New Publications
Asphalt and Politics: A History of the American Highway System, by Thomas L. Karnes (215 pages, October 2009), offers an informal look at the development of the 160,000 miles of President Eisenhower’s interstate highways, the 1919 transcontinental motor convoys that inspired them, and the current challenges of state and federal financing, upkeep, and congestion. $35.00. McFarland. 978-0-7864-4282-9.
The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther, by Jeffrey Haas (376 pages, November 2009), tells the story of Illinois Black Panther activist and community leader Fred Hampton, whose brutal murder during a Chicago police raid in December 1969 was the result of a collaboration between police and Hoover’s FBI, which was obsessed with neutralizing the Panthers as a militant threat. After a grand jury exonerated the Chicago police and Cook County State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan from any wrongdoing in 1970, Haas and the People’s Law Office represented Hampton’s family in a civil-rights lawsuit against Chicago police, Cook County prosecutors, and the FBI for wrongful death and conspiracy. After more than 12 years of frequent setbacks, the case resulted in a $1.85-million settlement. Haas’s skill as a memoirist adds legitimacy to this powerful story of corruption and political assassination. $26.95. Lawrence Hill Books. 978-1-55652-765-4.
Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story, by Evan I. Schwartz (374 pages, April 2009), examines the episodes and influences in the life of L. Frank Baum that led to his writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz—the White City of Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition as the prototype for the Emerald City; P. T. Barnum, Thomas Edison, John D. Rockefeller, and an Indian fakir as multiple sources for the Wizard; populist farmers and industrial workers as inspiration for the brainless Scarecrow and the heartless Tin Woodman; the tamed Sioux warrior Sitting Bull as the Cowardly Lion; and the quest to see the Wizard as a spiritual journey that Baum experienced in part through Helena Blavatsky’s theosophical writings. Schwartz pretty much ends his tale with the publication of Oz in 1900, so readers wanting a complete biography should consult Katharine M. Rogers’s L. Frank Baum: Creator of Oz (Da Capo, 2003) or Rebecca Loncraine’s The Real Wizard of Oz (Gotham, 2009). $28.00. Houghton Mifflin. 978-0-547-05510-7.
Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties,
by Bill Warren (1,004 pages, December 2009), is an updated reissue (in one alphabetically arranged deluxe edition) of Warren’s two classic volumes published in 1982 and 1986. Warren describes and analyzes every single SF film released in the United States from The Flying Saucer (1950) to Varan the Unbelievable (1962), encompassing the era when, as the author puts it, “the genre defined itself, when ideas were fresh (even naïve), and there was, even sometimes in the junkiest films, a sense of discovery.” Included in this edition are 35 full-color posters, a massively comprehensive index, an appendix on not-quite-science-fiction films of the 1950s, and the last-minute addition of a review of Tarzan’s Peril (1951). $99.00. McFarland. 978-0-7864-4230-0.Mistakes in Academic Library Management, edited by Jack E. Fritts Jr. (132 pages, October 2009), presents ten hypothetical tactical errors that academic library managers can make, discusses the ramifications, and suggests ways to avoid similar errors. The managerial errors include campus politics, communication, project management, staffing, knowledge management, knowing the user, budget failure, change management, program planning, and leadership failure. A good introduction for newly appointed directors. $50.00. Scarecrow. 978-0-8108-6744-4.
The Search for the Codex Cardona,
by Arnold J. Bauer (181 pages, December 2009), is a bibliographic mystery story revolving around the provenance and whereabouts of an Aztec illustrated codex of more than 400 folios, allegedly produced between 1550 and 1556 by scribes and painters under the direction of Captain Alonzo Cardona y Villaviciosa in Mexico City. Bauer had a brief glimpse of it in 1985 at the Crocker Nuclear Laboratory at the University of California-Davis, where it had been submitted it for PIXE analysis of its paper and ink (tests that proved inconclusive). The codex last surfaced in 1999, when Christie’s auction house turned down a request from an unknown seller to put it up for bids. Bauer’s narrative is a bit tangled (a timeline would have been nice), but so are the facts in this complex tale of possible fraud, theft, and intrigue. At least some slides made of the original codex by one-time owner Guillermo Gutiérrez Esquivel have survived and accompany the book. $21.95. Duke University. 978-0-8223-4614-2.Article Views (By Year/Month)
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