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NEW PUBLICATIONS

C&RL News, May 2005
Vol. 66, No. 5

by George Eberhart

Alexander the Great and the Mystery of the Elephant Medallions, by Frank L. Holt (198 pages, February 2005), will appeal to everyone who loves historical puzzles and the challenge of establishing the provenance of unusual artifacts. First published in hardcover in 2003, this study is well worth considering in trade paperback if you missed it, if only for its potential to stimulate a wider interest in ancient history, numismatics, and even critical thinking. Holt examines the evidence that a series of  medallions showing a Hellenic warrior and Indian soldiers riding a war elephant were minted in the 4th century B.C. shortly after Alexander’s victory at the Battle of the Hydaspes River. In the process, he shows how little we know about Alexander the man and what these artifacts might reveal about his psyche. $17.95. University of California. ISBN 0-520-24483-4.

Calculated Risk: The Extraordinary Life of Jimmy Doolittle, by Jonna Doolittle Hoppes (334 pages, March 2005), is a heartfelt memoir by the granddaughter of the famed aviator and general whose most renowned exploit was the April 1942 one-way bombing raid on Japan. However, before the war he was well-known as a daredevil stunt pilot who broke world speed records, performed an outside loop for the first time, and pioneered equipment and techniques for instrument flying. Hoppes shows that what the public saw as reckless was actually her grandfather’s carefully calculated risk-taking. Unlike other Doolittle bios, she looks at the role of his wife and lifetime partner Josephine. An intimate portrait, with many photos from the Doolittle Library at the University of Texas-Dallas. $24.95. Santa Monica Press. ISBN 1-891661-44-2.

An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Women in Early American Films, 1895–1930, by Denise Lowe (623 pages, January 2005), provides some 200 biographies of female film stars who were famous in their day but little-mentioned now. Lowe has culled about 150 rare photos of these femmes, many of them from her own collection. The listed film credits largely parallel the Internet Movie Database, but rarely does that online resource offer much in biographical detail. An appendix gives the locations on the Hollywood Walk of Fame of early women stars’ footprints. $69.95. Haworth. ISBN 0-7890-1843-8.

A Glossary of Netspeak and Textspeak, by David Crystal (197 pages, November 2004), will probably be most useful for its A-to-Z of textspeak, or abbreviations used in instant messaging—although your students may need this less than you do. ruup4it? Plus a list of country domain names, when you want to find out where that .gw spam is coming from. $12.95. Edinburgh University. ISBN 0-7486-1292-8.

Ghost Images: Cinema of the Afterlife, by Tom Ruffles (269 pages, October 2004), surveys the various ways that movies portray haunted houses, apparitions, and the afterlife. Ruffles, a long-time member of the Society for Psychical Research, takes a thematic approach and gives examples of cinematic ghosts who must expiate sins, console the living, dispense sage advice, complete unfinished business, or who use the living to play out a drama from their own lives. He also singles out six representative films for more detailed analysis—Dead of Night (1945), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), The Innocents (1961), The Haunting (1963), The Shining (1980), and Jacob’s Ladder (1990). An intriguing genre treatment, with much thanatological speculation. $39.95. McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-2005-7.

Jefferson’s Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello, by Andrew Burstein (351 pages, February 2005), examines Jefferson’s relatively unstudied writings and thoughts during the final years of his retirement, right up to his death in 1826. Burstein analyzes his opinions and reminiscences on old age, sensation and sexuality, nature, women, slavery, political controversies, and religion, contrasting them with the robustly political writings of his public life. What emerges is a more intimate portrait of one of the most imaginative geniuses of the early 19th century. $25.00. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-00812-7.

Another Jeffersonian tome is Adams vs. Jefferson, by John Ferling (260 pages, August 2004), a new study of the bitterly partisan presidential election of 1800 in which the conflicting values of the Federalists and the Republicans resulted in what many historians believe was the last chapter of the American Revolution and a final break from monarchy and aristocracy. $26.00. Oxford University. ISBN 0-19-516771-6.

The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories, by Sumathi Ramaswamy (334 pages, February 2005), surveys the belief in a submerged land in the Indian Ocean beginning with its birth as a hypothetical land bridge between Africa and Asia invented by 19th-century zoologists Philip Sclater and Ernst Haeckel to explain the distribution of lemur fossils on both continents as well as the isolation of their living descendants on Madagascar. The concept has since been appropriated by Western theosophists as a drowned land mass where modern humans first developed, by American occultists as a lost Pacific continent whose mystical descendants survive on Mount Shasta, and by the Tamil people of southern India as a sunken homeland destroyed by an ancient flood. Ramaswamy characterizes the imagery as a “cartography of loss” that has its own “poetics and politics” in the geography of human imaginings. $21.95. University of California. ISBN 0-520-24440-0.

A similar case could be made for a cartography of the underworld. Subterranean Worlds: A Critical Anthology, edited by Peter Fitting (224 pages, December 2004), contains brief extracts of speculative works from Athanasius Kircher (1665) to Edgar Allan Poe (1838), Jules Verne (1864), and Edgar Rice Burroughs (1914) on the earth as a hollow sphere accessible through holes in the poles or mysterious caverns. $29.95. Wesleyan University. ISBN 0-8195-6723-X.

The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, edited by Andrew F. Smith (1,564 pages, December 2004), offers an exclusively American perspective on the history and culture of food and beverage. Named a 2004 outstanding reference source by RUSA, this two-volume set lives up to expectations, with 800 articles on people, advertising, foods, technology, manufacturers, cookery, holidays, politics, and science, as well as 300 well-chosen illustrations. Appendices list food Web sites, major library collections, museums, organizations, and festivals. An excellent place to check when you need to find out who Uncle Ben was or how deep-fried Twinkies came about. $250.00. Oxford University. ISBN 0-19-517552-2.

A Polish Son in the Motherland: An American’s Journey Home, by Leonard Kniffel (236 pages, May 2005), recounts the author’s search for his maternal grandmother’s family in Nowe Miasto Lubawskie and Sugajno, Poland. Kniffel, editor of American Libraries, went on a months-long sabbatical in 2000 to look in libraries and archives for traces of Helena Bryszkiewska, who came to America in 1913. Along the way he discovered an entire family tree of cousins and a rich variety of colorful characters who introduced him to the history, culture, politics, and cuisine of the Warmia and Mazury region of northeastern Poland. Highlights of the trip include Kniffel’s finding a copy of his grandmother’s birth certificate and photos of his grandparents; the joys of kayaking and mushroom hunts; and the sad stories told by Pani Wituchowska, the proprietress of a wine shop whom he befriended. $35.00. Texas A&M University. ISBN 1-58544-420-0.

Weapons of Mass Destruction, edited by Eric A. Croddy and James J. Wirtz (1,050 pages, 2 vols., December 2004), is a comprehensive encyclopedia of every chemical, biological, and nuclear weapon ever developed, as well as the international policies and treaties that attempt to contain them. The book’s 500 well-referenced entries, written by some 80 contributors, cover incidents, accidents, tests, agencies, technologies, terminology, and delivery systems. Much of the information has been extracted from technical reports and scientific articles and thus appears here for the first time in an accessible format and in nontechnical language. Appendices in both volumes include the full text of treaties and key documents. $185.00. ABC-Clio. ISBN 1-85109-490-3.