This article was downloaded by: [Southern Illinois University]On: 21 December 2014, At: 14:02Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

History: Reviews of New BooksPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vhis20

Edmund Wilson: A BiographyL. Moody Simms Jr. aa Illinois State University , Emeritus , USAPublished online: 01 Aug 2012.

To cite this article: L. Moody Simms Jr. (2004) Edmund Wilson: A Biography, History: Reviews of New Books, 32:2, 48-48, DOI:10.1080/03612759.2004.10528549

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03612759.2004.10528549

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their appetites whetted, look to these sources to learn more.

FRANCIS G. COUVARES Amherst College

Daum, Andreas W., Lloyd C. Gardner, and Wilfried Mausbach, eds. America, the Vietnam War, and the World: Comparative and International Perspectives New York: Cambridge 1Jniversity Press 3JX pp.. $65.00 cloth, $22.00 paper ISBN 0-52 1-8 10-48-5 cloth ISBN 0-52 I -008-76-X paper Puhlicalion Date: July 2003

Twenty-eight years after the fall of Saigon, the Vietnam War still haunts the American consciousness. Within the last decade alone, “the first war the United States lost” has been the sub.ject of a veritable avalanche of mono- graphs, literature, and symposia. Carefully assembled by a distinguished staff of editors and professors who participated in the Ger- man Historical Institute’s (CHI) conference 19-22 Noveniber 1998, America, the Vietnam War; ond tlie World depicts the conflict as a truly global event whose origins and charac- teristics merit an interdisciplinary treatment,

I n compiling this book the editors have collected sixteen essays that address virtually every aspect of the war. Although the war continues to divide and to inflame a second generation of Americans, the essays success- fully link “three dimensions of the Vietnam War-the war as America’s War, the conflict ;IS an international event, and the war as a starting point for historical comparisons.” Consequently the book is divided into three distinct sections titled “Relocating Vietnam: Comparisons in Time and Space,” “Interna- tional Relations and the Dynamics of Alliance Politics.” and “Recasting Vietnam: Domestic Scenes and Discourses.” A con- cluding essay by Lloyd C. Gardner calls into question the familiar theme that the Vietnam War was merely a lost battle in the ultimately siiccessful struggle against Reagan’s “evil empire.”

Given the liberal nature of the majority of the GI11 participants at the 1998 conference, readers should not be surprised that the find- ings challenge the more conservative inter- pretation of the Vietnam War in American his- m y . Three essays illustrate this point. Wilfried Mausbach opines that Vietnam rep- resented an “opportunity for West German students to break away from their parent’s generation of perpetrators and assuage their inherited national guilt.” Barbara L. Tischler then links the antiwar activism to the emerg- ing feniinism of the late 1960s. According to ’Tischler, the antiwar protests and the sense of outrage associated with it led a new genera- tion of women to question everything and “kept them connected to a revolutionary enterprise in one form or another.” Finally

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Fredrik Logevall presents a convincing argu- ment that contrary to the claim of several presidential administrations that America’s credibility was at stake in Vietnam, what international powers actually questioned was not America’s will to persist, but its judgment in continuing the conflict.

In the final analysis, America, the Vietnam War; and the World offers a fresh, albeit provocative, perspective of the Vietnam War. In that sense the German Historical Institute is to be commended for gathering such a diverse array of historians and scholars, If their intent was to challenge the conventions of history, the result is, in editor Lloyd Gard- ner’s terms, “a good starting point for under- standing the vast extent of the tragedy that continues to challenge our understanding,”

COLE C. KINGSEED Colonel, U.S. Army, Retired

Meyers, Jeffrey Edmund Wilson: A Biography New York. Cooper Square Press

Publication Date: December 2003 592 pp., $19.95, ISBN 0-8154-1 I 1 1-1

This work chronicles the life and times of Edmund Wilson (1895-1972), whom many consider to be the premier American man of letters and literary critic of the twentieth cen- tury. Jeffery Myers, a prolific biographer and literary critic, uses Wilson’s extensive and diverse writings to construct a rich and varied portrait of a complex and contentious indi- vidual.

Wilson achieved literary recognition with the publication of Axel’s Castle in 1932. A contemporary of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, he was instrumental in promoting both men; his editing of Fitzger- ald’s works advanced the writer’s reputa- tion. Yet Wilson had interests far beyond lit- erature. He wrote about art, music, film, theater, and popular culture, as well as the culture and politics of Canada, the Zuni and Iroquois Indians, the revolutionary tradition in Europe, foreign travel, political events, and the Dead Sea scrolls. He was a master of the memoir and biographical essay. With eleven of his fifty books still in print and eleven new works brought out by publishers since his death, Wilson has far from faded to obscurity.

Especially good on Wilson’s strengths as a critic, Myers does not shy away from pointing out his subject’s weaknesses. Prone to drunk- en revelry and indiscriminate sexual liaisons, Wilson was married four times (his third wife was the writer Mary McCarthy) and had innu- merable lovers (among them the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay). A compulsive writer and chronicler, Wilson even recorded his sexual exploits in his posthumously published note- books.

Throughout this work, Myers offers read- ers perceptive and meticulously annotated

commentary on Wilson’s career. For example, he traces Wilson’s basic political attitudes. including his pacifism, to experiences i n France during World War I. He finds that Wil- son’s subsequent attitudes toward govern- mental authority and society had their moral origin in this war experience.

Myers displays good sense and writes read- able prose. With this life of Edmund Wilson, the author completes his “trilogy on modern writers” that began with biographies of Hem- ingway and Fitzgerald (xv). Myers’s present study provides insight not only into Wilson and his work but also into an important stretch of the cultural history of twentieth- century America.

L. MOODY SIMMS, JR. Illinois State University, Emeritus

Black, Earl, and Merle Black The Rise of Southern Republicans Cambridge: Harvard University Press

Publication Date: September 2003 442 pp., $15.95, ISBN 0-674-01248-8

With their body of work on Southern politics and society, political scientists, and brothers. Earl, and Merle Black have replaced V. 0. Key, Jr. whose Southern Politics in Stale ~ n t l Nation (1949) served for decades as the benchmark for understanding that region. The Rise of Southern Republicans examines ii topic familiar to students of the South, but i t does so with a clarity and readability that will allow scholars and the general public to prof- it from it. The “new reality” of the South is not a dominant Republican Party, like the Solid South Democratic Party from the late nineteenth century until the 1960s. but two minority parties that are very competitive (2). The strong presence of the COP not only has changed the South, but also has given the nation, for the first time since pre-Civil War days, a competitive national party system.

Black and Black carefully chart this transi- tion in the South after World War 11. This change occurred because of the migration out of the South by African Americans, fetlcrel intervention in voting rights, and presidential politics. Their narrative points to critical milestones from 1948 when Strorn Thur- mond, then a Democrat, ran for president as ;I Dixiecrat and carried four southern states, to 1994, when James Sasser of Tennessee, in line to be the Senate Democratic leader, lost to Republican Bill Frist by the largest margin for an incumbent Democratic senator i n the modem South.

The authors point to 1994 as the most dra- matic moment for this political transfornia- tion. Republicans captured both the Senate and the House, with key help from the South. In 1992 the Republicans in the South con- trolled 38 percent of House seats and 32 per- cent of Senate seats, but by 2000 the percent- ages soared to 57 percent and 59 percent, respectively. The Goldwater campaign and

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