2020 Philip S. Klein Book Prize Winner, Pennsylvania Historical Association

Known as America’s most historic neighborhood, the Germantown section of Philadelphia (established in 1683) has distinguished itself by using public history initiatives to forge community. Progressive programs about ethnic history, postwar urban planning, and civil rights have helped make historic preservation and public history meaningful. The Battles of Germantown considers what these efforts can tell us about public history’s practice and purpose in the United States.  

Author David Young, a neighborhood resident who worked at Germantown historic sites for decades, uses his practitioner’s perspective to give examples of what he calls “effective public history.” The Battles of Germantown shows how the region celebrated “Negro Achievement Week” in 1928 and, for example, how social history research proved that the neighborhood’s Johnson House was a station on the Underground Railroad. These encounters have useful implications for addressing questions of race, history, and memory, as well as issues of urban planning and economic revitalization. 

Germantown’s historic sites use public history and provide leadership to motivate residents in an area challenged by job loss, population change, and institutional inertia. The Battles of Germantown illustrates how understanding and engaging with the past can benefit communities today.

One of the hallmarks of FIELD magazine has always been its attention to what poets have to say about poetry. Many of these essays--by William Stafford, Denise Levertov, Gary Snyder, Adrienne Rich, Donald Hall, Robert Bly, and Sandra McPherson, among others--have become classics. This revised and expanded collection of essays from the magazine provides a rich and stimulating perspective on the state of contemporary poetry, as seen through the eyes of the poets themselves.

This capacious anthology has selections from the authors you would expect to find, from others you may be less familiar with, and from writers you might not expect to show up in this company. The result is a treasure trove of unusual fiction, one of the most exciting anthologies to appear in the last decade. This is a poet's companion, a student's delight, great bedside reading: the kind of book you'd take to a desert island!

Extragalactic radio sources are among the most unusual and spectacular objects in the universe, with sizes in excess of millions of light years, radiated energies over ten times those of normal galaxies, and a unique morphology. They reveal some of the most dramatic physical events ever seen and provide essential clues to the basic evolutionary tracks followed by all galaxies and groups of galaxies.

In The Physics of Extragalactic Radio Sources, David De Young provides a clearly written overview of what is currently known about these objects. A unique feature of the book is De Young's emphasis on the physical processes associated with extragalactic radio sources: their evolution, their environment, and their use as probes to solve other astrophysical problems. He also makes extensive use of the large amount of data now available from observations at x-ray, optical, and radio wavelengths to illustrate his main points.
The Physics of Extragalactic Radio Sources will be a comprehensive introduction to the field for graduate students and a useful summary for astrophysicists.

David Young combines autobiography, poetry, nature writing, and food writing in a remarkable book that celebrates life without denying its losses and mysteries. Organized by the months of the year, Seasoning traces the passing of time and the cycles of loss and renewal, meditating on the human place in the natural world.

Set in northeastern Ohio, where the author has lived and worked for close to forty years, Seasoning demonstrates that an “unremarkable” place—no grand scenery, no special claims to beauty—can be the perfect setting in which to learn about animals, plants, food, geology, history, weather, and time. Coming to terms with place and time, and connecting them, the author suggests, may be our true task in life.

Among the many distinctive features of this lovely book are the recipes, arranged seasonally and revealing Young’s preference for natural foods prepared with care.

 Despite the extensive critical attention that has been paid to the work of W. B. Yeats, we are still very much in the process of understanding both the greatness and the modernity of this poet. The assessment of his poetry has rested primarily on the scope, intensity, and memorability of his lyrics, but his romantic beginnings have made it problematic to acknowledge him as a modernist, while his failure to produce a long poem has for some time raised questions about his greatness. Don’t major poets, the argument runs, produce major poems?

            In this meticulous analysis of The Tower, David Young addresses both these issues, showing that this powerful volume represents Yeats at his best and most modern, and that its careful construction makes it the deliberate equivalent to the long poems of tradition.

            By tracing the careful ordering of the poems in The Tower, Young demonstrates the volume’s overall vision, giving careful readings of each poem and illustrating the growing repetition of images that create a whole which is both emotionally and dramatically greater than the sum of its parts. Young contends that the best way to read Yeat’s lyrics is through attention to the context he created for them. Their interdependence, he asserts, is the true key to their modernity.

            This eminently readable study appears at a time when most readers are in danger of losing touch with the particular achievement of Yeat’s individual volumes as he conceived them. Most students and readers now encounter Yeats in anthologies, in a volume of selected poems, or in a somewhat misleadingly presented complete Poems. Young convinces us that by persisting in this approach we will lose sight of a significant aspect of a foremost modern poet and the very elements that make him a true modern.