Roger Horowitz. Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. xiii + 170 pp. ISBN 0-8018-8240-0, $35.00 (cloth); ISBN 0-8018-8241-9, $19.00 (paper).

Roger Horowitz opens Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste,Technology, Transformation with the observation that Americais a meat-eating nation. Throughout his narrative, he examinesthe forces that allow so much meat—six to eight ouncesper person per day—to satiate Americans’ appetite.The central questions driving Horowitz’s analysis are(a) what is the relationship between producing and consuminga product and (b) how does the nature of the good affect thisrelationship? In     

Douglas Brinkley. Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress, 1903-2003. New York: Viking, 2003. xxii + 858 pp. ISBN 0-670-03181-X, $34.95. * Max Wallace. The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2003. 465 pp. ISBN 0-312-29022-5, $27.95

In recent years the line dividing scholarly histories from popularones has grown blurry. Changes in how books are marketed andretailed over the past two decades have whetted the appetiteof general readers for history, and many academic historians,though trained to write for specialists, now seek to tap into this audience more broadly. The commercial success of suchscholars as Joseph Ellis and James M. McPherson has inspiredacademic historians to try to write more readable books. Atthe same time, journalists and other writers are producing ambitiousnarratives based on primary sources. Still, important differencesremain between the kinds of history that academic and popularwriters produce. These differences surface in interesting waysin two new books on Henry Ford. The author of the first, Douglas Brinkley, is a professor anddirector of the Theodore Roosevelt Center for American Civilizationat     

Stuart B. Schwartz. Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xiii + 347 pp. ISBN 0-8078-2875-0, $59.95 (cloth); ISBN 0-8078-5538-3, $22.50 (paper).

This volume examines the surprisingly complex history of thewestward shift in sugar production from the Mediterranean toAmerica in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. Many factorsinfluenced this shift, including those most often studied: therise and growth of merchant capital, slavery, and technologicalchange. The local-level studies aggregated here reexamine thisdevelopment and thereby reveal the complex evolution and thegreat     

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., and Bruce Mazlish, eds. Leviathans: Multinational Corporations and the New Global History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xiii + 249 pp. ISBN 0-521-84061-9, $65.00 (cloth); ISBN 0-521-54993-0, $22.99 (paper).

The advertising extract, which is this book’s first sentence,reads "Leviathans represents a path-breaking effort to lookat multinational corporations in the round, emphasizing especiallytheir scope, history, development, culture and social implication,and governance problems" (p. i). Given the appropriately globalprestige of the editors and of several of the chapters’authors, one’s curiosity is unavoidably piqued. Whilefew readers will ultimately judge the book to be path-breaking,many will welcome its contribution to     

Geoffrey Jones. Renewing Unilever: Transformation and Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-19-926943-2, $64.50.

A commissioned study, Renewing Unilever analyzes the historyof one of the world’s largest and, arguably, most importantmultinational enterprises in the years after 1965. Primarilya manufacturer and seller of branded, non-durable, consumergoods, Unilever produced items that could be found in aboutone-half of households globally by the early twenty-first century.Picking up where earlier histories of Unilever by Charles Wilsonended, Geoffrey Jones very ably tells the story of Unilever’srecent activities.