$520.00; ISBN 9781851099696 ebook, contact publisher for price ... In this unusual book, art historians Craig McDaniel and Jean. Robertson (both ... in one's life. ... science Deborah Harkness, who supplies the introduction, enhance the.
Reviews
Humanities sources. Factual errors stand out, including, for example, incorrect birth and death dates and locations for Benito Mussolini. Entries seem to be missing for other important world leaders of this time period: while Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin are included, Adolf Hitler is not. Another oddity is that Harry Truman is mentioned in six places in the time line of world political events featured in the back matter, yet there is no entry for Truman, nor does his name appear in the index. Online access to the title is provided with the purchase of the print set, but readers should be forewarned that biographies of some individuals (claimed to number “over 200”) advertised on the publisher’s webpage have been omitted in the final product. Summing Up: Not recommended.—J. R. Bailey, Arkansas State University
cc 54-3047 D740 CIP World War II: the definitive encyclopedia and document collection, ed. by Spencer C. Tucker et al.; foreword by Gerhard L. Weinberg. ABC-CLIO, 2016. 5v bibl index afp ISBN 9781851099689 cloth, $520.00; ISBN 9781851099696 ebook, contact publisher for price This comprehensive five-volume encyclopedia set covers WWII, from the rise of Hitler through the Japanese occupation and war-crime trials. The collection, edited by Tucker (formerly, Virginia Military Institute; now ABC-CLIO’s senior fellow in military history), with a brief foreword by Weinberg (emer., Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), contains essays on pre-war battles and politics from the multiple actors in the war, important figures, concepts, strategies, weapons, technology, and diplomatic efforts, all of which are cross-listed and are followed by list of additional works. Each volume contains a series of maps of the various campaigns, pre- and post-war boundaries, and other useful maps, and the final one consists of several hundred primary resources featuring speeches, news stories addresses, and essays spanning a range of expected subjects, from a short excerpt from Mein Kampf through post-war discussions on the safety of atomic weapons. The final element of the collection is a thorough index of all of the essays, maps, and documents. The essays— well written and researched and easy to read—make up an excellent resource for beginning scholars of history and political science, although the work might be most useful for today’s academic library users in its electronic format. Summing Up: HH Recommended. High school, community college, and beginning undergraduate students; general readers.—G. Johnson, Knox College
HUMANITIES 54-3048 PN1077 2016-14314 MARC Dickinson, Colby. Words fail: theology, poetry, and the challenge of representation. Fordham, 2016. 114p bibl index ISBN 9780823272839 cloth, $90.00; ISBN 9780823272846 pbk, $25.00; ISBN 9780823272839 ebook, contact publisher for price Dickinson (theology, Loyola Univ. Chicago) examines how poetry addresses language’s failure to represent the “thing itself ” to which it presumably refers. In attending to this fracture between language and meaning, Dickinson situates theoretical and philosophical writings by Immanuel Kant, Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Giorgio Agamben in relation to poems by writers such as Paul Celan, Adrienne Rich, and Wallace Stevens. Consequently, Dickinson’s theological-philosophical reflection intersects with a particular poetic crisis to retrieve a material spirituality that, like poetry, fails to present anything like God or the divine as a representable object of knowledge that could definitively determine one’s subjectivity. Nowhere is this March 2017
more obvious than in the chapter on Agamben, which provides the clearest account of the conditions that constitute Dickinson’s theological insights. Though brief, and in places requiring more rigorous elucidation of theoretical arguments and terminology, Words Fail opens the possibility to think of a material spirituality that challenges dogmatism, prompting, as the author states in the conclusion, “a foreignness to ourselves that allows us to remain critical of ourselves.” Summing Up: HH Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.—M. Roberts, The University of California, Irvine
cc 54-3049 NK3600 MARC McDaniel, Craig. Spellbound: rethinking the alphabet, by Craig McDaniel and Jean Robertson. Intellect, 2016. 224p bibl ISBN 9781783205493 pbk, $43.00; ISBN 9781783205509 ebook, contact publishers for price In this unusual book, art historians Craig McDaniel and Jean Robertson (both, Herron School of Art and Design, Indiana Univ.) explore various ways verbal language, which is usually rendered typographically, can be reimagined. At its most basic, this involves a host of “substitution codes” in which different visual objects or colors replace letters of the alphabet. At its most radical, such reimagining suggests a time when each person has a private alphabet that is triggered automatically by being in proximity to smart objects. The book is a creative read, even as it strains in explaining why, other than as playful idiosyncrasy, any of these strategies would be preferable in one’s life. Certainly, if one thinks about the future possibilities of visual communication, the alphabet merits discussion. Perhaps a stronger case could be made for subtle changes in basic letter structure, or bringing spelling under clear rules, or moving away from a capital-lower case tandem form for the alphabet. Spellbound, however, does entertain and provoke thought, and that is largely the point. Summing Up: HH Recommended. Lower- and upperdivision undergraduates, including students in technical programs; general readers.—S. Skaggs, University of Louisville cc 54-3050 Z105 MARC The Voynich manuscript, ed. by Raymond Clemens. Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library/Yale, 2016. 66p index afp ISBN 9780300217230 cloth, $50.00 Among thousands of manuscripts held by Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Beinecke MS 408 seems to elicit the most interest among both scholars and the general public. This manuscript, which is usually referred to as the Voynich Manuscript after the rare book dealer Wilfred Voynich, who acquired the manuscript in the early 20th century, is an enigma due to its inscrutable text, which has eluded modern cryptologists, and its evocative illustrations, which also defy modern understanding. At one time the manuscript was attributed to Roger Bacon, but its true origin and purpose remain a mystery. The present publication offers a full-color facsimile of the original manuscript, complete with foldouts, along with essays from scholars analyzing the physical manuscript itself and its history and various attempts to understand its contents. The beauty of and mystery surrounding the manuscript would make the reproduction alone worthwhile, but the six essays and the prefatory commentaries by Clemens and historian of science Deborah Harkness, who supplies the introduction, enhance the value of this book to specialists and nonspecialists alike. Summing Up: HHH Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.—T. Timmons, University of Arkansas—Fort Smith
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