Reviewed Elsewhere
- Reviewed Elsewhere
Contributing reviewers Lucia Aranda, Alana Bell, Janet Butler, Michael Fassiotto, Lars Fischer, Noel Kent, Barbara Bennett Peterson, and Forrest R. Pitts provided the excerpts for this issue.
Publications reviewed include American Catholic Studies, American Scientist, Australian Book Review, Australian Journal of Politics & History, British Journalism Review, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Business History, Canadian Historical Review, Catholic Historical Review, Classical Review, Common Knowledge, Comparative Drama, Eighteenth-Century Music, Eighteenth-Century Studies, English Historical Review, English Literature in Transition, European Legacy, French History, French Studies, (Toronto) Globe and Mail, The Hawaiian Journal of History, The Historian, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Black Studies, Journal of Cold War Studies, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Journal of Japanese Studies, Journal of Latin American Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Journal of Religious History, Journal of World History, Legacy, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review (NYTBR), Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Notes, Oral History Review, Pacific Historical Review, El Paîs, Parergon, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Race & Class, Science, Scottish Journal of Theology, Slavonic and East European Review, Social and Legal Studies, Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Tempo, Theatre Research International, Times Literary Supplement (TLS), Twentieth-Century British History, University of Toronto Law Journal, Victorian Studies, War in History, and Women’s Writing.
When Marina Abramović Dies: A Biography. James Westcott. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2010. xiii + 328 pp. $27.95. Roberta Mock.Theatre Research International 36.3 (2011): 296–97.
“Biographies authorized by their subjects tend to be greeted with suspicion, but to mistrust either the veracity or the completeness of Westcott’s narrative would largely be to miss one of its central tenets; that is, that Marina Abramović is an artist who is still very much alive. . . . The story he tells is of a woman who has always carefully constructed, documented and refined her life/career for public consumption. . . . [A] weakness in this meticulously [End Page 850] researched book . . . is that occasionally interpretations and opinions are not attributed and are presented as ‘fact’. . . . Westcott has almost certainly produced what will be considered Abramović’s definitive biography, at least of her first sixty-five years.”
Atatürk: An Intellectual Life. M. Sükrü Hanioglu. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011. 280 pp. $27.95. The New Yorker, Aug. 8, 2011: 73.
“In this fresh and concise intellectual biography, Hanioglu warns against that perspective [Atatürk as the embodiment of the great-man theory of history], deftly outlining the regionally voguish movements that Atatürk built on for his utopian project, such as scientism, materialism, and nationalism (as well as those he only pretended to embrace, and only when they suited his ends, such as Islamism and Communism).”
Aethelstan: The First King of England. Sarah Foot. New Haven: Yale UP, 2011. 320 pp. $40.00. Hywel Williams. TLS, Sept. 30, 2011: 21.
“This study’s account of Aethelstan the churchman lays to rest the idea that here was a king who was longer on rhetoric than on achievement, and the discriminating quality of his ecclesiastical appointments—along with munificent gifts to religious foundations—revitalized the English Church. . . . In the pages of this remarkable biography—a work suffused with a rare empathy—Aethelstan emerges as a character of flesh and blood.”
Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography. Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008. 248 pp. $29.95. Janell Hobson. Journal of World History 22.2 (2011): 403–405. [End Page 851]
“[This] provocative and revealing biography . . . joins a growing corpus of . . . scholarship on this nineteenth-century icon. . . . What Crais and Scully bring to the already full table is an in-depth historical perspective few have accessed. . . . [O]ne cannot help but feel the authors are also engaged in some sort of apologia, wrapped up in the discourse of agency. . . . [T]he most troublesome aspect of Crais and Scully’s narrative is how racial ‘role reversals’ are employed here to neutralize contemporary claims of the racial injustice done to Baartman. . . . Nonetheless . . . by the end of the book, Baartman emerges as more than...
