Up, Up and Away with Johns Hopkins University Press

For serious steam-heads and rail fans, there is A Railroad Atlas of the United States in 1946, Volume 3: Indiana, Lower Michigan and Ohio, by Richard C. Carpenter. This is a continuation of a monumental project to create a comprehensive atlas of the rail system as it existed in 1946. The previous two volumes were Volume 1: The Mid-Atlantic States, published in 2003, and Volume 2: New York & New England, published in 2005. The New Yorker Magazine called this “surely one of the most appealingly eccentric projects of the year.” Carpenter, a retired railroad executive, hand-colored 276 individual maps for this edition, and it depicts major rail centers such as Indianapolis, Gary, Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, and Chicago. The critics have been astounded by the accuracy and rapt attention to detail for the first two volumes. There have been absolutely no mistakes!

We have a new publication from renowned psycho-historian Michael Burlingame, a massive oversize two-volume set, 1,952 pages in all, Abraham Lincoln: A Life. Each volume is self-contained: -- volume 1 covers his early childhood, his experience as a farm boy in Indiana and Illinois, his legal training, and the political ambition that led to a term in Congress in the 1840s. Volume 2 covers his presidency and the civil war years. There is a particularly harsh view of Mary Todd Lincoln, and Burlingame offers new interpretations of Lincoln’s private life and the untimely death of his two sons.

This book was originally signed to Random House, but they gave up on the project as each book neared 1,000 pages. This is destined to be a landmark publication, and is published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth. With this amazing book, Burlingame has established himself as the 21st century’s premier Lincoln historian.

To commemorate the upcoming 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (November 2009), Johns Hopkins is publishing Charles Darwin: The Concise Story of an Extraordinary Man, by Tim Berra. This book offers a complete life story of Darwin, well-written with 60 halftone and 20 color illustrations. Berra is a Fulbright scholar and professor emeritus at Ohio State University. His lecture, "Darwin and Man," fetches up to $2,500. A few hours with Berra’s book will give readers a real sense of what Darwin was really like – his personality as a scientist, father, husband, friend and a great intellect. Johns Hopkins is modeling this book on the Penquin Lives series, and it will be appropriate for all readers, including young adults.

Another cool short biography from Johns Hopkins is Saladin: The Sultan and His Times, 1138 – 1193, by Hannes Möhring, translated from the German by David S. Bachrach. What is different about this book is it is the only account in English written from Saladin’s point of view. The great Muslim emperor led Arab forces in the re-conquest of Crusader kingdoms, and captured Jerusalem in 1187. He was the great enemy of King Richard the Lionhearted of England, and was a central figure in uniting Arab lands in the Middle East. One of his big military accomplishments was his triumph over the Franks. Möhring uses Christian and Muslim sources to tell the story, and scholar Thomas F. Madden says, “This book provides a lively introduction to Saladin, a medieval sultan whose deeds and legend still loom large today.”