Johnson	Sullivan

Paul Johnson and Patricia Sullivan reviewed in New York Times

What are the chances that two non-fiction books by different authors who are colleagues in the same university history department would be reviewed in the same issue of the Sunday New York Times Book Review? Practically none.

And yet, that's what happened to two USC history professors on October 19 when glowing reviews of their books appeared back-to-back in the Times nonfiction Books In Brief section.

"This is remarkable," said history department chair Patrick J. Maney, who noted that the reviews of author Paul E. Johnson's Sam Patch, The Famous Jumper (Hill & Wang) and editor Patricia Sullivan's Freedom War, Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years (Routledge) appeared in "the single most prestigious review publication in the country. Practically every writer, whether of non-fiction for fiction, covets a review in the Times."

"And that two USC faculty members were reviewed brings great credit to the University," Maney said. "I doubt it's happened before."

Johnson's book, which is "delightful [and] crisply written," according to the Times review, documents the life of a 19th-century national celebrity who gained fame by jumping off of waterfalls in Patterson, N.J., Niagara Falls, and Rochester. Sullivan's work collecting and annotating the letters of prominent Southern white liberal Virginia Durr who was active in the civil rights movement in Montgomery, Ala., was praised as "an informal autobiography of a remarkable woman, as well as an unusual personal history of the civil rights movement," by the Times.