By Leland G. Stauber
Prometheus Books, $27.00, 292 pages
Frightening and unpatriotic in its premise, well-researched and surprisingly making some sense, Stauber tries to sell us the idea that America and life in general would have been better off without our complete independence from Britain in 1783.
The concept sounds baffling at first but when considering Britain outlawed [...]
By Joel Richard Paul
Riverhead, $25.95, 405 pages
The reverently-named founding fathers have, post mortem, long been guilty of a different sort of tyranny: tyranny over America’s early history. Here comes rebel Joel Richard Paul, a professor of international and constitutional law, wielding Unlikely Allies, a shadier version of the forging of the French-American alliance, without which [...]
By Joyce Appleby
Norton, $29.95, 494 pages
Books on Economics tend to be for economists; furthermore they tend to approach the subject as science. Joyce Appleby’s The Relentless Revolution doesn’t pretend that economics is scientific or that its “laws” are anything more than theoretical models that function only in simulation. Instead of presenting Capitalism in a model [...]
By Tom Myers
Arcadia Publishing, $21.99, 128 pages
Have you ever stood in a place in Sacramento and wondered how the area looked in decades past? Unless you work in the state librarian’s office, you’re unlikely to have access to the photographs that will provide such information. Until now, that is. Photographer Tom Myers has put together [...]
By the Special Collections of the Sacramento Public Library
Arcadia Publishing, $21.99, 127 pages
The Alkali Flat neighborhood in Sacramento is probably the least known and appreciated in the Sacramento area. Yet, it is also the first real neighborhood of the city; it was where some of the first power brokers of Sacramento lived and raised their [...]
By Larry Gonick
Harper Paperbacks, $18.99, 260 pages
Larry Gonick has a gift for explaining complex subjects with seemingly simple cartoons. Statistics, taxes, genetics, chemistry, sex… Gonick has tackled them all, and nothing is more complex and worthy of his singular attention than world history.
As a history minor in college, I have a deep and abiding affection [...]
By Herwig, Holger H.
Random House, $28.00, 416 pages
Holger Herwig has done something impressive. He is one of the very few historians of World War I to write in English, using French, German and British sources. The result is an authoritative account of one of the most significant battles of the 20th century. Herwig offers his [...]
By Joanna Levin
Stanford University Press, $65.00, 469 pages
Bohemia in American has always been seen through rose tinted glasses by the middle class through Puccini’s La Boheme to the modern day Rent. A life that is not defined by the cares of work and home. A life left to explore one’s self, to become the next [...]
By Jason Thompson
Anchor Books, $17.00, 382 Pages
Historical books replete with the human dramas of auld times past tend to grab one’s attention; this automatic intrigue gives an inch to the chronicler’s pedestal, merely for writing on a historical subject. In hearing the word ‘Egypt,’ images of pyramids, hieroglyphs, pharaohs, tombs, and mummies are conjured up, [...]
By David C. Engerman
Oxford University Press, $34.95, 459 pages
The rise of area studies in universities around the country can be traced to the support of Soviet Studies after World War II. The rise of Soviet Studies, and the experts that they produce has not been well documented. It first started out as a way to [...]
By Douglas Cazaux Sackman
Oxford University Press, $24.95, 384 pages
The author almost abandoned this project when he learned that another book about the last wild Indian (Ishi’s Brain: In Search of America’s Last “Wild” Indian by Orin Starn, 2004) was in the works. Encouraged by his publisher, Douglas Cazaux Sackman, a history professor at the University [...]
By Pamela Bauer Mueller
Pinata Publishing, $18.00, 276 pages
Jekyll Island is a small islet off the coast of Georgia, which between the years 1888 and 1942 was the site of an exclusive club and resort of America’s wealthiest and powerful men. While Splendid Isolation could be the standard tale of prices and leisure, Mueller opens the [...]
By Peniel E. Joseph
Basic Civitas Books , $26.00, 288 pages
Paniel E. Joseph, of Tufts University and a historical analyst during the 2008 democratic convention, explores the fact that Black Power is an aspect of American History and notes that in the election of Barack Obama as America’s first African American President.
In this volume, Joseph tests [...]
By Robert Sellers
Thomas Dunne Books, $25.99, 286 pages
Their names are included up there with the acting greats and these boys spent quite a bit of time behaving badly. From O’Toole getting arrested for wooing an insurance building, Reed dropping his pants in public to show off his “mighty mallet,” Harris attacking cars in Italy, to [...]
By Anthony F. D’Elia
Harvard University Press, $24.95, 256 pages
On Fat Tuesday in the year 1468, an unidentified informant gave Pope Paul II an urgent message – there was a plot afoot to assassinate him. Forewarned, the pope had the suspected leaders of the conspiracy arrested, and the assassination attempt was never made. Conspirators were tortured [...]
By Robert V. Remini
Harper Perennial, $15.99, 373 pages
After being told that a short comprehensive history of the United States hadn’t been written for sixty or seventy years, Robert V. Remini set out to write his own. This result is indeed a short history, very briefly covering everything from Native Americans up to modern times. But [...]
