Three very different Penn Press books were named "essential" in the June 2010 issue of Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries--Marisa Chappell's The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America, Lloyd Pratt's Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, and The Bohemians, a novel by Anne Gedeon Lafitte, Marquis de Pelleport.
Choice described The War on Welfare as a "must read for anyone interested in the Great Society and conservative attempts to dismantle it." Choice said of Archives of American Time, "This lively interdisciplinary study is entertaining as well as informative." Choice reviewer C. B. Kerr thanked Robert Darnton for rediscovering Pelleport's The Bohemians. "Witty and outrageous, the novel was lost as soon as it was published. Today, beautifully translated into English by [Vivian] Folkenflik, it seems remarkably modern. The novel richly deserves the audience it never had," wrote Kerr.
Choice Reviews Online subscribers can access the full reviews at the American Library Association's Choice web site.



Based on exclusive interviews with the top surviving Khmer Rouge leader, Nuon Chea, this book tells the story of a man who began as an idealistic freedom fighter and wound up involved in one of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century, Cambodia's Killing Fields.
Jean-Claude Schmitt examines a unique and controversial conversion narrative to explore its meaning within the society and culture of its period as well as what it has to tell us about the way historians think and write.
Examining fashion accessories in both novels and fashion discourses, Susan Hiner reframes the feminine accessory as a signifier of modernity and makes an important claim about the "accessory" status of women in nineteenth-century France: as both commodities and consumers, women were in fact "accessories to modernity."
