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America

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News from the Editor's Desk - September 2016

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September 2016, no. 384

News from the the Editor's Desk in the September issue of Australian Book Review.

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Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America by Michael A. McDonnell

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May 2016, no. 381
Glenn Moore reviews 'Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the making of America' by Michael A. McDonnell

Michael McDonnell knew he had a bestseller on his hands. Historical biographies regularly top the New York Times bestseller list, and his research uncovered a larger than life figure named Charles de Langlade. Born in 1729 to an Indian mother and a French-Canadian father, Langlade grew up straddling two cultures, but that did not stop him from becoming a le ...

'Letter from New Orleans' by Kevin Rabalais

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January-February 2016, no. 378

The streets of New Orleans double as scented gardens for the blind. Round any corner in the Vieux Carré – known to most as the French Quarter – and experience the assault of sensory details. It might start with a spicy tang of boiling seafood, crawfish, or shrimp or crabs plucked from the amphibious Louisiana land. Maybe it's frying beignets or praline mixture ...

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the making of American capitalism by Edward E. Baptist

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December 2015, no. 377
Glenn Moore reviews 'The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the making of American Capitalism' by Edward E. Baptist

There is something pleasurable about a good American history book. I recall reading David Hackett Fischer's Paul Revere's Ride (1994) on a train journey from Boston to Washington. I read it not because I was teaching about Paul Revere, but because it was a fine work, true to a tradition in which, as Fischer put it, books 'are a sequence of stories, with hig ...

Deep South: Four Seasons on back roads by Paul Theroux

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December 2015, no. 377
Kevin Rabalais reviews 'Deep South' by Paul Theroux

The traveller, as V.S. Naipaul describes that role in A Turn in the South (1989), 'is a man defining himself against a foreign background'. Over the past forty years, Paul Theroux has built his career writing books, nearly fifty novels and travelogues, to become an exemplar of that definition. He seeks always to go farther and deeper, often journeying, to b ...

Rendezvous with Destiny: How Franklin D. Roosevelt and Five Extraordinary Men took America into the War and into the World by Michael Fullilove

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October 2013, no. 355
Dennis Altman reviews 'Rendezvous with Destiny: How Franklin D. Roosevelt and Five Extraordinary Men took America into the War and into the World' by Michael Fullilove

Michael Fullilove, head of the Lowy Institute, has written about President Roosevelt and the men who helped him to guide the US so reluctantly into World War II. Dennis Altman reviews this model of academic research.

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The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick

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April 2013, no. 350
Alison Broinowski reviews 'The Untold History of the United States' by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick

It is ten years since the invasion of Iraq by the United States and the few countries willing to join it. Happening to be in Washington in February, and recalling worldwide protests in 2003, I was struck by what seems to be American amnesia about the war and its consequences. At least in Australia groups are exploring ways to prevent such catastrophic expeditions in the future. Even as Afghanistan follows Iraq towards a similar conclusion, the US government’s war mentality is kept alive by contestation with China, eyeballing of North Korea, countdown over Iran, nervousness about Syria, demands for more military spending, and war hunger in sections of the media. Americans’ nerves are further strained by domestic threats like cyber-infiltration, extreme weather, and mass killings, against which conventional defences seem powerless. Past wars don’t end all wars.

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Signs and portents

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February 2013, no. 348

November in America signals a time to gather in, take stock and breathe a little. The elections are done by the end of the first week. Thanksgiving beckons, the high holidays begin, media fever subsides – a little – and morphs into retrospective political analysis and projected anxiety about the future, especially, since 2008, the economic future.

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The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power by Robert A. Caro

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November 2012, no. 346
Peter Heerey reviews 'The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The passage of power' by Robert A. Caro

In Australia today, Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–73) seems a fleeting figure on history’s stage: a brief interlude between Kennedy’s Camelot and Nixon’s Watergate – ‘All the way with LBJ!’ – the retreat from quagmire Vietnam – and that’s about it. So how does one justify buying and reading Robert A. Caro’s seven hundred-page book (dubbed ‘bloated’ by one critic), the fourth in a five-volume biography?

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Fear and loathing in American politics

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February 2012, no. 338
'Fear and loathing in American politics' by Morag Fraser

The Princeton Post Office, as befits this famed university town, has a certain grandeur. It is small – Princeton is a village after all – and modest in its proportions, but grand in aspiration. As you step through its panelled doors your gaze is drawn by the long parade of milk-glass and bronze lights towards the mural that adorns the far wall. Like the White House murals, it is lofty, but almost domestic in its depictions of American history, American hope, American mythology.

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