David Blight's A Slave No More Reviewed in Publishers Weekly

From Aug. 20, 2007 issue of Publishers Weekly
A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation
David W. Blight. Harcourt, $25 (336p) ISBN 978-0-15-101232-9

Three fascinating works are packaged here: two unpublished manuscripts by former slaves Wallace Turnage (1846–1916) and John Washington (1838–1918), and an illuminating analysis of them by award-winning historian Blight. Turnage's journal (“a sketch of my life or adventures and persecutions which I went through from 1860 to 1865”) is about his attempted escapes and their dire consequences: from his first, when he “didn't know where to go,” to his successful “fifth and last runaway.” His account is particularly noteworthy in its revelation of the slave and free-black networks he found and utilized. Washington's “Memorys of the Past” moves from his “most pleasant” early childhood through “the many trials of slavery” and the disruptions of the Civil War, ending with his successful escape in 1862. As Blight observes, it's “very much a coming of age story,” offering a unique window on life (learning to read, falling in love, finding religious faith) in a slave society. Blight provides an accessible historical and literary context for the manuscripts and explores, as fully as possible, the men's lives not covered in their manuscripts (both are self-emancipated). These powerful memoirs reveal poignant, heroic, painful and inspiring lives. (Nov.)

Ronald Florence's LAWRENCE AND AARONSOHN in the Providence Journal

The roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict
BY EDWARD J. RENEHAN JR., The Providence Journal, Sunday, August 19, 2007

LAWRENCE AND AARONSOHN: T.E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn, and the Seeds of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, by Ronald Florence. Viking. 528 pages. $27.95.

"Florence does a superb job of contrasting these two fascinating characters. The flamboyant, romantic Lawrence who was so attracted by the free life of tribal randomness seems the polar opposite of the methodical, scientific Aaronsohn who was so dedicated to the creation of a Jewish homeland. In crafting complex and absorbing portraits of his two protagonists, Florence has produced a singular and important book that does much to illuminate the roots of today’s debate over borders and birthrights in the troubled Middle East."

For the complete review, please click here.

Davis Deal in 8/13 Publishers Daily

Knopf Wins Final Book in Davis Trilogy
By Matthew Thornton -- Publishers Weekly, 8/13/2007 7:24:00 AM

The final book in Yale historian David Brion Davis’s landmark examination of slavery, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, has gone to Ashbel Green and Andrew Miller at Knopf; agent Wendy Strothman sold world rights. The deal concluded an eight-house auction that also included a final round of bids from Simon & Schuster, Basic, FSG and Norton.

The first volume in Davis’s trilogy, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, was published in 1966 and won the Pulitzer Prize. The second volume, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution: 1770-1823, was published in 1975 and won the National Book Award, the Bancroft Prize and the Beveridge Award. Both books were published by Cornell University Press. This final volume will consider the antislavery movement’s interaction with emerging social reform movements in both Britain and America, and its effects on the boundaries of social protest. Knopf expects to publish in 2013.

For the story, please click here.

Ronald Florence's Lawrence and Aaronsohn Reviewed in Boston Globe

The birth of Middle East strife viewed through the conflict of two men
By Michael Kenney | July 31, 2007
Boston Globe

Lawrence and Aaronsohn: T.E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn, and the Seeds of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, By Ronald Florence, Viking, 512 pp., illustrated,, $27.95

T.E. Lawrence, the fabled Lawrence of Arabia, and Aaron Aaronsohn, a Palestinian Jewish agronomist, met only a few times, meetings that were invariably brief and hostile -- "devoid of amenity," wrote Aaronsohn in his diary after one of those meetings.

But out of those encounters during the final years of World War I, Ronald Florence, an independent historian who lives in Providence, has created a revealing narrative about the territorial conflicts in the Middle East.

For more please click here.

Ian Shapiro's Containment featured in NYTBR!

Ian Shapiro’s “Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy Against Global Terror” (Princeton University Press) is featured in a fascinating New York Times Book Review front page essay by Samantha Power of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government :

“Shapiro shows how aggressive action has played into the hands of terrorist recruiters… ‘The idea behind containment,’ Shapiro writes, ‘is to refuse to be bullied while at the same time declining to become a bully.’
“Shapiro is at his most persuasive when he argues against lumping Islamic radical threats together…. Had President Bush adopted Shapiro’s approach on Sept. 12, 2001, it is quite likely that he would have had more success in marginalizing adversaries….”

This thoughtful essay, appearing in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, is not to be missed.

Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, and … John Kenneth Galbraith?

A title now represented by the Strothman Agency #1 on the NYT bestseller list -- forty years ago. John Kenneth Galbraith's New Industrial State led the New York Times bestseller list in July 1967. And it's back in print, in a beautiful new edition published by Princeton. For more information, or to buy the book, please click here.

Jessie Gruman in Today's NYT Health Section

Advice on Dire Diagnoses From a Survivor
By JANE E. BRODY
From July 3, 2007, New York Times

Everyone knows lightning is not supposed to strike in the same place twice, let alone four times. Yet it did for Jessie Gruman, 53, the founder and president of the Center for the Advancement of Health, in Washington. She knows all too well what it’s like to be on the receiving end of bad health news: first at age 20 with a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s disease, 10 years later with cervical cancer, then five years ago with viral pericarditis (a potentially fatal infection of the heart’s lining) and just three years ago with colon cancer.

With each diagnosis, knowing her life hung in the balance, she was “stunned, then anguished” and astonished by “how much energy it takes to get from the bad news to actually starting on the return path to health.”

But following all four bouts with life-threatening illness, return to health she did, and the lessons she learned prompted her to write “AfterShock: What to Do When the Doctor Gives You — or Someone You Love — a Devastating Diagnosis,” published this year by Walker & Company.

I consider this book so valuable I plan to keep it on my bedside table should I need it later on [Emphasis added]. Its recommendations are based not just on the author’s experiences with illness, but also on interviews with more than 250 others: patients, family members, nurses, doctors, health plan administrators, managers of busy practices and nonprofit leaders.

For more, click here.