Fall Books

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I was a little late publishing my list of (then) forthcoming summer books a few months ago, and now I am late again with this list of forthcoming fall books. Still, there are some great books on the horizon. Here is my somewhat haphazard list of titles that caught my attention:

First up, the second volume of Ronald Hutton’s Oliver Cromwell biography will be published in October by Yale. It’s called Oliver Cromwell: Commander in Chief and tells the story of “Cromwell’s career from 1647 through to his seizure of supreme power.” More: “These decisive years saw the execution of Charles I and the establishment of the Commonwealth of England, as well as notorious and savage campaigns in Ireland and Scotland. Cromwell’s political and military leadership were well honed after years of practice, but this was also the period of his greatest ruthlessness and brutality.”

Charles King studies the contexts of Handel’s Messiah in Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah (Doubleday, October 29): “George Frideric Handel’s Messiah is arguably the greatest piece of participatory art ever created. Adored by millions, it is performed each year by renowned choirs and orchestras, as well as by audiences singing along with the words on their cell phones. But this work of triumphant joy was born in a worried age. Britain in the early Enlightenment was a place of astonishing creativity but also the seat of an empire mired in war, enslavement, and conflicts over everything from the legitimacy of government to the meaning of truth. Against this turbulent background, prize-winning author Charles King has crafted a cinematic drama of the troubled lives that shaped a masterpiece of hope.”

Brian Vickers’s Thomas Kyd: A Dramatist Restored (Princeton, November 19) offers “groundbreaking new account of the author of The Spanish Tragedy that establishes him as a major Elizabethan dramatist.”

Dan Jones biography of Henry V will be published in October by Viking. Here’s a snippet from the jacket: “For Dan Jones, Henry V is one of the most intriguing characters in all medieval history, but one of the hardest to pin down. He was a hardened, sometimes brutal warrior, yet he was also creative and artistic, with a bookish temperament. He was a leader who made many mistakes, who misjudged his friends and family, but he always seemed to triumph when it mattered. As king, he saved a shattered country from economic ruin, put down rebellions, and secured England’s borders; in foreign diplomacy, he made England a serious player once more. Yet through his conquests in northern France, he sowed the seeds for three generations of calamity at home, in the form of the Wars of the Roses. Henry V is a historical titan whose legacy has become a complicated one. To understand the man behind the legend, Jones first examines Henry’s years of apprenticeship, when he saw the downfall of one king and the turbulent reign of another. Upon his accession in 1413, he had already been politically and militarily active for years, and his extraordinary achievements as king would come shortly after, earning him an unparalleled historical reputation.”

I have already read Ann Schmiesing’s biography of the Grimm brothers (Yale, October 29), and it’s great. Keep an eye out for my review in WORLD. Here’s a snippet from the jacket: “Drawing on deep archival research and decades of scholarship, Ann Schmiesing tells the affecting story of how the Grimms’ ambitious projects gave the brothers a sense of self-preservation through the atrocities of the Napoleonic Wars and a series of personal losses. They produced a vast corpus of work on mythology and medieval literature, embarked on a monumental German dictionary project, and broke scholarly ground with Jacob’s linguistic discovery known as Grimm’s Law. Setting their story against a rich historical backdrop, Schmiesing offers a fresh consideration of the profound and yet complicated legacy of the Brothers Grimm.

Peter Marshall’s history of the Islands of Orkney was praised to the skies when it was published in the UK earlier this year. It comes out in the States in November: “Peter Marshall was born in Orkney. His ancestors were farmers and farm labourers on the northern island of Sanday – where, in 1624, one of them was murdered by a witch. In an expansive and enthralling historical account, Marshall looks afresh at a small group of islands that has been treated as a mere footnote, remote and peripheral, and in doing so invites us to think differently about key events of British history.”