UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney's Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield was named winner of the 2004 New England Historical Association (NEHA) Book Award. The award is given annually to an outstanding book on any historical topic written by a New England author or authors. The award was presented at a luncheon on October 16, 2004, in Rutland, Vermont, during the NEHA fall conference. This was the second year in a row that a book from the University of Massachusetts Press has won the award. In 2003, the award went to James M. O'Toole's Passing for White: Race, Religion, and the Healy Family, 1820-1920.

The authors of Captors and Captives also were honored by the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH). They received an AASLH Award of Merit at a banquet in St. Louis on September 30, 2004. The History Channel was underwriting the event.

Captors and Captives has been widely praised as a masterful work of history. Most recently, in a lengthy review in Reviews in American History , Brett Rushforth concluded, "In sum, Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney have written an exceptionally well-researched, engaging, and cogent book. Captors and Captives is sure to become the standard account of the 1704 raid, likely to withstand the scrutiny of antiquarians and professional historians alike. The authors' meticulous research has uncovered new insights about a story that has been told and retold for three centuries. They have also expertly situated Deerfield with the historiographies of New England, New France, and Native America, suggesting new directions for each of these vibrant and complex subfields. If Jean-Baptiste Hertel de Rouville accomplished the extraordinary by approaching Deerfield with so formidable and diverse an arsenal, Haefeli and Sweeney's book is a fitting commemorative for the event, for they have done the same."

Joel Dinerstein's Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars received the 2004 Eugene M. Kayden Press Book Award for the best book in the humanities published by an American university press.

Administered by the Office of the Chancellor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the Eugene M. Kayden Press Book Award is given annually and includes a $4,000 prize for the winning author. Each American university press may submit one entry for the competition.

In submitting Dinerstein's book, Senior Editor Clark Dougan wrote, "It is rare that an author's first book warrants consideration for a major prize, but Joel Dinerstein is a rare author and Swinging the Machine is a rare achievement. A former rock critic and fiction writer who turned to academic life in his thirties, Dinerstein brings to his scholarship in the humanities an unusually broad range of talents and interests. His study of the role of black popular culture in the emergence of American modernism is not only innovative in its approach and provocative in its conclusions, but it is also exceptionally well written and impressively researched."

Swinging the Machine has attracted attention among scholars in a variety of fields, from American studies and black studies to ethnomusicology and urban history. Matthew Frye Jacobson of Yale University praised the book as follows:

“Damn I love this book! Dinerstein writes about the interplay between aesthetic principles and social conditions with as much insight and grace as anyone ever has. Rattling machines and musical rhythms, chorus lines and assembly lines, industrial landscapes and racialized bodyscapes, mechanical motion and the flow or chug of dancing bodies—Dinerstein brings these together in original, compelling, and always illuminating ways. Swinging the Machine remaps the social and political meanings of swing, the fully national resonance of American cultural forms, modernity and anti-modernism, and a good deal else besides. A brilliant and beautiful book.”

Three University of Massachusetts Press books were selected by Choice for its list of “Outstanding Academic Titles.” The list for 2004 includes 651 books selected from among 6,847 titles reviewed. The winning titles represent less than 10% of the titles reviewed, and less than 3% of the 23,000 titles submitted to Choice for review. The books selected were Bowser and Kushnick's Against the Odds: Scholars Who Challenged Racism in the Twentieth Century; Ron Cohen's Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970; and Tom Cottle's A Sense of Self: The Work of Affirmation.

James M. O'Toole's Passing for White: Race, Religion, and the Healy Family, 1820–1920 was named winner of the New England Historical Association (NEHA) Book Award for 2003. The award is given annually to a New England author of an outstanding book on any historical topic and was presented at a luncheon on October 25, 2003, in Worcester, Massachusetts, during the NEHA fall conference. Passing for White, which was an Alternate Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, has been released in a paperback edition. The book received excellent reviews and was featured in the "Nota Bene" column of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Writing in St. Anthony's Messenger, Augustine Curley described it as "a lucid, riveting work. . . . I cannot begin to indicate the importance of this book for what it tells us about the Catholic Church in 19th-century America or about race relations. O'Toole is to be commended for a fine, well-balanced work that examines an issue that the church wrestles with even today."

Laura Kasischke's collection of poems, Dance and Disappear, was named one of six finalists for the 2003 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets. The prize, which has been given annually since 1975 and includes a $25,000 award, recognizes the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States in the past year. In 2002, Dance and Disappear won the Juniper Prize of the University of Massachusetts Press.

Grace Farrell's Lillie Devereux Blake: Retracing a Life Erased was named one of two finalists for a 2003 Connecticut Book Award in the category of biography and memoir. Sponsored by the Connecticut State Center for the Book, the awards are to be presented at a ceremony in Hartford's City Hall.

Susan L. Klaus's A Modern Arcadia: Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and the Plan for Forest Hills Gardens was named the winner of the 2003 Historic Preservation Book Prize. Since 1988, the award has been given annually by The Center for Historic Preservation at Mary Washington College in Virginia for a book deemed to have made the most significant contribution to the field of historic preservation in the United States.

The book had already garnered the New York Society Library's 2002 New York City Book Award for Landscape History. Founded in 1754, the Library established its award program in 1996 to honor books of literary quality and historical importance that evoke the spirit or enhance appreciation of New York. The award, which carries a $500 prize, was presented to Susan Klaus at a reception at the Library. A Modern Arcadia has been widely and well reviewed. Following an extensive feature article in Newsday and a boxed review in the New York Times Book Review, it went into a second printing. Choice, the journal of the Association of College and Research Libraries, commented, "Klaus has produced an exemplary short architectural monograph: succinct, eloquent, contextual, and copiously illustrated."

Growing up Abolitionist: The Story of the Garrison Children by Harriet Hyman Alonso was awarded the 2003 Warren F. Kuehl Prize from the Society for the History of American Foreign Relations. The biannual prize, which includes an award of $1,000, is "designed to honor authors of outstanding books dealing with the history of internationalism and/or the history of peace movements." In Alonso's book, she breaks ground in the study of peace movements by investigating the upbringing of the children of William Lloyd Garrison, demonstrating how the values of nonviolence, racial and social justice and women's rights were passed on, from one generation to the next.

Christie Hodgen's collection of stories, A Jeweler's Eye for Flaw, which won the Associated Writing Programs Award for Short Fiction, was named one of three finalists for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, America's best-known prize for a distinguished first book of fiction. As a finalist, Hodgen received a Residency Fellowship at the Ucross Foundation, a retreat for artists and writers located on a 22,000-acre ranch on the high plains of Ucross, Wyoming. Kirkus Reviews described the book as "a hit on all counts."

The Press is happy to announce that it will serve as the distributor for selected publications of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, the largest conservation organization in New England. Mass Audubon works to preserve the natural world through conservation, education, and environmental advocacy. The first book distributed by the Press was the Massachusetts Breeding Bird Atlas, a beautifully produced guide to all of the species of birds that breed in Massachusetts. The volume is edited by Wayne R. Petersen and Roger L. Meservey.

Based on a five-year survey that involved the efforts of nearly 600 volunteers, this landmark publication includes distribution maps showing possible, probable, and confirmed breeding areas for 198 Massachusetts nesting species on a grid of 989 ten-square-mile blocks. Opposite each species map is a summary account giving historical perspective, relative abundance, habitat, seasonal schedule, nest, egg and song descriptions, clutch size, egg dates, number of broods, and other pertinent details.

Each species account is illustrated with a scrupulously accurate, full-color watercolor portrait by award-winning nature artists John Sill and Barry Van Dusen. The book also includes a set of six transparent overlay maps in an attached pocket that allow the reader to correlate key environmental factors with the distribution of nesting species. This is a volume that will appeal not just to ornithologists, but to anyone who appreciates the remarkable diversity of bird life in Massachusetts.

Painting in Boston: 1950–2000, edited by Rachel Rosenfeld Lafo, Nicholas Capasso, and Jennifer Uhrhane, was praised in the pages of the Boston Globe as "an extremely valuable document. Filled with fascinating anecdotes and opinions, it fleshes out what happened here, the comings and goings of curators and galleries, the influence of local art schools, the history of Boston's slow warming to modernism." The book, which includes 67 color plates, was published in association with the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park to coincide with a major exhibition at the museum.

Published in association with the American Antiquarian Society and The Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, Perspectives on American Book History: Artifacts and Commentary was the first text designed for the growing number of courses in American print culture. Edited by Scott E. Casper, Joanne D. Chaison, and Jeffrey D. Groves, the volume includes a CD-ROM with over 200 digital images. According to Jay Fliegelman of Stanford University, its publication represents "a milestone event in the cause of bringing American book history into the classrooms of English, American studies, and history departments." The Library of Congress hosted a one-day symposium in honor of the book's publication.

Neil Schmitz's White Robe's Dilemma: Tribal History in American Literature was selected as one of thirty-two titles in the American Library Association's "The Best of the Best from University Presses," and the award ceremony was broadcast on C-Span's Book TV. White Robe's Dilemma also was cited by Choice as a "must read for students and scholars in Native American studies."

Library Journal responded enthusiastically to Steven Ratiner's Giving Their Word: Conversations with Contemporary Poets, "This compilation serves as a source of biographical information about the writing lives of 13 leading contemporary poets while offering instruction and inspiration to writers of all kinds. Each conversation captivatingly interweaves the life of the poet with the writing process and the creativity that his of her poetry represents. Consider even the chapter titles-William Stafford: Opening the Moment, Carolyn Forche: The Poetry of Witness, and Donald Hall: The Work That Makes a Home-which not only reflect each poet's body of work but also hint at the superb content of each of the interviews Ratiner (himself a poet) has compiled. Commenting on his interview process with Forche, he notes: 'The story seemed to just tumble forth, gaining momentum like a river coming down from high ground.' This could also describe Ratiner's expert interview process and the publication of this book, which is an absolute pleasure to read. Highly recommended for all libraries."

The Press regrets to report that Lynda Van Devanter died on November 15, 2002. The cause of death was systemic collagen vascular disease, which she had attributed to her exposure in Vietnam to chemicals, including the defoliant Agent Orange. The new edition of her book, Home Before Morning: The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam, had been hailed by the Vietnam Veterans of America. In the VVA Veteran, William Crandell wrote, "Van Devanter's groundbreaking [book] is back in print, with a new afterword updating her life and progress on the issues raised by her book when it first appeared. . . .Van Devanter wrote a classic in 1983 that meets the test of time. If you want to know about the Vietnam War, start with Home Before Morning."

The Press also mourns the passing of Senator Paul Wellstone, whose first two books were published by the Press: How the Rural Poor Got Power: Narrative of a Grass-Roots Organizer (1978) and Powerline: The First Battle of America's Energy War (1981, written with Barry Casper). Reviewing How the Rural Poor Got Power in the New York Times Book Review, Doris Grumbach described the book as "a landmark" and commented, "rarely are books about social action written with simple stylistic grace and honesty."

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a long excerpt from David Blight's Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War as the cover story in the Chronicle Review. Blight's previous book, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, won seven major book awards in 2001-2002, including the Bancroft, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Merle Curti prizes.

The Chronicle of Higher Education also featured the following UMass Press titles: Jeffrey Berman's Risky Writing: Self-Disclosure and Self-Transformation in the Classroom. The book formed the basis for a cover story in the Chronicle Review; an essay by Lynn Bloom was reprinted from Pilaf, Pozole, and Pad Thai: American Women and Ethnic Food; the permissions issues surrounding Lynda Bundtzen's The Other "Ariel, a study of Sylvia Plath, were the subject of a "Hot Type" article; and Jonathan Rose's The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation was profiled in the "Nota Bene" column.

Poet Mông-Lan's Song of the Cicadas received the 2002 Great Lakes Colleges Association's New Writers Award for Poetry and was invited to embark on a ten-college reading tour in connection with the prize. Song of the Cicadas previously won the Juniper Prize and also was chosen by the Poetry Society of America as a finalist for the Norma Farber Award for the best first book of poetry.

John Hartsock's A History of American Literary Journalism: The Emergence of a Modern Narrative Form was selected as Book of the Year by the American Journalism Historians Association. It was previously named winner of the annual Book Award of the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. According to Library Journal, the book is "distinguished for its breadth and exacting scholarship."

Richard Cheek's Land of the Commonwealth: A Portrait of the Conserved Landscapes of Massachusetts, published in association with the Trustees of Reservations, received an award from Bookbuilders of Boston as one of the two best-designed pictorial books of 2002. The book also was praised by the Boston Globe as "the Massachusetts gift book of the season. . . . The superb photos portray the spectrum of the state's preserved landscapes."

Christine Pawley, author of Reading on the Middle Border: The Culture of Print in Late- Nineteenth-Century-Osage, Iowa, was named cowinner of the 2002 Benjamin F. Shambaugh Award of the State Historical Society of Iowa. The award recognizes the most important book about Iowa published during the preceding year.

Leading the list in terms of sales was Paul Robeson: The Years of Promise and Achievement by Sheila Tully Boyle and Andrew Bunie. A reviewer in Publishers Weekly wrote, "twenty years in the making, this major biography covers Robeson's life from his birth in 1898 to the early height of his career in 1939. . . . An accessible, perceptive biography that will be essential reading for anyone interested in studies of race, performance, or theater in America."

Bolstered by strong advance reviews, Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period: The Complete Writings of Ambrose Bierce, edited by Russell Duncan and David J. Klooster, quickly went into a second printing. Writing in the Atlantic Monthly, Benjamin Schwarz commented, "an hour with this superbly edited volume will cure any Civil War buff, for Bierce was, as H. L. Mencken declared, 'the first writer of fiction ever to treat war realistically'. . . . Here is exemplary American prose, and here is the real war-without uplift, without virtue, without purpose."

David Gross's Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture was selected by Choice for its list of "Outstanding Academic Titles." This list includes fewer than 10 percent of the titles reviewed by Choice during the year and fewer than 3 percent of the 25,000 titles submitted for review.

In the first annual Massachusetts Book Awards, Mary Blewett's Constant Turmoil: The Politics of Industrial Life in Nineteenth-Century New England was one of five finalists in the nonfiction category. In a review published in the American Historical Review, Bruce Laurie described the book as "a remarkable achievement. It is easily the most distinguished work of its kind ever done and likely to remain the word on its subject for some time to come."

This Waiting for Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Verner Mitchell, won an award in the annual design competition of the Association of American University Presses. Booklist applauded the volume for its rediscovery of Johnson's poetry-"as frank, shrewd, fresh, and sexy now as then, Johnson's poems will at last take their proper place in American poetry."

Reviewers also looked favorably on Robert D. Dean's Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy. According to the Women's Review of Books, "Dean's shrewd analysis and solid scholarship offer a useful corrective to the belief that bellicosity is the only possible response when our nation feels threatened."

Gerald McFarland's Inside Greenwich Village: A New York City Neighborhood, 1898–1918 received consistently strong notices. Writing in the American Historical Review, Raymond Mohl concluded, "McFarland has written an excellent book, one that provides a full and fascinating account of this New York City neighborhood during the Progressive Era. . . . The book successfully integrates the development of the Village's ethnic and working-class communities with the institutional thrust of the elites and reformers. It makes for a complex history that gets well beyond the popular conception of Greenwich Village as little more than a hangout for bohemians and cultural radicals."

Young Charles Sumner and the Legacy of the American Enlightenment, 1811–1851 by Anne-Marie Taylor was described by the Boston Globe as "a gracefully written and thoroughly researched biography." According to Steven Mintz, "this extremely well-written and deeply researched book offers a fresh and compelling interpretation of a figure who has previously been depicted largely in caricature. . . . Above all, the author effectively shows how Sumner's moral absolutism coexisted with a profound political pragmatism."

Winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award in Short Fiction, Michelle Richmond's The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress was widely and well reviewed. In the San Francisco Chronicle, Steve Kettmann wrote, "Remember this name: Michele Richmond. . . . This is a young writer whose future progression should be exhilarating to watch. She writes with grace and calm and a refreshing sense of playfulness."

Italian publisher Edizioni Sylvestre Bonnard bought Italian rights to Jonathan Rose's The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation. Korean-language rights to Harmon Smith's My Friend, My Friend: The Story of Thoreau's Relationship with Emerson were sold to IRE Publishing Company. Romanian-language rights to John Hartsock's A History of American Literary Journalism were licensed to Institutl European. In Germany, Schneekluth issued a German-language edition of Bonnie Jo Campbell's Women and Other Animals. In Japan, Akashi Shoten brought out a Japanese-language edition of Hilary Lapsley's Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict: The Kinship of Women.

Josh White: Society Blues by Elijah Wald was named winner of the 2001 Independent Publisher Book Award for Performing Arts (Music, Dance, Theater). The book has also received excellent reviews. In the Washington Post, Jabari Asim wrote that Wald "manages to balance his fondness for his subject with a careful assessment of strengths and failures. This is an estimable achievement, considering the challenge a complex figure such as White presents for any biographer. . . . This affectionate, careful biography will serve as a useful guide should the resurgence [of interest in White] continue."

Library Journal describes the volume as "a sympathetic yet balanced biography. . . .by interviewing dozens of White's family members and friends and combing through secondary accounts, Wald uncovers a complex subject. . . .[the book] is complete, well written, and in-depth. Highly recommended."

Steven Tracy's Write Me a Few of your Lines: A Blues Reader won "Honorable Mention" for the annual book award of the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America. The African American Review noted that "Tracy has done the field a tremendous service by gathering forty-nine often seminal and always influential writings, binding between two covers an anthology of articles impressive in both its range and its depth."

H. Bruce Franklin's Vietnam and Other American Fantasies has attracted a lot of attention, and the author was asked to appear on the History Channel and on radio programs from New York to Berkeley. Typical of the reviews is this one in ForeWord: "Coming to terms with the Vietnam War— the war that America lost—has been a long, grueling struggle, mired by historical denial and distortion, and, as Franklin so formidably reveals, myths have become entrapped in American culture. He presents a scholarly, yet personal and lucid investigation of how these myths evolved and why people depend upon them to answer the confusing questions that have become the legacy of the war."

Another book that has made quite a splash is Hope & Glory: Essays on the Legacy of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, which was launched at a publication celebration held at the Old South Meeting House in Boston. Produced in cooperation with the Massachusetts Historical Society, the book was praised by the Boston Globe as "a richly rewarding series of 15 essays." Secretary of State Colin Powell contributed a foreword to the volume and wrote to the Press to express his pleasure at the high quality of the final product.

The journal Lingua Franca, which bills itself as "the Review of Academic Life," conducted a survey of its readers to determine "the 10 best academic books of the 1990s." The results were published in October 2001. Number 8 on the list was Sherry Lee Linkon's Teaching Working Class (UMass Press, 1999) and among the ten runners-up was Michele Tokarczyk and Elizabeth Fay's Working-Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory (UMass Press, 1993). Lingua Franca also cited Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier's A History of Reading in the West (UMass Press, 1999) as a "Breakthrough Book," saying "any study of reading has to start with A History of Reading in the West."

The Chronicle of Higher Education featured two books from the Press in rapid succession, running a long excerpt from H. Bruce Franklin's Vietnam and Other American Fantasies as a cover story in the Chronicle Review and following two weeks later with a cover essay by Maurianne Adams and John Bracey based on their book, Strangers and Neighbors: Relations between Blacks and Jews in the United States.

Winner of the AWP Award in Short Fiction, C. J. Hribal's The Clouds in Memphis received a starred review in Publishers Weekly ("the subtle power of these stories will leave the reader hungry for more") and favorable notices in newspapers across the country, including the New York Times Book Review ("Hribal writes lean, nuanced prose, and the people we meet in the these two short stories and three novellas are believable and tenacious, their states of shock or sadness real enough that the reader frets about them long after the book is set aside").

Hosei Daigaku Shuppankyoku published a Japanese-language edition of Martin Jay's Cultural Semantics; Patakis Publications published a Greek-language edition of David Gross's The Past in Ruins: Tradition and the Critique of Modernity, and Penguin Books India released an inexpensive English-language edition of Zhu Xiao Di's Thirty Years in a Red House for sale in India.

In the annual design competition of the Association of American University Presses, two UMass Press titles won awards: Patricia Cleary's Elizabeth Murray: A Woman's Pursuit of Independence in Eighteenth-Century America and Elijah Wald's Josh White: Society Blues.

Four UMass Press titles were selected by Choice, the journal of the Association of College and Research Libraries, for its list of "Outstanding Academic Titles": David Gross's Lost Time, Reed Browning's Cy Young: A Baseball Life, John W. Crowley's The Dean of American Letters: The Late Career of William Dean Howells, and Domhnall Mitchell's Emily Dickinson: Monarch of Perception. This list includes fewer than 10 percent of the titles reviewed by Choice during the year and fewer than 3 percent of the 25,000 titles submitted for review.

Cy Young: A Baseball Life by Reed Browning continues to garner awards and honors. The book re-creates the life of the famous baseball pitcher Denton True "Cyclone" Young and places his story in the context of a rapidly changing, turn-of-the-century America. The author is a professor of history at Kenyon College.

On publication last summer, the book was praised in many quarters, from the Boston Herald ("a finely crafted and well-documented study") to Baseball Weekly ("uncovers the real story behind the pitching legend") to former commissioner Fay Vincent ("I loved it and I learned a lot").

In February 2001, Cy Young was named to the select list of "Outstanding Academic Books of the Year" by Choice, the journal of academic and research libraries. Fewer than 10% of the books reviewed by Choice are accorded this honor. In its review of the volume, Choice described it as "the definitive biography. . . . The narrative carefully follows Young's life on and off the field, providing lots of information and insight into labor-management issues and player relationships. Browning based his study heavily on primary sources, especially the daily and sporting press. . . . Highly recommended."

In March, the book was named winner of the CASEY Award for the best baseball book of the year, selected from among ten finalists. One of the judges, Paul Herbert, commented, "this is an important biography which gets an A+ for its originality and coverage of Cy Young's entire life, despite the problems of a lack of living interviewees and Young's rural background which limited his personal writing. It is difficult to imagine a more definitive biography of Young ever being done."

In April, the Society for American Baseball Research announced the results of the 2001 Seymour Medal competition for the best book of baseball history or biography—a winner, a runner-up, and six finalists. Cy Young was selected as runner-up.

In May, the Boston Red Sox organization announced that Cy Young would be excerpted in the latest edition of the Red Sox Magazine, to be released in early June. Fans coming to Fenway Park have an opportunity to read portions of the book and learn more about the man who achieved 511 major league victories, nearly a hundred more than any other pitcher, and whose name is now attached to the game's most prestigious pitching award.

At a ceremony at the New School in New York City, the Publishing Triangle announced the winners of the twelfth annual Triangle Awards, honoring the best lesbian and gay fiction and nonfiction of the year. In the category of lesbian nonfiction, Hilary Lapsley's Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict: The Kinship of Women was selected as the recipient of the Judy Grahn Award for the best book of the year. The award includes a cash prize of $1,000.

Lapsley's book is the story of the extraordinary friendship between renowned anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. First as mentor and protégée, later as colleagues and lovers, these two remarkable yet temperamentally different women forged a bond that endured for twenty-five years, defying convention as well as easy categorization. The book charts the course of a relationship that persisted in the face of numerous obstacles, including separations of long duration, the competing claims of other partners, secrecy about lesbianism, the tensions of professional rivalry, and the clash of different personalities.

Writing in the Women's Review of Books, Carolyn Heilbrun commented that Lapsley's book "portrays with originality and provocative detail the development of anthropology, from its earliest days. . . . Once [Mead and Benedict] have met, Lapsley's story becomes a powerful reminder of how friendship and love between women once flourished." According to Kirkus Reviews, "feminist scholars, anthropologists, and students of that post-WWI era when gender roles were in motion will appreciate this complex tale."

At an "Awards Gala" in Chicago, Mark Wunderlich's The Anchorage was named winner of the Lambda Literary Award in the category of Gay Men's Poetry. The book has been widely reviewed, including a favorable notice in The New Yorker: "Poised between the shocks of furtive sex and limpid scenes of the summer seaside, Wunderlich's first collection of poems follows the heart's appetitive course. . . . his book reminds us how fully the spirit can illuminate the depths."

The sometimes volatile relationship between blacks and Jews in this country is the subject of a major anthology of writings entitled Strangers and Neighbors: Relations between Blacks and Jews in the United States, edited by Maurianne Adams and John Bracey. The 800-page book offers contemporary perspectives from such writers and scholars as Derrick Bell, Nat Hentoff, Bayard Rustin, Julius Lester, and Julian Bond, who provided the introduction. The volume also uses historical documents—newspaper accounts, letters, wills, musical scores— to explore such sensitive subjects as Jewish involvement in the slave trade, black anti-semitism and Jewish racism, and southern lynchings of both blacks and Jews. As a compilation of varying viewpoints, Adams told the Boston Herald, "The book goes against stereotyping and it goes against mythologizing and against glorification of a group."

Stephen Clingman won South Africa's premier prize for nonfiction, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award, for his biography Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary. Clingman was awarded the prize together with Antjie Krog, author of Country of My Skull; this was the first time the award has been given jointly.

The award, the South African equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize, was announced at a glittering banquet in Johannesburg. Clingman was flown to South Africa specially for the event, called at short notice earlier in the week. His book, covering more than a hundred years of South African history, details the life of Bram Fischer, a charismatic figure who was born into an Afrikaner nationalist family but identified with the struggle for freedom in South Africa. In his capacity as a lawyer, Fischer led the defense of Nelson Mandela in the Rivonia Trial, under the spotlight of the world. Ultimately, Fischer was himself sentenced to life imprisonment and died in 1975.

The judges acclaimed Clingman's book as "a glorious piece of research" yet easy to read. It "covers personal and emotional subjects and events without overdramatizing them," the judges remarked, pointing out that it is "academically disciplined" yet "contains poetry in its story." Clingman, who is himself from South Africa, said, "it is tremendously meaningful to have this sort of recognition in the country of my birth."

Love Makes a Family: Portraits of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Parents and Their Families by Gigi Kaeser and Peggy Gillespie was selected by Booklist as one of the ten "Outstanding Gay and Lesbian Books of the year." It also won the Independent Publisher Book Award in the category of Gay/Lesbian Studies.

The Children's Literature Association announced that Ann Romines's Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder has won the Children's Literature Book Award, given each year to "the most distinguished scholarly work in the field of children's literature." The chair of the selection committee, Claudia Mills of the University of Colorado at Boulder, wrote, "we are thrilled to have such a wonderful book to honor this year. The committee members were extremely warm in their praise of this eminently readable and insightful work of scholarship."

Daniel Horowitz's Betty Friedan and the Making of “The Feminine Mystique”: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism has attracted widespread attention and was named one of three finalists for an Independent Publisher Book Award. The volume dramatically revises conventional ideas about the development of Friedan's feminism and, by extension, the origins of the 1960s women's movement. Horowitz, who is director of American Studies at Smith College, gave a series of readings in Northampton, Chicago, Peoria, Seattle, New York, and Cambridge.

Commenting on an advance set of proofs, Jill Ker Conway wrote that it "exemplifies the very best research combined with the most professional and balanced efforts to interpret sources. What makes the book riveting is what he has pieced together about the sources of Friedan's feminism and its roots in an older left tradition."

The book has subsequently received very favorable reviews in such publications as Newsweek ("a fascinating and important new book"), the Times Literary Supplement ("Horowitz's engaging and well-told story is a landmark contribution to tour understanding of both Betty Friedan and the origins of the modern women's movement"), the London Times Higher Education Supplement ("a riveting account of the forces that produced one of the most important books of the modern feminist movement"), the Chronicle of Higher Education ("a mesmerizing study. . . . Horowitz's measured tone and care in laying the evidence before us commands respect"), and the Boston Book Review ("Horowitz's skillful and judicious intellectual biography opens up lines of inquiry that are vitally important and long overdue").

The Emily Dickinson Handbook quickly established itself as a standard reference work for Dickinson scholars. Booklist commented: "The best of recent Dickinson scholarship is gathered together in the multifaceted Emily Dickinson Handbook, a collection of essays that examine Dickinson's life, poetry, poetics, and social perspective."

According to the Virginia Quarterly Review, "Though modestly titled, this book presents perhaps the most exhaustive and useful summary of Emily Dickinson scholarship in the 20th century—a series of short but amazingly comprehensive essays on almost every aspect of Dickinson studies, written especially for this volume by Dickinson's most formidable contemporary critics. Invaluable to the expert and novice alike, every page of this book is sheer pleasure, in a way comparable to few scholarly texts."

Jayne Triber, author of A True Republican: The Life of Paul Revere, was featured on C-Span's Book TV. After videotaping her lecture at the Old South Meeting House in Boston on the life and times of Paul Revere, C-Span broadcast the hour-long lecture three times. The book was also a selection of the History Book Club. Booklist praised Triber's accomplishment, saying: "Revere will forever be immortalized by the mythology surrounding his ‘ride.’ The man behind the myth was far more interesting, as this informative and often surprising biography illustrates."

The Mystic of Tunja: The Writings of Madre Castillo, 1671–1742, by Kathryn Joy McKnight, was named winner of the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize of the Modern Language Association. The prize is given each year to "an outstanding book published in English in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures." McKnight accepted her award at the Modern Language Association convention in San Francisco.

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