8 New Books We Recommend This Week
Dec. 24, 2020
As the end of this endless year approaches, we find ourselves in a retrospective mood: Out with the old, in with the even older! Our recommended books this week cast an eye back on the Bolshevik Revolution and the seeds of the Cold War (“The Lenin Plot,” by Barnes Carr); and on the little-known role that people fleeing slavery played in American foreign and domestic policy before the Civil War (“South to Freedom,” by Alice L. Baumgartner); and on the ways that Winston Churchill’s larger-than-life legacy continues to shape British politics to this day (“The Churchill Myths,” by Steven Fielding, Bill Schwarz and Richard Toye).
Agents of Change
Kerri Greenidge discusses two books about African-Americans in the years before the Civil War, and Neal Gabler talks about “Catching the Wind,” his biography of Edward Kennedy.Hosted by Pamela Paul
transcript
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On this week’s podcast, the historian Kerri Greenidge talks about two new books she reviewed that help to reframe the role of African-Americans in the years of resistance that led to the Civil War: “South to Freedom,” by Alice L. Baumgartner, and “The Kidnapping Club,” by Jonathan Daniel Wells.
“The beauty and the contribution” of these books, Greenidge says, is that they take the focus “away from the North being a place of freedom” and the idea “that slavery ended because good people in the North good white people in the North knew that slavery was wrong and fought against it and that that’s how slavery ended. What these two books argue is that there’s a complicity in this relationship between the North and the South a