Book Review: Sounding American: Hollywood, Opera, and Jazz by Jennifer Fleeger
According to Fleeger, during the 1920s, many composers, hoping to create and distribute truly American music, attempted to create jazz-operas, a genre that recalled America’s European roots, as well as its ethnic and racial diversity. Although not traditionally described as jazz-operas, Fleeger considers the how The Singing Fool and Yamekraw function as jazz-operas, specifically the ways in which they advertise the Vitaphone, a new synchronous sound system.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Jimmy Carter and the Middle East: The Politics of Presidential Diplomacy by Daniel Strieff
There is no final evaluation of diplomacy, only a continued reimagining in the face of expanded information. In this spirit, Daniel Strieff’s Jimmy Carter and the Middle East: The Politics of Presidential Diplomacy mines a presidency almost forty years old for reclamation.
Continue ReadingBook Review: American Fiction in Transition: Observer-Hero Narrative, the 1990s, and Postmodernism by Adam Kelly
American Fiction in Transition focuses on four novels from the ‘long 1990s’ – Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000); Paul Auster’s Leviathan (1992); Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides (1993); E. L. Doctorow’s The Waterworks (1994) – that are emblematic of what Kelly convincingly argues is a significant contemporary literary genre: the observer-hero narrative.
Continue ReadingBook Review: A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars by Andrew Hartman
Are the culture wars truly a thing of the past? After decades of divisive arguments, has a consensus been reached over cultural and social norms in the United States?
Continue ReadingBook Review: Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis: Challenging Our Infatuation with Numbers by Michael Mack
Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis is, very consciously, a timely book. The crisis of the title is the political climate in which higher education in the arts and humanities currently finds itself. In the face of demands to demonstrate its economic contribution, arts education and research has been encouraged to make sometimes questionable claims for its ‘impact,’ its transferable values, or, in the event that its economic worth is not so readily visible, to make equally grandiose statements in support of its ethical or philanthropic mission.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Radicals In America: The U. S. Left Since The Second World War By Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps
With the apparent urgency of recent radical activities in the United States, including Black Lives Matter and the Occupy movement, the publication of Radicals in America by Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps arrives at an opportune time.
Continue ReadingBook Review: West of the American Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776 by Claudio Saunt
Throughout November 2015, U.S. Studies Online will be publishing a series of posts to mark Native American Heritage Month. In this post, Michael Griggs reviews West of the American Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776 by Claudio Saunt.
This book’s greatest strength is that it challenges the reader to open their minds to the larger struggle for the greater American continent. 1776 was a year of great civil war between the British Colonies and their motherland; however, equally important was the struggle of the Native American and First Nations people against the ever-expanding and exploring Europeans.
Book Review: Formations of United States Colonialism edited by Alyosha Goldstein
This collection’s ‘unique selling point’ is that it places the overseas empire and the settler colonialism of the United States in the same analytical frame. Influenced by the groundbreaking work of Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, Goldstein continues their work in attempting to highlight the error of U.S. imperial denial.
Continue ReadingBook Review: The Queerness of Native American Literature by Lisa Tatonetti
Throughout November 2015, U.S. Studies Online will be publishing a series of posts to mark Native American Heritage Month. In this post, Professor Joy Porter (University of Hull) reviews The Queerness of Native American Literature by Lisa Tatonetti.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Siblings: Brothers and Sisters in American History by C. Dallett Hemphill
From collective fun to mutual fondness, from emotional and financial support to bitter rivalry, and from abuse to acts of devotion this book is a cohesive narrative on intricacies of siblinghood in a country whose share of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was one of commotion, change, migration, social unrest, and attempts at self-definition and national coming-of-age.
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