must begin with the signature pointsof Cooper’s authorial résumé: progenitor of the frontier romance, the sea tale,and the revolutionary novel; pathfinder in the professional career of authorship;


elegiac early champion of Native Americans; and founder of American environ-mental consciousness in literature. Yet, as Franklin demonstrates, the deepercauses and implications of this list of extraordinary firsts are grounded in thepolitical, economic, and social textures of the major phases of Cooper’s early life.Here, in enlightening and unprecedented detail, the reader finds the formativecontexts of Cooper’s early literary output, in what Franklin calls a “biographyof the books”: in the speculative frontier economies of upstate New York (ThePioneers); onboard ships in the merchant marine and Navy (The Pilot); in thesocial and legal intrigues of life in Westchester (The Spy); and in the increasinglycosmopolitan cultural industry of New York City in the 1820s (xxxii). Drawingjudiciously from Cooper’s own writings to evoke the character of that history,Franklin recognizes that a “biography of the books” is at times best served byallowing the books themselves to speak. Implicit in this recognition is Franklin’ssubtle yet powerful understanding of Cooper’s representativeness as an inter-locutor of his times, a figure whose vigorous authorial temperament indexes thepartisan energies of his moment as well as his own urgent personal, political, andfinancial concerns.

Indeed, as Franklin shows, Cooper was driven to his improbable choice to writenovels by his precarious and frequently embattled personal finances, “madlyreasoning” that the success of Walter Scott might easily be replicated (xx). Perhapsthe most rewarding aspect of Franklin’s discussion is the profound historicalunderstanding with which he situates Cooper’s fateful career choice within thecommercial and material conditions of a rapidly transforming international literarymarketplace, a largely ad hoc setting that lacked “articulation between authors andpublishers on opposing sides of the ocean,” and that frequently left authors “ina boggy middle ground” (269). Here, in the complex “middle ground” betweenwriters, booksellers, publishers, and compositors, where questions of copyright,reproduction, editing, and distribution seldom favored authors, Franklin demon-strates how Cooper shrewdly negotiated his rights, capitalized on his burgeoningcelebrity, and in so doing shifted forever the balance that had defined relationsbetween authors and publishers in the United States to that time.

Although the biography is monumental in scope (the discussion in the copiousnotes alone is a trove of insight), Franklin is a gifted storyteller who manages thedetails of his subject with a graceful and seemingly effortless command. It prom-ises to set the standard for a new era in Cooper studies and history of the bookstudies, and will find grateful readers from a host of backgrounds.

University of Texas, El Paso Robert Gunn


No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. ByRobert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites. (Chicago, Ill.: University of ChicagoPress, 2007. Pp. xi, 419. $30.00.)

No Caption Needed is a snappy title. However, the subtitle, Iconic Photographs,Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, needs some sort of cultural caveat. Anicon is a totem; each one is not capable of global recognition.

That parameter aside, this book is aptly titled. The authors select nine photo-journalistic images to illustrate “why any icon continues to define the past, howit is evoked in contemporary public debate, and what its continuing history ofappropriation reveals about public culture” (173). Often the photographs sharean incongruous cultural context. The chapter “Borders of the Genre” contrasts“Migrant Mother” and “The Times Square Kiss.” Although each is thoroughlyexplored, the introductory link is their iconic value for a Samsonite camera bagadvertising campaign.

“The Flag Raising at Iwo Jima” is a historical, cultural, and political, as wellas visual, symbol for most of the western world. The authors review its iconicvalues, including those of civic representation and as a dialectic for democraticpublic address. However, in this work the reader discovers the icon’s commercialuse as an image on a condom wrapper or as an edible prop in an episode of “TheSimpsons.”

It is clear that there are two authors, and that they enjoy implementingtheir research in their writing. One voice is engaging and humanistic. Theother uses words like “hermeneutics” and “enthymematically,” usually in ref-erence to the thesis involving liberal democracy. Sometimes the sentences aresimply too long for this reviewer’s taste: iconic photographs “articulate patternsof moral intelligence that run deeper than pragmatic deliberation about mattersof policy and that disrupt conventional discourses of institutional legitimacy”(194).

Occasionally the authors venture onto subjective or descriptive quicksand.“Kent State University Massacre” [1970] is included in the book, as is a currentimage of Mary Ann Vecchio (the central figure) who is meeting photojournalistJohn Filo for the first time [1995]. They are “posed in a manner eerily similar toa snapshot of a couple comfortably settled into married life” (164). The whitevapor cloud caused by the “Explosion of the Challenger” is “a Life magazineimage of a live egg yolk within its gauzy white solution” (254).

The quality of the paper used is typical for a volume of prose. The ability of thepaper to translate halftones is less-than-ideal. Fortunately, the imagery is iconic,


and the dust jacket image of “Migrant Mother” gradually pixillating is visuallyand culturally prophetic.

The authors devote nearly a quarter of the book to endnotes, which are muchfuller and more entertaining than “normal” footnotes or citations. They expandwonderfully on primary textual statements and provide an invaluable biblio-graphical resource.

Although the writing style is occasionally difficult, the reviewer would not missthe opportunity to read this book, or any book that includes a 1999 painting ofthe Pieta with a “large, red, throbbing form” of the Hindenburg on her lap (262).

University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth Alma Davenport

The Secret Leprosy of Modern Days: Narcotic Addiction and Cultural Crisis in theUnited States, 1870–1920. By Timothy A. Hickman. (Amherst, Mass.: Universityof Massachusetts Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 190. $22.95.)

The author has written an important, yet ultimately unsatisfying, book. His goalis to describe how widely held ideas about habitual narcotic use, which he calls“the addiction concept,” simultaneously grew out of, and helped create, the“cultural crisis of modernity” that gripped the imaginations of a wide variety ofobservers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (4). By readingthe concept of addiction and the concept of modernity into one another, hesuggests that ideas about addiction were deeply embedded in the broader socialand cultural context of the time, including “the struggle to redefine the terms ofhuman agency in the face of rapid technological, economic, and political change”that lay at the heart of the cultural crisis he describes (4–5). He also suggests thatunlike the now-familiar disease model of addiction, the concept of addictionimplied that habitual drug use could be either voluntary or compelled; this“double meaning of addiction” led to the development of two distinct classes ofaddicts, the criminal and the patient, and was later codified into law by thepassage of the 1914 Harrison Act (7).

Timothy A. Hickman’s work is part of a recent body of scholarship thatdocuments the construction of addiction as a social and cultural phenomenonover the course of the last two centuries. It is an extremely important contributionto this literature. By drawing on the insights of contemporary cultural history,which historians of addiction have to date largely ignored, Hickman pushes thestudy of addiction in a vital new direction. Yet his methodological approach alsomeans that his insights are surprisingly limited in scope. The book is basedprimarily on a series of close readings of a number of what Hickman calls


“canonical” texts (13). As a result, there is a tendency in his work for humanculture to be reduced to the written word instead of analyzing the dense web ofmeaning that animated people’s lives. In other words, Hickman studies a relativelysmall set of books and articles written by a group of people who thought seriouslyabout habitual narcotic use. The distinction is not a quibble. The concept ofaddiction infused the lives of countless people who never wrote a word about it;addiction extended far beyond the texts Hickman describes, and at times itoperated in ways that defied the types of claims made by his writers.

To his credit, Hickman is quite explicit about his methodology, and his honestyon the topic is refreshing. Yet his unwillingness to move beyond textual analysisand make claims about how people actually lived is frustrating. Given theimmense amount of promise in the direction that Hickman’s work points and theintriguing and at times fascinating readings that he provides, the reader is leftwanting something more than his methodology allows.

Florida State University Joseph M. Gabrie

Frontiers: A Short History of the American West. By Robert V. Hine and John MackFaragher. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. vii, 248. $28.00.)

This volume is the abridged, updated edition of the authors’ now classic study TheAmerican West: A New Interpretive History [2000], which in turn was a majorrevision, if not a rewriting, of Robert V. Hine’s survey, American West: AnInterpretive History [1973, 2d ed. 1984]. The American West was warmly wel-comed by academics because it provided a readable and intelligent text thatstraddled the infighting between Old and New Western historians. Ranging fromthe first contacts between native peoples and European immigrants to the turn ofthe twenty-first century, it offered students a history that included diverse ethnici-ties and cultures while at the same time being hard hitting about events and“popular heroes.” The emphasis of the book is the nineteenth century, butmaterial before and after these years is present.

Clearly the 2000 edition of 616 pages has been a great success and has becomethe standard in college history courses, replacing the now outdated classic by RayAllen Billington, Westward Expansion. However, it is long. Students, increasinglyattuned to visual and electronic means of learning, may find it too long. So toomay the general reading population who are interested in the past and who wantto access “historical facts” rather than docu-dramas and popular films. HenceYale University Press has published a shorter version in both hardback andpaperback.


It is difficult to be precise about how much shorter is the text of Frontiers thanthat of The American West. The abridged version certainly condenses paragraphsand occasionally omits two or three pages. Yet other paragraphs are identical. Anyadditions to the 2007 edition come mainly in updating, as for example, theinclusion of George W. Bush as a Western President. What has been cut out are thepictures that accompanied virtually every part of the 2000 edition. These havebeen replaced by eighty-one illustrations drawn from Yale University’s BeineckeCollection, interleaved at four specific points. Certainly these are wonderfulhistoric images, some published for the first time. However, the 2000 edition withits 233 historic illustrations, many also from the Beinecke Collection, is improvedand is currently a better value than the hardback edition of Frontiers. Fortunatelythe twenty-three splendid maps have been retained in the abridged version. As thetargeted audience for the 2007 edition is the reading public, endnotes have alsobeen eliminated and the bibliography condensed. A selection of scholarly volumespublished after 2000 are included in the shortened bibliography, but it is difficultto work out why these particular books have been chosen or why other pre-2000eminent works have been omitted.

Yes, the new edition will probably become popular, if only because it is shorter.Its audience may, however, be college students as much as other readers. Certainlythe paperback edition of Frontiers is a cheaper option. Students may be advised,however, that the text really is not under half the length of the 2000 edition.

University of Nottingham Margaret Walsh

Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution. By Woody Holton. (New York,N.Y.: Hill and Wang, 2007. Pp. 370. $27.00.)

This book follows a neo-Beardian interpretation of the Constitution. The authorpresents a more subtle and nuanced perspective than Charles Beard by arguingthat the fifty-five Framers at Philadelphia in 1787 were upset by the economicdecisions of state governments during the Confederation period. Most states hadyielded to the demands of “unruly average Americans” who led rebellions anddemanded debt relief such as paper money, tax abatements, and postponementof debt collection. These determined Framers—elitists with antidemocraticintentions—wanted to reverse the economic trends shaped by and for the benefitof debtors. This would make America a secure environment for creditors, attractinvestment, and provide relief for debtors caught in the postwar depression.

This book greatly benefits from its sharp focus on the economic motives of theFramers. Woody Holton has adeptly mined rich resources of letters, diaries, and


newspapers. He also takes a careful look at the motives and thinking of theAnti-Federalists. In the process, Holton comes up with some profound newinsights into the Constitution. For example, he points out that most state consti-tutions drafted in the 1770s dramatically increased the membership of theirlegislatures. In sharp contrast, the Framers deliberately made the federal electiondistricts huge so the average American would have less influence on electedrepresentatives. He astutely argues that the Constitution would have containedeven more antidemocratic features had the Framers thought it could get ratified.In fact, this fear of the “people” resulted in a quick adoption of the Bill of Rights.

Ironically, this book is not so much a book on the Constitution as a richexploration into the troubled Confederation era. In fact, Holton’s careful analysisof the period makes his book a “must buy.” Holton brilliantly explains why theFramers took away economic powers from state governments. Consequently,the book focuses almost exclusively on two key clauses in the Constitution—thenational government’s power to tax and the enforceability of contracts—whilehardly analyzing most other clauses in the Constitution.

One can also question some elements of Holton’s main argument. That theFramers quickly adopted the Bill of Rights to save the Constitution from majoralterations cannot be a valid position when only one in three Framers wereinvolved in passing the Bill of Rights. A better argument might be that FramerJames Madison skillfully persuaded non-Framers in the First Congress to adoptthe Bill of Rights. Holton should have traced the antecedents of the Bill of Rightsin both the Articles of Confederation and the fifteen state constitutions draftedbefore the Federal Constitution. Many Framers in fact rehearsed key clauses in theConstitution when they had written earlier founding documents.

Despite these few caveats, this book deserves a wide readership for its pro-vocative interpretations.

Wheaton College David E. Maas

Lincoln and the American Manifesto. By Allen Jayne. (Amherst, N.Y.: PrometheusBooks, 2007. Pp. 392. $28.00.)

Although the author wants to give the impression that this book is aboutAbraham Lincoln’s understanding of the Declaration of Independence (hence thetitle), it starts to disappoint the reader on the first page. Instead of grappling withthe deepest questions raised by the Declaration of Independence—our “ancientfaith”—in Lincoln’s powerful mind and statesmanship, the author turns immedi-ately to Thomas Jefferson’s “deism” and how that deism—as the author asserts


more than once—is rooted in the European Enlightenment. Therefore, Allen Jayneasserts, the self-evident truths and natural rights of our founding are not depen-dent on—and indeed are disjoined from—Christianity and even Judeo-Christianmorality. His repetitious and sledgehammer-like approach quickly becomes anagenda-laden argument in favor of deism.

And this, of course, is too bad because it is the Declaration of Independencethat sets up “the standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar toall, and revered by all.” It is, according to Lincoln, “the great fundamentalprinciple on which our free institutions rest.” Furthermore, Lincoln asserts that“I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentimentsembodied in the Declaration of Independence.” In short, Lincoln’s understand-ing of that “apple of gold” and its relation to the “picture of silver” (theConstitution) is at the heart of his thinking and his statesmanship. The readerhas reason to expect the volume to address this great and consequential issuewith clarity and thoughtfulness.

But Lincoln becomes, for Jayne, a “democrat” rather than a “theist,” andaround this everything revolves. This becomes the essence of Lincoln’s politicalfaith and thought. There are no other possibilities. In other words, the Declarationis against all absolutism—because it is rooted in Enlightenment thinking—andabsolute truth, and it claims that nothing or no one has authority over humanbeings. This reviewer suggests that self-evidence is a claim to knowledge ofthe truth and its moral authority and is not diminished by the fact that—inprinciple—it applies universally to all men through all time. Indeed, it is strength-ened. Individual human beings, to the extent that they are human, cannot rejectthis axiom of political reasoning with impunity, as Jayne claims. Natural rights areinalienable because they are founded on human equality, and human beings wouldnot know that they are human without having a sense, understanding, or evenfaith, of those above or below them.

Jayne gets to his major point by arguing that because Lincoln read ThomasPaine and other deists, he must have adopted their views. This assumption may beexamined by coming to grips with Lincoln’s own words and thoughts (as Guelzo,Carwardine, et al., have done), but the author manifestly does not do that in acomprehensive and persuasive manner. It is not so much that everything theauthor writes about Lincoln is wrong or misleading. He gets much of it right. Yetthe reader is forced into artificial and simple-minded boxes that Jayne constructs.There is no nuance, no subtlety, very little clear thinking, merely a monologueclaiming that those “imbued with all-inclusive, universal, moral ideas—like thedeistic equal rights of all human beings contained in the Declaration—will be


large-minded and tolerant human beings.” This is Jayne’s aspiration and hope,and in the process he makes Lincoln’s poetry into prose and his political philoso-phy into ideology.

Ashland University Peter W. Schramm

The Black Hawk War of 1832. By Patrick J. Jung. (Norman, Okla.: University ofOklahoma Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 275. $29.95.)

In this book, the author provides a comprehensive analysis of the causes, theconfrontations, and the aftermath of one of the last Native American wars foughteast of the Mississippi River. The author turns to a wealth of primary documentsand uses them to reassess the considerable amount of literature written on therevolt that took place in Illinois and the Wisconsin territory during the summerof 1832. The result is an in-depth study of the complexities that existed in theUnited States between Native Americans and whites as well as among Indiannations and subsets of tribal groups that existed during the presidency of AndrewJackson.

The Black Hawk War was named for the Sauk and Fox chief who refused to giveup a portion of land allegedly ceded to the United States in 1804. He and his BritishBand—so-called because of their earlier alliances with the British—asked to remainon the land until after their harvest. Indian negotiations were met with hostility byIllinois volunteers, which, according to Patrick J. Jung, precipitated the conflict.

The facts of the war have long been established, and Jung’s goal is notrevisionist. What he aims to do is shed fresh light on the war’s causes andconsequences. He does an excellent job with the causes. First, he places the conflictinto the political milieu that existed in North America by explaining how NativeAmerican tribes related to and allied with Britain, France, Spain, and the UnitedStates. Next, he explains nativism and the pan-Indian movement of Tecumseh andthe Shawnee Prophet. He then explores the complex relationships that existedbetween groups such as the Sauks and Foxes, Winnebagos, Menominees, andSantee Sioux in the upper Mississippi River basin. Using the intricacies of theseinteractions, Jung sets the stage for the war and provides exacting detail about thepeople, places, and events of the war. His descriptions are of great value. Peoplewho live in Northwest Illinois and Southwest Wisconsin, especially, will be able tosee the region in an entirely different light.

As strong as the first chapters of this book are, the final chapter, which tracesthe war’s aftermath, fails to consult many of the contemporary documents aboutthe events or provide as much depth. Dozens of newspaper accounts discussed


Black Hawk’s visits to major Eastern cities, but these are glossed over in com-parison with the details of the war’s prelude and conflict. One of the more famousquotes from Black Hawk, who reportedly said, “I am a man and you are another”when he met Jackson, is said to be of “dubious provenance” (191). But the quoteappeared in newspapers immediately after the two met in the White House. Withsuch attention to detail, Jung should have dealt with the war’s aftermath and withexplaining away such engrained parts of the story with the exacting detail that isevident in most places in this study.

Even though the consequences portion lacks the depth of the rest of the study,Jung provides a fresh perspective about an event of momentous importance thatis largely overshadowed by the pan-Indian movement before it and the SecondSeminole War after.

Elon University David A. Copeland

The Jamestown Project. By Karen Ordahl Kupperman. (Cambridge, Mass.: TheBelknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 380. $29.95.)

Every society has a creation myth, but the United States of America has two: thecomfortable story of the founding of Plymouth by God-fearing and hardworkingreligious separatists, and the unsettling story of the founding of Jamestown bygreedy selfish English gentlemen literally dying to get rich quick from gold inVirginia or to discover a quick and easy passage to the lucrative ports of the FarEast. Karen Ordahl Kupperman looks anew at these two stereotypical first colonytales. She admits upfront that the Jamestown story is a “creation story from hell,”wrought with episodes of trial and deadly error (1). But she concludes that rumorsof complete failure were unfounded.

With skillful and well-written reexamination of the records of the first twodecades of the Jamestown experience, she reveals how and why the colonyultimately succeeded and argues that what happened at Jamestown created theformula for English colonization to follow. Kupperman suggests the forces leadingto stabilization in the wobbly colony were the discovery of a profitable export,tobacco; the decision of the sponsoring Virginia Company to give land to thosewho ventured to Virginia, the headright system; and the establishment of a formof self-government for the new landholders, the elected Burgesses. As theCompany parceled out such incentives to those already in Virginia and made themknown at home in Britain, much of the whining of the “ancient planters” abatedand suddenly there were not enough ships to meet the demand for emigration.Kupperman’s thesis is that the lessons at Jamestown did not go unheeded by the


Pilgrims at Plymouth. Consequently, she writes that “[t]he key to building Englishsocieties abroad, however messy and incomplete, was discovered in Virginia andall successful colonies henceforth followed its model” (327). So there is really onlyone American creation story and it begins thirteen years before anyone set foot onPlymouth Rock.

Although the central thesis of the book is this development of the successfulEnglish colonial business plan at Jamestown, two-thirds of the text makes surethe reader first knows that Jamestown did not happen in a vacuum. The colonial“projectors” had plenty of other more promising ventures elsewhere. Thoughforging this context for the Jamestown project is important to know, a readerbuying a book with the word “JAMESTOWN” in super-size font on the covermay become impatient with the number of early chapters that merely set the scene.That being said, the account of the actual Jamestown project is eye-opening, withimaginative use of the standard documentary sources and, uniquely, a draw onrecent archaeological finds. The author cites the newly discovered 1607–1624Jamestown site and makes the point that artifacts left by even the earliest strug-gling settlers show they were hard at work desperately searching for ways tosucceed even before free land, a cash crop, and the right to self-rule were anoption.

APVA Jamestown Rediscovery William M. Kelso

1812: War with America. By Jon Latimer. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press ofHarvard University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 637. $35.00.)

In many respects, the author provides an engaging and thorough version of theWar of 1812 from the often-neglected British perspective. He draws on vividprimary accounts and has exhaustively consulted the secondary literature to bringthe obscure to light and further illuminate the familiar. As military history, hisbook excels.

When Jon Latimer takes on other matters, he is less convincing. Apparentlythe “British perspective” persuaded this British author to adopt a callous attitudetoward Americans. They are depicted as cowardly louts, incompetent in the field,and cynical about their government. According to Latimer, they exaggerated theirindignation over minor matters such as impressment and frontier Indian depre-dations to mask venal appetites for expansion at the expense of peaceful neigh-bors. He dismisses Americans’ stated desire to defend their national honor andneutral rights and instead sees an enduring Anglophobia and a desire for Canada


as the real reasons America declared war on Britain in 1812. In addition, Latimerbelieves that the war made Americans into Bonaparte’s “friends across the Atlan-tic,” an offense that apparently justifies everything bad that happened to thoseerstwhile colonists, upstarts who might have distracted Britain from the hard taskof stopping the Corsican upstart (241).

In that spirit, Latimer details American transgressions and glosses over similarBritish offenses. The sack of Hampton probably was not as bad as reported in“outraged American propaganda”; the destruction of the Capitol, ExecutiveMansion, and Library of Congress “brought no pleasure” to the British burningWashington; and George Cockburn trades quips with pretty American girls“apparently abandoned by their menfolk” (172, 317, 320). In any case, Latimerinsists that because the Americans started the war, they had what happened inWashington and elsewhere coming to them.

Greater care would have avoided errors such as misdating the Embargo Act(22); describing Andrew Jackson as a senator in 1811 (29); stating that WilliamHenry Harrison “provoked a quarrel with Tecumseh by violating a treaty signedtwo years earlier,” although it was actually the Treaty of Fort Wayne itself, nota violation of it, that inflamed the Indians (29); having Thomas Pinckney leadthe Patriots into East Florida in March 1812 instead of George Mathews (33);saying the army captain in command of Fort Washington in 1814 was a navalofficer (325); speaking of the “ever inventive Richard Fulton” (349); or declaringthat the Treaty of Fort Jackson removed Indians to the West, when it did no suchthing (370).

Readers can overlook these mistakes as the normal pitfalls that snare anyauthor on unfamiliar ground, as Latimer’s previous work is about World War II.Harder to understand is Latimer’s peculiar assertion that America’s Anglophobiaand desire to conquer Canada endured well into the twentieth century. Forevidence, he points to U.S. War Plan Red, a military contingency created in the1920s for the invasion of Canada in case of war with Britain, and cites the lateRichard A. Preston as his authority. But Preston made clear in his 1977 book TheDefence of the Undefended Border that the color plans were contingencies inevery sense of that word and “did not signify anticipation of war with the countryconcerned” (Preston, 219). Coming at the end of a lengthy conclusion, which hasother problems, this strange insistence that Franklin Roosevelt’s government haddesigns on Canada is beyond absurd, but it does reveal a flaw that occasionallymars an otherwise estimable depiction of military events in the War of 1812.

Colorado State University–Pueblo David S. Heidler


Radio’s America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture. ByBruce Lenthall. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. x, 288.$20.00.)

In the 1930s, Americans listened to radio four to five hours a day. What did radiomean to them? A lot, apparently. When the vaudeville comedian Eddie Cantordivulged his shirt and sock sizes on the air, fifteen thousand fans sent birthdaygifts; when Amos and Andy complained they could not afford a typewriter, NBCreceived 1,880 machines from listeners wanting to help their radio friends. Thou-sands of letters were mailed every week to radio’s musicians, announcers, domes-tic advisors, and soap opera characters. Some offered advice, some asked forhelp, and some simply said thanks. “You are not giving us a fairy story,” wrote anadmirer of the eponymous heroine of The Story of Mary Marlin, “You are givingus Life” (71).

Modern readers may think imagining an intimate relationship with voices onthe air is nuts; Bruce Lenthall concludes otherwise. Reading the letters collected inradio archives while doing research for his dissertation, Lenthall saw irony, notinsanity. Depression-era Americans, he reminds readers, felt overwhelmed bychange. On guard against distant forces of government and commercial empirethat increasingly mattered in their lives, Americans relied on one of the leadingchange agents of mass culture, broadcasting, to personalize an impersonal andpotentially threatening public sphere, even imagining ways that the medium couldhelp them count and perhaps be noticed by those wielding power in the broaderworld. Yes, readers should question the adequacy of this remarkable use of radio,Lenthall allows. But he asks us to appreciate how and why so many found radiouseful for humanizing mass society.

Lenthall begins with the concerns of public intellectuals in the 1930s whoprovide him with his theoretical frame. Some, such as the economist WilliamOrton and the Marxist journalist James Rorty, feared that mass culture wouldoverwhelm individual voices and choices, cordoning off public speech to all butthe powerful, who would use the airwaves to engineer a mass mind. Cheerleadersfor radio countered that the commercial nature of radio’s ownership guaranteedthat ultimate power over programming lay with the masses. Lenthall assessesthese claims through a series of case studies analyzing important understandingsand practices that developed around radio. Examining the ethereal relationshipslisteners formed with radio characters—the radio democracy exemplified byRoosevelt’s fireside chats, the faith in popular radio champions such as FatherCharles Coughlin and Dr. John Brinkley, the birth of media studies, and the hope


that radio could make art matter—Lenthall concludes that neither critics nordefenders got the significance of radio completely right.

The meaning of radio, argues Lenthall, can be found “in some delicatebalances” between individual authority and centralized mass culture (210). IfAmericans learned to accept the new rules of mass culture, such as the power ofcorporations to control broadcast programming, they also found ways to pushback as individuals, leaving their stamp on the culture they inhabited.

A welcome development in recent years is that a number of scholars have setout to update Erik Barnouw’s classic three-volume work, A History of Broad-casting in the United States. Lenthall’s book is less comprehensive and descriptivethan Susan Douglas’s Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination. Butadvanced students will find it valuable for its clear and undistracted focus onimportant analytical questions raised by the rise of mass culture.

Augustana College Lendol Calder

George Kennan: A Study in Character. By John Lukacs. (New Haven, Conn.: YaleUniversity Press, 2007. Pp. viii, 207. $26.00.)

This slim book sketches the highlights of diplomat-scholar George Kennan’sremarkable life and character. The author tells readers upfront that his is not acomprehensive biography of Kennan, but instead, “a biographical study ofGeorge Kennan’s character” (8). For John Lukacs, character is a man’s “consciousdecisions, choices, acts and words, but nothing of his so-called subconscious; thatis, no attributions of psychoanalytic categories, no ham-handed projections orpropositions of secret or hidden motives” (127).

The book is a broad overview of Kennan’s life and intellectual contributionsrecounted by a friend with an intimate knowledge of Kennan’s personal traits, oneof the most important and impressive of which was “the consistency of his mind”(127). Lukacs with great merit observes that “George Kennan’s writing—his ‘useof letters’—had become the principal quality that distinguished him from a herdof otherwise educated people less and less capable of knowledge and reflection”(4). Kennan wrote for some eighty years, before dying at age 101, “to clarifyhis own mind—and, on occasion, when he so chose, the minds of others” (4).Kennan’s unquenchable desire to think and write left behind a mountain ofpublications, including letters, editorials, speeches, articles, and books that willintimidate even the most intrepid of future biographers, historians, and otherscholars.


Lukacs looks at Kennan’s lonely and unhappy childhood as a Midwestern boyand as a college student at Princeton University. Then he turns to Kennan’s earlydays in the American Foreign Service, or diplomatic corps, “marked by anotherlarge accumulation of his learning” and expertise on the Soviet Union, Germany,and Europe. He discusses Kennan’s heady days in the cabal of the Americannational security process laying the intellectual foundations in his famous “LongTelegram” from his post in Moscow and subsequently in his Foreign Affairs “X”article for the policy of containment that would guide American national securityfor the Cold War. Lukacs traces Kennan’s fall from favor in Washington powercircles and escape to a second career at midlife as a diplomatic historian parexcellence, working from the Institute for Advanced Study temporarily inter-rupted by ambassadorial stints in Moscow and Belgrade. Kennan wrote in 1940that “No people is great enough to establish world hegemony,” a sentence, forLukacs, that “sums up much—perhaps everything—of George Kennan’s view ofthe world, and of the United States too. Upon that he insisted and thought andspoke and wrote till the farthest end of his life” (48). Lukacs judges that Kennangrew intellectually and emotionally in his last stages of life to become “a con-science of a nation” and “a national treasure” (125).

This admiring tribute to George Kennan is a rewarding, easy, and refreshingread at a time in which dense prose that is loaded with jargon and coupled withunsparing criticism seems the norm. And Lukacs, throughout the book, lays downsome important recommendations and markers for those scholars who wouldbe interested in more fully exploring Kennan’s life and contributions. Scholars,citizens, and decision makers would do well to take a step back from the twenty-four-hour, seven-day-per-week news cycle to read Lukacs’s book and to reflect onKennan’s realistic, moral, Christian, and philosophic approach to internationalpolitics and American foreign policy as an antidote to today’s popular mindsets.

National Defense University Richard L. Russell

Maryland Voices of the Civil War. Edited by Charles W. Mitchell. (Baltimore, Md.:Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 548. $35.00.)

In this handsomely designed book, the author tells the story of the divisions thatkept Marylanders in contention with one another during the Civil War. Never-theless, he also shows that most Maryland citizens experienced no sense ofcontradiction in supporting Unionist and proslavery sentiments during the sec-tional controversy and well into the war. Charles W. Mitchell’s most fervent desire


is to “puncture the enduring myth that Maryland ever stood at the abyss ofsecession.” He argues convincingly that Maryland secessionists lacked leadershipand organization, although he acknowledges that Lincoln worried that the statedid stand at the abyss and, as a result, used the suspension of habeas corpus withincreasing frequency to squelch opposition to the Union war effort. Given therecord of arrests on which Mitchell draws, he inadvertently leaves readers with theimpression that Confederate sympathizers in Maryland seriously did underminethe Union cause. Although he does not say so explicitly, Mitchell seems also tobelieve that Lincoln’s policy of arrests succeeded in solidifying Unionist sentimentin Maryland as the war dragged on.

Unfortunately, Mitchell’s effort to narrate “Maryland’s Civil War story” fallsshort of the mark (x). At first glance, the book appears to be a documentaryhistory of the war years—a fact seemingly underscored by the designation ofMitchell as an “editor” rather than as an author of this work. But MarylandVoices is actually an amalgam, in the style of Richard S. Wheeler’s popular CivilWar books, that pieces together brief narration with long extracted quotationsfrom an impressive array of documents (although some of those “documents” areactually quotations lifted from secondary sources). In that sense, then, this workis neither narrative history nor a documentary edition. In fact, more than anythingelse, the book resembles antiquarian histories that were published in profusionduring the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The organization of the work into three parts, with each part containing fourto five separate chapters, is unnecessarily confusing. The story in part one is toldchronologically. In parts two and three, chapters are thematic (although arrangedaccording to an internal chronology). His arrangement of lengthy block quota-tions is sometimes misleading. At the opening of chapter one, Mitchell uses twoextracts from two different newspapers published in Carroll County. These quo-tations are placed together in a two-paragraph extract that appears to come froma single source. Only footnotes reveal that the first paragraph is from one news-paper and the second from another. Worse, perhaps, is the fact that Mitchellintroduces these paragraphs with the comment that they express “contrastingviews” on the issue of secession. Actually, the first paragraph states that SouthCarolina’s secession was unconstitutional; the second sets forth the belief that“dissolution is madness” (15). Where is the contrast between the two?

Mitchell does tell interesting and illuminating Maryland war stories, butreading this book has left the reviewer asking two nagging questions: Why did notMitchell, a talented writer, simply use his prodigious research to write a straight-forward narrative history of Maryland during the Civil War? Or, why did not he


simply compile a documentary history of Maryland in the war years and let thosedocuments speak for themselves? Instead, he has produced a book that is neitherfish nor fowl.

Western Kentucky University Glenn W. LaFantasie

Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home. By Susan Hardman Moore. (NewHaven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. xv, 336. $35.00.)

As an undergraduate nearly twenty years ago, the reviewer participated in anIntroduction to English Literature class. Arriving at the seventeenth century, theprofessor chuckled at the Puritans who fled to New England in the 1630s only tosee the changes they sought in England taking place there in the 1640s and 1650s.His point: the American Puritans had been sidelined by their move to NewEngland.

Building on the research of the last two decades, Susan Hardman Mooredemonstrates that the North Atlantic was a two-way thoroughfare. She concludes(with evidence shown in detailed appendices) that one-third of the ministersarriving in New England during the Great Migration returned whence they cameafter 1640, and almost half of the Harvard graduates through 1659 took passageto England. New England population figures are sketchy, and, as is so often sadlythe case, evidence concerning common folk is sparse; even so, Moore estimatesthat 7 to 11 percent of colonists returned to Albion after 1640.

Moving beyond statistics, Moore examines the angst often generated by Puri-tans torn between their uniquely strong commitment to a local New Englandcongregation and the prospect of influencing British life and politics duringpivotal times. Colonial “radicals” quickly headed home, but for the majority ofPuritans the theology developed in 1630s New England (known as the NewEngland Way) required, in part, a strong commitment to a local congregation;returning to England meant tearing one’s self from the heart of a covenantalcommunity and often separation from family, yet many left. These prodigaldaughters and sons set sail for many reasons: better economic opportunities, todefend the New England Way against critics, to fight alongside Cromwell, andto feel, once again, the familiar comfort of home. Like the decision to migrateto the colonies, boarding a ship bound for England came only after significantdeliberation.

Most of the returnees only marginally impacted Britain. Some MassachusettsArtillery Company members fought with Cromwell, and he encouraged NewEnglanders to settle in Ireland or Scotland or take navy appointments. Returned


ministers frequently found themselves integrating their understanding of the NewEngland Way’s visible covenanted church with England’s parish system. Theseministers cultivated small cliques of people they considered godly within theparish community and then performed their parish pastoral and teaching dutiesthroughout the community but administered the sacraments only to the godly.(Perhaps a new term should be coined to describe this amalgamation: “The NewOld England Way.”) Merchants also returned to England and used their contactson both sides of the Atlantic to further their business interests.

Because the return Puritan migration is so intricately linked to English eventsof the 1640s and 1650s, additional background information on England’s civilwars and the Protectorate would have increased the book’s accessibility for thegeneral reader. That small issue notwithstanding, Moore’s Pilgrims fits nicely withthe growing pedagogical trend of placing American history into a global contextand demonstrates that the Puritans of the Great Migration are no laughing matter.

Shasta College Dave Bush

Origins of American Health Insurance: A History of Industrial Sickness Funds. ByJohn E. Murray. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 313.$40.00.)

In this book, economist John E. Murray challenges historians who contend thatProgressive activists’ attempts to enact compulsory state insurance plans failedbecause of strong opposition from unions, physicians, and insurance companies.Instead, he argues that Progressives failed because workers were generally contentwith the existing industrial sickness funds offered to them through unions andemployers. “From all available evidence,” Murray writes, “sickness funds ap-peared where workers needed them . . . and until the late 1930s, provided adegree of financial protection equal to or better than that available from com-mercial insurers or proposed government programs” (241).

One way that Murray demonstrates the effectiveness of sickness funds is byanalyzing moral hazard, or the “tendency of insurance to remove an incentive toprevent the insured-agent event, which thereby increases the probability of itsoccurrence” (169). Testing the correlation between availability of sick pay andworker absenteeism, he finds that access to sick pay did cause a rise in absentee-ism, but that sickness funds were able to counter this effect by hiring their ownphysicians to determine when sick workers were fit to return to work. Murray alsoshows that industrial sickness funds mitigated issues related to adverse selectionby employing probationary periods to “screen out high-risk applicants” (196).


Progressives argued that government insurance was necessary because workerswere unable to accumulate enough personal savings to support themselvesthrough long illnesses, but Murray offers evidence to the contrary. His statisticalanalyses show that older workers were often able to save for such contingenciesand that many of the uninsured chose to be so, especially young, healthy men who“did not want to buy insurance because they did not expect to need it” (168).Murray bases his conclusions on wage statistics from the “average” Americanworker. The reader wonders, however, about the utility of identifying an“average” American worker when sex, race, ethnicity, age, and union status areremoved from the equation. This book is largely about the economic behavior ofwhite men employed in industrial labor. Murray could go further to address theimplications of studying this specific population, especially in the final chapterwhen he enters contemporary debates about government health insurance.

Industrial sickness funds declined in the late 1930s, not as a result of theDepression (which benefited the funds as unhealthy workers lost their jobs andtheir coverage), but instead because commercial insurance companies developedsuperior actuarial technologies that allowed them to lower the price of theirservices while also accepting higher risk clients. In addition, commercial com-panies began to offer medical coverage in the 1930s, something sickness fundsdid not. Lack of medical coverage did not become a liability for sickness fundsuntil medical advances like the development of sulfonamides increased physi-cians’ ability to heal patients. That industrial sickness funds did not declinebecause of incompetence, but instead because of technological and medicaladvances, Murray argues, reinforces their strength. Overall, Murray offers aconvincing story of early American health insurance, one that is accessible toscholars familiar with but not fluent in regression techniques and other statis-tical methods.

California State University, Sacramento Rebecca M. Kluchin

The Mind of Thomas Jefferson. By Peter S. Onuf. (Charlottesville, Va.: University ofVirginia Press, 2007. Pp. 281. $19.50.)

In these eleven previously published essays, the author, the Dean of AmericanJefferson scholars, addresses many of the contested aspects of Jefferson’s thought.This brief review will concentrate on his consideration of the policies Jeffersonbelieved central to American success: republicanism, territorial expansion, and theabolition of slavery accompanied by the return of the freemen to Africa.


Jefferson’s republicanism sought to guarantee the near autonomy of self-governing, rural territories isolated from the modernizing national government.He believed these new territories and nascent states should have even greatereconomic and political latitude than the original colonies. Peter S. Onuf arguesthat:

Jefferson’s conception of the American nation imaginatively countered thecentrifugal forces, the tendency toward anarchy and disunion, that repub-licanism authorized and unleashed. Devotion to the union would reversethese tendencies, drawing Americans together even as their private pursuitsof happiness drew them to the far frontiers of their continental domain. Itwas a paradoxical, mystifying formulation. (104)

Confidence in self-government and agrarianism stimulated Jefferson’s goal of thecreation of new utopias on the Western frontiers by doubling American territorythrough his opportunistic purchase of Louisiana. However, his “appeal to the‘federative principle’ disguised . . . the concrete interests—of land speculators,Republican politicos . . . [and] Jefferson’s original core constituency, the staple-producing, slave-holding planters of the South” (133). The Jeffersonians’ repub-licanism ultimately yielded incalculable advantages to the nation because evenwithout the strong central government favored by the Federalists, “the [Repub-licans] showed a genius for party and state building that successfully linked anexpanding periphery to the centers of power” (133).

Though Jefferson’s republican policies were initially successful, they eventuallyfailed due to the absence of an antislavery policy. Onuf argues that Jefferson’sview of slavery was guided not by the Declaration’s Lockean natural right to life,liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but by the conservative thought of LordKames. He writes:

The lesson he drew from Kames was that moral problems always arisewithin particular historical frameworks and that effective solutions dependon taking historical reality into account. . . . A revolution in Virginia’s racialorder would not advance the progress of civilization. The only solution wasto eliminate the institution of slavery and expatriate the former slaves tosome distant location so that white Virginians could fulfill their moralpotential as a civilized community. (252)

Moreover, “the failure to emancipate and expatriate Virginia’s slaves . . . wouldunleash a horrific race war that would reduce both ‘nations’ to the barbaricconditions of an anarchic state of nature in which any sort of moral life—much


less its progressive refinement—would be impossible” (260). Given the myriad ofAfrican Americans who had been on the land for almost two centuries, Jeffersonmust have known his demand for removal was a rhetorical solution at best.Besides, there was very little chance of a race war. Emancipating the slaves wouldneither destroy Virginia’s civilized community nor invite such a war. Only after acentury of emancipation, and segregation, were lunch counter sit-ins unleashed.

In addition to the essays on the central political issues, Onuf includes excellentstudies of “Jefferson as Image, Icon, Character, and Self” (with Jan Ellen Lewis),and on Jefferson’s religion, diplomacy, education, the Military Academy at WestPoint, miscegenation, the fate of Jefferson’s children, and finally, “Jefferson,Morality, and the Problem of Slavery”(with Ari Helo). Altogether, Onuf offers asavory intellectual feast for scholar and neophyte alike.

Loyola University Chicago Thomas S. Engeman

Caribbean Pleasure Industry: Tourism, Sexuality, and AIDS in the Dominican Repub-lic. By Mark Padilla. (Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. vii,294. $21.00.)

Tourism is nowadays the principal industry in most of the Caribbean, includingthe Dominican Republic; one of its facets, sex tourism, has recently receivedsignificant scholarly attention. However, this author focuses on a barely broachedarea: gay sex tourism and the relation between foreign gay men and local sexworkers. The work results from a three-year study that combined ethnographicfieldwork and quantitative surveys of two hundred male sex workers undertakenin close collaboration with ASA (Amigos Siempre Amigos), the country’s onlyincorporated gay organization (13). From his research on gay enclaves of thecapital Santo Domingo and the nearby beach town Boca Chica, Mark Padillaarrives at the following conclusion and paradox: although gay tourism contrib-utes to the transmission of “gay global culture” (taken up mostly by middle-classand elite gays), what gay tourists search out and thereby reinforce is a “Dominican(hyper)masculinity that is . . . defined in opposition to a ‘modern’ gay identity”(207).

In fact, as Padilla notes, male Dominican sex workers—whose sexual behavioris described as “fluid behavioral bisexuality”—largely reject the stigmatizedmaricón (gay) identity and cover-up their involvement in the gay sex industryvis-à-vis family, friends, and female partners (22). This stigma managementthrough “sexual silence” (a concept developed in Hector Carrillo’s work in


Mexico on queer male sexualities) provides male sex workers with a certain socialflexibility but also puts their female partners at an increased risk for HIV trans-mission. The role that male sex workers may play as a “bisexual bridge” in HIVtransmission in the Dominican Republic (and more broadly in the Caribbean)is, according to Padilla, “dangerously under-recognized,” partly because HIV inthe Caribbean has been depicted as primarily a “heterosexual epidemic” (172,174). Padilla critiques the use of “bipolar categories” (heterosexual or homo-sexual) to define the HIV epidemic in regions where these dichotomies do notapply and particularly the conflation of “gay sexual identity with homosexualbehavior,” which prevents HIV prevention programs from reaching men whohave sex with men but who do not identify as “gay” (26, 176).

Padilla incisively problematizes some other premises and categories tied to theglobalization of gay discourses and practices. First, he notes how during the firstDominican public LGBTQ protest in 1999 the appropriation of “global gaycultural symbols and modes of protest,” rather than being an effective politicalvehicle, problematically dissolved broader alliances and “eclipsed local voices anddiscursive practices” (78, 79). Second, he notes how the global gay sex market,rather than eradicating “traditional” forms of nonheteronormative male sexuali-ties (here the “non-gay” identified hypermasculine activo), as scholars haveargued in other cases in Latin America, “somewhat ironically” reinforces them inthe Dominican Republic (207).

The particular strength of Padilla’s work is how it apprehends the intrinsicrelation between local identities and global processes. Moreover, what makes thiswork stand out in comparison to other similar studies is how Padilla lucidlyindicates the implications of his findings for various different fields (public health,Latin American gender, and sexuality studies) and shows how they trouble someof their prevalent assumptions. The only fault a reader might find is that onewishes he could have developed some of these ideas further.

Barnard College Maja Horn

The Populist Vision. By Charles Postel. (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press,2007. Pp. xiv, 397. $35.00.)

Over the past ten years, a new generation of historians have reassessed thePopulist movement in the United States. This author’s excellent intellectual historyof Populism fits into this new scholarship because he persuasively argues thatPopulism was a modern, forward-looking, and transformative movement. The


significance of Charles Postel’s work lies in its national scope and its focus on theideas and the writings of key leaders.

Postel begins with an analysis of the Farmers Alliance’s vision. This is the mostcompelling section of the narrative as Postel expertly weaves together variousAlliance leaders’ modernist views on the need for rural reform to help the com-mercial viability of farming and to reorient society. For example, Postel explainsthat the Alliance supported science-based education to provide the tools formaterial progress, espoused the merits of scientific farming, and sought coopera-tion to enact positive change through centralization and professionalism through-out society. Utilizing secondary sources and primary documents, particularlynewspapers, Postel’s nuanced vignettes of Alliance leaders, such as CharlesMacune in Texas and Marion Cannon in California, illustrate the Alliance’smodernizing thrust. Postel’s most illuminating chapter discusses the role ofwomen in the Alliance, where he focuses on leaders’ extensive rights within theorganization, a chance to escape the monotony of rural life, and a set of reformsattractive to most women. Postel correctly discerns that as the Alliance movedtoward political insurgency, it jettisoned controversial issues such as voting rightsfor women but still pushed for better homes and education.

In section two, Postel analyzes the Populist Party’s political framework andvision to run the nation along scientific, nonpartisan, and businesslike lines. Henotes that Populism involved a melding of rural reform with working-class orga-nizations and urban middle-class activists, all of whom campaigned for a moderneconomy with large-scale cooperative enterprises and state-centered regulation.This argument is quite familiar to historians, but Postel does refute the contentionthat Populists were radicals and backward-looking idealists. However, his discus-sion of Populism and race and the role of Black Populists tends to reiterate theclaims of well-known scholarship.

Although there is much to praise in this well-written and deftly argued work,there are areas that require attention. Throughout the book, the reader wondershow the Populist vision played out at the grassroots and how local Populistsresponded to the modernist vision. In addition, there is little on the politicalculture of Populism as it attempted to turn its vision into electoral reality.Although Postel’s work is well researched, several key manuscript collections aremissing from the bibliography. In addition, Postel engages with the historiographyon the Populist movement but omits several recent works.

However, these points do not detract from an excellent book. This is the bestintellectual history of Populism since the work of Norman Pollack. Postel’s bookwill cause historians of the Gilded Age to rethink the Populist vision and


blueprints for society. Scholars should read this stimulating, provocative, andexemplary study.

Indiana University Southeast James M. Beeby

When the World Was Young. By Tony Romano. (New York, N.Y.: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2007. Pp. 320. $24.95.)

In a novel about an Italian-American family during a period popularly thought ofas an age of innocence, the author weaves a fascinating story of intergenerationalconflict between immigrant parents and their American-born children. His storyof the Peccatori family reveals the sins and weaknesses of both, as well as theprofound sacrifices and hardships endured by all as a result of the sins of the fatherand the tragedy that strikes this tight-knit yet conflicted family.

Set in Chicago in the late 1950s, When the World Was Young moves forwardand back in time in the voices of various family members revealing the innermostthoughts and personal struggles of each character.

In some ways, Tony Romano’s characters reflect popularly held stereotypesof Italian men and women. Agostino is a husband who “roams,” and Angela Rosais a wife who pretends to be unaware of her husband’s sexual transgressions. Afterall, “He came home each night, which was more than one could say about someof the other fathers in the neighborhood. He came home sober. And never raiseda hand to her” (258). However, Agostino is not a heartless cheat, and Angela Rosais not a passive Italian wife. The fullness and complexity of these individualsevolves as tragedies change each character forever. Agostino, in a moment ofself-indulgent weakness, gets a young Italian American girl pregnant. A confron-tation between the girl’s mother, who demands restitution from Agostino, iswitnessed by his eighteen-year-old son, Santo.

Just as a repentant Agostino is about to tell his wife the truth about his trystwith the young girl and the shame it has brought the Peccatori family, Benito, theiryoungest son, becomes gravely ill and dies. His death impacts not only the livesof Angela Rosa and Agostino, but also leads to an unyielding grief among theremaining children.

While Agostino vows never to be unfaithful to his wife again, his eldestchildren, Santo and Victoria, channel their grief and sorrow into rebellious behav-iors that permanently alter the family dynamics. Victoria, a sixteen year old whohas been challenging her mother’s authority since before her brother’s death, seekssolace in the arms of a young man, Eddie. Her brother, Santo, exhibiting the


traditional Italian role of protector of his sister’s virtue, warns both Victoria andEddie to stay away from each other. In defiance of “old world values,” Victoriarefuses and ends up pregnant.

Santo, whose motives are difficult to ascertain, pursues the girl that his fathergot pregnant and risks the loss of his own family to “father” his half brother, whileAngela Rosa risks the trust of her husband and pretends to be the mother ofVictoria’s son, Nicholas. In the end, no one sacrifices as much as the once-rebellious Victoria, who must forever pretend to be the sister of her own son.

When the World Was Young is an immigrant tale of seeking to find oneself ina strange land and of the intergenerational conflicts typical between immigrantparents and their American-born children. It is also a heartwarming novel of thestrengths, as well as the weaknesses, of family and the personal redemption thateach character finally attains after struggles, sorrows, and tragedy.

Furman University Diane C. Vecchio

The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. By Amity Shlaes. (NewYork, N.Y.: Harper Collins Publishers, 2007. Pp. 461. $26.95.)

The author, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a journalistspecializing in issues of political economy and taxation, offers a spirited andaccessible contribution to the revisionist literature critiquing the New Deal fromthe Right. Amity Shlaes contends that economic stagnation persisted throughoutthe 1930s because “government intervention”—underwritten by both the Hooverand the Roosevelt administrations—“helped to make the Depression Great” (9).She seeks to redress what she regards as an imbalance in the existing historiog-raphy, in which state action is valorized while private initiative is undervalued andregarded with skepticism. Various federal monetary, tax, and tariff policies, aswell as a wide range of regulatory programs, attract her critical attention.

Shlaes credits Roosevelt’s proliferation of federal entitlement programs withsystematizing interest-group politics and transforming the very concept of liber-alism for the worse. Roosevelt’s “Forgotten Man” was a member not only of thedispossessed “one-third of a nation, ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished” of which hespoke in his second inaugural address, but also of such robust and rewardingelectoral constituencies as union workers, farmers, and senior citizens (298).William Graham Sumner’s “Forgotten Man,” Shlaes reminds readers, was theproductive, self-reliant citizen who paid the (often unforeseen or underappreci-ated) costs of well-intentioned progressive reforms. Her exemplary forgotten men


are such small business owners as the Schechter brothers, kosher butchers ofBrooklyn prosecuted for violating provisions of the National Recovery Adminis-tration’s Live Poultry Code. Other private-sector figures receiving sympathetictreatment are former Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, who persisted inhis longstanding plan to donate his magnificent art collection to the United Statesto create the National Gallery even as the Roosevelt Administration pursuedhim over bogus charges of tax evasion; Chicago utilities magnate Samuel Insull,fingered by some as a scapegoat for the stock market crash, yet ultimatelyacquitted of charges of criminally defrauding his shareholders; Father Divine,the charismatic, transgressive African American religious leader who could bereached by a letter addressed to “God, Harlem, USA”; utilities executive and 1940Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie; and Bill Wilson, the founderof Alcoholics Anonymous, “who taught Americans that the solution to theirtroubles lay not with a federal program but within a new sort of entity—theself-help community” (14).

Shlaes relies principally on secondary sources, contemporary newspapers andperiodicals, and a handful of manuscript collections. In lieu of footnotes, there isa brief bibliographic essay keyed to quotations in the text. Although the narrativejumps around a bit in an effort to integrate all of its subjects, the writing is clear,if occasionally plagued by the stray factual or typographical error. The discussionof Supreme Court decisions is not always handled with the greatest precision, andconjecture concerning the mental states of the justices is sometimes presented asfact. The author has a nice eye for engaging vignettes and revealing quotations.Although the book is aimed at a general audience, many scholars will find it abreezy, entertaining, and provocative read.

University of Virginia School of Law Barry Cushman

U.S. Environmentalism since 1945: A Brief History with Documents. Edited by StevenStoll. (Boston, Mass., and New York, N.Y.: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007. Pp. xiv,175. $14.95.)

Environmental history became an important field for research and teaching duringthe past thirty years. For the most part, the field remains centered in the AmericanWest with comparatively little scholarly work on the area east of the MississippiRiver, particularly on the Great Lakes or Gulf Coast. Essentially, environmentalhistory is a synthesis of other fields and disciplines, such as political science,economics, and social history, as well as science in its multiplicity of forms. It is


a flexible, ever-changing field given the subject matter and any individual scholar’sapproach to it.

Steven Stoll presents a good, brief introduction to the main events that createdthe environmentalist movement and subsequent field of environmental historysince World War II. For Stoll, the environmentalist movement had its origin in theexplosion of the atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert on 16 July 1945, becauseit marked the beginning of a new age during which environmentalism emerged asa philosophy and a political movement. Stoll provides a brief sketch of nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century antecedents of the environmentalist movement, andhe clearly notes its distinction from conservation, particularly in relation to theuse of natural resources. He does not precisely define environmentalism, however,perhaps because the movement’s origin is rather amorphous and because envi-ronmentalists have multiple and not always mutual agendas.

Stoll distinguishes ecology from environmentalism as the science of biologicalinterdependence. Like environmentalists, the ecologists attribute the decline oflandscapes to people while holding wilderness as sacred. Most important, Stollcontends that ecology has provided environmentalists with data for politicalaction, for example, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, the government ban onDDT, and public awareness of global warming. Indeed, the science of ecology gavethe environmentalists the ability to seek government regulation of nature’s publicuse for the general welfare, but he also notes setbacks, such as the Reagan years,failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, and congressional rejection of the ClimateStewardship Bill.

Stoll has selected thirty documents that enable students and scholars comingto the subject for the first time to grapple with the complexity and expansion ofthe environmentalist moment. He begins with Ansel Adams’s 1944 photographClearing Winter Storm in Yosemite National Park and ends with a chronology ofkey events in U.S. environmental history through 2004. With this selection ofdocuments, Stoll moves beyond environmentalism and environmental history asprovenances of the American West to show their national foundations, includingoverpopulation, ethics, spirituality, ideological certainty, naiveté, principle, andgood will.

Stoll’s introduction, documents, and questions for consideration will givestudents much to discuss. It is not, however, a book for a one-week study in anenvironmental history course as the editors proclaim, but it will be a usefulsupplemental book for a semester’s read. It merits a long shelf life.

Purdue University R. Douglas Hurt


Henry Kissinger and the American Century. By Jeremi Suri. (Cambridge, Mass.:Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. x, 358. $27.95.)

The author of this study provides readers with both a brief overview of HenryKissinger’s career and an interesting conceptualization of that career based onKissinger’s religion and early life experiences. Kissinger is presented as a “bridgefigure” throughout his career, thanks to his Jewish background. According toJeremi Suri, while Kissinger was in the army, at Harvard, and during the Nixon-Ford administration, he was an “insider outsider,” a useful tool for his “Estab-lishment” patrons. Kissinger’s undeniable gifts aside, the author consistentlyattributes Kissinger’s progress to his religion and formative experiences.

There are really two separate issues that need to be addressed in this review.The first is the utility of the book as a historical biography of Henry Kissinger.Suri’s work is an adequate, brief, and selective overview of Kissinger’s life andprofessional accomplishments. Drawing from both established secondary sourcesand several interviews with Kissinger himself, Suri spends four chapters discussingKissinger’s life—his youth in Germany, his transition to America, his service in thearmy as an occupation administrator in Germany, and his career at Harvard. Thefinal two chapters are devoted to his service as National Security Advisor andSecretary of State. There are no new revelations here; indeed, the richest area ofnewly declassified material, relations with the People’s Republic of China, receivesminimal attention, as it is lumped together with Africa and Latin America. Thus,it is not the best or most interesting historical work on Kissinger’s career. Suri isrespectful of Kissinger’s talents, but critical of his limited vision, one that wasshaped by his formative experiences.

It is this aspect of the book, the discussion of Kissinger’s intellectual andpersonal formative experiences, that is most important to Suri and is thoughtprovoking for the reader. Suri’s core argument is that Kissinger’s prominence isdue primarily to his Jewish background. For example, Suri argues that his initialattraction for army officers was the fact that as a German Jew, Kissinger couldboth ferret out potential Nazis while being perfectly reliable as a result of Hitler’sslaughter of the Jews. At Harvard, Kissinger is portrayed as the stereotypicaloverachieving, well-connected Jewish student and then professor, a stereotype thatKissinger fulfilled through his exceptional administrative skills and his ability tomake contacts to forward his career. For Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger repre-sented everything the President disliked and distrusted; yet, Suri argues, he usedKissinger the way European monarchs used Jews in their courts centuries earlier:as counselors who were never fully trusted.


The final chapter discusses how Kissinger utilized this image of himself in theMiddle East. Both the Israelis and the Arabs viewed Kissinger similarly; theybelieved he could produce progress because he was both an insider and anoutsider. Kissinger’s skills and life experiences came together to enable him tostabilize relations between Israel and Egypt. Suri concludes that Kissinger’sactions laid the groundwork for the twenty-first century, for better and worse, andthat the world “awaits Kissinger’s successor” (274).

Western Illinois University Richard M. Filipink

Against the President: Dissent and Decision-Making in the White House: A HistoricalPerspective. By Mark J. White. (Chicago, Ill.: Ivan R. Dee, 2007. Pp. 384. $28.95.)

For those intrigued by how U.S. presidents make important decisions, thisauthor has provided a well-written and enjoyable book on this subject.Although this aspect of presidential policy making has been intensely investi-gated by others, Mark J. White focuses on what he claims is a neglected com-ponent of this process: the dissenter within a president’s administration. Whiteanalyzes the conflict between Harry Truman and his advisers, Harry Hopkinsand Joseph Davies, over the Polish question; the clash between Truman andHenry Wallace on how to respond to Stalin’s Soviet Union; Defense SecretaryCharles Wilson’s efforts to persuade President Eisenhower not to commit to thedefense of South Vietnam; Adlai Stevenson’s struggles with John Kennedy overpolicy toward Cuba; and George Ball’s endeavors to prevent Lyndon Johnsonfrom waging war in Vietnam.

Although White defines a dissenter as someone who breaks away from theherd and thinks for himself, the dissenters he chooses to write about may speakto his own ideological preferences. Dismissing those advisers whose policy pro-posals he may disagree with, he states, “[v]arious aides encouraged their presi-dents to adopt a tougher approach to [C]old [W]ar issues.” The reviewer doesnot include these harder-line officials because, although they promoted differentCold War strategies, they generally shared the same assumptions as the presi-dents under whom they worked. In this sense, these truculent advisers were notdissenters: “[T]hey did not disagree with the fundamental beliefs underlyingU.S. foreign policy” (5).

Because much is already known about the national security decisions theauthor discusses, the value of White’s book is dependent on whether his study ofdissenters’ roles in presidential decision making can improve the rationality of the


process. White believes that if presidents could be convinced to listen morecarefully to dissenters, they would be less likely to make such costly errors asGeorge W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. However, White spends less than ten pages inhis concluding chapter summarizing the lessons he has derived from his five casestudies. He concludes that,

[w]hat these episodes demonstrate is that when policy options are beingdiscussed, presidents should resist the impulse to strengthen consensus andnullify opposition within their administrations. Paradoxically, they need toencourage opposition, to allow dissenters to articulate their views in anunrestrained fashion and win converts to their points of view. (319)

Dissenters deserve respect within the president’s advisory system, according toWhite, because they are the most likely to uncover the weaknesses in the hiddenassumptions that frequently limit the options considered. If one accepts thevalidity of the domino theory, for example, then South Vietnam has strategic valueand one must prevent its fall to the Communists. When assumptions are notquestioned, the decision makers will focus on selecting the best methods to achievetheir objectives, not taking into consideration whether the objective can beachieved at a reasonable cost.

White does not address the question of why it will be difficult for chiefexecutives to accept his recommendations. The research of several politicalscientists—including Richard Neustadt, Larry Berman, John Burke, AlexanderGeorge, and Fred Greenstein—suggests that most chief executives feel over-whelmed by their domestic and foreign responsibilities. Presidents try to recruitadvisers who have demonstrated their loyalty and who will be responsive andcompetent in serving them. Believing that they already face too much antagonismfrom the opposition political party, an independent Congress, and an adversarialpress, presidents are not likely to adopt procedures within their administrationthat will increase internal dissent. Advisers want to tell the president what hewants to hear, and most presidents feel comforted when their advisers, afterdeliberation, reach a consensus in support of a particular option. No president isgoing to be pleased with a recommendation to change the direction of policy. Forthe president to reverse policy, he must concede that he made major mistakes. Fewpresidents are willing to hand their opponents that advantage.

University of Houston John W. Sloan


ASIA AND THE PACIFIC

From The May Fourth Movement to Communist Revolution: Guo Moruo and theChinese Path to Communism. By Xiaoming Chen. (Albany, N.Y.: State Universityof New York Press, 2007. Pp. xi, 156. $60.00.)

In 1925 Guo Moruo [1892–1978], who was giving up medicine to pursue aliterary career and who had converted to Communism one year earlier, com-mended Confucius “for having already developed a concept of Communism overtwo thousand years ago” (101). To readers who follow current developments inChina in popular magazines, newspapers, or blogs, this may no longer seem sosurprising; Confucius has made a comeback. In recent years, statues of him havegone up across China, and Confucius Centers are being established across theworld. Xiaoming Chen’s work may suggest that this does not represent a newphenomenon in modern Chinese society, but rather another twist in the history ofthe synthetic relationship between Confucianism and Chinese modernity.

Chen traces the personal and intellectual trajectory of one of modern China’sforemost writers. He limits himself to the 1910s and 1920s when Guo and otheryoung Chinese enthusiastically engaged in debates about the meaning of traditionand modernity for the individual, the nation, and humanity at large. This intel-lectual biography aims to contribute answers to questions that transcend thenarrow scope of its subject matter. It asks why and how Chinese intellectualsbecame interested in Marxism-Leninism. Why did their interpretation of it divergefrom competing interpretations in the Soviet Union, Western Europe, or Japan?Chen demonstrates convincingly that, in the case of Guo Moruo, a commitmentto and critical engagement with Confucian values played a very significant role notonly in his attraction to Marxism-Leninism but also in the particular ways inwhich he interpreted Marx and Lenin.

In four chapters, the author contrasts Guo’s stance towards individual eman-cipation, national salvation, the liberation of humanity, and modern China’sintellectual crisis in the May Fourth period (1910s to the early 1920s) and themid-1920s. He argues persuasively that Confucianism remained a constant frameof reference even as Guo first struggled with Confucian family ethics (refusingto abide by an arranged marriage and marrying a Japanese friend instead) andembraced romantic individualism, then opened up to collective concerns, andgradually turned to Communist revolution. His perception of Confucius, theembodiment of Confucian values, changed in accordance with these intellectualtransitions. From a romantic hero critical of the status quo, he turned into a model


of spiritual cultivation, social idealism, and activism. Why was Confucianismrelevant? The author proposes that, for Guo, personal and social crises could onlybe resolved through a synthesis of Western and Chinese traditions. The egalitari-anism Guo detected in the Confucian ideal society could only be accomplishedthrough Marxist social theory; at the same time, the Confucian emphasis on moralcultivation and human subjectivity led him to question and modify historicalmaterialism and the primacy of the industrial proletariat in the revolution.

This short book offers a different perspective on the role of Confucianism in theMay Fourth period and shows in meticulous detail how commitment to Confu-cian values as well as critiques of it justified at least one intellectual’s turn toMarxism. It is less successful in substantiating the claim that the Confucianelement in Guo’s Communist thinking “could also be found one way or anotherin Maoist thinking and practice” (5). Those with a general interest in modernintellectual history or in Chinese history will enjoy reading this highly readablepiece of scholarship. They may be left wondering how representative Guo isamong Chinese Communists in his commitment to Confucian ideals and adula-tion of Confucian thinkers, how his interpretive strategies compare to those ofpredecessors and successors who tried to achieve a comparable synthesis betweenWestern and Chinese thinking, or how he related to nineteenth-century thinkerswho had reinvented Confucianism in similar ways.

University of Oxford Hilde De Weerdt

The Taoists of Peking, 1800–1949: A Social History of Urban Clerics. By VincentGoossaert. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007. Pp. xviii,395. $49.95.)

The Baiyun Guan (White Cloud Abbey) in Peking (modern Beijing) emerged in thethirteenth century to become the preeminent Taoist monastic compound of China.Now a popular tourist site and home of the government-controlled NationalTaoist Association, this abbey continues to serve as the headquarters of thedominant Taoist order known as Quanzhen. Across town on the east side standsthe Dongyue Miao (Eastern Peak Temple), the corresponding seat of authorityfor the largely hereditary order known as Zhengyi. Dozens of additional templesin and around Peking generally fell under the management of Quanzhen orZhengyi clerics during the latter half of the Qing [1644–1911] and Republican[1912–1949] periods.

Vincent Goossaert’s broadly defined survey of Taoist clerical activity in Pekingduring this time takes the prestigious Baiyun Guan as its institutional anchor. This


book stems from and was shaped by the author’s participation in “Peking as aHoly City,” an epigraphically centered research project led by Kristofer Schipperfrom 1996 to 2000. Epigraphy similarly lies at the heart of this effort, with datadrawn from stele inscriptions spanning five centuries. Additional resources rangefrom imperial court records, Beijing Municipal Archives, and Taoist writings toethnographic accounts, local gazetteers, and press reports. Goossaert also makesgood use of Susan Naquin’s monumental Peking Temples and City Life, 1400–1900 [Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2000], seldom partingcompany with her analysis. But unlike Naquin, he leaves many Chinese termsuntranslated and provides no translations whatsoever for titles of Chinese writ-ings discussed. The generous incorporation of Chinese script throughout thebook, however, should please anyone at home with the language. Readers unfa-miliar with Taoist terminology may wish to consult the recently published Ency-clopedia of Taoism, edited by Fabrizio Pregadio [London, England: Routledge,2007].

Goossaert presents his local case study as a constructive alternative to “anti-clerical prejudices in the scholarly tradition of Taoist studies” (15). The notion of“Taoists as mystical beings” he also leaves aside, opting instead to provide aconcrete account of how Taoist clerics answered the needs of a changing urbanpopulation over time (5). He sets the scene in part one by outlining the history ofthe two major clerical lineages, the atypical social setting of Peking, and thevarious administrative systems set up to oversee Taoist affairs. Part two turns tothe training and activities of Baiyun Guan monastics, imperial chaplains, eunuchmonks, and temple managers hired by a lay community or clerical lineage. Partthree summarizes the performative repertoire on which clerics drew to obligediverse patrons, from their requests for healing and death rituals to the liturgicalprogram for a temple festival. Two appendices provide historical surveys of Taoistdeath rituals and the Taoist Canon in Peking.

Goossaert argues that the role of Peking Taoist clerics can only be understoodin terms of “their niche in the larger market of spiritual masters” (19). The marketfor spiritual guidance may have changed over time, but spirit mediums, mostlyfemale, were among those likely to give the Taoist cleric a run for his or hermoney. As a social historian would, Goossaert claims no interest in “representa-tive” or “eminent” figures in his effort to “trace all documented Peking Taoists,the anonymous as much as the famous” (15).

Some of his most riveting accounts in fact concern the lives of both the famousand infamous. A singular example of the latter is recalled with the story of howthe controversial Baiyun Guan abbot, An Shilin, perished in 1946 on a courtyard


pyre lighted by his opponents. This unfortunate episode could easily, but need not,overshadow the memory of clerics celebrated for exemplary leadership. Quanzhenmaster Zhang Yuanxuan, for example, who won acclaim for successfully lead-ing monks into battle against rebel forces in 1860, was later invited to overseeconsecration ceremonies at the Baiyun Guan. One of his disciples, the influentialeunuch Liu Chengyin, was recognized not only for his generous financial supportof the abbey but also for paving the way toward the ordination of many of hisfellow eunuchs. Liu’s putative sworn brother, abbot Gao Rentong, left his markby organizing a soup kitchen at the Baiyun Guan, which helped ensure patronageof the abbey during a time of heightened political tension. Such was his charismathat Gao is known to have been sought as mentor by artists and courtiers as wellas lay female adepts. He is also remembered for having been the only abbot of theBaiyun Guan to preside over the consecration of as many as 1,599 clerics and tosee his collected writings published by the abbey.

Infelicitous wordings only occasionally mar this richly detailed account. Goos-saert refers to normative texts, for example, as “descriptions of clerical life,” whenhe clearly means “prescriptions of clerical life” (155). In the absence of localsources, he is often led to paint a tentative picture of Peking, shaped in part bydrawing on comparative data from other sites. He also does not hesitate to fleshout missing details by citing evidence from accounts of Buddhist clerical activity,astutely demonstrating in the process its many parallels with Taoist practice. Butit is Goossaert’s skill in casting a critical eye both forward and backward in timeacross a wide spectrum of testimony pertinent to Peking that provides the mostleverage in support of the unavoidable speculative aspects of his account. Thisbook should prove to be not only of lasting value to specialists in Taoist studiesbut also of keen interest to anyone seeking new perspectives on the socioeconomicfoundations of the clerical professions. It merits special consideration by allconcerned with how governmental regulation shapes the nature and future ofclerical activity.

University of Washington, Seattle Judith Magee Boltz

A History of the Modern Chinese Army. By Xiaobing Li. (Lexington, Ky.: Universityof Kentucky Press, 2007. Pp. xiii, 413. $39.95.)

The author of this book has written an excellent and highly readable broad-brushpolitical and military history of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. XiaobingLi discusses its roots in the warlord period, Nationalist Army, and Republican


China. His use of original, newly available archival materials from China providesnew information about the People’s Liberation Army, or the PLA, as it is known.More importantly, this new information is made real and human by three otherfactors: Li’s own service as a soldier in the PLA, his personal insights into the livesand the motivations of some of his fellow soldiers, and a rich group of oral historyinterviews that the author conducted with former soldiers and military leaders inTaiwan and in China.

One feature that makes the book useful is that Li provides a good introductorysummary of each chapter at its start. There is also a remarkably accurate discus-sion of the effects of altitude on the newly deployed troops in Tibet when the PLAinvaded and took over that territory. The description of the difficulties in accli-mating new troops in that challenging environment tracks with this reviewer’sown experience and conversations with PLA officers in Tibet. Readers interestedin the Korean War or the U.S. war in Vietnam will like Li’s coverage. He combinesoral history with solid data on the number of troops China deployed (950,000PLA “volunteers” into Korea, 320,000 troops in Vietnam).

The reader should not expect the sort of detail on unit histories, organization,leadership, and honorifics one sees in other works. Nor does Li give the samedetailed treatment to politico-military affairs one sees in the seminal WilliamWhitson book, The Chinese High Command. Still, this is perhaps the best sourcedhistory this reviewer has seen on the PLA to date.

The book relies on an “alphabet soup” of acronyms to save space. There are fartoo many of them, and all of them are standard. Readers expect many acronymswhen dealing with military and government bureaucracies, but the publisherwould have done better to let the author spell things out. For example, theHuangpu (or Whampoa) Military Academy is abbreviated as HMA. It would bemore readable to have used a couple of extra words and referred to the HMAas “the Huangpu Academy” or “Huangpu,” Fujian Front Command as “FFC,” orHeilongjiang Production and Construction Corps as “HPCC.” After all, howmany times will a reader see these again? Li chooses to use Pinyin transliteration,but at one point, quoting another author, he uses the Wade-Giles transliteration,switching between Kuomintang (KMT) and Guomindang (GMD) when referringto the Nationalist Party (40).

Li’s access to Chinese sources did not hold him hostage to self-censorship. Hehas good information on the losses suffered by the PLA during its 1979 attack onVietnam. Also, based on this reviewer’s experience in the U.S. Defense AttachéOffice in China during the Tiananmen Massacre, Li managed to get what may bethe most accurate figures available on civilian deaths (364, note 93).


A History of the Modern Chinese Army should be on the shelf of everyhistorian of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. It is a superb resource forgraduate students or undergraduates that want to understand the military culture,traditions, and history of the Chinese army.

U.S. Army, Retired Larry M. Wortzel

150 Years in the Life of a Medieval Arabian Port: Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade.By Roxani Eleni Margariti. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North CarolinaPress, 2007. Pp. xiii, 344. $55.00.)

In this book, the author gives a portrait of medieval Aden and traces its devel-opment under the Zurayid and Ayyubid dynasties, from the late fifth/eleventhcentury to the early decades of the seventh/thirteenth century. The author dividesthe book into two parts: the city’s physical world and its commercial institutions.The first section, “The Physical Environment,” covers the environment, the topog-raphy of the harbor, and the typography of the port city; and the second, “TheCommercial Entrepôt,” examines the customs house, ships and shipping, andmercantile and legal services.

This is an interesting book. Roxani Eleni Margariti uses primary sources wellto construct a detailed analysis of the port of Aden and of its commercial activity.She stresses Aden’s “unique combination of geographical and ecological advan-tages, built infrastructure, and urban institutions,” questions various assumptionsabout trading practice, and highlights contrasts between the commerce of theMediterranean and the Indian Ocean (6).

As Margariti notes, little scholarly attention has been paid to the port citiesof the Islamic world “and less still to their physical components” (69). In line withrecent research, she questions the common assumption that harbors in the south-ern and eastern Mediterranean declined in the early Islamic period, and arguesthat the prevailing view that harbors in the Indian Ocean generally lacked formalbuilt features is a generalization that obscures the reality (70).

In relation to trading practices, Margariti’s research suggests that the wakilal-tujjar in Aden worked from his residence rather than the dar al-wakala, ascommonly thought; that he did not, again in contrast to the usual assumption,belong to a foreign merchant group, and that he may have rendered his serviceswithin a flexible framework of mercantile collaboration rather than acting as anappointee to a well-defined office (192, 181–82, 179). In contrast to the usualdefinition of the word “karim,” Margariti argues that in this period it was not aconfessionally exclusive term (152).


Margariti draws attention to various differences between Mediterranean andIndian Ocean commerce. Import taxes were much higher at Aden than those inthe Mediterranean, and dues do not appear to have been calculated strictly onan ad valorem basis but on a combination of ad valorem and ad naturam charges(114, 132). Despite the normal Muslim legal injunction that non-Muslims paytwice as much as Muslims, customs rates apparently did not distinguish betweennative subjects on the basis of their religion (113). Noting that there is noreference in the sources to a funduq, han, or caravansary, Margariti suggests thatalthough this may be coincidental, it is more likely to indicate a difference in theorganization of transient residence between the two regions (104).

This is very much a book about trade, which, in Margariti’s words, “func-tioned as the main force behind urban development” in Aden, and as such is auseful contribution to the scholarship on this area (2).

Cambridge University Kate Fleet

Between Dreams and Reality: The Military Examination System in Late ChosonˇKorea, 1600–1894. By Eugene Y. Park. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 2007. Pp. ix, 273. $39.95.)

The Chosonˇ dynasty founder, Yi Song-gye�

(King T’aejo), was a military man.Part of his legacy—introduced in 1402 by his son King T’aejon—was a militaryexamination system (mukwa) that lasted until the Kabo reforms nearly fivehundred years later and was appreciated across a broader cross-section of Koreansociety than the more prestigious civil service recruitment examination (munkwa)it complemented. If its contribution to the defense either of the country againstforeign invaders or of the establishment against internally induced change wasrelatively insignificant, its place in Korean social history nevertheless fully deservesEugene Y. Park’s meticulous and fair analysis.

Over the centuries mukwa tests were taken by millions of men and hadsomething to offer elites and nonelites alike. Whereas the munkwa was really onlyaccessible to the 5 percent of the population who comprised the yangban aristoc-racy, the mukwa provided a larger umbrella, under which there sheltered not onlyyangban from the central region and the provinces, but also as time passedmembers of the lower classes, chungin, sangmin, and even slaves. True, manysuccessful candidates failed to obtain appointments in the military bureaucracyand most of those who did were already yangban, so that by the eighteenthcentury a military aristocracy had evolved that enjoyed advantageous links withthe civil aristocracy. Yet the standing in the community and the cultural satisfac-


tion offered by mukwa training in practical and literary skills were sufficientlyattractive to make the investment of time and effort involved in preparing for itworthwhile to a far wider clientele.

Among many interesting revelations documented by Park on the basis of hisexhaustive database of military examination and other contemporary records, thereviewer particularly notes the involvement of mukwa graduates in the seven-teenth factional strife; the knee-jerk response of the authorities to the Japaneseand Manchu wars and the spread of internal discontent in the nineteenth century,increasing the frequency of the exams without any improvement in militaryeffectiveness; the effect on fiscal policy of the growing number of mukwa gradu-ates; the development of lineage patterns within the military bureaucracy; dis-crimination against the northern provinces from the Seoul region and the southernprovinces; the participation of the Kaesongˇ merchants in the examinationsystem; and the connection between the mukwa and the spread of cultural forms,including vernacular literature and p’ansori.

The reviewer’s initial apprehension about reviewing this book as a nonspecial-ist in military history was quickly dispelled, for it is really a sociopolitical studythat avoids both narrow specialization and excessive complexity. The structureand clarity of Park’s writing help. Each chapter begins with an identification of itstheme and ends with a summary of its findings. Points of particular importanceare reiterated and reinforced with concrete examples, and a graduate studentcould not do better than see how Park assembles, draws on, and interprets hisoriginal data (though a graduate thesis would certainly require a better index thanthe one provided here). This is a groundbreaking book that sheds light on manyaspects of Chosonˇ history.

University of Durham Keith Pratt

“A Constituency Suitable for Ladies” and Other Social Histories of Indian Elections.By Wendy Singer. (New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 246.$24.00.)

Separate electorates for India’s Muslim minority were first introduced early in thelast century by the British and were later extended to other minorities as well, aspart of British India’s “affirmative action” process with which many are familiar.The author of this scholarly social history focuses on less well-known ways in whichIndia has of late sought to increase electoral representation of women, providing acomprehensive account of various legislative attempts to insure that strong femalevoices may be heard in Lok Sabha, rectifying India’s traditional male dominance.


Several Indian women’s organizations united to help educated women win theright to vote as early as 1920. Thanks to those suffragette pioneers, British officialsas well as enlightened leaders of India’s National Congress took interest inadvancing the cause of “equality for women,” supporting “the notion that womencan best represent other women of all classes” (36). Sarojini Naidu and RajkumariAmrit Kaur were among the most famous early leaders of Indian women’s valiantfight to win universal suffrage.

Separate electorate constituencies for women were introduced by the BritishRaj in the provincial elections of 1936–1937 and 1946, but were abandoned byindependent India as imperial restraints incompatible with democracy. By the1950s, however, India’s ruling Congress Party treated women as a “special cat-egory,” determined to ticket women for at least 15 percent of all its Lok Sabhacandidates. Other parties followed Congress’s lead, selecting other women as theircandidates for the same constituencies, so that after 1957 one-fifth of all themembers elected to Lok Sabha were women. Most “constituencies suitable forladies” were in large cities, where the best-educated female candidates generallylived.

The Panchayati Raj Act, established by Constitutional Amendment 73 in 1992,brought many village women into the electoral process as Women Sarpanches,intensifying popular demands for one-third of all elective representatives to bewomen. The debate over the Women’s Reservation Bill, which started in 1996,has yet to be resolved, stalled by the demand for “backward class” subquotaswithin the overall body of elected women representatives. Many NGOs led by andfocusing on “gender equality” and the “feminist perspective in politics” haveflourished throughout India during the past few decades and continue to raise theconsciousness of Indian women as well as men to the barbarous realities of malechauvinism.

“Some women’s groups proposed their own political party and in 1999mooted . . . running a candidate on a unified women’s platform,” Wendy Singerreports. “Other groups fought for women’s reservations in Parliament and statelegislatures” (182). In February 2005, Women Power Connect (WPC) was born,lobbying nationwide for one-third reservations for women in all of India’s legis-lative bodies. The “Women’s Bill,” first presented as the Eighty-first Amendmentin India’s Constitution in 1996, was to have achieved that elusive goal. Thisexcellent book helps explain why to date it has not been enacted by India’sParliament.

University of California at Los Angeles Stanley Wolpert


Shadow of the Silk Road. By Colin Thubron. (New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins, 2007.Pp. 363. $25.95.)

One of the most distinguished English travel writers, Colin Thubron, prepareshimself very seriously for his journeys. Apart from wide reading in preparationfor each trip, he learned Russian in the early 1980s for Among the Russians[1983] and continued to use the language when travelling in the newly indepen-dent Central Asian Republics [The Lost Heart of Asia, 1994], through Siberia[In Siberia, 1999], and while researching this book. He learned Chinese inpreparation for Behind the Wall: A Journey Through China [1987] and found itstill possible to converse in Chinese when travelling along the Silk Road onceagain.

As the title hints, the Silk Road now barely survives, and Thubron was, indeed,following shadows as he made his way from Xi’an, skirting the southern edge ofthe Taklamakan Desert, through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, northern Afghanistan,Iran, to Antioch on the Turkish coast of Syria. It is true that some talk of a “newSilk Road” of convoys of trucks hurtling across Asia, but the Silk Road oflegend—the fabled route of supremely luxurious commodities and majorreligions—has become, in Thubron’s account, elusive, part buried, and fastfading.

Not only does Thubron study the history of the places he visits, but he alsobrings his own experiences to the narrative. Revisiting Xi’an after eighteen years,in place of the low-rise concrete drabness and a guarded, slow-moving popula-tion, he finds “a hectic procession of overcrowded shopping malls, restaurantsand high-tech industrial suburbs.” In Samarkand after twelve years, “[s]treetshave been renamed. Statues of Turkic grandees have arisen. And the Bibi Khanummosque is no longer a gaping ruin but a thunderous restoration . . . restoration,little by little, is snuffing out the strange vitality of ruin, and building in its placea shining blandness” (196, 199). And in Afghanistan, “[n]o memory surfacedfrom the place I had known. My hotel had gone. The streets laid out by themodernising [K]ing Amanullah in the 1920s, once jingling with pony-carts, nowconverged in a ramshackle cavalcade of trucks, motor-scooters, horses and cabs.Diesel fumes stank the air I remembered pure” (245).

Very English in his preference for properly ruinous ruins, Thubron seeks outthe tomb of the Emperor Hulagu, the ruins of Oljeitu’s capital, the Assassin’sstronghold, and the abandoned caravanserai of Miandasht. Many of the charac-ters Thubron encounters are as much ruined as the buildings. For example, theUighur who says, with justification in the light of the destruction of much of old,


Uighur, Kashgar, “We’re just a persecuted minority. Nobody wants to marry aUighur,” or the elderly Chinese man in poverty-stricken Gansu with split shoesand watery eyes, or a Russian ex-convict encountered on the road to Bukharabegging—all, like the ruins, are beautifully described (150). When Thubron saysof Kashgar that “it lies where the maps in people’s minds dissolve,” where “thesouthern and northern Silk Roads converge . . . and the desert dies against themountains,” this is beautiful, but also absolutely accurate (139).

British Library Frances Wood

EUROPE

Floods of the Tiber in Ancient Rome. By Gregory S. Aldrette. (Baltimore, Md.: JohnsHopkins University Press, 2007. Pp. xviii, 338. $60.00.)

Floods are a neglected topic among historians. Many early cities lay in vulnerableflood plains where fertile soils and irrigation agriculture produced high cropyields, but often at considerable risk. Ancient Egypt is a case in point for theannual Nile inundations were unpredictable and always potentially destructive. InFloods of the Tiber, the author examines the complex relationship between thevagaries of floodwaters and ancient Rome, the earliest city with over a millioninhabitants.

Gregory S. Aldrette assembles an impressive array of sources to document thelinks between the city and the river that nourished it. He begins with a literarydatabase of forty-two primary sources for floods between 414 BC and AD 398.The written records, as well as archaeological and geographical sources, yield atopography of the city that establishes the extent of floods under different hypo-thetical scenarios. For example, a flood reaching twenty meters (sixty-six feet)above sea level would have engulfed many public buildings and residential dis-tricts. Chapter two surveys the hydrology of the Tiber and reveals a pattern ofmore severe inundations in the spring as a result of heavier snowfall and higherwinter rainfall than today. Whether these floods were the result of climaticchanges, or, more likely, human activity such as forest clearance, is a matter fordebate. Two chapters then assess the effects of floods on the densely inhabited city.Aldrette rightly makes a distinction between the immediate and long-term conse-quences of a major flood and rightly includes the task of cleanup and such factorsas undermined buildings, food spoilage, and disease. He also discusses the oft-neglected psychological effects of disaster, a major concern of contemporarydisaster studies.


From effects, Aldrette moves on to the various flood control methods devel-oped by such officials as Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, who even traveled throughthe sewers by boat in 33 BC. Such efforts tended to be piecemeal, often short-termreactions to a specific disaster. Why, then, did the Romans not use their engineer-ing ability better to protect their city? Aldrette points out that most victims werepoor and marginal groups, who often lived closest to the river. There were fewincentives for the governing elite to protect crowded minority quarters or odifer-ous workshops in obnoxious slums. Indeed, a flood might wash them away forawhile and create open space in a crude form of urban renewal. Uncertainty abouthow to proceed with flood protection and religious concerns may also have playeda role. It was not until 1876–1890 that massive embankments provided the firsttruly effective protection for Rome’s historic buildings.

Floods of the Tiber is a meticulously researched, well-written, and thoroughlyreferenced study of a little known aspect of Rome’s history. And, like all goodhistorical research, Aldrette’s synthesis raises important questions. As tree-ringsand other fine-grained climatological and environmental data accumulate, onemay be able to look at the Tiber floods in a wider climatic and human context.Such a day is still a long way away. In the meantime, Aldrette provides anexemplary baseline for future research.

University of California, Santa Barbara Brian Fagan

Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England. By Michael Alexander. (NewHaven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. xxvii, 306. $45.00.)

In this book, the author offers up a history of the Medieval Revival, focusing onthe period from 1760 to 1971, and engaging the social, political, artistic, religious,and, perhaps most interestingly, architectural manifestations of medievalism. Asa literary scholar, Michael Alexander’s focus is on the ways these are producedwithin literary texts, although the 106 illustrations provide a rich visual contextas well. This combination gives the book an odd effect; for all its scholarlyinterest, its size and pictures create the effect of a coffee table book. And like those,Medievalism provides interesting browsing.

Alexander sees his task as tracing “the evolution of a neglected movement inEnglish cultural history,” which he suggests is often overly identified by the GothicRevival. However, he attempts to use this book to show the larger scope of theMedieval Revival, which has languished in an obscurity created by this very largearchitectural shadow. He makes no apologies for focusing his study on England,


noting that “in no other country does the Medieval Revival seem as central,perhaps because the origins of the English Church, monarchy and Parliament (inthat order) are medieval” (xxi).

Medievalism, Alexander points out, is the “offspring of two impulses: therecovery by antiquarians and historians of materials for the study of the MiddleAges; and the imaginative adoption of medieval ideals and forms” (xxii). Hisinterests lie in the second principle, essentially studying the imaginative output ofthe Revival, with chapters focusing, among other subjects, on chivalric romances,religious Gothicism, building and craft, Arthurianism, history and legend, anddesign. He ends with two investigations of Modernist medievalism, one focusingspecifically on Christian contexts, and finishes with an epilogue that treats bothacademic medievalism and the increasing portrayal of medieval stories on televi-sion, film, and other visual media. In answer to what many people no doubt askedhim as he prepared this volume, Alexander states emphatically that J. K. Rowling“is no medievalist” (267).

Alexander’s chapters are cogent, clear, enjoyable, and often insightful;although his goal seems more to identify than to theorize. He often makes pointedobservations about what led to this persistent fascination with examining andremaking the Middle Ages, arguing that it provides not an escape from historybut an attempt to reconstruct it. His broad scope puts to rest the idea that theMedieval Revival was solely a Victorian phenomenon, showing this “consciousadoption of, or devotion to, medieval ideals or usages” to be a long-standing andcontinuing movement that reaches from the 1760s to the present. Although onewould have wished for more revelations about why the Middle Ages capture theimagination so fervently and have for so long, as a medievalist, finding that theperiod was not the obscure distant past of which it forms a part, but a continuousportion of aesthetic and social history, was affirming.

Seton Hall University Angela Jane Weisl

Signs of Devotion: The Cult of St. Æthelthryth in Medieval England, 695–1615. ByVirginia Blanton. (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007.Pp. xiv, 349. $65.00.)

This book joins a diverse body of criticism that examines saints as culturalsymbols whose study can illuminate not only medieval religious practices but alsoan array of social, economic, and political issues. Many of these culturally ori-ented studies have focused on individual saints, and Virginia Blanton’s mono-graph ranks with the best, comparable to Kathleen Ashley’s and Pamela


Sheingorn’s collaborative work on Saints Anne and Foy, Katherine Jansen’s andTheresa Coletti’s monographs on Mary Magdalene, and Katherine Lewis’s studyof Katherine of Alexandria.

Æthelthryth (Etheldreda, Audrey) is a fascinating figure, a seventh-centuryEast-Anglian princess who preserved her virginity despite two marriages and wenton to both found and preside as abbess over a monastery at Ely. Her broad appealfor nearly a millennium following her death is attested in twenty-five survivingversions of her life in Old and Middle English, Anglo-Norman, and Latin, as wellas in Church dedications, rood screens, altar panels, and many other artifacts. Ina multidisciplinary study of wide temporal range, Blanton does a splendid job ofexplaining that appeal. She begins with Æthelthryth’s contemporary, Bede, whosewritings established her on a par with the time-honored virgin martyrs of the earlyChurch. Blanton then turns to the use of Æthelthryth’s life by Bishop Æthelwoldand other advocates of the tenth-century Benedictine reform, who shaped her intoan emblem not only of the commitment to chastity that they were promoting forthe clergy but also of the urge to celibacy that they wished to kindle amongpotential lay converts to monastic life.

Moving ahead to post-Conquest England, Blanton examines the representationof Æthelthryth in the twelfth-century Liber Eliensis, produced by the monasteryat Ely that housed the saint’s relics. By presenting their patron both as avulnerable—but ultimately inviolable—body and as a virago jealously protectingher devotees, the monks warned Norman prospectors against infringing on theirwealth and autonomy. Blanton dedicates her final two chapters to works aimed atlay audiences, first analyzing a thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman life composedby one who identifies herself only as “Marie.” That life, which presents the saintas a model for aristocratic women, and particularly of aristocratic patronage toreligious houses, survives only in a manuscript owned by the wealthy priory ofCampsey Ash, and Blanton discusses how the priory might have used the lifeto encourage financial support by its wealthy lay associates. Her final chaptercontrasts the paucity of surviving lives of Æthelthryth in Middle English withthe saint’s frequent depiction on late medieval rood screens; this visual evidencesuggests that she was truly popular in late medieval England.

Blanton’s study is by no means comprehensive—she offers detailed discussionsof only a handful of literary texts and a sampling of images. This reviewer wishesthat the final chapter, in particular, had said more about the late lives. But overall,by judiciously choosing her materials and detailing their social, religious, andpolitical contexts, Blanton clearly conveys the trajectory of Æthelthryth’s cultand provides insight not just into that cult but into devotional life in medieval


England. The book is richly illustrated and includes a useful apparatus of tables,maps, and genealogies as well as an appendix listing evidence of Æthelthryth’scult, from surviving images and artifacts to references to guilds, fairs, and churchdedications.

The Ohio State University Karen A. Winstead

Monarchisms in the Age of Enlightenment: Liberty, Patriotism and the CommonGood. Edited by Hans Blom, John Christian Laursen, and Luisa Simonutti.(Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Pp. x, 306. $60.00.)

This collection of fourteen essays, originally papers presented by eminent politicalhistorians at a conference held at the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-century Studies at UCLA, explores and assesses the concept and practice ofmonarchical systems from the late seventeenth century to the reign of George III.Research draws on Europe-wide sources and does not exclude Asia and theAmericas. The volume is divided into four parts. Part one consists of five essays oncanonic theories of “monarchisms and republicanisms”; part two has three essayson “enlightened Christian and millenarian monarchisms”; part three presentsfive essays on the defense and resistance to absolute monarchy; and part fourcontains a substantial essay on “the case” of George III. Many of these interesting,well-documented essays are anchored to the thought of specific thinkers such asPieter de la Court, Spinoza, Bayle, Hume, Fénelon, Vico, Condillac, Castillon, andMandeville; others offer more thematically focused studies of early and lateEnlightenment practice across a wide range of constitutions.

The editors have sought to challenge entrenched orthodoxies, which tend topromote the virtues of republicanism to the detriment of those of monarchism,and to reaffirm the notion of monarchy as the “unexamined Other” of republi-canism. In this they have largely succeeded. The central proposition and organiz-ing principle of the volume is that republicanism and monarchy are not separate,monolithic polarities, but are intimately linked in a symbiotic relationship. Thisapproach facilitates the emergence from the shadows of past oversimplificationsof a long overdue historical reappraisal of government theory and practice in theearly modern period. Contributions highlight neglected positive aspects of the“mixes and blends” of differing monarchical systems as forces for stability inthe modern world without recourse to narrow dogmatic argument, a selective useof sources, and evidence of any committed political stance.

Essays by Hans Blom, Luisa Simonutti, Sally Jenkinson, Patrick Riley,and Michael Mosher set the seventeenth-century theoretical background with


impressive scholarly authority, and this hinterland of political theory is extendedto the Age of Enlightenment in part two by George Wright, Gianni Paganini, andRichard Popkin. The meat of this book is to be found, however, in parts three andfour with excellent analyses of the debate around monarchy and the workings ofmonarchical governments in Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Prussia, and Britainby Henrik Horstbøll, Johan Van Der Zande, Michael Sauter, Simone Zurbuchen,John Christian Laursen, and J. G. A. Pocock. A rich menu of themes includescontrasting theories of Dutch republicanism, the problem of the stateless in theform of the Protestant diaspora from France, Huguenots and the right to resis-tance in the face of state persecution, the concept of “republican monarchy” andits Rousseauist legacy, the “reinvention” of French monarchy, and the notionof “monarchical liberty” heralding the emergence of modern liberalism. Thescope of contributions covers also the monarchism of enlightened Christianorthodoxy, civil Christianity, millenarianism, “heavenly” monarchy and its post-Enlightenment extensions, the paradoxical nature of absolute monarchy and theexceptional nature of “Norse” monarchy with its emphasis on justice and security,“enlightened” monarchy in Prussia, the subtleties of the British “compound ofmonarchy, aristocracy and democracy,” and the modern monarchy of the UnitedStates (13). Chapters are well written, and sources are extensive and judiciouslydeployed. There is a useful index, but a consolidated bibliography would alsohave been helpful.

Inevitably, in a book whose contents are entirely dependent on conferenceproceedings, there are always elements of the random and the arbitrary. Thefour-part structure is a little artificial and unbalanced, with the isolation ofPocock’s contribution on the British monarchy as the whole of part four beingparticularly unnecessary. As an overview of theories and practices of monarchyand republicanism, the territory covered is patchy and the choice of material foranalysis is sometimes tangential. There is nothing here on the progressive desac-rilization of monarchy or the European impact of the 1688 settlement, for ex-ample, and the elephant in the room is, of course, the French Revolution and itsimmediate aftermath. Republicanism as a mode of discourse barely makes anappearance. On its own terms, however, this collection has much to offer, par-ticularly to specialists in the areas of history, political theory, and philosophy. Thecomplexities of government in a key period of transition and upheaval, and inspecific, sometimes unfamiliar contexts, are vividly exposed, and the dilemmasarising for the civil order from the conflicting imperatives of individual freedom,collective security, economic life, and constitutional change are all explored withstriking contemporary relevance. The UCLA conference has resulted in a volume


of essays of distinguished scholarly quality which advances readers’ knowledge ofthe political life, hopes, and aspirations of a period in history whose influence onmodernity has not yet been fully understood.

University of Sheffield David Williams

The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany. By Rita Chin. (Cambridge,England: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xi, 281. $75.00.)

This is a timely and eloquent exploration of what is surely the most debated issueabout German society, culture, and identity today: the increasing reality of amulticultural society. The book is artfully framed by the illustrated portrayal of apeak media event of the initial foreign labor importation program, the arrival ofthe one-millionth guest worker in September 1964, and its historical commemo-ration in the Federal Republic’s fiftieth-anniversary exhibition in 1999, featuringthe motorcycle that had been awarded to that Portuguese worker at his arrivalthirty-five years before. Rita Chin follows this up with a concise historical descrip-tion of the essential legislation, administration, and practice of the guest-workerprogram. But her focus is much broader. She “understands the [foreign] labormigration as a foundational event in the constitution of the modern Germannation” (272). National identity in this context is not static but in a continuousprocess of transformation, based on “a conception of culture that was far moredynamic, fluid, and syncretic” than is often assumed (203). She clearly andconvincingly adds this labor migration as a third powerful motor of fundamentalchange in post-World War II Germany to the generally recognized transformingevents of westernization/Cold War and the even more massive migration ofeastern German expellees and refugees.

Although Chin depicts the overwhelmingly young and male imported workers’lives in social isolation and often hostile surroundings with great sympathy, shefollows the German public debates on the “guest-worker problem” without thehaughty indignation and snap moral judgments a reader often finds on this topic.She lays out even the most conservative mainline arguments for full assimilationor immediate expulsion fully and fairly, and she expertly explains the politicalreasons for the frustratingly slow citizenship reform. But she devotes the greaterpart of the book to an extensive discussion of the rich array of migrant art andespecially German-language literature and film. The first chapter sets the tonehere, entitled “Aras Ören and the Guest Worker Question.” Her literary analysisand her explanation of the strategies these writers and artists have followed to findtheir voice and gain a hearing in Germany are extraordinary. These voices seem


even more essential to her for the evolution of a multicultural society than theGerman public debate. For she believes in “the central importance of culturalpractices” for “the constitution of the modern German nation”: “As we have seen,literature, poetry, and film were at the heart of the . . . debates . . . during the[critical] 1970s and early 1980s” (213).

Ultimately, Chin is optimistic that Germans will achieve a “modern nation,”whose society is not just “multicultural,” which she rightly considers still a poorlydefined term, but is syncretic and transnational, with the cultures speaking to andinfluencing each other.

Carleton College Diethelm Prowe

The Making of the Middle Ages: Liverpool Essays. Edited by Marios Costambeys,Andrew Hamer, and Martin Heale. (Liverpool, England: Liverpool UniversityPress, 2007. Pp. x, 252. $80.00.)

The 2007 octocentenary of the founding of Liverpool was inspiration for a seriesof lectures by some of Britain’s most distinguished medievalists; most of thesehave been collected in this finely edited and well-illustrated volume. But if KingJohn’s letters patent announced the foundation of the borough of Liverpool eighthundred years ago, the population of the city remained very modest until well intothe seventeenth century. In view of this fact, the essays in this volume focus not(because they cannot) on the medieval history of Liverpool, but rather on medi-evalism in post-medieval Liverpool and the metropolitan county of Merseyside,where interest in the Middle Ages has flourished in and especially outside ofacademia since the Enlightenment. The “Making of the Middle Ages” is under-stood, therefore, not in the historical sense implied by Sir Richard Southern’scelebrated book of the same title, but in the more historiographical sense impliedby the study of medievalism (the meaning of which is explored in Pauline Straf-ford’s introduction).

Ten essays of roughly equal length follow Strafford’s introduction to medieval-ism in Merseyside. T. M. Charles-Edwards opens with a study of the history ofCeltic philology between the middle of the nineteenth century and World War I,charting its efflorescence at the turn of the twentieth century while lamenting itscomparative decline at the turn of the twenty-first century. This is followed by anexcursion into “The Uses and Abuses of the Early Middle Ages, 1750–2000” byIan Wood, who calls attention to the ideological agendas of Enlightenment schol-ars, the nationalist agendas of nineteenth-century scholars, and, most recently, thepolitical agendas of the European Union, all of whom have turned to the Early


Middle Ages for less-than-historical purposes. David Matthews continues thetheme of Enlightenment-inspired medievalism and protonationalism with a studyof legendary heroes Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Hampton in seventeenth- andeighteenth-century literary circles, while articles by Helen Phillips, John Marshall,and David Mills examine gender in Chaucer’s writings, Robin Hood’s embodi-ment of pageantry, and the Chester Plays, respectively. Andrew Wawn expands onhis earlier work by examining Victorian makers of the Viking Middle Ages activein Merseyside and Edward Morris surveys early nineteenth-century Liverpoolcollectors of illuminated manuscripts, devoting considerable attention to restitut-ing the scholarly reputation of Sir John Tobin, a retired seaman, former slavetrader, and pioneer in the acquisition of medieval manuscripts whose collection,amassed between 1823 and 1835, was “perhaps the most important small groupof late medieval illuminated manuscripts ever assembled by a private individual”(166). Morris discusses Tobin in connection with two other gentlemen scholars ofthe same generation, Charles Blundell and William Roscoe, the second of whomalso wrote a very successful biography of Lorenzo de Medici, which is the focusof Arline Wilson’s essay. Joseph Sharples concludes the volume with an elegantand well-illustrated architectural tour through Liverpool’s mid-nineteenth-centuryrevival of secular Gothic aesthetics, a must-read for anyone interested in appre-ciating the urban development of one of England’s most important cities duringindustrialization.

This fine collection of essays not only provides intriguing snapshots of Liver-pool’s admirable contribution to medieval studies, but also serves as a usefulreminder that medievalism can hold historical implications as interesting andimportant as the Middle Ages themselves.

St. Joseph’s University Alex Novikoff

The Yorkists: The History of a Dynasty. By Anne Crawford. (New York, N.Y.:Hambledon Continuum, 2007. Pp. xxiv, 200. $29.95.)

It is difficult to know of whom the publishers were thinking as readers of thisbook; not scholars, certainly, as eight out of the eleven chapters are a quick-firehistory of the fifteenth century along lines already familiar to those who work inthe field. It is also history along family lines: some of the Yorkists were theForsytes. Most of the rest of what elsewhere passes for history these days (thesociology of politics; the discourse of economics; the linguistic analysis of publicrhetoric; the issues of war and peace; and the relevance of social disorder, socialmalaise, and social class, to political dialogue and civic mentality) is missing. The


author is an authority on royalty and it is the remaining three chapters on Cecilyof York and Elizabeth Woodville, on Edward IV’s brothers, and on his sisters thatare the best. But, of course, the Yorkists were not Forsytes; they ruled England andhad to make decisions that touched the lives of the whole nation. They mostlymade wrong ones.

Nowhere in the book is their disastrous record as a ruling dynasty brought out.Richard, Duke of York, never “got his act together” and perished miserably in abattle he should not have fought. Edward IV lost his throne, famously regained it,and then sat back and ate, drank, and womanized himself into an early grave, asif he were any run of the mill English aristocrat rather than the king of England.Contrast Henry V, who was also not born to be king yet was every inch of one.Edward’s irresponsibility is shown by what happened after his premature death.His brother Richard usurped the throne, had his nephews murdered, came closeto marrying his niece, and perished in a battle he ought to have won. It wasfortunate for Englishmen and women that such a flaky family governed for onlytwenty-five years. That they self-destructed in so short a time demonstrates theirunfitness to rule. All the hopes placed on them in the 1450s as the purveyors of aNew Deal turned out to be sadly misplaced. They were a spectacular failure.Much more might (indeed should) have been made of that failure in this book.

For whom then is the book intended? The writing shows signs of haste. As thisis not narrative history, there is a good deal of repetition. Is it in essence an airportbook for the slightly more discerning and world-weary traveller? Yet, might it notbe too taxing even for such a person? It cannot be for students either: far too outréfor them. The reviewer is at a loss to come up with a readership, but for theauthor’s sake he hopes there will be one, for those three quite good chapters at anyrate.

Woodbridge Suffolk, England Colin Richmond

Sport in Ancient Times. By Nigel B. Crowther. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2007.Pp. vii, 183. $49.95.)

The history of Greek athletics has become such a specialized field that thediscovery of a hitherto unknown terra-cotta statuette, black-figured vase, orten-word inscription can occasion a lengthy essay in Nikephoros, the journalestablished in 1988 for the study of Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and other ancientsports. Nigel B. Crowther has been among the most frequent contributors to thatprestigious journal. Nikephoros sponsored Athletika, a large collection ofCrowther’s scholarly essays, published by Weidmann in 2004.


Sport in Ancient Times targets readers towards the other end of the educationalspectrum. It is meant for anyone with a high school education and a modicum ofcuriosity about the distant past. (Surveys have shown that an interest in sports,especially team sports, can be assumed for over 90 percent of the population ofevery modern society.)

Crowther is a very skillful popularizer. Although he does not shy away fromdifficult concepts and technical terms, he writes clearly and without excessive“dumbing down.” Realizing, however, that even college-educated readers areliable to be a little hazy about the dates of Chinese and Egyptian dynasties andthe periodization of Greek and Roman antiquity, he includes a helpful set of“timelines” (xiv–20).

Crowther casts a wide net. His first chapter discusses the sports of China,Japan, and Korea (but not India). There are short chapters on Egyptian, Minoan,Mycenaean, Etruscan, and Mesoamerican sports. The book’s main focus,however, is on Greek and Rome, which is clearly Crowther’s terra cognita. Thereare excellent summaries of what scholars know about Greek athletics, Romangladiatorial combats, and Byzantine chariot races. There are also brief chapters onwomen’s sports and on three “sporting heroes”: the fifth-century-B.C.E. Olympicchampion Theogenes of Thasos, the first-century-C.E. Roman gladiator Hermes,and the sixth-century-C.E. Byzantine charioteer Porphyrius (about whom AlanCameron has published an entire monograph).

Inevitably, the attempt to cover so much in so few pages resulted in shortchapters and a somewhat hurried pace. Readers can pause to catch their breath bystudying the thirty-seven carefully chosen black-and-white illustrations. It is ashame, however, that none of the images, except for the dust jacket illustration oftwo black-figured Greek boxers, is in color. Although there are no footnotes,Crowther has provided helpful suggestions for further reading (in English).

“To some,” writes Crowther, “the major attraction of studying ancient sportlies in the numerous parallels that one finds with sports today” (xii). Crowthersometimes—too often for this reviewer’s taste—caters to these present-centeredreaders. In the page and a half he devotes to Porphyrius the charioteer, he refers,for example, to baseball’s Hall of Fame, to Michael Schumacher’s career as aFormula I Ferrari driver, and to Willie Shoemaker’s winning the Kentucky Derbyat the age of twenty-three and then again at fifty-four (145). If such deference topopular taste brings a few new readers to Nikephoros, the reviewer will reconsiderhis cavil.

Amherst College Allen Guttmann


Budapest: A Cultural History. By Bob Dent. (Oxford, England: Oxford UniversityPress, 2007. Pp. xv, 237. $15.00.)

In this work, the author of travel guides and a cultural history, Budapest 1956:Locations of Drama, amalgamates two strains of his earlier study of Budapest,masterfully weaving together the history of places and events related to Budapest,covering the narrative of Hungarian history from the early nineteenth century tothe present day.

In twelve chapters, Bob Dent familiarizes the reader with the history of thearchitecture of Budapest, with Hungarian music and literature, and with “Budap-est’s present-day identity and its links with the past” (ix). Dent’s sources rangefrom an impressive array of Hungarian literary works to English and Americantravelogues and memoirs; from classical and popular music to movies; and fromthe cityscape to its historical interpretations. Dent is “mainly focused on loca-tions . . . and the stories they tell about the city,” but his extraordinarily richsource base allows him to tell these stories through the poetry of Attila József, thewriting and cultural politics of Lajos Kassák, and the music of Zoltán Kodály andBéla Bartók, to mention a few of many notable short sections of the book.

The first two chapters take the reader on an imaginary stroll along the city’snorth–south axis (“By the Danube”) and from east to west along the AndrássyStreet (“Avenue of Dreams”), introducing the city’s geography and the basicnarrative of Hungarian history. The following eight chapters present differentfaces of Budapest from bath and coffee culture through monuments and markets,all the way to the culture of music. These chapters range widely in length anddepth. The chapters “Hearts and Minds,” with a fascinating discussion on theCouncil’s Republic, and “Jews and Gentiles,” with a section on HungarianHolocaust literature and Jewish architecture in Budapest, attest to the author’serudition. The last two chapters, “Above the City” and “. . . And Below,” com-plete the frame of the book, in a geographic and social sense, covering the rulingelite of the castle district and the literature arising from and reflecting on working-class neighborhoods with a foray into the history of criminality.

For Dent, Budapest is a city constantly in the making. Controversial architec-tural and cultural projects, such as the House of Terror or the construction ofthe National Theatre in Erzsébet tér, introduce the reader to the complexities ofcontemporary Hungarian identity politics. The reviewer adds that the “Hole”(Gödör)—the abandoned construction site of the National Theatre—not only isan underground car park as Dent writes, but also functions as a concert andexhibition venue (27).


The reader should not be deceived by the older man with a giant mustache onthe cover of the book posing in Hungarian national attire. This is a rich, thought-ful, and engaging cultural history of a city characterized by “traditions anddiscontinuities, progress and paradoxes” (221).

Harvard University Heléna Tóth

Tropic of Venice. By Margaret Doody. (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of PennsylvaniaPress, 2007. Pp. 345. $32.50.)

Margaret Doody loves Venice. Her opening chapter reads like the narrative of aconversion experience. She evokes the mythical foundation of the city itself whenshe recalls first seeing the floating paradise, “around six in the afternoon of 27August, in 1961” (7). Her joy becomes clear as she discovers “a depth of delightimmediately produced by Venice—an ineffable delight something between painfullonging and recognition. To put it simply, I had not known that human beingswere capable of anything this good” (8). Venice has a habit of eliciting this kindof response; the city forces hyperbole on the visitor. In fact, every scholar of Venicethis reviewer has ever met has a similar story, a similar response, a similaroverwhelming desire to proselytize and defend Venice against the uninitiated. Veryfew use their memories as an opening to a work of scholarship. This is not anindulgence on Doody’s part. Rather, this is a topos that will provide a unifyingpoint of departure for the work. The Venice of literature is not made of marbletottering on piles, but instead of something even more ephemeral. Writers viewVenice through the lens of their own discontents, infatuations, and fears.

Doody uses her own arrival to segue into and as a central feature of her studyof literary treatments of Venice. The trope of arrival, resulting either in ecstasy ordisappointment, figures heavily in the works of Venetian commentators. Doodyshows that travelers to the city read their own deaths into Venice’s death. As thecity, conquered so fully by Napoleon, the Hapsburgs, neglect, the modern world,and, most convincingly, the tides of the lagoon, dies, so too does the viewer. Boththe hospitable—art, music, play—and the sinister, as represented by the terrificCouncil of Ten, loom large in the imagination. From its foundation as a placeof hiding from the northern invaders to its status as romantic travel destination,even the physical appearance of the city was subject to interpretation. This leadsnaturally to Doody’s treatment of Venetian art, though she spends most of hertime on Venice’s painters instead of painters of Venice. Representations of thecity’s women mirror representations of the city itself, as justice, as love, and asbeauty. She closes with a treatment of the Venetian carnevale, imposing the annual


celebration on the geography of the city. Both are unusual and demanding; bothhide considerably more than they give away.

So, too, does Doody’s book. The author meanders through Venetian history,literature, and art much like a tourist or part-time resident. Occasionally a featurecatches her eye and she pauses to observe, to explain and analyze, before movingon to a new topic. Doody is likely to leave historians cold with her personal spinand lack of archival research or rigorous historical analysis. However, this bookis a thoroughly satisfying read for the Venice-lover and would be a welcomeaddition to any personal library.

Whitman College Jana Byars

Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age. By AnneGoldgar. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. xx, 426. $30.00.)

One of the most notorious events in Dutch history is the “tulipmania” in the1630s. The frenzied trading in tulip bulbs, which reached its peak in February1637, has become famous as the first great economic bubble in history. But whatwas it really all about? Many historians, economists, and novelists have writtenabout it (including recently Anna Pavord, Mike Dash, Peter Garber, and DeborahMoggach), but few have actually taken a hard and serious look at the originalsources. This is exactly what Anne Goldgar has done for her new book. Shewondered why people traded in bulbs; who these people were; how the crazeaffected the economy, culture, and society; and why it has left such a lastingimpression. To answer these basic questions, she immersed herself in the archivesof Haarlem, Amsterdam, and other Dutch cities; studied prints, paintings, anddrawings; and read all the relevant pamphlets, tracts, and songbooks she couldfind.

Goldgar deftly deflates the myths. Trading in bulbs was not some irrationalactivity, she argues, but a normal practice like buying paintings or curiosities, bornfrom a desire to make profit or show connoisseurship in special areas. Contraryto legend, tulipmania did not affect everyone in Dutch society, from “nobleman”to “chimney-sweep.” Tulip traders, Goldgar found, formed a rather small group,mainly consisting of “middle-level to well-off merchants . . . wealthy manufactur-ers, and professionals, artists and high-level artisans,” who bought and sold bulbsas a sideline to their normal activities (147–148).

The crash of 1637 barely led to bankruptcies; it scarcely influenced theeconomy; and it did not make people suddenly averse to growing or trading tulipbulbs. And yet, the craze did leave traces in Dutch society and culture, because it


created uncertainty about “the whole notion of how to assess value” (17). Exper-tise, authority, and trust for a brief, alarming moment seemed to rest on shakyfoundations indeed. That experience has served as a cautionary tale ever since.

Goldgar’s research can hardly be bettered. Yet even her meticulous inquirieshave not led to entirely conclusive answers. Much of her interpretation of tuliptrading and traders is based on data about people who are actually mentioned byname in various sources. Thus she has been able to find particulars about hun-dreds of bulb traders. But a not-insignificant part of the buying public remainsunknown, as Goldgar herself notes, namely, most of those who bought bulbs atauctions held by urban Orphan Chambers (137). Whether these obscure buyerscame from different backgrounds than the regular ones and whether their swellingnumber may have caused the dramatic rise in prices in the early weeks of 1637 willprobably never be established. The veil of mystery around the tulip craze thus cannot be completely lifted. Regardless, Goldgar’s book is the most authoritativestudy on the subject and it will be the statutory starting point for fresh research.

VU University Amsterdam Karel Davids

Four Queens: The Provençal Sisters Who Ruled Europe. By Nancy Goldstone. (NewYork, N.Y.: Viking, 2007. Pp. xv, 336. $24.95.)

With all the passion and pace of a novel, this is a beautiful introduction to thepolitics of thirteenth-century Europe for the general reader. The four queens of thetitle were the daughters of Raymond Berenger V, Count of Provence. Margueriteand Eleanor married Louis IX of France and Henry III of England, respectively.Both queens proved their mettle during the greatest crises of their husbands’reigns. Marguerite’s diplomacy from her childbed in Damietta was crucial to theterms of her crusading husband’s release from captivity. Eleanor proved herself afierce opponent of England’s baronial reform movement. Their younger sistersmarried the ambitious younger brothers of these kings: Sanchia wed Richard, earlof Cornwall, who effectively bought himself the title of King of the Romans butwho was unable to exert authority in his German lands. Beatrice, who inheritedProvence itself to her sisters’ chagrin, became the wife of Charles, count of Anjou,and led an army through the Alps to help her husband win the kingdom of Sicilybut died just eighteen months later.

Although there is nothing new in the story told, Nancy Goldstone’s approachelegantly interweaves the sisters’ lives to make a highly accessible account. Unfor-tunately, in attempting to make sense of the thirteenth century for modern readers,Goldstone’s interpretations frequently fail to take account of the medieval mindset


as well as overplay the influence of queens during the period. For example, sheclaims that Sanchia was pious but ignores the political motivations for religiousactions: “Sanchia named her son after St. Edmund the Confessor [sic]” (210).Quite apart from mixing up England’s royal saints and assuming that Sanchiarather than her husband chose the name, this argument overlooks the obviouscompliment being paid to Henry III who had named his own son Edmund fouryears earlier.

The book is clearly not written for an academic audience. There are nofootnotes and there is a great deal of conjecture about emotions and motivation.She skillfully uses chroniclers such as Matthew Paris and Joinville to draw thereader into her narrative, but is rarely critical of these chroniclers’ own agendas.Her colorful evocations of the thirteenth-century world from England to the HolyLand capture the imagination but are sometimes drawn too broadly. There areoverly simplistic explanations of phenomena such as courtly love and Catharismor events like the death of Arthur of Brittany. Astonishingly, Goldstone fails torealize that Gwynedd was an independent principality at this time, instead shepaints Llywelyn ap Gruffudd as a mere recalcitrant baron.

Despite these limitations, Four Queens succeeds in convincing the reader thatdetermined women could influence medieval politics. The queens did not “ruleEurope,” and indeed Sanchia is depicted as the stereotypical powerless pawn.Nonetheless, Marguerite, Eleanor, and Beatrice formed the heart of an extendedfamily of crucial significance to the course of thirteenth-century European history.Goldstone is an impressive storyteller and this is a tale that was worth retellingfrom the sisters’ perspective.

Reading, England J. L. Laynesmith

Imagining the Sacred Past: Hagiography and Power in Early Normandy. By SamanthaKahn Herrick. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 256.$49.95.)

Assessing the historical value of medieval hagiography has engaged researchers formore than three centuries. Miracle stories, reliance on topoi, and the fabricationof events often rendered the sources suspicious. When applied to such texts, thehistorical-critical method aimed to sift the paucity of fact from the abundance offiction. Yet the pursuit of “historical kernels” did not occur without an awarenessof what might be lost. Even some of the more “scientifically” minded researcherssensed they were asking questions that hagiography, as religious literature glori-fying saints and edifying the faithful, could hardly answer.


As her introduction shows, Samantha Kahn Herrick knows these pitfalls. Inlight of that knowledge, she asks questions that yield remarkable, far-reachingresults. The author focuses on three saints: Taurinus, Vigor, and Nicasius. All havea murky past in the history of early Gallic Christianity, but they come to promi-nence during the eleventh century, within clearly demarcated geographical bound-aries. Why did such obscure saints become so important in the 1020s and 1030s?The author addresses this question at different levels of complexity. Her answerswill likely impress specialists in Norman history as well as thinkers exploring theinterconnectedness of medieval religion and society.

The study itself is tightly constructed, with the answers to highly specificquestions leading to broader and more probing observations. For example, deter-mining the sources’ dates of composition becomes crucial for considering thepolitical function of the hagiographic corpus under investigation. She compellinglyargues that the lives of Taurinus, Vigor, and Nicasius “all appear to have enjoyedmarked attention at particular moments in the early eleventh century” (33). Intelling readers why they received such attention then, Herrick exposes the charac-teristics of a distinctive Norman hagiography, which she links to the politicalaspirations of the dukes whose authority these literary productions legitimized(115).

What follows the dating is fascinating, with the elaborate geographic, monastic,and political ties explicated carefully and clearly. Each of the main texts receivessustained treatment that uncovers the distinctive circumstances surrounding thesource’s function in specific locations. Impressive is the way the author creates aninterlocking explanation out of the most disparate kinds of evidence, including theway the texts reflect their natural environment. The bike rides through the Normancountryside that the author mentions served her well (x). Most readers would likelymiss the way this hagiography relates to rivers, islands, purification, and the Vikingraids (107). Such evidence, especially the depictions of religious conversion, showshagiographers turning to an obscure Christian past to make sense out of theregion’s violence and to justify ducal claims to political power.

What emerges, then, is a view of history. By placing the sources in variouscontextual layers, Herrick captures hagiography appropriating a religious past tovalidate, as part of a “divine plan,” the Norman present. She thus demonstratesthe potential saints’ lives offer contemporary historians, for the hagiographer’simaginative projections are rendered here as valuable to current historical knowl-edge as any “reliable” document might be.

University of Alberta John Kitchen


The Druids. By Ronald Hutton. (London, England: Continuum Books, 2007. Pp. xvi,240. $29.95.)

Recent books about the Druids are generally either surveys of the ancient priestlyclass of the Celts by notable archaeologists or discourses by New Age authors onvarious aspects of modern druidic wisdom, including mysticism, nature lore, andtips for improving one’s love life. This author’s new book on the Druids fitsneither category. Ronald Hutton has very little to say about Druids before themodern era and indeed argues that “we can know virtually nothing of certaintyabout the ancient Druids” (xi). Although this may be overstating the case, Huttonchooses instead to focus on the history and practices of those who have identifiedthemselves as Druids in recent centuries. The result is a unique and engaging lookat modern druidic movements with a particular focus on the British Isles.

Rather than divide his book into chapters on different druidic organizationsor deal with the modern Druids chronologically, Hutton instead uses a thematicapproach. The first chapter, “The Patriotic Druids,” covers the history of Druidsas political leaders resisting foreign threats, from early British priests fighting theRoman legions to modern Welsh dramatists resisting English cultural assimilation.“The Wise Druids” details the colorful tradition of Druids as guardians of secretwisdom and traces the dubious history of identifying megalithic monuments withthe Druids. “The Green Druids” covers the romantic notion of Druids possessinga special relationship with the natural world, while “The Demonic Druids” tracesthe literary tradition of Druids as practitioners of barbaric rites of human sacrifice(e.g., the high camp of the 1973 film The Wicker Man). “The Fraternal Druids”surveys the many modern organizations which have claimed, often with a wink,that they continue the ancient and noble order of druidic priests while devotingthemselves more to drink and fellowship than religious rites. The final chapterson “The Rebel Druids” and “The Future Druids” cover the appropriation of thedruidic legacy in political battles and the prospects for modern Druids in thetwenty-first century.

This book is written for a popular audience, though Hutton is planning a largervolume on the same subject that may be more useful to serious scholars of moderndruidic movements. For readers interested in thorough studies of the Druids fromall eras, Stuart Piggott’s The Druids and Miranda Green’s The World of the Druidsboth provide excellent overviews of the ancient Druids with final sections onmodern druidic movements. Nevertheless, Hutton’s current book will well servethose interested in a brief and reliable introduction to Druids of modern times.

Luther College Philip Freeman


Ireland: Contested Ideas of Nationalism and History. By Hugh F. Kearney. (NewYork, N.Y.: New York University Press, 2007. Pp. x, 309. $39.00.)

This collection of reflections on nationalism in Ireland, Britain, and further afieldrepresents a record and summation of the evolving thought of the author—ahistorian so deeply rooted in the English, Irish, and now American academies thathis fundamental originality and iconoclasm have sometimes been obscured. Thefirst two essays set the tone for the entire volume and signal the author’s deter-mination to subject every tradition and interpretation to withering scrutiny. Somewill feel uncomfortable, and like Fr. John Ryan, SJ, leave the room (291).

In the opening essay, Hugh F. Kearney charts his own intellectual evolutionvia Peterhouse (Cambridge); University College (Dublin); the Universities ofManchester, Sussex, and Edinburgh; and most recently, the University of Pitts-burgh. In the second, Kearney reviews the current state of scholarly writing aboutnationalism in order to discover models and methods through which to under-stand the Irish experience. Kearney will not allow readers to sidestep comparisonswith other national experiences by invoking an Irish exceptionalism. Togetherthese two essays constitute an introduction, and the essays which follow aredivided into two sections—“Contested Ideas of Nationhood” and “ContestedIdeas of National History.”

Kearney is clearly influenced, but apparently not limited, by the work ofBenedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Ernest Gellner. Missing in the work ofthese scholars is a recognition of “the role played by individual decision making”(31). An acknowledged influence on Kearney’s thinking is the work of RogersBrubaker whose 1992 Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germanyproposes contrasting models of civic and ethnic nationalism, a distinction that iscentral to the author’s understanding of the course of modern Irish history.

One assertion likely to be particularly unpalatable concerns the claim that Irishnationalism has frequently been dependent on British originals, and that “ethno-culturalists in Ireland followed the example of their counterparts in England”(73). When it comes to the “Faith and Fatherland” paradigm of Irish nationalism,so central to Eamon de Valera’s Ireland, Kearney exposes this as a construct thatemerged in the 1870s, particularly during the 1875 O’Connell centenary celebra-tions. Having recognized the achievement of Emmet Larkin in demonstrating thecentral role of the Roman Catholic Church in the making of modern Ireland,Kearney clearly sees the Catholic Church as one of the “groups who fought” overthe memory of O’Connell in the 1870s, and were thus “guilty of trying to use thepast for their own purposes” (94).


Kearney’s sharpest barbs are reserved for Fr. Brendan Bradshaw, whose claimsthat Catholicism provided the basis for a nationalist ideology from the 1570s areshown to be far from “irresistible” (98). For Kearney, the problem with nation-alist history is its need for a “total emotional commitment,” thus placing it inpolar opposition to academic history, which is open to “a variety of hypotheses”(109).

Kearney is at his most pugnacious in the 1994 essay, “The Irish and TheirHistory.” Bradshaw is once again taken to task for apparently justifying thedissemination of “bowdlerized history of a paternalist kind” on the grounds thatit represents a beneficent legacy (204, 205). Perhaps Kearney is incensed at theattempt to appeal to his own former mentor, Herbert Butterfield, in order to createan Irish version of the Whig interpretation of history.

In an essay on “Mercantilism and Ireland, 1620–1640,” Kearney criticizes thetendency of some Irish historians to ascribe personality to England and Ireland,rather than recognizing that these were “complex, articulated societies in whichdifferent economic interests could create tension” (221). Such anthropomorphismtogether with the tendency to see English policy as always motivated by “calcu-lated Machiavellianism” is “superfluous” to say the least.

This varied collection of Hugh Kearney’s ruminations on Irish history and thetroubled course of Irish historical writing will shed much light—and perhaps alsosome heat.

Texas A&M University David Hudson

National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History. By Joep Leerssen. (Amsterdam, TheNetherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 2007. Pp. 304. $32.50.)

This is a fascinating and erudite account of national images. The author doesnot engage in debates about the modernity of nations or nationalism, or treat“ethnics” as a stock of myths and memories transmitted across generations.Rather he inquires into how images of one’s own and other nations are formedand change over time.

Joep Leerssen argues that up to 1800 these were elite conceptions. In “SourceTraditions 1200–1800,” he argues that medieval stereotypes of self and others inother terms, for example barbarians versus civilized, were more important thannational ones. The influence of Tacitus is considered as well as how terms suchas Germania, Belgae, and Batavians acquired significance. National stereotypingin seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe deploys notions such as the fourhumors to classify national character. “Character” shifts from meaning external


conduct to inner state or disposition. Writers then seek explanations, from climateand social circumstances (Montesquieu, Hume) to national spirit (Rousseau,Herder, Fichte).

The section “The Politics of the Nation” is a more standard account of thehistoricizing of humanities disciplines to envisage a Europe of nations. Leerssenconsiders how this idea plays out within states assumed to be national and usesit to justify projects of unification or separation. However, what is now anintellectual rather than cultural history is detached from power and accounts ofhow and why such ideas become popular. National ideas, politics, and popularculture combined in different ways in “national” states like Britain and France.The politics of unification in the German and Italian lands have arguably littlepopular resonance and use national ideas more diverse than those considered here.

Leerssen then considers the rise of new components of the national idea suchas race. However, this reviewer disputes that this constitutes a “rightward” shiftin nationalism. Ideas of the nation as democratic and chosen also become moreimportant, for example with socialist appropriations of national values.

The third section, “Identity Rampant,” deals with a world of nation-states inwhich public culture is “nationalized” and governments pursue nationalist poli-cies against each other and internal minorities. The problem is how far this is abroadening out of prior national traditions or a selection or transformation frommore diverse themes to suit the interests of new states. That has implications fordebates over possible shift from ethnonationalism to the “civic” state, whichLeerssen advocates in a concluding section. There is also an invaluable appendixon the politics of language.

The opening part of the book relates images to ways of seeing the world,especially on the period c. 1600–1800. However, the account then shifts from“images” to “ideas,” from cultural to intellectual history, with connections topower and popular culture and sentiments assumed rather than demonstrated.The significance and originality of this book lies in its wide-ranging considerationof images of national self and other, linked to culture and mentality, and thisworks better for the earlier than the later period.

London School of Economics John Breuilly

Adela of Blois: Countess and Lord (c. 1067–1137). By Kimberly A. LoPrete. (Dublin,Ireland: Four Courts Press, 2007. Pp. 663. $95.00.)

In this impressive tome, the author utilizes a vast array of sources, many of thempreviously unknown to scholars, to provide a detailed narrative of the events


that transpired in the Anglo-Norman realm of the late eleventh and early twelfthcenturies, a pivotal period in the evolution of the feudal kingdoms of Englandand France that would ultimately dominate the High Middle Ages. Kimberly A.LoPrete assesses significant political developments that occurred during thistransformative period from the perspective of the counts of Blois-Chartres, posi-tioning the enigmatic Adela at the center. The daughter of William I of England,wife of count Stephen-Henry of Blois, and mother of King Stephen of England,Adela was an active political player in her own right for more than six decades,drawing upon familial connections when necessary to consolidate her maritalfamily’s position vis-á-vis the other feudal powers of the region. Until her retire-ment to the abbey of Marcigny in 1120, Adela tirelessly worked to promote theThibaudians through a masterful combination of diplomatic savvy and militarymight.

By assessing events on the continent from the perspective of Adela and herThibaudian kin, LoPrete is able to provide a more detailed and accurate under-standing of key political developments of the period. Events during this periodare typically viewed from the vantage point of either the kingdoms of Englandor France. LoPrete offers an alternative view of these political developments, onethat integrates a number of key regional feudal powers involved, including theThibaudians, providing a more complex and inclusive history. LoPrete portraysAdela as particularly adept at balancing her family’s alliance with the Anglo-Normans (especially after the ascension of her brother Henry to the Englishthrone) while continuing to maintain good relations with the Capetians.Throughout the period, the counts of Blois-Charters found themselves forced tojockey for position with a number of other aspiring regional feudal powers, mostnotably the dukes of Normandy. Adela’s success in these endeavors is reflectedin the ability of the later Thibaudians to emerge as one of the most powerfulcomital families in France.

Assessing events from a Thibaudian perspective also expands the availableprimary sources, which LoPrete mines exhaustively. Although her knowledge ofthe secondary material allows her to engage in frequent historiographical debates,her familiarity with primary documents provides the foundation for the historicalnarrative. Her survey and analysis of political events across discrete chronologicalsegments is based primarily on charters and letters, supplemented by chronicles(both monastic and secular) and commentaries when possible. All of these sourcesare carefully evaluated in regards to the context within which they were produced,resulting in an interpretation that accounts for a myriad of influences and agendasthat may cloud the presentation of events and individuals. Ultimately, these


sources allow LoPrete to untangle the complex web of relations, both local andregional, within which the Thibaudian counts were enmeshed, and which Adelaso ably navigated.

In addition to exploring the experience of Adela and measuring the extent ofher political agency, LoPrete’s familiarity with extant documents allows her tochallenge current historiography. She takes issue with studies that assume that theposition of the counts of Blois-Charters in the eleventh century was the same asthat in later centuries, significantly underestimating their importance and influ-ence in the formative decades of Capetian rule. Such studies also interpret therelationship between the Thibaudians and the kings of France and England in thetwelfth century as predetermined, rather than as the outcome of careful maneu-vering on the part of the eleventh century counts and countess. Through hercareful use of primary documents and her facility with the secondary literature,LoPrete suggests a more complex understanding of Thibaudian strategy in theseyears, using Adela as a fulcrum to explore their multifaceted approach to con-solidating their position and establishing control over their scattered domains.

Although LoPrete never loses sight of the fact that Adela was first and foremosta woman, she is able to explore the full range of her agency as a powerful lord ina pivotal period of history. The extent to which Adela’s gender impacted herability to maneuver in a world otherwise dominated by men raises importantquestions about our understanding of politics and gender in the High MiddleAges. What is perhaps most striking about the portraits of Adela that emerges hereis the absence of any strong indication that her actions were overtly constrainedby perceptions of gender. Although Adela does engage in certain activities (such asarranging marriages) uniquely associated with members of her sex, other than herinability to lead men into battle, her actions are typical of those of a lord, male orfemale. The experience of Adela challenges the assumption that noble womenfunctioned merely to transmit power from one generation of males to another.Not only was Adela a strong political presence during her husband’s lifetime, butalso she continued to direct the family’s interests until well after her eldest sonreached the age of majority, refusing to relinquish power until she was in her earlyfifties and an opportune moment presented itself. As LoPrete so aptly demon-strates, in the case of Adela, gender was clearly secondary to social status indetermining one’s ability to access and wield political power.

LoPrete not only presents a new, and more expansive, interpretation of eventsas they transpired in northern Europe during the decades preceding the ascen-dancy of the Capetians under Philip II, but she provides an invaluable source forfuture scholars. LoPrete’s careful reading of archival sources enables her to set the


record straight regarding a number of current historiographical disputes, and herappendix makes a number of key charters accessible to scholars for the first time.She also provides valuable information about the complex cast of characters thatinhabited the world of Adela, both in the text and in the number of genealogicalcharts included. In her familiarity with the relevant sources, both primary andsecondary, LoPrete has laid the groundwork on which historians can build andhas made it virtually impossible for future scholars to ignore the role played by thecounties of Blois, Chartres, and Champagne (and other counties) in the politicalevolution of medieval France.

University of Northern Colorado Erin Jordan

Imperial Saint: The Cult of St. Catherine and the Dawn of Female Rule in Russia. ByGary Marker. (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007. Pp. xvii, 309.$42.00.)

Scholarship on Russia in the eighteenth century has tended to stress discontinuitiesfrom the past. In the master narrative, Peter the Great transformed Russia’sintellectual and governmental elite, rejecting Muscovite traditionalism and religi-osity and substituting western rationalism. However, a number of recent scholarshave advanced a cogent alternative reading, documenting continuities betweenMuscovite and Imperial culture. This author is among them.

In this book, Gary Marker undertakes an explanation of one of the moststriking innovations in Russian political culture in the eighteenth century: theadvent of female rule. Catherine I, Peter the Great’s second wife, imperial consort,and successor, was Russia’s first female monarch. Further, Catherine I ushered ina century dominated by empresses: Anna, Elizabeth, and finally her namesake,Catherine II (the Great). Marker is less concerned with why Peter’s court circledecided upon his widow, Catherine, as the heir of choice; despite her foreign andplebeian background, there were no politically attractive alternatives. Instead,Marker focuses on “the state’s appropriation and redeployment of symbols ofsacralization on behalf of its modernizing and secularizing agendas” (155).Although St. Catherine provides the organizing theme, Marker examines a widerange of religious topoi that were put to political use in seventeenth- andeighteenth-century Russia.

In the first half of the book, Marker traces the deep roots of the cult of St.Catherine, which he presents as the primary vehicle for inspiring confidence infemale rule. St. Catherine was an early Christian martyr who, according to thelegends that developed in Eastern and Western Christendom, was marked by her


mastery of secular learning, her purity of faith, and her mystical marriage toChrist. In seventeenth-century Muscovy, St. Catherine became emblematic of thepious virtue of Romanov imperial women. In the second half of the book, Markerdocuments how Peter and his churchmen deliberately fused the images ofCatherine-the-saint and Catherine-the-empress. But far from dismissing religiouslanguage as a superficial façade for secular power, Marker presents it as a richlynuanced system of symbols that legitimized earthly authority. He draws upon amyriad of little-known published and unpublished sources—particularly hagiog-raphy, sermons, liturgies, and accounts of ceremonies—all placed within theircomplex historiographical contexts.

Marker’s book, then, is a pioneering study of religious culture and ideologyof Russia, rather than a familiar reiteration of court politics. His text presumesfamiliarity with the details of early modern Russia’s narrative history, though, sodespite Marker’s hope (as enunciated in the preface) to use common questionsof political theology to bridge the chasm between Russianists and WesternEuropeanists, the latter may (unfortunately) be deterred. For Russianists,however, Marker’s work should inspire a serious reconsideration not only ofCatherine I and her female successors, but also of the Petrine era as a whole.

University of Kansas Eve Levin

The Gladiators: History’s Most Deadly Sport. By Fik Meijer. Translated by Liz Waters.(New York, N.Y.: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2007. Pp. xvii, 266. $14.95.)

In this English translation of a work first published in Dutch in the Netherlandsin 2003, the author suggests that the gladiator mania and the supposed “lust forblood” of ancient Rome has parallels, in various virtual and brutal forms, inmodern society, and that “we are closer to the gladiatorial shows than we mightadmit” (12).

Aiming to detail the realities of the phenomenon of gladiatorial and beastcombats over several centuries, Fik Meijer explains the possible origins and earlyhistory of shows, the background, training, life expectancy, and “love life” ofgladiators; the architectural settings; the sequence of events in the arena; purchaseprices of gladiators and animals; and later opposition and decline (68). Drawingon a wealth of information from relevant scholarship, ancient authors fromMartial to St. Augustine, and physical evidence from mosaics and equipment toinscriptions and tombstones, the author investigates the allure of combat forfighters and viewers, and the political wisdom of emperors in providing butcontrolling the shows of the arena. Quite properly, he clarifies that gladiatorial


combats were well-organized duels—not mass murderous mayhem and notalways to the death, where other victims, condemned convicts, and exotic beastsfaced certain brutal death.

After a brief introduction, eight chapters cover the early history of the combats,the recruitment, preparation, equipment, fighting styles, and daily life of gladia-tors, the architecture of amphitheaters (including construction techniques anddimensions), the beast spectacles, a speculative reconstruction of “a day at theColosseum,” staged sea battles (naumachiae), the burial or disposal of corpses andcarcasses, the decline of gladiatorial shows, the later history of the Colosseum,and a discussion of gladiator films, which ranks Spartacus above Gladiator forhistorical accuracy concerning arena combats. Meijer closes with an epiloguesuggesting that he himself “would not have been capable of resisting the appeal ofthe Colosseum” (235). Meijer’s lively and informal style and over fifty black andwhite illustrations of settings and combats suggest a very broad popular audience,but his work perhaps invites classroom use by including a chronology, glossary,list of amphitheaters, notes, bibliography [to 2001], and index.

Reminiscent of Michael Grant’s Gladiators [1967] or Roland Auguet’s Crueltyand Civilization [1972], The Gladiators is not very profound or original, but itis a provocative and quick read. Neither the first nor the last such book, it offersan energetic, economical, sound, and clear synthesis of scholarship on a topic ofenduring fascination.

University of Texas at Arlington Donald G. Kyle

The Fall of Mussolini: Italy, the Italians, and the Second World War. By PhilipMorgan. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. ix, 263. $29.95.)

This fine monograph does much more than describe the end of Mussolini’s regime.It asks why Italians remember the war the way that they do, emphasizing thebrutality of the German occupation and the victimization of Italians rather thanmemorializing the victims of Italy’s 1940 to 1943 war of aggression. In castingabout for an answer, Philip Morgan’s social history concentrates on the lives ofordinary Italians and their testimony about their experiences in the war. He writesof the gradual deterioration of their living standards during the war, the increasingthreat of Allied and German occupation, and the resulting erosion of Italians’support for Mussolini’s war and regime. After the overlapping palace coups thatremoved Mussolini from power, the Badoglio government botched its attempt towithdraw from the war, leading to dual occupations, with the United Nations inthe South and the Germans in the North. This situation set off a series of civil and


resistance wars, and Italians had to determine how to respond in order to survive.No one could be passive, simply awaiting events. Some chose active resistance andsome collaboration, but more did what was necessary from day to day, collabo-rating one day and perhaps resisting the next.

Morgan’s book contains little new research, but it brings Italians’ testimony toan English audience largely unaware of Italians’ harrowing experiences during thelast years of the war. Morgan writes ably, telling their stories in effective languageand without pathos. His use of evidence is judicious, and he reaches reasonableconclusions. Italians have good reason to forget the unpleasant activities of theirgovernments and good reason to forget their compatriots’ often ambivalentresponses to the wartime challenges that they faced.

The Fall of Mussolini has some flaws. First, Morgan generally reserves theuse of endnotes only for citing the source of quotations. Given that this bookis not based on his own archival research, it seems unusual not to cite his debtsto other historians’ prior work, and it seems a doubly odd choice in a bookproduced by a university press. Second, the book’s organization is unusual. Itstarts with Mussolini’s fall, backtracks to 1940 through 1943 to discuss thereasons for the collapse of the fascist regime, then jumps to the forty-five daysof Badoglio’s regime and the armistice, and then forward to cover the occupa-tions and civil wars in both the north and the south. The last chapter—on thesecond fall of Mussolini—deals with postwar purges before backtracking todeal with Mussolini’s death in April 1945. This reviewer thinks that a morestraightforward structure, dealing with thematic chapters building towards aconclusion while maintaining some concession to chronology, would haveserved Morgan better. The reviewer can imagine many undergraduates strug-gling with the author’s structural choices and sees no compensatory benefitfrom the current approach. Third, and most importantly, the book’s cover, withits abbreviated title and photograph of a stern looking Mussolini, is rathermisleading. This book is not primarily about Mussolini or either of his fallsfrom power. Mussolini appears in the first chapter, largely disappears from thebook, and only reappears for a four-page denouement on page 223. The titleunderstates this book’s real importance as an effective and often compellingaccount of ordinary Italians and their lives during the war and as a meditationon history and memory. A different title and cover art could better advertise thebook and its genuine accomplishments.

These criticisms do not outweigh the real strengths of this monograph. Morgantells the Italians’ story well, highlighting the tremendous complexity of theirresponses to fascism, occupation, and the resistance. The reviewer very much


appreciates that his book brings their testimony and their story to an Englishaudience, and his discussion of historical memory and politicians’ uses and abusesof history is a welcome caution for his audience.

Lakehead University G. Bruce Strang

Communists and British Society 1920–1991. By Kevin Morgan, Gidon Cohen, andAndrew Flinn. (Chicago, Ill.: Rivers Oram Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 356. $25.95.)

The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was formed in 1920 as an affiliateof the Moscow-based Communist International (Comintern). It was dissolved in1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It never attained great heights ofpower. It never had more than two members of parliament at any one time (andnone after 1950). Its membership never reached sixty thousand, and peaked atthe height of enthusiasm for the Soviet Union in World War II. This very lack ofsuccess has, however, fascinated numerous historians, and, with the opening ofarchives from the early 1990s onwards, new opportunities for its study haveopened up.

Much of this new interest has focused on the party’s development over time,and especially its high politics and relations with Moscow, but there werealways other research possibilities, and some of them are developed in thisvolume with considerable success by three British historians, Kevin Morgan,Gidon Cohen, and Andrew Flinn. The product of a major prosopographicalproject, it makes use of more than three thousand autobiographical question-naires completed by members, as well as over a hundred interviews with formerparty members. And, in combining these unique sources with a deep knowledgeof the archival record and a very thorough grounding in the wider literature onCommunist parties the world over, the authors offer a brilliantly illuminatedinsight into what it meant to be a Communist, and how this changed—or didnot change—over time. Rather than treat the subject chronologically, the bookfocuses on a number of themes: how far the party was of “a new type”; thenature of the party as a community or collection of communities within it; cultsof leadership; gender and party membership; national and international identi-ties; and career and life “trajectories.”

In a short review it is not possible to do full justice to the book’s texture andnuance, but all the chapters are full of insights and new perspectives, and it isfitting that it should be dedicated to that most sensitive of historians of Commu-nist milieux, Raphael Samuel. The chapter on cults of leadership was particularlyimpressive to this reviewer. It focuses, obviously, on Lenin, Stalin, and Dimitrov,


but it also asks penetrating questions about attitudes toward leadership moregenerally. The book, by its nature, cannot offer any kind of definitive view of whypeople did or did not become or remain Communists; indeed, its willingness toleave loose ends untied is one of its most attractive features. Nonetheless, it goesa long way towards explaining why British Communism attracted some andrepelled many more, and it raises a very high bar for subsequent works to try tosurmount. The final irony, perhaps even perversity, is that Morgan, Cohen, andFlinn offer a far deeper insight into the lives and beliefs of ordinary Communistsin their historical setting than is available for members of the far larger Conser-vative, Labour, or Liberal Parties in the same period. If nothing else, Communistsknew how to keep good records.

University of Exeter Andrew Thorpe

Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart: The Perils of Marriage. By Anka Muhlstein. Translatedby John Brownjohn. (London, England: Haus Publishing, 2007. Pp. 408. $26.95.)

The author of this study is not the first biographer to bring Elizabeth I and MaryStuart together, but her study of these queens applies a specific lens to theenterprise: the negotiation and influence of marriage on their lives and reigns.Beginning with the question of how marriage “affected queens regnant in the ageof absolute monarchies,” Anka Muhlstein proceeds to explore how marriageaffected Elizabeth and Mary from their earliest years as young princesses throughthe constant pressures to find appropriate husbands amidst political and religiousrivalries (1). Elizabeth never married, and Muhlstein’s central argument is thatElizabeth’s ability to navigate her long reign as an unmarried queen is a result, inlarge part, of her witnessing the mistakes and misfortunes of the marriagessurrounding her, particularly those of her cousin Mary, who was betrothed in thecradle and married no less than three times.

A major task for any biographer of Mary Stuart is to unpack the disastrousthree-month period following the murder of Mary’s second husband, the roundlyunpopular Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. Mary could not avoid being implicated inDarnley’s murder, but the extent to which Mary was an agent in what has becomeknown as the “Bothwell Plot” is more difficult to unravel. Muhlstein explains thedifficulty in picking up a unifying strand of evidence in the discordant eventssurrounding Darnley’s murder and Mary’s marriage to James Hepburn, Earl ofBothwell: “We reconstruct; we reflect on psychological data that are merelyhypotheses because the incessant upheavals that occurred in the relations between


the various actors give rise to a troublesome discontinuity that thwarts all ourefforts to discern some method in their doings” (139).

Ultimately, Muhlstein situates herself in familiar territory. Like other recentbiographers of Mary Stuart, such as Jenny Wormald, Muhlstein interprets Mary’s“demented” behavior during the Bothwell episode without painting her as theeasily manipulated victim of the more powerful political forces swirling about her.She writes, “Cynics, of whom the present author is one, think the worst: thatMary and her loyalists had concluded a pact” (134). On the question of Mary’sguilt, Muhlstein suggests Mary’s complicity in both Darnley’s assassination andher marriage to Bothwell. In contrast, Retha M. Warnicke casts Mary more clearlyas Bothwell’s unwilling victim, arguing that Mary was not only raped by Both-well, but also abducted and held as his captive until their marriage. BetweenMuhlstein and Wormald on one hand and Warnicke on the other is Susan Doran,who doubts Mary colluded in the abduction, although she concedes that the rapeis much more difficult to prove.

Despite the fact that Muhlstein refuses to romanticize Mary, she does not treather unsympathetically. Muhlstein posits that Mary’s ardor for Bothwell may havebeen born out of an awakened desire understandable in a woman whose previousmarriages provided little sensual fulfillment. Mary is ultimately most sympatheticin moments of extreme crisis, paradoxically, when she seems most able to rise tothe level of majesty. Such an example is found in the moments immediatelyfollowing the assassination of David Riccio, when Mary’s “[s]peed, daring and avigour remarkable for a woman in her [pregnant] condition had won the day”(125).

Muhlstein is careful to avoid easy dichotomies by refusing to cast either queenas antagonist, although early in the text Elizabeth emerges as the more traditionalheroine, partly because her character is given more time to develop through thereigns of her father as well as her younger brother, Edward, and older sister, Mary.By nature of her long life and reign, Elizabeth’s narrative stretches for threechapters beyond Mary’s execution. Because of this framework, Elizabeth gets thelast word, so to speak, in Muhlstein’s text.

If Elizabeth is this book’s heroine, she earns the title through reflection.Muhlstein’s inquiry illustrates that Elizabeth, like her cousin, often kept hermost intimate feelings guarded, even from her closest associates. In present-ing the lives of these two queens, the disparity is in unpacking the chaos ofMary’s marriages while Elizabeth’s deft maneuvers around marriage form aless elusive pattern. Where the motivations behind Mary’s actions are ambigu-ous, Muhlstein more easily traces Elizabeth’s actions (or inaction) back to her


observance of the real dangers inflicted by matrimony. What is clear is thatneither queen could be easily intimidated by the question of marriage. Muhl-stein’s book is engaging and well written and should appeal to a wide audience.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Amber Harris Leichner and Carole Levin

Refractions of the Third Reich in German and Austrian Film. By Chloe Paver.(Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. vi, 174. $74.00.)

Studies of the cultural meanings of the Third Reich are becoming increasinglycommon in considerations of German history and identity. The author of thisbook seeks to move beyond ascertaining a canon of texts on Nazi Germany,providing snapshots of significant themes in the postwar representations of indi-vidual and collective behaviors under dictatorship and their ability to shed lighton the complex process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Chloe Paver offers newperspectives on Verhoeven’s Das Schreckliche Mädchen and Schlink’s Der Vor-leser and original analyses of the documentary form; the effect of accent, lan-guage, and sound; and memorialization through a thought-provoking discussionof the commemorative spaces at Mauthausen and Ebensee.

Paver does not draw on an extensive body of traditional empirical and con-textual materials and does not openly engage with the dominant debates incontemporary historiography of Nazi Germany. But this is not her intention, andshe acknowledges that in order to “gauge the general validity of [her] interpreta-tions of historical evidence [she] would have to test them out on a much biggercorpus of material from the Third Reich and against established disciplinarycriteria.” Rather, she sees texts as a means by which to “formulate the kind ofquestions we would need to pose of that material in order to understand . . . statusand room for manouevre in the Third Reich” (59). Paver is right to emphasize thevalue of reading cultural texts and spaces to provide an alternative framework foranalyzing the meaning of National Socialism and its effect on the national con-science. Her examination of remembering the victims, for example, brings intosharp focus the fact that history is often written by those who have representation.As Paver notes, whilst the “asocial” cause has the potential to attract a groupwilling to “fight for recognition, . . . it is less easy to see who might take up thecommemorative cause of the ‘Criminals,’ but growing interest in the NationalSocialist justice system . . . may lead to a greater public awareness of their expe-rience” (127). It is this interface between cultural, scholarly, and public discoursesthat lies at the heart of Paver’s study.


Although not explicit, the connections to current historiography are evidentthroughout Paver’s work, notably in the reconstruction of conceptions of com-plicity, guilt, identity, gender, and representation, all of which are at the forefrontof current historical research into the inner workings of the Reich and the postwarattempt to come to terms with the past. Equally, her commentary on the nature ofcourses is also illuminating to the historian, because she draws attention to theplacing of artifacts in public spaces and, in particular, the way in which they canbe read. Readers should not imagine, she argues in relation to the exhibition atSchloss Hartheim—the site of the notorious “euthanasia” program—that histori-cal evidence is “static”: how visitors react to its objects can “highlight discrep-ancies between a museum’s script and its performance” (136). Paver’s study is atimely reminder, therefore, that interdisciplinary perspectives can provide debateand new ways of thinking about the past.

Durham University Joanne Fox

Images and Identity in Fifteenth-Century Florence. By Patricia Lee Rubin. (NewHaven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. 418. $60.00.)

The author of this interdisciplinary study of fifteenth-century Florence is an arthistorian. She writes in the preface of Images and Identity that she is “one amonga number of art historians interested in examining the ways that form, style andsubject matter might be related to specific social, political and institutional con-texts” (xi). To this ambitious objective, Patricia Lee Rubin brings a comprehensiveknowledge of Florentine history in the quattrocento together with the insights andperspectives gleaned from a professional lifetime dedicated to the study of “a timeand place that made beauty a defining and definitive social value” (xix).

In the book’s first section, “Moral Imperatives and Material Considerations,”the author describes the social and cultural context of the works of fifteenth-century Florentine artists. She stresses in particular the universal desire for honorthrough display and the ethical justification for that “necessary” expenditure byciting humanist texts that were being circulated. In chapter three, “The Economyof Honor,” she argues that painters, sculptors, smiths, and architects were strivingto achieve honor through their talents, but that as a professional category, they didnot achieve either the wealth or status of Florence’s social and political elite. Forexample, Donatello achieved fame and enjoyed the patronage of Cosimo de’Medici, but he died in poverty. Cosimo did arrange for his burial in the Medicifamily church of San Lorenzo.


In part two, “The Eye and the Beholder,” Rubin examines visual experience inquattrocentro Florence, exploring “the attitudes and assumptions that form thecontext for the visual sensitivity that characterizes the artistic production of thecity” (xv). Chapter four, “Seeing and Being Seen,” is a compendium of referencesto modes of seeing by prominent authors (Alberti, Landino, Lorenzo de’ Medici)and by such major artists as Masaccio, Andrea del Castagno, Domenico Ghirlan-daio, and Botticelli. She acknowledges the contribution to this topic by MichaelBaxandall’s Painting and Experience in Renaissance Italy [1972], although shesuggests that his influential book requires revision and elaboration. In the fifthchapter, Rubin analyzes Dante’s visual reaction (in Purgatory, canto X) to a seriesof sculptures of religious themes, a description that influenced a number ofRenaissance authors and artists. In part three, “Seeing and Being,” Rubindescribes how Florentine artists created images that motivated viewers to reaffirmtheir Christian faith, and their identity in a fluid society.

Images and Identity is an important contribution to the historiography ofRenaissance Florence. Most impressive is the clarity and precision with which theauthor describes her objectives, her methodology, and her conclusions. The bib-liographical notes testify to the range of her reading, and the hundreds of superbillustrations provide the visual background to her analysis.

University of California, Berkeley Gene Brucker

Karl Brandt: The Nazi Doctor; Medicine and Power in the Third Reich. By UlfSchmidt. (London, England: Hambledon Continuum, 2007, Pp. xvi, 462. $29.95.)

Many historians are wary of biography, but this author’s study of Karl Brandtought to challenge suspicions about this genre of history. This biography of thedoctor who began his ascent in the hierarchy of the Third Reich as Adolf Hitler’sescort physician and ended up on trial as a war criminal offers insight intopersonal relations as well as the power dynamics within Hitler’s inner circle. Thedearth of literature on figures in the second and third tiers of leadership is a seriousgap in the voluminous literature on Nazi Germany; this volume contributes to thefilling of that gap.

A difficulty facing the historian studying these lesser figures is the limiteddocumentary base, which is ironic given the vast ocean of documents survivingfrom the Nazi era. Ulf Schmidt has cast his nets broadly, drawing from conven-tional and unconventional sources. He effectively uses Brandt’s own words,including his Nuremberg diary, trial notebook, interrogation, and trial transcripts,as well as the words of others in his search for fuller understanding of Brandt and


the Nazi administrative system. During the postwar interrogation and trial Brandtsought to evade and to dissemble, repeatedly understating his role in the Nazihierarchy. Schmidt critically evaluates Brandt’s words to distinguish truth fromdistortion, presenting a man who actively and successfully sought and exercisedpower. By the end of 1943, he had become the supreme medical authority in theThird Reich. But Schmidt acknowledges the limits of his documentation. Wherethe record is incomplete, he engages in informed speculation, laying out variouspossible scenarios and offering “likely” or probable explanations.

An unconventional source is photographs from the archives of Hitler’s pho-tographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. This visual record repeatedly demonstratesBrandt’s proximity to Hitler at important moments and, although the photo-graphs cannot tell what was said or decided, the combination of the photographswith other sources demonstrate that Brandt was far from the peripheral figure orthe medical man he sought to portray after the war. These photographs comple-ment the conventional sources.

Schmidt uses Brandt’s story to illustrate how power was gained and used in theThird Reich. “Hitler’s personalized and amateurish style of government . . . wasalmost totally devoid of any systematic and rational form of governance” (205–6).One key to power rested in access to Hitler. Other historians have emphasized theimportance of access, but here is an effective case study of access parlayed intopower. Brandt actually drafted for Hitler’s signature directives that increased hisown power and authority. Part of his expanded role in the Third Reich includedthe so-called euthanasia program and the revival of the killing of incurable andmentally ill patients later in the war to make bed space for the tens of thousandsof wounded soldiers and civilians.

This is a fine study, marred only by a tendency to state and restate the samepoint time and again. Schmidt’s readers benefit from this study of one man and theadministration of the Third Reich.

Hanover College Larry Thornton

The Hanoverian Dimension in British History, 1714–1837. Edited by Brendan Simmsand Torsten Riotte. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007.Pp. xi, 337. $105.00.)

This elegantly produced volume of thirteen essays stems from papers given ata 2004 Peterhouse colloquium that have been appropriately revised, expanded,and organized by the German Historical Institute in London and the Centre forInternational Studies at the University of Cambridge. The essays in general are so


insightful that it seems invidious to highlight in this review only those few whosetheses were particularly revelatory or meaningful to one reviewer. Jeremy Black,fresh from his magisterial biography of George III, which firmly located the thirdHanoverian ruler in the German political scene, reiterates here that Britain,despite the Protestant succession, did not follow a Protestant foreign policyafter 1714. He also finds more coherence and stability in Pitt the Elder’s overallHanoverian policy than is normally allowed. Torsten Riotte, in his article onGeorge III and Hanover, offers an even more detailed analysis than Black’s bookdid on George’s separation of his electoral role from British foreign policy aims inthe empire. Riotte also stresses the independence of George III’s Hanoverianministers. In 1801, for example, they even suggested that Hanover join theanti-British alliance! Christopher Thompson challenges the orthodox viewpointthat the new Hanoverian kingdom meant little to British sovereigns or ministersafter 1815. Thomas Biskup offers a pathbreaking analysis of the crucial post-1737scientific and cultural ties between Oxbridge and the Royal Society with theUniversity of Göttingen. Andrew Thompson’s sensitive article on the confessionaldimensions of British-Hanoverian relations only whets the appetite for his forth-coming biography in the Yale English Monarchs Series of that much-neglectedmonarch, George II. Hamish Scott examines the Personal Union through theeyes of French foreign policy and military experts, and emphasizes the degree towhich their British counterparts overplayed any French desire to occupy andhold Hanover. Clarissa Campbell Orr discusses the intricate royal British-Germaninteractions implicit in the Personal Union and in the process continues herimportant study of the dynastic and cultural influence of George III’s consort,Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.

Running through many of the essays, perhaps not surprisingly, is an insistenceon the overriding historical importance of the Personal Union and an attack onthose modern British historians who downplay or ignore this factor of the longeighteenth century. Norman Gash, Christopher Hibbert, E. A. Smith, PhilipZiegler, Roy Porter, Jonathan Clark, and, especially, Linda Colley—both in herrole as an early Tory historian and as a theorist of British national identity—comein for quite a drubbing. Sometimes, however, this Hanoverphilia becomes over-wrought as when Christopher Thompson suggests that only the Hanoverianconnection prevented a “complete apotheosis of the royal family as the embodi-ment of British identity” (90). In an age that featured Butcher Cumberland, QueenCaroline Matilda, George IV, Queen Caroline of Brunswick, Mrs. Clarke, and theDuke of Cumberland’s valet, such special pleading seems excessive. Also, the royalcommemorations of August 1814 in London’s parks did not exactly celebrate the


centenary of the Personal Union, as Brendan Simms would have it, but theaccession of the House of Hanover to the British throne, which is not quite thesame thing.

Finally, Mijndert Bertram engages in some interesting counterfactuals when hespeculates that if the Personal Union had not been broken in 1837, Prussia wouldnever have dared annex Hanover in 1866, and the World Wars of the 1914–1945period would never have happened!

University of Illinois at Chicago James J. Sack

The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany. ByJonathan Zatlin. (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xviii,377. $75.00.)

As a student living in East Germany, this reviewer’s idée fixe about the problems itfaced realizing communist utopian ideals was that one could not simply transplanta nineteenth-century Marxist ideology onto a modern consumer society. Thisproved to be an even more difficult task in a country like East Germany that had astrong capitalistic consumer-oriented Western neighbor with the same culturaltraditions and history. Of course, economic historians present more complexanalyses of such societies, emphasizing prices and the limits of planned economies.

In this detailed research monograph, Jonathan Zatlin offers a refreshinglydifferent approach to analyzing the failures of the East German economic experi-ment by replacing the prices explanation with one focusing on the leadership’sattitude toward money. He argues that it was the regime’s antipathy towardmoney that led to a dysfunctional economy. Further, it even attempted to create anew society of “inexhaustible plenty and limitless good by eliminating money”(3). This more philosophical approach presents an alternative backdrop to ananalysis of production and consumption.

The first part of the book (“Production”) is an economic and political historyof the Eric Honecker period [1971–1989]. After an introductory chapter onmonetary theory and economic planning in East Germany, Zatlin turns to threechapters on the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) material debt to WestGermany and the growing influence of the sycophantic, disliked Günter Mittag.The author likely pays scant attention to the founding years when the philosophi-cal basis for the antipathy toward money was forged because of the absence ofsources. For it is clear from the book’s weighty footnotes that it is thoroughlyresearched in the Communist Party archives and well documented using therelevant literature.


The second half of the book focuses on money as a cultural category anddesired consumer goods like the automobile and items from the Intershops. Zatlincloses the book with a chapter on letters of complaint about East Germany’sinability to satisfy consumer desires and an epilogue on German unification.Although beyond the scope of the volume, a comparative analysis with the SovietUnion and other Eastern-Bloc countries may have illuminated the peculiarities ofthe East German experience.

The author is best when he illustrates abstract concepts with specific stories.The most memorable and emblematic story the author has dug up is East Ger-many’s attempt to bottle and sell the Western-trademarked Pepsi-Cola. Typically,the GDR ended up reneging on the contract and used the bottles to sell beer andnot Pepsi.

The Currency of Socialism will appeal to specialists in GDR history and offersa richly documented alternative to traditional accounts about the failures of theEast German economy. Paradoxically, money was never eliminated, but ratherEast Germans’ desire for Western consumer goods led to a quest for hard currency.In a globally interdependent world, the bankrupt economy also became increas-ingly dependent on the West in other areas like modern technology to keep thesociety functioning. Finally, instead of continuing to import goods from the West,East Germany became part of it through unification.

Michigan State University Kristie Macrakis

GENERAL, COMPARATIVE, HISTORIOGRAPHICAL

Comrades and Commissars: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War. By CecilD. Eby. (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. Pp. xv,510. $39.95.)

On 17 July 1936, the Spanish military revolted against the legally elected center-left Republican government. While Hitler and Mussolini backed the insurgents,the Soviet Union provided military aid and promoted the recruitment of overthirty-five thousand volunteers to join what became known as the InternationalBrigades to assist the Republican government in the fight against its fascistfoes.

From the onset of hostilities, a debate has raged over the place of the SpanishCivil War in U.S. history. Many see the struggle of the Spanish Republic againstits enemies as part of the global fight against exploitation, and they hold theappeasement policies pursued by the U.S. along with other Western democracies


responsible for the defeat of the Republic and for encouraging further Fascistaggression. Others, including Cecil D. Eby, dismiss Moscow’s intervention in theconflict and its decision to recruit international volunteers, including 2,800 Ameri-cans, as an expression of Stalin’s global expansionist designs. The work most citedas evidence of Moscow’s nefarious designs over Spain is George Orwell’s Homageto Catalonia [1938], in which he accused Soviet agents of crushing the anti-Stalinist and anarchist movement in Barcelona in 1937. The Barcelona events, asdescribed by Orwell, provide a common foundation for the interpretations offeredby anti-Soviet leftists and conservatives. Although the first group claims thatSoviet-inspired repression of the anti-Stalinist forces undermined popular supportfor the Republic, the second sees it as proof that a Republican victory would haveturned Spain into a satellite of the Soviet Union.

Significantly those who use Homage to Catalonia as the centerpiece of theirinterpretation ignore Orwell’s later writings on the subject. In 1943, with Hitlerin control over continental Europe, Orwell revised his earlier assessment of thereasons for the fall of the Spanish Republic in an essay titled “Looking Back onthe Spanish War.” This time, rather than blaming Communists and Moscow forthe defeat of the Republic, Orwell wrote that the “outcome of the Spanishwar . . . was settled in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin—at any rate, not in Spain.”The Fascists won, he wrote, not in response to Moscow’s expansionist aims butrather “because they were the stronger; they had modern arms and the othershadn’t. No political strategy could offset that.”

The author claims that Comrades and Commissars is an “updated” version ofhis earlier book, Between the Bullet and the Lie [1969]. Unlike Orwell, nothing isnew in Eby’s second work. The author ignores the wealth of new documentation,including personnel files of international volunteers that have emerged from thearchives of the former Soviet Union and, instead, continues to rely on discreditedsources, repeats disproved rumors, and “cherry picks” through secondary worksfor information that supposedly supports earlier claims while ignoring what doesnot. Readers are presented with a litany of clichés, errors of fact, and sloppytranslations; even worse, the author’s extensive claims of Soviet malfeasance andheavy-handed activities in Spain are made without reference to documentaryevidence. In the end, Comrades and Commissars does not add to the ongoinghistorical discussion on the Spanish Civil war and the book’s shoddy editing doesnot reflect favorably on the press that published it.

University of South Florida,Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Fraser Ottanelli


The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900. By David Edgerton.(Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xviii, 270. $26.00.)

In this pathbreaking book, the author presents a radical reinterpretation oftechnology and invention, and in so doing he rereads not only the history oftechnology, but modern history itself. David Edgerton rejects the standardinnovation-centered history of technology, one that looks to a succession ofgreat technological inventions (and inventors) of high cultural visibility—Watt’ssteam engine, Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb, Jobs’s and Wozniak’s personalcomputer—as transformative events characteristic of nations and of technologicaleras. Instead, he substitutes a “use-centered” vision of technology, one thatfocuses on how technologies become integrated into longstanding practices or arereworked in different cultural contexts. The result is a visionary panorama ofunexpected continuities in technological history, a new view of the timelines oftechnological progress, a rejection of technological futurism, an emphasis onglobal perspectives transcending the local, and a devastating historiographicalcritique of the existing literature. For these reasons this book should be requiredreading for anyone concerned not only with technology and its history, but alsowith the making of the modern world.

Edgerton makes his case in a series of thematic chapters concerning timelinesand the impact of technologies, production, maintenance, nations, war, killing,and invention. In each, he contrasts received notions of technological progresswith a more nuanced and informed vision that does not deny that fundamentaltechnological changes took place in the twentieth century, particularly duringthe “long boom” of the three decades following World War II. But Edgerton’saccounts contextualize these changes in ways that cause us to rethink the place ofthe “seemingly old.” In his revision, the condom eclipses nuclear power. Produc-tion is not limited to great industrial enterprises, but must include the householdand building “bidonvilles” throughout the “poor world,” where “creole technolo-gies” redefine technological change.

The necessity of maintaining technological systems undermines the analyticalimportance of their flashy creation. The Kalashnikov and their ilk killed morepeople in the twentieth century than more dramatic aerial bombing or otherhigh-tech mechanisms of death. The lowly machete is as much an instrumentof genocide as was high-tech Zyklon-B. “Techno-nationalism” misleadinglyattributes civilian origins to modern military technologies (e.g., the airplane).Today’s slaughterhouse is a killing factory that differs in scale, but less in tech-nology, from earlier antecedents. The rickshaw and the bicycle are as emblematic


of technology today as are iPods or the Internet. That shipbuilding is a high-techindustrial marvel, whereas ship breaking today is a low-tech operation conductedon the beaches of the “poor world” and gives pause to reconsider notions oftechnological time and technological “progress.”

The “shock of the old” in this book comes only partly from the realization thatmany “seemingly old” technologies are still with us today. The real shock ishistoriographical and stems from taking Edgerton seriously and what that meansfor understanding technological change. As the author rightly concludes: “Torethink the history of technology is necessarily to rethink the history of the world”(220). He succeeds in both.

Stevens Institute of Technology James E. McClellan III

Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta toDarfur. By Ben Kiernan. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. viii,724. $40.00.)

The author of this book is internationally known for his extensive writings onthe Pol Pot regime and other subjects related to Southeast Asian Communism. Heoffers a magisterial and wide-ranging account of genocides and exterminationsfrom ancient times to the present day. Although there have been a number ofprevious comprehensive histories of genocide and extermination—the publisher’sclaim that this is “the first global history of genocide and extermination fromancient times” is inaccurate—it is certainly among the most far reaching and bestwritten. If Ben Kiernan has a general thesis about the origins of genocide, whichis not always clear, he appears to root most modern genocides in the drive bynation-states or regimes for “blood and soil,” expansion and space at the expenseof indigenous peoples, minorities, classes and ethnic “enemies,” and anyone whostands in their way.

Kiernan ranges very widely in his work, which would clearly be useful for anycollege-level course on this subject or a related one. His chapters extend fromancient times to the Spanish Conquest of the New World, to the Europeansettlement of North America, to the more obvious genocides of the twentiethcentury. Kiernan’s coverage of recent massacres is balanced, devoting as muchspace to Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot as to Hitler and the genocide of the Armeniansby the Turks during the First World War. As noted, it is exceptionally well written,and is accompanied by many useful, well-drawn maps. Kiernan frankly expoundson the unspeakable horrors of genocide in every chapter: this work is not for thesqueamish.


However, Kiernan’s book, his subjects, and his main theses are anything butunproblematic, at least to this reviewer, and it is also important to note thesecaveats. The more general point might be made, too, that few subjects in histo-riography have engendered more bitter and hostile debate than the question ofgenocide, and especially the uniqueness or otherwise of the Jewish Holocaust. Thehighly intemperate nature of these exchanges may be flavored from, for example,the essays by various historians in Alan S. Rosenbaum’s collection, Is the Holo-caust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocides [revised edition 2001],which includes discussions of many genocides and massacres.

As imposing as Kiernan’s work clearly is, there are a number of importantareas where, in this reviewer’s opinion, it can be legitimately criticized. Kiernanhas little to say about the demographic element in defining and assessing allegedgenocides and continuously understates its importance. It seems absolutely clear,for example, that the catastrophic demographic declines which occurred amongboth American Indians and Australian Aborigines following European settlementwere primarily caused by the introduction of virulent diseases and not by directslaughter and deliberate “genocide.” According to Steven T. Katz, only 3.7percent of the decline in the number of American Indians between 1775 and 1900can be attributed to killings by white settlers. In Australia, Judy Campbell’s 2002work Invisible Invaders: Smallpox and Other Diseases in Aboriginal Australia,1780–1880 makes a convincing case that, again, it was the introduction ofsmallpox and other diseases that produced the apparently sharp decline inaboriginal numbers, while Sydney scholar Keith Windschuttle has been respon-sible for launching a fiercely contested debate in Australia about the extent ofEuropean killings of aborigines in Tasmania, which he claims were minimal.

This points to the ambiguities in the very definition of “genocide” whichKiernan avoids addressing, bearing in mind the considerable difficulties in offeringa universally accepted definition. Kiernan rightly stresses the “intent” by thosecommitting genocide, but also includes in his discussions a number of cases wherethere was no “intent” at genocide (and no genocide in reality). For example, heincludes a highly original but somewhat peculiar chapter on “The English Con-quest of Ireland, 1565–1603,” an event that certainly comprised some appallingmassacres but only with difficulty might be described as genocide. The number ofkillings involved, given its early date and the lack of real statistics, is surelydubious. Curiously, the author does not examine the Irish Potato Famine of the1840s, in which one million died and another million emigrated, and which isoften alleged by Irish nationalists to have been an example of genocide by theBritish government.


Although Kiernan certainly ranges widely in this work, the thrust of thisbook—as is the case in virtually all recent general discussions of genocide byscholars—is to show that genocide is a component of western expansionism, oran explicit aspect of Western racism, social Darwinism, and “modernism,” whileomitting a range of slaughters carried out by non-western and non-Europeanpeople against one another. With his extensive coverage of many massacresundertaken by Asian peoples, Kiernan is less guilty of this than most, but he stillomits any number of non-western mass murders, from those of the Aztecs (whosehorrifyingly murderous society is mentioned only in footnotes) to the TaipingRebellion in midnineteenth-century China, in which perhaps ten million Chinesewere murdered by other Chinese. His discussion also omits the beneficial effects ofwestern expansionism, from the suppression of innumerable barbaric indigenouspractices to the introduction of western medicine and education.

The subject of genocide is always likely to be extremely controversial, andKiernan’s magisterial work succeeds better than most: it is certainly more read-able, and—if this does not sound like black humor—more enjoyable. But massa-cres were no monopoly of the European settler, nor were the settlers’ incursionswithout positive aspects.

University of Aberystwyth William D. Rubinstein

Impotence: A Cultural History. By Angus McLaren. (Chicago, Ill.: Chicago UniversityPress, 2007. Pp. xi, 332. $30.00.)

It is impossible to open an e-mail account today without encountering a tidal waveof words about potency, or lack of it. The historian of the future would beforgiven for concluding that the erect, pleasure-giving penis was the key preoc-cupation of the early twenty-first-century West. Angus McLaren’s timely andintriguing book will set them right on that score. McLaren casts his net wide, andthis is both the work’s strength and at times its weakness. The historical range isimportant and necessary to give a sense of both change and continuity in theWest’s obsession with impotence. However, the treatment across the ages fromclassical antiquity through Christianity’s gradual hegemony, to the rise of sexualscience via Freud that fostered a cultural preoccupation with (male) sexual per-formance, is at times a little unbalanced. In terms of quantity, the majority of thebook (more than half) is concerned with impotence from the nineteenth centuryonwards. Nevertheless, the latter chapters that deal with impotence in modernityare especially detailed, articulate, and informative, so this, ultimately, does not“grate.”


McLaren identifies from the outset the complex meanings that are associatedwith the preoccupation with sexual performance; the relationship with definitionsof masculinity (which both shift and stay the same); the misogyny that seemsalways to wait in the wings; the intertwining with a wider framework of sexualmorality whether its logic is religious or secular. The role played by the culturalfocus of this work strengthens and binds the sometimes selective evidence, and itis here that McLaren’s details bond into something that keeps the past relevant tothe present: impotence as a joke; females being rapacious and demanding whilebeing “passive”; sexual performance as a marker of physical decrepitude. Thebook is especially strong in identifying the growing link between impotence as afearsome but ever-present phenomenon and sexuality that is both masculinist andphallocentric.

In parts the author is uneven in his treatment of historical detail: like the topicitself, the text has a curious relationship to the history of sexuality. At times hetreads familiar paths (the role of the Church; masturbation phobia and thetwo-seed theory); at others he tends to impose a pattern on complexities that arebest understood as fragmented and complex. The weakest chapter is on theeighteenth century, in which the role of bourgeois morals especially in relation towomen’s sexuality is overstated. However, he redeems himself, for this reviewer,in the chapters that deal with the early twentieth century. His discussion of MarieStopes and Freud illuminates some unfamiliar commonalities and shows howcomplex, yet how inevitably negative, was the impact of what both saw as“civilization” on the sexual performance of both men and women. The finalchapter deals with the emergence of the “little blue pill,” and here McLaren showsclearly the interaction between “anxiety-making” and commercial clothed-as-scientific imperatives. The reader is left with the uncomfortable yet inescapableconclusion that impotence is itself a potent weapon in social control.

University of New England Gail L. Hawkes

A Natural History of Time. By Pascal Richet. Translated by John Venerella. (Chicago,Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 471. $29.00.)

Anyone who has paid attention to nonfiction in the last decade cannot help buthave noticed a subgenre characterized by works that view history through a lensprovided by a commodity (say, codfish) or an artifact (say, the pencil). PascalRichet’s A Natural History of Time (ably translated by John Venerella) undertakesthe same sort of endeavor, but achieves greater success because the lens at issueoffers a wider field of view; Richet’s work is nothing less than the history of the


inquiry into the age of the cosmos, that word defined variously as the knownworld, the earth, and, finally, the universe.

The author begins with an overview of human and cosmic origins as depictedin myth, and moves quickly through the cyclic conceptions of time favored by theGreeks. Judeo-Christian tradition introduced a linear history—the world createdat a particular moment, and the patriarchs and generations of Israel appearing inpurposeful sequence—and an implicit requirement (if the Pentateuch is takenliterally) that all of natural history be confined to a span of several thousand years.In a particularly interesting chapter, the author describes doubts raised long beforethe age of Darwin. This is from English naturalist John Ray, writing (in 1673) ofsediments a hundred feet deep: “which is yet a strange thing, considering thenovity of the World, the age whereof, according to the usual Account, is not yet5600 years” (112). In the eighteenth century, Buffon published his conclusion thatthe earth was 75,000 years old, and confided his more controversial belief of a fargreater age to a private journal. Arguments for a youthful earth were becomingeven more difficult to defend, and estimates of the age of the earth’s environs wereincreasing as well; by the early nineteenth century, astronomers realized that somestars were millions of years old.

By 1850 geologists and paleontologists had developed a timeline marked atintervals by the appearance of biological groups. Meanwhile, Kelvin’s applicationof the laws of thermodynamics to the question gave an estimate for the earth’s agewhose lower range was twenty million years, far less than that proffered by manygeologists. After discussing physical sciences in the 1890s, the author turns to thedevelopment of radioactive dating techniques in the first years of the twentiethcentury and then to British geologist Arthur Holmes, who determined an age forthe Earth on the order of several billion years. The book’s concluding chapterdiscusses the work of American geochemist Clair Patterson, who, in part byapplying the new dating methods to meteorites, settled on what remains the bestestimate: 4.55 billion years.

Richet, a senior geophysicist at the Institute de Physique du Globe de Paris, hascomposed a rich, wide-ranging, and authoritative history, well-spiced with anec-dote, some rather arresting illustrations, and welcome flashes of humor.

University of Massachusetts—Amherst David Toomey
