Author Richard Cartwright Austin uses his father’s letters, Russian and American documents, and extensive photographic resources to tell how this cooperation between capitalist and communist, American and Russian, was achieved. From near-breakdown during the initial months, through a Russian winter that called for bravery and ingenuity, to a frantic race toward completion in the final months, Building Utopia reveals the common humanity of both communists and capitalists and the contrasts between Russian and American cultures. Historians as well as scholars interested in early U.S.-Soviet cooperation or in the history of technology will be attracted to this compelling story.

When the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) between the Soviet Union and United States faltered during the administration of Jimmy Carter, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski claimed that “SALT lies buried in the sands of the Ogaden.” How did superpower détente survive Vietnam but stumble in the Horn of Africa?

“In 1989, the Supreme Court ruled that dissidents had a constitutional right under the First Amendment to burn the flag. During the Bush Administration, Congress passed the Flag Protection Act (FPA), and so doing reflected the broad spectrum of opinion that saw the flag as a sacred symbol of American freedoms. Robert Justin Goldstein’s Burning the Flag thoughtfully draws on the disciplines of law, political science and history to analyse the controversy in all its dimensions.” — London Review of Books

Bushwhackers adds to the growing body of literature that examines the various irregular conflicts that took place during the American Civil War. Author Joseph M. Beilein Jr. looks at the ways in which several different bands of guerrillas across Missouri conducted their war in concert with their households and their female kin who provided logistical support in many forms. Whether noted fighters like Frank James, William Clarke Quantrill, and “Bloody Bill” Anderson, or less well-known figures such as Clifton Holtzclaw and Jim Jackson, Beilein provides a close examination of how these warriors imagined themselves as fighters, offering a brand-new interpretation that gets us closer to seeing how the men and women who participated in the war in Missouri must have understood it.

During its single year of existence, more money was expended on the Elmira prison than in any of the other Union Stockades. Even with this record spending, a more ignominious figure was attached to Elmira: of the more than 12,000 Confederates imprisoned there, nearly 3,000 die while in captivity – the highest rate among all the Northern prisons. The authors conclusions are based on new, little-known, or never used archival materials. In a similar vein, his description of the prison culture is especially illuminating.

In C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages, medievalist Robert Boenig explores Lewis’s personal and professional engagement with medieval literature and culture and argues convincingly that medieval modes of creativity had a profound impact on Lewis’s imaginative fiction.

Although C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) achieved a level of popularity as a fiction writer, literary scholars have tended to view him as a minor figure working in an insignificant genre-science fiction-or have pigeonholed him as a Christian apologist and moralist. In C. S. Lewis in Context, Doris T. Myers places his work in the literary milieu of his times and the public context of language rather than in the private realm of personal habits or relationships.

In C.S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse Don W. King contends that Lewis’s poetic aspirations enhanced his prose and helped make him the master stylist so revered by the literary world. With its careful examination of early diaries and letters, and the inclusion of four of Lewis’s previously unpublished narrative poems and eleven of his previously unpublished short poems, this important book explains the man through his writing and considers how Lewis’s lifelong devotion to poetry is best realized in his works of prose. Readers and admirers of Lewis will certainly find their understanding of his writing greatly enhanced by this perceptive book.

This work brings together a world-class group of literary and theological scholars and Lewis specialists that includes Paul S. Fiddes, Monika B. Hilder, Sanford Schwartz, Michael Travers, and Michael Ward. The collection is enhanced by Walter Hooper’s reminiscences of his conversations with Lewis about Perelandra and the possible provenance of the stories in Lewis’s imagination.

Having children fundamentally disrupts and remakes us, in terms of body, identity, perspective, and voice. The world shrinks and exponentially expands. Our already-fraught human experience of time is shredded and magnified.

Cadence captures the poet’s point of view as a new mother, reveling in a position of heightened vulnerability and ferocity. The poems in this chapbook are breathless, hyper­attentive to others’ needs, and equally in love with earthliness and repulsed by the monstrousness we enact/bear witness to.