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NEW PUBLICATIONS

C&RL News, February 2005
Vol. 66, No. 2

by George Eberhart

The Concise Encyclopedia of the Revolutions and Wars of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1639–1660, by Stephen C. Manganiello (612 pages, September 2004), identifies all the important personalities of the English Civil War and Commonwealth period—parliamentarians, Puritans, royalists, and Levellers—as well as the significant battles, skirmishes, castles, weapons and armor, and acts and decrees of what for many Americans is a very confusing historical era. However, as Manganiello points out in his preface, some of the concepts articulated at the time are central to the American experiment, such as universal franchise, civil rights, religious toleration, and feminism. Hundreds of maps and an appendix on naval vessels make this an essential guide for students. $95.00. Scarecrow. ISBN 0-8108-5100-8.

The Great Composers Portrayed on Film, by Charles P. Mitchell (338 pages, November 2004), analyzes the movies about 65 classical composers to assess how accurately they depict the men and their music. Among the films analyzed are Amadeus (Tom Hulce as Mozart), Farinelli Il Castrato (Jeroen Krabbé as Handel), Stars and Stripes Forever (Clifton Webb as Sousa), Casta Diva (Maurice Ronet as Bellini), and Bride of the Wind (Jonathan Pryce as Mahler). Mitchell also comments on the effectiveness and quality of each film and includes appendices on films about fictional composers and composers on TV series. $49.95. McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-1795-1.

Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas, by David Hackett Fischer (851 pages, October 2004), begins with a simple question, asked by a 21-year-old scholar in 1843 of an elderly veteran of the American Revolution: "What made you go to the Concord fight?" His response was, "We always had been free, and we meant to be free always. They [the Redcoats] didn’t mean we should." The 91-year-old Captain Levi Preston knew nothing about John Locke, but he and his compatriots had an innate understanding of liberty and freedom that each generation of Americans has inherited, interpreted, and expanded in unique ways. Fischer points out that English is the only language that uses both words, which have different origins and ultimate meanings: "liberty" refers to independence and autonomy, while "freedom" entails the rights of belonging to a community of free people. Liberty and Freedom is a graphically fascinating and intellectually stimulating examination of images and artifacts (such as the "Don’t Tread on Me" snake, the Statue of Liberty, the Freedom Train, and political cartoons and buttons) representing the merging, interaction, and conflict of these two concepts from the colonial Liberty Tree to the War on Terror. Fischer concludes that the very thing that keeps an often divided America free is the diversity of its traditions of liberty and freedom. $50.00. Oxford University. ISBN 0-19-516253-6.

Online Investing Hacks, by Bonnie Biafore (485 pages, July 2004), offers a wealth of tips on analyzing company financials, executing trades, and managing portfolios for the careful investor. Especially valuable are its suggestions on how to tweak Excel to make it a formidable analysis tool, but other tricks involve calculating investment returns, how to spot hanky-panky with cash flow analysis, and using rational values to buy and sell. One of the best of O’Reilly’s "hacks" titles, which also include Word Hacks, iPod and iTunes Hacks, and Home Theater Hacks. $24.95. O’Reilly. ISBN 0-596-00677-2.

The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery, by Ingrid D. Rowland (230 pages, December 2004), immerses the reader in a delightful concoction of 17th-century antiquarian controversy and bibliographic intrigue. In 1634, Curzio Inghirami, the well-educated teenaged son of a Tuscan noble landowner, claimed to have discovered south of Volterra a cache of Latin and Etruscan scrolls encased in strange earthen capsules he called "scarith," a supposed Etruscan word referred to in the texts. Curzio published an account of his discovery in Florence two years later titled Ethruscarum Antiquitatum Fragmenta that sparked a scholarly debate on the find’s provenance. Foremost of the doubters was a scrappy Vatican librarian named Leone Allacci who wrote a withering critique of Curzio’s dubious discovery. Rowland provides a broader context for the story, showing how it epitomized Roman-Tuscan rivalries and the Calvinist-Catholic debate on free will. A treasure for bibliophiles. $22.50. University of Chicago. ISBN 0-226-73036-0.

Science Frontiers II, compiled by William R. Corliss (338 pages, October 2004), contains more than 1,300 abstracts of journal articles on anomalies and curiosities in archaeology, astronomy, biology, geology, geophysics, psychology, chemistry, and other disciplines. A sequel to Corliss’s 1994 volume, this edition covers articles published over the past 10 years in a wide variety of publications from New Scientist and Nature to BBC News Online and Current Anthropology. Some of the topics included are enigmatic structures in the Arctic, discordant red shifts, bacteria in the stratosphere, aberrant bird behavior, problems with plate tectonics, icy minicomets, and near-death experiences. $21.95. Sourcebook Project, P.O. Box 107, Glen Arm, MD 21057. ISBN 0-915554-47-X.

Sleuthing the Alamo: Davy Crockett’s Last Stand and Other Mysteries of the Texas Revolution, by James E. Crisp (201 pages, October 2004), offers a glimpse of the excitement, frustration, and intense controversy involved in investigating the "Texas creation myth" of the fall of the Alamo—especially the question of whether Crockett died swinging Old Betsy in a Disneyesque tableau or was executed by firing squad after pleading for his life. Crisp is a leading proponent of the latter scenario and explains why he came to that conclusion in this engaging personal memoir, which also tackles the racism inherent in the traditional Alamo myth. Sam Houston and the original Texians were apparently a bit more culturally inclusive than some of their descendants. $20.00. Oxford University. ISBN 0-19-516349-4.

The Superhero Book: The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Comic-Book Icons and Hollywood Heroes, edited by Gina Misiroglu with David A. Roach (725 pages, November 2004), provides some 300 essays on the colorfully costumed crime fighters of comics, graphic novels, film, and television, with an emphasis on the genre’s role in American popular culture. Many of the entries describe subcategories (DC Comics, multiculturalism, sidekicks and protégés, supernatural heroes) in addition to specific characters. The coverage is not as comprehensive as Jeff Rovin’s out-of-print Encyclopedia of Superheroes (Facts on File, 1985) nor as episode-specific as John Kenneth Muir’s Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film and Television (McFarland, 2003), but it serves as an excellent supplement for libraries with this collection focus. $29.95. Visible Ink, distributed by Omnigraphics. ISBN 0-7808-0772-3.

Ultimate Robot, by Robert Malone (192 pages, September 2004), presents a potpourri of droids, drones, and automata from collectible toys and kits to cinematic bots, commercial products like Sony’s QRIO, and the Martian landers. More pop-cultural and visual than technical, this overview should satisfy the curious browser. $30.00. DK. ISBN 0-7566-0270-X.

George M. Eberhart is senior editor of American Libraries, e-mail: geberhart@ala.org