Upcoming Author Event
Michael Devine will be giving a book talk at the National Archives: Harry S. Truman Presidential Library on Thursday March 14th from 6:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. CST.
Find out more here!
Reviews
Starred Review in Booklist:
“Journalist and critic Kapur’s vivid descriptions of Jaya’s paintings and Kamlesh’s dancing bring them to life on the page. Recommend to fans of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Independence and Alka Joshi’s The Henna Artist.”
Review in Naval Institute Proceedings:
“Although it is mainly a reference book, Spy Ships may be read for entertainment by readers with an interest in the Cold War because of its narrative writing style and focus on operational histories of spy ships.”
Review in Western Historical Quarterly:
“Taken as a whole, Speculative Wests projects two very convincing points. The first is the most intuitive: the western is a productive playground for storytellers from surprisingly disparate genres. The second is the more revelatory: “speculative” westerns and other intersecting genres provide a new discerning lens through which to view western history and the contemporary West. They offer surprising insights, and Johnson’s analysis demonstrates that cultural historians are not the only ones who should be engaging with them.”
Review in Journal of Popular Culture:
“We are living in a cultural moment in which the western is not only thriving in popular culture but also as a subject of scholarly study. Michael K. Johnson’s vibrant Speculative Wests embeds an astonishing array of different kinds of pop culture hybrid westerns into a narrative that centers them in discussions of race, gender, and genre. Johnson’s book will enthuse any scholar or lay reader interested in contemporary westerns, social justice, and the ways in which BIPOC creators engage with the genre. Johnson’s coverage of critical conversations is exemplary, his case studies concise and clear, and his argumentation conceptually rich. This book is a major achievement.”
Review in Kansas History:
“Skywalks is the story of an obsession. It is also one of the most comprehensive accounts of what may be America’s worst structural failure, the 1981 collapse of the skywalks at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, which killed 114 people. The obsession was that of lawyer Robert C. Gordon, who was cocounsel for the victims in a federal class action suit against the hotel’s builders, designers, owners, and operators and who for years had a story to tell—but who could never quite manage to get it out.”
Review in H-Environment:
“While retaining an underlying commitment to sustainable change, Liburkina is careful not to condemn all forces and agents at play in the food systems under examination. Instead, the organizational and belief systems that underpin these structures are criticized with an understanding of the efforts and individuals that maintain them. Liburkina suggests, among other proposals, that an important strategy for sustainability is to maintain an ongoing commitment to reimagination and reflexivity concerning everyday operations within the food sector. In this sense, the overall tone of the work is that of optimism for the future of our food provisioning systems.”
Review in American Historical Review:
“Goodwin presents this highly readable book as an intellectual history organized chronologically around key figures in the movement for self-determination in higher education. Over the course of five chapters, readers gain an introduction to some of the seminal figures within the movement, including Henry Roe Cloud (Ho-Chunk), Elizabeth Bender Cloud (Ho-Chunk), D’Arcy McNickle (Salish Kootenai), and Jack Forbes (Powhatan-Renapé, Delaware Lenape). Through them, we learn about processes of institution building that included the American Indian Institute, the Workshop on American Indian Affairs, Navajo Community College, Haskell Indian Junior College, Deganawidah-Quetzalcoatl (D-Q) University, and the larger Tribally-Controlled Community College movement of the 1970s and after, of which they can be seen as antecedents.”
Review in American Historical Review:
“Boarding School Voices is a much-needed addition to the scholarship on Carlisle that has appeared in recent years. By accounting for the successes and the frustrations that Carlisle graduates dealt with, Krupat’s study is a testament to their stunning endurance, adaptations, innovations, and mobility. It extends the crucial work of Dickinson College’s archivists to make this rich archive of Indigenous writing accessible, while offering a useful model for how to contextualize and interpret Indigenous writings that emerged from American Indian boarding schools. For any reader exploring these understudied archives, Boarding School Voices is an indispensable work.”
Review in Midwest Book Review:
“Enhanced for the benefit of the reader with a number of Illustrations, a listing of Abbreviations, forty pages of Notes, a thirty-eight page Bibliography, and a nine page Index, The Korean War Remembered: Contested Memories of an Unended Conflict is an impressively well written, organized and presented ground-breaking study that be of immense value to readers with an interest in America’s involvement in the Korean War — which was the first war that America was a part of that ended in stalemate and not end in victory for America and its allies.”
Review in Women in Judaism:
“As the title indicates, Feldman utilizes traditional midrash, but she also creates her own ‘modern midrash,’ oftentimes based on or reflective of ancient sources.”
Review in ALH Online Review:
“Through his methodology, Lynch demonstrates that one way to do decolonial scholarship is by applying his creative energies both to recognizing the cultural and ecological effects of settler violence and to telling new stories about both Wests.”
Author Interviews
Interview in New Books Network
UNP blog 