Monthly Archives: March 2007

Press Release: Attlee, Isolarion

March 29, 2007
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Press Release: Attlee, Isolarion

Is it possible to travel without leaving home? Is there a way to be a pilgrim without leaving your life behind? James Attlee answers that question in this thoughtful, savvy, and personal account of his pilgrimage to a place he thought he already knew—the Cowley Road in Oxford, right outside his door. Isolarion takes its title from a type of fifteenth-century map that isolates an area in order to present it in detail, and that’s what Attlee, sharp-eyed and armed with tape recorder and notebook, provides for Cowley Road. From a sojourn in a sensory-deprivation tank to a furtive visit to an unmarked pornography emporium, Attlee investigates every aspect of the Cowley Road’s appealingly eclectic culture, where halal shops abut craft jewelers and reggae clubs pulsate alongside quiet churchyards. Drawing inspiration from sources ranging from Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy to contemporary art, Attlee is a charming and companionable guide who revels in the extraordinary embedded in the everyday.

Read the press release.

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Publishing Hayek’s Road to Serfdom

March 29, 2007
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Publishing Hayek’s Road to Serfdom

The March 30th edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education is running an article about F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents—The Definitive Edition recently published by the Press. The piece details “the story behind the publishing of Hayek’s seminal volume” and how close the book’s critics came to shutting down publication of one of the Press’s most influential and best-selling titles. The article begins:

If the University of Chicago Press had listened to one of its reader’s reports, it might not have published one of its best-selling books of all time. The story of how Chicago came to issue The Road to Serfdom, by the Austrian scholar F.A. Hayek, in 1944 is provided in a new definitive edition coming out this month.

As The Road to Serfdom, a seminal volume in modern libertarian thought, was wending its way to publication in Britain, three American university presses turned it down. Chicago decided to go ahead despite a review from a prominent economist at the university who said it wouldn’t sell. The original print run was gone in a month, and Chicago went on to sell more than 350,000 copies over the years. Some 600,000 more were . . .

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Press Release: Scientific American, Oceans

March 29, 2007
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Press Release: Scientific American, Oceans

In March 2007, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that the combined land and ocean temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere for December 2006 through February 2007 were 1.3°F higher than average, based on records dating back to 1880. Climate change has the potential to wreak havoc on oceanic ecosystems, as the contributors to Oceans report. An accessible collection of thirty articles published in Scientific American in the last decade, the collection considers, in addition to global warming and its devastating effects, the origins of the world’s oceans, the diversity of life in the water, the state of global fisheries, the dangers of natural disasters, and the future of marine conservation. With a breadth of topics as wide as the ocean is deep, this timely guide offers the nonscientist an opportunity to appreciate the importance of this expansive—and fragile—frontier.

Read the press release.

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Caitlin Zaloom on “What Capital Markets Can Learn From Clifford Geertz”

March 28, 2007
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Caitlin Zaloom on “What Capital Markets Can Learn From Clifford Geertz”

In the March 23rd issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, author Caitlin Zaloom has penned an interesting piece about the late Clifford Geertz, one of the world’s leading cultural anthropologists, and a man she calls her intellectual “grandfather.” In her article, Zaloom cites Geertz’s groundbreaking studies in books such as Peddlers and Princes and Agricultural Involution as the foundation for her own new book, Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London.

Out of the Pits is a fascinating exploration of how the recent trend of online trading is effecting the culture of the marketplace. Zaloom’s article states, “even though their publication preceded today’s global economy by decades, Clifford Geertz’s works on culture and economy can still help us understand the cultural import of the online evolution in the world’s marketplace.”

Here’s a few links to the UCP website where you can find out more about the works of both of these groundbreaking figures in the field of anthropology:

Clifford Geertz by His Colleagues

Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia

The Religion of Java

Kinship in Bali

Peddlers and Princes

We also have an excerpt from Out of the Pits.

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Sex, Spirituality, and the Esalen Institute

March 27, 2007
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Sex, Spirituality, and the Esalen Institute

The March 21st issue of Publishers Weekly contains an intriguing article by Donna Freitas on Jeffery J. Kripal and his latest work Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. The article leads off with Kripal claiming, “All of my books are about sexuality and sprituality.” Freitas goes on to unpack Kripal’s alluring statement:

This chair of religious studies at Rice University is explaining why he chose Esalen—the eclectic spiritual retreat in California’s Big Sur region—as the subject of six years of research and his most recent book, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion.

Freitas continues:

Kripal said what he discovered there was “an American mysticism that allowed the body and spirit to form a unity of erotic and spiritual energies. At Esalen, the Western religious traditions’ rules about a male divine didn’t apply anymore. The divine is anything at Esalen. There is no creed. There is no orthodoxy. If anything, it’s a pantheistic worldview which opens up hundreds of possibilities for images of divinity… Esalen was born during the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements, so it integrated these into its history and intellectual life. All of the battles you see going on today in . . .

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Susan Basalla May’s “FAQ From the Lecture Circuit”

March 23, 2007
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Susan Basalla May’s “FAQ From the Lecture Circuit”

Susan Basalla May, co-author of So What Are You Going to Do with That?: Finding Careers Outside Academia has posted an interesting FAQ for students preparing for a nonacademic career to the website of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Culled from the question and answer sessions that follow her frequent lectures, Basalla comments on a variety of topics including how to get started as a freelancer and how to explain to potential employers about unfinished dissertations. You can find the full article in the career section of the Chronicle.

A witty, accessible guide full of concrete advice for anyone contemplating the jump from scholarship to the outside world, So What Are You Going to Do with That? covers topics ranging from career counseling to interview etiquette to translating skills learned in the academy into terms an employer can understand and appreciate. Packed with examples and stories from real people who have successfully made this daunting—but potentially rewarding— transition, and written with a deep understanding of both the joys and difficulties of the academic life, this fully revised and up-to-date edition will be indispensable for any graduate student or professor who has ever glanced at her CV, flipped through the . . .

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Susan Bielstein on WVKR’s Library Cafe

March 22, 2007
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Susan Bielstein on WVKR’s Library Cafe

Susan Bielstein, author of Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property will appear on Library Café, a program on WVKR Independent Radio FM 91.3 in Poughkeepsie, NY, on March 27th at 11 am CST. Bielstein will join host Thomas Hill to discuss her book. You can tune in to a live broadcast online at the Library Café where they should also post archived audio after the show.

Organized as a series of “takes” that range from short sidebars to extended discussions, Permissions, A Survival Guide explores intellectual property law as it pertains to visual imagery. How can you determine whether an artwork is copyrighted? How do you procure a high-quality reproduction of an image? What does “fair use” really mean? Is it ever legitimate to use the work of an artist without permission? Bielstein discusses the many uncertainties that plague writers who work with images in this highly visual age, and she does so based on her years navigating precisely these issues. As an editor who has hired a photographer to shoot an incredibly obscure work in the Italian mountains (a plan that backfired hilariously), who has tried to reason with artists’ estates in languages she . . .

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James Attlee at the Oxford Literary Festival

March 21, 2007
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James Attlee at the Oxford Literary Festival

Author James Attlee was interviewed by Danny Cox of BBC Radio Oxford on the occasion of the 2007 Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival. Attlee discussed his book Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey. You can listen to archived audio (RealMedia format) of the interview.

In Isolarion Attlee delivers a thoughtful, streetwise, and personal account of his pilgrimage to a place he thought he already knew—the Cowley Road in Oxford, right outside his door. Though a lesser known local on Oxford’s lower east side, Attlee reveals Cowley to be a thoroughly modern, impressively cosmopolitan, and utterly organic collection of shops, restaurants, pubs, and religious establishments teeming with life and reflecting the multicultural makeup of the surrounding neighborhood. In his interview Attlee expands on that notion by focusing on his account of the Cowley Road as a story not only about this quaint Oxford neighborhood, but a more universal tale of modern cities generally.

We have an excerpt from the book.

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Press Release: Nouvian, The Deep

March 21, 2007
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Press Release: Nouvian, The Deep

Combining the latest scientific discoveries with astonishing color imagery, The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss by Claire Nouvian takes readers on a voyage into the darkest realms of the ocean. Revealing nature’s oddest and most mesmerizing creatures in crystalline detail, The Deep features more than two hundred color photographs of terrifying sea monsters, living fossils, and ethereal bioluminescent creatures, many of which are photographed here for the first time. Accompanying these breathtaking photographs are contributions from some of the world’s most respected researchers that examine the biology of these deep-sea organisms, the ecology of their habitats, and the history of deep-sea exploration. An unforgettable tour of the teeming abyss, The Deep celebrates the incredible diversity of life on Earth and will captivate anyone intrigued by the unseen—and unimaginable—creatures of the deep sea.

Read the press release. A special site for the book—www.thedeepbook.org— has images from the book and much more information.

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Press Release: Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations

March 20, 2007
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Press Release: Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations

Seventy years ago, in a small office at the University of Chicago, dissertation secretary Kate L. Turabian changed forever the way research is reported. Asked to provide students with a style guide, she wrote a small pamphlet describing the correct format for writing college dissertations. That pamphlet eventually became A Manual for Writers and has gone on to sell more than eight million copies in six editions. This spring the University of Chicago Press will publish the seventh edition of her widely used and respected Manual—now fully revised to meet the needs of a new generation of students and researchers. The stellar team of Joseph Williams, Gregory Colomb, and Wayne C. Booth, master teachers and authors of the bestselling Craft of Research, have thoroughly updated the Manual while respecting the Turabian tradition. With this careful revision, they have ensured that A Manual for Writers will remain the most valuable handbook for writers at every level—from first-year undergraduates, to dissertation writers, to senior scholars.

Read the press release. Much more information will soon be available at www.turabian.org.

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