The Hot Type column in the June 1 Chronicle of Higher Education discusses Angus McLaren's new book Impotence: A Cultural History. Peter Monaghan gives a nice overview of McLaren's project to document the history of male sexual impotence from Renaissance Italy to our modern age of Viagra:

Impotence was with us long before Viagra and Cialis. And curing it has never been quite as simple as popping a pill, reports Angus McLaren in Impotence: A Cultural History. … Ancient Mesopotamians chanted spells and ate helpful plants and roots to combat it, but some more-recent salves seemed liable to further unman the man. During the 20th century, the German surgeon Peter Schmidt's "Steinach operation," for example, involved cutting the vas deferens and injecting "testicular extracts," which were drawn from prisoners executed at San Quentin State Prison in California or from goats, rams, boars, and deer. …

As for Viagra, its cultural workings are worth pondering, suggests Mr. McLaren. While such medications may work, forgoing the magic pill then becomes "almost a lack of responsibility, and defeatism," he writes, leaving men no freer than before from trying to live up to masculine ideals.

Read a special feature drawn from the book: "Two Millennia of Impotence Cures".

Archived in Books for the News | History | History and Philosophy of Science
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In his new book, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science author Daniel Gross embarks on an intellectual voyage to examine the history of emotions in western culture. Writing for the Times Literary Supplement reviewer Stephen Pender praises Gross's newest work for delivering a fascinating counterpoint to the way we generally understand emotions today. Pender writes:

One way to prise open the emotional sphere is to situate the passions socially, to investigate their exigencies with an eye on the polis. And we have a fine guide in Daniel Gross, the author of The Secret History of Emotion. To recognize the social in the passionate, Gross urges a turn to Aristotelian traditions, and in particular to the Rhetoric, which offers "a pragmatic phenomenology of the passions." In opposition to "current platitudes of emotion," Gross offers a bold, compelling and occasionally rebarbative argument about the turn from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political rhetoric, which articulated the social and the particular in the passionate, to a hopelessly insular psychology, marked by disingenuous universalizing and specious materialism.… Gross's deft and remarkable book should be required reading for neurobiologists and, of course, for humanists of every school.

Archived in Classics | History | Psychology | Reviews
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Dorothy Cheney and Richard Seyfarth's new book, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind, has received several notable reviews over the past month. Writing in the May 19 issue of New Scientist primatologist Frans de Waal notes the the author's insightful study of baboons' social organization, and the implications of their research in gaining a better understanding of our own human society. Steven Poole also reviewed the book for the May 12 issue of the Guardian noting the book's entertaining study of the often dramatic social lives of these primates. Poole writes:

What have years of observing wild baboons in Botswana taught the authors about [baboon's] social thinking and learning abilities? The vivid narrative is like a bush detective story, as the authors conduct ingenious experiments, setting up loudspeakers to play back prerecorded baboon calls (the baboons recognize individual voices, and act surprised if a sequence indicates a violation of rank), or lament the loss of their favorites to lions and leopards. The detail of how baboons keep track of the, er, grunting order is almost novelistic, as we track social peaks and troughs in their lives, and the authors' conclusions have intriguing implications for the evolution of language in humans.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Biology | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week's edition of Nature has quite a positive review of Charles Thorpe's new book, Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect. Catherine Westphall writes for Nature:

Does the world really need yet another book about J. Robert Oppenheimer? … Amazingly, Charles Thorpe's Oppenheimer still manages to provide a fascinating new perspective. …

What's new here is a precise and compelling description of how Oppenheimer's Los Alamos persona was forged by wartime circumstances and the Los Alamos community. To succeed in its grim mission, Los Alamos needed a certain type of leader, and Oppenheimer nimbly fit himself to the role, becoming the intellectual, moral, and social center of gravity for the constellation of scientific and engineering problem-solving. Thorpe argues that just as Oppenheimer created Los Alamos, so Los Alamos created, or at least reconfigured, Oppenheimer.

Westphall's review concludes: "Thorpe's book provides the best perspective yet for understanding Oppenheimer's Los Alamos years, which were critical, after all, not only to his life but, for better or worse, the history of mankind."

Archived in Biography | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
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Last Monday Salon.com ran an in-depth review of Angus McLaren's new book Impotence: A Cultural History. Drawing from McLaren's work, reviewer Laura Miller walks through several centuries of male sexual failure and the various theories behind its causes and cures to explore its social impact throughout the history of western civilization. But according to Miller, it's what all this history has to teach us about our attitudes towards impotence today that make McLaren's book notable. Miller writes:

The final chapters of Impotence, covering the last 50 years of sexual liberation, feminism and Viagra, are the most interesting. McLaren's long historical view lends substance to his argument that our current, "enlightened" take on sex hasn't necessarily made things easier for the average guy. The idea that manliness consists of being able to sexually satisfy a woman—not merely penetrate and impregnate her—increased the pressure. So did the rise of sex therapy, with its notion of sex as a body of sophisticated techniques requiring planning and practice—sex as work, in effect. A mid-20th-century preoccupation with "simultaneous orgasm" as the pinnacle of marital love and a necessity for any truly happy couple set many couples up for disappointment and insecurity. With the advent of feminism, women who gained the ability to support themselves economically had one less reason to settle for a sexually unexciting spouse.

Viagra seemed to promise relief at last, but as McLaren points out, only half of the men who tried it ever bothered to refill their prescriptions. As reassuring as it was for intimacy-averse guys to be offered a purely mechanical solution to their sexual problems, many found it somehow still wasn't enough.…

"A flaccid penis," McLaren writes, can "give pleasure and result in orgasm"—surely a revelation to many. What it can't do, however, is fulfill the fantasy of ever-rigid, ever-aggressive, ever-dominant manhood. Until that changes, potency—and therefore impotence—will always be about a lot more than just getting it up.

Read a special feature drawn from the book: "Two Millennia of Impotence Cures".

Archived in History | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews | Sociology
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The May 20th Boston Globe featured a review of not one, but two new books celebrating the "breathtaking diversity of life" inhabiting the earth's deep oceans. Reviewer Anthony Doerr writes:

Two new books from the University of Chicago should help forever banish the paradigm of the lifeless deep. Tony Koslow's The Silent Deep is an illustrated survey of deep-sea ecology, deeply informed by history and rendered in straightforward, careful prose. Claire Nouvian's The Deep is a big, glossy book of deep-water photographs, punctuated with short essays by 15 leading oceanographers. (Koslow has an essay in Nouvian's book. )

The two books present earth's biggest, strangest ecosystem with reverence and wonder. Koslow tells the stories of deep-sea pioneers like Wyville Thomson and William Beebe; tours us past hydrothermal vents, underwater mountains, and whale falls; and laments the destruction of deep-water habitats caused by mining, pollution, and bottom trawling.

Nouvian's The Deep features more than 200 color portraits of the planet's least-known creatures: sparkling pink octopi like floating lanterns; iridescent squid with corkscrew tails; predatory fish with hooded eyes and translucent teeth looming in the darkness. Some of these are the first-ever photographs of certain organisms. At least eight of the pictures feature animals so unknown that Nouvian's captions list them as "unidentified."

Exploring the unusual life in one of the darkest and most mysterious environments on earth, these complementary volumes definitely make for some very cool summer reading.

See our special website to preview some of the astonishing color images from The Deep and read an interview with the author.

Archived in Biology | Reviews
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The May 12 Financial Times ran an interesting review of Anne Goldgar's new book, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age. Simon Kuper writes for the FT:

We think we know the story of "tulipmania": the 17th-century Dutch dropped fortunes on tulips, ruined their economy, even killed themselves over the bulbs. In short, tulipmania is remembered as the first market bubble. It has been used as an analogy for subsequent ones, most recently during the dotcom boom. However, Anne Goldgar tells us at the start of her excellent debunking book: "Most of what we have heard of it is not true.…"

The bubble grew from late 1636.… Prices of Switsers bulbs, to cite one example, rose 12-fold from new year of 1637 to peak on February 3 at 1,500 guilders a pound.… The crash came in early February 1637, when prices fell by approximately 90 per cent.… Yet the effects were modest. It's a myth that tulipmania devastated the Dutch economy. How could it, when so few people traded tulips? Even those who did survived the crash. Tulips were merely a sideline to their real professions. Rather, tulipmania damaged the code of honour that underlay Dutch capitalism. When buyers reneged, trust suffered. Tulipmania was a social crisis, not a financial one, argues Goldgar.

To read the rest of the review head over to the Financial Times website. We also have an excerpt from the introduction to the book.

Archived in Economics | History | Reviews
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Monday's San Francisco Chronicle featured an interview with author Jeffrey Kripal on the topic of his new book Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. In his interview with the Chronicle's David Ian Miller, Kripal discusses "Esalen's contributions to the evolution of religion, the state of spirituality today, and the importance of maintaining many paths to enlightenment."

Situated on the edge of the pacific coastline, the Esalen institute has long been a world leader in alternative and experiential education, as well as an influential player in the creation of the American counterculture. Popularized by such luminary figures as Aldus Huxley, Ram Das, and Ansel Adams—all of whom either lived at or visited the institute—Esalen has had a long and fascinating intellectual and spiritual legacy that continues to influence American culture to this day.

To learn more about Esalen and its legacy check out Kripal's interview on the SFGate website. We also have an excerpt from the book.

Kripal was also featured Tuesday, May 22, on KQED radio's Forum with Michael Krasney. Get the audio here.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Philosophy | Religion
Posted by TXM at 03:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lance Bennett, coauthor of When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina, was interviewed Monday morning on Weekday, a public affairs program from KUOW in Seattle. Bennett discusses with host Steven Scher how the news media covered pivotal events from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina—where the news media succeeded and where it failed. You can find archived audio from the program at KUOW's website.

In When the Press Fails W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston argue that reporters' dependence on official sources has disastrously thwarted coverage of dissenting voices from outside the beltway, especially in terms of recent events such as the response to 9/11, the buildup to war with Iraq, and the Abu Ghraib scandal. A sobering look at the intimate relationship between political power and the news media, When the Press Fails delivers a revealing account of the mass media's willingness to provide critical reportage when we need it most.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 03:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the 1630s the Netherlands was gripped by tulipmania: a speculative fever unprecedented in scale and, as popular history would have it, folly. We all know the outline of the story—how otherwise sensible merchants, nobles, and artisans spent all they had on tulip bulbs. We have heard how these bulbs changed hands hundreds of times in a single day, and how some bulbs, sold and resold for thousands of guilders, never even existed. Tulipmania is seen as an example of the gullibility of crowds and the dangers of financial speculation.

But it wasn't like that. As Anne Goldgar reveals in Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age, not one of these stories is true. Making use of extensive archival research, she lays waste to the legends, revealing that while the 1630s did see a speculative bubble in tulip prices, neither the height of the bubble nor its bursting were anywhere near as dramatic as we tend to think. By clearing away the accumulated myths, Goldgar is able to show us instead the far more interesting reality: the ways in which tulipmania reflected deep anxieties about the transformation of Dutch society in the Golden Age.

Read the press release. Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Economics | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Watching primates at zoos is so fascinating because they seem to relate to one another as individuals; we see in their actions and vocalizations signs of friendship, rivalry, and even love. But how much of what we see is just our anthropomorphizing? How do primates really understand their relationships and their place in the world? The fruit of fifteen years living with baboons in their native habitat, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind answers these questions and more, showing us how baboons understand themselves and their world. The drama of rank and kinship, the authors reveal, would be right at home in Jane Austen, as the baboons make and break alliances with friends, relatives, and rivals. Through unprecedented field experiments, Cheney and Seyfarth enable us to understand the intelligence underlying these bonds and the forms of communications baboons employ to manage their relationships—and the dangers and stress of living in the wild. Baboon Metaphysics gives us an unprecedented and compelling glimpse into the mind of this most fascinating species.

Read the press release. Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Biology | Press Releases
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Claire Nouvian's The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss has been making waves in the media lately with reviews in Discover Magazine, the BBC's Focus Magazine, and the Literary Review among others. But this morning's piece in the New York Times probably weighs in as the book's best review yet. The science section of the May 22 edition features an enthusiastic review of Nouvian's fascinating illustrated journey into the abyss, complete with an interactive slide show featuring a sampling of the often beautiful—and sometimes scary—images that grace the pages of her new book. Reviewer William J. Broad writes for the NYT:

In [the book's] preface, Ms. Nouvian writes of an epiphany that began her undersea journey.

"It was as though a veil had been lifted," she says, "revealing unexpected points of view, vaster and more promising."

The photographs she has selected celebrate that sense of the unexpected. Bizarre species from as far down as four and half miles are shown in remarkable detail, their tentacles lashing, eyes bulging, lights flashing. The eerie translucence of many of the gelatinous creatures seems to defy common sense. They seem to be living water.

On page after page, it is as if aliens had descended from another world to amaze and delight. A small octopus looks like a child's squeeze toy. A seadevil looks like something out of a bad dream. A Ping-Pong tree sponge rivals artwork that might be seen in an upscale gallery.

The review also notes the "essays by some of the world's top experts on deep-sea life" that complement the book's breathtaking images with fascinating commentary on the science of marine biology, the ecology of deep-sea habitats, and the history of deep-sea exploration—making this book one of the most comprehensive introductions to life in the deep sea ever published.

The Press has put together a special website where you can view even more images, learn more about the book, and read some of the other great reviews it has received.

Archived in Biology | Reviews
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Last week, the Times Literary Supplement ran a review of David Grene's posthumous memoir, Of Farming and Classics. Weaving together Grene's life as a professor of classics at the University of Chicago with his alter ego as a farmer in Ireland and in Illinois, Of Farming and Classics delivers a refreshing and intelligent take on classical scholarship in the twentieth century. TLS reviewer Edith Hall seems to agree when she writes:

David Grene's experience of Irish, British, Austrian and American Classics across the whole period from the 1920s until 2002 makes this slim, deftly written, posthumously published volume an illuminating read for every classical scholar engaged with the current quest for the subject's roots, and the excavation of the way that it has evolved over the past century and a half. But Grene's memoir is made really memorable by his "other", bucolic voice; for his account of twentieth-century Classics runs in tandem with his memories of his other profession, as a dairy farmer in Illinois and subsequently in Wicklow and Cavan in Ireland.…

Belonging to two social worlds gives him an unusually keen eye for the precise nuances of social class and the ways in which they are defined and displayed. [For example,] looking at the effects of the British Empire on both farming and Classics produces a sophisticated reading of some aspects of both professions.… He [also] sees parallels between the mental attitudes and skills required of a satisfactory and personally satisfied small farmer and a university teacher: "some degree of intellectual discrimination and willingness to disregard the attraction of being like most other people". He draws a few inspiring connections: for example, his charming account of how the myth of the centaur emerged from the magical synergy between a sensitive horse and a skilled rider. When talking of his own ecstasy in ploughing an Irish furrow with a team of horses, he alludes to passages in Hesiod and Aeschylus before drawing attention to what he perceives as the contentment of the ploughman in Breughel's famous painting of the fall of Icarus.

We previously posted three excerpts from Grene's book to this blog including "Dublin Theatre in the 1920s and '30s", "Learning Greek and Latin in Dublin Schools" and "Honors Classics at Trinity College."

Archived in Biography | Classics | Reviews
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Last Friday's New York Times had a review of an exhibition at the SculptureCenter. The exhibition drew inspiration from a book that the Press recently honored, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images by W. J. T. Mitchell. Martha Schwendener writes for the NYT:

What do objects want? The question, immediately recalling Freud's about women, also paraphrases the title of W. J. T. Mitchell's book What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, the inspiration for an exhibition at the SculptureCenter in Long Island City, Queens.

Mr. Mitchell, a professor at the University of Chicago and editor of the journal Critical Inquiry, observes that "modern, rational, secular" people don't generally treat pictures like persons, yet "we always seem to be willing to make exceptions for special cases." (Most of us, for instance, would be reluctant to poke out the eyes on a photograph of our mother.) But pictures have desires, too, he argues, and a primary one is the desire to capture our attention—to "transfix the beholder" and gain some measure of mastery or power over us.

The Happiness of Objects, organized by Sarina Basta, the SculptureCenter curator, takes Mr. Mitchell's ideas and tweaks them to fit an exhibition of work by nearly two dozen artists and artist collectives. Visitors receive a handout titled "The Object's Bill of Rights," which lays out a series of demands like "The Object has the right to be claimed or forgotten, lost or found," and "The Object has the right to many lovers."

You can learn more about the show at the SculptureCenter website, or check out Mitchell's fascinating book, either way, your understanding of our increasingly visual culture is guaranteed to be transformed.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Literature
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Marshal Zeringue, whose blogging enterprises are clustered at the Campaign for the American Reader, has a daily feature called "The Page 69 Test" in which he asks an author to quote and briefly discuss whatever text can be found on page 69 of their book.

On the basis of the title alone, one could scarcely find an apparently less fit candidate for the rigors of the Page 69 Test than Angus McLaren's Impotence: A Cultural History. But we are pleased to note that Impotence was—yes, we will stoop to this joke—up to the task. The Page 69 Test exhibits, as a test on most any page of this book would, some fascinating material. In fact, page 69 discusses a legal case in Pennsylvania in 1728 in which a woman claimed her husband was impotent. The husband, a George Miller, submits to a virility test and, in due course, proves his manhood. Synchronicity rules.

You may further sample Impotence in a special feature drawn from the book, "Two Millennia of Impotence Cures."

Archived in Commentary | History
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Robert Fulford wrote an article in Canada's National Post on Fuad I. Kuri and his posthumously published memoir An Invitation to Laughter: A Lebanese Anthropologist in the Arab World. A Christian Lebanese, Khuri offers in his unusual autobiography both an insider's and an outsider's perspective on life in Lebanon, often fraught with contradictions, and of course, laughter.

Khuri entertains and informs with clever insights into such issues as the mentality of Arabs toward women, eating habits of the Arab world, the impact of Islam on West Africa, and the extravagant lifestyles of wealthy Arabs as Fulford writes in the Post:

Laughter is not the first sound that comes to mind when someone mentions Arabia. As Khuri wrote, "In Arab culture, laughing loudly in public demeans one's character." … [But] Khuri was not an ordinary Arab, or an ordinary anthropologist. Laughter was frequently his response to the societies he studied. He investigated African villagers and other traditional subjects, but he loved studying prosperous societies.… Khuri, it's clear, loved to follow the rather over-assertive habits of rich Arabs who wanted to display their wealth. He mentions an Arab who asked that Harrods department store in London be closed so that his wife could shop in private. (Michael Jackson did him one better by closing Tokyo Disneyland for a day of fun with his entourage.) Khuri knew of Arabs using mink coats as bathrobes. When he took a ride on a private plane he discovered that even the toilet handle was gold.

A profound appreciation for humor in the study of cultures is a distinctive theme of An Invitation to Laughter, and one that makes this book a must read for anyone interested in the culture of the Middle East and the discipline of anthropology

Archived in Anthropology | Biography | History | Reviews
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Author Mary Pattillo was featured Tuesday on Chicago Public Radio's daily news-radio talk show Eight Forty-Eight. Pattillo speaks with host Richard Steele about her new book Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City and the revitalization of Chicago's North Kenwood-Oakland neighborhood. Their conversation explores the problems facing this rapidly gentrifying black community to touch on broader issues of race and class in contemporary urban America. You can find archived audio of the show on the Chicago Public Radio website.

Pattillo will also be at 57th Street Books today at 7pm to read from her book. In the meantime, you can check out an excerpt on our website.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Events | Black Studies | Chicago | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
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Pascal Richet's new book, A Natural History of Time tells the fascinating tale of humanity's quest to pinpoint the age of the Earth. Beginning with ancient mythology and ending with a detailed discussion of modern scientific attempts to date the Earth, Richet's book chronicles the many ways in which human societies have conceptualized the idea of time throughout the ages. A recent review in Publishers Weekly explains more:

For millennia humans relied on mythical or biblical accounts to conjure up a birth date for our planet. Astronomer Edmund Haley used the amount of salt in the oceans as his calendar. The great Newton ventured at writing a chronology that took most of the stories of Greek kings and heroes at face value. But as French geophysicist Pascal Richet tells readers, people didn't get serious about ascertaining the age of the earth until the Enlightenment, when researchers tried to figure the amount of heat lost by the earth to reckon backwards to its molten youth. But a firm date—4.5 billion years—couldn't be established until the discovery of radioactive elements to date everything from textiles to stones.…

[With A Natural History of Time] geology and natural history buffs will discover a rich, baroquely embellished birthday cake to dig into and enjoy.

Archived in History | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
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We're catching it a little late, but last month the London Review of Books ran such an interesting review of Richard Sher's The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America that we thought it worth a mention. Sher brings to light the forgotten role of the publishing industry on the explosion of intellectual activity in Scotland during the eighteenth century, as reviewer James Buchan—a Scotch writer himself—explains:

For Sher, whether a piece of paper was folded into four to make a big square volume (quarto) or eight like a modern hardback (octavo) or 12 like a livre de poche (duodecimo), who printed a book and who sold it and for how much, how many editions a book went through and how much money the author or publisher made, whether there were engravings, frontispieces or printed advertisements—all those have important things to tell us about works such as Hume's Essays and Treatises, his country and his age [and] as befits such an argument Sher's book is beautifully illustrated.

"Even among bibliographers and book historians who specialize in the 18th-century book trade," Sher writes, "relatively little work has been done to connect publishers and the conditions of publication with the authors and their books. One of the primary tasks of this book is to re-establish that connection." For Sher, the Scottish printers and booksellers of the second half of the century … were not 'mechanicks' … but collaborators in a London-Edinburgh publishing enterprise that put Scotland on the literary map.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 04:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea Brague takes his readers back three thousand years to trace the idea of divine law in the West from prehistoric religions to modern times. Brague explains how divine law, which served in ancient Greece as a metaphor for natural law, was seen in ancient Israel as divine revelation. Then, in the Middle Ages, it took on different sacred meanings within Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Illuminating these meanings with a wide array of philosophical, political, and religious sources, he goes on to address the recent break in the alliance between law and divinity—when modern societies, far from connecting the two, started to think of law simply as the rule human community gives itself. Powerfully expanding on the project he began with his critically acclaimed The Wisdom of the World, Brague explores what this disconnect means for the contemporary world, ultimately inviting us to re-imagine the implications of our own modernity.

Read the press release.

Archived in History | Law | Press Releases | Religion
Posted by TXM at 04:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jeffrey Kripal, author of Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion was featured last Wednesday on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed. Kripal was joined by Eileen Barker, Professor Emeritus of Sociology with Special Reference to the Study of Religion at the London School of Economics to discuss "the history of Esalen, its philosophy, and the effects it has had on the new age."

The Esalen institute was one of the leader's in alternative and experiential education during the sixties and seventies. The revolutionary ideas, transformative spiritual practices, and innovative art forms it fostered attracted such luminary figures as Henry Miller, Joseph Campbell, Aldous Huxley, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Hunter S. Thompson, and others to it's stunning locale on the face of the Pacific coastline. In Esalen, Kripal recounts the spectacular history of the institute and its profound influence on the American counterculture—an influence that continues to shape modern American society to this day.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Religion
Posted by TXM at 05:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Drawing on interviews with Washington insiders and astute analysis of mainstream reportage, When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina argues that the dependence of journalists on government sources has silenced credible voices from all but the highest circles of power—with disastrous results. The authors trace this harmful dependency across the arc of the Bush administration's media-assisted political fortunes, beginning with an unflinching look at why major news outlets neglected to cover evidence against the presence of WMDs in Iraq. They find that such catastrophic blind spots, especially during the Abu Ghraib controversy, stemmed from a dearth of high-level officials within government willing to question the administration publicly.

To remedy this shortcoming, the authors propose new practices aimed at diversifying the kinds of sources that professional conventions allow journalists to use. Seeing promise in the refreshingly balanced coverage of Hurricane Katrina, When the Press Fails ultimately illuminates how the press and the public alike can work toward a new kind of journalism, the emergence of which is absolutely vital to the future of our democracy.

Read the press release.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The May 9 Sydney Morning Herald includes an excellent review of James Attlee's new book, Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey. Praising Attlee for his ability to transform a seemingly mundane trip down Oxford's Cowley Road—a side-street just minutes from the author's doorstep—into a fascinating travelogue of his adventures through the exotic and the extraordinary, reviewer Bruce Elder writes:

Having lived in south Oxfordshire for seven years in the 1970s I have traveled up and down Oxford's Cowley Road, which runs from Magdalen Bridge to the famous Morris car works, literally thousands of times. In all those journeys, not once did it occur to me that the rich diversity of cafes, shops, pubs, galleries and houses would be the suitable subject for a travel book. What a great idea. …

Part of the appeal of this remarkable book is the way each shop manages to fire the author's imagination. Thus a visit to a jeweller includes references to Shakespeare, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Petrarch and Charlemagne and the porn shop on the corner evokes Lucretius, St Jerome and even the Bible. Each experience opens up worlds of associations and slowly the street becomes the world. Attlee describes in meticulous detail each place—right down to the misspellings on the walls—and thus the book becomes a series of vignettes connected by the road. In this he echoes the style adopted by Bruce Chatwin in his groundbreaking travel book In Patagonia. The vignettes, like marks on a painting by a pointillist, eventually coalesce to become a beautiful work of art.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 04:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The American Academy of the Arts and Sciences has announced the selection of their 2007 fellows. We were pleased to note that eleven University of Chicago Press authors and editors were honored with this impressive distinction. A press release on the Academy's website quotes the organization's president Emilio Bizzi saying: "Fellows are selected through a highly competitive process that recognizes individuals who have made preeminent contributions to their disciplines and to society at large." This year's recipients include:

Michael Christ, lead editor of Harmonic Analysis and Partial Differential Equations: Essays in Honor of Alberto P. Calderon

David M. Cutler, editor of The Changing Hospital Industry: Comparing Not-for-Profit and For-Profit Institutions and coeditor of Medical Care Output and Productivity.

John A. Goldsmith, coauthor of The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career: A Portable Mentor for Scholars from Graduate School through Tenure and editor of The Last Phonological Rule: Reflections on Constraints and Derivations.

Robert Pogue Harrison, author of The Dominion of the Dead and Forests: The Shadow of Civilization.

Mary Power, coeditor of Food Webs at the Landscape Level.

N. Gregory Mankiw, editor of Monetary Policy.

Anna J. Schwartz, author of Money in Historical Perspective.

John L. Sullivan, coauthor of Political Tolerance and American Democracy.

Bruce Winstein, coeditor of Kaon Physics.

Wu Hung, author of Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space, Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century, and The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting.

Robert Jeffrey Zimmer, president of the University of Chicago and author of Essential Results of Functional Analysis.

Archived in Awards
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In The Discovery of Insulin—a brilliant, definitive history of one of the most significant and controversial medical events of modern times—award-winning historian Michael Bliss brings to light a bizarre clash of scientific personalities. When F. G. Banting and J. J. R. Macleod won the 1923 Nobel Prize for discovering and isolating insulin, Banting immediately announced that he was dividing his share of the prize with his young associate, C. H. Best. Macleod divided his share with a fourth member of the team, J. B. Collip. For the next sixty years medical opinion was intensely divided over the allotment of credit for the discovery of insulin. In resolving this controversy, Bliss also offers a wealth of new detail on such subjects as the treatment of diabetes before insulin and the life-and-death struggle to manufacture insulin.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | History | Press Releases
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Two University of Chicago Press authors were honored last Tuesday at the Society of Midland Author's annual awards ceremony. Roger Ebert's Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert received the top prize for adult non-fiction books, while Timothy J. Gilfoyle's Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark also weighed in as a finalist in the same category.

The awards contest is described on the Society's website as a "competition … open to authors and poets who reside in, were born in, or have strong ties to the twelve-state Midwestern Heartland." Ebert is an Illinois native while Gilfoyle is a professor of history at Loyola University Chicago. The winners will receive cash prizes, plaques, and of course, recognition from one of the Midwest's most distinguished literary societies.

Back in November we reprinted Ebert's interview with Robert Altman on this blog. Our website also features “A Millennium Park Trivia Quiz” based on Gilfoyle's book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Awards | Film and Media
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"When a film is not a document, it is a dream. … At the editing table, when I run the strip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood." Bergman, who has conveyed this heady sense of wonder and vision to moviegoers for decades, traces his lifelong love affair with film in his breathtakingly visual autobiography, The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography.

More grand mosaic than linear account, Bergman’s vignettes trace his life from a rural Swedish childhood through his work in theater to Hollywood’s golden age, and a tumultuous romantic history that includes five wives and more than a few mistresses. Throughout, Bergman recounts his life in a series of deeply personal flashbacks that document some of the most important moments in twentieth-century filmmaking as well as the private obsessions of the man behind them. Ambitious in scope yet sensitively wrought, The Magic Lantern is a window to the mind of one of our era’s great geniuses.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biography | Film and Media | Press Releases
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For thousands of years, both scientists and novices alike underestimated the enormous diversity of life in the deep seas. And until recently, they were right—or at least they were not yet proved wrong. Only in the last fifty years or so did the deep sea reveal itself to be a source of unimaginable wonders—Lilliputian fauna on the seafloor; seemingly bizarre life forms at mid-ocean depths; profusion of life at hot vents, cold seeps, and whale falls; and coldwater corals and fisheries on seamounts and deepwater reefs. The deep sea is, indeed, the last unexplored frontier on the planet.

But just as research and exploration are rendering the briny deep accessible, a host of new threats is endangering it—the spread of trawling into the deep ocean, the buildup of humanity's worst pollutants in deepwater life-forms, the potential consequences of climate change and ocean acidification, and the future mining of seabed minerals and methane hydrates for hydrocarbons. The Silent Deep: The Discovery, Ecology, and Conservation of the Deep Sea tells the stories of discovery of the deep sea, the ecologies of its ecosystems, and of the impact of humans, highlighting the importance of global stewardship in keeping this delicate ecosystem alive and well.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Press Releases
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At its award ceremony on Monday, April 30, the University of Chicago Press awarded the 2006 Gordon J. Laing Prize to W. J. T. Mitchell, the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History, for his book What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images.

Awarded annually since 1963 by the Press, the Laing Prize is given to the Chicago faculty author, editor, or translator whose book has brought the greatest distinction to the Press's list.

In What Do Pictures Want? Mitchell explores the idea that images are not just inert objects that convey meaning but animated beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own. The book highlights Mitchell's innovative and profoundly influential thinking on picture theory and the lives and loves of images. Ranging across the visual arts, literature, and mass media, Mitchell applies characteristically brilliant and wry analyses to Byzantine icons and cyberpunk films, racial stereotypes and public monuments, ancient idols and modern clones, offensive images and found objects, American photography and aboriginal painting.

Mitchell becomes only the third faculty member to win the Laing Prize twice; he also won the 1996 prize for Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation.

What Do Pictures Want? was also the co-winner of the 2006 James Russell Lowell Prize awarded by the Modern Language Association.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Awards | Literature | UCP News
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Yesterday's New York Sun features a review of Rémi Brague's new book The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea. Comparing Brague's newest work with his fascinating cultural history of cosmology, The Wisdom of the World, reviewer Adam Kirsch writes:

In The Law of God, Mr. Brague undertakes another journey through the buried continent of the ancient and medieval mind. But his topic this time—the idea of divine law, as it was understood from the ancient Greeks through the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish middle ages—does not seem nearly so remote. Humanity has long conceded that the structure of the inanimate world is the province of science. But most of us continue to believe that the moral law has other, deeper sources. …

That is why The Law of God strikes the reader with more intimate force than The Wisdom of the World. Mr. Brague's earlier book was archaeology, the digging up of something dead and buried; his new one is genealogy, tracing the descent of ideas that are still living. …

Brague's sense of intellectual adventure is what makes his work genuinely exciting to read. The Law of God offers a challenge that anyone concerned with today's religious struggles ought to take up.

Archived in History | Law | Philosophy | Religion | Reviews
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The ALA's Booklist magazine recently ran a positive review of Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth's new book, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. The review notes that many recent book-length studies of primates have successfully documented primate social organization, but not until Cheney and Seyfarth's ground breaking new study has anyone attempted to document the intelligence that underlies it. Nancy Bent writes for Booklist:

Primatologists Cheney and Seyfarth have studied the same troop of chacma baboons since 1992, and here they demonstrate the importance of their social behavior. Living in a world of predators, baboons must rely on each other for safety, and the resulting large groups they live in are perfect hotbeds for complicated relationships. Matrilineal groups of females retain status by helping their own kin, whereas males act individually and for themselves. Females form short-term bonds with males for mating and long-term friendships with the same or other males for protection. But how do baboons view the world? How do they decide who to associate with, who to defer to, and who to dominate? Cheney and Seyfarth discuss these and other related questions in a style that both explains complex concepts and challenges the reader.

Written with a scientist's precision and a nature-lover's eye, Baboon Metaphysics gives us an unprecedented and compelling glimpse into the mind of another species.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Anthropology | Biology | Reviews
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No story of World War II is more triumphant than the liberation of France, made famous in countless photos of Parisians waving American flags and kissing GIs as columns of troops paraded down the Champs Élysées. But one of the least-known stories from that era is also one of the ugliest chapters in the history of Jim Crow. In The Interpreter, celebrated author Alice Kaplan recovers this story both as eyewitnesses first saw it, and as it still haunts us today.

The American Army executed 70 of its own soldiers between 1943 and 1946—almost all of them black, in an army that was overwhelmingly white. Through the French interpreter Louis Guilloux's eyes, Kaplan narrates two different trials: one of a white officer, one of a black soldier, both accused of murder. Both were court-martialed in the same room, yet the outcomes could not have been more different.

Kaplan's insight into character and setting make The Interpreter an indelible portrait of war, race relations, and the dangers of capital punishment.

"American racism could become deadly for black soldiers on the front. The Interpreter reminds us of this sad component of a heroic chapter in American military history."
Los Angeles Times

"A cross section of a tragedy … This is an extraordinary book."
John Lukacs, Boston Globe

Read the press release.

Archived in Black Studies | History | Press Releases
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Another great review of a book the critics can't stop talking about, Claire Nouvian's The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss received high praise from reviewer Andrew Robinson in this month's issue of the Literary Review. The review begins:

When Robert Hooke published his famous folio of drawings, Micrographia, based on observations using a simple microscope and including astonishing fold-out copperplate engravings (some by Christopher Wren), the book caused a sensation and became a bestseller. Samuel Pepys bought it, sat up until 2am reading it, and noted in his diary for 1665 that it was 'the most ingenious book I ever read in my life'.

It is possible that Claire Nouvian's The Deep will have a similar impact in our time, given its perfect marriage of astounding images with ingenious science and exotic ideas. This superbly designed large-format book of photographs of deep-sea creatures, eloquently edited by a French journalist and film director, with brief and highly readable contributions from sixteen leading scientific explorers of the deep, is eye-poppingly magnificent. So much so that it provokes gasps of amazement and awe at the complexity, beauty and uniqueness of life in the abyss. …

The Deep deserves to become a modern classic of natural history.

Navigate to www.thedeepbook.org to see a sampling of images from the book and more.

Archived in Biology | Reviews
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In the May 6 New York Times Book Review, Diane Johnson reviewed Jeffrey Kripal's new book Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. NYTBR also has an excerpt from the first chapter. Johnson recognizes the Esalen Institute's powerful social and political influence as one of the American counterculture's leading centers for alternative and experiential education, as well as its noting its hedonistic reputation:

People of a certain age will remember Esalen, the famous (or infamous) spa in Big Sur on the California coast, founded in the 1960s as a center of the human potential movement. In his book Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, Jeffrey J. Kripal describes it as "a utopian experiment creatively suspended between the revelations of the religions and the democratic, pluralistic and scientific revolutions of modernity." In 1990, someone painted graffiti (unprintable in its entirety here) at the entrance: "Jive … for rich white folk."

Both descriptions are justified, it turns out. It won't escape any reader of this interesting book that almost all the players are good-looking and rich, but we learn that along with the sex and drugs with which it was synonymous, the Esalen Institute, as it was formally known, had considerable intellectual seriousness and was unexpectedly influential in global affairs, with leaders like Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev having some connection. It was Esalen, for example, that beat out the Rockefeller Foundation and the Council on Foreign Relations, among others, to be the sponsors of Boris Yeltsin's 1989 visit to America, during which he experienced his famous conversion to capitalism in a Texas grocery store.

In addition to the material posted in the NYTBR we have our own excerpt from the book: "Totally on Fire: The Experience of Founding Esalen."

Archived in History | Philosophy | Religion | Reviews
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John Patrick Diggins, author of Eugene O'Neill's America: Desire under Democracy—a fascinating biography of the preeminent American playwright Eugene O'Neill—recently published an essay adapted from his book in the May 4 Chronicle of Higher Education. Commenting on the broad applicability of O'Neill's plays to virtually all aspects of modern American life, Diggins writes:

O'Neill merits appreciation beyond the conventional categories of politics, the aesthetic criteria of dramaturgy, or the neurotic symptoms of psychology. Ideas pervade O'Neill's plays, and not only ideas central to drama like irony, pathos, and tragedy.… He considered fortuitous contingencies and unintended consequences; sympathy and pity; falls caused by pride or jealousy; social and political philosophy involving class, religion, gender, race, marriage and family, power and freedom, and money and status.

And as a recent review in the Library Journal notes, it is just this appreciation of the diverse thematic content in O'Neill's work that sets Diggins's biography apart.

Biographers have published dozens of books on Eugene O'Neill over the last 50 years in an attempt to explain the complexities of America's 20th-century 'master playwright.' What makes Diggins's thoroughly researched effort particularly effective is his use of political, philosophical, social, psychological, and religious themes in his discussion of O'Neill's life and plays in the context of a dynamic American society.… Diggins generously illustrates each theme with multiple examples from O'Neill's plays and correspondences. Particularly insightful are his comparisons of O'Neill's work with that of other great writers on the theme of American democracy, including Alexis de Tocqueville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Abraham Lincoln. This book offers the reader a lot to think about, regarding O'Neill's life and work but also American society at large.

Painting a richly detailed portrait of the playwright's life and work, Eugene O'Neill's America offers a striking view of America's greatest playwright—and an insightful picture of America itself.

Archived in Biography | History | Literature | Reviews
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Making the poet available to contemporary readers of poetry without denying him his historical context, Selected Poems of Luis de Góngora represents Góngora as master of many genres and a writer whose life and poetry are closely intertwined. John Dent-Young’s free translations capture Góngora’s intensely musical voice and transmit the individuality and self-assuredness of the poet. The first significant edition of this seminal and challenging poet in many years, Selected Poems of Luis de Góngora puts the Spanish master in his rightful place alongside other masters of the difficult, such as John Donne and Stéphane Mallarmé.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
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The Arctic of towering icebergs and midnight sun, of flaming auroras and endless winter nights, has long provoked flights of the imagination. Now, in The Last Imaginary Place, renowned archaeologist Robert McGhee lifts the veil to reveal the true Arctic world. Based on thirty years of work with native peoples of the Arctic and travel in the region, McGhee's account dispels notions of the frozen land as an exotic, remote world that exists apart from civilization.

Read the press release.

Archived in History | Press Releases
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Reviews of James Attlee's Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey have flooded the UK periodicals recently. Attlee's book is an engaging chronicle of his unusual pilgrimage down Oxford's Cowley Road—a bustling multi-ethnic side street not more than a few blocks from his own doorstep.

It's quite telling of the author's rhetorical prowess and insight that the his depiction of this decidedly lesser-known thoroughfare in his hometown has become such a a smash hit. Especially amongst so many of his fellow Brits who, before Attlee's book, probably never knew such a diamond in the rough existed, let alone right in their own back yards. (Or should that be "in their own gardens"? Or maybe "just beyond their gardens"?)

In the past ten days the book has received some outstanding reviews from the Times, the Financial Times, as well as the Spectator magazine. Here's a sampling of what the reviewers are saying:

“[Cowley Road] remains one of the last three Oxford thoroughfares with a bit of life in it. For the time being, before the rents shoot up and the developers triumph, it is where you go for foreign fruit, halal meat, exotic dry goods, cheaper domestic wares, direct calls to Dakkar, the Authentic Flavour of Kurdistan and 17 other lands, and all the amenities floating in the wake of the immigration quinquireme. As well as the sex shops, the postcard and stamp specialist, the hard-shell socialism, the Honest Stationery, and the sound of Urdu, Bengali, Chunga Chunga (fidget freezin’ crazy breakin’ funkin’ beats), and of Imperial Leisure (supported by Random Character and Drunken Uncle Bungle); not forgetting Inflatable Buddha. As [James Attlee] asks, ‘Why make a journey to the other side of the world when the world has come to you?’”
Eric Christiansen Spectator

“[Reading Attlee’s book], I often found myself thinking: ‘Hang on a minute. How did we get on to this?’ But seldom in a spirit of irritation, because the writing is so good: dildos of varying sizes are racked against the wall in a sex shop ‘like Kalashnikovs for sale on an Afghan market stall.’ Attlee comes across as a charming daydreamer, with a mind ever open to serendipity: ‘I have a theory that the discarded newspaper often contains more interesting news than the one purchased in the normal way.’”
Andrew Martin Times

“Isolarion, despite its title, is about engagement. I want to hand out copies of this book to everyone who tells me that moving to a middle-class suburb would be ‘better’ for my inner-city children. Attlee shows the hidden beauty of the plural society: ‘To put it simply, this is what I love about the moment in history I inhabit.’”
Isabel Berwick Financial Times

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
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In the face of seemingly relentless American optimism, Eugene O’Neill’s plays reveal an America many would like to ignore, a place of seething resentments, aching desires, and family tragedy, where failure and disappointment are the norm and the American dream a chimera. Though derided by critics during his lifetime, his works resonated with audiences, won him the Nobel Prize and four Pulitzer, and continue to grip theatergoers today. Now in Eugene O’Neill’s America: Desire Under Democracy noted historian John Patrick Diggins offers a masterly biography that both traces O’Neill’s tumultuous life and explains the forceful ideas that form the heart of his unflinching works.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biography | History | Literature | Press Releases
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A capstone to the career of a giant in Shakespearean scholarship, This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now is the first book of its kind: an utterly accessible history of how the works of Shakespeare have been performed, from the Renaissance right up to the present—and even on the silver screen by such directors as Orson Welles, Roman Polanski, and Kenneth Branagh. The world’s leading expert on the subject, Bevington moves from the sparse stage sets of Elizabethan playhouses to the spectacular visual effects of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century productions to the present, which has seen companies employ far more understated approaches, emphasizing character and language in a manner much closer to Shakespeare’s own aims. Bringing a lifetime of study to bear on a remarkably underappreciated aspect of Shakespeare's art, Bevington has crafted a book that will enthrall newcomers and aficionados alike.

Read the press release.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
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Last Sunday, in his weekly column in the New York Times on politics and the press, Frank Rich gave a shout out to When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina by W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston.

Rich's editorial reflected on the continued failure of the U.S. media to deliver critical reporting, especially about the war in Iraq. Far from criticizing the failures of the Bush administration, says Rich, "a propaganda-driven White House can enlist the Washington news media in its shows."

When the Press Fails looks at the intimate relationship between political power and the news media and argues that reporters' dependence on official sources disastrously thwarts coverage of dissenting voices. The book has just been shipped.

You can read Rich's article on the NYT website or circulating around the internet on a variety of politics and media oriented blogs. You can find out more about the When the Press Fails on our own website.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
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Another Chicago book has found its way into the New York Times, only this time it wasn't among the usual Sunday book reviews, instead it was hiding out in the travel section of the paper. Reviewing Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey, for the NYT's "Armchair Traveler" column, Richard B. Woodward gives a nice account of the making of James Attlee's unconventional new travelogue:

Stricken with ennui during commutes to his publishing job in London, [Attlee] was tempted to set out on an adventure far outside cellphone range of his wife and children. Instead, he put his tape recorder in his pocket, walked out the front door, and embarked on a voyage around his Oxford neighborhood.

"Why make a journey to the other side of the world when the world has come to you," he reasons. Recording not the hallowed academic haven of dreaming spires, but the more recent and fractious multicultural city, he decides that this less venerated England is best seen on Cowley Road, an ancient thoroughfare that once led pilgrims from the colleges to a medieval healing well, and is now home to immigrants from five continents.

As a document of the author's fascinating journey, Isolarion takes its readers down one of the lesser known back streets of Oxford, a place just minutes from Attlee's own home, but one that he reveals to be just as exciting and full of surprises as a trip around the world.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
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David Bevington's new book This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now was recently noted by the New York Times' William Grimes in his comprehensive review of "a stack of Shakespeare books released to coincide with the playwright's birthday on April 23." Though Bevington's book is set amongst some tough competition, as Grimes notes, his book stands out for its detailed study of the performance of Shakespeare's plays. Grimes writes:

Mr. Bevington, by focusing on the stage directions in Shakespeare's plays, shows how actors relied on words alone to suggest time, place and action, and how the stage at the Globe could be manipulated in the hands of a canny playwright. There was no balcony in "Romeo and Juliet." On the other hand, since there was nothing in the way of stage décor, no intervals were needed to move from scene to scene. More recent directors, returning to Shakespeare's idea of staging, have embraced abstract spaces and let the language do the work.

Examining the performance of Shakespeare's art both in his own time and in the succeeding centuries, David Bevington's This Wide and Universal Theater is an essential addition to any Shakespeare lover's bookshelf.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 07:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)