The Chicago Blog

Wall Street Journal reporter Greg Jaffe, writing on his blog Washington Wire, noted our revival of a United States Army guidebook for soldiers stationed in Iraq, and says it "includes lots of homespun wisdom that would have come in handy in 2003."

The book is Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World War II, handed out to soldiers in 1943 and now published with a foreword by Lt. Colonel John A. Nagl. Jaffe notes:

Recently, senior Army and Marine Corps officials have had success in al Anbar province in western Iraq by cutting deals with Iraqi tribal leaders and sheikhs to fight Sunni radical groups like al Qaeda in Iraq. If the Pentagon's top brass, who initially rejected working with tribal leaders, had read the World War II guide it's possible that idea would have come to them sooner. "The nomads are divided into tribes headed by sheiks," the guide notes. "These leaders are very powerful and should be shown great consideration."

Archived in Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Barbara Stafford is at the forefront of a growing movement that calls for the humanities to confront the brain's material realities. In Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images she argues that humanists should seize upon the exciting neuroscientific discoveries that are illuminating the underpinnings of cultural objects. In turn, she contends, brain scientists could enrich their investigations of mental activity by incorporating phenomenological considerations—particularly the intricate ways that images focus intentional behavior and allow us to feel thought.

As precise in her discussions of firing neurons as she is about the coordinating dynamics of image making, Stafford locates these major transdisciplinary issues at the intersection of art, science, philosophy, and technology. Ultimately, she makes an impassioned plea for a common purpose—for the acknowledgment that, at the most basic level, these separate projects belong to a single investigation.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Philosophy | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We know that the books we publish inspire scholarship. But it is especially gratifying to see that our books can inspire creativity of a different sort. Poetry instructor Cassie Sparkman recently used photographs from Claire Nouvian's The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss to inspire her writing students at an Evanston summer arts camp. And judging by the output of these amazing young writers, inspire them it did! Sparkman posted her students’ work to the Evanston Arts Camp Poetry! blog.

See our website for the book if you want to be inspired yourself.

Archived in Biology | Commentary
Posted by TXM at 04:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Every day, the media present us with thousands of photographs of world events, accompanying and illuminating the stories of the day. Most of those images are forgotten as soon as the day's paper is discarded—but a very small number take on a larger life, resonating with the public and influencing opinions, emotions, and actions. These iconic images—a cluster of marines struggling to plant the American flag on Iwo Jima, a naked Vietnamese girl running in terror from a napalm attack, an unarmed man stopping a tank in Tiananmen Square—are seared into our brains, instantly calling up emotional memories of the past century's major events. But why are these images so transcendent? Out of innumerable photos, why did these particular ones become icons? And what role should such images, and photojournalism itself, play in public life? In No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites explore the creation, dissemination, and the effects of iconic photographs taking us back to the circumstances in which these photos were taken and setting them in their full historical and cultural contexts.

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

Archived in Art and Architecture | Film and Media | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 04:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

All this week the LA Times will print a running debate between Robert Bruegmann and Gloria Ohland on the topic of urban sprawl and the future of America's urban landscapes. Drawing from his groundbreaking book, Sprawl: A Compact History, Bruegmann overturns many of the common assumptions about America's rapidly expanding suburbs, arguing for the sometimes overlooked benefits of this popular form of urban development. On the other side of the fence, Gloria Ohland, vice president for communications for Reconnecting America—a non-profit organization that promotes best practices in transit-oriented development—responds with an interesting counter argument for higher-density development centered around public transportation. Check out the LA Times website for the first installment of this fascinating debate.

Read an excerpt from Sprawl: a Compact History.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics
Posted by TXM at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

John Sugden recently reviewed Edwin Amenta's memoir of amateur sport, Professor Baseball: Searching for Redemption and the Perfect Lineup on the Softball Diamonds of Central Park for the June 8 Times Higher Education Supplement. A British academic periodical might seem like an unlikely prospect for a book about a thoroughly American game, but Sugden swings for the fences:

One hot and humid summer when Professor Edwin Amenta should have been hard at work at home or in his office in the sociology department of New York University—finishing up his book on pensions organizations in Depression-era America—"Eddy" could be found roaming the recreational spaces of Central Park indulging in the very serious business of playing softball.…

At one level, Professor Baseball is a straightforward diary of Amenta's successes and failures over one summer season in the several teams on which he plays and the one of which he is player-manager. At another, the book is a narrative account of one person's lived-through obsession. It is a coming-of-middle-age tale of a fortysomething man, with fatherhood imminent, trying to come to terms with changing fortunes in his professional and personal life. Above all, it is about his forlorn and ultimately doomed quest for redemption.…

The academic community might have had to wait a little longer for Amenta's quantitative study of pension funds in depression-era America because of it, but I for one found Professor Baseball a more than worthwhile diversion.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Biography | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The shocking human rights violations at Abu Ghraib and the use of sexual humiliation to interrogate inmates at Guantánamo Bay have become notorious flashpoints in the debate over America's recent interventions in the Arab world. That these abhorrent techniques were specifically adopted for their effectiveness against Arabs points to a racist and sexually charged power dynamic at the root of the U.S. conquest of Iraq—a dynamic born from centuries of Western assumptions about Arab sexuality.

These assumptions have been disputed ever since Edward Said's Orientalism sparked fierce debate over the biases at the heart of Western study of the Arab world. But left out of this argument was the history of how Arabs themselves wrote and thought about their own sexual desires. In Desiring Arabs, Joseph Massad brings to light the other side of the story by investigating a massive compendium of overlooked Arabic writing from the nineteenth century to the present. This unprecedented study is a much-needed look at how Western discourse on sex has shaped the Arab world.

Read the press release.

Archived in Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

George J. Borjas, professor of economics and history at Harvard University and author of the recently published Mexican Immigration to the United States, recently started a blog at http://borjas.typepad.com/the_borjas_blog/. With posts on everything from "rockonomics" to the political economy of immigration, Borjas's blog should be a first stop for anyone looking for insight into some of the nation's hottest issues, and especially immigration reform in the United States.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 02:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On May 1, Mexican immigrants took to the streets in cities across America to demand a living wage, greater access to health care, and an easier path to legal status. Meanwhile, cable news pundits and newspaper columnists breathlessly debated the implications of their growing numbers—they now account for over 28 percent of all foreign-born inhabitants of the United States. But despite the visibility of Mexican immigrants in the media, little is known about their real impact on American society. Why do Mexican immigrants gain citizenship and employment at a slower rate than non-Mexicans? Does their migration to the United States adversely affect the working conditions of lower-skilled workers already residing there? And how rapid is intergenerational mobility among Mexican immigrant families?

Data is needed to answer these questions and inform policymakers and concerned citizens alike about the reality behind the headlines. In Mexican Immigration to the United States, the world's foremost economists report startling new findings on an immigrant influx whose size and character will force us to rethink economic policy for decades to come. For anyone seeking to cut through the rhetoric—and understand the future of social conditions and economic opportunities in both countries—Mexican Immigration to the United States is essential reading.

Read the press release.

Archived in Economics | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Equal parts medical drama, political chronicle, and ringing polemic, Inclusion tells the story of the movement for a more inclusive approach to medical research, from the struggles of advocacy groups in the 1980s to force researchers to diversify their subject pools to the current model, under which drug companies make bold assertions that group differences in society are encoded in our biology. While Epstein appreciates the hope that more inclusive practices offer to traditionally underserved groups, he argues forcefully that these practices can overshadow far more important social inequities and will only make a real difference if tied to a broad-based effort to address health disparities.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lieutenant Colonel John A. Nagl was interviewed Monday on The World to talk about the new U.S. strategy for fighting the insurgency in Iraq, which involves arming and supporting Sunni's who, at one time, were themselves insurgents. Nagl spoke to the issue from the historical perspective of his book Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam.

Nagl also co-authored and contributed a foreword to our edition of The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, which will be published on July 4. Additionally, Nagl has written a foreword to a little book we plucked out of the archives of the U.S. Army and will publish a little later this summer, Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World War II.

Read the new preface to Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife.

Updated: Read “Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency Operations” and Nagl’s foreword to The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ashley Gilbertson, whose words and photographs we will publish later this year in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War, was interviewed today on WHYY's Fresh Air.

Gilbertson arrived in Iraq on the eve of the American invasion, hoping to pick up some picture assignments. He landed a contract with the New York Times, and his extraordinary images of life and death in Iraq chronicled the invasion, the occupation of Baghdad, the battle for Falluja, the Iraqi elections, and much more over the past four years. In the Fresh Air interview, he discusses his experiences, his photography, and new restrictions the U.S. government has placed on photographs of soldiers.

We will have much more to say about Whiskey Tango Foxtrot as the fall season progresses. Stay tuned.

Updated: We have a special website for Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Images have become an indelible part of our daily lives with the power to radically transform the way we view the world around us. The summer 2007 edition of Bookforum is running an interesting discussion of two new books that explore the tremendous social power of the image and the various ways they have shaped our modern culture.

Reviewer David Levi Strauss notes the essays in Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain for offering an insightful critique of the public impact of depictions of suffering. With a special focus on the popular media during 9/11 and its aftermath, these essays explore the inherently problematic issue confronted by many artists and photojournalists who seek to produce aesthetic beauty in their art, even as they document the most painful of human suffering.

Strauss's article places this insightful critique of our visual culture side by side with that of another book, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites's recently published No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. According to Strauss, Hariman and Lucaites's No Caption Needed "'[challenges] the presumption that visual media categorically degrade public rationality.'" The review continues:

[The authors] approach photojournalism as "an important technology of liberal democratic citizenship.…" Their close readings of… iconic images employ multiple strategies and tools to investigate how they create a "public culture that lies somewhere between hegemony and resistance.…" They look hard at the images themselves and the way that they are used, appropriated, parodied, and celebrated.

Pick up a copy of Bookforum to read the rest of this stimulating review. In the meantime, check out an excerpt from No Caption Needed.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 03:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Robert Seyfarth, co-author of Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind was recently featured on WHYY Philadelphia 's Radio Times with host Marty Moss-Coane. According to the Radio Times website, Seyfarth draws from his new book to discuss how "baboons relate to each other and understand their place in the world as well as what can we learn from them about human behavior." Archived audio of the radio show is available via the WHYY Radio Times website.

In Baboon Metaphysics Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert Seyfarth aim to fully comprehend the intelligence that underlies baboon's social organization. How do baboons actually conceive of the world and their place in it? Using innovative field experiments, the authors test whether baboons understand kinship relations, how they make use of vocal communication, and how they manage the stress and dangers of life in the wild. They learn that for baboons, just as for humans, family and friends hold the key to mitigating the ill effects of grief, stress, and anxiety.

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 from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology
Posted by TXM at 04:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The authors of When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina recently posted an interesting summary of their book on Jay Rosen's blog Press Think. In the posting W. Lance Bennett, Regina Lawrence, and Steven Livingston outlined their critique of the post 9/11 news media, in which they explore its inability to "resist the ever-present spin of those in power"—focusing especially on the Bush administration's various bids to sell the war in Iraq to the American public.

When the Press Fails was also featured in a recent editorial piece by Don Wycliff in the Chicago Tribune. Wycliff writes:

According to the authors of a new book on press coverage of the Bush administration, the president and his people actually have enjoyed until relatively recently the acquiescence of a timid, compliant, intimidated press.

The Iraq war, which has become possibly the gravest foreign policy blunder in U.S. history, is the most disastrous result of that acquiescence, say political scientists W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence and Steven Livingston in When the Press Fails.

The review continues:

[The authors] are indisputably right about the news media's dereliction in covering the administration's campaign to take the nation to war against Iraq. Professional skepticism in too many cases gave way to an uncritical, post-9/11 patriotism. (Check out the newspaper editorials that appeared in the days just after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's much-anticipated speech at the UN Security Council. Seldom is heard a discouraging word.)

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Eric Santner's new book On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald, recently received an enthusiastic review by Ross Wilson in the Times Literary Supplement. Wilson's review begins:

What is life? What kind of beings are human beings? Despite their forbidding enormity, these questions have received sustained scrutiny in contemporary political theory, philosophy, literary theory, and criticism.… Eric L. Santner's fascinating, difficult book is a significant contribution to this attempt to specify what is human about human life and, indeed, what is meant by "life" to begin with.

Ross not only praises Santner's book as "the most urgently relevant sort of intellectual history" but explains its relation to the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and provides a lucid gloss of its main arguments:

"Creaturely life" is not simple biological life, then, but the "zero degree of social existence"; it is that minimum of human life, closest to animal life, which is caught up in the antagonisms of the political."

Two years ago we posted an essay by Santner that offered a highly topical rehearsal of these ideas—an account of Terry Schiavo and Abu Ghraib as "two faces of the state of exception in which political power takes a direct hold on human life."

As Ross notes in his review, Santner's new book not only extends his earlier work on political theology, but shows how the great novelist W. G. Sebald "in particular, and literature in general, are especially suited to documenting the nature of creaturely life."

Archived in Literature | Philosophy | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Robert Pinsky recently featured Peg Boyers' latest book of poems Honey with Tobacco in his "Poet's Choice" column in the Washington Post. Pinsky writes:

Cuban life before Castro has supplied American poetry with rich, ambiguous material. An engaging, poignant group of poems in Peg Boyers's new book, Honey with Tobacco, includes childhood memories of that time. Boyers declines mere nostalgia, as in this poem that scrutinizes pleasure-seeking, a leisured class, even memory itself, with a cool attention, analytical as well as sympathetic.…

PLAYA COLORADA

It was a beach
like all beaches, only perhaps more beautiful.
And the sand was pink not red.
We would arrive in caravans,
hampers overflowing with food and drink
like Aziz and his party on the way to Malabar.
The colonials and their servants away on an outing.
We would stop under thatch umbrellas,
towels and tablecloths spread out against the sea.
My mother in her skirted swim suit
surrounded by fathers of other children,
her olive skin lit through her straw hat.
They would laugh and drink beer
and leer
while the children did the usual beach things,
boring futile tunnels to China, running
at waves and then away,
daring each other to be swallowed.
I would go out by the forbidden rocks and pick off oysters,
then give them to the men to pry open,
cover with lime juice and suck dry.
Once, I saw my mother sucking
an oyster out of another daddy's hand.
Her dappled face bobbed and smiled and her tongue
searched the shell for pearls.

Update: Marshal Zeringue also graciously noted Boyers's new book on his blog newreads.blogspot.com.

Archived in Poetry | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The annual Printers Row Book Fair is this weekend, June 9-10, in the historic Printers Row district in Chicago’s south loop. Along with more than a hundred publishers and bookstores plying their wares, the fair offers the opportunity to meet firsthand the literary masterminds behind some wonderful UCP books, including readings and author signings from:

Joel Greenberg, author of A Natural History of the Chicago Region and Sally A. Kitt Chappell author of Chicago's Urban Nature: A Guide to the City's Architecture + Landscape. June 9, 3:00 pm at Grace Place, Sanctuary, second floor.

Carl Smith author of The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City. June 10, 1:00 pm at the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry stage.

Mary Pattillo, author of Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City. June 10, 1:30 pm at University Center / Private Dining Room.

Paul D'Amato author of Barrio: Photographs from Chicago's Pilsen and Little Village. June 10, 3:30 pm at University Center / Private Dining Room.

The University of Chicago Press will be located in Tent A at Congress and Dearborn and will be offering books from the above authors and many more.

Check the Printers Row Book Fair website for updated locations and schedules. See our author events page for other appearances by our authors.

Archived in Author Events
Posted by TXM at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

James Attlee's new book Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey received a positive review by Paul Kingsnorth in the Independent. Kingsnorth—an Oxford resident himself— writes:

Oxford's supposedly dreaming spires have been committed to print so often that you'd have thought there'd be nothing we don't know about the city now. Yet James Attlee shows otherwise with a book about the last part of Oxford that remains colorful, wild, unpredictable and, for the moment, untouched by the dead hand of "regeneration."…

Its subject, the Cowley Road, … is a ramshackle, multicultural mélange, the old track through the marshes between Oxford and Cowley village, now home to a mix of races and religions, strung with halal butchers, flotation centers, porn shops and pawn brokers, Chinese herbalists, Caribbean fishmongers, Russian grocers, pubs and mosques.… It's my neighborhood, and I thought I knew it pretty well. But Isolarion has made me think, not just about local history and the hidden everyday, but about religion and philosophy, democracy and social change.

More than a day trip, Kingsnorth notes in Isolarion "Attlee's aim is to make a pilgrimage: 'Why make a journey to the other side of the world when the world has come to you?'… Attlee captures the essence of this city better than any tour bus ever could."

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 07:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

More brittle than glass, at times stronger than steel, at other times flowing like molasses, ice covers 10 percent of the earth’s land and 7 percent of its oceans.

In Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance author Mariana Gosnell explores the history and uses of ice in all its complexity, grandeur, and significance. From the freezing of Pleasant Lake in New Hampshire to the breakup of a Vermont river at the onset of spring, from the frozen Antarctic landscape that emperor penguins inhabit to the cold, watery route bowhead whales take between Arctic ice floes, Gosnell examines icebergs, icicles, and frostbite; sea ice and permafrost; ice on Mars and in the rings of Saturn; and several new forms of ice developed in labs. A record of the scientific surprises, cultural magnitude, and everyday uses of frozen water, Ice is a sparkling illumination of a substance whose ebbs and flows over time have helped form the world we live in.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 06:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today's issue of the the Chicago Reader—the Spring Books Special—has a nice little feature about the writer of The Chicago Manual of Style Q&A. But if you're hoping that the identity of the Q&A writer will at long last be revealed to all the world … you’ll be disappointed to learn that the woman behind the wit of the Q&A has adopted a pseudonym, Jody Fisher.

Every month new entries are published to the The Chicago Manual of Style Q&A. Here’s one from this month’s lot:

Q. Is it really necessary to include “as” before “per”? For example, “Client has requested, as per original agreement, two hard copies of all reports.” Since “per” means “according to,” can’t we just delete the unnecessary (and wordy-looking) “as”? Thank you, great gurus, for your wisdom!

A. It is not necessary to add “as.” In fact, it used to be considered incorrect, and sticklers still feel superior when they slash through it.

Archived in Commentary | Reference and Writing | UCP News
Posted by DB at 02:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On the eve of yet another effort at forging a lasting peace in Israel and Palestine, American-born Israeli David Shulman takes readers into the heart of the long-running conflict with Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine, an eye-opening memoir that reveals the unforgettable human stories behind the angry faces and despairing pronouncements.

A soul-searching memoir, Dark Hope chronicles the efforts of Shulman and his companions—Israeli and Palestinian both—in the peace group Ta'ayush to bring aid to Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. In the face of hostile settlers, police, and soldiers, the members of Ta'ayush work through checkpoints and blockades to deliver food, medicine, and basic human comfort. By focusing on the human dimension of the occupation, Shulman forcefully clarifies its inherent injustice. We meet ardent partisans on both sides—but we also see ordinary people radicalized by conflict. Settlers shoot innocent Palestinians harvesting olives, soldiers blow up houses, police savagely beat nonviolent demonstrators, and families and communities are irrevocably destroyed.

With Dark Hope, Shulman has written an unforgettable book, an attempt to discover how his beloved Israel went wrong—and how it might still be brought back.

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

Archived in Biography | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)