New Publications
The Fence: National Security, Public Safety, and Illegal Immigration along the U.S.–Mexico Border, by Robert Lee Maril (368 pages, March 2011), looks at the efforts by the Department of Homeland Security to build a virtual, technological fence along the border with Mexico. Launched in 2006 as the Secure Border Initiative, the contract was awarded to Boeing and involved the construction of towers with sophisticated surveillance equipment that would alert the Border Patrol to smuggling operations or unauthorized crossings. However, Maril concludes that the project, which was largely scrapped in 2010, committed the same blunders as an earlier effort under the Clinton administration known as the Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System. Both projects, Maril concludes, relied too heavily on technology with minimal input from the Border Patrol itself and involved too little public oversight to be anything but costly failures. Meanwhile, Customs and Border Protection announced in March 2011 that it will hold an open competition for yet another attempt to set up a network of cameras and sensors. $29.95. Texas Tech University. 978-0-89672-680-2.
The Golden-Bristled Boar: Last Ferocious Beast of the Forest, by Jeffrey Greene (183 pages, March 2011), pays tribute to the wild boar (Sus scrofa), hated by farmers and viticulturists in Europe, and adored by hunters for the challenge of the chase. Greene, who purchased an 18th-century presbytery in northern Burgundy, found that his property was part of one of the most densely populated boar areas in Europe. After a neighbor gifted him with an enormous piece of boar meat, he became fascinated with the lore, cuisine, biology, and history of the beast. Greene traveled to Sardinia, Corsica, Tuscany, and the American South (where introduced boars have bred widely with feral pigs) to investigate its interactions with humans. The final chapter has six different recipes for the gastronomically adventurous. $22.95. University of Virginia. 978-0-8139-3103-6.
In Too Deep: BP and the Drilling Race That Took It Down, by Stanley Reed and Alison Fitzgerald (226 pages, January 2011), analyzes the corporate culture at BP that led to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of April 20, 2010. This massive blowout was preceded by other serious accidents, among them a huge fire at BP’s refinery in Scotland in 2000, an explosion at another refinery in Texas City in 2005, and a BP pipeline leak at Prudhoe Bay in 2006. The authors, both reporters for Bloomberg News, point out that CEO John Browne’s string of acquisitions in 1998–2003 (Amoco, Atlantic Richfield, the Russian company TNK) was typical of the company’s vigorous expansion that caused it to cut corners on management and safety. However, they praise BP’s excellent track record in oil and gas exploration; it remains to be seen whether new CEO Robert Dudley can revive the company’s reputation. $24.95. Bloomberg Press. 978-0-470-95090-6.
A Long Silence: Memories of a German Refugee Child, 1941–1958, by Sabina de Werth Neu (260 pages, February 2011), captures the fear, shame, and guilt of a German family traumatized by the horrors of war and forced to move numerous times—first sent east from Berlin in 1942 as settlers in newly occupied East Prussia, next fleeing southwest to Bohemia in 1944 to avoid the Red Army, then relocated to East Germany by the Czechs and Russians in 1945, and finally escaping as refugees to Stuttgart in 1946. The author, now 69 and a naturalized U.S. citizen, wrote this compelling memoir to heal the pains of her childhood, reconstruct the hazy memories of a repressed past, and thank the Americans for all they did for Germany through the postwar Marshall Plan. Her story is filled with so many jolting, stressful events that one can understand why it took her nearly 50 years to come to grips with them. $19.00. Prometheus. 978-1-61614-256-8.
Mussolini, by R. J. B. Bosworth (511 pages, 2d ed., March 2011), is a well-balanced portrait of Il Duce that depicts him as both a ruthless social engineer of Fascism and an inconsistent, flawed leader swept up in a destiny rooted in the inadequate nationalism of the Risorgimento. Bosworth corrects some errors in the 2002 edition and extends the narrative of Mussolini’s legacy to the ongoing revisionist sentiments in Berlusconi’s Italy. $23.95. Bloomsbury Academic. 978-0-340-98173-3.
The Polish American Encyclopedia, edited by James S. Pula (585 pages, January 2011), is a useful compendium of information about Polish-American people and organizations that have made significant contributions to the history and culture of the United States. Also included are such broad topics as Polish-American literature, fine arts, women, sports, monuments, religious life, ethnic identity, and interethnic relations. $145.00. McFarland. 978-0-7864-6222-3.
2012 and the End of the World, by Matthew Restall and Amara Solari (141 pages, January 2011), originated with the authors’ preparations for teaching a class at Pennsylvania State University on 2012ology, the millenarianist notion that the Mayans predicted a world apocalypse taking place on December 21, 2012. Both authors are anthropologists, and Restall has a specialty in Latin American history while Solari is also an art historian with a focus on Mayan art. They discuss the Mayan calendar, the inscription on El Tortuguero Monument 6 (discovered in 1960) that sparked the 2012 phenomenon, apocalypticism in the West and its role in interpreting the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, the influence of Franciscan mysticism on the 18th-century Mayan Chilam Balam books, and reasons for the modern interest in allegedly Mayan eschatology. $16.95. Rowman & Littlefield. 978-1-4422-0609-0.
The Whaling Expedition of the Ulysses, 1937–38, by Lt. (J.G.) Quentin R. Walsh, edited by P. J. Capelotti (325 pages, October 2010), consists of Walsh’s report as a U.S. Coast Guard observer on the cruise of the whaling ship Ulysses, a Norwegian operation sailing under an American flag, which traveled 29,000 miles and killed and processed more than 3,660 whales in Australian and Antarctic waters. Walsh was assigned to document modern whaling operations and enforce the 1937 International Agreement for the Regulation of Whaling. Just as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick provides us with a look at the American whaling industry in 1850, Walsh’s often grisly report offers a snapshot of ruthless commercialism in the 1930s that laid the foundation for U.S. policies in opposition to pelagic whaling. Although he received a Navy Cross for leading a commando raid on Cherbourg shortly after D-Day, Walsh, who died in 2000, looked back on his days with the Ulysses as instrumental in saving some species of whales from extinction. $34.95. University Press of Florida. 978-0-8130-3479-9.
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