Today, the topic of male sexual impotence is inevitably discussed in terms of biology where drugs like Viagra are seen as the answer for one of the perennial problems of mankind. But in a review this month in the New England Journal of Medicine Yvonne M. Marshall takes note of Angus McLaren's new book, Impotence: A Cultural History for challenging the way we think these days about this age-old affliction. Marshall writes:

Advertisements for Viagra would have us believe that impotence—or at least erectile dysfunction—and the compromises in lifestyle that it leads to could soon be a thing of the past. Almost a decade after the drug went on the market, however, we are still waiting, and Angus McLaren's historical analysis of impotence indicates that the wait is unlikely to end any time soon. His goal is "to understand the main tendencies that have historically structured representations of masculine sexual inadequacy," and he shows that what constitutes impotence is culturally and historically variable. It is specific to particular times and places and is not merely a question of biology—regardless of what Pfizer might claim.…

The review coninues:

There is much in this book to interest both the general reader and the specialist medical practitioner. McLaren draws on an extraordinarily wide range of literature and references it closely in detailed endnotes that allow the reader to follow up on specific points of interest. The great strength of the book is the diversity of the material that is brought together and summarized.… Some will choose to read this book from cover to cover, but I suspect that many more will productively dip into its wide array of cultural perspectives and historical moments and select those that are most pertinent to their own interests. However readers approach this book, they will not put it down unrewarded.

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

Archived in History | Reviews
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“In 1970, President Nixon announced a massive war on crime. More prisons were built and more people incarcerated than ever before in U.S. history. With the media's portrayal of convicts as demons, the public attitude toward anyone who had ever been arrested became bleak and hostile. According to Pager [Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration], this attitude prevails today, particularly in the job market. Using scholarly research, field research in Milwaukee, and graphics, she shows that ex-offenders, white or black, stand a very poor chance of getting a legitimate job (though black men with clean records fared the same as whites just out of prison). As a result, many live in poverty or return to crime. Pager is not an activist clamoring for reform but instead presents her findings in a clearheaded manner, pointing out the societal consequences of the predicament and suggesting ways for change. Written for the general reader with a nod to the academic audience, the book is both informative and convincing. Highly recommended.”—Library Journal

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

Archived in Black Studies | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In Search of Lost Time has enthralled lovers of literature for nearly a century. But for diehard fans, its seven volumes are never enough: Proust fans also devour biographies of this most enigmatic of writers, tap guidebooks to navigate his magnum opus, and even sponsor book clubs devoted to plumbing its considerable depths. Here National Book Award nominee Alice Kaplan offers Proust fans the gift they've long been waiting for: a crystalline translation of Madame Proust, the enthralling biography of Proust's mother.

Written by Evelyne Bloch-Dano and originally published in France to lavish critical acclaim, Madame Proust: A Biography explores how Marcel's mother both inspired and informed his legendary novel. Renowned both jokingly and lovingly as the quintessential mama's boy of all of modern literature, Proust was dramatically influenced by his mother, Jeanne Weil, and this intimate portrait of her life and times reveals precisely how, limning their unusually close bonds and the fin de siècle French milieu in which they lived.

Read the press release. Read a chapter from the book, “The Goodnight Kiss.”

Archived in Biography | Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Boston Globe's Christopher Shea wrote an interesting piece for last Sunday's paper on America's growing prison system and its formative impact on American society. In his article, Shea details the revealing social experiment in Devah Pager's new book, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration, to show how the American penal system has become an "engine of inequality … actively [widening] the gap between the poor—especially poor black men—and everyone else." Shea continues:

In an ideal penal system, prisoners might exit the system having paid their debt to society and be more or less restored to their previous status as free men and women. But Pager's book demonstrates just how detached from reality that view is. She had four college students, two black and two white, pose as applicants for low-level jobs in Milwaukee.…

They used résumés that were nearly identical—high school degrees, steady progress from entry-level work to a supervisory position—except that in some cases the applicant had a drug conviction in his past… for which he served an 18-month sentence and then behaved perfectly on parole.…

In her field study, Pager found that her black applicants with criminal records got called for an interview—or to interview on the spot, as they applied in person—a mere 5 percent of the time. That compared with 14 percent for the black applicants without a criminal record. Meanwhile, the white applicants with a record were called back 17 percent of the time, compared with 34 percent for the white men lacking the blotch on their résumé. "Two strikes"—blackness and a record—"and you're out" is how Pager summarizes her findings.

Read the rest of the article on the Boston Globe website.
Read an excerpt from Pager's book.

Archived in Black Studies | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 09:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our books are not often reviewed in Jordanian newspapers. In fact, we can't remember the last time. So it was a treat to see Joseph A. Massad's new book Desiring Arabs receiving some positive press in Monday's Jordan Times. Writer Sally Bland praises Massad's book for its detailed analysis of the influence of Western culture on Middle Eastern sexual mores through a comprehensive survey of Arabic writing from the nineteenth century to the present. Bland writes:

The material reviewed by Massad is amazingly comprehensive, covering a time span of over a century and all major schools of thought from Arab nationalist to Marxist to Islamic. Their writings come in many forms and genres—academic, literary, journalistic and theological—and touch on many subjects related to sexuality, such as heritage, women's status, health issues and how state policy has dealt with "deviance."

Like Massad's two previous books, Desiring Arabs is meticulously researched and documented, using a broad spectrum of Arabic, English and French sources. Touching on so many disciplines as it does, the book inspires—or provokes—a radically new way of looking at human identity, culture and social behaviour, in part based on a more objective assessment of the past.

Archived in Gay and Lesbian | History | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Stuart Dybek, currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Northwestern University is one of twenty four academics to be awarded a 2007 MacArthur Fellowship. Dybek, born and raised in the Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods, is the author of several books of poetry and three short story collections. We re-printed his first collection of stories, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods.

The Chicago Sun-Times ran a short piece this morning giving more details about the award:

MacArthur fellows were called out of the blue and told they each will receive a $500,000 no-strings-attached grant over five years.

Dybek, 65, said the grant "couldn't have come at a better time." By freeing him from having to take side jobs, the money will give Dybek time to finish three books.… A book of poems set in the Caribbean, a collection of short stories set in Chicago and other places, and a memoir.

We can't wait to see more work from one of Chicago's best homegrown authors!

Find out more about Dybek's Childhood and Other Neighborhoods on the press website.

Archived in Awards | Literature
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The online literary magazine Bookslut is running a nice review of Evelyn Bloch-Dano's forthcoming book, Madame Proust: A Biography. The mother of one of the nineteenth century's most important novelists, Jeanne Weil Proust was a profound influence on her son's life and writing. But as Bookslut reviewer Aysha Somasundaram notes, Bloch-Dano's new book goes beyond the typical focus of most biographies to deliver a thorough account of the social and cultural milieu in which Proust's masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, was written. Somasundaram writes:

Meticulously researched, Madame Proust offers a socio-cultural portrait of French and Jewish culture and how each intersected in Proust's lifetime. It not only explores Anti-Semitism, assimilation and naturalization of Jewish French Nationals and the Dreyfus affair but also ably recreates the bourgeois milieu, familial and cultural context and the physical lay-out of the Paris in which Marcel Proust lived. Marcel Proust was the product of an arranged marriage between an affluent Jewish mother and upwardly mobile Catholic father.…

Bloch-Dano's biography offers a sensitive, delicate evocation of the relationship Proust would describe as his life's "only purpose, its only sweetness, its only love, its only consolation." Madame Proust is a well-conceived and insightful tribute to a woman who lived quietly and whose ambitions and hopes centered fixedly on her family's well-being and her son's fulfillment.

Read an excerpt, "The Goodnight Kiss".

The official publication date for Madame Proust: A Biography is October 1 of this year.

Archived in Biography | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Philip Gossett, author of Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera, wrote an article titled "What Pavarotti's Eulogists Wouldn't Say" this week in the New Republic discussing the myth and reality of the late operatic superstar.

On his blog, the Page 99 Test, Marshal Zeringue asks authors to flip to page 99 of their books and briefly summarize the contents. Zeringue recently asked Michael Elliott, author of Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer to take the test. Check out Zeringue's blog to read Elliott's response.

Bernard Harcourt, author of Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy was featured on Chicago Public Radio's 848 last Thursday to discuss gun violence among youths. In the program Harcourt discusses interviewing youths at an all-male correctional facility in Arizona for his book, using the interviews to explore the roots of youth gun violence in America.

Last Wednesday BBC Radio's Thinking Allowed featured sociologist and author Howard Becker speaking about his long and distinguished career in sociology and his new book Telling about Society—a groundbreaking writing guide for social scientists exploring the many ways knowledge about society can be shared and interpreted through different forms of telling.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by TXM at 09:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Army Times recently reviewed two of the press's most talked about books on the war in Iraq—Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World War II and The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. While the Counterinsurgency Field Manual was given its own special treatment in a review by Rob Colenso Jr., in the LifeLines section of the September 10 edition of the Army Times, reviewer William H. McMichael touches on the confluence of both books. Acknowledging the Countinsurgency Field Manual's new and unconventional approach to counterinsurgency, McMichael points out its emphasis on "gaining the trust of the general populace so insurgents can be rooted out and eliminated." But, McMichael notes, these kind of tactics might not be so new or unconventional after all:

Well before the 2003 invasion—64 years ago, to be precise—a simple booklet written for soldiers [had already] spelled out how to survive military service in Iraq and, most pertinent to the current war, how to win friends and influence people.…

The Army published Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq During World War II in 1943 as a handy, easy-to-read guide for U. S. troops assigned to bolster the British occupation in Iraq and help keep the Nazis out.

[But] this booklet, so full of helpful advice and so applicable today, was set aside after the war and forgotten.

Now back in print with a new foreword by Lieutenant Colonel John A. Nagl, Instructions for American Servicemen puts a fascinating historical perspective on the current situation in Iraq and the military's recent counterinsurgency tactics. Check out both the Counterinsurgency Field Manual along with Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq on our website. Also read an excerpt and Nagl's foreword from the Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Chicago Tribune is running an article today about the forthcoming Festival of Maps—a three month display of "rare and important" maps from around the world to be held at more than twenty participating venues throughout Chicagoland beginning later this fall. In conjunction with the exhibition the Press is set to release a companion volume in early November, Maps: Finding Our Place in the World edited by James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow, Jr. Delivering a comprehensive account of the diverse ways maps have been used throughout the ages and across cultures, Maps covers much of the material featured in the exhibition, from maps "tracing the rise of the American West" to those used to track and predict the weather. Read today's article in the Tribune or check out the exhibition's official website at www.festivalofmaps.com to find out more about the Festival, or learn more about the companion volume, Maps, on our website.

Archived in Anthropology | Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Cartography and Geography | History
Posted by TXM at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mike Royko would have been 75 today.

Royko was born in Chicago and never left it. He wrote for the Chicago Daily News, then the Sun-Times, and finally for the Tribune. His career should be measured in column inches. He wrote 7,500 columns. You do the math.

The Chicago Outfit is going to jail and the Cubs are in a pennant race. Wonders never cease. Hell freezes over. It would be great to get Royko's take on such bizarre phenomena.

Hoist an extra beer for Royko today. Something domestic. Read and re-read.

Archived in Chicago | Commentary | Film and Media
Posted by DB at 09:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Stephen Braude is no stranger to controversy. Braude is a professor of philosophy who has investigated paranormal phenomena for over thirty years. In the preface to his new book, The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations, he relates what happens when a philosopher who has previously limited his research to language, time, and logic turns to investigating parapsychology:

Some philosophers I expected to be open-minded and intellectually honest instead behaved with surprising rigidity and cowardice. I clearly knew the evidence and issues much better than they did, but they condescendingly pretended to know this material well enough to ridicule my interest in it.… I had really thought that as philosophers—as people presumably devoted to the pursuit of wisdom and truth—my colleagues would actually be willing to admit their ignorance and be curious to learn more. I genuinely believed they'd be excited to discover that certain relevant bits of received wisdom might be mistaken.

Fortunately, at least some revelations were more encouraging. Several philosophers whom I thought would be inflexible or disinterested surprised me with their honesty, courage, and open-mindedness. And some reactions I've never fully understood. One famous philosopher (I won't say who) said to me, "Well if someone has to do this I'm glad it's you." I think that was meant as a compliment, but it's obviously open to multiple interpretations.

We posted an excerpt from Braude's book at the beginning of the month and it's been interesting to see those same kinds of reactions played out in the blogosphere:

Jason Kuznicki at Positive Liberty took us to task, opining that "university presses … have certain responsibilities, including above all scientific rigor." (Gosh, thanks for the reminder.) To his credit, though, he engaged with his critics and has perhaps gained a more complete sense of what rigor requires.

One of those critics was Michael Prescott, who posted a defense of the book on his self-named blog. Taking the other side of the issue is biologist P.Z. Myers, blogging on Pharyngula, who for some reason mixes in a discussion of bottled water with his shoot-from-the-hip criticism.

Reading the excerpt from The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations is no substitute for reading the whole book, but it's a place to start. Just don't make up your mind too fast. Braude brings skepticism to his observations of phenomena purported to be paranormal, but he also brings a willingness to put his fundamental scientific beliefs to the test.

Archived in Commentary | Philosophy | Psychology
Posted by DB at 07:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Martin Kemp's new book The Human Animal in Western Art and Science was given an interesting advance review in the September 6 edition of Nature. Reviewer Alison Abbot begins her piece:

On waking, Henry Jekyll stared with horror at the metamorphosis of his hand, normally "professional in shape and size… large, firm, white and comely." Jekyll's experiment to separate the human and animal sides of himself had been all too successful. He noted further: "The hand which I now saw … lying half shut on the bedclothes was lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a smart growth of hair. It was the hand of Edward Hyde."

Thus Martin Kemp ends his treatise The Human Animal in Western Art and Science with this apposite quote from Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novel. It epitomizes the dilemma that has fascinated us for millennia. How much of the animal is there within us? Conversely, how much is human in animals?

Kemp answers these questions. Science, from Darwin to the latest neuroscience and genomics, has shown that there is no sharp animal-human divide, only a sliding scale. And in guiding us to this conclusion, Kemp's six chapters deviate through an amusing and erudite visual history, drawing from art, philosophy, literature, film and other cultural media.

Continue reading the review on the Nature website.

Kemp's book is currently scheduled for release in early October.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 09:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A decision by the European Court of First Instance upholding a 2004 ruling by the European Commission that levied a fine of almost 500 million euros against Microsoft and required the company to share server protocols with competitors has once again brought the issue of antitrust to the legal forefront.

William H. Page and John E. Lopatka, authors of The Microsoft Case: Antitrust, High Technology, and Consumer Welfare, are blogging this week on the Antitrust & Competition Policy Blog. They will discuss the European case as well as the litigation in the U.S., which they see as "the defining antitrust case of our era."

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Law
Posted by DB at 08:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A review in the September 12 New York Sun focuses on author Vicki Hearne's (1946–2001) double life as an assistant professor of English at Yale and a "respected horse and dog trainer;" two worlds which Hearne brings together in an unusual and fascinating way with her newest work, posthumously published by the press, Tricks of the Light: New and Selected Poems. Louisa Thomas writes for the Sun:

Vicki Hearne was taken seriously in both the academy and in the kennels where she spent much of her time. But she was not wholly at home in either. As she wrote in her book Adam's Task: Calling Animals by Name, "Dog trainers and philosophers can't make much sense of each other." The trainers talk about animals in anthropomorphized language, whereas philosophers tend to assume that only humans are truly moral creatures. Ms. Hearne spent much of her time trying to bridge the gap—to build off of what the philosophers say about consciousness and the trickeries of language, while vigorously defending the idea that animals are in on the game.

This is the task of her poetry as well as her prose. Ms. Hearne is less well known as a poet, but she is a skilled practitioner, and her subject is well-suited to verse. Her talent is plainly clear in her posthumous collection of new and selected poems, Tricks of the Light … edited by her longtime friend and champion, the critic and poet John Hollander.

Read the rest of the review on the New York Sun website.

Archived in Literature | Poetry | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“Unlike most guides to the city, Chicago's Urban Nature: A Guide to the City's Architecture + Landscape does not include the alley where John Dillinger was shot. Instead, this delightful little book breaks new ground by presenting what author Sally A. Kitt Chappell terms 'urban nature,' defined as 'the place where architecture and landscape [are] not only both present but where each [has] been conceived in response to the other … fusing into a dynamic relationship.' Her personal response to Chicago's built environment, and her enthusiasm for the city, informed by her years of highly regarded scholarly research, is infectious, making this a book you can't put down.

“Chappell writes for four different audiences: tourists, Chicagoans, armchair travelers, and architecture landscape and planning professionals. Amazingly this works.… Chicago's Urban Nature is a beautifully designed book, a tactile and visual pleasure that is small and flexible enough to carry in purse or backpack, or, as Chappell hopes, in the glove compartment for quick reference.”—Barbara Geiger, Landscape Architecture

View a video portrait of the numerous new green spaces that have enlivened and rejuvenated our hometown, narrated by the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Chicago | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

New York Times film critic A. O. Scott wrote a lovely article for last Sunday's paper about Francis Ford Coppola's forthcoming film adaptation of Youth Without Youth—a surreal, philosophy-driven novella by Mircea Eliade (1907-1986)—the University of Chicago professor whose writings in the history of religions defined the field. Scott's article begins:

Youth Without Youth, Francis Ford Coppola's first film in 10 years, is about Dominic Matei, an elderly Romanian professor of linguistics who, after being struck by lightning, becomes young again. Though Matei, played by Tim Roth, retains a septuagenarian's memories and experiences, his body, restored to 30-year-old fighting trim, is mysteriously immune to the effects of time.

The professor's condition is presented as a medical curiosity and a metaphysical conundrum—like the novella by Mircea Eliade on which it is based, Mr. Coppola's movie is a complex, symbol-laden meditation on the nature of chronology, language, and human identity—but it also speaks to a familiar and widespread longing. What if, without losing the hard-won wisdom of age, you could go back and start again? What if you could reverse and arrest the process of growing old, securing the double blessing of a full past and a limitless future?

Coinciding with the film's international premiere at the Rome Film Fest, the Press will be releasing the first paperback edition of Eliade's novel in late October featuring a new foreword by Coppola himself. The U. S. release of the film is scheduled for December. In the meantime you can find the official website for the film at http://www.ywyfilm.com/. You can also view a trailer at rottentomatoes.com.

Archived in Books for the News | Literature
Posted by DB at 09:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to the New York Times, in his testimony before Congress yesterday General Petraeus was clear in his assertion that the military must continue to play a vital role in the counterinsurgency operations in Iraq—and unfortunately for a much longer period of time than many might have hoped. But until the situation affords an opportunity for peace without military intervention the army must be able to find a way to adapt to one of the most entrenched and unconventional conflicts in U.S. military history. With a foreword written by Petraeus himself, the recently published U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual suggests a new set of tools and techniques to deal with modern counterinsurgency operations and represents a relevant, if not revolutionary, challenge to conventional U.S. military doctrine. A review of the book was published in the Chicago Tribune recently, testifying to the importance of its ideas in relation to the current conflict. Robert Bateman writes for the Tribune:

Doctrine is the written foundation upon which we as a nation organize, train and equip our forces to fight our wars. We are, it is rumored, currently at war, and the man who oversaw the creation of this manual is the same one now charged with running that war, Gen. David Petraeus, who is set to offer his assessment of the progress of that war next week. But because the military does not distribute doctrinal manuals to the general public, such material rarely reaches the average reader. By publishing the new Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual, the U. of C. is correcting that situation with this, probably the most important piece of doctrine written in the past 20 years.

The Manual also recently figured in to a critical but interesting piece by Tom Hayden for The Nation.

Read the first chapter of the book, "Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency Operations" and a foreword by Lt. Col. John A. Nagle.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 09:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New York Times reported today about the controversy surrounding the work of Barnard professor of anthropology Nadia Abu El-Haj, whose 2001 Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society has sparked disputes in and out of academe since its publication.

El-Haj's work is an analysis of archaeological practice in Israel, attempting to explain the complicated interplay of politics and science in the Middle East and the ongoing role that archeology plays in defining the past, present, and future of Palestine and Israel.

El-Haj is currently up for tenure at Barnard, but due to the controversial nature of her work, she has some powerful opponents who claim that her own findings have been influenced by political interests. From the New York Times:

It is Dr. Abu El-Haj's book, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, that has made her a lightning rod, setting off warring petitions opposing and supporting her candidacy, and producing charges of shoddy scholarship and countercharges of an ideological witch hunt.…

The Middle East Studies Association, an organization of scholars who focus on the region, chose her book in 2002 as one of the year's two best books in English about the Middle East. The other was Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship, by Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled, published by Cambridge University Press.

Jere L. Bacharach, a historian at the University of Washington who presented the awards, said at the time that both books were "nuanced, nonpolemic works on subjects that too often lend themselves to political tirades and polemics."

Critics of Dr. Abu El-Haj's book, however, said her aim was to undermine Israel's right to exist, and challenged her methodology and findings.

Read the rest of the article on the New York Times website. Also read an excerpt from Facts on the Ground previously posted to this blog.

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science | Religion
Posted by TXM at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lt. Col. John A. Nagl will be a featured guest this weekend on Book TV's After Words. Nagl will join Sean Naylor, senior writer for the Army Times, to discuss The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Nagl was on the team of writers who created the new Counterinsurgency Manual.

Our edition of the Manual includes Nagl's foreword as well as an introduction by Sarah Sewall, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. We also have online “Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency Operations,” an excerpt from the first chapter.

You can catch Nagl's discussion of the book on C-SPAN2 this Saturday at 9 pm, Sunday at 6 pm and 9 pm, and again Monday at 12 am. (Times are Eastern.) Check the Book TV website for more details.

Nagl is also the author of one of the most influential books on counterinsurgency, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam; we have his preface to the book available.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It is always interesting to see the kind of reception books about America receive overseas, which is why a recent review of Kevin Rozario's The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America in London's Daily Telegraph caught our eye. The book is a comprehensive survey of the various ways both natural and manmade disasters have shaped American culture, but reviewer Lucy Moore also devotes much of her article to Rozario's explanation of how America's rich and powerful have been able to exploit these disasters to meet their own ideological and economic ends. Moore writes:

As Rozario shows, the resilience and optimism with which Americans have traditionally met adversity have become increasingly susceptible throughout the 20th century and into the 21st to manipulation. All too often, disaster mitigation has been subordinate to the demands of development. From 1927 onwards in the Mississippi River basin, government relief acts have funded vast new areas of construction, often on wetlands which used to act as flood barriers. Flooding, when it inevitably reoccurs, is far more severe in areas where artificial defenses have been built. As Rozario observes, "if calamities enable progress, 'progress' itself often seems only to increase human vulnerability to increasingly severe calamities.…"

Most alarming of all, Rozario shows how neatly September 11 served President Bush's political agenda. A year before the bombing, the Project for the New American Century submitted a paper setting out its ambitions for preserving American "pre-eminence" abroad and consolidating Republican power at home. The starting point was war with Iraq, but the signatories—who included Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney and Jeb Bush—regretted that "absent some catastrophic and catalysing event," their aims might take many years to fulfill. Progress and catastrophe indeed.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Martin Kemp's soon-to-be-published The Human Animal in Western Art and Science was given a noteworthy review in today's New York Sun. Praising the book for its exploration of the many fascinating intersections between man and beast in western culture, reviewer Eric Ormsby writes for the Sun:

[The Human Animal in Western Art and Science] is based on the Louise Smith Bross Lectures that Mr. Kemp gave at the Art Institute of Chicago in April 2000 and that he has revised and expanded, supplementing his witty and erudite text with some 185 marvelous illustrations. His theme is "humanized animals and animalized humans" and he ranges widely to explore it. Beginning with a lucid (and rather gruesomely illustrated) discussion of the four humours, which humans and animals were thought to share, Mr. Kemp moves through the centuries. Dürer, Cranach, Da Vinci, and Rembrandt may occupy pride of place, and rightly so, but many fascinating, lesser known figures appear as well. These include the brilliant Charles Le Brun in 17th-century France, whose drawings of human facial expressions from despair to astonishment are one of the marvels of the volume, as well as the half-mad Viennese sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, whose contorted portraits of "manic grins" and the grimaces of "beak-like mouths" fairly leap from the page. In such depictions, humans are animalized and animals humanized, so disturbingly that all our artificial boundaries begin to dissolve.

Read the rest of the review online at the New York Sun website.

The Human Animal in Western Art and Science is currently set to be released this October.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 09:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ashley Gilbertson's new book, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War has received some pre-publication praise in an article published in this month's edition of Mother Jones. Ted Genoways begins his article by arguing that much of the recent war reportage from Iraq has been corrupted by bad reporting and bias, but offers Gilbertson's forthcoming book as a much needed corrective. Genoways writes:

Thankfully, we have writers and photographers like Gilbertson, now working primarily on contract for the New York Times, who have not given up on the idea of real reporting. The photographs in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot convey a clear eyed fidelity to the facts. They include pictures of corpses and bleeding soldiers, pictures of officers practicing golf swings and enjoying saunas, and pictures of incarcerated prisoners and brutal interrogations. The lurid and the ludicrous share equal space often to dizzying effect. The text is refreshingly direct and self deprecating—whether revealing Gilbertson's embarrassment at wetting his pants under fire or his agony and post-traumatic stress after being splattered by the brains of the man in front of him on patrol. This is the kind of reporting we so desperately need: free of false bravura, free of agenda, free of inflated urgency.…

The book belongs less on the shelf with other histories of the war than on the same shelf with Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. This is not trumped up news coming live from Iraq but the straight story with harrowing snapshots of the American soul. When future generations look back and wonder where we went wrong, where we failed ourselves and them, it will not be hours of television and radio broadcasts that they will pore over. It will be a select few texts, and Gilbertson's book deserves to be one of them.

Check the Mother Jones website where they should post the entire article soon. Our own special website for Whiskey Tango Foxtrot will also be online soon featuring images from the book and an interview with Gilbertson.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Vicki Hearne, best known and celebrated today as a writer of strikingly original poetry and prose, was a skillful dog and horse trainer, and sometimes controversial animal advocate. Before her untimely death in 2001, she entrusted her last manuscript to distinguished poet, scholar, and long-time friend John Hollander. This manuscript became Tricks of the Light, the definitive Vicki Hearne collection that spans the entirety of her illustrious career, from the 1980 publication of her first book to never-before-published poems composed on her deathbed.

These poignant meditations on life and death possess a rare combination of philosophical speculation, boundary-shattering lyricism, and an unusually elegant style that became Hearne's trademark. Tricks of the Light—acute, vibrant, and deeply informed—is a sensuous reckoning of the connection between humans and the natural world.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)