Archive for The Book Bum - page 12

Smith, Douglas. Former People, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2012 (464pp.$30) The sudden disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1989 opened many of its locked and shuttered government archives, libraries and spy vaults to historical view. Building on the epochal work of Alexander Solzhenytsin and…

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Brown, Frederick. The Embrace of Unreason: France 1914-1940, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2013 (345pp.$28.95) On May 16, 1915, one of the largest crowds ever to gather on Paris’ Place des Pyramides honored Joan of Arc, Catholic heroine in the long French war against the…

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Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands, Basic Books, New York, 2011 (544pp. $29.95) The unraveling of the Soviet Empire, the unchaining of Eastern Europe, and the rise of independent-minded countries on the dung heap of formerly communist territory, have all contributed to a new historiography focusing on a…

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Schloegel, Karl. Moscow 1937, Polity Press, New York, 2013, Trans by Rodney Livingstone (653pp.$35) In the year of the Great Terror, a brilliant piece of reportage about America appeared in the Soviet Union and became in its time one of the most widely read bits…

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Moynihan, Brian. Leningrad: Siege and Symphony, The Story of the Great City Terrorized by Stalin, Starved by Hitler, Immortalized by Shostakovich, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 2015 (542pp.$30) Stalin despised Leningrad that, as St. Petersburg, had been the locus of the October coup d’etat conducted…

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Dyer, Geoff. Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, Pantheon, New York, 2012 (232pp. $24) For 20 years or so English writer Geoff Dyer has landed his reader smack in the middle of an archly idiosyncratic search for post-postmodern literary meaning….

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Frankel, Glenn. The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, Bloomsbury, New York, 2013 (405pp. $28) The Parker clan were Baptist revivalists, part-time rustlers and small-scale con men who pulled up stakes in the Appalachians and headed for Texas, a Mexican backwater where a lack…

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Coleman, Jon T. Here Lies Hugh Glass: A Mountain Man, A Bear, and the Rise of the American Nation, Hill and Wang, New York, 2011 (252pp.$28) In 1823 Hugh Glass, journeyman hunter and trapper, signed up to serve the American Fur Company as a hunter…

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Graybill, Andrew R. The Red and The White: A Family Saga of The American West, Liveright Corporation (W.W. Norton), New York, 2013 (338pp.$28.95) Malcolm Clarke ranched on Prickly Pear Creek, south of Helena, where he ran cattle and lived with his wife, a Piegan Blackfoot…

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Gwynne, S.C. Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson, Scribner and Co., New York, 2014 (672pp.$35)  His father was a failed everything, lawyer, merchant, and farmer in turn, and at an early age he and his beloved sister Laura were orphaned. Luckily,…

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