CURRENT BOOKS
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SCHOLARS' CHOICE
Recent titles selected and reviewed by Fellows and staff of the Wilson Center
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JOHN MAYNARD Why should the life, in particular the private KEYNES:Vol. I life, of a man of ideas compel our attention? Hopes Betrayed, How are we now supposed to assess his the- 1883-1920 ories if we discover he was cruel to animals by Robert Skidelsky or never spoke to his wife? Are we the wiser Viking, for this discovery--or titillated?
1986 merely
447 pp. $24.95 Ro...
David J. Garrow Morrow, 1986 800 pp. $19.95
Big as this book is, it is not the complete chronicle of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life (1929-68). Garrow, a political scientist at the City College of New York, focuses mainly on the years of King's civil rights activism, beginning in the mid-1950s.
One learns that the 26-year-old Baptist minis-ter from Atlanta accepted the burden of leading the Southern black civil rights movement with misgivings. He was propelled to prominence in 1955, when organizers...
Alain Corbin Harvard, 1986 307 pp. $25
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164
educator Charles Willie: "By idolizing those whom we honor, we fail to realize that we could go and do likewise."
In eight crisp essays, Demos, a Yale historian, looks back at difficulties that continue to beset the American family. This perspective allows him to dismiss a number of popular notions. One is that child abuse is an enduring problem in our society. In truth, he finds, it was rare in Colonial New England; when i...
Albert 0. Hirschman Viking, 1987 197 pp. $18.95
classified air to identify what were considered to be dangerous, even deadly, odors. A strong whiff of "excrement, mud, ooze, and corpses provoked panic," says Corbin, particularly among finer folk. As for the stench of the poor, it merely offended the gentry, who, in their effort to create a well- scented "personalized atmosphere," supported a growing perfume industry.
Cholera epidemics during the 1830s brought home the urgency...
John Strohmeyer Adler, 1986 242 pp. $17.95
UP FROM THE ASHES: The Rise of the Steel Minimill in the United States
by Donald F. Bamett and Robert W. Crandall Brookings, 1986 135 pp. $26.95 cloth, $9.95
paper
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166
for human action. He then elaborates two con- cepts of his own: "exit" and "voice." Defined as possible options linking economic and political be- havior, "exit" is the individual's ability to choose, to leave intolerable business relationships, a...