America
News from the the Editor's Desk in the September issue of Australian Book Review.
... (read more)Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America by Michael A. McDonnell
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
Rendezvous with Destiny: How Franklin D. Roosevelt and Five Extraordinary Men took America into the War and into the World by Michael Fullilove
The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick
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.
... (read more)The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power by Robert A. Caro
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.
... (read more)