History Man: The Life of R.G. Collingwood
By Fred Inglis
(Princeton University Press, 385 pp., $39.50)
Dancing In the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression
By Morris Dickstein
(W.W. Norton, 598 pp., $29.95)
Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits
By Linda Gordon
(W.W. Norton, 536 pp., $35)
American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty In U.S. Literature, 1840-1945
By Gavin Jones
(Princeton University Press, 248 pp., $38.50)
“Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a story of 1926, at the height of the economic boom and his own creative powers. “They are different from you and me.” Rich people “possess and enjoy early,” he explained, which makes them cynical and haughty. “Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are.” The passage is best known not for its psychological insight, but for Ernest Hemingway’s withering rejoinder. Yes, the rich are different, he conceded: “They have more money.” As with so many of their recorded exchanges, Hemingway is supposed to have come out on top. We are meant to feel that Fitzgerald, in his usual romantic way, believed that the rich really were better, and that he needed Hemingway’s bracing realism to bring him back to earth.
Famine: A Short History
By Cormac Ó Gráda
(Princeton University Press, 327 pp., $27.95)
The earliest recorded famines, according to Cormac Ó Gráda in his brief but masterful book, are mentioned on Egyptian stelae from the third millennium B.C.E. In that time--and to an extent, even today, above the Aswan dam in Sudan--farmers along the Nile were dependent on the river flooding to irrigate their fields. But one flood out of five, Ó Gráda tells us, was either too high or too low. The result was often starvation. The stelae commemorate the philanthropy of the aristocracy in providing food to the hungry. Other records of famine in the ancient world can be found in texts as various as Gilgamesh, the Joseph narrative in Genesis, Nehemiah, Cicero, and the Book of Revelation, in which the figure of famine is the third of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
The End of Empire: Attila the Hun and the Fall of Rome
By Christopher Kelly
(W.W. Norton, 350 pp., $26.95)
Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age To the Present
By Christopher I. Beckwith
(Princeton University Press, 472 pp., $35)
The extraordinary reputation of Attila and his Huns requires an explanation, because they had so much competition. Their apogee, until Attila's death in 453, came just after the invasions that were extinguishing the Roman Empire in the west: the invasions of Germanic Alamanni, Burgundians, Ripuarian Franks, Salian Franks, Gepids, Greuthungi and Thervingi Goths, Heruli, Quadi, Rosomoni, Rugi, Sciri, Suevi, Taifali, and the original Vandals, as well as Alan horsemen of Iranic origin and probably Slavic Antae as well. Yet it is the Huns who are more vividly remembered than any of them, including Alaric's Goths, who in 410 had the historical distinction of being the first to sack Rome since the Gaulish raid of 387 B.C.E. (and to loot the accumulated wealth of centuries of empire); and more vividly remembered than the proverbial Vandals, who later inflicted greater damage by cutting off North Africa's grain supply to Italy.
Richard A. Posner is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for theSeventh Circuit and a senior lecturer at the University of ChicagoLaw School.
The Judge in a Democracy By Aharon Barak
(Princeton University Press, 332 pp., $29.95)
