Absorbing as biography, invaluable as reference, this latest volume in the distinguished series that began publication in 1906continues Traubel's minute, detailed, day-by-day account of America's greatest poet. William White, editor of the Walt Whit­man Review and coeditor of The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, assumed the editorial chores when Gertrude Traubel was un­able to continue the project. Traubel wrote of the work that had absorbed so much of her life: "Vitality, contemporaneity--these Whitman characteris­tics--bring him to you not just an old man reliving a memora­ble career, but--like most seers--looking at events before him with flashes of prophetic insight." Volume 6presents the period from September 15, 1889, to July 6, 1890, with virtual transcripts of the conversations of Whitman with Traubel. Whitman's thoughts and opinions, reminiscences, his goings and comings, letters he received and wrote, and hundreds of other matters as well as important de­tails of his life in his home on Mickle Street in Camden. This series is indispensable for an understanding of and insight into the life and opinions of Walt Whitman. Horace Traubel fulfilled Whitman's charge "to speak for me when I am dead," in a manner without precedent.

The calculated use of media by those in power is a phenomenon dating back at least to the seventeenth century, as Harold Weber demonstrates in this illuminating study of the relation of print culture to kingship under England's Charles II. Seventeenth-century London witnessed an enormous expansion of the print trade, and with this expansion came a revolutionary change in the relation between political authority -- especially the monarchy -- and the printed word. Weber argues that Charles' reign was characterized by a particularly fluid relationship between print and power. The press helped bring about both the deconsecration of divine monarchy and the formation of a new public sphere, but these processes did not result in the progressive decay of royal authority. Charles fashioned his own semiotics of power out of the political transformations that had turned his world upside down. By linking diverse and unusual topics -- the escape of Charles from Worcester, the royal ability to heal scrofula, the sexual escapades of the "merry monarch," and the trial and execution of Stephen College -- Weber reveals the means by which Charles took advantage of a print industry instrumental to the creation of a new dispensation of power, one in which the state dominates the individual through the supplementary relationship between signs and violence. Weber's study brings into sharp relief the conflicts involving public authority and printed discourse, social hierarchy and print culture, and authorial identity and responsibility -- conflicts that helped shape the modern state.

"Samuel Sidney developed an interest in the Australian colony after the emigration of his brother John to New South Wales. Samuel and John established the magazine Sidney's Emigrant Journal, and worked together on two books concerning Australian emigration. The present work is an excellent description of Australia's contemporary state, where Samuel Sidney is clearly influenced by both Caroline Chisholm and Alexander Harris. He argues that the Australian colonies are ideal for working class emigration. Already in the introduction it becomes clear that Sidney is very anti-Wakefield, which makes it an important document in the debate between competing proposals for emigration. Apparently Sidney was very well-informed, he had access to otherwise inaccessible primary sources, and the verbatim transcripts add considerably to the book's value. Sidney's work is a full guide, giving excessive and detailed information on one of the most interesting world-regions."--Abebooks website.