Club Selection Research Articles

Cinque of the Amistad a Slave Trader? Perpetuating a Myth

For more than fifty years a story has circulated both inside and outside the history profession that Joseph Cinque (Sengbe Pieh), leader of the Amistad mutiny in 1839 and the central character in Steven Spielberg's movie Amistad, became an international slave trader upon his return to Africa in 1842. release of the movie in 1997 heated the controversy by subjecting Spielberg to the charge of romanticizing a black figure who preyed on his own people. Debbie Allen, the film's producer (who had convinced Spielberg to do what he called his important movie), encountered the allegation while on a TV talk show and, both there and later in the press, attributed the story to rumor and innuendo. Soon afterward, Richard Grenier made the same indictment in the Washington Times. But the most widely known accusation came in USA Today and on CBS's Face the Nation from the noted film critic Michael Medved of the New York Post (and was repeated by Martin F. Nolan in the Boston Globe). Medved quoted the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison. In Oxford History of the American People, a 1965 Book-of-the-Month Club selection still available in Penguin paperback, Morison wrote: The ironic epilogue [to the Amistad story] is that Cinque, once home, set himself up as a slave trader.1 During the early 1980s, in writing my book Mutiny on the Amistad, I tried to find evidence that would resolve this serious charge against Cinque.2 effort

Positive illusions in golf: Empirical and conceptual analyses

The apparent prevalence and impact of cognitive biases (e.g., positive illusions) during planning by golfers was examined in two studies. In Study I, club selections used by 171 golfers (133 men, 38 women; M Handicap = 20.8, SD = 8.6) for initial tee shots were compared with club selections used when golfers were offered a second ball to hit following a conservative (and realistic) plan for shot selection. Second shots, following the conservative plan, were vastly superior to those observed when golfers used their initial plans. In addition, comparison of club selections for the conservative plan to club selections used for the initial plan suggested that approximately 80% of the golfers may have used poor planning for their initial tee shots. In Study II, 184 golfers (155 men, 29 women, M Handicap = 22.4, SD = 8.1) were randomly assigned to use their own planning strategy (Control group) or to follow a realistic and conservative plan (Experimental group). In accord with hypotheses based on Study I, 83% of participants in the Control group demonstrated questionable planning when selecting clubs for their initial tee shots. Golfers in the Experimental condition also hit significantly better tee shots than their counterparts in the Control group. These results suggest that many golfers of diverse skill levels may use positive illusions when planning their shots. Discussion includes proposed methods to counteract the potentially adverse consequences of cognitive biases on sport performance.

Subjectivity and the Aesthetics of National Identity in Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

On September 2, 1933, the following headline the books section of the Chicago Daily Tribune heralded the literary event of the season: Stein Writes a Book Simple Style (Butcher). This was news. Stein's publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas August 1933 marked her first attempt at writing a popular book, a lucid if rambling account of her life in the heart of an art movement of which the outside world at that time knew nothing (The Autobiography 28). The book presented a Gertrude Stein previously unknown to the American - understandable, entertaining, conversational, and seemingly confessional. The American embraced this figure. Within a month of its publication, The Autobiography was named both a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and one of the top 10 best-selling nonfiction books the nation by Publishers Weekly (P.W. Market News). According to one biographer, many predicted Stein's book would win the Pulitzer Prize (Wagner-Martin 201). Stein's adoption of a distinctly plain-spoken American voice The Autobiography and the mass appeal of the book have defined it as a text that separates Stein's earlier, experimental work from her more public writings that followed.(1) However, important recent criticism that brings The Autobiography back within the fold of Stein's experimental oeuvre fails to address the text's treatment of national identity. While it is clear that Stein invokes an essentialist view of nationality, her repeated destabilization of the essential nature of national identities demonstrates that The Autobiography, as a popular book, remains dedicated to decentralizing and destabilizing the terms we use to define our identities. Most importantly, Stein's discussion of national identity The Autobiography marks this as a text that extends her continuing engagement with American cultural issues her work. Critics have highlighted, much as the reviews of the book did when it was published, the conventional aspects of this text.(2) While Tender Buttons, often considered emblematic of Stein's experimental work, resists generic categorization, The Autobiography Stein writes within an identifiable genre. Moreover, she chooses a genre that has traditionally been identified with male authors and the mastery of narrative control.(3) And because Stein is using Toklas's voice, her usual cadences are entirely absent from this text. Stein's revelation of her part the genesis of The Autobiography the last lines of the book reinforces the idea that she is coming clean this text: about six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it. (252) At long last, The Autobiography insists, the writer American readers had perceived as an incomprehensible aesthete has stepped forward to reveal the ruse and expose herself as the author of a simply written text. Stein's resistance to an essential identity The Autobiography is the focus of much recent feminist criticism on the text, which demonstrates that while Stein's ventriloquism of Alice's voice makes this work far more readable than much of her other writing, this move also defines The Autobiography as experimental. For these feminist critics, Stein's displacement of the autobiographical 'T' onto the lesbian couple demonstrates that The Autobiography presents a distinctly feminist notion of identity that, with its resistance to the idea of a unified, coherent self, anticipates postmodern notions of subjectivity.(4) Sidonie Smith directly connects Stein's experimentation with time the text to the subversion of coherent subjectivity: the anecdotal breaks chronology, the confusion of past, present, and future, as well as the externalized portrait, subvert the notion of clearly defined developmental stages of growth, of the subordination of time present and future to time past autobiographical narrative, and the notion of a coherent, unified core of selfhood. …

A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire.

Deftly melding ethnography, cultural history, literary criticism, and autobiographical reflection, A Feeling for Books is at once an engaging study of the Book-of-the-Month Club's influential role as a cultural institution and a profoundly personal meditation about the experience of reading. Janice Radway traces the history of the famous mail-order book club from its controversial founding in 1926 through its evolution into an enterprise uniquely successful in blending commerce and culture. Framing her historical narrative with writing of a more personal sort, Radway reflects on the contemporary role of the Book-of-the-Month Club in American cultural history and in her own life. Her detailed account of the standards and practices employed by the club's in-house editors is also an absorbing story of her interactions with those editors. Examining her experiences as a fourteen-year-old reader of the club's selections and, later, as a professor of literature, she offers a series of rigorously analytical yet deeply personal readings of such beloved novels as Marjorie Morningstar and To Kill a Mockingbird . Rich and rewarding, this book will captivate and delight anyone who is interested in the history of books and in the personal and transformative experience of reading. |For anyone who is interested in the history of books and in the personal and transformative experience of reading. Radway offers both an engaging look at the Book-of the-Month Club's role as a cultural institution and a profound meditation on the love of books.

I Know This Much Is True (review)

novel are the chapters that seem to occur within King's mind, when he gives in to his weariness and doubts and when the clever dopplegänger motif of the book finds resonance in King's internal conflict between individual growth and public service. The passages in which King is described as longing for time to read and meditate and spend time with his children are moving, intimate glimpses in a narrative that is sometimes too remote and in peril of sounding like a history textbook. Despite the pedantic tone, one cannot help but enjoy Johnson's premise, the giddy ingenuity of spUtting King into a "good" and a "bad" brother to illustrate the divisions within the civil rights movement and within King himself. The creative license Johnson takes with historical events that many authors shy away from, and the sympathetic scrutiny he applies to King's private dreams, make this a novel well worth reading. (TH) I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb Reganbooks, 1998, 901 pp., $27.50 Lamb's weU-received first novel, She's Come Undone, about the selfloathingbut ultimately heroic Dolores Price, went platinum when Oprah Winfrey picked it for her book club. Lamb's second book, I Know This Much is True, has also soared to the top ofthe bestseUer Ust, thanks in part to Oprah's choosing it as another of her book club selections. Don't be put off by the length. Nine hundred pages go fast in this book about mental illness, family obligations and emotional healing. The book's self-deprecating narrator, Dominick Birdsey, launches us into the story by describing a violent act of self-mutilation in a public library by his schizophrenic identical twin, Thomas. The novel's present action concerns Dominick's attempts to get Thomas out of Hatch, the highsecurity mental institution to which he is hauled off after his bloody act, and returned to the more humane, less restrictive Settle, where Thomas has been comfortably hospitalized off and on over the years. Interwoven with the present narrative are flashbacks that sketch the twins' 1950s childhood and '60s adolescence . From the start, Thomas, who descended into paranoid schizophrenia in his twenties, is the more sensitive, "weaker" brother, often derided by others and abused by the boys' adoptive father, Ray. Lamb convicingly depicts Dominick's past as a long struggle to reconcile his own instinct to survive—which pits him against Thomas, his albatross— with his deeply felt obligation to protect his "weaker half." The results , of course, are massive guilt and buried anger at his crazy twin, and as the story proceeds, the emphasis shifts from Dominick's attempts to get Thomas released to his initially reluctant quest for self-knowledge and self-healing. It's a welcome shift, since while Thomas's paranoid delusions that he is the mouthpiece of God are an alluring hook, they quickly become less interesting than Dominick's tangled real life. Given the complexity of Dominick 'sproblems—hisbrother'sinsanity, his mother's death from cancer, his divorce (due to the strain of losing an The Missouri Review · 207 infant daughter to SIDS), his confused flight, several years earher, from a teaching career and his current troubled relationship with a sexually manipulative kleptomaniac—the length of the novel seems fully justified . What's noteworthy is how weU Lamb orchestrates it all. This is a story full of characters, all of whom seem to have Uves as compUcated as Dominick's, but' because they're aU seen from the perspective of the protagonist 's search for self-knowledge and acceptance, the whole is remarkably integrated—even the strange and gruesome journal of Dominick's Italian grandfather, which Lamb interpolates in its entirety. In fact, the journal is one of the highlights of the novel and features by far the best villain in the book. By contrast, Lamb's other characters, even the Ul-doers, are a little too soft, a Uttle too nice. Even the worst of them is easily and neatly redeemed in the end. It seems like hair-spUtting to criticize this good, big, absorbing book, but a touch less earnestness wouldn't have hurt. (ES) The Wealth...

Cherished and Cursed: Toward a Social History of The Catcher in the Rye

T HE plot is brief: in 1949 or perhaps 1950, over the course of three days during the Christmas season, a sixteen-yearold takes a picaresque journey to his New York City home from the third private school to expel him. The narrator recounts his experiences and opinions from a sanitarium in California. A heavy smoker, Holden Caulfield claims to be already six feet, two inches tall and to have wisps of grey hair; and he wonders what happens to the ducks when the ponds freeze in winter. The novel was published on 16 July 1951, sold for $3.00, and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Within two weeks, it had been reprinted five times, the next month three more times-though by the third edition the jacket photograph of the author had quietly disappeared. His book stayed on the bestseller list for thirty weeks, though never above fourth place.' Costing 750, the Bantam paperback edition appeared in 1964. By 1981, when the same edition went for $2.50, sales still held steady, between twenty and thirty thousand copies per month, about a quarter of a million copies annually. In paperback the novel sold over three million copies between 1953 and 1964, climbed even higher by the 1980s, and continues to attract about as many buyers as it did in 1951. The durability of

Keeping fires night and day: selected letters of Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Eleanor Roosevelt called her one of the most influential women in America. Among the earliest and most assertive members of the Book-of-the-Month Club selection committee, Dorothy Canfield Fisher define literary taste in America for more than three decades. She shape the careers of such famous writers as Pearl Buck, Isak Dinesen, and Richard Wright. A best-selling author herself, Fisher was also a deeply committed social activist. In Keeping Fires Night and Day, Mark J. Madigan collects much of Fisher's copious correspondence. With letters to Willa Cather, W. E. B. Du Bois, Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, Margaret Mead, James Thurber, and E. B. White, this volume documents Fisher's personal and professional life and career in a way that no biography could. Set against the American historical and cultural landscape from 1900 to 1958, these letters offer a firsthand account of one of the twentieth century's most remarkable women. Fisher's life was anything but conventional. When her best-selling novels made her the chief breadwinner in her marriage, her husband, John Fisher, assumed the role of secretary and editor of her work. Fluent in five languages, Dorothy Canfield Fisher founded a Braille press in France and introduced the educational methods of Dr. Maria Montessori to the United States. She became a pioneering advocate of adult education and served as the first woman on the Vermont Board of Education. In letters to friends, fans, and colleagues, Fisher discussed her homelife, her work, and the world around her. Her passions and concerns - revealed in her correspondence with wit and poignancy - include the New Woman and the suffrage movement, racial discrimination andthe emergence of the NAACP the development of a national education system, two world wars, the depression, and the influence of book clubs in the literary marketplace. Dorothy Canfield Fisher helped twentieth-century American literature to come of age, writes Clifton Fadiman i

American Studies in Black and White: Selected Essays, 1949-1989 (review)

book reviews281 on how anti-Andrew Johnson members of Congress such as Benjamin F. Butler and James M. Ashley tried to implicate the president in the murder plot. Chamblee continues his research into the closing years of the nineteenth century. As late as the 1890s there were still some who claimed to have firsthand knowledge of the Booth conspiracy. Much of the later information was bigoted in nature and tended to implicate the Catholic Church in the assassination. One person who comes off well in this book is Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. The time has come to finally put aside the Otto Eisenschimel allegation that Stanton wanted Lincoln murdered. In 1937 Why Was Lincoln Murdered? (erroneously referred to as Why Was Lincoln Shot? by Chamblee) was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and consequently reached more readers than otherwise would be the case. How many people saw the title of that book and came to accept the treachery of Stanton can never be known. The truth is that Stanton was loyal to Lincoln and pursued the investigation of his murder with honesty and dispatch. In light of what Chamblee has to say about Stanton, it is surprising to find no mention of Stanton: The Life and Times ofLincoln's Secretary of War (1962) by Benjamin P. Thomas and Harold M. Hyman in the bibliography while several older and inferior biographies of Stanton are cited. William Hanchett's book, too, should have been included in the Selected Bibliography; perhaps the author deliberately stayed away from it. The vital research has been done in government documents, archival material, and records of the various inquiries and trials. There are many people besides the conspirators who are given brief biographical attention in this book. It is a serious work of research and writing. Perhaps there will be no need to have further investigation into Lincoln's assassination for a generation to come unless new revelations turn up—which is improbable . With the publication of this study, it can be said that this is all we know and most likely all that we will ever know about events surrounding those tragic days in April 1865. Lewis H. Croce Mankato State University American Studies in Black and White: Selected Essays, 1949-1989. By Sidney Kaplan. Edited by Allan D. Austin. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991. Pp. 336. $39.95.) Perhaps the most impressive feature of this volume of essays is the range and diversity of Sidney Kaplan's subjects and interests. The volume brings together twelve essays written by Kaplan, a historian and black studies scholar, over the course of his career. Eight pieces first appeared in the 1950s or 1960s; two were written in the 1980s. All of the essays examine 282civil war history different features of the African-American experience, or issues concerning white attitudes towards blacks, and cover five different topics: the colonial and revolutionary eras, the Civil War, fiction and fantasy, art, and invention. Although written as many as forty years ago, several of the pieces in this volume have a direct relevance for contemporary scholarly concerns. In this regard, perhaps the most noteworthy contribution is "The Miscegenation Issue in the Election of 1864," an essay that originally appeared in the Journal of Negro History in 1949. Kaplan uncovered the first use of the term miscegenation in a campaign document with this title, issued in 1863. Published anonymously by two antiabolitionist New York Democrats, the authors attempted to present their work as abolitionist literature supportive of the thorough mixing of the races and invited prominent abolitionists and Republicans to respond to their ideas. The conflation of race, sex, region, and politics in both the original document and in the response of various abolitionists offers a fascinating insight into mid-nineteenth century racial and sexual attitudes. Kaplan, however, reads the episode not so much with an eye toward these issues but more with an interest in the workings of the New York press in covering this event. Still, present-day scholars could certainly benefit from Kaplan's presentation of this revealing dialogue. Kaplan does some of his best work in close readings of historical and literary texts. He does...

The university and democratic life: Allan Bloom's Platonic attack

The Closing of the American Mind has become a best-seller, appeared in the BookOf-The-Month Club's selections, and made its author, Allan Bloom, a millionaire. The critical attention has been equally impressive in quantity, if not always in quality: there have been so many reviews of Bloom's book that a collection of them has been published (Stone, 1989). 1 Unfortunately, Bloom's rhe to r i c which has doubtless contributed to the book's popular success has elicited mostly counterrhetoric from critics. 2 In this paper, I wish to focus on an aspect of The Closing of the American Mind which has been virtually ignored by reviewers and which I believe, nevertheless, forms the backbone of not only Bloom's standards in higher education but also his critique of the modem university and its political context (democracy), namely, Bloom's systematic reliance on Plato. 3 In general, critics are more interested in focussing on Bloom's connection, both personal and philosophical, with Leo Strauss. 4 Whatever the influence of Strauss on Bloom, he is quoted only once; Plato, by contrast, crops up at least 40 times in The Closing of the American Mind. Notwithstanding claims that the relative absence of any reference to Strauss holds some subversive significance for the interpretation of Bloom's message, I prefer to focus on what Bloom does say and as I plan to show the message is quite Platonic. In the first part of the paper, I will argue that Bloom is presenting four related theses about the university and democratic life; the evidence for this (some of which has been discussed by reviewers for different purposes) is given in some detail in order to make Bloom's Platonic assumptions manifest. The latter are explicitly drawn out in the second part of the paper where I discuss some of the problems which Bloom's Platonic approach creates, not only for his analysis of the university's (alleged) malaise, but also for his proposed cure.

Coroners in the Academy

Abstract During the past seven years the right has gradually taken over public discourse concerning intellectual life in America. Self-hating liberal academics now add their voices to the chorus, as Allan Bloom and other neo-conservatives rage against the sins of higher education. Falling in lock step behind Secretary of Education William Bennett, administrators and academic committees have joined a crusade for “accountability” that promises students no less than urine tests and civics exams upon graduation. With each new Book-of-the-Month Club selection, with each “official” report on the dismal state of historical knowledge among seventeen year olds, the airwaves and newspapers fill with interviews of seemingly benign and level-headed neo-conservative “experts,” who warn us that the nation's culture is weakened and defenseless, thanks to rock music and a lack of vigilance on the part of liberals.

We Knew William Tecumseh Sherman: An Eyewitness Biography , and: The Seige of Vicksburg , and: Sherman's March: An Eyewitness History of the Cruel Campaign that Helped End a Crueler War (review)

BOOK reviews91 erate States Marine Corps provide service records for the fifty-seven men who accepted commissions to become C.S.M.C. officers and one whose commission was not confirmed. Biographical information is provided for forty-two of diese individuals. Information is also given for two officers of the Virginia Marine Corps who did not serve as C.S.M.C. officers. In addition, service records are given for four individuals reported as Marine officers but whose commissions are not confirmed by records. Service Records of Confederate Enlisted Marines has details of wartime service for 1,238 men, arranged alphabetically by name. In a few instances, biographical information is added. Also included is an index of spelling variations for names. Anodier index gives known information about Marines' places of birth or residence. In addition, there is a "Correction and Addenda" which has biographical supplements for eleven commissioned officers. Donnelly's organization and presentation are admirable and reflect a vast knowledge of the military forces serving along the Confederacy's coasts and rivers. All material presented is meticulously documented, although some detail is inevitably missing due to die absence of complete records. W7here conjecture is possible, careful substantiation is given for the conclusion presented. Donnelly's research, writing and resourcefulness in finding sources can serve as standards for others to attain . These three volumes fill a void in the history of the Navy and Marine Corps. Those who study Civil War naval operations, or who research the prodigious Southern efforts to form and maintain their military power, will find much supplementary detail in Donnelly's books. For four years, the officers and enlisted men of die CS. Marine Corps were part of a "great civil war." Aldiough no former Confederate Marine ever rose to national prominence, the men of the Corps stood the trials of their disrupted civilian lives with the same strength of character that characterized their endurance of wartime trials. Thomas J. Bohon Cascade, Maryland We Knew William Tecumseh Sherman: An Eyewitness Biography. By Richard W7heeler. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1977. Pp. xiii, 130. $7.95.) The Seige of Vicksburg. By Richard W7heeler. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1978. Pp. x, 257. $11.95.) Sherman's March: An Eyewitness History of the Cruel Campaign that Helped End a Cruder War. By Richard Wheeler. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1978. Pp. xi, 241. $11.95.) Richard W7heeler has, without question, mastered the technique of writ- 92civil war history ing "eyewitness" histories. In addition to the volumes under review he has had published recently three other "eyewitness" works. One of these, Voices of the Civil War, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection as well as winner of the Fletcher Pratt Award as the best Civil W7ar book of 1976. His Civil W7ar volumes are largely collections of first-person accounts integrated into a narrative by short, clear passages written by W7heeler himself. These are in italics. Although the quotations, which appear in regular type, are in most cases from standard sources such as published memoirs, reminiscences, diaries, journals and letters, they are well chosen. We Knew William Tecumseh Sherman: An Eyewitness Biography was written as a companion volume to the author's previous work, We Knew Stonewall Jackson. "Jackson was right-hand man to General Robert E. Lee" writes W7heeler. "Sherman was the same to General Ulysses S. Grant." This is true but only to a limited extent. For one thing, Jackson never commanded above the corps level whereas Sherman, whenhe marched out ofChattanooga in the spring of 1864, was the ranking general in the western theater and headed an army of 100,000 men. This was the beginning of a march to fame and glory for the Union general whose sanity had been questioned early in the war. Atlanta fell to his forces inSeptemberand in Novemberhe commencedhis famous"March to the Sea," Atlanta to Savannah. After presenting the latter city to President Lincoln as a Christmas present, Sherman turned his columns in the direction of the Carolinas. The campaign ended near Durham, North Carolina, in April, 1865, when Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston surrendered his small force. North and South Carolina, and Georgia...

The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople, 1201-1204

On August 15, 1199, Pope Innocent III called for a renewed effort to deliver Jerusalem from the Infidel, but the Fourth Crusade had a very different outcome from the one he preached. Proceeding no further than Constantinople, the Crusaders sacked the capital of eastern Christendom and installed a Latin ruler on the throne of Byzantium. This revised and expanded edition of The Fourth Crusade gives fresh emphasis to events in Byzantium and the Byzantine response to the actions of the Crusaders. Included in this edition is a chapter on the sack of Constantinople and the election of its Latin emperor. A History Book Club selection.

The American Presidency: An Interpretation

With its call for new, revitalized presidential leadership, The American Presidency is as relevant and timely today as when it first appeared in 1940 as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. In addition to providing innovative ideas about the American presidency, Laski's book examines such contemporary, critical issues as the deadlock between the president and Congress, the crucial need for a coherent presidential direction of foreign policy, the relative unimportance of the presidnet's cabinet, and the weaknesses of America's pwer system in dealing with special interest groups.