Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2020 -

Parker's impressive biography reflects 50 years of researching the 16th-century Spanish monarchy. Raised in the Burgundian Netherlands, Charles became king of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor before the age of 20. His Spanish inheritance brought him wars with France, with the papacy in Italy, and with the Ottoman Turks in North Africa and the Mediterranean. It enriched him with America's vast resources but also challenged him in governing a distant empire. As Emperor, Charles struggled with Luther and his Protestant supporters while defending Christendom against the Ottomans in Hungary. Parker's thorough research in numerous archives provides the knowledge to present and analyze the complexities of his subject's political world and contradictions of his personal life. Parker chronicles four phases of Charles's biography through narrative enriched by extensive quotes from Charles, his family, his advisers, ambassadorial observers, and his enemies. The first three phases end with a verbal "portrait" of Charles at a personal turning point, the fourth with a postmortem examination of Charles's legacies. Parker concludes with an analytical epilogue. His compelling account is gracefully written. Includes appendixes, chronology, maps, colored figures and plates, discursive endnotes, and a massive bibliography.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Some readers may wonder whether we really need another Hitler biography. Yes, we do, especially this one by Simms (Univ. of Cambridge), who offers a revisionist interpretation of Hitler's ideas about communism, global capitalism, and "Anglo-America." Providing a deep reading of Hitler's earliest speeches, Simms argues that Hitler's anticommunism was not an original aspect of his worldview in the formative years of the Nazi Party. Instead, Hitler was a fierce anti-capitalist and saw Anglo-American capitalism as an existential threat. His obsession with global capitalism, Great Britain, and the US, which he believed were all controlled by Jews, served as a focus for his foreign policy once in power. Hitler both feared and admired the US and, as Simms argues, he did not underestimate the threat it posed. Instead he began a preemptive war with the industrial and demographic giant because he considered the US such a powerful adversary. This vigorously researched book will no doubt spark controversy for its bold thesis, but Simms delivers. His revisionist thesis is not just about selling books; it is backed with solid evidence from the Bavarian archives, making this a must read.Summing Up: Essential. All readership levels.

The task of the historian most often is to simplify, collate, and arrange, essentially to take the complex and make it understandable. Sometimes, however, as Coller (Univ. Of California, Irvine) suggests in this fascinating monograph, such efforts can miss the forest for the trees. Who knew, for example, that reputedly xenophobic proponents of the Terror could show themselves so solicitous to the plight of foreign Islamic visitors? This text thus reimagines Islam as part of a broader effort by revolutionaries to deal with religion, an initiative that created violent confrontations between believers and anti-clericalists, and ultimately proved to be one of the rocks on which the French Revolution itself foundered. Coller mines a host of archival and printed primary sources to show how a relative handful of Muslims in metropolitan France found themselves a focus of revolutionary politics and, in turn, sought to use this focus to their advantage. Constructing the idea of citizenship, however, proved far more difficult than building empires. Ultimately ideas of revolutionary universalism that included Islam were trumped by imperialism and the ambitions of Napoleon. This is an important acquisition for upper-division and graduate collections.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

This thoroughly researched book is essential for anyone seeking to understand political theory in France during the 20th century. In addition to explaining the evolution of philosopher Raymond Aron's thought, the book situates his work in critical moments of French political history. Though Aron was not an orthodox liberal, at points, Stewart (Univ. College London, UK) seems to take that liberalism for granted to highlight Aron's association with known critics of liberalism, such as philosopher Leo Strauss. This is significant because Stewart's classification of "anti-liberal" depends on Aron's anti-totalitarianism and anti-communism, but in many respects, Aron's liberalism differed from Anglo-American liberalism. Following political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, Aron's thought emphasized that a viable liberal democracy required that people uphold the necessary mores. In some contexts, Aron could even be considered conservative. There is nothing wrong with a broad understanding of liberalism, and recognizing the heterogeneity of 20th-century liberalism is surely important, but Aron seems liberal only in the context of French political thought. As with many of his contemporaries, Aron's views are complex and difficult to sum up because they changed over the course of his life.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Popular belief often characterizes life in the Middle Ages as ignorant, primitive, and dirty--akin to the muck-slinging peasants in Monty Python and the Holy Grail--and holds that the field we now call public health was invented in the early modern period, or even later. Roads to Health by Geltner (Univ. of Amsterdam, the Netherlands) is an important recent salvo in premodernists' efforts to correct these fallacies, demonstrating that the inhabitants of northern Italian cities c. 1250-1500 were both very aware of public health dangers, such as overcrowding, pollution, and contamination, and took extensive measures to combat them. Geltner's masterful analysis combines scientific evidence (exploring how citizens and their magistrates understood these problems) with narrative evidence (explaining what they thought should happen) and administrative or legal evidence (detailing the concrete attempts they made to correct or improve the situation). Thus, even in a world without germ theory, widely understood theories of contagion and miasma encouraged the adoption of public health and safety practices, developments that occurred well before the Black Death, which is often--but incorrectly--framed as an originating moment in the history of public health.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

During the Holocaust thousands of Jews managed to survive in the metropolises of Europe, a topic Lutjens (Texas Tech Univ.) meticulously dissects here, specifically examining the means by which some 1,700 survived in the very capital of the Third Reich. By 1943, having lost any semblance of legal status, many Jewish residents were forced to flee underground in large numbers. Unlike Anne Frank, however, they could not often stay in one place. "Divers," "dashers," and "U-boats"--euphemisms for those in hiding--submerged and surfaced throughout Berlin in a never-ending struggle for adequate food, false papers, and shelter. Most were unsuccessful, denounced by people conditioned over decades to hate Jews or by Jews who cooperated with the Gestapo in the vain hope of saving themselves; others simply fell victim to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Almost all who survived were aided by courageous and kind non-Jews--and good luck. With a fine ear for the nuances of the German language, Lutjens extracts meaning from the testimonies of survivors to give readers some sense of the nightmare Jews lived through and from which they never wholly recovered. An excellent, sensitive work.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.

Focusing on Naples, Paris, and London, Rauser (art history, Franklin and Marshall College) has written a monumental, groundbreaking work on the history of art, fashion, and the classical ideal in the 1790s. Emma Hart (companion to the British ambassador to Naples in the 1790s) was instrumental in defining neoclassical style, and she was followed by Mme. Tallien (1773-1835) in France and Lady Charlotte Campbell (1775-1861) in London. The key to their pioneering fashion was the revolutionizing of cotton, silk, and muslin to combat the domination of the market from India. Women's fashion changed from corsets, stays, and heavily armed garments to sheer elements that represented a new feminism and above all showed a woman's shape--arms, breasts, waist, legs, buttocks, the total figure. More important was the intersection of fashion with the culture and politics of the time. Most of the fashion represented here dates from the late 1780s through the French Revolution. It accented white as a color of purity, in contrast to creole and West Indian styles that portrayed exploitation of women in the slave trade (Haiti, Martinique, southern US). Rauser's superb combination of art history, women's movement, and political revanche paints a portrait of a volatile era in modern European history when fashion took hold of culture and history.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

The horrific bombing of Dresden, Germany, February 13-14, 1945, is a frequently visited subject among popular historians, but McKay's study is among the most valuable of the works resulting from this fascination with the controversial attack. More than just a history of the assault itself--the first bomb does not fall until about halfway through the book--McKay seeks to place the British and American attacks in a much broader context. As a result, the book also serves as a history of the city of Dresden from the 18th century through the post-war Soviet occupation. A firm believer that history is collective biography, the author introduces readers to scores of historical figures who played a role, however tangential, in the events at the center of the book. The Germans who suffered under the Allied onslaught and the American and British airmen who dropped the bombs on Dresden appear in the text, and so do such cultural icons as Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Wagner, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Richly layered details add nuance to this popular history of the highest order.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through upper-division undergraduates.

This volume explores the growth of war memories in medieval and modern Europe, contending that, contrary to prevailing opinion, war memories did not emerge with the rise of modern nation states but were evident as far back as the early 13th century. Using the Fifth Crusade as a case study, Cassidy-Welch (Univ. of Queensland, Australia) probes several detailed accounts written by eyewitnesses to the events in the Holy Land. She focuses on how war was remembered, memorialized, and commemorated as memories were considered essential to motivating, justifying, and defending crusading. Medieval people fit war memory within their larger biblical and eschatological perspectives, and crusade fighting and its memory became a sacred and religious experience as well as a physical act. This very-well-organized scholarly study, written by a respected authority on the Crusades, incorporates very helpful concluding segments at the end of each chapter, maps, and many up-to-date notes and references.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.