ERA Reviews

Donald starts off his book as an iconoclast, intent on reversing the apotheosis of Lincoln. Lincoln was not, he asserts, the god among us that many ardent admirers believe. He gives examples of this uncritical adulation and states that Lincoln has been claimed by Mormons, vegetarians, and other disparate groups anxious to claim a popular figure as their own.

But, as it turns out, Donald's iconoclasm is a bit false. He reexamines Lincoln's more controversial points, and casts his verdict with the purveyors of the Lincoln legend. Did Lincoln imprison thousands of people without charges or trial? He did, but they deserved it. Did Lincoln destroy the Constitution by starting a war without the approval of Congress? Yes, but he had to abrogate the Constitution in order to save it.

Donald starts out bravely but in the end, cops out in favor of sentimental Lincolnism. I thought it a bit disappointing.

Lincoln Reconsidered is a collection of provactive essays that probe the multiple depths of Abraham Lincoln--life and mythology. He paints Lincoln's portrait onto the background of the sectional conflict that led to the Civil War. Originally published about 1961, Donald's stories remain fresh and relevant. In fact the reader will encounter the thesis and outline for his recent prize-winning biography of Lincoln. I first encoutered LR in 1962 when I taught Advanced Placement American History and assigned portions of the book to my students. They loved it; you will. Donald is a superlative historian and stylist. Listen to these chapter headings: Getting Right With Lincoln, Reconsideration of Abolitionists, Herndon and Mrs. Lincoln, Folklore Lincoln, An Excess of Democracy. Readers of Donald's Lincoln will want to have this as a companion reference piece. It's rare for an historian's essays to experience such a rich and extended publishing history. Here's a quote from my faded copy of LR, a touch of wisdom for our parlous times: "...Lincoln knew that there were limits rational human activity, and that there was no virtue in irritably seeking to perform the impossible. As President, he could only do his best to handle problems as they arose and have a patient trusdt that popular support for his solutions would be forthcoming. But the ultimate decision was beyond his, or any man's, control. 'Now at the end of three years struggle,' he said, 'the nation's condition is not what either party, or any man, devised, or expected. God alone can claim it.'" Page after page runs like this, and virtually every theme connected to the Civil War gets enough discussion to stimulate and edify.

Madness, Malingering and Malfeasance: Transformation of Psychiatry and the Law in the Civil War Era by R. Gregory Lande (Brassey's) describes the struggle of the medical and legal professions and the US. government to cope with insubordination, substance abuse, and crime in the Civil Warera military
During the American Civil War, as in all wars, soldiers were wounded not just physically but emotionally as well. Good men traumatized by the violence of war were sometimes driven to their mental limits, while criminals and troubled individuals who had joined the ranks of the citizen armies found themselves in a more rigid environment in which to commit their transgressions. In the Civil War military, justice was swift and harsh and forgiveness difficult to come by. Citing numerous period documents, Dr. Lande demonstrates that the scientific understanding of mental illness and substance abuse was in its infancy during the mid-nineteenth century. He chronicles cases in which soldiers' mental afflictions or problems with severe alcohol abuse contributed to their misconduct, soldiers such as Leroy Shear, a.k.a.. "Lorenzo Stewart," whose arrest after deserting from two different Union units resulted in an even more serious crime.
Once charged with disobeying orders or committing a crime, soldiers faced an uncertain fate. While the requirements of military law have always differed from those of civilian law, Civil War troops did not have access to legal counsel unless they could afford to hire a lawyer themselves. The sad result was that many mentally ill, incompetent, and poor men were imprisoned for long periods or even put to death. Though a more sophisticated understanding of mental illness and substance abuse developed after the war in the emerging field of forensic psychiatry, it would take many years for American society to reform the treatment of those deemed "criminally insane."
Madness, Malingering and Malfeasance shows that the effects of war unfolded in numerous compelling, tragic, and shocking events beyond the battlefield. It is an important contribution to the growing literature on the medical-legal aspects of the Civil War era.

A work of considerable and original Civil War research by R. Gregory Lande (Director of Professional Services of the William S. Hall Psychiatric Institute, Columbia, South Carolina), Madness, Malingering & Malfeasance: The Transformation Of Psychiatry And The Law In The Civil War Era is a sophisticated and original study of how the medical and legal professions and the American government struggled to contain military insubordination, substance abuse, and crime in the Civil War era. From the law's viewpoint of alcohol use; to life in Civil War era prison; to effective and unsuccessful strategies of treatment and control; as well as commentary on what today's medical and legal professionals can learn from them, Madness, Malingering & Malfeasance is a unique and very highly recommended addition Civil War Studies reading lists and reference collections.

The words "Manifest destiny" are associated, in the popular mind, with the whole conquering outburst that, in less than a century, managed to expand the area of white English-speaking settlement in what are now the United States of America from a group of thinly settled communities on the East Coast to a continent-wide nation numbering in the hundreds of millions. It associates this conquering outburst with the taint of nationalistic and bellicose arrogance, of chauvinism and brutality; and may therefore be said to taint even further the already inevitably bloody business of conquest and settlement.
At the height of American self-confidence and belief, at the beginning of the sixties, Frederick Merk set out to disprove this popular image; and showed, with a wealth of documentary evidence, that the actual jingoistic "Manifest Destiny" episode was nothing more than a short-lived craze, such as the US are seized with from time to time, peaking, but also falling apart, with the notorious 1848 war against Mexico. Merk observes that, while in the light of events the superiority of the USA over Mexico seems obvious, it was by no means so clear to contemporaries: the military establishment of Mexico was considerably larger than the peacetime US army, and the Mexicans would be fighting on their own soil. Yet the American army, thanks largely to a stiffening of the officer corps with civilians trained in the numerous American military academies and recalled to arms, proved the more efficient and effectively conquered Mexico. At that point, the vociferous "Manifest destiny" lobby, which had supported President Polk's cold and deliberate move towards war, was faced, not with the opportunity to spout about unifying (in some remote future visible only to rhetoricians and fools) a whole continent, but with the real choice: was an American Union of twenty million largely Protestant English speakers to absorb the indigestible morsel of a Mexico of eight million Spanish-speaking Catholics, spread over an enormous territory, naturally tumultuous, and separated from the main areas of Anglo settlement by prairies, mountains and deserts? Faced with this choice, the Manifest Destiny lobby fell silent; and that, argues Merk, was by and at large the end of it. He can trace no direct influence of any sort from the copious pamphleteering of the early forties on later American debate and politics; the Manifest Destiny craze, as crazes do, had died out.
The objection to this picture is fairly obvious. There is one absolutely silent partner at Merk's party - one of which, indeed, he never makes mention, who does not even appear in the Index: the Indians. At all times, before, during, and after the Manifest Destiny craze, the Western frontier was rolling inexorably forwards, plowing under its farmsteads and its cattle all the earlier inhabitants of the land. Does this not fall under the tag of brutality and arrogance of Manifest Destiny? Well, no. Manifest Destiny, as such, was a movement aimed more at the Western element in North America - not only the successor states of the old Spanish empire, but also Britain's remaining colonies in Canada and the Caribbean - than at any Indian. The destruction of the Indian tribes was the background to it, rather than its core: its argument was that BECAUSE the inexorable Anglo wave was rolling over every Indian tribe in North America, THEREFORE it was its "destiny" to sweep over Mexico and Canada as well. As for the destruction of the Indians, it was not the product of any craze - even of any intellectual or political theory at all - but of desperately objective conditions. Most Indian tribes did not farm, living typical hunter-gatherer tribes; therefore, to the citizens of a Republic of farmers - industrialization was only beginning in America at the time - their land appeared empty. (It is significant that the Indian tribe that has most successfully survived American conquest, the Navajo, is a farming one, famous for their orchards.) To a farmer, to bring a tract of grassland under the plough is the natural business of life; it does not impinge on his consciousness, let alone on his conscience, that there is someone else who claims the land, making what he regards as an idle and wasteful use of it. Given the contact between any population of farmers, American or not, and a population of hunter-gatherers settled on potential farming land, the result is inevitable; and while it may SHAPE a mentality of conquest, it does not ARISE from one.
Merk insists that Manifest Destiny is no fundamental component of the American mentality; that the really fundamental component of American attitudes to world politics can be summed up in the word "Mission". To some extent this may be seen as too optimistic, not so much in the matter of Manifest Destiny as in the more general one of crazes - McCarthyism will be the one that springs to everyone's mind, though in actual fact Senator McCarthy was a kitten compared to the really cruel and savage "Red scare" of 1919. Crazes and witch-hunts are frequent and apparently inevitable features of the American mind. But having said all that, I still find Merk's argument, within certain limits, quite convincing; for crazes come and go, but the American itch for Mission seems permanent.

I love this book. I first read it as an undergraduate who thought history was boring. This book and my diplomatic history professor completely changed my mind about history almost 20 years ago. The book is very readable and the focus, which tries to look at whether average americans really believed in Manifest Destiny before, during, and after the Mexican-American War, gives the book a social history flavor that one certainly did not see in Diplomatic History back in the early 80's when I first read this book. I highly recommend the book!

Weisenburger, with a meticulous eye and a careful hand, vividly retells the story of Margaret Garner, whose case (or rather, one account of whose case) was the seed from which Toni Morrison grew the central stalk of her novel Beloved. It is not exactly facts that he gives us -- Weisenburger is too careful a critic, too aware of the complex nature of the historical record -- but around what facts can be found, he has written a novel of his own, one which richly complements Morrison's though-experiment with the historical legacy of slavery.

Garner's case, though little recalled today, was far better known in its day than many readers of Morrison's novel may realize. The best-known lawyers and abolitionists of the day argued Garner's case, and newspapers across the country reported the story. The most fascinating aspect of the story is the account of the competing legal and rhetorical strategies used to try to free Garner -- or, if she could not be freed, to give her the greatest possible symbolic value for the cause.

Garner's act -- killing one of her children rather than allowing het to be returned to slavery -- placed her between two contrary legal systems. Within the slavery system, and the Federally- administered Fugitive Slave Act, Garner was a piece of property to be returned. Yet within Ohio law, as a person accused of murder, she was subject to persecution for her crime as a human being. Her lawyer, paradoxically, had to persuade a judge to issue a writ for her arrest for murder, in order to prevent her from being returned to Kentucky as a slave -- it was in fact her one hope.

Weisenburger details how, in the end, this defense too failed, partly due to the complicity of certain Ohio officials with the Kentucky counterparts, and partly due to the inaction of then-governor of Ohio Salmon Chase. The actual tale of Margaret Garner, strangely enough, is even more tragic than that of Morrison's Sethe. Margaret was shipped off to cotton-belt slavery with relatives of her Kentucky owner, losing a second child to a streamboat accident en route, and evenrually died a horrible death from typhoid fever.

I'd recommend this book to anyone engaged by Morrison's novel, or by the recent film -- not as 'the fact behind the fiction,' but instead as a vital counterpoint, an *other* story of Margaret Garner, a woman who stood at the razor's edge of on of American history's most brutal junctures.

Very well done indeed. I am impressed that an English professor could turn in such good work as an historian and cover the courtroom battles with the skill of an experienced lawyer. A well told story of an obscure, but very revealing, chapter in the period just before the Civil War.

Minor criticisms: Too much is devoted to courtroom battles at the expense of describing daily slave life. As the author is a professor at a late 29th Century American university, he feels it necessary from time to time to wave his little red PC book in the air and shout slogans: Slavery was evil! Racism is not nice! Well, duh. None of this adds to the book and all of it detracts from the book.

Still, this is a good read. Buy it; you won't be disappointed. (By the way, I have never read Toni Morrison's "Beloved"; one doesn't need to in order to enjoy this book.)

I borrowed this book from a friend a few weeks ago. For those just beginning an interest in Ohio's canals, this is a grand book you'll find difficult to put down. If you are already versed in the Ohio canals' history, this is a very good book to have for a reference. The introductory chapter on the history of photography was, in itself, an education. Why? Because it examined that technology as it progressed through time. And since the book is made up of hundreds of canal photos through time, it is important to put the status of photographers into the overall understanding (and appreciation) of this era.

Highly recommended for those interested in the history of canals, particularly in Ohio. Book is organized very nicely and contains unusual photographs. Those living in canal areas will like to compare scenes of then with now. This book gets its point across that at one time (early 19th century) canals were the best thing going for shipping goods and for transportation.

This edition has "some" of Erasmus' most influential works; namely, "The Praise of Folly", the political "Complaint for Peace", "Forewords to the Latin New Testament", "Julius Excluded from Heaven", the "Colloquis", and excerpts from his finest letters. These works are selected more to understand the humanistic side of Erasmus rather than the scholarly doctrinaire who labored for the peace of christendom. With these selections - entailed by fotenotes, the editor's prefaces, and critcical commentaries - this edition will invariably enhance a more intimate impression of the mind of Erasmus at the dawn of the reformation.

I managed to stumble across Erasmus while reading William Manchester's "A World Lit Only By Fire", and was beyond intrigued by such a character as described that I had never even heard about. Of course, Erasmus had been mentioned in my presence often, but never in a direct context. So I pick up this book, hoping to find out what the deal was and what I was missing.

My entire view of the middle ages changed practically overnight. Do not miss the fact, people: Erasmus was THE deal. Erasmus makes Luther look like a limp little hothead. Erasmus is Jim Carrey to Voltaire's Carrot Top. Erasmus drows the candle of Aristophanes with a roaring torch. The ultimate critic, the ultimate wit, and the ultimate reason in an age of insanity. Without this fantastic book I may have passed a second 18 years without Erasmus as an inspiration. The pure genius and subtlety of truly the most underappreciated scholar of all time is laid out glowingly. Why did I waste my time with "Mandrake" and "Candide" when "In Praise of Folly" does the same job a thousand times better? Why on earth do we pay attention to Martin Luther, the most incompetant and ridiculous "reformer" of all time, when Erasmus was doing everything twice as good at exactly the same time?

Get this book, people. Understand Erasmus and understand a wisdom that defied an age of stupidity.

Mitchell's book might be thought of as two books. It is mainly about the meaning of photography at a time when pictures can be so easily manipulated and changed. It's really a philosophical discussion of truth and ethics. However, the middle section of the book is more about the technical aspects of 2D and 3D graphics, with explanations of the fundamental concepts that underlie digital images and compositing techniques, as well as computer modeled and rendered scenes.

And fortunately, both sections are great. THE RECONFIGURED EYE is valuable both as a reconsideration of photographic truth in a the context of new technologies, and as a book to help photographers, graphic designers, architects, and anyone working with photographs to understand how the basic functions of 2D and 3D software work and why. Though I wish there were even more photos of some of the paintings and photographs he refers to, there are many great pictures of paintings, photos, and rendered scenes to illustrate what he describes in the text. This is definitely one of the more thoughtful books on digital images and there's a lot of good stuff here to think about.

I can't believe that no one has written a review here of this essential book! Anyone creating, curating, writing about, or simply trying to appreciate computer-based art work should own this text. Mitchell weaves together theory, history, and technique to explain the fundamentals of this new field. His scholarship and knowledge of the area are unbeatable.

This book collects the hot issues on the very recent deep submicron (less than 0.18um) semiconductor process technology, such as EUV lithography, high and low k materials, CMP, and 300mm wafer. It seems to provide a good guideline to anyone who wonders what it is going on in the semiconductor process industry.

This well written reference book is highly recommended to anyone interested in the technology used to manufacture deep-submicron MOSFETs, i.e., MOSFETs requiring lithography in the 1/4 to 1/8-micron range. The first chapter nicely identifies several practical problems that appeared during the evolution of the MOSFET to ULSI, and the remainder of the book discusses processing solutions to those problems.

Major processing topics include thin gate oxides, self-aligned silicides, high- and low-k dielectrics, double and triple level metal interconnects, dual damascene copper interconnects, copper seed and electroplating technology, deep uv photoresists and tools, chemical-mechanical planarization, and processing issues unique to 300-mm wafers. State of the art CMOS topics including super-steep retrograde channel doping, punchthrough-control implants, source/drain engineering, shallow trench isolation, and more are used to illustrate the integration of deep-submicron processes into manufacturing. Increasing use of Si-Ge heterojunction bipolar transistors and silicon-on-insulator is anticipated and discussed.

This up-to-date book is one of a kind. It is simply required reading for those in the business.

Certainly, any rational thinking American is completely flabbergasted by the atrocities Stalin commited in the very long twenty-four years he reigned in the Soviet Union. And naturally any thinking person would want to know why a person would commit these atrocities.

Ulam's excellent biography puts into perspective how a seemingly under-educated person such as Stalin could fill the void left by a giant of a person like Lenin. The part of the book that is most insightful is the chapters describing the power stuggle that took place "after" V.I. Lenin's death. You really start to understand how a gifted author and orator such as Leon Trotsky lost the battle for Lenin's mantle to Stalin. A person can even begin to sypathize for Stalin, but then the author describes what happened after Stalin became the maximum leader of the USSR in 1929. Of course everyone knows what happened after 1929, collectivization, purges, show trials of Bukharin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev, and the assasination of Leon Trotsky. Ulam's book is quite lengthy, but it is well worth the read, I would recommend this book to anyone.

This is quite simply a masterful book. Ulam gives the impression of having read, pondered, and put in context everything ever written in any language by and about Stalin, the other Bolsheviks, and their close contemporaries in the USSR and Europe. And yet he is anything but tedious. He is as fine a writer as any historian around -- lucid, incisive, authoritative, serious and yet with a very witty, very dry irony. His tone is ideally suited for writing about historical figures, especially such grotesque ones as Stalin and his cohorts.

It is an amazingly organized and coherent book about an amazingly explosive time and place. And therefore a precious resorce - where probably was x when y was organizing in Nebraska. And is full of useful reminders of what the world beyond New York was really like through the experiences her subjects brought back with them from trips outside. But it fail to convey to me the hope or the horror of the times. Though the author herself felt them as evidenced by the title. Maybe she simply has to cover to much given a broad audience. There is enough in every page, sometimes every paragraph for a life and times books and a novel on the size of Dickens or Balzac not to mention having to give constant background on the Haymarket riots and presidental elections and on and on .

I admire her for being able to handle all this. But I was looking , because of the title , for something else. If you know about say labor history or some of her subjects then you can imagine, or just have your mind boggled by their conjuntion in one place and time. But I don`t think the book alone succeeds in conveying it. If you want to feel about the period as the author obviously does feel, then you should read her along with books about say Mother Jones and Mable Dodge and a book of Sloan paintings. And then perhaps the authors purpose will be fullfilled.It is a time worth thinking about.

To Be Young Was Very Heaven is both a beautiful and an apt title for this entertaining and inspiring book by Sandra Adickes. It tells the story of a number of left leaning, idealistic, young, and adventurous women who emerged in New York around the turn of the century and grew in prominence and significance larger than than this one town in this one time. Among the more famous women are Margaret Sanger, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Dorothy Day, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (a personal favourite). This book is not a dry, academic look at the reasons behind the rise of some women at this time, nor is it an examination of the lives of the women in general in New York at this time. This book, instead, explodes with the joy of being in the right place and the right time and having the courage and idealism to believe you can change things. Ms. Adickes takes the reader to the beating heart of New York when it truly had one and brings this time alive and shows us some true heroes in their prime. A pleasure to read.