Indiana University Press blog

Book review: Tirpitz and the Imperial German Navy

"Kelly’s book is a great achievement. Well written and based on new sources, his biography of Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz allows the reader deep insights into the life of a man who played a very important role at the turn of the last century and who shaped German policy in a way few others did." —German History Journal

New book on Bosnian genocide and Angelina Jolie’s directorial debut relate

In July 1995, the Army of the Serbian Republic killed around 8,000 Bosnian men and boys in and around the town of Srebrenica—the largest mass murder in Europe since World War II. New in theaters is Angelina Jolie’s forceful directorial debut, In the Land of Blood and Honey, set against the backdrop of this war and seen through the eyes of a Bosnian woman.

In a new book, Surviving the Bosnian Genocide, 60 female survivors of the massacre share their disturbing testimonies of this tormenting time. These women, many of whom still live in refugee camps, tell of their lives before the Bosnian war, the events of the massacre, and the ways they have attempted to cope with their fate. Drawing on their memories, though fragmented by trauma, the women tell of life and survival under extreme conditions, while recalling a time before the war when Muslims, Croats, and Serbs lived together peaceably.

By giving them a voice, this book looks beyond the rapes, murders, and atrocities of that dark time to unearth these women both during and after the war and their fight to uncover the truth of what happened at Srebrenica and why.

Selma Leydesdorff is Professor of Oral History and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. She is author of We Lived with Dignity: The Jewish Proletariat of Amsterdam, 1900-1940 and editor (with Nanci Adler, Mary Chamberlain, and Leyla Neyzi) of Memories of Mass Repression: Narrating Life Stories in the Aftermath of Atrocity.

Kay Richardson is a retired editor with 30 years of experience in international scholarly publishing. During her 13 years of residence in the Netherlands, she gained fluency in Dutch and developed an abiding interest in Dutch history and culture.

For digital or print review copies and interview requests contact: Mandy Clarke, Trade Marketing and Publicity Manager, mlclarke@indiana.edu, or 812-855-4522.

Book review: Victorian Investments

"Victorian Investments is an outstanding example of the merits of economic cultural studies. ... This is a generous collection in every sense of the term, commendable for the breadth of its voices and for the wealth of information it offers both newcomers to and veterans of the study of Victorian finance." —Journal of British Studies

Book review: Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War

"This enjoyable volume is a welcome addition to the literature on popular culture in Italy. It is a comprehensive and informative book which will be of great interest to scholars and postgraduate students of Italian cultural and social studies, and to those working on Italian history and politics of the twentieth century." —The European Legacy

Book review: Intrepid Women

"Thomas Cardoza is to be congratulated on his attempt to shed some light on the role of the cantinière in both war and peace. The role of women in war has been overlooked for far too long." —H-War

Book review: Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War

"[T]his volume on Italian mass culture, based on a vast oral history project
comprising almost 120 oral testimonies, is an extremely precious contribution to
the subject, one which future research will not be able to ignore." —European History Quarterly

Book Review: The Ceremonial Musicians of Late Medieval Florence

"After laying out the fascinating array of Florentine religious and secular events in which musicians were called to perform, McGee provides a rich account of the creation and growth of ensembles, the personnel involved, and the instruments used by them. . . . As a fruitful trove of particulars illuminating the civic musical life of Florence over several centuries, McGee’s book will be a welcome addition to the library of the general reader and specialist alike." —Evan A. MacCarthy, Early Music America Magazine (requires subscription)

IUP author writes article on Northern Ireland

Tom Lodge, author of Politics in South Africa, writes for openDemocracy about the precarious road toward a lasting peace in Northern Ireland:

Northern Ireland: between peace and reconciliation

Two years since the establishment of its power-sharing executive following the March 2007 elections to the Northern Ireland assembly, the peace process in the territory appears firmly entrenched. The condemnation by deputy first minister Martin McGuinness of dissident Republicans' murder of a Catholic police-officer in March 2009 as the action of "traitors to Ireland" represents the crossing of a new threshold in the journey of Sinn Féin - once the political wing of the Provisional IRA (PIRA) - into constitutional politics. Continue reading article...

Tune into author Samuel Kassow on Book TV

Book TV will air a program with Samuel Kassow, author of Who Will Write Our History?, Saturday, Feb. 21 at 8:30 p.m. and Sunday, Feb. 22 at 8:30 a.m.

About the Program

Samuel Kassow recounts the efforts by Polish historian Emanuel Ringelblum and a group of amateur and professional historians, the Oyneg Shabes, who worked secretly from 1940 to 1943 to record Jewish suffering and subsequently hid thousands of records prior to the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. This event was hosted by the Tenement Museum in New York City.

The Nazi Ancestral Proof reviewed by H-German

"Ehrenreich's book carefully and clearly enumerates scientific racism's fallacies of logic. ...[His book shows that] although racist eugenics was less logically coherent than hereditary health eugenics, greater numbers of ‘racially acceptable’ Germans appear to have been willing to accept racist eugenic doctrine in order to come to terms with their own failure to act in the face of their neighbors' suffering. In other words, Ehrenreich concludes. ...racial antisemitism was an indicator of what people  sincerely hoped to be true. I find this thesis both terrifying and plausible. ...[The] book is an extremely well-argued, insightful exposition of the institutionalization of racism in everyday life during the Third Reich." --H-German