The Editor: Fred M. Leventhal, who received his B.A. and his Ph.D. from Harvard, is Professor of British History at Boston University. Among his many publications are Respectable Radical: George Howell and Victorian Working-Class Politics (1971), The Last Dissenter: H. N. Brailsford and His World (1985), and Arthur Henderson (1989). He is co-editor of the journal Twentieth Century British History and former President of the North American Conference on British Studies.
A companion to the publisher's Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia (LJ 3/15/89), this A-Z volume concisely treats British cultural, social, political, military, economic, and scientific history from 1900 to the present. The articles‘most written by U.K. and U.S. academics‘are signed, readable, reliable, and pull no punches, e.g., the entry "Singapore" notes that "British racial arrogance" contributed to the humiliating loss of Singapore in 1942. Some quibbles about coverage are inevitable. Why, for example, is F.R. Leavis included and C.P. Snow not? Why nothing on libraries? Most disconcerting is editor Leventhal's decision to exclude major individuals "whose ongoing careers preclude retrospective assessment," which means that Elizabeth II, one of the century's dominating figures, is ignored. A detailed chronology, 38 large black-and-white illustrations, and carefully selected bibliographies complement the encyclopedic text. Finding information in the book is normally not difficult, due to plentiful cross references and a substantial index, although the latter occasionally fails, as in the case of the Angry Young Men movement, which is discussed in "Film Industry" and "Novel, English, Since 1945" but not indexed. In sum, a useful but hardly indispensable source for larger public libraries.‘Ken Kister, author of "Kister's Best Encyclopedias,'' Tampa, Fla.
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