Fifth batch. Finished going through my list, winding up with enough for two batches. I divided them by picking out the more historical titles, leaving whatever else was left. Will post the sixth batch tomorrow, than that will be the end of it for a while -- maybe I'll try this again in the fall, but the exercise has gotten rather tedious for me, so maybe not.

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Kenneth Ackerman: Young J Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties (2007, Da Capo): I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that Hoover cut his teeth working for the DOJ during the 1919-20 Palmer Raids. He made a lifetime career out of trampling on citizens' civil rights and liberties -- from the first great red scare through the Black Panthers, he almost singularly cornered the market. I remain very interested in Ann Hagedorn's big book on the period: Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919.

Karen Armstrong: The Bible: A Biography (2007, Grove/Atlantic): About the only writer I trust when it comes to sorting out the historical roots of religions. I have a rough idea of how The Bible was put together over hundreds of years, especially the New Testament, but this should be the essential reference to settle, or at least frame, it all.

George BN Ayittey: Africa Unchained: The Blueprint for Africa's Future (paperback, 2006, Palgrave Macmillan): Relatively optimistic approach to Africa's future, positing a fresh restart from the chaos and depredations of the past. Author, an economist from Ghana, previously wrote Africa in Chaos: A Comparative History.

Jack Beatty, Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900 (2007, Knopf; paperback, 2008, Vintage). Important history of the coming of the Gilded Age and its resultant subversion of American democracy.

Jeremy Bernstein: Plutonium: A History of the World's Most Dangerous Element (2007, Joseph Henry Press): One of the best physics writers working on the synthetic element that makes nuclear weapons possible. Also wrote Nuclear Weapons: What You Need to Know, which I've read, and Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall, which despite its marginal interest -- it collects transcripts of German nuclear scientists sequestered by the Allies after WWII -- I'm sure is fascinating.

Douglas A Blackmon: Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (2008, Doubleday): Not just a general critique of the failure of reconstruction and the imposition of Jim Crow segregation, as if that wasn't enough. This book recounts how black convicts sentenced to "hard labor" were lent or sold to commercial interests, about as close to slavery as you can get. This practice continued "well into the twentieth century"

Tim Blanning: The Pursuit of Glory: The Five Revolutions That Made Modern Europe: 1648-1815 (2007; paperback, 2008, Penguin): Big book (736 pages), part of the "Penguin History of Europe" series, which evidently slices up history into time periods allotted to each author, covering a little bit of everything -- not just the five revolutions of the subtitle, a list that I haven't seen enumerated in any review (1648 marked the Treaty of Westphalia, ending the 30 Years War; 1815 ended the Napoleonic wars).

Giles Bolton: Africa Doesn't Matter: How the West Has Failed the Poorest Continent and What We Can Do About It (paperback, 2008, Arcade): Another book on the failure of aid to develop Africa. Don't know that he has any special insights, but he no doubt has stories.

Richard Bookstaber: A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation (2007, Wiley): Evidently the author was a pioneer in some of the novelties he now warns of. They basically seek to disguise risk, thereby inflating apparent value now and amplifying risk later. Should have been clear enough, but who believes they'll wind up holding the bag? -- especially in a world where profits are private but liabilities are easily sloughed off on the public.

Max Boot: War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today (2006, Gotham): Boot's The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power offered useful history wrapped up in a profoundly dangerous bag of theorizing, in essence arguing that small wars always work out fine for America, regardless of how ill-conceived or half-assed. The book was written to argue against the Powell Doctrine, appearing before the Afghanistan and Iraq wars that were intended as small wars before they got out of hand. The new book looks to technology to solve the problems of the old book. Anything to keep the war romance going.

HW Brands: The Money Men: Capitalism, Democracy, and the Hundred Years' War over the American Dollar (paperback, 2007, WW Norton): Historian, has written books on Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, the somewhat more intriguing The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s (the decade of the worst depression in US history up to the 1929 crash), a book on Texas, one on the Cold War. This one has five faces on the cover: Alexander Hamilton, Nicholas Biddle, Jay Cooke, Jay Gould, and JP Morgan.

Tom Brokaw: Boom!: Voices of the Sixties Personal Reflections on the '60s and Today (2007, Random House): Broadcaster, author of The Greatest Generation tries to do it again. Not sure what "it" is, perhaps just to haphazardly reduce a slice of time to a set of clichés. Given how badly the decade has been abused in the popular media lately, it's unlikely that this will make things much worse. At best people will start to be disabused of the notion that the quest for justice by children of an affluent society was nothing but naked self-indulgence, drug-induced fantasy, and hypocrisy. It still seems to me like a nobel attempt to achieve the ideals we were brought up to think the country was always about. The backlash of sheer hatred took us aback, especially how it was exploited by political hacks who have done little since them except grind us into the ground. Compared to their legacy, any sense of normal human aspirations in the 1960s would be a blessing.

Caleb Carr: The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians: Why It Has Always Failed and Why It Will Fail Again (2002, Random House): Historical novelist comes up with a quick historical framework to 9/11, framed in the context of war against civilians going as far back as Rome, something the US is not unfamiliar with.

Dan T Carter: The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (paperback, 2000, Louisiana State University Press): In reading several broad histories of the rise of the new right, one thing I've been struck by was how the current tone and temper of the movement -- what Jim Geraghty calls "voting to kill" -- only arrived with Wallace. Carter also wrote: From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994.

Derek Chollet/James Goldgeier: America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11 (2008, Public Affairs): Washington think-tankers on the decade-plus from the collapse of the Berlin Wall to the fall of the World Trade Center -- something they describe as "a holiday from history," as if war really is the only thing that gives us (think-tankers) meaning.

Adam Clymer: Drawing the Line at the Big Ditch: The Panama Canal Treaties and the Rise of the Right (2008, University Press of Kansas): In his 1980 campaign, Ronald Reagan made a big stink about Jimmy Carter having signed away the Panama Canal -- a pretty successful campaign ploy, but Reagan never did anything to undo the treaty, nor did his VP Bush when the latter was president and invaded Panama and overthrew the government.

Lizabeth Cohen: A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (paperback, 2003, Vintage): That post-WWII America turned into a shopper's paradise is pretty much a given -- this goes into details like advertising, shopping malls, suburban sprawl, but perhaps more significantly relates them to growing inequality rooted earlier than most studies report. Previously wrote: Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939.

Christopher Coyne: After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy (paperback, 2007, Stanford Economics and Finance): Seems like a heavy read, but probes deeply into why the US is unable to rebuild any of those countries we're so good at destroying. Examples go back to Germany and Japan, which aren't translatable into places like Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Somalia.

Michael Eric Dyson: April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr's Death and How It Changed America (2008, Basic Civitas): One way it changed America was that it moved King from being an active critic of injustice in America to an icon of America's glorious past. Dyson helps bring that voice back, where it's as needed as ever. Dyson also wrote: I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. Also relevant: Clarence B Jones: What Would Martin Say?

M Stanton Evans: Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies (2007, Crown Forum): Not just an attempt to resurrect McCarthy's soiled reputation -- the goal is show how this conservative saint was martyred by the insidious liberal media. In the old canonical view, McCarthy was sacrificed as a case where a right-winger went too far, like David Duke or Oliver North. But sooner or later the right's think tanks will rehabilitate all of them. Didn't Goldwater say "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice"?

Anne Farrow/Joel Lang/Jenifer Frank: Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited From Slavery (paperback, 2006, Ballantine): Written by three Connecticut journalists, who shouldn't have had much trouble digging up the evidence, the sort of history that many would prefer to quietly forget. Some of this is well known; some, like gangs that kidnapped free blacks and sold them into slavery, isn't. I doubt there's enough here to quantify the title assertion -- e.g., certainly there are those who profited, but how much did this profit mean to the North as a whole?

Charles Ferguson: No End in Sight: Iraq's Descent Into Chaos (paperback, 2008, Public Affairs): The book behind a pretty good documentary about how Bush got us into Iraq and especially how his people screwed up the early occupation.

Daniel J Flynn: A Conservative History of the American Left (2008, Crown Forum): The title aims to preach to the choir, assuring them that it's safe to go there, kind of like A Puritan's Guide to the Sexual Revolution. Amazon's product description starts off in subtitle fashion: From Communes to Clinton. Probably not as nutso as Jonah Goldberg: Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left or Dinesh D'Souza: The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, but one can't be sure a priori: cf. Flynn's previous Why the Left Hates America: Exposing the Lies That Have Obscured Our Nation's Greatness.

Philip Gourevitch/Errol Morris: Standard Operating Procedure (2008, Penguin): Companion book to Morris's documentary, focusing on the Abu Ghraib scandal.

John Gray: Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007, Farrar Straus and Giroux): British philosopher examines the history of utopian ideas and how the right, especially the religious right, has taken to them in recent years. Previously wrote: Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern; Beyond the New Right: Markets, Government and the Common Environment.

Stephen Grey: Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program (2006, St Martin's Press): I wouldn't be surprised if there is more to this story, but this is at least a start: how the CIA kidnapped terrorism suspects, whisking them away to countries where they could be tortured at leisure.

Roy Gutman: How We Missed the Story: Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban, and the Hijacking of Afghanistan (2008, Potomac Books): A journalist with extensive experience in the area digs into the question of how the media failed to grasp the significance of the relationship between Bin Laden and the Taliban. I doubt that this exonherates Condoleezza ("Who Knew?") Rice.

Adam Hochschild: Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (paperback, 2006, Houghton Mifflin): The story of the political movement that over a few decades turned Britain from its leading position in the slave trade to abolitionism, with the British navy working to suppress the slave trade.

Ayesha Jalal: Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia (2008, Harvard University Press): Presumably South Asia means India (up through Kashmir) and Pakistan -- Jalal has previously written The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan. The Deobandis are at least one distinct fundamentalist strain in Islam in the area, and have been little written about -- the exception is Gilles Kepel's essential study: Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam.

Elliot Jaspin: Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America (2007, Basic Books): When I was in Arkansas a couple weeks ago, I was talking about the Civil War there, and was told that there were several cases where slaveholders killed all their slaves rather than let them go free. Don't know whether those specific stories are here, but this book details 12 of the most brutal racial purges.

Charles H Karelis: The Persistence of Poverty: Why the Economics of the Well-Off Can't Help the Poor (2007, Yale University Press): These things bear repeating, especially since the contrary positions are repeated so often, even when they have little or no empirical support. Recently read Ha-Joon Chang's book on the same basic subject: Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism.

Stephen Kinzer: A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It (2008, Wiley): I've read Kinzer's good books on Iran and Turkey, as well as his valuable Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq. This one on Rwanda is a change of pace, a trusting (if not necessarily a puff piece) account of Paul Kagame's post-genocide Rwandan rule and its putative economic progress, following Asian Tigers like Singapore rather than the IMF.

Charles Lane: The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction (2008, Henry Holt): Easter Sunday, 1873, in Colfax, LA, white vigilantes murdered at least 80 blacks. The Supreme Court decided that the states should handle such cases, effectively condoning lynching. Another new book covers the same story, more briefly: Lee Anna Keith: The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction.

Nicholas Lemann: Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (2006, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Short history of a key turning point in the white South's reconquest of Mississippi and rejection of Union reconstruction.

James W Loewen: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (2006, Touchstone): These are towns, mostly outside the South, that used various legal formalities (as well as extralegal acts) to remain all-white. Loewen also wrote Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong and Lies Across America: What American Historic Sites Get Wrong -- both useful pieces of remedial education.

Myra MacPherson: All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist IF Stone (paperbck, 2008, Scribner): I grew up on Stone, subscribing to his weekly after devouring his collection, In a Time of Torment.

Laton McCartney: Teapot Dome Scandal: How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country (2008, Random House): One of the all-time big scandals, perhaps relevant today for what it says about the oil industry's deep roots in politics and for the Republicans' laissez-faire take on greed, or maybe just because it's a juicy story. The early days of a boom cycle that went bust big time -- perhaps another lesson.

Michael McGerr: A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 (paperback, 2005, Oxford University Press): A broad history of progressive movements during the first gilded age.

Lisa McGirr: Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (new edition, paperback, 2002, Princeton University Press): Orange County, CA, is the prototypical case, not just Republican or conservative but downright militant about it. One thing that clearly emerges from such places is the sense that each atomic household is on its own, distinct from and not responsible for any other. That's the intuition that the politics of responsibility thread is drawn from. Similarly, the isolation allows such thoughts to be developed with little risk of reality checking -- another trademark of the new American right.

JR McNeill: Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (paperback, 2001, WW Norton): Fairly systematic overview of what we've done to the environment since 1900. I picked up a copy of this a couple of years back. Still haven't gotten to it; still want to.

Bryan Mealer: All Things Must Fight to Live: Stories of War and Deliverance in Congo (2008, Bloomsbury): Reporting from the Congo, a war nobody hears about, that quietly towers over just about every conflict of the last several decades, not nearly as recognized as Rwanda or Darfur. Other books (more or less): Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja: The Congo: From Leopold to Kabila: A People's History; Thomas Turner: The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth and Reality; John F Clark, ed.: The African Stakes of the Congo War; Michela Wrong: In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo; Jeffrey Tayler: Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey Into the Heart of Darkness; Robert B Edgerton: The Troubled Heart of Africa: A History of the Congo.

Martin Meredith: Mugabe: Power, Plunder, and the Struggle for Zimbabwe's Future (paperback, 2007, Public Affairs): Basic political biography, from the author of the near-encyclopedic The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence. Another book on Zimbabwe: Peter Godwin: When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa.

Jim Powell: Wilson's War: How Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II (2005, Crown Forum): Cato Institute hack, on a one-man crusade to recast American history to his way of thinking, as in his earlier FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Depression and his later Bully Boy: The Truth About Theodore Roosevelt's Legacy. Powell's economics is crackpot -- in the TR book he argues that the FDA was unnecessary because market incentives would have prevailed to ensure safe food. But his anti-interventionist foreign policy predilections have some merit, even though he makes the least of them. Powell greatly exaggerates Wilson's culpability for WWI -- Wilson shamefully piled onto a war he had done nothing to start, and he lied and schemed to do so. But he was notably unsuccessful at imposing his postwar order, which set up the myth that had he been able to do so the tragic aftermath ("Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II," as Powell puts it) could have been avoided. The bigger problem with Wilson isn't what he did so much as how he has been used since WWII to justify the forceful imposition of American order on the world -- a process that more resembles Wilson's actual subjugation of the Carribbean than his high-minded but deceitful rhetoric.

Ahmed Rashid: Descent Into Chaos: The US and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (2008, Viking): Pakistani journalist, previously wrote two essential books: Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia and Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia. With the chaos he covers so well slopping over and threatening to envelop Pakistan, his reporting stands to be more crucial than ever.

Corey Robin: Fear: The History of a Political Idea (paperback, 2006, Oxford University Press): Explores old political theory and modern spin, how fears are provoked and exploited for political means. Other books on this subject: Barry Glassner: The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things; Frank Furedi: Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right; Marc Siegel: False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear; David L Altheide: Terrorism and the Politics of Fear, and Creating Fear: News and the Construction of Crisis; Joanna Bourke: Fear: A Cultural History.

Olivier Roy: The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East (2008, Columbia University Press): Short essay on current state from an important expert on political Islam, going back to his 1990s book The Failure of Political Islam.

Elizabeth Royte: Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (paperback, 2006, Back Bay Books): Journalistic survey of trash and what comes of it -- one of those lowly subjects someone needs to deal with. Royte's next book is also out: Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It. Not obviously as important a question, although there is probably something of interest there too.

Simon Schama: Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution (paperback, 2007, Harper Collins): Question: if you were black in America at the start of the Revolutionary War, whom would you want to win? British offers of emancipation to slaves resulted in thousands of defections, a twisted legacy. Book goes on to follow the fate of those blacks who joined the British, most sent on another rough crossing to Sierra Leone.

James J Sheehan: Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?: The Transformation of Modern Europe (2008, Houghton Mifflin): Good question. Europe is the best case we have as to obsolescence of war and the inutility of the armed forces that used to plague it to an unparalleled degree. (Japan is another. South America hasn't had a significant war in over 100 years, aside from a few American invasions and coups.)

Amity Shlaes: The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (2007, Harper Collins): The argument here is that Roosevelt's New Deal made the depression longer and deeper than it would have been otherwise, for instance under the steady hand of Herbert Hoover and Andrew Mellon. This sort of thing has been argued by right-wing economists off and on over the years, notably by Milton Friedman -- the same sort of people who'll tell you that the last 3-4 years under Bush have been boom times. The thing about the New Deal was that it wasn't an exercise to pump up profits and stock prices, like we have with Bush, or even GDP, like we had with Clinton. It was a political effort to restore democracy by equalizing economic stakes that had been upset in the 19th century gilded age. The big problem that revisionists like Shlaes has is that big majorities of US voters thought that the New Deal was in their interest, otherwise they wouldn't have followed Roosevelt like they did. One more bit of evidence that the New Deal was more politics than economics is that the first 5-star Amazon reader review is by someone named Newt Gingrich. Another book along these same lines is Jim Powell: FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Depression.

Nicholas Shrady: The Last Day: Wrath, Ruin, and Reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 (2008, Penguin): Case study of one of the most famous natural disasters in historical times.

Peter Silver: Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (2007, WW Norton): Indians remained a significant factor in the early American colonies, up until the forced transfer of many tribes in the early 19th century. War against Indians served both to push them back from colonial settlers and to unite those settlers, eventually into a force that threw off British rule. The 19th century period is better known, possibly because by that point the US had been firmly established and the Indians diminished to a small and relatively powerless minority. The earlier period was more precariously balanced, hence less inevitable, less secure.

Stephen Singular: When Men Become Goes: Polygamist Warren Jeffs, His Cult of Fear, and the Women Who Fought Back (2008, St Martin's Press): While I generally have no interest in ordinary crime stories, let alone gossip sensationalism, this is one such story that piques my interest -- but then I've long found Mormons to be a curious mix of respectable and incredible. Author is prone to exploit the sensational -- previous book was Unholy Messenger: The Life and Crimes of the BTK Serial Killer.

Ginger Strand: Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies (2008, Simon & Schuster): Inventing seems like the wrong word: the Falls predate the Army Corps of Engineers, even if they've been much altered. Plenty of history surrounds Niagara; enough for an interesting book.

Harriet A Washington: Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present (paperback, 2008, Harlem Moon): The 40 year Tuskegee Syphilis Study, where blacks who could have been treated were allowed to die from syphilis just to see what the decay was like, is the relatively well known tip of the iceberg for the long history covered here. The sort of thing that winds Rev. Jeremiah Wright's clock, making him a political untouchable.

Steve Weinberg: Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D Rockefeller (2008, WW Norton): This is the history of how Standard Oil got broken up into a dozen or so companies, some like Exxon and Mobil only recently reassembling themselves as the oil business is taking another predatory turn. I find the general lack of interest in antitrust these days especially disappointing.

Jules Witcover: Very Strange Bedfellows: The Short and Unhappy Marriage of Richard Nixon & Spiro Agnew (2007, Perseus): Don't they look cute on the cover? I'm just reading Rick Perlstein's account, which I'm sure for me will be more than enough.