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David Seed, Brainwashing: The Fictions of Mind

Control: A Study of Novels and Films Since World
War II (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press,
2004, \$54.95). Pp. 325. ISBN 0 87338 813 5.
Kathleen Taylor, Brainwashing: The Science of
Thought Control (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004, £18.99). Pp. 324. ISBN 0 192 80496 0.
PETER KNIGHT
Journal of American Studies / Volume 40 / Issue 02 / August 2006, pp 449 - 450

DOI: 10.1017/S0021875806601801, Published online: 27 July 2006
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0021875806601801
How to cite this article:

PETER KNIGHT (2006). Journal of American Studies, 40, pp 449-450 doi:10.1017/
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Journal of American Studies, 40 (2006), 2, 413–461 f 2006 Cambridge University Press
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Reviews
Journal of American Studies, 40 (2006), 2. doi :10.1017/S0021875806211800

Sean P. Adams, Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth : Coal, Politics, and Economy
in Antebellum America (Baltimore and London : John Hopkins University Press,
2004, £32.00). Pp. 319. ISBN 0 8018 7968 X.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, Virginia seemed set to dominate America’s
nascent coal industry. During the antebellum era, however, it was Pennsylvania
that emerged as the nation’s leading coal-mining state. Although Virginia and
Pennsylvania were endowed with similar natural resources, by 1860 Pennsylvania
mined 78 percent of America’s coal and Virginia less than 2.5 percent. Moreover,
on the back of its coal industry, Pennsylvania had developed a flourishing urban
industrial economy, while Virginia remained an overwhelmingly agricultural state.
In Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth, Sean Adams explains the divergent fates
of the Virginia and Pennsylvania coal industries in terms of political economy.
Focussing on the ways that political institutions actively shaped economic devel-
opment, Adams departs from previous scholarship that has argued that the econ-
omic impact of slavery and technological change were the main reasons for the
contrasting fortunes of the coal industry in the North and South. Whilst recognizing
that Virginia colliers profitably employed both slaves and free labourers, Adams
concludes that the growth of Virginia coal was inhibited by the political decisions of
eastern slaveholders who dominated the state government and feared that coal, as
well as other forms of industry and manufacturing, would compromise the value
and security of their land and enslaved property. By contrast, it was difficult under
Pennsylvania’s Constitution for any interest group to dominate the state legislature,
which consequently proved more supportive of the coal industry than its Virginia
counterpart.
As Adams meticulously documents, the impact of Virginia and Pennsylvania’s
divergent political economies was evident in diverse aspect of the coal industry’s
development, including state promotional policies, internal improvements, geo-
logical surveys and corporate charters. Moreover, Adams shows how distinctive
state policies continued to shape the coal industry through the late nineteenth cen-
tury when West Virginia developed a third path of industrial development. In
making his case for the persistence of state political influence during Reconstruction
and beyond, Adams challenges the view that the Civil War marked a watershed
in American economic development after which the importance of state policies
declined.
Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth is an engaging and persuasive work that
addresses in a highly accessible manner the intricacies of state-level politics and
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414 Reviews
economic decision-making. Furthermore, although slaves and free workers are at
times surprisingly passive participants in Adams’s analysis, his work has presented
a challenge to social historians to integrate insights into political economy into
their understanding of slavery, the American working class and early industrial
development at the local level.
University of Portsmouth JAMES CAMPBELL

Ronald D. Asmus, Opening NATO’s Door : How the Alliance Remade Itself for a New
Era (a Council for Foreign Relations book, New York : Columbia University
Press, 2004, £42.00 cloth, £12.50 paper). Pp. xxxii+372, 16 photos. ISBN
0 231 12776 6 cloth, 0 231 12777 4 paper.
On his first day as a member of the Clinton administration in 1997 (a deputy in

the State Department’s European Bureau) Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
gave Ronald Asmus his job description : ‘‘I am looking to you to help us enlarge
NATO, work out this deal with the Russians, and come up with a strategy for the
Baltic states ’’ (xxxi). The book is the author’s engrossing account of his time spent
doing this. He manages to present a memoir with popular appeal and scholarly
rigour.
Two features present themselves very powerfully. First, President Clinton chose
to enlarge the organization ; it was not foisted upon him. Indeed, the issue ‘‘ was
undoubtedly one of the farthest things from Bill Clinton’s mind ’’ until direct
personal appeals – from Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa, notably – were made to
him (18). He could have avoided this issue – and denied himself this foreign policy
legacy – had he listened to sceptical academics and the New York Times, sources of
reaction derided here by Asmus (121–22). Clinton had space and time to choose
his issues.
Second, the author highlights the crucial context provided by the war in
Bosnia, conceived and presented here (in a manner consistent with other Clinton-era
officials and even many Bush era neoconservatives) as a genocidal war by Serbs
against Muslims. The alliance could hardly expand into eastern Europe when
southern Europeans were still killing each other. Enlargement, the book argues, was
conditional on peace in the Balkans. What credibility would the enlarged alliance
have if it could not force an end to Serb aggression? Of what value would a formal-
ized declaration of common, essentially American, defence be for the Czechs, Poles
and Hungarians if Bosnians could not be defended ? The entire credibility of the
enlargement strategy rested on getting to Dayton.
Because enlargement was hugely consequential for the author he assumes it
was likewise for international relations. The alliance expanded because the effect
of expansion would be negligible, its importance essentially symbolic. The new
members, whilst the jury is still out, have hardly transformed the nature and
operation of NATO, an institution which, despite the invocation of Article 5 in the
wake of 9/11, is still searching for a role and a monolith to confront.
Institute for the Study of the Americas T I M O T H Y J. L Y N C H

Reviews 415
Edward L. Ayers, In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart
of America ( New York and London : W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2004,
$15.95 paper). Pp. 471. ISBN 0 393 32601 2.
In the Presence of Mine Enemies presents the reader with the feelings and fears of
ordinary people faced with the catastrophe that was the Civil War. By concentrating
on just two counties in the Shenandoah Valley, one in the north, one in the south,
just prior to and during the war, Ayers has managed to encapsulate the reasons for
and reactions to the outbreak of hostilities. Letters, documents and newspapers of
the time and area provide new insights ; we hear the words of the people involved,
rich and poor, North and South.
Ayers paints a picture of two different societies living in reasonable harmony
prior to hostilities. Once the war began, grudging admiration was replaced by
a feeling that the opposition was nothing more than the ‘‘ Devil Incarnate, ’’ a
sentiment driven by arrogance and revenge ; any deviation was viewed as treason-
able. The change, confirmed by the many documents cited, was so swift as to take
the breath away. Many battles and skirmishes occurred in the area, or in close
proximity, and this helped to fuel the hatred each side felt for the other. Logistically,
the region was crucial to both sides during the Civil War, being the major agricultural
centre of the eastern United States with relatively small farms in the North and
larger plantations in the South.
The book is split into four parts that cover specific periods : the fall of 1859
to the fall of 1860, when secession was only a vague possibility ; the critical
period of winter 1860 to summer 1861, by which time secession was a fact and
war inevitable ; summer 1861 to summer 1862; and fall of 1862 to the early
summer of 1863, the ‘‘High Watermark of the Confederacy. ’’ Each part is
introduced by a line from the 23rd Psalm, which is very apt as both sides invoked
God’s blessings, and ends with an overview that helps put the local views into a
larger context.
While it is a pity that the book fails to offer a more analytical perspective on
some of the points raised, such as Lincoln’s decision to relieve McClellan of his
command, it does bring together a wealth of useful information, and provides an
extensive bibliography and index. This book is just part of the award-winning
‘‘ Valley of the Shadow ’’ project, which includes an extensive website and a CD-
ROM. A second, and concluding, book on the subject is anticipated. Taken as a
whole, these promise to provide scholars with an invaluable resource.
Manchester Metropolitan University ALAN LOWE
Journal of American Studies, 40 (2006), 2. doi :10.1017/S002187580624180X

Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History : Concept and Contours (Cambridge, Mass. :
Harvard University Press, 2005, $29.95). Pp. 160. ISBN 0 674 01688 2.
One of the most remarkable developments in Anglo-American scholarship in
the early modern era has been an explosion of interest in a new subject, Atlantic

416 Reviews
history. Indeed, the word ‘‘ Atlantic ’’ has become so ubiquitous in book titles, course
designs and job advertisements for specialists in early American history (early
modern European historians have been slower to jump on the Atlantic band-
wagon), that Atlantic history threatens to become a monster devouring all other
subjects. The problem with Atlantic history, of course, is its all-encompassing
nature : any work dealing with the history of the four continents involved in
European expansion in the early modern world can be conceivably called Atlantic
history. If, as David Armitage proclaims, with bold disdain for the perils of hubris,
‘‘ We are all Atlanticists now, ’’ then the subject threatens to dissolve into
incoherence.
A touch of definition is therefore necessary to give all of us labouring to expand
the reach of Atlantic history some idea of what we are actually doing. No one is
better placed to give that definition than Bernard Bailyn. He has used his un-
parallelled influence in the early American historical community to foster and
develop a generation of young scholars’ interest in Atlantic history. He has done
so partly through his monumental list of path-breaking publications dating back
over fifty years and partly through his patronage of the Atlantic History Seminar,
a Harvard-based seminar over which he presides that has been a key intellectual
destination for a new generation of early modern historians.
Bailyn’s new book is short, typically elegant and stylish and is intended to shape
this amorphous new field by showing where Atlantic history came from and by
advancing a theoretical apparatus within which Atlantic scholars should work.
Readers will find the first essay, on how Atlantic history evolved from its postwar
beginnings, interesting ; they will find the second essay, a developmental interpret-
ation of how an Atlantic world fused together, important. Bailyn sees Atlantic
history as emerging from American internationalists’ reaction against isolationism
interacting with an Atlantic perspective of a few visionary French historians
working on the margins of French historiography. He downplays the influence of
the Annales School and denies that Atlantic history is just a new version of imperial
or ‘‘discovery’’ history. He has a point but he can only make such an argument by
eliding the contribution to Atlantic history made by British historians, who com-
monly have come to Atlantic history from imperial history. He rightly shows how
the internal dynamics of scholarship also led to increased attention to how the
encounters between old worlds transformed both and integrated them into a single
New World. He might have paid some attention, also, to the institutional im-
peratives that made Atlantic history a desirable field for historians to specialize in at
a time when history departments were simultaneously reducing their complements
and expanding then-subject matter. What Bailyn does emphasize, however, is that
the result of this new focus on Atlantic interactions produced an important
new synthesis ; Atlantic history is more than the sum of its parts. He brilliantly and
concisely distils his past statements on how Atlantic history developed – from
brutal marchlands to an integrated, polycentric and dynamic ‘‘ single area of action’’
that eventually broke from the Old World to become places ‘‘ open for the most
exalted aspirations. ’’ He manages to do one of the hardest things a historian can
do – describe the process by which a multitudinous world in motion came together
around common themes – with skill and economy. He does much, in short, to
bring order out of chaos and shows how we might begin to have a clear definition

Reviews 417
of a complex but very exciting historical subject. Once more, as so often in the
past, we are in his debt.
University of Sussex TREVOR BURNARD

Bert Bender, Evolution and ‘‘the Sex Problem ’’: American Narratives during the Eclipse
of Darwinism, illustrated by Tony Angell (Kent and London : Kent State
University Press, 2004, $59.95). Pp. 416. ISBN 0 87338 809 7.
Bert Bender has largely achieved his stated purpose of showing ‘‘ how post-
Darwinian writers have consciously sought to keep pace with developments in
science that have emerged not only in evolutionary biology itself, but in anthro-
pology, sociology, modern psychology and ecology ’’ (Preface, xiii ; original
emphasis), and in the process has given enriched readings of works by a number
of authors not normally associated with evolutionary thought. Bender’s arguments
are lucid and convincing, and his material (the works of fifteen writers active
during the eclipse of Darwinism between the 1890s and the 1950s) is well ordered,
making intelligent use of the plot summaries required by the unfamiliarity of some
of this diverse work. Bender’s careful structuring is particularly evident in the
chapter on the Harlem renaissance, where his focus on five novels published in
the same year (1928) gives scope for a wide-ranging discussion which includes
theories of both race and gender while maintaining clarity of thought and
expression.
Other aspects of this book are less successful, however. Tony Angell’s illus-
trations are easy on the eye but neither elucidate the point under discussion nor
develop the argument in general. Editing is occasionally sloppy, with references to
Moby-Dick, for example, being given by chapter number and title, rather than the
more helpful system of edition and page number. It would also be useful to have
the location of the illustrations signalled in the text by page number; the final
illustration, for example, is located on page 235 but discussed in the Introduction
(13), putting the reader to some unnecessary trouble to find it.
These are minor criticisms which should not be allowed to detract from the
book’s achievement overall. More damaging, however, is the lack of an appendix
giving brief details of the main scientific theories used, as such a wide range of work
(not only Darwin, but also Lamarck, Henri Bergson, Haeckel, Joseph Le Conte,
Peter Kropotkin, Freud, William James, and Havelock Ellis) is likely to be unfamiliar
in detail to many readers. The extensive bibliography helps solve this problem, but
an outline of the main theories available to the reader for constant reference would
be more useful still, especially in the frequent passages where a writer’s response to a
number of theories is discussed.
Nevertheless this is a fascinating book which places a number of authors in a new
light and is likely to interest a wide readership.
University of Glasgow HELEN SUTHERLAND

418 Reviews
Lisa Bier, American Indian and African American People, Communities and Interactions :
An Annotated Bibliography (Westport CT: Praeger, 2004, $54.99). Pp. 266. ISBN
0 313 32347 X.
While interactions between European Americans and the Native American tribes
have been extensively studied, the long and complicated history of Native contact
with the African American population remains badly underexplored. This seems
particularly strange when one considers the crucial role that many American Indian
tribes played in suppressing or aiding slave revolts (e.g. the Stono Rebellion of 1739),
or the use of Buffalo Soldier troops to police reservations in the late 1800s, or indeed
the continuing existence of ‘‘ Black Indian ’’ tribes such as the Seminole or Lumbee.
In her short introduction to this bibliography, Lisa Bier suggests that previous
research into this area has been hampered by a fluctuating terminology for the two
races. This includes over three hundred tribal names, many generic terms for Black
and Indian people, and long-defunct terms such as ‘‘Zambo’’ or ‘‘ Mustee ’’ for
people with mixed African and Native parentage. This is a rather generous reading
of the situation, and it might also be permissible to deduce that a eurocentric
academy has until recently paid little attention to sustaining and funding scholarship
in this area. It is also noticeable that, while black authors such as Percival Everett
and Alice Walker (herself part-Native) have occasionally tackled Native themes in
their work, Native American literature still contains virtually no black characters.
This bibliography is, the author declares, virtually complete save for some minor
newspaper articles, and every entry includes full publishing information plus a short
summary of relevant aspects of the text. The summaries are exceptionally well-done ;
although each does give relevant information about the book in question, there are
few repeated facts, making this bibliography something of a potted history in itself.
There is also information on resources available from the Internet and video
libraries. The entries have been grouped into sections mostly organized around
geographic area, a move which reflects the regionalism of the vast majority of
available material, and there are special sections on Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw,
Creek and Seminole, as well as the Buffalo Soldiers. Finally, there is a very com-
prehensive alphabetical index.
This is an exceptional piece of scholarship, clearly a labour of love on the part
of the author, which will prove useful to scholars, librarians and students and, it is to
be hoped, will help inspire new research into a woefully unknown area of American
history.
University of Glasgow JAMES MACKAY

Avital H. Bloch and Lauri Umansky (eds.), Impossible to Hold : Women and Culture
in the 1960s (New York and London : New York University Press, 2005, $65.00
cloth, $22.00 paper). Pp. 342. ISBN 0 8147 9909 4 0 8147 9910 8.
This collection of sixteen essays aims to counter the perception that ‘‘sixties culture
remains synonymous with men ’’ by investigating the intersection of women’s

Reviews 419
lives and US culture and society in this revolutionary period. Its first section,
‘‘ Break, ’’ discusses women whose actions challenged gender norms inherited from
the 1950s. Typical examples are Geraldine Cobb, whose career in the US space
program was thwarted because a ‘‘female astronaut ’’ was deeply threatening to a
new (male) domain that was emblematic of the USA’s image of itself as a dominant
nation, and Billie Jean King, whose athletic skills provoked intense misogyny. The
second section, ‘‘ Bridge, ’’ explores the work and lives of women who connect
earlier movements with later 1960s radicalism, including Anne Waldman, who
deployed the legacy of the Beats in her experimental poetry ; Joan Baez, whose
politicized folk music informed rock’s development ; and Diana Ross, who crossed
racial and class barriers only to find herself out of synch with the tenets of Black
Power. The third section, ‘‘ Confront,’’ chronicles women who consciously defied
power structures in a range of fields, such as Yoko Ono’s challenge to white
male rock music and Jane Fonda’s anti-war demonstrations. The final section,
‘‘ Connect, ’’ focusses on artists whose later work responds overtly to the 1960s :
Carole King’s introspective, assertive song-writing ; Sonia Sanchez’s and Dianne
McIntyre’s race- and gender-conscious writing and choreography ; Judy Chicago’s
confrontational installations.
The collection has admirable range (including sport, dance, music, architecture,
poetry, sci-fi) and offers useful biographical material for all of its subjects. It is
strong on historical context and addresses the complex intersections of economics,
education, race and sexuality in its subjects’ lives by including work on white,
African and Asian Americans ; lesbians and heterosexuals ; and women from a
variety of class and political positions. The essays do vary in length and detail and
not all offer the analysis of the collision of women’s experience and culture that the
editors promise. For example, the essay on Cobb proves the derision with which US
society viewed female astronauts by citing a telling episode of I Love Lucy but the
bulk of the article simply tells Cobb’s (undoubtedly interesting) story. However,
several of the other essays do analyse the ways in which women’s lives and work
respond to and shape their society ; particularly good is the piece on Carole King’s
album Tapestry (from which the collection takes its title) which convincingly asserts
the cultural and political significance of a familiar work and genre. Overall, an en-
gaging and useful collection.
University of Leicester SARAH GRAHAM

Kathleen J. Bragdon, The Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Northeast (New
York : Columbia UP, 2001, $24.50). Pp. 292+xv. ISBN 0 231 11453 2.
This book offers the most recent reference tool on Native American cultures of the
Northeast, a region that stretched from Canada to Tidewater Virginia and west to
the Ohio River Valley. The text is divided into four parts : an ethnographic and
historical summary from the ‘‘ Paleo-Indian Period ’’ to 2000, a dictionary of notable
people, places, and events, a brief historical timeline, and an annotated bibliography
of sources, both printed and electronic. Throughout there is a strong emphasis on

420 Reviews
ethnographical and linguistic material. Bragdon’s work fills a significant void in the
available reference compendia by supplementing and updating the authoritative
Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. XV: The Northeast (1976). Of particular
note for modern students is its list of Native tribes and organizations with
appropriate contact information.
Organization occasionally presents a problem, however. Discussion of the
League of the Iroquois (55–57) is illustrative. The historical narrative notes its
sixteenth-century origins and its political role in Native society, but fails to mention
the question of its possible role as a model for the polity established in the US
Constitution. It is discussed in more detail only in the bibliographic section (236),
which also lists two pages of sources. Nowhere is there mention of its influence on
Franklin’s Albany Plan of Union (1754), a product of the British attempt to secure
an Iroquois alliance against the French.
The treatment of William Apes(s) is similar. In the historical narrative he figures
as a Native American Christian minister and author (64 and 80). In Part II his career
is blandly described as presenting ‘‘ the perspective of the American Indians ’’ (111)
on their history. His only cited work is his autobiography. Absent is any discussion
of Apes(s)’s pan-Indianism, his sense of the solidarity of all colored peoples, and
his role in the Mashpee Revolt (to regain political and religious autonomy on
their reserved lands), manifested in his Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws
of Massachusetts Relative to the Marshpee Tribe (1835). Early Native American radicalism
is thus downplayed.
Despite these shortcomings, Bragdon’s Guide should become an essential work
in any college or research library. As a supplement to older reference works,
it performs an invaluable service for those who would explore the native cultures
of the Northeast region.
Hofstra University L O U I S J. K E R N

Louis F. Burns. Osage Indian Customs and Myths (Tuscaloosa : University of
Alabama Press, 2005, $19.95). Pp. xvi+230. ISBN 0 8173 5181 7.
First self-published by Osage historian Louis Burns in 1984, Osage Indian Customs and
Myths is described in this new edition as the only comprehensive study of Osage
culture in book form. Coming as it does from a long tradition of ethnographical
accounts of cultural traditions that set out to ‘‘capture’’ a moment in the cultural
evolutionary process, it treads a testy boundary in modern historiography between
‘‘ past preserved ’’ and continuity in change.
This is by no means to question the integrity of the book and Burns, a member of
the Mottled Eagle Clan, lives up to the claim on the reverse cover that he is ‘‘ an
extremely meticulous researcher. ’’ With the addition of scholars such as David I.
Bushnell, whose accounts of burials and burial customs inform the chapter on
mourning customs, Burns’s principal source is Omaha anthropologist Francis La
Flesche, who, alongside Alice Fletcher, collected a wealth of recorded material from
the Osage between the 1880s and 1932.

Reviews 421
The book is divided into two sections, the first describing (and to some degree
interpreting) customs, and the second myths, with a core of religious sensibility
throughout. Both sections are illuminating although a greater sense of the relation-
ship between ‘‘ customs ’’ and ‘‘myths ’’ in Osage culture might have aided in Burns’s
request for the non-Osage reader to place their minds in ‘‘ neutral ’’ to better
understand what is ‘‘ alien. ’’ Having said this, Burns repeatedly makes Western
comparisons : Osage philosophy to the ancient Greeks, or the relationship between
the Chief of the Tsi Shu Peacemaker clan and the Chief of the Pon Ka Peace-
maker clan to that between the English prime minister and the cabinet. While such
analogies seem facile, they usefully illustrate the points Burns is making, while clearly
delineating his anticipated readership.
Having approached the text as a standard ethnographic text, however, there are a
few key features that make this a compelling extension of the collections made by
the likes of La Flesche. Burns includes a number of changes in Osage customs (such
as in marriage and adoption) following such significant issues as the adoption of
Christian mores and customs, and the introduction of blood quantum to prove tribal
enrolment. Burns also stresses at apposite moments that the customs and myths he
describes are neither monolithic nor unchanging, but that they constitute the core
values and practices of clans that nevertheless adapted them or the order in which
they were recounted or performed. Further, there are one or two key comments that
lend depth to the assumed readership of this book – from the statement that the
Osage were ‘‘realists and not superstitious fools, ’’ which could be read as admon-
ition of stereotypical assumptions and an esteem-indicator to modern-day Osage, to
the assertion that ‘‘ We thought young Osage men and women would like to know
how their ancestors let each other know when they wanted to marry, ’’ which, at the
very least, reminds the non-Osage reader that these details reflect the beliefs and
lifeways of a living people and their ancestors.
University of Kent DAVID STIRRUP

Edward T. Chambers, Roots for Radicals: Organizing for Power, Action, and Justice,
with a Foreword by Studs Terkel (New York and London : Continuum, 2004,
$18.95). Pp. 152. ISBN 0 8264 1499 0.
Chambers’s book is continuation, and an appraisal of the effects, of the two books
written by Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals. Alinsky founded the
Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in 1940 to counter the effects on the average
American citizen of excessive corporate capitalism, and Chambers’s task is to
evaluate the IAF’s legacy and to facilitate its further development. A cornerstone of
community organizing, the IAF teaches individuals and community groups how to
coordinate, mobilize and fight against corporate and governmental domination. Lest
this be misconstrued as a socialist agenda. Chambers makes clear that the central
ethos of his organization is rooted in a specific American sociopolitical matrix. Early
on he reclaims ‘‘ politics ’’ in its Aristotelian origins of the coming together of a
community of individuals as equals. In its essence, the IAF espouses the core beliefs
that make up dominant cultural definitions of ‘‘ America,’’ and encourages a wide

422 Reviews
and broad-based participation in shaping communities in areas from public housing
to rights in the workplace. Particular emphasis is placed on the need for multi-faith,
multiethnic and multiracial collaboration.
Constantly stressed in the book are core values of family, church, the work ethic
and, despite the philosophy of community, self-reliance ; the ‘‘Iron Rule ’’ of the IAF
is, Chambers assures us, ‘‘Never, never do for others what they can do for them-
selves. ’’ Indeed, without naming it, the book evokes Nietzsche’s will-to-power as
a rallying cry for the disenfranchised. Echoing the IAF’s opposition to political
abstraction. Chambers stresses that the need for ‘‘social, not theoretical, knowl-
edge ’’ is the basis for successful direct action, and anecdotes about various
groups and individuals effecting change through practical knowledge of political
machinations, and via collaboration, pepper the book.
This is, though, ultimately more of an account of the IAF, mixed with bio-
graphical details of Chambers’s involvement with it, and in this sense there is a
piecemeal element to it : essentially it is neither one nor the other. That is not to
demean the overall worth of the book, however. The mixture of personal endeav-
our, examples of actual confrontation and descriptions of methods of engagement
makes for a genuinely interesting account of what can be done and how to over-
come the many problems incurred in challenging powerful forces. Anyone hoping
to find within the covers a manual for radical activity will be disappointed, but
the book does direct any interested parties to IAF and network organizations. An
engaging account and a useful starting point for potential activists.
University of Exeter GARY BLOHM

Susan Castillo, Performing America : Colonial Encounters in New World Writing
1500–1786 (London and New York : Routledge, 2005, £55.00/$100.00 cloth,
£18.99/$33 paper). Pp. 260. ISBN 0 415 31606 5, 0 415 31607 1.
Heralding the hemispheric turn in early American studies, Susan Castillo’s new
book, Performing America, is a fascinating journey through the literature of colonial
encounter, bringing together European, indigenous American and creole voices
from three centuries and in three languages (English, French and Spanish). Castillo
contends that polyphonic and performative texts were particularly important in
enabling ‘‘explorers, settlers and indigenous groups to come to terms with radical
differences in language, behaviour and cultural practices ’’ (19). Plays and pageantry,
including the royal entry, Jesuit missionary drama and Spanish Golden Age
theatre, are key sources for Castillo’s investigation, but the study also highlights the
theatrical elements of early colonial historiography. Indeed, even writers whose
traditions eschewed drama, such as Huguenots and Puritans, turned to dialogic
forms such as lexicography and catechism to write about colonial encounter.
Furthermore, performance arts were not unique to the colonizers ; dramatic ritual
and the visual arts were important in pre-scribal American cultures, and bore
literary fruit in Peru in The Tragedy of the Death of Atahualpa and Guamán Poma’s New
Chronicle. Castillo concludes that dialogic genres in particular ‘‘enabled Europeans

Reviews 423
to attempt to impose, and natives to appropriate or resist, ideological and
cultural norms ’’ (237). Moreover, because of their potential for being open-ended,
such genres were also well suited to expressing the creole’s dilemma of allegiance,
as illustrated in plays by the Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and the Anglo-
American soldier Robert Rogers.
Written with astuteness, warmth and sensitivity, Performing America is an enjoy-
able read. Castillo is an energetic and knowledgeable guide, providing textual
interpretation and mining contemporary scholarship to give rich, succinct accounts
of a host of contextual matters, from Aztec and Inca customs to Enlightenment
discourses on the noble savage and New World inferiority. Careful attention is paid
to textual history, especially the translation and reception of the selected texts.
Rather than pursuing a narrow critical argument, this study is itself polyphonic,
offering a wide-ranging survey of dialogic and performative colonial writing, and
presenting texts that will be new to most Anglo-Americanists (often with the added
treat of quotations in the author’s own elegant translation). Given the scope of
the study, some regrettable omissions are inevitable, such as discussion of Dryden’s
American plays. Yet this scarcely detracts from the overall strength and uniqueness
of the study. Performing America is a landmark book that succeeds in bridging
cultural, linguistic and disciplinary divides, and demonstrates the value of a com-
parative approach to American literary studies.
University of Cambridge A M Y M . E. M O R R I S

Joe Domanick, Cruel Justice : Three Strikes and the Politics of Crime in America’s
Golden State (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004, £10.95).
Pp. xiii+266. ISBN 0 520 24668 3.
Domanick relates how California’s ‘‘ three strikes ’’ law came into being and how
it has worked politically, socially and economically, with its underlying agenda
intended to play upon the fears of California voters. He writes powerfully and in
detail of the deaths of Kimber Reynolds and Polly Klaas, whose ghastly murders
were the catalysts for the law, passed in 1994. However, as a serious academic
study, the book fails.
Domanick’s writing style, especially in the early chapters, is an example of
adjectival over-use. Dramatic accounts suggest a pitch for a widespread, general
readership. Yet the book’s background information is scanty as, in terms of sub-
stance, he assumes the reader has expert knowledge of the subject. For example,
on page 41, he writes that California’s ‘‘ three strikes ’’ law was ‘‘ astounding in its
scope and radical in its ambition _ one of an entirely different magnitude. ’’ It is
not until p. 78 that he explains his assertion of difference. Another example is
the repeated reference to the ‘‘ Rampart ’’ scandal without any explanation.
The footnotes are problematical. Domanick writes of LAPD nightmare prisons
where ‘‘guards shoot prisoners for sport ’’ without attribution or other substan-
tiation. Figures, for example quoting costs of law enforcement or rising and falling
violent crime and homicide rates, are often not attributed.

424 Reviews
Whilst bemoaning the current expense of ‘‘ three strikes ’’ to the California
taxpayer, Domanick fails to project future tax burdens as twenty-five-year-old
offenders in 2000 remain incarcerated in 2025. Nor does he consider the problems
of long-term incarceration on aging young offenders experiencing medical and
psychological problems.
What is most disappointing is Domanick’s failure to engage at all with the
legal issues endemic in ‘‘ three strikes ’’, particularly the Supreme Court’s 5–4
decision in Andrade, when states’ rights were upheld over Eighth Amendment
rights. Instead, he rants about the fate of drug addicts and nonviolent offenders,
doomed to a life in jail. He alludes briefly to the judgment of O’Connor and is
scathing about Scalia’s circuitous ruling that a punishment cannot be unusual
if others have already received the same. Since in practice politics and law are
interchangeable in the American system, ignoring the opportunity to rigorously
examine the court’s decision is a glaring omission.
Nevertheless, for those wishing to take a lighter route into California’s refer-
endum and proposition system and the reasons why Californian voters approved a
law when many had no real idea what they were voting for, it is a good, easy read.
Brunel University JOHN MATLIN

Jorge Durand and Douglas S. Massey (eds.), Crossing the Border : Research from the
Mexican Migration Project (New York : Russell Sage Foundation, 2004, $42.50).
Pp. 336. ISBN 0 87154 288 9.
In the volume Crossing the Border: Research from the Mexican Migration, editors Durand
and Massey present recent research into migration to and from the US and Mexico.
Initiated in 1987, the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) is a non-random sampling
of eighty-one Mexican communities and a proportionate number of corresponding
settled communities in the US. Individually and together, the sixteen chapters
strategically answer many of the unfounded presumptions about US–Mexican
migration.
Sections on social capital and remittances (Mooney), homeownership (Parrado),
and green-card matrimonial strategies (Martinez Curiel) launch this erudite collec-
tion. Part Two examines migration and gender, looking at undocumented border-
crossing by women (Donato and Patterson) and the gender role and economic
impact of wives left behind (Aysa and Massey). Part Three surveys the regional
variations discernable through the MMP data-set. Scholars tracking maquiladora
and other border phenomena will find Fussell’s contribution on Tijuana’s role
in migratory trends especially informative. Likewise the historical portrait of
Guanajuato (Arias) will give readers an exemplary understanding of the ways the
MMP gives new insight into the complex relations between the Guanajuato region
and ‘‘ the States ’’ over the better part of the last century.
The final section comprises correctives to mythologies that come as a result of
the immigrant-menace discourse now permeating US airwaves and policy corridors.
For example, agricultural workers, Kandel reports, continue to be used as raw

Reviews 425
human capital and thus experience disadvantage relative to other occupational
groups, yet rely upon social service supports only after their experiences in the US
have matured by some years. Similarly, the failures of the 1986 Immigration Reform
and Control Act and the militarization of the US–Mexico border are laid bare
through contributors’ careful analyses of return migration trends (Riosmena), of
US border enforcement practices (Orrenius), and of the duration of trips without
documentation (Reyes).
Durand and Massey have assembled an impressive collective that richly details
migration trends not readily interpretable from statistical data-sets alone. However,
absent from these accounts are narratives of the migrant subjects of the MMP.
Also missing are the broader linkages of Mexican migration to the global patterns
of neoliberal capitalism and the treatment and flows of working people under
this ever-shifting regime of labor supply and demand. Still, scholars and policy-
makers should find the empirical heft of these contributions extremely useful in the
struggle against the currents of nativist politics in the US and elsewhere.
Anthropology and Chicano/Latino Studies, M I C H A E L J. M O N T O Y A

University of California–Irvine

Lee Edelman, No Future : Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham and London :
Duke University Press, 2004, £15.95 paper). Pp. 200. ISBN 0 822 33369 4.
No Future is a work whose argument cannot be divorced from the experience of

disillusionment with the failure of liberal sexual politics to prevail in a political
struggle that the author suspects to have been doomed from the start. For political
discourse is inconceivable, Edelman argues, without prior agreement to invest
in the fantasy of the symbolic intelligibility of the social tissue. Such agreement,
however, always turns out to involve a pledge of allegiance to the figure that
embodies the promise of a meaning-fulfilling future at the same time that it affirms
the transcendental meaningfulness of heterosexual union – the child. What is
therefore exacted as entrance fee to the political is the perennial othering and
exclusion of those who embody all that is queerly meaning-negating and thereby
child-threatening as well : those whose forms of pleasure register as narcissistically
antisocial, those whose sexuality refuses to be etherealized into an anodyne
expression of subjectivity, those whose very existence appears as a threat to the
innocence of the child and to the future-serving ethics of its self-declared protectors.
Edelman’s defiant response to this ideological circuit (one made unmistakably
visible in the resounding tactical success of the anti-gay marriage ballot in last
November’s US presidential elections) is to affirm precisely what liberal defenses of
queerness must necessarily seek to deny : an uncompromising ‘‘embrace of queer
negativity, ’’ whose ethical value would reside in its ‘‘ radical challenge to the value
of the social itself. ’’ The bulk of what follows Edelman’s main thesis consists of
three chapters, each of which psychoanalytically examines the vexed relation be-
tween the narrative exigencies of ‘‘ reproductive futurism’’ and the figure of a subject
whose queerness registers as an antisocial pursuit of jouissance and an enthrallment

426 Reviews
in the meaningless compulsions of the death drive – a subject Edelman, evoking
Lacan, dubs the ‘‘sinthomosexual. ’’ The first chapter anatomizes this relation
through a reading of Victorian prose fiction (focusing on the misanthropic bachelor
misers of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and George Eliot’s Silas Marner and
the children who providentially straighten them out), while the remaining two focus
on twentieth-century narrative cinema and on the future-negating figures inhabiting
Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and The Birds.
Edelman’s book takes obvious pleasure in provocation, stylistically indulging
in the ironic hermeneutics it methodologically advocates with at times infelicitous
results (an excess of largely gratuitous verbal punning and a partiality for highly
convoluted syntax are cases in point). More disconcertingly, No Future involves
a vision of queer subjectivity that is so strongly invested in transvaluating the
homophobic linkage of homosexuality with a ‘‘ culture of death ’’ that it ends up
ignoring the complexity and diversity of what has historically constituted queer
(lesbian and transgender as well as gay) politics. Missing, for instance, is a serious
and sustained attempt to engage with the multiple transformations the concepts of
reproduction and parenthood have undergone in the last two decades, partly as a
result of the interventions of queer theory itself. Equally absent is any analytical
concern with the cultural and representational resonances of the queer child – a
figure that certainly complicates the book’s one-dimensional treatment of the
image of besieged childhood, while making apparent the unreflectively eclectic and
historically untheorized nature of Edelman’s choice of primary texts.
The effect of such exclusions – a highly repetitive account of texts that are treated
as virtually interchangeable – is particularly troubling from a theoretical standpoint.
For though Edelman’s argument largely rests on a theoretical distinction between
an ideologically normative and a radically destabilizing kind of repetition com-
pulsion, his analytical practice makes the difference between them less than obvious.
Paying the reader diminishing dividends with each page, No Future bulldozes
its way from Plato to the Victorians and from Hitchcock to Judith Butler by
unwaveringly locating the same Manichean conflict between reproductive ideology
and its queer negation, a struggle to the death between monolithic and unchanging
absolutes. To declare No Future a timely work is hence not an unambiguous com-
pliment ; for its timeliness comes at the cost of intellectual surrender to the
increasingly polarized and disconcertingly fundamentalist climate of American
politics in the present.
University of Cyprus ANTONIS BALASOPOULOS

Hazel Arnett Ervin, The Handbook of African American Literature (Gainesville, FL :
UP of Florida, 2004, $45.00). Pp. 236+xviii. ISBN 0 8130 2750 0.
After the heady days of the emergence of African American studies, the second
generation of AfricanAmerican scholars has begun to produce a set of basic
reference tools, The Encyclopedia of African American Culture and History (1996), the
Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997), and the Norton Anthology of

Reviews 427
African American Literature (1997) now provide reliable resources for scholars.
The Handbook of African American Literature is rather a guidebook for undergraduate
students.
It is organized into two sections. The first and longer, ‘‘ Terms, ’’ consists of short
definitions that range from the exclusively African-American-related, like ‘‘ Bakongo
cosmology ’’ and the ‘‘ Umbra Workshop, ’’ to the most general, such as ‘‘ alliter-
ation, ’’ ‘‘ legend, ’’ and ‘‘ psychoanalysis. ’’ This section provides quick, general
definitions of common literary terms (defined more comprehensively elsewhere),
supplemented by a scattering of African-American-specific terms.
The second section, ‘‘Criticism and Theory, ’’ suffers from the same breadth of
focus ; only one term included there – ‘‘ Signifying/Signification ’’ – being specifi-
cally associated with African American literature. This section of the work is the
strongest, however, since these eight longer essays allow Ervin to apply the more
general literary terms to specific African American texts and to provide some
references to standard critical sources.
The appendices to the volume provide a schematic overview of the history of
African, African American, and anglophone Caribbean literatures, a list of African
American Pulitzer Prize-winners, and a list of African American literary associations
and research centers. A substantial bibliography provides a good basis for further
research in specific areas addressed in the text. Overall, the Handbook is accessible
to the introductory student and offers a reliable guide to contemporary literary
terminology (though it is weak on current critical theory). It is not broadly encom-
passing or encyclopedic in its coverage, but perhaps that is the result of the now
established status of African American literature in the academy and the need to pass
the traditions of the field on to the next generation of students, for, as Henry Louis
Gates has observed, such works contribute ‘‘ to the creation of a shared baseline
of knowledge about the subject, a common culture of shared referents, a canon of
common knowledge ’’ (Oxford Companion to African American Literature, ‘‘ Foreword, ’’
vii). Ervin’s Handbook may well serve to transmit that ‘‘ common knowledge ’’ to a
new generation of students of African American literature.

John Ferling, A Leap in the Dark : The Struggle to Create the American Republic ( New
York : Oxford University Press, 2003, $30.00). Pp. 558. ISBN 0 19 515924 1.
The story has been told many times before : thirteen colonies unite in the face
of imperial encroachment – ‘‘setting the world ablaze,’’ to reiterate the title of an
earlier book by John Ferling. Ferling, of State University of West Georgia, a veteran
historian of revolutionary America, has produced with A Leap in the Dark a vintage
narrative of old-school political history, describing the creation of the American
republic. This wide-ranging book consists of the potatoes and bread of politics,
war, and foreign affairs, as Ferling admits to take interest in questions of ‘‘leader-
ship ’’ – that is, in great men – or the constellation who came to be known as the
Founding Fathers. Indeed, Ferling conveys a group biography of the men who
stood in the vanguard of the revolutionary struggle.

428 Reviews
In A Leap in the Dark Ferling delivers an engaging account of the creation of
the United States, setting his narrative in the fifty-odd years between the Seven Years
War and the Jeffersonian revolution of 1800. Political thought and action are
placed within their historical contexts in a readable and clear fashion, and person-
alities, as this is mainly a history of leaders who enjoy extensive agency in Ferling’s
interpretation, are described and analyzed thoroughly. Critically at times (‘‘ these
were not disinterested men, ’’ he writes at one point, 282), the book tends to
maintain a subtle if unmistaken reverence for the founding generation and its
achievements.
Within the framework of his project Ferling has produced a synthetic work
on a grand scale. However, even if it is not fair to judge a book for failing to
achieve goals it had not set, one wonders why Ferling did not incorporate, or
at least address, in his work the new and exciting scholarship published in the
past couple of decades, namely Atlantic history and recent reassessments of
the American Revolution. For example, from reading A Leap in the Dark one
would not realize that Britain had mastered an empire consisting of some thirty
North American colonies of which only thirteen chose to rebel. Furthermore, the
fact that the revolution and its aftermath were calamitous for numerous inhabi-
tants within the thirteen rebellious colonies, such as Native Americans, African
and Afro-American slaves, Loyalists, and probably even women, is also under-
emphasized. One would have wished to see Ferling taking such issues to the
mat, and thus marking his historiographical stamp by providing a reinterpretation
of the era.
Haifa University, Israel ERAN SHALEV

Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble (eds.), The Other Side of Nowhere : Jazz ,
Improvisation and Communities in Dialogue (Middletown, CT : Wesleyan University
Press, 2004, $70.00 cloth, $29.95 paper). Pp. xvi+439. ISBN 0 8195 6681 0,
0 8195 6682 9.
Academic theorizing about jazz has traditionally lagged far behind the inspired
playing of it with the field of jazz writing dominated by magazine journalists and
social commentators. This has often been a relief, making the literature of jazz
unburdened by the obfuscatory language and petty point-scoring of the academic
establishment. Since 1990 some excellent jazz academicians have emerged such as
Krin Gabbard, Graham Lock, Ingrid Monson, Nathaniel Mackey, Paul Berliner
and George E. Lewis, who incorporate the best of the jazz writing tradition whilst
riffing a new discourse using the resources of cultural theory. Some of them are
represented here in this excellent comprehensive collection of writings about the
politics and aesthetics of improvisation.
The collection of essays analyses gender, alternative politics, pan-Africanism, the
relation of hip-hop to jazz experimentation, the poetics of improvisation and
the influence of an improvisatory mode on figures as diverse as Marlon Brando

Reviews 429
and John Cage. Jason Stanyek, in discussing the intercultural collaboration key to
pan-African jazz, shows how in the ‘‘live dialogue ’’ of multiple cultures Africa is
not just a past, not just roots, but is central as an ‘‘ improvisation which provides
a welcome hearth where the sharing process can begin. ’’ Here and elsewhere in the
collection the tone can become hagiographic, particularly in contrasting jazzers
to pop stars. Overall, perhaps the most interesting contributions are those
theorizing improvisation from a feminist perspective. Julie Dawn Smith’s critique
of the heterosexist world of male jazz is particularly astute and her article, with
its wonderful anecdotes weaved into and out of queer theory, is a model of the
participant observer frame that many of the musician–writers use here. She de-
scribes how her feminist improvising group got opposition from the feminists for
being too difficult and from avant-garde musicians for not being technically com-
petent. As Sherrie Tucker usefully delineates in a speculative essay questioning the
whole idea of ‘‘ women-in-jazz ’’ as a category, alternative takes are needed to fully
flesh out the meaning of marginalized jazz communities like women. Meanwhile,
for the old-style aficionados, there is a marvellous mass interview with some of the
most famous jazz producers, including Orin Keepnews, Nat Hentoff and Teo
Macero, who all relate how their job was to be as unobtrusive as possible. It is a
measure of the quality of the essays in this collection and their cutting-edge nature
that it seems rather tame and antediluvian in comparison to the essays that
surround it.
University of Central Lancashire ALAN RICE

Thomas Fleming, Mysteries of My Father (Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley and Sons
Inc., 2005. $24.95). Pp. ix+341. ISBN 0 471 65515 5.
Thomas Fleming has written a biography of both his parents, attempting to

reconcile the enigma that was his father. Teddy was a ‘‘thick mick ’’ raised in a
tenement in the poor end of Jersey City towards the end of the nineteenth century.
Kitty, three years younger, was raised in uptown Jersey City in an affluent family.
The book traces their history, as Teddy courts and marries schoolteacher Kitty and
she seeks to reform Teddy into an upright citizen. The personal revelations are
often painful as the parents’ disconnections are confronted, especially their dis-
cordant allegiances to their Irish American, Catholic heritage. Whilst acknowledging
the flaws of both parents’ characters, the book is nevertheless written with wit
and humour, as well as deep affection.
Counterpointing family history is corrupt politics. The man for whom Teddy
worked was Frank Hague, the boss of the Jersey City Democratic machine. After
World War I, in which Teddy won a commission in the US army, he returned from
France to triumph as leader of the Sixth Ward, becoming chairman of the Board
of Chosen Freeholders, judge of the Second Criminal Court and finally sheriff of
Hudson County. Most notable was that, unlike many of Hague’s underlings, Teddy
escaped prosecution in the late 1940s.

430 Reviews
However, the author writes of Teddy’s progress as ‘‘ the dark side of the
American dream ’’ (135). The book offers insights into the ‘‘machine, ’’ especially
its downfall, although the author skirts over reasons why Frank Hague, Jr. did not
take over from his father. The author ascribes it to mere resignation. The truth
was that Hague’s son failed to complete his college education and his appointment
as a judge was a step too far for New Jersey politics, even under a machine dictator.
Of the complexities within the Jersey City machine Fleming gives perceptive
analysis :
A political machine was a meaningless misnomer. There was no such thing in Jersey
City _ or any city where the Irish-Americans organized things politically _ For anyone
who saw how things worked from the inside, the opposite was the case. A political organiz-
ation was a churning mix of ambition and resentment and inertia over which leaders presided
only by constant effort. (195)
This is a powerful and bittersweet memoir of family history intertwined with
ethnic politics in the first half of the twentieth century. As such, it is eminently
readable.
University of Birmingham JOHN MATLIN

Murray Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution : Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping
of Public Policy (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2005, £20.00). Pp. 303.
ISBN 0 521 83656 5.
A useful addition to the literature on neoconservatism, this book’s unique selling

point is its focus on the Jewishness of the neocons from the perspective of
an insider. It grew out of the author’s long-held concern with exploring the links
between Jews and conservatism, in particular a desire to refute the notion that a
Jewish conservative is a contradiction in terms. In doing so, it aims to prove that
the ‘‘ neocon break with the left had begun in the 1950s, ’’ more than a decade earlier
than usually suggested. It is laid out in roughly chronological fashion and each
chapter focusses on a particular theme ( Nicaragua, capitalism, Reaganism, etc.).
Discounting memoirs and newspaper, magazine and journal articles, the book is
written entirely from secondary sources and Friedman seems to be in thrall to
some of them. The result is part history, part memoir – indeed parts of the book
are often punctuated by a first-person narrative – which never achieves the level of
objectivity its author desired. Friedman’s neoconservatism means that he suffered
from the same myopia as his colleagues on the right – a glaring example is his
declaration that ‘‘ Reagan was a genuine neocon, ’’ which ignores the fact that
prominent neocons complained that he was not tough enough. Yet, fortunately,
Friedman is not so blind as to realize that the neocons’ role in influencing Bush
administration policy has undoubtedly been exaggerated and that Rumsfeld,
Rice and Bush are not neocons but simply ‘‘ advocates of a strong national defense, ’’
who ‘‘ are capable of making up their own minds. ’’ Furthermore, he admits, the
neocons did not always get it right and were sometimes ‘‘caught short, ’’ as in

Reviews 431
‘‘ extolling the beneficent effects of capitalism. ’’ In his Epilogue, Friedman sum-
marizes the neocons’ achievements, which, he says, ‘‘have been remarkably
prescient in identifying the central issues of the times and supporting approaches
that have found favor with many of the countrymen. ’’ He also points to a new – and
numerous – younger generation of neocons, influential today. Yet Friedman betrays
his allegiances by advising this new generation that neoconservatism is a ‘‘work
in progress, ’’ the task of which is to ‘‘infuse American life with a new vision that
will strengthen democracy at home and abroad, increase the social and economic
well-being of all Americans, and set an example for the rest of the world. ’’ It is our
task to now wait and observe to see if his advice is heeded.
University of Aberdeen NATHAN ABRAMS

John Gatta, Making Nature Sacred : Literature, Religion, and the Environment in
America from the Puritans to the Present. (Oxford University Press, 2004, £35.00
hard, £12.99 paper). Pp. 291. ISBN 0 19 516505 5, 0 19 516506 1.
The book sparkles when it discusses John Muir, when it looks at the mystical
naturalism of Peter Matthiessen and when it looks at contemporary writers
such Marilynne Robinson and Annie Dillard. However, overall Sacred Nature fails to
investigate comprehensively the two key terms of its title, terms imbued with
culturally specific meaning and shifting valency. Nature and the sacred have never
been static concepts, and their definition and conceptual development in the United
States cannot be assumed to operate outside political, social, or literary dynamics of
power. The most interesting thing, after all, about the confluence of the sacred and
the natural in American letters is, as Renato Rosaldo has pointed out, the way in
which the ‘‘ attitude of reverence toward the natural developed at the same time that
North Americans intensified the destruction of their human and natural environ-
ment ’’ (Culture and Truth : The Remaking of Social Analysis, Beacon, 1989, 71). This ugly
underside to the American approach to land, the ability to simultaneously revere
what is actively being destroyed, receives only superficial attention in Gatta’s book.
This is not the case in studies such as Philip Fisher’s Hard Facts: Setting and From in
the American Novel (Oxford, 1985) and The Green Breast of the New World (Georgia,
1996) by Louise Wrestling. Their analysis of what is deemed sacred in literature
inevitably brings Native American and African American history, culture and
literature into sharp relief. By comparison, Gatta has decided to leave all things
Native American ‘‘to anthropologically trained specialists’’ (7) and to keep his
evaluative eye trained strictly upon the canonical. This assumption that Indian
literature is somehow discrete from the bulk of American literature and culture and
that its critical evaluation should remain the preserve of anthropologists is deeply
problematic. Gatta does mention Leslie Marmon Silko, Zitkala S̆a and Black Elk but
at no point is the centrality of Native American spiritual relationships to land given
sustained attention. Instead of literary Native American voices we hear once more
about a series of well-known Puritans, and then of Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau,
Hawthorne, and Melville and of the ecopoets Wendell Berry and Gary Synder.
Perhaps because he feels on surer ground with African American work, Gatta does

432 Reviews
briefly consider ‘‘ maroon communities ’’ and provides a welcome discussion of a
hitherto largely ignored novel by W. E. B. Du Bois, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911).
Ultimately, in this book the sound of missing African and especially Indian voices is
deafening. Their inclusion is essential in achieving the ‘‘ renewal of reverence ’’ (243)
that Gatta calls for.
Department of American Studies, University of Wales, Swansea, UK JOY PORTER

Philip Goff and Paul Harvey (eds.), Themes in Religion and American Culture
(Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2004, £42.50 cloth). Pp. 389.
ISBN 0 8078 2890 4.
Professors Goff and Harvey have assembled a collection of nineteen essays,

intended to be a unique contribution to the field of American religious studies. Their
aim is to offer an introduction to the subject which reflects the changes that have
taken place in American historical studies as a whole, in particular the growing
recognition that the discipline has unduly relied on a white, male and Protestant
metanarrative, which takes insufficient account of the role played by other faiths,
ethnicities and women. As the editors acknowledge, this metanarrative has already
been challenged by a large number of specialist monographs, but the book attempts
to synthesize these studies into a coherent, general overview. On the whole, it
succeeds in offering a very readable survey of religious belief and activity, in their
broadest sense, throughout the nation’s history – from precolonial times to the
present. The wide coverage of minority ‘‘ stories ’’ tends to compliment, rather
than displace, coverage of America’s three major faiths : Protestantism, Catholicism
and Judaism – with the respective diversities of these communities also well
catered for.
The layout of the book is unusual ; it is arranged into ‘‘ stand-alone ’’ chapters
which cover particular themes, which are then divided into chronological segments,
each representing the same broad divisions of American history. This offers the
reader a choice of approaches, with the option of reading ‘‘across ’’ the book if an
overview of a specific period is required. However, this format also means that one
is constantly confronted with repetitious information, something which certainly
consolidates learning, but can also, at times, prove tiresome. The absence of refer-
ences is also frustrating, with one frequently being met by unattributed quotation
and other evidence, and left to speculate on their source from the ‘‘ suggested
reading ’’ sections which follow each chapter. These are, however, together with the
comprehensive glossary and index, an otherwise helpful addition. The textual format
results in a remarkable uniformity of style, with each contributor offering a dis-
passionate, but engaging, analysis, and any obvious ideological bias intrudes only
very rarely. However, this is not the book to choose if one is looking for a more
definitive interpretation of the overall picture, as it is very successful at detailing
diversity but less useful when it comes to highlighting dominant trends.
University of Sheffield TOM ROGERS

Reviews 433
James Goodman, Blackout (New York : North Point Press, 2003, $13.00).
Pp. 254. ISBN 0 86547 715 9.
On the night of the 13 July 1977 a storm in Westchester County, north of New York
City, resulted in a series of freak lightning strikes on power lines. The electricity supply
for all five boroughs was knocked out. While Con Edison struggled to both explain
and shift the blame for this failure, an unusual, almost carnivalesque mood seized the
sweltering city. Thousands of people – some criminal, many desperately poor, others
just bored or caught up by the moment – indulged in an impulsive and opportunistic
orgy of looting. By dawn, thousands were under arrest, abandoned buildings were
ablaze and millions of dollars worth of consumer goods had been stolen.
In his original and unusual account of the 1977 New York blackout, James
Goodman eschews conventional, historical analysis. Instead, he adopts a much
more polyvalent, multivocal and intertextual approach, incorporating a multiplicity
of differing perspectives on the blackout. The book itself is split into fifty-three
brief sections, facilitating Goodman’s kaleidoscopic and episodic treatment of his
subject. Instead of presenting a single critical view of what happened and who was
to blame, his account questions the notion that such a complex historical event
can be reducible to a single causal explanation.
Goodman draws primarily on reports from local and national media, supple-
mented with first-hand and eyewitness accounts. Anecdotes about particular
incidents of looting are juxtaposed with the opinions of merchants facing ruin. By
contrasting looter with shopkeeper, these arguments parallel the political fallout be-
tween Con Edison and city officials, and between city officials and national govern-
ment. Goodman also digests and surveys popular media discourse inspired by the
blackout. From the editorials and letter pages of publications such as the New Times
and Commentary, Goodman articulates the different perspectives put forward by
liberal, conservative and radical commentators. While right-wing pundits, as well as
many ordinary citizens, denounced the looters as ‘‘animals, ’’ others highlighted
the socioeconomic pattern of the looting, as well as the high unemployment
and severe urban neglect that blighted the city. Weaving personal accounts – and
justifications – of the looting alongside various strands of political discourse gener-
ated by the event, Goodman complicates and undermines simplistic political gen-
eralizations about why the blackout provoked such disorder. The result is a highly
entertaining (if at times rather lightweight) book, giving a vivid, almost novelistic pres-
entation of the blackout and its socioeconomic, cultural and political repercussions.
King’s College London JAMES MILLER

David Gould and James B. Kennedy, Memoirs of a Dutch Mudsill : The ‘‘ War
Memories’’ of John Henry Otta (Kent, OH : Kent State University Press, 2004,
$39.00). Pp. 400. ISBN 0 87338 799 6.
John Henry Otto was a Prussian professional soldier who fled Germany for the
Upper Midwest after the 1848 revolution ; he there retired into private life until

434 Reviews
mustered to fight in the conflict with the South. Memoirs of a Dutch Mudsill is an
annotated transcription of the journal that Otto kept throughout his involvement
in the war, starting with the efforts to raise his volunteers in the summer of 1862, and
ending with his and his men’s ‘‘restoration to citizenship and liberty ’’ in June 1865.
Two copies of the original manuscript were given by Otto, in around 1890, to his
two sons, one of whom was Gould’s grandfather. Ironically, the survival of the text
is thanks to the other son depositing his copy with the Wisconsin Historical Society,
as the Gould family manuscript went up in smoke as long ago as 1932 ; the current
edition is the end product of the two editors, great-grandson and WHS staffer, each
starting work on the manuscript independently. Gould and Kennedy’s title cel-
ebrates Otto’s birth nation and perceived lowly status by reappropriating the insults
hurled by southern partisans at the Union soldiers that they saw as mercenaries.
The role of peoples of German descent in the founding of the American nation is
a subject to which a not inconsiderable amount of study has been devoted, and the
major strength of Gould and Kennedy’s edition lies in the contribution it makes to
this body of work. As with many works that attempt to capture the imaginations of
both the general historian and the military enthusiast the book could have done with
further editing, as the minutiae that fascinate the military-minded necessarily delimit
scholarly applications. There is simply too much detail surrounding the hard facts to
make this a ready resource for most historians. While Gould’s cutting of the great-
grandfather’s memories could have been much more extensive, the excellent index
and the notes that Kennedy (no relation) provides allow the reader access to the
wider context of the Civil War, the involvement of the Wisconsin Volunteer
Infantry in it, and the battles that are described in the detail throughout the text.
University of Sussex JOE KENNEDY

Elizabeth Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, 1770–1865 (Cambridge :
Cambridge University Press, 2004, £45.00/$70.00). Pp. x+230. ISBN
0 521 842550 7.
Elizabeth Hewitt explores connections between letter-writing and the articulation

of a national identity in American antebellum literature, suggesting that authors
‘‘ turn to the genre that inscribes social intercourse in an effort to interrogate the
most crucial question of national construction : how will we be united ’’ (2).
The letter, she argues, brings together notions of ‘‘ individual sovereignty ’’ and
‘‘ common good ’’ (7). In the exchange between author and reader, the writer
can ‘‘ communicate his interests without restriction or coercion’’ and come ‘‘to a
consensus and mutual understanding with his correspondent ’’ (7).
Her book, focussing on the work of Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Jacobs, Emily Dickenson and Walt
Whitman, is an absorbing discussion of how the letter became the site for teasing
out democratic and political ideals. The result was varied notions of that ideal.
Hewitt is particularly determined to distinguish early American epistolary novels
from the more radical English and French versions. Rather than wanting to

Reviews 435
destabilize the ‘‘ national authority, ’’ most American epistolary novels depict the
‘‘ breakdown in correspondence as signaling a breakdown in sympathetic attachments
and therefore the corrosion of republican virtue on which national consolidation is
forged’’ (28, original emphasis).
Particularly fascinating is Hewitt’s exploration of abolitionist and pro-slavery
debates about the dangers of letters, waged through the pamphlet wars as well
as in the work of Harriet Jacobs. Slaveholders knew that if the postal service could
link them to other parts of the world, slaves could use letters as a mechanism to
‘‘ organize black insurrection’’ (113). For the abolitionists, the letter was a ‘‘rhetorical
mode that can best heal national union ’’ (116) and ‘‘ relay honest knowledge and
sentiment across a terrain of difference ’’ (118). Writers from each side aimed ‘‘to
correct miscommunication occasioned by the failure to know all the facts ’’ (118).
Hewitt traces the epistolary form to Walt Whitman, who turns away because
‘‘ familiar letters are no longer the textual space in which to imagine this ideal model
of nation and citizenship’’ (186). Instead the contract takes over. She ends with an
idea raised in her opening, that the dangers and anxieties of letter-writing in the
twenty-first century might not be that different from those of the antebellum era.
The Internet is ‘‘conceived as a textual form that is potentially anarchical, or
tyrannical, or capable of reconciling these political antinomies ’’ (187) in much the
same way as the antebellum letter. The post is also dangerous following the
September 11 attacks, with fears that the mail could carry biological weapons.
University of Tasmania ELIZABETH DELANEY

John Houchin, Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century
(Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2003, £45.00). Pp. 332. ISBN
0 521 81819 2.
John Houchin’s book Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century argues
that conservatives in twentieth-century America consistently perceived theatre as a
threat because of its power to transform society. Censors therefore targeted sexually
transgressive plays and plays and playwrights with radical political messages.
Houchin’s strongest chapters, two and three, together deal with the period from
1900 to 1930. These chapters provide historical context and thorough details behind
the censorship of several major plays. Placed on the context of growing concern
over prostitution, the efforts to censor four plays dealing with prostitution in 1913
and 1914 (The Lure, The Fight, The Traffic, and The House of Bondage) are discussed
in great depth. Critics and public officials, outraged at what they perceived as a
promotion of immoral behavior, effectively worked to change or eliminate offensive
scenes. Despite the censorship, however, the author effectively demonstrates that
these plays represented a new direction for the American stage, one where human
sexuality would be portrayed. As more lurid productions were produced in New
York in the 1920s, public officials increasingly took notice of the theatre. Censorship
debates often focussed on who should have the power to censor plays : the state,
local officials, or citizen organizations. Eventually, in 1927, New York State passed

436 Reviews
the Wales Padlock Law which enabled local officials to revoke the license of a
theatre if one of its productions was convicted of violating local obscenity laws. This
made the District Attorney and Police Commissioner ‘‘ unofficial censors’’ (106).
When the play Maya, about a prostitute, was produced, the Attorney General
informed the theatre owners, Lee and J. J. Shubert, that charges were going to be
filed. The Shuberts quickly forced Maya to close down.
Much of the book, however, tends to over-contextualize. The first chapter, which
discusses censorship of American theatre from colonial times through the nineteenth
century, could be done in more summary form. In addition, rather than setting the
general scene for some of the later chapters, more of the specific historical contexts
for individual cases of censorship would have been helpful. In discussing the 1960s,
for instance, the author discusses the Students for a Democratic Society at length,
without ever indicating its direct relevance to issues of censorship. Elsewhere, the
reader is often left wondering why cases of censorship occurred in certain eras.
When discussing censorship in the 1930s, the author states that ‘‘agitation for
stricter controls once again emerged ’’ (120), but does not explain why. Discussions
centering on the significance of specific cases of censorship, in addition, are lacking.
Much detail is presented on the 1968 controversial Wellesley High School pro-
duction of LeRoi Jones’s play The Slave, for instance, without an analysis of the
significance of the controversy. The book also lacks a conclusion which would help
the reader understand more concretely how censorship of theatre changed over the
course of the twentieth century.
These faults notwithstanding, scholars interested in controversial American
theatrical productions in the twentieth century will find the book to be a very good
starting point.
Kutztown University D A N I E L P. K O T Z I N

Connie Anne Kirk, Mark Twain : A Biography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
2004, $29.95). Pp. 140+xxi. ISBN 0 313 33025 5.
In ‘‘ Why Americans are not Taught History, ’’ Christopher Hitchens lamented

that American children were taught to separate history and literature, such that
they could not appreciate that literature is – can be – history ; in particular they
neglected ‘‘ the great Samuel Clemens, ’’ radical critic of imperialism, race etc., in
whose life and work so much of American history could be found. I doubt that
Connie Anne Kirk wrote her biography of Twain to satisfy Hitchens – he
would squirm at her use of such hackneyed, unbrave language as ‘‘ management
skills ’’ and ‘‘ leadership skills. ’’ Kirk’s method was, as she wrote, to synthesize
standard and familiar works (such as Justin Kaplan’s and Albert Bigelow
Paine’s biographies). In many respects, Kirk in this book answered Hitchens’s
challenge.
In her chronology, for example, Kirk listed important incidents in Samuel
Clemens’s life and pre-life alongside, in bold, ‘‘ historical ’’ events that provide a
familiar guide to American literature and history in the nineteenth and early

Reviews 437
twentieth centuries. Her readers might be frustrated, however, that Kirk did
not have the wit to gradually merge the two categories. Who can deny that the
publication of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was an American historical event?
Did Twain do more to affect the conditions of American blacks than the foundation,
in the year of Clemens’s death, of the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People ?
The appendices are mostly satisfactory: an extended bibliography, including
useful websites (but not www.twainquotes.com, of which Twain scholars may well
be fond), a selected list of Clemens’s reading material, Clemens’s family tree and a
small number of quotations largely taken from Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendars.
This has the effect of emphasizing Twain’s capacity for pithy (and possibly self-
indulgent) cynicism, when his humour, love, warmth and intensity could all have
been illustrated in a more thoughtful selection. This book could be read instead of
Stephen Leacock’s Mark Twain (1938) or Larzer Ziff’s Mark Twain (2004). I gained a
suspicion of unsatisfactory amateurism, not from Kirk’s status as an ‘‘independent
scholar, ’’ but from her assertion, from analysing catalogues, that the author of Tom
Sawyer is almost always known to academics as ‘‘ Samuel Clemens. ’’ A glance at her
own bibliography would have told her otherwise. Kirk has also written biographies
of J. K. Rowling (Kirk asserts that Rowling is more famous now than Twain ever
was) and Emily Dickinson for Greenwood Biographies ; among others in the same
series are works on Billy Graham, Oprah Winfrey, George S. Patton and Langston
Hughes. The fuller list leaves an irresistible smell of television in American
education.
Edinburgh University IAIN BORROWMAN

Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights : The Supreme Court and the
Struggle for Racial Equality (New York : Oxford University Press, 2004). Pp. 655.
ISBN 0 19 512903 2.
Michael J. Klarman’s book examines the interaction between the Supreme Court,
constitutional history and the African American struggle for freedom and equality
from the 1890s to the 1960s. Although the study is not formally broken into sections
it includes three distinct parts. The first part, chapters 1 to 3, navigates the dense
legal thicket of court decisions that shaped much of segregation law from the 1890s
up to the Second World War. The second part, chapters 4 and 5, provides greater
detail and more in-depth examination of court cases during the Second World War.
The third part, chapters 6 and 7, provides yet more detailed analysis of just one area
of focus, school desegregation, and in particular the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of
Education decision and its impact on the course of the civil rights movement.
The structure of Klarman’s study indicates its strengths and weaknesses. It is
admirably clear and accessible and sets out a credible thesis of how the Supreme
Court became increasingly important to the civil rights movement, moving from
abstinence to hesitancy to intervention to decisive action. Yet while this structure
suits Klarman’s thesis it provides an uneven survey overall. As the focus narrows to
Brown and school desegregation the book loses sight of legal developments in other

438 Reviews
areas covered earlier in the study. Likewise, the detailed coverage of Brown tends to
diminish the relative impact of earlier court rulings.
Nevertheless, if the book does not ultimately transcend the sum of its parts, the
parts themselves are impressive. Readers will welcome the detailed commentary of
segregation laws in the first part which makes for a valuable reference tool. The
second part boasts one of the best available overviews of the impact of the Second
World War on the civil rights struggle. Part 3 offers a provocative and influential
thesis on Brown’s importance that will be familiar to readers of Klarman’s earlier
published work (most notably ‘‘How Brown Changed Race Relations: The Backlash
Thesis, ’’ Journal of American History, 81 ( June 1994), 81–118), although it is worth-
while carefully scrutinizing the caveats and amendments of this revised version.
If Klarman’s book does not always provide comprehensive and convincing
answers to all of the questions that it raises, the careful, critical and skilful dissection
of what those questions should be will undoubtedly influence research agendas on
the subject for a considerable number of years to come.
Royal Holloway, University of London J O H N A. K I R K

Robert Lee, Multicultural American Literature : Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a
and Asian American Fictions (Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 2003,
£17.99). Pp 307. ISBN 07486 1227 0.
As a critical category, literary multiculturalism has, in recent years, taken more than
a few knocks. In some quarters, multiculturalism is viewed as an essentializing
gambit through which texts by writers from ‘‘ethnic ’’ backgrounds are locked into
neat, hermetically sealed ghettoes which have balkanized the discipline of literary
studies. In others, so-called ‘‘ ethnic ’’ texts are treated as exotic curiosities existing on
the periphery of the Anglo-American canonical tradition, which is never itself seen
as ethnic in nature. Many leading anthologies and scholarly studies tend to slot
writers into one or another ethnic category, while ignoring the complexities of
American racial and ethnic identities. How, then, can one square this particular
circle ? How can we recognize and value the specificity of texts emanating from
diverse cultural and racial contexts, while remaining open to the complex (and
fascinating) links between these traditions ?
Lee begins by pointing out that the term ‘‘ fiction ’’ in the book’s title includes
many genres, such as novels, novellas, stories, story-cycles, verse chronicles, and
autobiography. In the first chapter, he analyzes several important novels, drawn
from what he calls four different ‘‘ legacies, ’’ by Ralph Ellison, Scott Momaday,
Rudolfo Anaya, and Maxine Hong Kingston. This is followed by a deft and
perceptive account of ethnic autobiography, and the permutations it undergoes in
writers such as N. Scott Momaday, John Edgar Wideman and Lorene Cary, Piri
Thomas and Gloria Anzaldúa, Garrett Hongo, and Li-Young Lee, among others.
The following chapters focus on specific issues within (successively) the African
American, Native American, Chicano and Asian American traditions. In doing so,
however, he is careful to point out that these categories are deceptively wide, and
that writers may belong to more than one tradition (the case of Scott Momaday, with

Reviews 439
links to Kiowa, Cherokee, and Jemez Pueblo, comes to mind). In keeping with
recent developments in the field of cultural geography, he then shifts to an emphasis
on ethnic sites and topographies, such as Harlem, Indian Country, the Borderlands,
and Indian Town. The book concludes with a chapter on multicultural post-
modernism, and with an excellent epilogue titled ‘‘ Fictions of Whiteness ’’ on the
complexities of white ethnic identity.
Lee is dazzlingly well read and articulate, and his perceptive analyses are
guaranteed to delight and, on occasion, infuriate his readers. Multicultural American
Literature is a wonderfully intelligent contribution to the continuing debate about
the nature of the canon of United States literature.
Glasgow University SUSAN CASTILLO

Elizabeth D. Leonard, Lincoln’s Avengers : Justice, Revenge and Reunion after the
Civil War ( W. W. Norton & Company, New York and London, 2004, $14.95).
Pp. 303. ISBN 0 393 32677 2.
Professor Leonard is to be applauded for writing two books in one, for she not only
writes a superb critical analysis of the Lincoln murder but, at the same time, informs
the reader of the complexities of the reconstruction period.
Her judgement of Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, who is the central
character of the piece, seems fair and she avoids any mawkishness over the death of
Mary Surratt, simply appraising her possible guilt as she does with all the other
accused.
The merits of various theories are discussed: the possibility that Vice President
Johnson might have been involved to gain the presidency or the explanations of
General Grant’s failure to attend, as planned, Ford’s Theatre on the fateful night
and the idea that the Confederate government, and President Jefferson Davis in
particular, might have been involved in the plot. Her conclusion that Booth’s
decision to kill Lincoln was made but a few days before the actual act and that
only one or two associates knew of the plan is based on first-class research and
would seem to finally put to rest the conspiracy theories. Leonard’s assessment of
the arguments over how the South should be reconstructed and who should be
punished is informative, clear and concise. She makes no judgement on the men
involved, leaving that to the reader. My only complaint is her failure to give
William H. Seward, secretary of state under both President Lincoln and President
Johnson, a more prominent role in the story. As the only major politician to
survive the tempestuous years from 1850 to 1869 physically and politically, he
deserves more than the passing mentions he receives here. Had it not been for
the fact that an attempt was made on his life the night Lincoln was killed, it is
doubtful he would have received a mention at all. This omission can be forgiven,
however, when one considers the work for what it is, a clear and succinct analysis
of a complicated subject, a subject that has needed a work such as this for some
time.
Manchester Metropolitan University ALAN LOWE

440 Reviews
Patricia Barker Lerch. Waccamaw Legacy : Contemporary Indians Fight for Survival
(Tuscaloosa : University of Alabama Press, 2004, $29.95). Pp. xiv+168. ISBN
0 8173 5124 8.
The Waccamaw Siouan tribe in North Carolina is one of any number of groups of
Native people in the United States whose tribal status is contested at local, state, and
national levels, most visibly enacted currently by the struggle of the Lumbee Indians
in North Carolina to gain full federal recognition. Waccamaw Legacy traces the history
of that contested status, exploring issues such as the origins and provenance of the
community, their relationship with North Carolina’s other Indian communities,
their ties to traditional culture, and the origin and accuracy of their moniker.
In many ways, Lerch offers a standard narrative history – its minute detail is at
times relatively dry, the complexity of relationships inevitably confusing. Yet
the significance of this narrative to the wider narratives of self-determination and
self-governance is clear, revolving as it does around the Waccamaw Bill, presented
to Congress in 1950 amidst the rising popularity of Termination. Frequently
returning to this pivotal point, Lerch builds a chronological story of the progression
of these people (loosely termed the Cape Fear Indians) from contact, through
the various stages of settlement of the Cape Fear area, including changes in self-
identification, from Cape Fear, to Cherokee, to ‘‘ Wide Awake, ’’ to Siouan Indians,
stressing all the while that the Waccamaw Siouan believe the only significant change
in this time has been the name by which they have been identified.
The story Lerch tells is not to any significant degree the ‘‘people’s ’’ story, insofar
as the majority of her sources are past historians, anthropologists, and eth-
nographers. As such, this book catalogues the attempts of scholars, among whom
the professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina is merely one in a
long (and distinguished) succession, to identify and ‘‘ authenticate ’’ the heritage of
the Waccamaw Siouan. There is an obvious irony inherent in this. Lerch states,
several times, that her book is about the efforts of the Waccamaw Siouan to self-
identify. And yet, as she equally frequently shows, the state and federal recognition
they desire in order to protect, first, their right to independence in schooling, and
then their fragile land base, has depended on this historic and scientific proof. It is
for this reason that the tribe engaged Lerch in her work, and the resulting text
ultimately represents a fascinating overview of the long-standing relationships
between the tribe and their various scholarly touchstones.
University of Kent DAVID STIRRUP

Alan Lovell and Gianluca Sergi, Making Films in Contemporary Hollywood
(London: Hodder Arnold, 2005, £16.99 paper). Pp. 162. ISBN 0 340 80983 3.
As Alan Lovell and Gianluca Sergi’s Making Films in Contemporary Hollywood indicates,
generating a balanced assessment of Hollywood filmmaking as a collaborative
process is no easy feat, given the egos involved, and the persistence of the director

Reviews 441
as a focus for accounts of cinematic creativity. For the film lecturer faced with
undergraduates already schooled in the language of cinema ‘‘authorship, ’’ their
book provides a succinct and thought-provoking look at Hollywood filmmaking as
a collective process. The introduction promises an investigation into the parts of
Hollywood that other critics fail to reach, namely the wide range of contributors
to moviemaking sidelined by most introductory guides to film studies, and the book
is structured as a series of investigative case studies in collective creativity. The first
is a brief look at ‘‘ The Politics of Filmmaking ’’, which extends the notion of
creative input to encompass ten contributors : directors, producers, screenwriters,
stars, production designers, cinematographers, editors, visual effects artists, sound
designers and composers, all of whom are given space in chapter 3 (‘‘ What Do
Filmmakers Think about Filmmaking ? ’’) to explain their involvement. While it
is hard to argue with this move, the exclusion of costume designers and stunt
coordinators from the list is debatable, and omission of the latter, a coalition of
whom failed in 2005 to persuade AMPAS to introduce an Oscar to recognize their
creative contribution, seems ironic since the subsequent case study, on ‘‘Oscars and
Aesthetics ’’, addresses the complex issue of professional recognition. This useful
chapter underlines the role played by the academy and the professional guilds
in supporting the hierarchical division of labour and reward that structures the
industry, and also indicates how much more research should be undertaken in this
area. Chapter 5 discusses three books, The Devil’s Candy, Monster and Final Cut in
order to draw on first-hand accounts of contemporary filmmaking, while the final
chapter sketches assessments of Jurassic Park, Chinatown and When Harry Met Sally as
examples of how taking account of collective input impacts on the practice of film
criticism. These are uniformly excellent, and stumble only when turning from an
assessment of creative contribution to the question of ‘‘ quality, ’’ and nowhere is this
more apparent than in the concluding remark that ‘‘ the majority of Hollywood films
are undoubtedly of limited interest ’’ (118). This strikes something of a false note in
relation to the book’s overall tone, as even the worst-made films can be fascinating
and entertaining, but perhaps the biggest loser in the perpetual obsession with
‘‘ above-the-line ’’ talent is not the undervalued make-up artist or hairdresser to the
stars, but the cheap labour employed in outsourced post-production in China, India
or Brazil. The challenge is to try integrating that into the seminar discussion of
‘‘ Tarantino’s ’’ Kill Bill Volume 2.
University of Exeter JAMES LYONS

Margaretta M. Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution : Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in
Early America (Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005, $39.95
cloth). Pp. 360, 10 colour plates, 104 black-and-white illustrations. ISBN
0 8122 3842 7.
In this beautifully produced book, Margaretta Lovell joins Robert Blair St. George,
Laurel Ulrich, and Susan Stabile in reading the world of objects in colonial America,
teasing out what St. George has named the ‘‘ poetics of implication, ’’ and what

442 Reviews
Lovell herself calls ‘‘ situat[ing] the act of creation _ and the act of consumption
within communities, specifically _ the extended patriarchal family ’’ (2). Through
close analysis of objects, primarily portraits, Lovell’s objective is to show how these
objects ‘‘ generated meaning and communities of communication ’’ and what they
can tell us ‘‘about important matters on which the written record is silent ’’ (269).
These are ambitious goals, and Lovell’s case studies succeed to various degrees
in their achievement. The chapters on portraiture are by far the most effective. In
examining portraits of New England’s urban mercantile elites, Lovell encourages
readers to understand these images as ‘‘ a kind of magic replication, instrumental in
negotiating family identity, ’’ employing ‘‘the body as a site of identity, physical
presence, and memory ’’ (25–26). For example, John Singleton Copley’s 1770
portrait of Boston merchant Joshua Henshaw, which at first seems a conventional
depiction of a middle-aged businessman, constitutes a performance, not a reflection,
of Henshaw’s eminence. Henshaw was indeed a man of wealth and position,
but, according to Lovell, the former was threatened by his growing support
of the revolutionary cause, and the latter was undermined by a family heritage of
disinheritance, treason, and murder. By tracing the portrait’s transmission over
generations, Lovell argues that it became a site of the creation and transmission of
family identity, ‘‘an active visual admonition ’’ (132) to posterity. Equally valuable
are the chapters in which Lovell employs a series of eighteenth-century portraits
of gentry families to chart changing ideas about familial relations, and in which
she reads three Copley portraits of Boston women in what appears to be the same
blue dress, an endeavour which enables her to reconstruct an intricate web of
patronage, identity formation, and personal and commercial alliance.
Some later chapters are less successful in supporting Lovell’s ideas about
the interaction of the human and the material. Chapter 6, in which she studies the
emergence of drawing as a site of gentility for artists and amateurs alike, is intriguing,
but would have benefited from clearer connection to her wider concerns. The final
chapter, on Newport cabinet-makers, resembles Laurel Ulrich’s account of Hannah
Barnard’s cupboard in The Age of Homespun, but Lovell is far less successful in
unfolding the meanings which can be teased out from the creation and transmission
of household objects. These caveats notwithstanding, Art in a Season of Revolution
brilliantly illuminates the dynamic lives and afterlives of seemingly static objects,
and deftly explores transatlantic traffic in artistic production in an era of cultural
change.
University of Manchester NATALIE ZACEK

D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America : A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of
History. Volume 4, Global America, 1915–2000 (New Haven : Yale University Press,
2004, £27.50). Pp. 467. ISBN 0 300 10432 4.
With this volume Professor Meinig completes his remarkable geographical history
of ‘‘America, ’’ which is to say the United States and its antecedents. First came
the Atlantic America of the colonial period, followed by the era of Continental America

Reviews 443
in which the United States subdued the continent, and then Transcontinental America
during which an industrializing people began to reach beyond their national
boundaries. In the final stage of this evolution the United States became a world
power and can best be understood in a global perspective.
Part One of this volume treats the technological advances of the last century,
from the ‘‘ automotive revolution ’’ with its road systems and its restructuring of
industry and settlement, through the ‘‘neotechnic ’’ industrialism of electrification,
radio, telephone and air service, and the remarkable acceleration of communication
made possible by these technologies and eventually even more by the Internet. The
successive transport and communication systems tended in the first half of the
twentieth century to build on earlier patterns, but in the second half were part of
a complex restructuring process whereby the country became better integrated
and geographically balanced, if at the same time increasingly segmented. Part Two
examines the growth, composition and movements of populations and the regional
characteristics of the United States (with attention to ethnic and religious detail),
and the reshaping of the nation. By the end of the twentieth century, it is suggested,
while American society remained rich in its variety, the country was no longer
dominated by a major (or ‘‘ core ’’) region and no region was subordinate. Part Three
addresses the ways in which American growth and power touched or interacted with
the outside world, succinctly placing the foreign policy of the United States in a
geographical perspective. Both world wars and the Cold War figure prominently in
this story. The book is phenomenally well researched, and one of its strengths is
its wealth of fascinating illustrations. Interesting episodes of all kinds are glimpsed
in this commanding synthesis – Warren Harding marking a new era by riding to
his inaugural in a motor car rather than a carriage, the role of air conditioners in
promoting the peopling of the sunbelt, the ‘‘ unnatural leaps ’’ in Indian population
towards the end of the century as individuals are invited by the Census Bureau to
select their own ethnic identity. Professor Meinig has concluded his magnum opus
in fine style.
Lancaster University M . J. H E A L E

Linda Mizejewski, Hardboiled and High Heeled : The Woman Detective in Popular
Culture (New York and London : Routledge, 2004, £55.00 hard, £13.99 paper).
Pp. 228. ISBN 0 415 96970 0, 0415 96971 9.
Written partly as a fan’s tribute to a favourite icon and partly as a scholarly
monograph, this book explores bestselling novels, television, and mainstream films.
Mizejewski traces the ambivalent relationship with class, gender, and sexuality that
the female detective embodies, and explores how she has crossover appeal between
lesbian and heterosexual audiences.
Mizejewski’s breezy style, imitative of a hardboiled novel, sometimes works
against the text, but this may be a result of trying to capture two different audiences.
For example, her insertions of personal details – as when she reveals that the setting
of a scene in the Silence of the Lambs was her hometown drugstore – reflect a fan’s

444 Reviews
desire for more intimate contact with the subject of her review. At other times,
though, Mizejewski maintains a more scholarly discourse ; her exploration of Sue
Grafton and Patricia Cornwell’s carefully constructed public personae in chapter 2
is a case in point.
Chapter 3 focusses on television programmes from the 1960s to the 1980s,
beginning with Honey West and Police Woman. These serials, she argues, compromised
their (supposed) feminist intentions by ensuring that the detectives in question
were portrayed (or, in Mizejewski’s recurring phrase, ‘‘ pictured ’’) as feminine and
unthreatening male fantasies. Only Cagney and Lacey offered a more realistic assess-
ment of gender politics. Chapter 4 moves into the 1990s, focussing on Prime Suspect,
The X-Files, and Profiler as more complicated texts that move the boundary from
being seen (as woman) as, to seeing, the generic position of the (male) detective.
Chapter 5 explores a variety of films from Sheba, Baby, which featured the
first professional female PI, to V. I. Warshawski, exploring racial as well as gender
constructions. Mizejewski also explores the failure of mainstream cinema to get
beyond clumsy stereotypes. Chapter 6 analyzes female action films, psychological
thrillers, and comedies. This shows how far the female detective has come from
her earliest incarnations, but also means that discussions of these texts are
sometimes rushed. The final chapter focusses both on The Silence of the Lambs and
Hannibal, and Mizejewski ends by pronouncing that the best female detectives
are uncomfortable with their roles, fight against gender preoccupations, and avoid
traditional romantic conclusions. This conclusion comes a bit quickly, and not
unexpectedly.
Overall, it is a book that will appeal to the undergraduate market, but its
occasionally chatty style may, unfortunately, keep it from fully engaging the
academic audience that it is seeking.
University of Central Lancashire HEIDI SLETTEDAHL MACPHERSON

James E. Perone, Woodstock : An Encyclopedia of the Music and Art Fair (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 2005, £39.99). Pp. xvi+231. ISBN 0 313 33057 3.
The first hundred pages of this book are taken up by four essays, the longest of
which gives a narrative of the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair. Shorter chapters
address the 1994 and 1999 attempts to replicate the Woodstock experience, and a
brief introductory chapter skims through eight other music events of the late 1960s
and early 1970s, ranging from the Beatles’ appearance on the roof of the Apple
headquarters to the concert for Bangladesh, via such locations as Monterey,
Newport, Rhode Island, Atlantic City, Altamont and the Isle of Wight.
The rest of the book is taken up by various lists. In a sixty-four-page ‘‘A-to-Z of
the Woodstock Music and Art Fair ’’ the author lists much of the information
already incorporated into the previous narrative chapters. A fourteen-page appendix
of ‘‘ Woodstock Set Lists ’’ has also been extensively quoted earlier within the
content of earlier chapters. It is supplemented by another appendix of ‘‘Recordings

Reviews 445
and Films ’’ of the Woodstock events, complete with track lists. A twenty-one page
Annotated Bibliography precedes the volume’s Index.
One puts down this book with the feeling of having read the author’s file cards
in several different formats, though never in a form that brings much in the way
of originality to the materials. The approach is entirely descriptive reportage, and
while the first four chapters attempt to place the Woodstock events into some kind
of context there is no strongly expressed theory and little analysis that would give
the reader a sense of the place of any of the Woodstock events within the history
or politics of their times.
The author does provide evidence of the speculative business underpinnings on
which the Woodstock Fair was built. He identifies some of the strictly pragmatic
decisions that were made before and during the event, adding a leavening to the
common and rather romantic vision of the original Woodstock. That having been
said, this is still a thin work and a repetitive read.
De Montfort University and the British Library PHILIP JOHN DAVIES

Kendall R. Phillips, Projected Fears : Horror Films and American Culture ( Westport,
CT : Praeger, 2005, £22.99). Pp. 240. ISBN 0 275 98353 6.
The premise for Kendall R. Phillips’s Projected Fears is contained within the Paul
Wells statement he includes early in his introduction : ‘‘The history of the horror
film is essentially a history of anxiety in the twentieth century. ’’ Phillips chooses the
ten films that he believes have signified a shift in the genre, the moments when
that which was scary has become tired or comic and a new kind of demon is
needed to tap into a new set of cultural anxieties and fears. The films he heralds as
achieving this are Dracula (1931), The Thing from Another World (1951), Psycho (1960),
Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Exorcist (1973), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974),
Halloween (1978), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Scream (1996), and The Sixth Sense
(1999).
To these films, Phillips applies his own theory of ‘‘ resonant violation, ’’ exploring
the ways the films both resonate with the broader cultural moments in which they
are released, and how they violate our expectations of how horror works and thus
usher in a new kind of fear. There is no arguing with Phillips’s choice of films and, as
he says, many would add their own favourites to the list. But as films that begin a
new cycle of terror, his choices are excellent. Using each film in its time as the scope
for each chapter, Phillips creates historically convincing arguments that touch upon
the key issues of the moment and explore how the films, often in subtle ways, play
out generational, national and regional fears. Dracula, for example, is revealed as an
‘‘ ethnic monstrosity, ’’ a ‘‘horrific creature arising from the Balkans, ’’ preying on
both anti-Semitism and resonating with post-First World War fears of old Europe ;
Halloween’s killer, Michael Meyers, is a late 1970s punisher of sexually liberated
teenage babysitters in suburbia.
There are places in the text, however, that do not live up to the rest. The structure
of each chapter, with synopses, historical backgrounds and readings of the films,

446 Reviews
sometimes lends itself to repetition. The often very short sections under the head-
ings of ‘‘ Cultural Contexts ’’ can, now and again, feel too general and inconclusive,
and the phenomena of successful remakes, as in the case of Dracula and The Thing,
were not, in my opinion, explored thoroughly enough. But these are small criticisms
of a most enjoyable book that will hopefully achieve a wide readership and increase
the horror fan’s awareness of why the genre is so important.
University of Glasgow JOHN ARMSTRONG

James Roman, From Daytime to Primetime : The History of American Television pro-
grams (Westport, Connecticut : Greenwood Press, 2005, £28.99). Pp. xxvii and
345. ISBN 0 3133 1972 3.
From Daytime to Primetime offers a descriptive history of American television, with

thematic chapters devoted to key television genres, such as the Western, the medical
drama, situation comedies, drama and soap opera, reality TV, the talk show, chil-
dren’s TV, science fiction, news, docudrama and sport. Although the principal focus
of the book is television content, several chapters consider industrial and social
factors that have shaped the form of television programmes – such as the evolution
of television from radio broadcasting and the relationship between the television
networks and Hollywood – as well as the representation of race and gender in
television programming and current trends in television broadcasting. The scope of
the book is, therefore, extremely broad and it is clearly intended to offer a general
introduction to American television rather than a critical account of particular,
well-defined aspects of it.
While this breadth of range makes the book a useful resource for new students
of television and US culture – particularly in its inventorying of long-forgotten
television programmes that played significant roles in the evolution of familiar
genres – the lack of an overarching thesis gives the book a fragmented structure that
makes it better suited to ‘‘ dipping in ’’ than to reading straight through. Additionally,
there is a tendency to repetition where particular programmes are of interest
both generically and for other reasons. The book’s treatment of the 1970s African
American situation comedy Sanford and Son is exemplary : the programme is men-
tioned in chapters dealing with both racial representation and the situation comedy,
but there is no real attempt to link the discussion of each of these aspects of the
show, to consider whether the situation comedy genre might have opened up new
possibilities for making African Americans more visible on television, or to make
connections between the programme or the genre and the wider context of US
culture during that decade.
Ultimately this is the most frustrating aspect of Roman’s book, which repeatedly
lights on important aspects of American television history that could be fruitfully
explored in greater depth but fails to do so. Although it proclaims its intent to
‘‘ analyze various television program genres as arbitrators of American values and
their influence on behaviour, ’’ analysis is precisely what is lacking in this book

Reviews 447
and this absence limits its appeal to scholars and more advanced students of
television.
London Metropolitan University M I K E C H O P R A- G A N T

Mary Ruggie, Marginal to Mainstream : Alternative Medicine in America (Cambridge :
Cambridge Univeristy Press, 2004 price £17.95). Pp. xv+232. ISBN
0 521 542227.
Mary Ruggie examines how funding and research have been implemented to in-
vestigate the safety and efficacy of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).
Ruggie traces the history of CAM in America and demonstrates how CAM con-
tinues to be subjected to scientific research testing, in order to be accepted by, and
integrated into, conventional medical practice. Much of the basis for the book stems
from a 1995 conference in which participants made some headway in classifying
CAM terms.
Ruggie’s book starts by contrasting how science is perceived as having a superior
status in society, legitimizing claims, by proving them with statistical results that
can be repeated in measurable trials; whereas CAM has been perceived in the past
by the American Medical Association in terms such as ‘‘ quackery, ’’ ‘‘ sorcery, ’’ and
‘‘ voodoo, ’’ with reference to cults.
Ruggie demonstrates how CAM as a holistic way of life is becoming increasingly
popular in America. The popularity of CAM is evidenced by numerous medical
schools offering courses in CAM, the profusion of published literature on CAM,
manifest media interest in CAM, government support for researching funding
(which increases yearly – revealing $2 million in 1992, comparable with $247.6
million in 2002), and increased public spending : ‘‘ Americans are currently spending
more than $20 billion on dietary supplements alone ’’ (43). Ruggie explores different
types of CAM, including naturopathy, yoga, meditation, dietary supplements,
acupuncture, homeopathy, tai chi and qigong. Ruggie points out how public’s self-
help usage of CAM, and desire for autonomy of their own treatments, has created an
interest amongst physicians an in turn a response of financial coverage by insurance
companies.
Throughout the book, Ruggie looks at the difficulty of subjecting the non-
medical CAM to conventional medical standards (with sham procedures) and
claims that because of its background history, CAM will always be subjected to
more rigorous testing than conventional medical trails to prove its worth. In
chapter 6 Ruggie’s interesting descriptions of exciting new CAM research trials,
which had effectively taken into account how to create controls, were disappoint-
ingly followed time and time again with anticlimactic statements, regarding either
the study being so far incomplete or the research findings not being published
yet.
Ruggie concludes that whilst CAM is becoming ‘‘mainstream ’’ and will more
frequently be integrated to work alongside conventional medicine, particularly
in a preventative sense (including specific clinics set up to combine both),

448 Reviews
CAM is unlikely to have equality with conventional medicine or to completely
replace it.
University of Exeter E M M A L. K I L K E L L Y

Beth Barton Schweiger and Donald G. Mathews (eds.), Religion in the American
South : Protestants and Others in History and Culture (Chapel Hill and London :
University of North Carolina Press, 2004, £42.50 cloth, £14.50 paper). Pp. 340.
ISBN 0 8078 2906 4, 0 8078 5570 7.
The subtitle of this showcase of recent scholarship indicates two of its characteristic
themes. On the one hand, we reminded that English Protestantism has not been
the only religious tradition that has left its mark on the region ; the importance of
Native American, African, Jewish and Catholic beliefs and practices are beginning
to be recognized. On the other, it is evident that the more familiar Evangelical
tradition has come under increasingly critical scrutiny – as a force that both
oppresses and empowers its followers (especially women and blacks), often at the
same time.
The ten essays – organized chronologically according to their subject matter –
take us from the colonial period to the 1960s. Several contributors attend closely to
the personal dimensions of religious experience, drawing on lesser-known autobio-
graphical writings. Elsewhere, life stories serve as the pretext for more general
reflections on neglected aspects of southern religion, especially its modernity : its
secularization, bureaucratization and commodification.
While all of the contributions provide snapshots of the authors’ more detailed
research in recent or forthcoming monographs, sometimes a little awkwardly
condensed, the collection includes three longer essays that develop more sustained
and assured arguments. Lynn Lyerly examines the work of black and white
women within and beyond the church bureaucracies, deftly exploring the some-
times conflicting impulses of a ‘‘ proper mother ’’ and a ‘‘proper wife. ’’ In what is
effectively a genealogy of the civil rights movement, Paul Harvey identifies carni-
valistic ‘‘liminal moments ’’ where segregation was breached (especially in the early
Holiness and Pentecostal churches, but leaving their mark on later gospel music
and music influenced by it) and the more direct challenge to racism found in the
middle-class initiatives such as the Commission on Interracial Cooperation and its
successors.
But the collection’s outstanding centerpiece is provided by Donald G. Mathews’s
provocative yet subtle observations on lynching – understood not as a secular
practice that white southern evangelicals had views about, but as a ritual that pro-
ceeded from a nexus of sacred beliefs that were beyond question. Lynching, he
argues, was a primal. Christian act, that nevertheless could not anticipate the
way African Americans transformed the victim into an innocent martyr, punished
not for his alleged sins, but for belonging to a particular race. As a guide to
new developments in the study of southern religion, this book is invaluable – and

Reviews 449
its rich bibliographical detail warmly welcomes the student who wishes to learn
more.
Nottingham Trent University ALASDAIR PETTINGER

David Seed, Brainwashing : The Fictions of Mind Control: A Study of Novels and Films
Since World War II (Kent, OH : Kent State University Press, 2004, $54.95).
Pp. 325. ISBN 0 87338 813 5.
Kathleen Taylor, Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control (Oxford : Oxford
University Press, 2004, £18.99). Pp. 324. ISBN 0 192 80496 0.
The term ‘‘brainwashing’’ was coined by CIA agent Edward Hunter in 1950
to describe whatever process of mind alteration had gone on in Chinese prisoner-
of-war camps during the Korean War, causing American soldiers to re-emerge as
seemingly loyal Communists. Since then the term has been applied to all manner of
scenarios involving the involuntary psychological influence that turns individuals
into compliant puppets, from cults to subliminal advertising. The central question
that the notion of brainwashing raises is whether it actually exists, or whether it is
just a paranoid fantasy born of Cold War conspiracy fears.
Taylor’s basic concern is to dispel the myths surrounding the idea of brainwash-
ing. Looking at a range of case studies, she argues that there is no need to invoke the
notion of brainwashing as a mysterious and fear-inducing explanation of last resort
because all the examples can be explained by well-known processes of emotional
and mental influence documented in social psychological research. In effect, Taylor
concludes that brainwashing is less scary than people might think because it is in
fact not some magical, secret and ultra-efficient technique of thought control out of
the pages of Cold War propaganda or science-fiction fantasies, but it is also
more worrying precisely because the processes of influence are so mundane and
ubiquitous. Taylor’s detailed analysis of the evidence from neuroscience might help
diffuse some of the more fantastical fears about brainwashing, but the evidence of
how the brain actually functions also serves to undermine the comforting faith that
an individual’s mind is sacrosanct and impregnable – the very faith that has usually
made brainwashing seem so scary. She concludes the book by offering advice on
how as individuals and societies we can minimize the risk of unwanted mind control
(whether political, religious or commercial), without resorting to wearing a home-
made tinfoil helmet.
The story that Seed uncovers in his painstakingly detailed treatment of fictional
accounts of brainwashing is a shift from fears about an alien threat to American
minds and values during the Cold War to fears that brainwashing might well have
taken root actually within American society. Even if at first the notion of brain-
washing was nothing more than Cold War propaganda cynically promoted to
reinforce popular fears of the ruthless immorality of communism and to divert
attention from the embarrassing possibility that US soldiers had defected willingly,
the irony is that very soon the US military and intelligence agencies began to believe

450 Reviews
their own paranoid fantasies, conjuring up the equivalent of a ‘‘ missile gap’’ in
psychological warfare, a literalization of the ‘‘battle for men’s minds. ’’
Proceeding via a mixture of extended analysis and one-page potted summaries
of a very wide range of popular and literary texts, Seed documents how all kinds of
everyday social processes such as advertising and psychotherapy came to be seen
as coercive indoctrination akin to brainwashing. The chapter on One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest and The Bell Jar, for example, is particularly strong, offering a clear
account of the use of brainwashing metaphors in those novels, a dimension of
these and other books that now seems obvious (until you realize that few critics have
called attention to it in any detailed way before). Drawing on Timothy Melley’s
Empire of Conspiracy : The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (2000), Seed shows how
the American ideology of possessive individualism provides the fuel for the repeated
panics about any erosion of individual agency and identity that litter postwar popular
and literary culture. Like Taylor, Seed concludes that even if brainwashing never
actually existed in quite the way it was imagined, then faith in an inviolable self is
also a fantasy.
University of Manchester PETER KNIGHT

Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival : Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World
(Cambridge, MA and London : Harvard University Press, 2005, £14.95).
Pp. 302. ISBN 0 674 01689 0.
In what may be viewed as a prequel to Jon Sensbach’s first study of Afro-Moravians
(A Separate Canaan, 1998), Rebecca’s Revival is an illuminating book that traces the
embryonic beginnings of black Christianity. Sensbach’s title figure, Rebecca, was the
product of mixed parentage and began her life in Antigua as a slave. She learned
to read, was granted her freedom, and became a Moravian missionary to the slave
community of St. Thomas, which had experienced a prolonged but unsuccessful
uprising of Amina slaves only a few years before her work began. She later traveled
with her first husband on a pilgrimage to Germany. After his death, Rebecca and
her second husband established a mission on Africa’s Gold Coast, where they both
died under the shadow of Fort Christiansborg.
Moravian missionaries were openly critical of the slaveholding class when they
first arrived in St. Thomas, and they encouraged converted slaves to use Christianity
to invert the existing power relationship on the plantations. However, imprisonment
and mob violence forced them to tone down their rhetoric, and missionaries like
Rebecca refused to attack the institution of slavery because they believed that it was
ordained by God. They emphasized the redeeming power of Christ’s word rather
than the liberating implications of universal spiritual equality. While Moravians were
the first and most effective evangelizers of slaves, they were reluctant to become
involved in the international movement against slavery and the slave trade.
However, Moravian emphasis on spiritual equality also offered black women like
Rebecca access to spiritual power and authority. Women had their own meetings
and leadership core, and they served as evangelicals to other women. Rebecca may

Reviews 451
have even been the first black woman ordained in Western Christianity when she
was made a deaconess in 1746.
Some readers may be surprised at the lack of African influence on black
Christianity. Though Sensbach discusses the centrality of African systems of men-
torship and kinship to the incorporation of new Africans into the black church, he
does not examine how African cosmological or eschatological beliefs fared when
exposed to Moravian Christianity. Nevertheless, this is both a thoroughly researched
and elegantly written book. Sensbach marshals manuscript sources from
Pennsylvania, Denmark, Germany, and the West Indies, navigating the same
multilingual challenges that Rebecca and other missionaries faced in the Atlantic
world. Rebecca’s Revival demonstrates that the most important actors in the spread of
black Christianity were not white missionaries, but black evangelicals themselves.
University of New Hampshire E D W A R D E. A N D R E W S

Eric Smoodin, Regarding Frank Capra : Audience, Celebrity, and American Film
Studies, 1930–1960 (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2004, £16.50 paper).
Pp. 320. ISBN 0 8223 3394 5.
Frank Capra had a motto he quoted many times in his career and later in his
memoirs. ‘‘The audience is always right, ’’ he said, suggesting that individuals (he
meant critics) were no replacement for the reactions of a crowd when watching a
movie. Capra’s faith in his audience was such that he maintained literally hundreds
of letters from fans throughout his life. As well as the usual plaudits and requests,
however, this fan mail offered many alternative perspectives on his films, and
showed the way images and values were transposed onto an audience that for
the most part regarded the director as the last word in 1930s social and cultural
commentary.
Capra deposited the letters with the rest of his papers at the Wesleyan University
in Connecticut, and in his new book, Regarding Frank Capra, Eric Smoodin has done
a remarkable job of exhuming a huge chunk of this correspondence. Smoodin
demonstrates the worth of the exploration not only for a re-examination of Capra,
but as material that contributes to an evaluation of American cinema in the first
half of the twentieth century, and the state of film studies as an academic
discipline thereafter. In previous work the author has alluded to the connections
audiences had with specific Capra films, notably Mr. Smtih Goes to Washington and Meet
John Doe. But in this book Smoodin widens his gaze to consider, in a broader sense,
the impact of society upon Capra in particular and cinema in general. He addresses
questions of social space, of gendered publicity emanating from stars and texts,
and overall constructs a persuasive theoretical framework for ‘‘the architecture of
reception. ’’
Implicit within this argument is the relationship between the corporate and the
artistic, between the pressure for commercial product and the need to establish
oneself as a creative force, a dilemma Capra never quite shook off in his career. More
explicitly Smoodin asserts that Capra’s films, and the assessments they invited

452 Reviews
from his audience, tackled the forces of modernity in American life. Indeed, the
written assessments of theatre managers concerning the popularity of each film and
the studio distribution policy for particular movies followed a strong line of social
class and gender politics that both targeted the key audience for Capra’s pictures and
also sublimated their wider curiosity towards social problems. In short these con-
trolling forces proselytized an ‘‘ American way of thinking, ’’ as one fan noted in a
letter to the director. The correspondence emphasised an educational role for
Capra and marketing and publicity forces of the studio played on the perceived
optimism of his redemptive narratives.
Smoodin’s text stretches impressively across the full gamut of Capra’s output,
from the classic films to the educational shorts of the 1960s. All in all it is an
engrossing work and one that should contribute immensely to these prominent
questions of audience reception and the academic film studies agenda. It is also a
book worthy of the director’s contribution to American cinema and should be
invaluable reading for film scholars of all persuasions.
University of Manchester IAN SCOTT

Randy L. Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar : An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey
(Cambridge, MA and London : Harvard University Press, 2004, £14.95).
Pp. 189. ISBN 0 674 01312 3.
Little Ephraim Robin John and Ancona Robin Robin John were ‘‘ princes ’’ of a
prominent slave-trading family from Old Calabar, along the west coast of Africa.
A 1767 conflict with rival slave-traders led to the brothers’ being kidnapped
by Europeans slavers, transported to the Caribbean, and sold into slavery. There
followed an extraordinary series of adventures. The two princes escaped and fled
to Virginia, where they were promptly re-enslaved, only to escape again. Landing
in Bristol, England, capital of Britain’s slave trade, they entered into a protracted
legal battle. Assisted by anti-slavery Methodists (with help from former business
associates), the two princes eventually won their freedom and returned home –
where they renewed to their old profession : kidnapping Africans and selling them
to into Atlantic slavery.
Randy L. Sparks skilfully reconstructs this remarkable story. Heavily influenced
by Ira Berlin’s notion of ‘‘Atlantic Creole, ’’ Sparks sees the princes as products of
the cosmopolitan, polyglot, multilingual Atlantic sphere. Sparks weaves a vast range
of historiography into the narrative : from West African culture to Atlantic
merchants, from Caribbean slavery to its North American varieties. Sparks is at his
best when discussing West African culture and British Methodism, while the context
is thinnest during the princes’ Caribbean and Virginian experiences. Despite some
uneven writing, the book remains engaging and well suited for undergraduate
readers.
The only disappointment is Sparks’s failure fully to confront the story’s tantalizing
moral ambiguities. Falling back on traditional anti-slavery narratives, Sparks calls the
princes’ conversion to Christianity ‘‘ an act of defiance, ’’ suggesting that Christianity

Reviews 453
offered a ‘‘ language of protest, liberation, and reform ’’ grounded in ‘‘ the link
between Christian faith and freedom ’’ (115, 113, 110). Perhaps. But then how to
account for the book’s startling conclusion ? It simply lies outside the conceptual
bounds of that narrative. Sparks addresses the conundrum by gesturing to
an ‘‘ African system of ethics that their conversion to Christianity could not entirely
erase ’’ (130–31) – as though either European ethics or Christianity precluded
involvement in the slave trade.
Were the princes ‘‘victims ’’ of the slave trade (5) or were they its villains ? The
interest of this story lies precisely in the ambiguity between the two.
Perhaps these unanswered questions are a strength rather than a weakness,
however, for they only highlight the complexities of this fascinating tale. By
providing a personalized dimension to often abstract accounts of the Atlantic
world, this book should prove a valuable addition to the growing literature on
Atlantic history.
University of Montreal FELIX FURSTENBERGER

Lynn Spigel and Jan Olssen (eds.), Television After TV : Essays on a Medium in
Transition (Durham, NC and London, Duke University Press, 2004, £17.95).
Pp. 480. ISBN 0 8223 3393 7.
The editors of this volume have assembled an impressive array of some of the
key names in academic television studies with the aim of examining and in-
terrogating the past, present and future of television. The first section focuses on
industry concerns, and features contributions from John Caldwell, examining the
importance of television content to the medium’s survival in a period of tech-
nological convergence; Charlotte Brunsden, who focuses on the ‘‘ lifestyle’’ shows
that occupy the 8.00–9.00 p.m. slot on British television ; Jeffrey Sconce, on new
forms of viewer literacy demanded by the television text ; William Boddy, con-
sidering advertisers’ responses to technologies that enable viewers to evade the
traditional advertising ‘‘slot, ’’ and Lisa Parks, examining gender and ‘‘flexible
microcasting. ’’ Section two considers the social contexts of television use and the
impact of technologies on democracy and the public sphere. William Uricchio
examines the uses of television within changing patterns of everyday life, Anna
McCarthy focuses on television viewing in waiting rooms and other public
spaces, Jostein Gripsrud evaluates the digital challenge to broadcast television and
Anna Everett discusses the uses of television and the Internet made by the
organizers of, and participants in, the Million Woman March. The book’s third
section turns to issues of television and nation. Jan Olsson provides a historical
account of the introduction of television to Sweden in the 1950s, while Michael
Curtin turns the historical gaze towards three ‘‘ media capitals’’ – Chicago, LA
and Hong Kong – in order to examine changing patterns of production, distri-
bution and exhibition. David Morley draws on his earlier work on the con-
struction of a sense of home – or Heimat – to examine the role of broadcasting

454 Reviews
in producing this sense in an age of displaced community. Completing this
section of the book, Priscilla Peña Ovalle recounts the strategies of detournement
employed by Pocho.com in aid of their recuperation of the formerly pejorative
term ‘‘ Pocho ’’ as an elective – and resistant – Mexican American identity. The
final section considers the pedagogical potential of television and the trajectory of
television studies itself, with chapters by Lynn Spigel, John Hartley and Julie
D’Acci.
Overall, this collection is broad-ranging and thought-provoking and offers much
of value to students and scholars of television.
London Metropolitan University M I K E C H O P R A -G A N T

Patricia Sullivan (ed.), Freedom Writer : Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil
Rights Years (New York : Routledge, 2003, £24.99). Pp. xi+442. ISBN
0 4159 4516 X.
Brian Ward, Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South (Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2004, £29.50). Pp. xvi+437. ISBN 0 8130 2729 2.
These two books complement earlier publications by both authors : Virginia Durr’s
‘‘ oral autobiography, ’’ edited by Hollinger F. Barnard, Outside the Magic Circle (1985),
and Brian Ward’s Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race
Relations (1998).
Patricia Sullivan provides a well-selected and admirably annotated anthology
of the prolific private correspondence of that redoubtable southern white liberal
Virginia Durr, from 1945 to 1968. Durr’s letters reveal a highly intelligent and
compassionate woman who (along with her husband, attorney Clifford Durr) felt
increasingly isolated and threatened in a state (Alabama) and a city (Montgomery)
seemingly committed to the perpetuation of racial proscription and segregation.
As she confided to one correspondent, ‘‘ The South is like a ring of cattle with all
of the horns pointing out in a circle, and if you are not in the circle you only feel
the sharp points of the horns. ’’ Durr, a close friend of Rosa Parks and E. D. Nixon,
was elated by the onset of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, but had reservations
about Martin Luther King’s abilities as a political leader. Following the successful
outcome of the boycott, she was contemptuous of those she regarded as the villains
of the piece : Richard Nixon (‘‘ a low down SOB ’’), George Wallace (‘‘ I used to think
he was a clown but not any more ’’) and her former friend Lyndon Johnson – after
he became obsessed by the Vietnam War. (‘‘ more and more he reminds me of the
mindless Texan in Dr. Strangelove who rode the bomb to the destruction both of
himself and the world. ’’)
Durr, as her engaged and engaging letters reveal, also probed and exposed the
sexual taproots of southern racism, understood (but rejected) black separatism, and
regretted the splits in the civil rights coalition. In 1964 she wrote, ‘‘As I get older
I am getting more radical all time. ’’ Freedom Writer is a major contribution to
southern letters.

Reviews 455
During the Montgomery Bus Boycott the local black-orientated radio station
WRMA broadcast a statement by the Montgomery Improvement Association that
reports of an agreement between the boycott leaders and the white authorities were
false. This is one of several examples in Brian Ward’s massively researched and
persuasive examination of the role of radio as ‘‘ often the most important mass
medium operating within southern black communities during the zenith of the civil
rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. ’’ From the 1920s to the 1970s commercial
radio stations (and not television or the press) provided black listeners (and potential
consumers) with news and entertainment, and ‘‘ made a mockery of the spatial
segregation that was supposed to be the foundation of the Jim Crow system by
exposing each race to the culture – especially the musical culture – of the other
race. ’’ Movement sympathizers also utilized radio to appeal to moderate white
opinion inside and outside the South. One of the many strengths of Ward’s book is
his examination of the differing connections between radio stations, their owners
and operatives and civil rights activists in Birmingham, Alabama, Charlotte, North
Carolina, and the state of Mississippi. Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South is
a seminal study of ‘‘cultural miscegenation via the airwaves. ’’
Reader Emeritus in American History, University of Hull JOHN WHITE

Werner Troesken, Water, Race, and Disease (London and Cambridge, MA : The
MIT Press, 2004, £22.95 cloth). Pp. xvii+251. ISBN 0 262 20148 8.
Water, Race, and Disease, a National Bureau of Economic Research monograph in the
Long-term Factors in Economic Development series, employs a variety of statistical
and econometric methods and geographic analyses. A range of studies (e.g. case
studies of individual cities, mortality data analyses) elucidates the relations between
racial discrimination and segregation, the provision of public water supplies (and
filtration) and sewerage, and black/white differentials in life expectancy. ‘‘What is
new here, ’’ Troesken writes, ‘‘ is the basic thesis that [during the period of insti-
tutional Jim Crow, 1900–1940] African-American households in urban areas had
greater access to public water and sewer systems than commonly believed, and that
they actually benefited disproportionately from such investments. ’’
Why did black mortality decline steeply, absolutely and relatively, from 1900 to
1950, and level off during the civil rights era, from 1960 on ? Reductions in water-
borne disease, typhoid particularly (now known to affect adversely the adult health
of childhood survivors) and diarrhea provide a large part of the answer. What fac-
tors account for nondiscriminatory provision of public water and sewer mains to
black neighbourhoods when racism otherwise prevailed ? Troesken reasons that
discrimination would have been costly to white politicians and voters, unlike deny-
ing blacks other services and rights, in three ways. Where neighbourhoods were
residentially integrated (much more so in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries than today, even) excluding African American homes from a network of
pipes also excluded white houses. Inclusion was also an ‘‘ aesthetically’’ and a

456 Reviews
medically and epidemiologically sound strategy, minimizing smells and squalor and
the risks of contagion from black to white (poor to better off).
Arguments and evidence for, and implications of, these generalizations form the
book’s core ; presented intelligibly, clearly and simply, they are a cliometric model
(not Troesken’s term, but he claims and regrets that ‘‘ historians have largely aban-
doned numbers ’’. Moreover, the diversity of approaches and case studies enlarges
substance and salience beyond an apparently narrow public-health focus. Two
chapters exemplify. ‘‘ Typhoid Mary Meets Jim Crow : Stories from Memphis
[chronologically exceptional, improvements beginning in the 1880s], Savannah, and
Jacksonville ’’ offers two cases that provide, inter alia, contrasts in the degree of
residential segregation ; the last shows how racist ideology helped impel public-
health regulation. Chapter 5, ‘‘The Exception that Proves the Rule : Shaw,
Mississippi, ’’ is partly an essay on post-Brown civil rights litigation and its significance
(Hawkins v. Shaw, 1971) and in part analyses of 1960 data on access to water and
sewer facilities demonstrating equality of provision for blacks and whites nationally,
accounting for Brown being cited thirty-eight times more frequently than Shaw. There
is much more.
Lewes GEORGE REHIN

Patricia Vettel-Becker, Shooting from the Hip : Photography, Masculinity, and Postwar
America (Minneapolis and London : Univesity of Minnesota Press, 2005,
$19.95). Pp. 215. ISBN 0 8166 4302 4.
Patricia Vettel-Becker’s Shooting from the Hip explores the ways in which American
photography in the period after World War II reasserted masculinity through the
construction of a variety masculine types – ‘‘breadwinner, warrior, tough guy,
playboy, and rebel. ’’ Under these headings and by looking at the photographic
representation of the female body during the same period she draws on close textual
analysis, detailed historical background, and accounts of the art’s most prolific and
successful practitioner’s working methods to show how photography in postwar
America was a fiercely contended arena which succeeded in giving the man, ‘‘still in
tact ’’ after the brutality of the war, back to the country in an array of mythic forms.
As photography in the 1930s and 1940s became more a profession than a pastime
so it was wrestled away from women both by the male dominance of the bread-
winner status and a subscription to old gendered principles about which side of
the camera suits a woman best. Vettel-Becker’s first chapter, on ‘‘ Gendering
Photographic Practice, ’’ foregrounds a general force within photography intent on
making women models or assistants. The war’s need for combat photographers,
media soldiers who were prepared to die for the right shot, combined with this
engendering force to further masculinize both the practice of photography and the
kinds of picture the public wanted to see. The fine artwork of modernists such as
Ansel Adams and Aaron Siskind was relegated to a secondary role as grainy action
photography of the battle for the Pacific became the favourite of both Life

Reviews 457
magazine and the Museum of Modern Art and this trend continued after the war
as ‘‘ masculine realism ’’ was preferred over the ‘‘feminized, ’’ and even ‘‘homo-
sexualized, ’’ intellectual and artistic left.
There are places where Vettel-Becker’s commentary is too sweeping and forced
beyond what is for the most part logical and conclusive. For example, the critique
of one W. Eugene Smith picture, that the ‘‘she’’ of nature is shown as ‘‘ raped and
murdered ’’ and that these acts have been caught to be ‘‘forever savoured, ’’ seems a
misplaced feminist theorizing of a piece that seems more intent on depicting the
fragility of the soldier within a vast hellish landscape. These moments aside, Shooting
from the Hip is as fascinating and provocative as it is erudite in its combination of
history and the weighty theoretical argument it draws on in proving that ‘‘ man with a
camera ’’ in postwar America was indeed the ‘‘ epitome of masculine potency. ’’
University of Glasgow JOHN ARMSTRONG

Todd Vogel, ReWriting White : Race, Class, and Cultural Capital in Nineteenth-
Century America (New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 2004, £15.50).
Pp. 194. ISBN 0 8135 3432 1.
Todd Vogel’s ReWriting White examines how and why nineteenth-century

‘‘ marginal ’’ figures used the performance of words to resignify aesthetic codes of
the period closely associated with the virtues of American citizenship. Moreover,
Vogel focusses on the currency of standard English as a sign of cultural capital and,
more significantly, argues that standard English can be viewed as the exemplary
language of racial whiteness. By drawing liberally on Pierre Bourdieu’s description
of field and capital, ReWriting White shows how non-white performers and writers
engaged in acts of racial ventriloquism by using standard English to serve their
own political and personal interests.
Structurally, the study is divided into two temporal parts. Part one explores the
key concept of public virtue in the antebellum period by analysing the theatrical
performances of William Apess and the work of African American press editors. In
Part two Vogel examines the formation of aesthetic norms in the postbellum period
and the dynamic between aesthetic taste and elevated language. In this section Vogel
discusses the work of Anna Julia Cooper and Edith Eaton, whose inclusion in the
study raises salient questions around racial impersonation and the interaction
between discursive and material constructions of race.
The author’s playful writing style complements the study’s fusion of critical
methodologies and communicates effectively Vogel’s passionate plea to desegregate
literary studies. However, in spite of the central place of language and speech in
ReWriting White, it is curious that the book pays scant attention to linguistic studies
of racial discourse which would have complicated his reading of standard English
as the consummate sign of linguistic whiteness and foreign to the linguistic tra-
ditions of ‘‘minority’’ writers. Vogel’s methodological approach is orientated
towards the fields of sociology, history and cultural studies and, certainly, one

458 Reviews
of the strengths of the book lies in its broad interdisciplinary approach. By virtue of
its wide coverage of the period, this short study cannot contextualize fully the
particular literary and vernacular traditions encircling the selection of representative
authors. As such, Vogel’s ambitious book lays the foundation for future scholar-
ship in the field.
ReWriting White is an innovative and compelling discussion of the connotations of
charged language used by non-white public performers and writers in the nineteenth
century; it deserves to be read widely and its omissions and elisions taken up as
productive points for critical debate.
University of Sheffield RACHEL VAN DUVYENBODE

David Walsh and Len Platt, Musical Theater and American Culture (Westport, CT :
Praeger, 2003, £52.50/$64.95). Pp. 200. ISBN 0 275 98057 X.
David Walsh and Len Platt argue that the musical is a specifically American
phenomenon, and that the particular hybrid of ingredients that constitutes the mu-
sical (as opposed to operetta, revue or any of the other allied forms) could only have
come together in the particular circumstances that were advantageous at the turn of
the twentieth century. The circumstances of America at that time – the influx of
immigrants from eastern Europe, the recent freeing of the blacks from the South
and other economic, social and political factors – led to the creation of the
American musical, and specifically the Broadway musical.
This book is ground-breaking in its field. There have been many books written
on various aspects of the musical, but there have been few that focus on the
genealogy and evolution of the musical from the perspective of sociology and
social and economic history. This allows for a fresh and innovative approach to
familiar material. In this way, these very American musicals (not just in terms of
their genesis, but in their ideology and very essence) are firmly placed in a cul-
tural, political and historical context that helps us to understand the resonance
these musicals must have had for their contemporary audiences, and gives us an
insight into how we in the twenty-first century can better understand their
importance.
Walsh and Platt look at the musical from many perspectives and a lot of attention
is given to its relation to black America. Each of the important ancestors of the
musical is given its own section, and careful thought has gone into the preparation
of this book. Among the highlights are the sections devoted to Sondheim and ‘‘ The
Deconstruction of ‘ Happy Even After ’,’’ which is perceptive and insightful, and the
discussion of the interplay between the Depression and the output on Broadway
resulting from it. However, I do feel that a disproportionate amount of attention is
paid to certain subjects, such as the detailed discussion of historical events not
directly linked to musicals, and the influence of the minstrel show. One would hope
that if this book runs to a second edition, the factual errors in it will be corrected,
namely the misspellings of names and inaccurate datings of shows. I enjoyed this

Reviews 459
book tremendously and found the arguments it presents persuasive and enlighten-
ing. A must for any serious student of the American musical.
University of Glasgow EVA SPEVACK

William J. Watkins, Jr., Reclaiming the American Revolution : The Kentucky and
Virginia Resolutions and Their Legacy (New York : Palgrave/Macilllan, 2004,
$39.95). Pp. 236+xx. ISBN 1 4039 6303 7.
This work combines a prosaic factual narration of the nation’s politics in 1798 and
1799, and provocative speculations on the relevance of the resolutions. An appendix
reprints the full text of the two resolutions (1798), the revised Kentucky Resolution
of 1799, and Jefferson’s original draft thereof. It suffers from the absence of a
bibliography, and its use of secondary supporting sources is rather minimal.
Watkins’s conclusions about the relevance of the Kentucky and Virginia resolu-
tions for modern America place him squarely in the camp of the ‘‘ new federalism ’’
(local autonomy), and his arguments suggest sympathies with neoconservative, anti-
(central) government ideology (he opposes ‘‘judicial activism ’’). Nevertheless,
Watkins is critical of the Bush administration, making an explicit connection be-
tween the abusive violations of civil rights under the Alien and Sedition acts (1798)
and those of the Patriot Act.
Watkins is a research fellow at the Independent Institute, a libertarian, free-
market, conservative think tank with strong ties to Microsoft, the Hoover Insti-
tution, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Cato Institute. Watkins considers
federal legislation, from the establishment of the Federal Reserve (1913) and the
Federal Trade Commission (1914) to New Deal-related programs like Social
Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, to contemporary legislation like the Hate Crimes
Prevention Act and the current controversy over the legal availability of medical
marijuana as unjustifiable intrusions of the central government into problems best
left to local solution.
In an era when federally elected officials openly campaign on a platform of re-
ducing the size and power of the central government, a resurgence of states’ rights
federalism is to be expected. The most interesting recent example is the movement
for the Second Vermont Republic. As the ‘‘ Middlebury Declaration ’’ (2004) put it,
‘‘ there seems to be a growing argument that, because the national government
has shown itself to be clumsy, unresponsive, and unaccountable in so many ways,
power should be concentrated at lower levels _ the principle of secession must be
established as valid and legitimate ’’ (Vermont Commons, #2, May 2005, 11 ; original
emphasis). Whatever we may think of the feasibility of separation, Watkins’s book
provokes the reader to revisit the issues of constitutionally delegated and reserved
powers and to rethink the inevitability and immutability of the federal system as it
now exists.

460 Reviews
Dana Cairns Watson, Gertrude Stein and the Essence of What Happens (Nashville :
Vanderbilt University Press, 2005, $69.95 cloth, $29.95 paper). Pp. 203. ISBN
0 8265 1462 6, 0 8265 1463 4.
Dana Cairns Watson proposes an exciting critical agenda : to excavate the ‘‘deep
structures ’’ (61) of conversation in Gertrude Stein’s works and thereby to reveal a
radical political discourse with the potential to change self and nation. It sounds an
intriguing and worthwhile project : unfortunately – perhaps unsurprisingly, given its
ambition – it does not quite come off.
The reader, in fact, has to wait some time before any Steinian conversation is
quoted, let alone excavated. In the (too brief) discussion of Three Lives in the opening
chapter, it is surprising not to hear any of the long, languorous exchanges between
Melanctha and Jeff Campbell, Jamesian in the power of their non-oral communi-
cation, and surely crucial to Cairns Watson’s thesis. But if vital quotation from
conversation is missing, there is superfluous quotation from secondary sources,
which proliferates, weed-like, to choke the arguments. The motive appears to be
apotropaic, as if no point can stand unsupported. Harold Bloom is dragged in to
bolster a section on influence ; Saussure is invoked as authority that ‘‘the relation of
words to their meaning is fundamentally arbitrary ’’ (117) – such an over-simplifi-
cation of what he did say as to be worthless. (Oddly, though, others, whose presence
might have been expected – Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, Virginia Woolf – are absent.)
The sentence (not untypical) ‘‘Stein urges Americans to listen to themselves talk in
clichés, just as Jacob Riis, the early photographer, made Americans look at American
streets, which were not paved with gold ’’ (27) made this reviewer first blink at
the gratuitous allusion, then wonder whether the cliché at the end was a self-
incriminating witticism or just a cliché, and then speculate as to whether Cairns
Watson’s prose was itself aspiring to its subject’s stylistic faux naı̈veté.
Cairns Watson’s method throughout is to expose the aural connections or ‘‘ nearly
sounds’’ (110) which a reader of Stein’s prose might miss. ‘‘Susie Asado, ’’ for
example, said three times fast, sounds like ‘‘you see as I do’’ (84). This is useful,
well-done analysis – particularly in its etymological investigations – and supports
the important argument that words can be cubist. The sections on William
James’s thinking and Stein’s own research in neurophysiology and possible
aphasia provide thought-provoking suggestions as to her stylistic motivations. If
the argument for her conversational ‘‘ deep structures ’’ is ultimately unconvincing,
the book can nevertheless be recommended as good, clear textual analysis of Stein’s
oeuvre. As such, it will be a welcome resource for students.
Oxford University KATE MCLOUGHLIN

William H. Young with Nancy K. Young, Music of the Great Depression
(Westport: Greenwood Press, 2005, $39.95). Pp. 304. ISBN 0 313 33230 4.
The history of music in America is a hitherto somewhat neglected topic for

academic texts, and as such this sourcebook is a necessity rather than an indulgence.

Reviews 461
Music of the Great Depression, part of the American History Through Music series
which should go some way towards addressing the lack of material, is a compre-
hensive and extensively researched text which covers every facet of American music
during the 1930s. There are few scholarly texts which present the topic in such
detail ; prior to this study, the only available work which dealt specifically with the
period was Timothy P. Lynch’s Strike Songs of the Depression (Jackson : University of
Mississippi Press, 2001). William and Nancy Young’s book not only builds on this
scholarship but also allows a more rounded view of the era to come to light, with a
considered rather than excessive emphasis on the socioeconomic context of the
music in question. The material covered is wide-ranging, from popular music
of the stage and screen to classical and folk compositions ; indeed, the breadth of
musical output during this time results in the reader feeling that the project may have
benefited from a longer book. The Youngs present a wealth of biographical details
on well-known and lesser-known artists of the time, including such seminal figures
as Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and George Gershwin. The writing is objective and
factual, with little room for musical anecdotes or asides, and this may for some
readers mean a lack of engagement with the topic. The book does not reach any
overwhelming conclusions regarding particular musical structures and forms and
their subsequent decline or success, but rather allows the reader to draw his or
her own conclusions from the facts presented. There is no particular theorizing
regarding racial or class distinctions amongst musicians of the time. However, the
comprehensive detail, including short biographies and a number of indexes detailing
facts and figures, makes this an extremely useful reference book for the researcher.
Music of the Great Depression is an invaluable resource for graduate students and
non-specialist academics who wish to augment their factual awareness of the era.
Middlesex University HOLLY FARRINGTON

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David Seed, Brainwashing: The Fictions of Mind

Journal of American Studies / Volume 40 / Issue 02 / August 2006, pp 449 - 450

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University of Portsmouth JAMES CAMPBELL

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On his ﬁrst day as a member of the Clinton administration in 1997 (a deputy in

Institute for the Study of the Americas T I M O T H Y J. L Y N C H

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University of Glasgow HELEN SUTHERLAND

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University of Glasgow JAMES MACKAY

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University of Kent DAVID STIRRUP

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Brunel University JOHN MATLIN

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Anthropology and Chicano/Latino Studies, M I C H A E L J. M O N T O Y A

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No Future is a work whose argument cannot be divorced from the experience of

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University of Central Lancashire ALAN RICE

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Thomas Fleming has written a biography of both his parents, attempting to

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A useful addition to the literature on neoconservatism, this book’s unique selling

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