LSU Press publishes the works of a host of talented scholars and writers. Each month, we take a moment to recognize the impact these authors and their works are having on communities nearby and around the world.
Trade
Atomizer, by Elizabeth Powell, is receiving a good deal of attention and many positive reviews. PANK Magazine’s Nandini Bhattacharya writes, “It’s easy to fall instantly in addiction with the conceit of Powell’s poems,” and Judith Harris commends Atomizer as part of On the Seawall’s “Poets Recommend” series, writing, “I cannot recommend Atomizer more highly than to say this book will never disappoint.” Sara Grimes writes for the Coachella Review that Atomizer’s “true power” is in the way that it “explodes open the potential of finding staying truths in moments of grace, even in the face of deceit.”
Patrick Dacey gave a “capsule review” of Jen Fawkes’s Mannequin and Wife for Style Weekly, in which he writes that Fawkes “takes us into brutal realities both real and absurd.” Every story in this collection, Dacey writes, “is buttressed by beautiful, short vignettes that act like spears to the heart.”
In a thoughtful and thorough review, the Civil War Monitor’s Kent Gramm called Christopher Kempf’s What Though the Field Be Lost “an excellent series of poetic reflections on the crossroads of past and present at Gettysburg.” Gramm praises the book’s use of literary and historical allusions, its ambiguity, and its irony.
As part of his thirty days of poetry reviews for National Poetry Month, David Starkey highlighted Jay Rogoff’s Loving in Truth: New and Selected Poems. Starkey writes, “This is a big book full of the poet’s wonder at the many and varied things of this world” and calls Rogoff “a person whose poems you ought to read.”
Scholarly
“In this excellent book, John Maxwell Hamilton examines the darker side of US president Woodrow Wilson’s administration during the First World War,” says Lloyd Ambrosius in his review of Hamilton’s Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda for H-Net Reviews. This in-depth article explores some of the main arguments in what Ambrosius calls an “outstanding book.”
Earl J. Hess’s Civil War Supply and Strategy: Feeding Men and Moving Armies received two recent positive reviews. Writing for Civil War Book Review, David Coffey praises both the book and Hess’s “breathtakingly prolific” work as he has seemingly “singlehandedly redefined Civil War military history.” Civil War Books and Authors calls the book “very highly recommended reading.”
In “How America Became So Violent,” National Review’s Robert Verbruggen reviews and explores The Roots of Violent Crime in America: From the Gilded Age through the Great Depression, by Barry Latzer. Verbuggen writes, “If we want to become less violent as a society, we need to understand why we’re so violent to begin with, and this book is a great contribution to that discussion.”
Clayton Butler of the Michigan War Studies Review writes that Larry Lowenthal’s A Yankee Regiment in Confederate Louisiana: The 31st Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry in the Gulf South “deserves a place on the bookshelf and in the hands of every Civil War history enthusiast.” The book goes beyond telling the story of the 31st Regiment, Butler writes, to paint a larger picture of the nature of day-to-day Civil War soldiery.
In an article for Civil War Book Review, Niels Eichhorn writes that Michael J. Turner’s Stonewall Jackson, Beresford Hope, and the Meaning of the American Civil War in Britain shines a light on a previously ignored element of Civil War scholarship: the transnational perspective as it applies to the study of memory. Eichhorn comments, “With his book, Turner pushes ajar a door previously closed and there is much left to explore.”
First Chaplain of the Confederacy: Father Darius Hubert, S.J., by Katherine Bentley Jeffrey, also received multiple recent positive reviews. The Civil War Monitor’s Caleb W. Southern praises Jeffrey’s success in telling Hubert’s story despite the limited availability of primary materials, noting that Jeffrey has “meticulously resurrected Hubert’s life from historical obscurity.” Civil War Book Review’s A. James Fuller writes that this “slim-but-significant book . . . adds tremendously to our understanding of the religious life of the Civil War era.”
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