News & Reviews

Reviews

“Keisner debuts with a riveting essay collection that revisits her painful past. Adopted as an infant and raised in a series of homes in rural Nebraska by a borderline-abusive father and a meek mother, Keisner began these pieces as an effort to untangle longtime fears and hypervigilant compulsions, such as continually checking under beds for monsters, even into adulthood.

The essays attack difficult material straight on, but Keisner’s smart, clear, and incisive writing cuts deep.”

If This Were Fiction

Review in Brevity:

“If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays gives you what you didn’t know you needed: sloths and loss and Swedish Fish candy, alligators and avocados and bird girls, pain and loss and hard traveling back to confront that pain, googly eyes and wayward skirts and lipsticks uncapped in purses, electric eye contact with a fetching poet across a dive bar, all woven with joy. This expertly crafted essay collection works as a memoir and clocks in at a slim 205 pages, but it feels like water, like each sentence is a tumbled and smoothed river stone.”

Red Barber

Review in Daily Hampshire Gazette:

“Red Barber: The Life and Legend of a Broadcasting Legend is co-written by Judith R. Hiltner and James R. Walker.

The authors meticulously researched this 544-page biography. More than 1,000 footnotes cite the material used from the New York Times, San Diego Union, Tallahassee Democrat and dozens of other newspapers, as well as Robert Creamer’s biography “Rhubarb in the Catbird Seat” and Barber’s own memoir and syndicated columns.”

Apostles of Empire

Review in H-Net:

“If this book is any indication, McShea will be an authoritative figure in colonial French history for many years to come. Her ability to extrapolate a nuanced, multifaceted, and unique interpretation from the multivolume Relations is a Herculean task for any scholar in this field. However, her true skill comes from understanding the context and, even at times, subtext of the primary sources. Nowhere does this skill come across more clearly than in her chapters concerning French conflicts with the Iroquois.”

Out Here on Our Own

Review in Publisher’s Weekly:

“Journalist and musician Anselmi presents an evocative portrait of Rock Springs, Wyo., the “wind-worn mining town” where he grew up. Stitching together contemporary interviews and excerpts from historical documents, Anselmi traces the community’s boom-bust cycle from 1850, when a survey party discovered coal in the region, to the present day.

By turns affectionate, mournful, embittered, and proud, this is an exceptional account of life in a boomtown.”

Baseball Rebels

Review in The Bradenton Times:

“If you want history lessons in professional baseball and to listen to a voice that has a finger on the pulse of social movements today in America, Peter Dreier and Robert Elias have written a book for you.

Baseball Rebels: The Players, People, And Social Movements That Shook Up The Game And Changed America will tug at your emotions, for sure.

Who better to tell a different side of baseball history than a social justice lifer than Dreier? The 284 pages in Baseball Rebels are attention-getters from the get-go. For some readers, the subjects and topics detailed will be a refresher, and introductions to others.”

Poisoned Eden

Review in H-Net Reviews:

“Dimas achieves his aim of showing how cholera epidemics played a part in the state-building process in Argentina in the second half of the nineteenth century. The whole path traced between local and international spheres is elegantly described throughout the pages of the book, with the support of well-designed maps. The epilogue contains an interesting reflection on COVID-19, and Dimas draws important parallels between this recent pandemic and the cholera pandemics. Poisoned Eden is recommended to researchers, students, and anyone interested in the history of medicine, the history of South America, and the history of cholera pandemics.”

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