Category: items new in print

My review of Fintan O’Toole’s White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America is in the New York Times Book Review of Sunday, 16 October 2005.

Peter reviews the Complete New Yorker on DVD in the 27 September 2005 issue of Newsday. (Should have posted this a week ago, but I just finally figured out how to make the Wi-Fi in the hotel room work.)

In the New York Times Book Review of 5 September 2005, I have brief reviews of five books: Philip Dray’s Stealing God’s Thunder: Benjamin Franklin’s Lightning Rod and the Invention of America, Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels’s Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All into Patients, John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger’s In Search of the Promised Land: A Slave Family in the Old South, Bryan Murphy’s The Root of Wild Madder: Chasing the History, Mystery, and Lore of the Persian Carpet, and Jesse Helms’s Here’s Where I Stand: A Memoir.

My review of William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life by Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson is in the 15 August 2005 issue ofThe New Republic. (I think you have to be a subscriber to read it online.)

“The terrorists not only murdered but also mutilated their victims. They brained infants and burned men alive in front of their wives. In response, some on our side also began to kill and soon convinced the government to declare war. Anyone killing a terrorist would receive a bounty from the state. Only a small subset of our community remained calm enough to wonder why the terrorists were angry. To the consternation of their compatriots, this subset arranged a conference, where the terrorists explained why they had turned to violence: twenty years earlier, at the behest of a family whose role in our government was all but dynastic, we had taken their land by fraud. . . .”

My review-essay about Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic by Peter Kafer is in the summer 2005 issue of Common-Place.