The New York Sun, the six-year-old weekday paper, has fantastic arts coverage, in particular its book reviews, which are published throughout the week but arrive in bulk each Wednesday. I visit the site every Wednesday morning. Critics Adam Kirsch, Eric Ormbsy, Benjamin Lytal, Hua Hsu, and Otto Penzler consistently publish insightful, well-written, well-informed reviews of books that are occasionally esoteric but never uninteresting. While the newspaper has recently re-designed its website and is still porting its archives and fixing bugs (like author bios occasionally appearing in the midst of the review text), now seems like an appropriate time to mention it because the editors have roped in a 2008 Pulitzer Prize winner, Daniel Walker Howe, to write a review. His piece is about Walter A. McDougal’s Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era:
Although political history is the strong skeleton of his account, Mr. McDougall fleshes it out with social, economic, and intellectual history. His descriptions of the important consequences of public literacy and numeracy in facilitating the industrial revolution are excellent. He accords the German immigrants the importance they deserve and seldom receive from historians. His treatment of the military history of the Civil War imparts new interest even to a subject one thought was familiar.
Howe received the Pulitzer Prize for What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848, part of the Oxford History of the United States. Click here for a piece Howe posted to the Oxford University Press blog.
Tags: Adam Kirsch, American history, book reviews, Civil War, Daniel Walker Howe, New York Sun, newspapers, Walter A. McDougall
