Alan Steinweis's Kristallnacht 1938 (Harvard University Press, 2009) is a concise account, perhaps of most value to novices and from my perspective offering less bite than Saul Friedländer's Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume I: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (HarperCollins, 1997). It's of interest for its microhistories of participants in the 'night of broken glass'.
Wilfred Prest's William Blackstone: Law & Letters in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2008) considers the author of the Commentaries - praised by one contemporary as the "most correct and most beautiful outline that was ever exhibited of any human science" - and other works. Prest takes issue with Jeremy Bentham's attack on the Commentaries and on Blackstone -
... [a] persistent and sustained condemnation of the misanthropic enemy of reason and reform, 'everything-as-it-should-be Blackstone', a muddled and shallow apologist for the status quo. Making up in critical acerbity what it lacked in humdrum detail. Bentham's Blackstone replaced the conscientious and upright scholar, judge and public man with an even more two-dimensional caricature; that of failed barrister turned stodgy Tory academic and confused textbook apologist for the British Constitution and unreformed common law.Michael Kirby in 309 Australian Book Review (Mar. 2009) 14–15 noted that "Prest frequently reaches the limits of his source materials" and suggested that "what really matters about [Blackstone] today is not so much his life ... more important would be an analysis of what [Blackstone] wrote, and how, often unthinking, it has influenced the law in lands far from Oxford’s dreaming spires". Blackstone's shopping list is interesting but ultimately unimportant; the reception of his work is fundamental.
Martin Wiener's superb An Empire on Trial: Race, Murder and Justice under British Rule, 1870-1935 (Cambridge University Press, 2009) is far more enjoyable ... lucid, persuasive, insightful. I have yet to get into Legal Foundations of Tribunals in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 2006) by Chantal Stebbings and In The Common Defense: National Security Law for Perilous Times (Cambridge University Press, 2007) by James Baker. Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing and the Erosion of Integrity (New Press, 2007) by Anne Moore is marketed - oops, that damn M word - as -
both a scathing critique of corporate marketing's dalliances with the cultural underground and a highly entertaining depiction of the absurdity produced by our advertising-saturated late-capitalist wonderland. Here is a world in which cultural resistance and the DIY underground, once refuges from consumer society, have been repurposed by corporations even as the underground itself emerges as a key demographic to be targeted.All in all, deliciously ahistorical and self-involved.
