Reviewed Elsewhere
- Reviewed Elsewhere
Contributing reviewers Nell Altizer, Patricia Angley, Alana Bell, Janet Butler, Michael Fassiotto, Lars Fischer, Théo Garneau, Noel Kent, and Barbara Bennett Peterson provided the excerpts for this issue.
Publications reviewed include the Australian Book Review, Canadian Historical Review, Catholic Historical Review, Eighteenth-Century Studies, French Review, French Studies, (Toronto) Globe and Mail, Histoire sociale/Social History, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Journal of American Asian Studies, Journal of Cold War Studies, Journal of the Civil War Era, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Kritika, The New Yorker, New York Review of Books (NYRB), New York Times Book Review (NYTBR), Nine, Notes, Pacific Historical Review, Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Restoration, Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, Studies in the Novel, Times Literary Supplement (TLS), Victorian Studies, and the Women's Review of Books.
Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life. Natalie Dykstra. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. 318 pp. $26.00.
"Dykstra, intending to restore to Clover 'her full humanity,' often overreaches, insisting that her photographs reveal her growing isolation and identifying as influences paintings she never saw. Yet the book is in a way more moving for this failure. If it is hard to bring Clover back to life, this is perhaps because her life, like that of so many women of the time, was never fully lived." The New Yorker, Mar. 19, 2012: 83. "For biographers, though, silence is seductive. Absent sources stir speculation. And the latest biography of Clover Adams, melodramatically subtitled 'A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life,' takes the idea of loss as the theme of her story. To Natalie Dykstra, the life of Marian Hooper (nicknamed Clover) was founded in grief and early sorrow, and in a touch of madness." Brenda Wineapple. NYTBR, Mar. 4, 2012: 19.
The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine. David Brock, Ari Rabin-Havt, and the staff of Media Matters for America. New York: Anchor Books, 2012. 329 pp. $15.00. [End Page 408]
"Brock and his associate Ari Rabin-Havt target Rupert Murdoch's lucrative flagship cable network, Fox News. They draw on Michael Wolff's biography of Murdoch as well as on transcripts and leaked memos (some of which Media Matters has already publicized) from Fox journalists and executives to contend that it is not a traditional news organization, but a propaganda outlet intent on reshaping the Republican Party in its own image." Jacob Heilbrunn. NYTBR, Mar. 4, 2012: 8.
A Cook's Life. Stephanie Alexander. Camberwell, Vic: Lantern, 2012. 362 pp. $Au39.95.
"Is it not curious that . . . cooks repeatedly praise the table for its central role in hospitality, conviviality, generosity, and equality, yet seem so needful of . . . praise? . . . Alexander undermines her genuine achievements and her obvious intelligence through solipsism. . . . Every story in A Cook's Life is . . . a story of getting what she wants. . . . There are . . . some very good parts where Alexander records the food she ate and learned about in the 1980's." Gay Bilson. Australian Book Review 340 (Apr. 2012): 25-26.
The Lady and the Peacock: The Life of Aung San Suu Kyi. Peter Popham. London: Rider Books, 2011. 446 pp. $52.95.
"Perhaps Popham's finest achievement in this book is the precise and curiously patient way he unravels, layer by layer, the many ways in which Suu Kyi learned to weather the junta's crudest and most subtle forms of attack, be they through propaganda, through emotional cruelty . . . through imprisonment, or through direct violence. . . . Popham also does an excellent job of elucidating this stalwart woman's early life. . . ." The review faults the author for patronizing descriptions of his subject's beauty and for the unsubstantiated claim that Suu Kyi's former friend had him expelled from Burma. Karen Connelly. Globe and Mail, Feb. 18, 2012: R20.
Grand Ventures: The Banning Family and the Shaping of Southern California. Tom Sitton. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 2010. 483 pp. $34.95.
"Sitton states that his book is 'an interpretation of the rise of Southern California in the larger American Southwest as told through the exploits of one family'. . . . The largest portion of...
