Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2018 -

The European resistance movements remain a fascinating and controversial aspect of WW II. Just how effective were these heroic freedom fighters? Was their impact worth the enormous cost paid by the men and women of the resistance and the societies that themselves suffered the savage retributions of their Nazi occupiers? Like most aspects of this global war, the scholarship on the resistance is enormous but relatively difficult to access. Zander (Georgia Gwinnett College) provides an excellent overview of this complex topic. Based of necessity on secondary sources, Hidden Armies provides an excellent introduction and starting place for further study. Individual chapters outline the organization, achievements, and controversies of resistance forces in France, Northern Europe, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Russia, and southeastern Europe; the text also provides useful links to key sources for more detailed research. Zander notes that the early assessments of the effectiveness of the resistance--almost universally negative based on the fearsome calculus of cost to benefit--are giving way to a more balanced judgment of the impact of these "hidden armies." An important acquisition for modern history collections.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.

Partridge (Lancaster Univ., UK) traces the use of drugs to achieve transcendence, specifically the relationship between psychoactive substances and religious experiences. He opens with an explanation of how psychoactive substances can function as "technologies of transcendence," a term inspired by Foucault's work on technologies of the self, and then chronicles the use of various such "technologies" in Western society, beginning with opium use in 19th-century England and concluding with psychedelic shamanism as it was understood by American authors and thinkers Carlos Castaneda and Terence McKenna. In between are chapters on the advent of anesthesia, 19th-century cannabis use, the turn of the century connection between drug use and occultism, and the psychedelic revolution. Throughout the work, Partridge provides detailed examples of drug-induced transcendent experiences and thoroughly explains the complex associations between these experiences and religious thought across history. In addition to its likely essentiality for scholars of religion and alcohol and drugs history, Partridge's clear and engaging language and intriguing subject matter will probably make this book appealing to audiences beyond academia.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Thanks to the centenary of WW I, there is no shortage of excellent surveys available about this epochal conflict. Yet even among their number, Leonhard's book, originally published in German in 2014 and now available in an English translation, stands out for its comprehensiveness and for the perspective it brings to English-language readers. In it Leonhard (Univ. of Freiberg, Germany) provides a sweeping account of the war, one that incorporates its political, social, and cultural dimensions into a description of the campaigns on the various battlefields. No front is left unaddressed, and all are integrated into his narrative in a way that shows how developments did not take place in isolation but instead reflected the complex interactions of a global event. Little is left out from Leonhard's acute scrutiny, yet his description and analysis are presented in a fluid narrative that ties all the details together into an epic whole. The result is the best single-volume history of the war yet written, one that is an invaluable addition for academic libraries with specializations in the war, military history in general, European history, and modern world history.Summing Up: Essential. All academic libraries.

In her splendid introduction to the field of history, Maza (Northwestern) identifies why and how history as a discipline differs from other fields. Unlike other disciplines, history lacks a defined, overarching structure; historians generally do not share common canons, bodies of knowledge, or technical methods. Differing from researchers in other fields, too, most historians work hard to avoid jargon and seek to disseminate their findings to broad, non-"insider" audiences. Eclecticism lies at the core of the historian's craft, a quality that Maza considers essential to the field's vibrancy and broad appeal. To identify research projects, historians first ask a question and then read broadly, often comparatively. Maza rightly insists that it is virtually impossible to teach historians a research methodology because no methodology is fully applicable to all historical research. Beyond this, most historians are less wedded to "theory" than practitioners in virtually any other scholarly field. To illustrate why and how history constitutes "the ultimate hybrid field," Maza devotes chapters to such essential topics as causality, changing ideas over time, global history, objectivity, quantification, resistance and agency, and historical revisionism. Her book is ideal for advanced undergraduate and introductory graduate seminars.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

Every decade or so, an exceptional volume is born. Provocative and inspiring, historian Goldberg's volume is one such work in the field of Holocaust studies. He begins with theory and methodology related to life stories and autobiographical writing, incorporating the language of trauma discourse to analysis and offering a model that "describes the dynamics at work within the autobiographical texts from the Holocaust period." Goldberg (Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem) then turns to the application of this theory in the diaries of Otto Klemperer (Dresden) and Chaim Kaplan (Warsaw), "writers [who] not only describe the reality they experience but also struggle against it through writing." Though the author studies these two diaries in some detail, he also compares them with the work of other diarists from this tragic period. "What is essential during this period is precisely that which cannot be accurately described and is therefore termed traumatic." Indeed, Goldberg's introduction of trauma as a "central concept in understanding the lives of the Jews in the Holocaust," enriched by philosophical, psychological, and narratological thought, may very well produce the radical shift he envisions in the historiography of the Holocaust. Replete with informational notes and a detailed bibliography.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

For four decades, Winter (emer., history, Yale) has researched war and communicated his findings to scholars and laypersons. His new book addresses the cultural history of war through the lenses of language and the creative arts that frame memory. Four chapters in part 1, "Vectors of Memory," explore the thematic, spatial, and temporal variations in "mediated images" produced since 1914 in art, photographic images, non-documentary films and popular exposure to war, and the semantic history of words, with a focus on war poetry. The three chapters in part 2, "Frameworks of Memory," examine how imaginings of war are structured by expressions of the sacred and martyrdom, the focus of horizontal and vertical axes at sites of memory, and silence and the suppression of troubling memories, with a focus on shell shock. Winter's central findings are that since 1914, there has been a shift from recognizing soldiers as victims of war to viewing civilians as victims of war and that together, these undermine the legitimacy of war as an instrument of politics. The book's last sentence is as depressing as it is insightful: "Imagining war is the curse of our violent world; we have no choice but to face that task with as much intelligence, compassion, and courage as we can." Splendid illustrations.Summing Up: Essential. Most levels/libraries.