Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2018 -

This best comprehensive history of the Netherlands, with thorough coverage in a few hundred pages, is a marvel both in its evenhandedness and its beautiful writing. Kennedy, a specialist on modern Dutch history (dean, Univ. of Utrecht), sweeps from earliest inhabitants to 2017 with clear and concise chapters on the medieval Low Countries, Golden Age Republic, Dutch international expansion, nation building, and the modern Netherlands. The author incorporates political, religious, economic, social, and even cultural history. Although the Dutch empire plays a minor role, it is adequately integrated. The entire work is inspired, but the last two chapters on the Netherlands, especially from WW II onward, are magnificent. In such a short space, Kennedy clearly outlines the key issues leading up to the war, the role of the National Socialist Movement (NSB), and the Dutch postwar response. By far the most interesting section is the material on the Netherlands from the 1960s to the present. Themes of openness to external conditions that forged the early Netherlands are tied to the progressive attitudes of the Dutch in the 1960s and 1970s, but are also used to explain the more recent backlash of populist politics. Numerous images and maps elucidate.Summing Up: Essential. All public and academic levels/libraries.

Homer understood that artisans' work had deadly consequences: "And the crippled Smith brought all his art to bear on a dancing circle, broad as the circle Daedalus once laid out..." (Iliad). Historian Bertucci (Yale) constructs a tour de force about "artistes" (artisans with esprit) who worked to elevate their status, promote their epistemological methods, and assume official power in 18th-century France. The author draws heavily from archives. Her focus is 1666 to 1751: from the founding of the Academie Royal des Science to the initial publication of Diderot's Encyclopedie. The thematic/chronological structure highlights encyclopedic mechanical arts projects; chapters examine savants, artistes, and the artiste-directed Societes des Arts. Bertucci describes how artistes used writing, notable artifacts, and teaching to champion their superior practical knowledge, commitment to improvement, and unique ability to advance state/public interests. She argues that Enlightenment ideals of improvement, progress, and useful knowledge emerged from ubiquitous artistes whose world created an "artisanal enlightenment." Alas, the Encyclopedie privileged philosophy; Clio forgot the significance of ambitious and widely distrusted men. But Achilles's shield and Daedalus's wings conveyed immortal fame. Artistes and their enlightenment have their deserved recognition in Bertucci's excellent study, with its superb illustrations.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above; professionals.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the prominent role of airpower in regional conflicts during the 1990s has sparked renewed interest in the Allied bombing of German cities in WW II, and the ways in which this trauma has been remembered. In his remarkable new book, historian Crew (Texas) examines the significant role that local memory cultures have played in conceptualizing the air war and German victimhood after 1945. His study concentrates on local history publications to demonstrate how postwar authors crafted a powerful narrative of German suffering. Furthermore, Crew incorporates dozens of photos from these works to illustrate how visual representations of ruins and bodies served to commemorate death and loss as well as to symbolize reconstruction. Perhaps most remarkable are the continuities that Crew reveals in his analysis of German memory culture. He persuasively argues that postwar histories relied considerably on the bombing narratives formulated by the Nazis during the war. And in an outstanding chapter on East German representations of the Dresden bombing, Crew also shows that the official communist narrative, liberated from Cold War propaganda, has largely survived intact in contemporary Germany.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

Jarausch (Univ. of North Carolina) curates autobiographical accounts of the Weimar generation to discern how economic chaos, dictatorship, world war, and rebuilding impacted Germans born during the Weimar Republic (1919-1933). The first section analyzes their prewar childhood to reveal children who enjoyed relative peace and prosperity until the economic collapse in 1929. The Nazi regime co-opted their adolescent years, requiring regimentation and ideological training in the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls, which most memoirists recalled fondly. The second section of the book explores how the tremendous violence of total war devastated the lives of young men and women. This violence sparked the concept of German victimhood that emerged in the postwar period as Germans felt exploited by the Nazi regime and the occupation authorities. In the final section, Jarausch examines the postwar lives of the Weimar generation--specifically, their attempts to rebuild their lives and country. Most Germans saw defeat as a new beginning leading to a liberal democracy in the west and a communist state in the east. As time passed, members of the Weimar generation had to come to terms with their role under the Nazi regime. Well written and an excellent addition to history collections.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

Despite the continuous avalanche of Third Reich studies, the intensive study of even a sliver of the SS volunteers from neutral Sweden, Denmark, and Switzerland in the hands of a skilled historian illuminates new contradictions of the Nazi bureaucracy. This well-researched and elegantly written study is based on the stories of a hundred of the most influential and high-ranking volunteers from those three countries outside Germany's sphere, and reveals the tension between national loyalty and the SS's obsession with a racial Germano-centric plan for Nazi-occupied Europe. In spite of the neutrality of the countries and their volunteers, and the clear inequality of the volunteers in the German Waffen-SS, they became enthusiastic participants in the Holocaust. Gutmann (Albert-Ludwigs-Univ. Freiburg, Germany) focuses on what motivated these men and how their views evolved over the course of the war. Moreover, how did these volunteers from neutral countries participate in Germany's plan to absorb Europe? Yet, even at the jaw-dropping retail price of $99.00, this study is a significant contribution to the examination of the stresses of fascism and nationalism run amuck.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All academic levels/libraries.

Approximately 40,000 unaccompanied children, of every age and nationality, were among the hundreds of thousands of persons displaced in Germany at the end of WW II. Drawing on the vast records of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and the International Refugee Organization (IRO), Taylor (Univ. of Waterloo, Canada) describes in exhaustive detail the intractable practical, legal, ethical, and political problems that beset the agencies responsible for the children's care. Complicating these inherent difficulties were the heated battles that erupted among the NGOs, the American military government, and the governments of Germany and other countries. As a result, priority for the ultimate disposition of the unaccompanied children shifted: UNRRA's and IRO's original goal was to reunite unaccompanied children with their families, but the organizations were forced to accept a policy of repatriation to the child's country of birth. When that proved too difficult, the American government decided to resettle the children in Germany, thus ratifying the Nazis' theft of many children from their native countries and turning the children into pawns in the emerging Cold War. This is a tragic story, masterfully told. The title of the book belies the callousness of the governments involved in caring for and resettling these unaccompanied children.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

A superb addition to the publisher's growing list of German primary sources in its "Manchester Medieval Sources" series. These texts, in English translation for the first time, open new inroads into the rich social, cultural, and religious history of the German ruling elite during the 12th century, a period poorly represented in primary source collections, which have thus far favored the Ottonian and Salian eras. An admixture of vitae and gesta, these biographies of an abbess, a magistra, a bishop, a count, and a margrave reveal both ecclesiastical and lay societies with nuances of gendered voices from a variety of social locations among the nobility and from frontier zones to the heartlands of the German kingdom. Expected political and religious trends are thus elucidated, but more engaging is the flexible social order of nobles on a local level amid these trends. The translations are done with dexterity, and the texts are splendidly contextualized with an opening general and then individual text-specific introductions, which include analyses of the manuscripts themselves. A must have for undergraduate courses and a model for any future editions.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

This is a stunning work, handsome and massive, its author a distinguished and prolific archaeologist. The maps offer a "sea-wise view of the world," and their unconventional projections bring readers more deeply into the narrative, which is enhanced by numerous color photographs. Scholarly research has rarely been so richly and attractively presented. The book's originality lies in the depth of its chronological scope, especially its reach back to the prehistoric, about which, thanks to nautical archaeology, scholars are learning more and more. Cunliffe (emer., archaeology, Oxford) contrasts the human experience of "the contained Mediterranean with the endless Atlantic" with the western European peninsula thrust between the two. The book is highly specific but also offers general observations on humanity's relationship to the sea. Cunliffe points out that the sea has stimulated the imagination, serving both as inspiration and deterrent, predatory and uncertain, yet with a magnetism drawing people to what it offers. The heft of the book and its huge array of facts may discourage casual readers, but those with a serious interest in the subject will find this splendid, challenging book immensely rewarding.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

Paris and the Cliche of History is a study of photography as a form of preserving and imagining Parisian history. Clark (scholar of modern France and visual culture, MIT) takes as her starting point the 100,000 photographs from the "C'etait Paris en 1970" photo contest preserved in the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris and the Musee Carnavalet. She is interested not simply in the content of the photos as a visual record but also in the ways in which Parisians began to think about photographs as historical evidence and how this shift in the perception of photography led to new practices of collection, preservation, display, and interpretation of photographs. As photographs increasingly replaced other forms of representation, especially in what Clark terms "photohistories" of Paris, scholars, artists, and city leaders realized the growing role of photography in shaping historical imagination, especially of the enormous physical and cultural transformations taking place in Paris. Finding ways to conceptualize, preserve, and document photos and photography, both professional and amateur, led to the development of photo contests, museum exhibits, and archival collections. This extensively researched and elegantly written study exemplifies the best in the "visual turn" in scholarly history.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.

Siemens (European history, Newcastle Univ., UK) has written three previous books, most recently an excellent study on the murder of Horst Wessel and the creation of the Nazi icon myth (The Making of a Nazi Hero, 2013). History is replete with scenes of Nazi Brownshirts marching through German cities chanting nationalist and anti-Semitic songs and slogans. From its inception in 1920s Bavaria, the Sturmabteilung (SA) swelled with WWI veterans, nationalists, the unemployed, anti-communists, and some who thrived on violence. Hitler's army of thugs became the spine of the Third Reich, bullying reluctant citizens, rounding up Jews in Eastern Europe, and stiffening the government's dictums. The organization changed organically after Hitler's 1923 putsch to reflect society's insecurities: political urban violence and growing disdain for the weak Weimar government. The expansion into the countryside unified the nation. While numerous studies exist on the Brownshirts, they generally end with the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934, when Hitler's paranoia led him to assassinate the SA leadership. Siemens's excellent history continues the story until 1945, as many SA men served in the army, helping to form the postwar myth of the "Good German." This authoritative, elegantly written book on the Storm Troopers will doubtless stand as the final story of the Brownshirts.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.