Penn Press Log

Dolan's Book Makes for a Heavy Wedding Favor

Chronicle of Higher Education reviewer Carlin Romano sees many contemporary applications for the lessons found in Frances E. Dolan's Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy.

"Oh, how the quality of debate on same-sex marriage would improve if activists on the subject, candidates, and officials sate down to read it! Maybe it can be tossed out, like a bouquet, anywhere such players meet," Romano writes.

The complete review, which appears in the the August 1, 2008 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education is available online to subscribers at www.chronicle.com.

Change Isn't Coming

In a recent article for The National Interest online, Nikolas K. Gvosdev cites Thomas M. Nichols in his argument that foreign policy change in the form of a return to the pre George W. Bush international order will be "highly unlikely."

"Thomas M. Nichols’ Eve of Destruction: The Coming Age of Preventive War (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) takes a hard look at an increasingly dysfunctional international system and notes that the 'cat'—the concept of preventive war—is now out of the bag," wrote Gvosdev in his review of three new books on international relations and U.S. foreign policy.

The TLS on Minnis's Chaucer Study

"In pages rich with explication of scholastic, literary and historical material, [Alistair] Minnis recovers a medieval notion of authorial fallibility," wrote Seth Lerer in his The Times Literary Supplement review of Fallible Authors: Chaucer's Pardoner and Wife of Bath. "In its attentions to debates on Lollardy, its learned engagement with theological detail, its sensitivity to nuances in scholastic definition, Fallible Authors tells the student and the teacher that we'd better get our Latin into shape, learn more about Archbishop Arundel, and brush up on our Bonaventure."

The TLS Online subscribers can read the complete review at the TLS Subscriber Archives.

Chambers's Book is Choice Editors's Pick

Choice Reviews Online includes Madison Avenue and the Color Line: African Americans in the Advertising Industry by Jason Chambers among its Editors's Picks for July, calling the book  "a cogent analysis of an important aspect of race relations in the U. S."

"Deans and Truants Contributes Enormously"

"Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature is a richly textured study of theoretical conceptions of the African American canon as well as primary and secondary sources." says Joseph Helminski in the latest issue of American Literature.

"Given how much [Gene Andrew] Jarrett’s book investigates, and how much it clarifies without sacrificing complexity, it is difficult to fathom how Jarrett has done this work in roughly two hundred pages. Deans and Truants contributes enormously to our understanding of how notions of race, canonicity, politics, and genre intersect."

Click here to download a pdf of the review from the American Literature website.

Blum Repeats Du Bois Prayer

In a timely post to the Religion in American History blog, W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet author Edward J. Blum quotes the 20th century African American activist in a prayer for unity.

“It is never too late to mend. Nothing is so bad that good may not be put into it and make it better and save it from utter loss. Strengthen in us this knowledge and faith and hope, O God, in these last days. Amen.”

W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet is making history in its own right by being the first scholarly book to receive praise from both RapPagesMagazine.com and Sojourners within the same month.

LRB Reviews Deirdre David's Fanny Kemble

". . .few subjects can have had more incarnations than Kemble," writes Ruth Bernard Yeazell in the latest issue of London Review of Books. "and Deirdre David's new biography is particularly alert to this long exercise in self-fashioning, while she divides her attention more evenly over the full range of Kemble's achievements than her recent predecessors."

The complete review of Fanny Kemble: A Performed Life by Deirdre David is available to London Review of Books subscribers at www.lrb.co.uk.

History Wire on Visions of Progress

Steve Goddard selected Doug Rossinow's Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America for today's History Wire Book Alert, calling the history "an effective way to introduce today's progressives to their historical predecessors and suggests the pitfalls of losing sight of the forest for the trees."

H-Urban Review of Nightclub City

". . .[Nightclub City: Politics and Amusement in Manhattan] is an important addition to the literature on New York and the social world of leisure and entertainment that emerged between the wars," writes David S. Churchill in a recent H-Urban H-Net review of Burton W. Peretti's history of New York City night life and politics.

Read the entire review at www.h-net.org.

Almost a Dynasty Rekindles Fond Memories

A review of Almost a Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the 1980 Phillies, by William C. Kashatus, appeared in the March 30 edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer. In this review, retired sports journalist Bill Lyon writes:

. . .[Kashatus] has knitted together a meticulously detailed, exhaustively researched, thoroughly dissected offering that contains no fewer than four appendices, a selected bibliography, an index, an introduction, a list of acknowledgments, and a veritable novella's worth of notes. It is difficult to believe that anything has been left out. . . .

If you grew up with the Phillies of his generation, this book will resonate and rekindle fond memories. If you are learning of it for the first time, well, there was a time, believe it or not, when the Phillies rose above their rag-tag history, when the teams of the most futile franchise in all of sport were perennial contenders.