In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Reviewed Elsewhere

Contributing reviewers Nell Altizer, Patricia Angley, Alana Bell, Judith Lütge Coullie, Lars Fischer, Marie-Christine Garneau, Barbara Bennett Peterson, and Forrest R. Pitts provided the excerpts for this issue.

Publications reviewed include American Catholic Studies, American Jewish History, American Scientist, The Americas, Australian Journal of Politics & History, American Music, Business Day, Canadian Historical Review, City Press, Comitatus, Diogenes, English Historical Review, European History Quarterly, Forum for Modern Language Studies, French History, German History, (Toronto) Globe and Mail, Goethe Yearbook, Histoire sociale/Social History, The Historian, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Holocaust Genocide Studies, Independent Online, Journal of American Folklore, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Journal of Religious History, Journal of Sport History, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Journal of World History, Labor History, Legalbrief Today, literaturkritik.de, LitNet, Mail and Guardian, The New Yorker, New York Review of Books (NYRB), New York Times Book Review (NYTBR), Nine, Notes and Queries, Oral History Review, Pacific Historical Review, Parergon, Political Quarterly, Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Reviews in Religion & Theology, Russian Review, Science, Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, Socialism and Democracy, Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Speculum, Studi Francesi, Twentieth Century British History, The Witness, Women: A Cultural Review, Women’s Review of Books, and Women’s Studies.

Abbott, Steve
Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father. Alysia Abbott. New York: Norton, 2013. 326 pp. $27.50.

“Abbott is best-known now for coining the phrase ‘New Narrative,’ a loosely defined appellation for a tight-knit generation of mostly queer writers . . . who strove to create a uniquely self-aware, deeply personal literature rich with sex, political consciousness, gossip and unabashed autobiography. . . . Fairyland, however, is a much more conventional autobiography, much less about Steve the writer than Steve the loving but reluctant single dad. And much less about Steve the single dad than Alysia, the young, motherless daughter he alternately fawned over and neglected. . . . This is, to say the least, an unusually [End Page 588] complicated and painful childhood and an even more unusual father-daughter love story. As a book, however, it’s inconsistent, even surprisingly mundane.” Jason McBride. Globe and Mail, July 13, 2013: R13.

Adam, James and Robert
Robert and James Adam, Architects of the Enlightenment. Ariyuki Kondo. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012. 209 pp. £60.

“Kondo’s book . . . sets out to reinterpret the Adam brothers’ work in the light of their architectural theory. Theory, though fascinating to many architects and to growing numbers of architectural historians, is always difficult to apply to buildings. . . . Kondo’s book, which started life as a doctoral thesis, performs a useful service in explaining the intellectual and cultural context in which the Adam brothers moved, but it adds little of real significance to our understanding of their varied and fascinating œuvre. For this it is still necessary to refer to other writers and, above all, to the buildings themselves.” Geoffrey Tyack. English Historical Review 128.534 (2013): 1254 –56.

Aehrenthal, Alois Lexa von
In the Twilight of Empire: Count Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal (1854–1912), Imperial Habsburg Patriot and Statesman. Vol. 1: The Making of an Imperial Habs burg Statesman. Solomon Wank. Vienna: Böhlau, 2009. 292 pp. €39.

“Aehrenthal is long overdue a biographical treatment. Solomon Wank, who has already co-edited an extensive volume of Aehrenthal’s correspondence, offers here the first volume of a biographical study, which is nothing if not a tribute to scholarly endurance. The author details in the preface how research for the project began in 1958. . . . Over the years, Wank has continually returned to Aehrenthal’s life and times, and this impressive, scholarly work is testimony to the careful perusal of much archival material and secondary literature.” Laurence Cole. European History Quarterly 43.3 (2013): 595–97.

Æthelstan
Æthelstan: The First King of England. Sarah Foot. New Haven: Yale UP, 2011. xix + 283 pp. $40.00.

“Rather than claiming it to be a biography, Foot terms her work a ‘biographical treatment,’ and this, surely, is the right way to approach this subject. A biography as such is almost impossible for Æthelstan, but it is possible to produce more than simply a ‘life and times’ type of book. . . . Foot handles the sources with considerable...

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