George F. Kennan: An American Life / John Lewis Gaddis
Review Date: 21 March 2013
‘No one knows what George Kennan really meant [to say]!’ So did the late McGeorge Bundy, my then professor, initiate me and a half a dozen other graduate students into mystery of George Frost Kennan. I say ‘mystery’ deliberately, as both at the time and later, there was indeed something distinctly odd about two aspects of the life and career of the one-time scholar-diplomat.
Kaia, Heroine of the 1944 Warsaw Rising / Aleksandra Ziolkowska-Boehm
Review Date: 21 March 2013
This is a very personal book, first published in Polish in 2006. The author, Aleksandra Ziolkowska-Boehm, tells the story of Cezaria Ilyin Szymańska, a personal friend who participated in the Warsaw Rising of 1944. Kaia is the name under which the heroine is known to her friends.
Museums and Biographies: Stories, Objects, Identities / ed. Kate Hill
Review Date: 21 March 2013
Slowly but surely the history presented in museums is coming to the attention of academic historians. However, the relationship between museums, memory and history remains complex. In selecting what to collect, museums seek to define what is or is not history. In preserving their collections in perpetuity they act as a permanent, if selective, memory store.
The Queen’s Hand; Power and Authority in the Reign of Berenguela of Castile / Janna Bianchini
Review Date: 14 March 2013
Berenguela of Castile (1180–1246) is a figure who is often overshadowed by her famous relatives, including her grandmother Eleanor of Aquitaine, her sister Blanche of Castile and her son Fernando III of Castile and León. However, there is no doubt that during her lifetime, she exercised considerable political power as a part of the ‘plural monarchy’ in both Castile and León in a range of roles.
Revolutionary Communist at Work: A Political Biography of Bert Ramelson / Tom Sibley, Roger Seifert
Review Date: 14 March 2013
Bert Ramelson, one of the leading figures of the post-war Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and the Party’s Industrial Organiser during the era of heightened industrial militancy in the 1960s and 1970s, has been a widely debated person in the historiography of the CPGB, but a new biography by Roger Seifert and Tom Sibley attempts to reassess the characterisations of Ramelson by other authors.
The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe / Nwando Achebe
Review Date: 14 March 2013
The Female King of Colonial Nigeria is the story of a woman, Ahebi Ugbabe, who rose from the status of a local girl and commercial sex worker to that of a village headman, a warrant chief and a king. Ahebi was born in Enugu-Ezike, an Igbo community, in the late 19th century.