Our sound track this week is Mabel Scott’s “Baseball Boogie,” from the episode of Bob Dylan’s XM Theme Time Radio Hour devoted to baseball. Yes, the long wait is over. Stay tuned for Michael Stevens’ annual preview.
It’s been only a little over a month since we visited the bookshelf, but already the new arrivals have stacked up to dangerous levels. Near the top of one pile is a galley from Harvard University Press, Thomas K. McCraw’s Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction, due in April. This caught my eye when I returned to the office Monday after a Liberty Fund conversation on Christianity and economics (especially the compatibility or conflict between Christianity and the market economy). Clearly this is a book we’ll have to cover. Also among the new arrivals, on a related theme, is William T. Bogart’s Don’t Call It Sprawl: Metropolitan Structure in the Twenty–First Century (Cambridge Univ. Press). Look for a review in B&C later this year. (I must remember not to take this book home before I send it out to a reviewer—Wendy would be sure I’d gone over to the Dark Side. Remember: she was for some time a volunteer at a local site re–creating a 19th–century farm.)
Richard Bushman’s usefully provocative Believing History: Latter–Day Saint Essays (Columbia Univ. Press), the subject of a review and a forum in Books & Culture, is just out in paperback. The back of the book features a quote from Duke University’s Grant Wacker (a B&C editorial board member) and another from Elesha Coffman’s excellent B&C review, but she isn’t mentioned by name, and the source cited is Christian Review. Well, B&C has only been around for eleven–plus years now.
Cornell University historian Nick Salvatore has edited an excellent collection of essays under the title Faith and the Historian: Catholic Perspectives (Univ. of Illinois Press), another book we’ll be reviewing in due course. Also available from Illinois: paperback editions of Salvatore’s Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church and the Transformation of America (assigned for review way back, in its hardcover version from Little, Brown, but the piece never arrived); We All Got History: The Memory Books of Amos Webber, based on the journals of a 19th–century black factory worker and activist; and a new edition of Salvatore’s Bancroft Prize–winning biography Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist.
New from Eerdmans is a meaty collection of essays edited by Wilfred M. McClay, Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Person in the American Past. How can you not be drawn into a volume that has George Marsden batting leadoff with an essay entitled “Human Depravity: A Neglected Explanatory Category”? If you are a devoted reader of Frederick Buechner or are looking for a guide, Calvin College’s Dale Brown has produced a substantial survey, The Book of Buechner: A Journey Through His Writings (Westminster John Knox Press), soon to be a B&C Book of the Week.
We’ve noted the vogue for “little books.” Though the field is already crowded, a new series from Atlantic Monthly Press commands attention under the heading “Books That Changed the World.” The first two volumes—the redoubtable P. J. O’Rourke’s On The Wealth of Nations and Bruce Lawrence’s The Qur’an: A Biography—have just appeared, and the third entry, Janet Brown on Darwin’s Origin of the Species: A Biography, is coming soon. More on the series to follow.
Next week in this space, a visit to the Lunatic Center, courtesy of Dinesh D’Souza and Chris Hedges.
John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.
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