U. of South Carolina Press

The African American odyssey of John Kizell; a South Carolina slave returns to fight the slave trade in his African homeland.

John Kizell was a South Carolinian slave who served as a British loyalist during the American Revolution and subsequently repatriated to his homeland of Sierra Leone with the first British colony in Africa. There he fought the slave trade and African complicity, and facilitated the return of American slaves to countries such as Liberia. Lowther, a journalist and former newspaper editor, views the slave trade, the impact of slave agency on cities such as Charleston, colonialism in Africa, and the Back to Africa movement through the lens of Kizell's remarkable biography. He draws greatly from the rich trove of documentation left by Kizell, a literate, well-traveled, principled and passionate advocate for Africa and Africans under colonial rule. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Among the nightmare fighters; American poets of World War II.

This book focuses on a generation of white, male academic poets who came to prominence in the 1940s and 1950s and published poems about their WWII experiences in the Kenyon Review, the New Yorker, and the Partisan Review. Oostdijk (VU U. in Amsterdam) argues that despite the differences among them, these poets should be regarded as one generation. He notes that the poetry of WWII was formed by the poets' acute awareness of literary history. Allen Tate, W.H. Auden, Robert Lowell, James Dickey, Karl Shapiro, and Howard Nemerov are some of the poets whose work is considered. The book offers a wealth of background information on the poets' personal lives, and analyzes their treatment of themes such as masculinity, ethnic identification, and traumatic combat memories. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Captured at Kings Mountain; the journal of Uzal Johnson, a loyalist surgeon.

Uzal Johnson (1757?-1817), a surgeon with an American Loyalist unit under British command in the Revolutionary War, was taken prisoner at the battle of King's Mountain, North Carolina, a turning point for Americans fighting the British. Kolb (law clerk, US Court of Appeals) and Weir (emeritus, history, U. of South Carolina) introduce Johnson's "Memorandum of Occurrences during the Campaign of 1780," and the similar record of another captured Tory. Dr. Johnson, who returned to his native New Jersey after treating wounded on both sides, expresses sympathy for civilians in the war. Illustrations include maps of where Johnson traveled in the South and his portable surgeon's instruments kit. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Dawn of desegregation; J.A. De Laine and Briggs v. Elliott.

De Laine Gona, the daughter of the Reverend Joseph De Laine, presents this compelling memoir of her life in South Carolina and the circumstances surrounding the pursuit of the important school desegregation case Briggs v. Elliot. Reverend De Laine was one of the key figures in the filing of the education equity lawsuit that was one of the foundational pieces of the eventual Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruling. The volume recounts the early stages of the struggle on the local, regional and federal levels and documents the critical involvement of De Laine and other South Carolina civil rights leaders in the larger national movement. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Deliver us from evil; a Southern belle in Europe at the outbreak of World War I.

Schaller, author of Soldiering for Glory: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Frank Schaller, presents the story of Nancy Johnson's escape from Europe during the outbreak of World War I. Johnson, daughter of Congressman Ben Johnson of Kentucky, had just begun her leisurely travels in Europe during the summer of 1914 when she and her companion found themselves trapped in a war zone. This book chronicles their daring journey from Venice to Genoa where they were picked up by other wealthy Americans. From Genoa they sailed back to Washington all the while avoiding German submarine attacks. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Gender and sexuality in indigenous North America, 1400-1850.

Contributors in Native American history, comparative cultural and literary studies, and American and Canadian history demonstrate how Europeans manipulated Native ideas about gender for their own purposes, and how indigenous people responded to European attempts to impose gendered cultural practices that clashed with Native thinking. Some specific topics explored include the Conquistador who became a Native American woman, women and power in the 19th-century Choctaw tribe, the Native American two-spirit as warrior, and two-spirit histories in Southwestern and Mesoamerican literatures. Slater teaches history at the College of Charleston. Yarbrough teaches history at the University of Oklahoma. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Gleaning Ruth; a biblical heroine and her afterlives.

Koosed (religious studies, Albright College, Pennsylvania) takes Ruth's relationships with other characters in the story as the organizing principle, but also acknowledges the social, geographical, and cultural context within which those relationships were embedded. More overtly, however, is the farming context, and agricultural interludes are intertwined between chapters on Ruth and Orpas, Naomi, Boaz, and Obed. Her approach is informed by feminist biblical scholarship and literary theory, and particularly influenced by the work of Carol Meyers. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Speaking hermeneutically; understanding in the conduct of a life.

Arthos (Denison U., Granville, Ohio) examines the relationship between rhetoric and hermeneutics, arguing that hermeneutics is a cornerstone of the human experience which is both self-conscious and self-reflexive. He draws from case studies such as Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg and John Henry Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua as well as theory to illustrate this relationship. This book is intended for those studying communication. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Unvarnishing reality; subversive Russian and American Cold War satire.

Maus (English, State U. of New York at Potsdam) offers a comparative analysis of Cold War satirical writing from the United States and Russia. Exploring writings by Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, John Barth, Walker Percy, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Vasily Aksyonov, Yuz Aleshkovsky, Alexander Zinoviev, Vladimir Voinovich, Fazil Iskander, and Sasha Sokolov, Maus places each national strand within its own unique historical, political, and cultural context, but nevertheless finds some striking thematic commonalities between the American and Soviet productions, including nuclear anxiety, distrust of militarization, and criticism of the mobilizing construction of threat from the Cold War enemy. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)