[Vision2020] What's in a Book Blurb?

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

To the Editor of the Daily News:

We all know how misleading book "blurbs" can be, so what are we to make of the fact that Doug Wilson keeps trotting out (most recently Nov. 5) historian Eugene Genovese's praise for Wilson's self-published book "Black and Tan"?

Of all the professional reviews that I have read of Wilson's work on slavery, it is only Professor Genovese who has approved it.  Two UI history professors and a University of Washington expert on the Civil War (and member of a Wilson related Christ Church in Seattle) have condemned it. The historians on George Mason University's History News Network (http://hnn.us) have roundly rejected it. 

When the Seattle professor told Wilson that 20 percent of the early booklet "Southern Slavery As It Was" was lifted from another book, Wilson withdrew it from circulation and promised to fix the "citation problems" and reissue it as soon as he could.  But it took Wilson 18 months to republish it as "Black and Tan," with substantial revisions responding to the criticism that he had once publicly rejected.

Here is the real rub, however.  The original slavery booklet has now been reprinted without change (except for quotation marks around the lifted portions) in "The War Between the States: America's Uncivil War," which historian Ed Sebesta claims "incorporates every 'Lost Cause' and modern Neo-Confederate idea." 

Genovese's blurb raises another serious problem.  Here are the relevant parts: "Wilson . . . has a strong grasp of the essentials of the history of slavery. . . .  Indeed, sad to say, his grasp is a great deal stronger than that of most professors of American history, whose distortions and trivializations disgrace our college classrooms."

Perhaps Genovese thinks that none of his professional colleagues will read or hear of Wilson's book, so that he can spew this venom about them behind their backs.  Genovese's betrayal of his profession, however, is now all over the internet. 

Nick Gier, Moscow

My thanks for Bill Ramsey, UI history professor, for help in writing this.  I wish he would write a letter, too.  The Daily News refused to let him have a guest column to respond to Wilson's Nov. 5th piece.