Sunday, September 20, 2009

Book news round-up

DELIVER US FROM EVIL: The Slavery Question in the Old South by Lacy K. Ford is reviewed in the New York Times. Ira Berlin writes:

For Lacy K. Ford, the division between the states of the upper South (Virginia along with the border slave states) and those of the lower South (South Carolina and the cotton-producing states to its south and west) best explains how white Southerners “understood their position with regard to slavery, and how they saw themslves as citizens of the United States right down to secession and Civil War.”...

In extraordinarily close detail, he demonstrates how white slave-owning Southerners in the two regions followed sharply different trajectories in addressing the slavery question, and he argues that the development of a Southern nationality and its controversy with the North must be understood from the inside out rather than the outside in.

David Cole discusses his new book, The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable, with the Boston Globe, and takes up the case against the lawyers in an essay in the New York Review of Books.