Publishers Weekly - March 7, 2016

Robert Kennedy; he was fired and later rehired, and eventually he left the NAACP for a major law firm. Drawing on his experiences in two different social and cultural worlds, Steel has no trouble getting to the dark heart of our nation’s racial ills in this polished, accomplished book. (June)

★ Oneida:
From Free Love Utopia to the Well-
Set Table—An American Story

Ellen Wayland-Smith. Picador, $27 (336p)

ISBN 978-1-250-04310-8

In this impressively thorough and engaging work, Wayland-Smith tells the story of the Oneida Community, a 19th- century utopian Christian commune that later became known for silverware manufacturing. The author, a descendent of community founder John Humphry Noyes, combines stellar research with exceptional critical analysis that considers the community in light of the work of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and George Bernard Shaw.

Organized in upstate New York in 1848, Oneida was marked by a practical approach to finances and countercultural religious beliefs, including free love or “complex marriage.” A schism split the religious community and it dissolved as Noyes grew old, but his descendants continued to run Oneida’s business operations—primarily silk, animal trap, and iron spoon factories.

Their spoon factory soon shone brightest, becoming one of the top silverware companies in the country until its 2006 bankruptcy. Wayland-Smith demonstrates that Oneida was very much a product of its time, placing the community in the context of the Second Great Awakening and the expansion of American capitalism while highlighting Noyes’s incorporation of communism, utopianism, eugenics, and spiritualism (among other aspects of industrial modernism) into his belief system.

This book is a fascinating look into the strange history of Oneida silverware and how its origins reflect an exhilarating period of American history. Agent: Rob McQuilkin, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin. (May)

The Incomplete, True, Authentic,
and Wonderful History of May Day

Peter Linebaugh. PM (IPG, dist.), $15.95 trade paper (192p) ISBN 978-1-62963-107-3

In these collected ruminations spanning three decades, historian Linebaugh (Stop,

It’s odd that pit bulls have such a bad reputation, when around the early

20th century they were really America’s dog.

Petey, from the

Little Rascals series, was a pit bull.

Absolutely! [Petey] is one of the dogs people are more familiar with, but celebrities like Gary Cooper and Fatty Arbuckle also had pit bulls. As I say in the book, Rin Tin Tin [a German shepherd] appeared in 37 movies, but there was a pit bull named Pal that appeared in

224 films. Both were very much the all-American mascot.

What caused public opinion of pit bulls to turn?

More than anything, the ball started
rolling downhill as a result of a very
well-intentioned effort by animal
welfare groups and law enforcement
to eradicate dog fighting—which
was a necessary thing to do. But
because the subject was so horrify-
ing to so many people, and because
the press seized on that aspect and
sensationalized it, the dogs kind of
got swept into that. There were all
these wild speculations about
behavior by people who weren’t
qualified to talk about it. That
triggered a kind of gonzo magazine
reportage in the ’70s about hanging
out with dog fighters and doing
this taboo thing. Magazines like
Esquire and Harper’s were running
all these bad-boy
types of features.

It got more and more popular.

Can people really predict which breeds are more likely to bite or attack?

The science has been really clear that there’s a very predictable pattern around who gets bitten and why.

You’re much more
likely to be bitten if
you’re on the dog’s home turf. And
children ages five to nine have the
highest rates of being bitten, [because]
they are very mobile, they are very
curious, and they don’t yet have an
understanding of the importance of
respecting the dog’s space. There are
all kinds of reasons why they might
not understand what the dog is sig-
naling to them. Dogs are seen as a
big, fun toy. And boys are twice as
likely to be bitten as girls. That pat-
tern’s been in the research for years.

One would think that by now parental supervision would be preached from the mountaintop when anything like this happens. But we’re embroiled in this discussion about good traits and bad traits and good breeds and bad breeds. And that message gets lost.

—Kyle Tonniges

[Q&A]

PW Talks with Bronwen Dickey
Man’s Best Friend?

In Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

(Knopf; pub month, May; Reviews, Feb. 29), Dickey sets out to
uncover how and why a particular breed of dog developed a bad
reputation in Western culture.