Edited by Celeste-Marie Bernier, Judie Newman and Matthew Pethers
Edinburgh University Press

¡°There are striking divergences between the Postal Age and the Internet Age,¡± opines the prologue of this brilliant bumper resource for epistolary studies ¨C ie, the field of reading other people¡¯s proto-emails with purely historical motives, back when it was all beautiful copperplate, studious quotations, intricate subclauses and all-caps MY DEAR AND TENDER FATHER-type salutations. Louisa May Alcott (sick of fan mail), Abraham Lincoln (a postal threat a day), Solomon Northup, Henry James, Thomas Jefferson: their pronouncements, peeves, politicking, piety, mad pashes and quill-pen-supply particulars are all here.

Katherine Isbister
MIT Press

In which a computational media scholar argues that, far from spawning a race of anomie-gripped loners, designers of video games use choice and flow to help create empathy and other positive emotional experiences. Or perhaps not always so positive, you may suspect of Japan¡¯s ¡°2-D¡± fans playing Love Plus (with its array of lemur-eyed nymphettes awaiting ¡°cuddling¡±). However, sharp-eyed looks at The Sims¡¯ ¡°living dollhouse¡±, the comical battles of Hit Me! and lump-throated accounts of the shutting-down of City of Heroes¡¯ servers do suggest that all human life is here. Albeit probably in the basement.

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Anne Boyd Rioux
W. W. Norton

Compared in her day to the Bront?s and Jane Austen and attracting tremendous critical and popular success, 19th-century American writer Woolson left a body of work that was, as this fine and detailed study¡¯s epilogue observes, ¡°dismissed as Victorian in the early twentieth century and then as not sufficiently feminist in the late twentieth¡±. But Rioux¡¯s book makes a strong case for reassessing this contemporary and close friend of Henry James (and ¡°contributor to his conception¡± of his heroine Isabel Archer) whose work presages Edith Wharton and who met her end, perhaps at her own hand, in Venice.

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Scott M. Gelber
Johns Hopkins University Press

Did US courts, as Justice Sandra Day O¡¯Connor once said, always observe deference to universities? Not these days, says historian Gelber, but in picking through a century of suits and opinions in this satisfyingly thorough account, found ¡°nearly absolute respect for academia¡± until the 1960s. Herein lie tussles over admissions (women, Jews, Christian Scientists), expulsions (carrying a revolver; being ¡°undesirable¡±; radical speech), and tuition, from divorce courts obliging parents to pay up to ex-sailor, socialist and ¡°lawyer for hoboes¡± Mark Litchman bringing a suit in 1915 that argued that $10-a-term fees contravened Washington State University¡¯s constitutional promise to be ¡°open to all¡±. Expressing sympathy, the judge still ruled that ¡°open¡± did not mean ¡°free¡±.

Linden West
UCL IOE Press

To Stoke-on-Trent, where an impressive and valuable case study surveys a post-industrial city struggling with poverty, malfunctioning democracy and narrowed educational opportunities, and where Islamism, Islamophobia and the BNP take hold. But its first-person accounts ¨C from Aatif the community leader worried about radicalisation to Workers Educational Association activists Red Mick and Kerry and Andrew the minister ¨C reveal honest, articulate people rather than ¡°Broken Britain¡± ciphers, and the ¡°resources of hope¡± that West details end the book on notes of pride, compassion and determination. Recommended.

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karen.shook@tesglobal.com