Reviewed Elsewhere

Contributing editors Patricia Angley, Alana Bell, Helke Dreier, Marie-Christine Garneau, Théo Garneau, Michael Fassiotto, Noel Kent, Gabriel Merle, George Simson, and Eric Thau provided the excerpts for this issue.

Publications reviewed include French Review, French Studies, German History, Globe and Mail, Herizons, Historische Zeitschrift, Das Historisch-Politische Buch, Kirkus Reviews, Los Angeles Times Book Review (LATBR), Le Monde des Livres, El Mundo, The New Yorker, New York Times Book Review (NYTBR), Studi Francesi, Times Literary Supplement (TLS), Washington Post Week in Review (WP), Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, and Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung.

Adams, John

John Adams: Party of One. James Grant. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004. 544 pp. $30.00.

"Grant is a financial writer, and his focus on Adams's career as a 'junk-bond promoter,' whose machinations in European capital markets kept the Revolution afloat, is illuminating, but it also results in a portrait that is somewhat bloodless. Grant doesn't quite rescue Adams from the traits that exposed him to ridicule in his own day: as Vice President, he argued he should be called 'your Majesty.'"

The New Yorker, Mar. 21, 2005: 81.

Adorno, Theodor

Theodor W. Adorno. Ein letztes Genie. Detlev Claussen. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 2003. 479 pp. Euro26,90.

Adorno. Eine Biographie. Stefan Müller-Doohm. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2003. 1032 pp. Euro29,90.

Adorno. Eine politische Biographie. Lorenz Jäger. Munich: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 2003. 319 pp. Euro22,90.

Those who would like to read an account about Adorno, his life, his research, his work, his friends, and fears in a narrative way, will find a . . . depiction of the development of the "last genius" Theodor W. Adorno in Detlev Claussen's biography. . . . Lorenz Jäger . . . tries a critical-conservative discussion of Adornos's ideological pillars: Marxism and psychoanalysis. . . . Stefan Müller-Doohm submits the most ambitious and extensive biography. . . . For Müller-Doohm the social, political, and contemporary historical position of the thinker is inseparably connected with his oeuvre.

Holger Burckhart. Das Historisch-Politische Buch 52.5 (2004): 532–34.

Aitken, James (John the Painter)

The Incendiary: The Misadventures of John the Painter, First Modern Terrorist. Jessica Warner. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2005. 298 pp. $32.99.

"[T]he quaint tale of a young arsonist who briefly terrorized 18th-century England as a soi-disant agent of the revolutionary Americans. . . . Jessica Warner has told his story quite magically, with a flair both for research and literary narrative that is going to propel her, if she so wishes, onto a career track of a quite stellar success."

Simon Winchester. Globe and Mail, Mar. 12, 2005: D3.

Altmaier, Jakob

Jakob Altmaier. Ein jüdischer Sozialdemokrat in Deutschland (1889–1963). Christoph Moß. Cologne: Böhlau, 2003. 310 pp. Euro29,90.

From the first parliamentary term to the 1960s, three members of the German Bundestag came from Jewish families. One of them was Jakob Altmaier. . . . Christoph Moß has now written a political biography, which closes a gap in the latest German-Jewish historiography . . . and dedicated it to this social-democratic politician.

Ludger Heid. Das Historisch-Politische Buch 52.5 (2004): 555–56.

Anderson, Paul Thomas. See Film Directors.

Robert Antelme

Robert Antelme: Humanity, Community, Testimony. Martin Crowley. Oxford: Legenda, 2003. 111 pp. £19.50; $29.50.

In 1947 Robert Antelme published L'Espêce humaine, a work ranked at the time alongside David Rousset's L'Univers concentrationnaire for its powerful account, both personal and philosophical, of the eleven months Antelme spent in Buchenwald, Gandersheim, and Dachau until rescued by François Mitterrand from among the dying in Dachau in 1945. Like so many other testimonies of the camps, it had a checkered publishing history to say the least. Antelme's extraordinary story found a new audience from 1985 when Marguerite Duras published La Douleur, which told of her ordeal as she waited to find out if he would return, renewing interest in L'Espéce humaine also. Martin Crowley's concern, in this thought-provoking study of the text and the readings to which it has given rise, is to elucidate the dynamics of...