August marked a month of plentiful reviews across many magazines and journals. Find your next great read below, and see which books everyone’s talking about!
Discover America’s favorite gourmet doughnut shops in an interview with Paul Mullins, author of Glazed America: A History of the Doughnut, in “Foodie Friday: The Rise and Rise of the Gourmet Doughnut” on the Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection Blog.
Be sure to check out his recommendation for the best place to nab doughnuts in “The Rise and Rise of the Gourmet Doughnut, Part II”
And if you missed it, here’s NPR’s story on the book, along with their Q&A with Paul Mullins!
Attitude: The Dancers’ Magazine called Toba Singer’s Fernando Alonso: The Father of Cuban Ballet “a detailed portrait of an important contributor and visionary in the development of ballet in Cuba” and praised On Stage Alone: Soloists and the Modern Dance Canon (edited by Claudia Gitelman and Barbara Palfy) as “a welcome addition to bring needed attention to artists who have slipped through some of the cracks in dance history.”
In Kosher Feijoada and Other Paradoxes of Jewish Life in São Paulo, Misha Klein “underscores quite rightly that one of the most outstanding characteristics of Brazilian Jews is their Brazilianness,” noted Chasqui. For Jewish History, Life, and Culture in Latin America, Klein’s work resonated as “a welcome addition to the [Latin American Jewish Studies] historiography.” Ethnohistory praised Klein for “treat[ing] her human subjects with sensitivity” and creating a text “invaluable to any course about Jewish identity or the role of ethnic and racial minorities in Latin America.”
For what the South Florida Opulence considers “a fascinating story of the life and work of Ann Norton,” read Caroline Seebohm’s Monumental Dreams: The Life and Sculpture of Ann Norton.
Nation within a Nation: The American South and the Federal Government by Glenn Feldman is “an interesting read for those concerned with the history of the South, but also for those interested in how newer issues such as the US–Mexican border and criminal justice policies fit within the region’s history,” says New Books in Political Science.
“With rich documentary material from press reports, letters, internal memos, and popular songs, Icke’s book fills a major gap in the historiography of regional identity in Bahia and has much to offer to historians, anthropologists, literary critics, musicologists, and scholars of other disciplines,” the Hispanic American Historical Review says of Scott Ickes’s African-Brazilian Culture and Regional Identity in Bahia, Brazil.
The Abolition of Slavery in Ottoman Tunisia 
by Ismael M. Montana “provides a careful analysis of the history of slavery in Tunisia during the Ottoman period and allows the reader to place Tunisia in the larger contexts of African, Middle Eastern, and the Mediterranean worlds,” notes the Journal of African History.
Suzanne E. Joseph’s Fertile Bonds: Bedouin Class, Kinship, and Gender in the Bekaa Valley stood out to Nomadic Peoples as “a valuable ethnographic work in medical anthropology, which integrates questions of bio politics and culture into discussions of social production and reproduction.”
In Saved and Sanctified: The Rise of a Storefront Church in Great Migration Philadelphia, Deidre Helen Crumbley “presents a clarion call to those in mainstream Christian communities to refrain from ‘othering’ and denigrating adherents to smaller, more expressive Christian congregations and traditional African spiritual practices in the United States,” the Journal of African American History states.
The Florida Historical Quarterly highlighted many of our Southern History titles:
Skyway: The True Story of Tampa Bay’s Signature Bridge and the Man Who Brought It Down
by Bill DeYoung
“DeYoung’s account of the accident from the perspectives of the victims travelling on the bridge is riveting…Skyway is a fresh and vivid retelling of the disaster.”
The Politics of Disaster: Tracking the Impact of Hurricane Andrew
by David K. Twigg
“Twigg has assembled an impressive array of facts by pouring through scholarly documents, books, and back issues of magazines.”
War on the Gulf Coast: The Spanish Fight against William Augustus Bowles
by Gilbert C. Din
“Din has created a fascinating counter-narrative to the traditional historiographical interpretation.”
The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and Their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World
by Nathaniel Millett
“Millett has shed new light on this history of this unique maroon colony and its place within the broader narratives of American and Atlantic world history.”
Georgia Democrats, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Shaping of the New South
by Tim S. R. Boyd
“Full of new ideas and interesting details that will delight historians and political scientists trying to make sense of the evolution of twentieth century southern politics.”
Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule: African American Landowning Families since Reconstruction
edited by Debra A. Reid and Evan P. Bennett
“Adds another important layer to the intersection of race and class in the nation.”
The Florida Bookshelf 