These days, the state of the sovereign is strong. But issues such as warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency have now prompted a debate over how much power the executive should have in times of war and crisis. Two recently published books offer some philosophical perspectives on the powers of the sovereign. The first is Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception; see an excerpt, “A Brief History of the State of Exception.” The second book is our just-released reprint of Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty..

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | Philosophy | Politics and Current Events
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Alan Wolfe recently reviewed Louise W. Knight's Citizen in the New York Times: "Knight's book is what the Germans call a bildung, an account of how a person's character is formed. As it happens, Knight's decision to focus on Addam's early years is a stroke of genius. We know a great deal about Jane Addams the public figure. We know relatively little about how she made the transition from the 19th century to the 20th. In Knight's book, Jane Addams comes to life.… Knight's book is filled with fascinating detail about everyday life at Hull House, from the way residents were selected, to the fundraising difficulties that emerged as Addams exhausted her personal wealth, to an absorbing account of Addam's life as a Chicago garbage inspector. Knight's extensive research and straightforward narrative allow readers to watch Addams gain self-confidence, survive a breakup with [Ellen Gates] Starr and the formation of a new relationship with Mary Rozet Smith, wrestle with her desire to help immigrants even as she disdains much about their way of life, and try to establish democracy at Hull House while remaining reluctant to cede control of its destiny.… Knight, an independent scholar, has something in common with [Addams]. Citizen is written neither to make money nor to gain academic tenture; it is a gift, meant to enlighten and improve. Jane Addams would have understood."

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Biography | Chicago | Reviews
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The Guardian featured an essay by Robert Bruegmann in their Saturday edition. “Just as Britain led the world in producing sprawl, so it also has led the world in trying to combat it,” writes Bruegmann. Sprawl has been a feature of London (and cities in general) for centuries, Bruegmann argues, and the conventional wisdom about the pernicious effects of sprawl is often wrong. See also our excerpt from the book.

Bruegmann was also interviewed today in U.S. News and World Report.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News
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Why would anyone say this fifty-year-old book is "one of the most important books of our time," as a customer recently described it on Amazon? They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer has been bubbling through the online zeitgeist for a little while now—most recently it was passed around the social bookmarking sites del.icio.us, reddit, and stumbleupon.

Ten years after World War II, Mayer went to Germany and spent a year interviewing ordinary Germans to try to understand how they came to accept—even embrace—fascism. Is there any similarity to our current situation, as liberals and libertarians like to claim by citing Mayer's book? Decide for yourself. Start with an excerpt.

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | History | Politics and Current Events
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The Guardian (UK) recently praised Sylvia Lovegren's Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads. From the review: "The lowdown on every fad imaginable is here, within two covers. That they are mostly American is not a problem. What was good for the US was invariably a showstopper here too. Great recipes (if you can stomach them), grand stories. Amusing."

Read an excerpt featuring eight recipes.

Archived in History | Reviews
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The sports section of the Daily Telegraph featured a review of Cut Time: An Education at the Fights, Carlo Rotella's acclaimed book on boxing. From the review by Andrew Baker: "Rotella's guiding philosophy is honesty, both with the fighters he encounters and with his own reactions to what he sees. And, unusually among American academics, he practises a beautifully pared-down prose style, with little pretention and none of the hyperbole that afflicts so many boxing writers. He may lack the wit of A J Liebling, say, but his insight more than makes up for it."

You can judge Rotella's prose style and wit in this excerpt.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
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A piece by John Noble Wilford in the New York Times is occasioned by the anniversaries of the destruction of the space shuttles Challenger (twenty years ago on January 28, 1986) and Columbia (three years ago on February 1, 2003) and the fire that killed three Apollo astronauts (thirty-nine years ago on January 27, 1967).

Ten years ago we published The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA by Diane Vaughan which put forth the view—now widely accepted—that the Challenger accident was not the result of bad engineeering but of a management culture that normalized deviance: that flew missions even when presented with evidence of serious problems. The Columbia accident showed how difficult it is to change the patterns of organizational life.

Another author brought a different sensibility to the shuttle; you can read Howard Nemerov's two poems on the space shuttle.

Archived in Commentary | Poetry | Sociology
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"The romance, the misery and the music of migration are all captured in William Howland Kenney's Jazz on the River, a book that narrates a history that couldn't be captured merely by doting on scratchy records, tattered scores and old reviews. It was commonly known that jazz was born in New Orleans and made its way up the Mississippi, but until Kenney no one had investigated the makers of the boats and the conditions of the musicians who worked on them. And no study before this one ever charted that northern migration so that we can appreciate the artists and how their musical communities were formed, giving us new ways to appreciate the Pittsburgh of Billy Strayhorn, Art Blakey, and Mary Lou Williams, the St. Louis of Miles Davis…. [U]ntil Kenney's book we never got to feel what…the riverboat gig was actually like. What we get in this book, with lucid prose and meticulous research, is a geographical and cultural context for the figures who would eventually become canonical, providing a vital new backdrop for music and anecdotes that had seemed well trodden…. As for actually placing jazz in its historical and cultural context in America, Kenney is among the scholars who have…with a scholar's mission to bring the music into a geographical, economic and social investigation of what was going on around it…."—David Yaffe, The Nation. Read the review.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Music | Reviews
Posted by at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Chicago Sun-Times reports that Lawrence Weschler has been named the first artistic director of the Chicago Humanities Festival. The University of Chicago Press has published and reprinted a number of Weschler's books over the past few years, including A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers, Boggs: A Comedy of Values, and Calamities of Exile: Three Nonfiction Novellas.

In March we will bring back into print Weschler's A Wanderer in the Perfect City: Selected Passion Pieces.

Archived in Commentary | Literature
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Love poetry includes, yes, descriptions of the beloved. And images of a fantastic idyll complete with falling stars, the sound of the sea, and beautiful countryside. In the hands of Surrealists, though, love poetry also includes gravediggers and murderers, dice and garbage, snakeskin purses and "the drunken kisses of cyclones." Surrealism, the movement founded in the 1920s on the ashes of Dada's nihilism, embraced absurdity, contradiction, and, to a supreme extent, passion and desire.… Read the press release.

Read three poems from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by at 09:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Charles Harrison is one of the world's most renowned teachers and theorists of modern art. In this, his latest work, he brings his finely tuned eye, encyclopedic knowledge, and keen philosophical intelligence to a fundamental question in the history of art: is there a relationship between the representation of women and the modernist project? Harrison's answer is an emphatic yes.... Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Press Releases
Posted by at 03:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Before Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman, and Michelangelo Antonini—as well as contemporary auteurs such as Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson—there was Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936). The Nobel Prize-winning Sicilian writer recognized and explored, long before art cinema of the 1960s, the permeable boundary between reality and illusion. As the Wall Street Journal put it on the centennial of his birth, Pirandello "was one of the first moderns to insist that the theater itself is an art form, something to be reshaped according to the requirements of the twentieth-century imagination." And reshape it he did.... Read the press release.

Archived in Film and Media | Press Releases
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The British Museum exhibition "Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia" opened recently to the delight of critics and museumgoers alike. Taking full advantage of unprecedented loans from the National Museum of Iran, the Persepolis Museum, and the Louvre, the exhibition provides, in the words of the Guardian, a "first-rate" encounter with another culture. The Daily Telegraph called it "a triumph on many levels." The Persian Empire, Lindsay Allen's beautifully illustrated companion volume to the exhibition, is also, in its own right, a triumph.... Read the press release.

Archived in History | Press Releases
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It's no secret that politicians at every level aim to appeal to voters' emotions with campaign television ads. Indeed, as gubernatorial and local races intensify in communities across the country, and as congressional representatives begin to prepare for next year's midterm elections, campaign officials are surely crafting new emotionally evocative ads, following in the tradition of presidential, congressional, and local campaigns before them. Yet little is known about how these ads work, or even whether they work at all. This is where Ted Brader comes in.... Read the press release.

Archived in Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
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Lee Clarke explores the consequences of terror and catastrophe for our future as a civilization. A leading expert on disasters and a consultant to the federal government on disaster response strategies, Clarke argues that the time has come to devote more energy to preventing not just the improbable, but the unimaginable. Things that have never happened before happen everyday, and it is the worst cases that we fail to anticipate that pose the greatest threat to our way of life.... Read the press release.

We have an interview with Clarke and his lists of past and future worst case scenarios.

Archived in Press Releases | Sociology
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Philip Smith presents the simple theory that we make sense of certain situations, threats, and risks such as war by telling stories: stories about what form of involvement is necessary in conflict, what the outcome might be, who the heroes and villains are. Taking the cases of three broadly comparable conflicts—Suez, the Gulf War, and the Iraq War—Smith exposes the stories told by respective politicians in Washington, London, Paris, and Madrid. Storytelling, he shows, makes it easier to assemble confusing information into comprehensible scenarios.... Read the press release.

Read an excerpt on Britain and the war in Iraq.

Archived in History | Press Releases
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Catharsis is an elegant and moving book that reminds us of the humanity and gentle dignity of being a doctor. Written by Andrzej Szczeklik, a world renowned cardiologist who counts among his patients the poets Wislawa Szymborska and the late Czeslaw Milosz, this life-affirming work gives spiritual resonance to mundane medical moments and disenchanted science by embedding them in a rich blend of myth and art. Deftly weaving the history of medicine, classical literature, and anecdotes from his own clinical experiences, Szczeklik draws deeply on our humanistic heritage to describe the art of medicine.... Read the press release.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Literature | Press Releases
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Picture, if you can, a time when New York wasn't the center of the financial universe. A time when the business and investment capital of our great nation was Philadelphia, home of the Bank of the United States, the U.S. Mint, the country's first stock exchange, and several major banks all clustered on or around Chestnut Street—the thoroughfare which historian Robert Wright dubs The First Wall Street. Here in this fascinating work, Wright recounts the forgotten story of Chestnut Street and its pivotal role in the birth of American finance.… Read the press release.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Economics | Press Releases
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Hanukkah may be over but Purim is right around the corner, so the time is still ripe for the intellectual and gastronomic delights of The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate, a collection of the best of nearly sixty years of brilliant University of Chicago oratory deployed on behalf of latkes and hamantashen. Our online feature for the book includes the text and audio of Ted Cohen’s “Consolations of the Latke” as well as recipes.

Archived in Books for the News | Chicago
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Archived in UCP News
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