The Chicago Blog

The online news and media magazine AlterNet has just published a fascinating interview with Kevin Rozario, author of The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America. In the interview Onnesha Roychoudhuri talks with Rozario about everything from the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 to 9/11 to explore some of the ways Americans have responded to such disasters—responses which Rozario argues have played a vital role in shaping the nation that we know today. From the interview:

OR: You argue a broader point in the book that our economy may require this kind of obliteration in order to stay afloat.

KR: Capitalism itself is a system of destruction and creation. You have to keep destroying the old in order to clear space for then new. Otherwise, it achieves stasis, and if it achieves stasis, it dies. It depends on constant expansion just to keep going. But again, to be very clear about this, not all Americans think this is a blessing. This is a process that can be extremely lucrative for businesses, but it's a process that can be extremely destructive for laborers. The benefits of disaster are very unevenly portioned and they go to those with power and influence rather than ordinary Americans.

Read the rest of the interview on the AlterNet website or read an excerpt from Rozario's book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History
Posted by TXM at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Poetry Daily—a website dedicated to the dissemination of contemporary poetry through news, reviews, and excerpts—has published the introduction as well as several excellent poems from Vicki Hearne's (1946-2001) new book, Tricks of the Light: New and Selected Poems. Written by John Hollander, the introduction delivers some fascinating insights into some of the new material, published posthumously, in this latest work. Hollander writes:

The thirty-six posthumous poems (including the long, shockingly original five-part title sequence, Tricks of the Light) explore some of her previously traveled terrain, but with a greater concern for its edges and deceptive contours. The weather, the activity of painting and sculpting, arguments with Plato, a continuing discourse with and of dogs, and always in these poems the array of different kinds of light—different figurations of it, but all somehow heading toward governing tropes of consciousness itself and, ultimately, language. This can be seen even in some of the more casually beautiful short poems like "White Out," "Getting It Right," and "Every Time the Mountain," and in parts of the long poem itself. Running to something like 360 lines in five numbered sections, the sequence starts out with the image of a young girl "hot with light" riding a stallion (returned to briefly later on in the poem) and subsequently moves through its heavily enjambed free-verse tercets with an almost Pindaric profusion of images in complex periodic sentences that, in the course of the poem, seem to be representing rhythms of thought rather than that of archaic eloquence …

You can read the rest of Hollander's introduction detailing Hearne's life and career, and peppered with examples of her writing, on the Poetry Daily website. Don't forget to check out the selection of Hearne's work they've posted as well.

Archived in Poetry | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 09:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Daniel Lazare has written a fascinating review of several books on America's growing prison crisis for Monday's edition of the Nation. According to Lazare, the U.S. prison system currently incarcerates about a quarter of the world's prisoners with "about 3.2 percent of the adult population under some form of criminal-justice supervision." And for African Americans, Lazare writes, "the numbers are even more astonishing. By the mid-1990s, 7 percent of black males were behind bars, while the rate of imprisonment for black males between the ages of 25 and 29 now stands at one in eight." But according to Lazare this is only half the problem; what happens after this large, racially disparate prison population is released to face the prospects of finding a job and living without crime? Lazare turns to Devah Pager's new book, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration for the answer:

In Marked, Devah Pager, who also teaches sociology at Princeton, uses a simple technique to show how mass incarceration has undone the small amount of racial progress achieved in the 1960s and '70s. Working with two pairs of male college students in Milwaukee, one white and the other black, she drilled them on how to present themselves and answer questions. Then, arming them with phony résumés, she sent them out to apply for entry-level jobs. The résumés were identical in all respects but one. Where one member of each team had nothing indicating a criminal record, the other's résumés showed an eighteen-month sentence for drugs.…

The results? The white applicant with a prison record was half as likely to be called back for a second interview as the white applicant without. But the black applicant without a criminal record was no more likely to be called back than the white applicant with a record, while the black applicant with a record was two-thirds less likely to be called back than the black applicant without. The black applicant with a record therefore wound up doubly penalized—as a black man and as an ex-con. With the chances of a call-back reduced to just 5 percent, the overall effect, Pager writes, was "almost total exclusion from this labor market.…" This is not only bad news for those arrested but bad news for those who have to foot the bill for their incarceration and for dealing with the social problems that labor-market exclusion on this scale helps generate."

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Black Studies | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ten suspects have been arrested for the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya last October. The ten include "five police and Federal Security Service officers and three Chechen brothers," according to the Moscow Times which went on to state that

Prosecutor General Yury Chaika, in announcing the arrests Monday, said Politkovskaya had known and met the person who ordered her killing and that her death was probably carried out on behalf of someone living abroad who wanted to discredit Russia. Those arrested belong to a Moscow-based criminal group specializing in contract killings and led by an ethnic Chechen, Chaika told reporters.

In the New York Times, Dmitry A. Muratov, editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, the independent newspaper where Politkovskaya worked, called the prosecutor's account of the murders' motives "a nightmare.' "Political interference is hindering the investigation," said Muratov in a telephone interview with the newspaper. "The prosecutor general is acting not like a prosecutor general but a politician who works at the instructions of the president."

The Moscow Times also notes:

Politkovskaya was the thirteenth reporter in Russia killed in a contract-style murder since Putin came to power in 2000, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. A lack of convictions in any of those cases has raised doubts about the state's commitment to protecting journalists and a free press.

In 2003, we published Politikovskaya's second book on the Chechen War, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya. We have an excerpt from the book, an article titled "Russia's Secret Heroes."

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Chicago Tribune published an article in Sunday's edition praising the return of a Chicago classic, Bessie Louise Pierce's A History of Chicago. Though long out of print, all three volumes of Pierce's landmark story of the birth and evolution of one of America's greatest cities are now available from the Press in paperback. Staff reporter Patrick T. Reardon writes for the Tribune:

Bessie Louise Pierce, born in 1888, lived life her own way. And Chicago is better for that.

Never married, she devoted herself to scholarship, first in the field of education as an Iowa high school teacher and professor at the University of Iowa. Then, in midlife, she moved to the University of Chicago where she wrote A History of Chicago, the definitive account of the city's first years.

That magisterial, three-volume history, begun in 1929 and completed in 1957, has been a touchstone ever since for anyone writing about early Chicago. It was also a pioneering work in academia, the first scholarly study of a large American city.…

"It's wonderful these books are back in print," says Carl Smith, a professor of English and American Studies at Northwestern University and author of three books on Chicago, including The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City. "I refer to [the set] constantly, repeatedly. It's as good a source as there is of the evolution of the political texture of Chicago."

Reardon's article also cites the praise of Ann Durkin Keating, co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Chicago saying: "Pierce's books 'were used extensively for fact-checking [in the decade-long preparation of the encyclopedia]. I can't think of an instance of anything she provided us being inaccurate.'"

In addition to the article Sunday's edition of the Tribune also offers several excerpts from Pierce's work.

You can find out more about all three volumes on our website:
A History of Chicago, Volume I: The Beginning of a City 1673-1848
A History of Chicago, Volume II: From Town to City 1848-1871
A History of Chicago, Volume III: The Rise of a Modern City, 1871-1893

Archived in Chicago | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here is the Jon Stewart interview of Lt. Col. John Nagl on the Daily Show on Thursday night, as provided by Comedy Central:


(Tip of the hat to Small Wars Journal.)

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week's Chicago Reader features a front page story titled "Defending Strauss" in which contributor Julie Englander delivers a comprehensive report on the long-running controversy surrounding the former University of Chicago professor of philosophy, Leo Strauss, who died in 1973. As Englander explains, Strauss's name and work have become closely associated with the political practices of some of the neoconservative architects of the war in Iraq, like former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and high-ranking Pentagon official Abram Shulsky, based partly on their association at the University of Chicago. Englander writes:

[The critics argue that] Straussians agreed with their guru, a scholar of Plato, that there are "truths [that] can be comprehended only by a very few, and would be misunderstood by the masses." Thus the "noble lie" (a phrase from Plato's Republic that Strauss liked to use) that [the Bush administration] told the American public: Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, and we've got to go in there, whatever the cost.

But as Englander notes, several writers have recently come to Strauss's aid, arguing that his work has been misinterpreted and misappropriated in the context of America's current political woes:

Figuring enough was enough, in 2006 Michael and Catherine Zuckert published The Truth About Leo Strauss. They described Strauss's encounters with ancient and modern philosophy and pictured him as a skeptic and moderate who had conflicted feelings about modern democracy (as he did about modernism generally) but thought it better than the alternatives. They asked, "Does the Platonic/Straussian doctrine of the noble lie serve to justify the kind of alleged lies critics of Strauss… lay at his doorstep?" They went on, "This is not to say that political leaders do not on occasion do such things, but again, they did not learn to do this from Strauss."

"A lot of stupid and unfair things were said about Strauss," says Michael. "The idea that he had some big political agenda is just nutty."

Yale's Steven Smith concedes in the preface to Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism that Strauss "has always been something of an exotic plant" and is undoubtedly "an acquired taste." But he was "a friend of liberal democracy—one of the best friends democracy has ever had."

To find out more about this thinker and the controversy he stirred up thirty years after his death, read an excerpt from Reading Leo Strauss or read an excerpt from the Zuckert's The Truth about Leo Strauss.

Also be sure to do a quick search on our website to find some of Strauss's own works including Leo Strauss On Plato's Symposium and On Tyranny.

Archived in Commentary | History | Philosophy | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Updated on August 24: The Daily Show interview of Lt. Col. Nagl is viewable on YouTube. It may not be there for long.

Making our debut as the inside source for UCP celebrity news, we're excited to announce that Lt. Col. John Nagl will be appearing on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart tonight at 10:00 PM CST, to discuss The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. The result of unprecedented collaboration among top U.S. military experts, scholars, and practitioners of U.S. counterinsurgency operations, The Manual documents a revolutionary change in U.S. military doctrine. Nagl, who wrote a foreword for the Manual, will presumably be discussing how the document's emphasis on the importance of decentralized decision-making, the need to understand local politics and customs, and the key role of intelligence in winning the support of the population promises a vast change in U.S. military strategy—but on the Daily Show you never know.

Nagl has also recently contributed to the Press's re-publication of the United States Army's Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World War II, and released a book, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam—both offering more relevant and fascinating insights into U.S. military strategy.

Read an excerpt from the Counterinsurgency Field Manual or the preface to Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife.

Archived in Author Events | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Art Book magazine, a monthly publication from the Association of Art Historians, is carrying an interesting review of Annabel Jane Wharton's Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replicas, Theme Parks. Reviewer Hadas Yaron delivers a concise summary of Wharton's work writing:

Selling Jerusalem is a fascinating analysis of place, objects, commodities and representations. In this account, Annabel Wharton explores Jerusalem from cultural-material and historical perspectives, concentrating on the connections between Christian Europe and North America and Jerusalem as they were, and as they are created through the possession and worship of relics (such as the cross), as well as paintings, buildings and models. Wharton wishes to draw our attention to the relationship between Jerusalem and the West, exploring not only how the city was and is represented in Europe and North America, but also how the city was and is materially possessed and lived in the West, and in this context how religious art, commerce and exchange are related to power and politics.

The August edition of the Art Book also contains several other reviews of our recent publications in art, art history, and architecture including Terry Smith's The Architecture of the Aftermath and Anthony Alofsin's When Buildings Speak: Architecture as Language in the Habsburg Empire and Its Aftermath, 1867-1933. You can find the online version here.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Kevin Rozario's new book, The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America, recently received some positive press from the Chicago Tribune's cultural critic, Julia Keller. Keller writes:

With a Minnesota bridge lying in jagged-edged tatters and the residue of Katrina still haunting New Orleans, the United States never seems to run short of catastrophes. But the way we look at devastation—nature-made, in Katrina's case, or man-made, with the 9/11 terrorist attacks—is a crucial index of the way we think about God and progress, argues Kevin Rozario in his new book, The Culture of Calamity: Disaster & The Making of Modern America. Rozario, an American Studies professor at Smith College, traces the history of our nation's response to large and terrible events, from Puritan days to the current CNN-saturated world of wall-to-wall disaster coverage. Broad in its historical sweep, sharp and pointed in its insights, this is academic writing at its spirited and relevant best.

Rozario's book was also given an enthusiastic review in this month's Library Journal praising Rozario's "interesting and complex" examination of American resilience in the face of disaster. (Scroll down the page about half way.)

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Film and Media | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Last week's edition of Nature carried an interesting review of Joseph E. Harmon and Alan G. Gross's The Scientific Literature: A Guided Tour. As Nature's Steven Shapin explains, Harmon and Gross's fascinating new book delivers a unique historical account of scientific knowledge that focuses not on the facts, but the various rhetorical strategies scientists have used to report them:

Today, few scientists consider themselves to be rhetoricians. How many even know the meaning of anaphora, antimetabole or litotes?

But it's not that simple. The scientific literature reports, but it also aims to persuade readers that what it reports is reliable and significant. And the arts of persuasion are inevitably literary and, specifically, rhetorical. It is an arduously learned skill to write in the way that Nature deems acceptable. Conventions of scientific writing have changed enormously over the past few centuries and even over recent decades. The very big differences between Jane Austen's Persuasion and a scientific paper lie in the different patterns of rhetoric used in the latter, not in their absence from it.

There are now many historical and sociological studies of scientific communication. Joseph Harmon and Alan Gross's book, The Scientific Literature, is something different—neither a research monograph on the history of scientific writing nor a straightforward compilation of excerpts. Originating from an exhibition held at the University of Chicago in 2000, it includes about 125 examples of scientific writing taken from papers, books, reviews and Nobel speeches, and covers material from the seventeenth century up to the announcement of the rough draft of the human genome in 2001.

A comprehensive anthology, The Scientific Literature is an essential contribution to our understanding of modern scientific knowledge.

Archived in Biology | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Robert Hariman, co-author of No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, was quoted at length in an interesting article posted to the New York Times City Room blog. The article focuses on the social significance Alfred Eisenstaedt's famous photograph of an exuberant sailor planting a kiss on a nurse in the heart of Times Square on V-J day 1945. Marking the 62nd anniversary of the kiss, about 75 people turned up in Times Square on Tuesday to re-enact the event. Hariman delivers an interesting discussion of this phenomenon and the lasting imapct of this iconic image in American culture. Also read an excerpt from Hariman's book.

Marshal Zeringue who authors the literary blog The Page 99 Test, asked Barbara Maria Stafford, author of Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images, to apply the test to her book. The test requires authors to open to page 99 of their book and and write a brief synopsis of the contents of that page. Stafford's response delves into a fascinating discussion of the conscious and unconscious effects of images.

Kevin Rozario, author of the The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America, recently discussed his book on BBC's Thinking Allowed. Rozario's book is an exploration of the role of disasters, both natural and man made, in the shaping of the American social consciousness. Archived audio is up on the BBC's website. Rozario was also recently interviewed along the same lines in a piece published by the Chronicle of Higher Education called "The Upside of America's fascination with Disasters." You can read an excerpt from Rozario's book on our website as well.

Ward Farnsworth, author of The Legal Analyst: A Toolkit for Thinking about the Law, has set up a great website for his book that includes some interesting excerpts in down loadable format, and some great reviews of his fascinating guide through the world of legal thought. Find it at www.thelegalanalyst.com.

Last but not least, Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, was interviewed by Paul Comstock in the California Literary Review. In the interview, Kripal discusses the history and people of Esalen, the nation's premier institution for alternative and experiential education and hothouse of the American counterculture. We also feature an excerpt from Kripal's book on our website.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by TXM at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New York Times brought the sad news this morning that Liam Rector, distinguished poet and educator, committed suicide on Wednesday morning at his home in Greenwich Village at the age of 57. According to his bio posted at Poets.org, Rector "was born in Washington, D.C., in 1949. He received an M.A. from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and an M.P.A. from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard."

"Rector taught at Columbia University, The New School, Emerson College, George Mason University, and elsewhere. He founded and directed the graduate Writing Seminars at Bennington College, and administered literary programs at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets."

"His books of poems include The Executive Director of the Fallen World, American Prodigal and The Sorrow of Architecture. His work has also appeared in a variety of distinguished literary publications including Agni, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Ploughshares."

His contributions to the literary community will be sorely missed.

Archived in Commentary | Poetry
Posted by TXM at 09:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The United States Army's Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World War II has been drawing quite a bit of attention this week. With two reviews in the Washington Post, a web-exclusive article on MSNBC's Newsweek website, and a discussion about the book with Lt. Colonel John Nagl, (author of the new foreword), posted to Dwight Garner’s Paper Cuts blog at the New York Times, this small handbook has everyone wondering why it wasn't discovered sooner. Originally issued to soldiers serving in Iraq during WWII, the book contains both practical and diplomatic advice that, to many, seems highly relevant to the current conflict in Iraq. Columnist Al Kamen writes for the Washington Post:

As the war in Iraq drags on, some folks talk about wishing everyone knew in 2003 what we know now. Turns out, we did.

The surprise hit book of this summer may well be a 44-pager by an unknown War Department writer in 1943 titled: Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq During World War II.

On the very first page, we learn that "American success or failure in Iraq may well depend on whether the Iraqis (as the people are called) like American soldiers or not. It may not be quite that simple. But then again it could.…"

Army Lt. Col. John A. Nagl, who commands the 1st Battalion, 34th Armor Regiment, at Fort Riley, Kan., said he wished he'd read the guide before his unit deployed to Anbar province in 2003. It's "particularly good on religious customs and courtesies that bedeviled my unit," he wrote in the foreword to the guide.…

Nagl photocopies and distributes parts of the guide for soldiers deploying to Iraq. There are other Pentagon primers on Iraq, he said, but "none were as charming and enjoyable as this … happy little book. It would be harder to come up with a better read for those going to Iraq. This is a book to help you live among the people," and "that is the strategy Gen. Petraeus is implementing."

To read the rest of the article navigate to the Washington Post website (you might have to login to read). Also see the Paper Cuts posting or the web-exclusive in Newsweek, where you can view several illustrated excerpts from the book.

Archived in Books for the News | History
Posted by TXM at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With the recent bridge collapse in Minneapolis many have turned their attention to the problems posed by America's aging infrastructure. A potential sinkhole for millions of taxpayer's dollars, the cost of fixing roads, bridges, and other public works sometimes acts to prevent essential repairs from being made, and may result in tragedy. But according to Barry B. LePatner, author of the forthcoming Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets: How to Fix America's Trillion-Dollar Construction Industry, providing a safe and well-maintained infrastructure does not have to mean wasting the taxpayer's money. In an article last Sunday for the Boston Globe LePatner argues that by consolidating a fragmented industry into larger "national construction powerhouses" the business of construction could become much more efficient:

The modern construction business hasn't changed significantly since the first steel-frame skyscrapers began to rise in the early 1900s. Early tall buildings such as the Tribune Tower in Chicago and the Woolworth Building in New York grew too complex to remain under the purview of a single 'master builder,' the architect who knew and supervised every detail of the project. Instead, each required an assembly of specialists—electricians, plumbers, heating contractors, excavators. Dozens, then hundreds of companies arose to handle those systems, each a local family-run shop that drove its truck to one project at a time. Today, in 2007, that's still basically how the business works.…

This fragmentation has enormous costs. It guarantees that any building site will be an assembly of strangers, with a high risk of miscommunication. It traps the industry in conservative practices, ensuring that any new learning will spread slowly, if at all. Splintered into so many firms, the construction industry has never developed the economies of scale, financial cushions, or comfort with risk that would allow it to enter a new phase and truly modernize.

But, LePatner argues, "under a regime of incentives and real accountability, construction companies would begin to transform. The industry would spawn a few winners that, as they prospered, would acquire the capacity to research new techniques, retain skilled employees through down periods, and buy up dozens or even hundreds of small specialized players."

To read the rest of LePatner's article navigate to the Boston Globe website. To find out more about the book, (due out this October), navigate to http://www.brokenbuildings.com/.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics
Posted by TXM at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Last Friday's Chronicle of Higher Education carried a nice piece on sociologist Gary Allen Fine's latest book, Authors of the Storm: Meteorologists and the Culture of Prediction. Reviewer Nina C. Ayoub delivers a concise synopsis of Fine's inside account of the cultural and social influences affecting the science of meteorology:

Combining theory with a shop-floor view, Mr. Fine describes how the forecasters do their "futurework," under a range of bureaucratic and time constraints. While machines abound, data are not simply registered and reported but interpreted and massaged. Meteorologists defend their job as a blend of art and science in which intuition may trump the best software. Or as one forecaster joked: "The real atmosphere has great difficulty simulating the modeled atmosphere, which has ruined a number of good forecasts."

Forecasting, he also shows, is a social process. No forecast is created anew. Instead, each shift looks at what it has "inherited," and issues of collegiality can shape whether predictions are changed, tweaked, or left alone, assuming no dramatic demands by the climate.…

Language is [also] a frequently contested issue, between, for example, a "partly sunny" optimist and a "partly cloudy" pessimist, or between forecasters who favor such evocative terms as sultry and blustery, and others who think even "fair" is too ambiguous.

Revealing the people and personalities behind the daily weather forecast, Fine's Authors of the Storm offers a valuable glimpse of a crucial profession.

Archived in Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 09:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Would you rather chair your university department or manage an amateur softball team? Edwin Amenta, NYU professor of sociology and author of Professor Baseball: Searching for Redemption and the Perfect Lineup on the Softball Diamonds of Central Park, was pretty sure he'd enjoy the softball team a lot more. In an interesting piece of commentary for the careers section of the Chronicle of Higher Education Amenta relates how he was passed over for departmental chair but then was given the opportunity to spend the summer as manager of the Performing Arts Softball League. But as it turns out Amenta got a little more than he bargained for. Amenta writes:

Near the end of the season, I realized that not only was managing not that much fun, it was not greatly different from being a department chair.

Both jobs provide an undercurrent of excitement, with little crises to attend to all the time. Sometimes there are important general managerial decisions to make—like deciding which players or faculty members to recruit.

But the rest of the work is extensive and thankless. It takes great effort to get teammates and colleagues to do things they should volunteer for, like practicing or serving on committees. Teammates want always to play their favorite positions the way colleagues like to teach their favorite classes.

To improve the team or curriculum requires making a few people angry, while the majority who benefit will barely notice. Winning or success in hiring new faculty members—all that is to be expected and brings little praise. Losing or failing in hiring brings blame.

Navigate to the Chronicle's website to read the rest of Amenta's article or read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lieutenant Col. John A. Nagl was featured yesterday on NPR's All Things Considered to discuss the recent re-publication of the U. S. Army's Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World War II. Nagl—who wrote the forward to the new edition—joins host Michele Norris to discuss the valuable lessons to be found in this small advice manual issued to soldiers serving in Iraq more than 60 years ago; advice which Nagl argues is still very much relevant today. In his interview, Nagl laments the fact that the army had not heeded some of this advice before the current counterinsurgency operations began in 2003, and encourages the adoption of some of the book's suggestions in the context of the United States' current efforts to win Iraqi hearts and minds.

Navigate to the NPR website to listen to archived audio of the show as well as read an illustrated excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last Sunday the Los Angeles Times ran an interesting review of Pascal Richet's new book, A Natural History of Time. Applauding some of the many rich details included in this fascinating story of mankind's endeavors to construct a chronology, Times review editor Sara Lippincott writes:

[Richet] begins with early myths, stories humans told themselves to make sense of their world. These myths were "outside of time," he writes, "because nature, above all, is governed by cycles" and "neither beginning nor end can be discerned." The Egyptians, for example, counted years in cycles, starting with each new reign. Speaking of the Egyptians, one of the entrancing nuggets in this nugget-studded book is the information that their hours "varied in duration according to the length of the day." We owe the stable, 60-minute hour to the Greeks, via "the sexagesimal notation of the Mesopotamians."

From the ancient Egyptian calendar to modern radiometric dating, Richet's book delivers an eye-opening exploration of the history of man's quest for time, giving us a chance to truly appreciate how far our knowledge—and our planet—have come.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The August 2 edition of Nature features a review of Dorothy L. Cheney and Richard Seyfarth's recent book Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. The review focuses on the author's detailed examination of Baboon's complex social behavior—the results of years of research in Botswana's Okavango Delta—and their trenchant exploration of the perennial question of nature vs. nurture. Asif A. Ghazanfar writes for Nature:

In Baboon Metaphysics, Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth explain that our social reflexes evolved from our group-living primate ancestors. They explore what sort of intelligence is required to navigate the intricate social landscape that baboons live in. Is it based on a complex calculation, a system of innate rules that are applied to specific contexts? Or is it based on simple, implicit rules governed solely by learned associations?… This tension pervades this wonderful book on the social intelligence of non-human primates and what they might tell us about the evolution of the human mind.…

[The author's] enthusiasm is obvious, and their knowledge is vast and expressed with great clarity. All this makes Baboon Metaphysics a captivating read. It will get you thinking—and maybe spur you to travel to Africa to see it all for yourself.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Anthropology | Biology | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An interesting piece on the United States Army's recently re-released Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World War II appeared last Tuesday in the "No Comment" section of Harper's magazine. Pointing out the urgent relevancy of this small handbook more than sixty years after it was originally issued to American servicemen during WWII Harper's contributor Scott Horton writes:

Those despairing of American policymakers' mistakes in Iraq (of which there are now so many it's hard to keep count) may find some solace in this amazing little booklet just out from the University of Chicago Press. It's 44 pages long, just enough for a commuter's bus or train ride home, but it's a treasure chest of information. And the bottom line for the piece couldn't be clearer: we didn't used to be so stupid.…

Offering such practical advice as "American success or failure in Iraq may well depend on whether the Iraqis like American soldiers or not," and "manners are important" this new edition of Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq should indeed be essential reading for anyone who cares about the future of Iraq and the fate of the American soldiers serving there.

Update: The Chicago Tribune also released an enthusiastic review of the book that made the cover of Tuesday's paper. Tribune higher education reporter Jodi S. Cohen writes:

The University of Chicago Press has a hot book on its hands, with some solid advice for U.S. military in Iraq: "Make friends with the Iraqis. Stay out of political and religious arguments. Try speaking in Arabic—even if you're not good at it.…"

The advice, which sounds like it could be lifted from a lesson book from the war on terror, was actually written 65 years ago during World War II and recently discovered by the U. of C. Press. It's called Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq During World War II.

The book includes an updated foreword from Lt. Col. John A. Nagl, who served in Iraq with the 1st Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division. He writes about wishing he read the book before going to Iraq's Al Anbar province in 2003.

"Some of the guidance in this little book is eerie to anyone who has fought in Iraq recently," he wrote in the introduction. "It is almost impossible, when reading this guide, not to slap oneself on the forehead in despair that the Army knew so much of the Arabic culture and customs, and of the importance of that knowledge for achieving military success in Iraq, six decades ago—and forgot almost all of those lessons in the intervening years."

Archived in History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 09:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In a recent article for the Chicago Tribune staff reporter Ron Grossman delivers a fascinating account of the long legacy of sociological study that has used Chicago's South Side as its laboratory. Grossman begins his article by mentioning one of the latest additions to this legacy, Mary Pattillo's Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City. Her book, like those of the many other sociologists who have chosen to study the South Side's unique black urban communities, focuses on the sharp divides in race, class, and culture that can be found in the area's neighborhoods. But it also explores a growing phenomena in Chicago's South Side communities, the black urban middle class. Examining the social impact of the gentrification of neighborhoods that have for years been home to some of the city's poorest residents, Pattillo's book continues to break new ground in one of the most often studied urban neighborhoods in America.

You can read Grossman's article online at the Tribune website, or navigate to the press's site to find out more about Pattillo's fascinating new book, as well as read an excerpt.

Archived in Anthropology | Black Studies | Chicago | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 09:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)