Joseph M. Williams, Professor Emeritus of English and Linguistics at the University of Chicago, died Friday, February 22 at his home in South Haven, Michigan. Williams will be remembered as the founder of the University's writing program and for his contributions to the development of some of Chicago's most influential books on the teaching of writing. These include his Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, as well as the book he co-authored with the Gregory Colomb and the late Wayne Booth, The Craft of Research—the third edition of which is slated for publication this spring. Williams was also a contributor to Kate L. Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations and was at work on the accompanying Students Guide at the time of his passing.

William's contributions to the University and its students, and to writers and scholars everywhere, will most certainly be missed, as will he himself.

Archived in Chicago | Commentary | Education
Posted by TXM at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Chicago 10, the innovative documentary that revisits the tumult of the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the Chicago 8/7 conspiracy trial of key antiwar activists a year later, opens Friday in select theaters. The film is directed by Brett Morgen and combines archival footage of the chaos of August 1968 with animated reenactments of scenes from the trial. Plus a soundtrack ranging from Black Sabbath and Steppenwolf to the Beastie Boys and Eminem.

Morgen has been quoted as saying that he "wanted to do the myth of Chicago rather than the history," and "if you want to know the history of what happened in Chicago so long ago, then read a book." Well, we think understanding history is pretty darn important and are happy to oblige.

Twenty years ago we published the most complete account of the events surrounding the 1968 DNC, David Farber's Chicago '68. That book is innovative itself, creating multiple perspectives reflecting both police and demonstrators. Farber shows the developing plans of the antiwar movement for protesting the war in Vietnam during the convention, as the shocks of 1968 shift the ground—the Tet offensive, President Lyndon Johnson's withdrawal from the re-election race, the assassination of Martin Luther King and subsequent riots in cities across the country, and the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

Next month we will release a paperback edition of Battleground Chicago: The Police and the 1968 Democratic National Convention by Frank Kusch. Battleground Chicago is essential for understanding what is completely absent in Chicago 10—any insight into the motivations, thoughts, and feelings of the individual policemen who were enforcing order on the streets of Chicago. (Or, as Mayor Richard J. Daley famously misstated it: "the policeman is there to preserve disorder.") Kusch interviewed eighty former Chicago police officers who were on the scene and uncovered the other side of the story of '68.

If you want to get a taste of 1968, go see Chicago 10. But if you want to understand 1968, read a book.

Update: We now have an excerpt from Battleground Chicago and an excerpt from Chicago '68.

Archived in Books for the News | Chicago | History
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Now Available in Paperback

Peter Dear's intellectual journey begins with a crucial observation: that scientific ambition is, and has been, directed toward two distinct but frequently conflated ends—doing and knowing. Teasing out this tension between doing and knowing during key episodes in the history of science, he reveals how the two principles became formalized into a single enterprise, science, that would be carried out by a new kind of person, the scientist.

“The portraits of individual scientists, from Newton, Boyle, and Faraday to Einstein and Bohr, are vivid and pithy; [Dear] has a good ear for the apt quote that lets us hear their voices.”—Eric Ormsby, New York Sun

“[Dear] shows how mechanistic explanations in physics and chemistry became ever more frequent after the industrial revolution, only to be supplanted by the nihilism of quantum theory in the social turmoil that followed the first world war. It is full of insights into how society, culture and people’s perception interweave across biology, chemistry and physics.”—Adrian Barnett, New Scientist

Read the press release.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases
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In a review appearing in last Sunday's edition of the Toronto Star Christine Sisimondo begins:

In academia, generally, food writing is relegated to… 'the kind of thing you might find in a newspaper'—not in the hallowed halls of higher ed.… But of late, "that's been changing. Anthropology and environmental science departments are beginning to redefine the study of food, as not just about nutrition and shortages through the ages but as a serious cultural indicator.

Laszlo is a chemistry professor who is probably best known for his previous book, Salt: Grain of Life, and has now moved on to one of the next great essential staples, citrus.

Laszlo has a truly charming way of telling the story, weaving his personal biography into the tale of the migration of various fruits around the world.

He is careful, though (and tells us he is worried about overstepping his bounds), to never let the personal overshadow the story of lemons, limes, grapefruits, oranges and, of course, such exotics as ugli fruit, kumquats and yuzu.…

[And] while there's … plenty of great history in Laszlo's account, it's [also] interdisciplinary, adding to his personal tale and all that lore discussions on chemistry and three great chapters on the symbolic meanings of citrus and the image of these fruits in poetry and art.

Laszlo proves that citrus is a serious matter, worthy of real academic study.

Read the rest of the article on the Toronto Star website. Also read six citrus recipies from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biology | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This month's Boston Review is running a nice piece on Liam Rector's The Executive Director of the Fallen World—the last book of poetry Rector would publish before taking his own life in late August of 2007 after battling both colon cancer and heart disease. But as reviewer Robert Schnall notes, though the poet may be gone, his poetry continues to have a profound effect upon its readers with its "hard-won insight and incandescent gallows humor… intermixing pathos with practical wisdom, tragedy with relentless sass." The review continues:

Often his mordant irony and slang diction prove to be his best defenses against despair, as in "So We'll Go No More," which presents a dying speaker's valediction to his lover: "Cancer, heart attack, bypass—all // In the same year? My chances / Are 20%! And I'm f—g well / Ready, ready to go." For Rector's speakers, the past is a looming presence. "Now" presents a tender, comic, and ultimately beautiful overview of life as a lesson in disheartenment from early childhood to death, while "First Marriage," "Beautiful, Sane Women," and "Our Last Period Together" all document failed relationships with a humor so delicate that it can barely conceal the vulnerability it seeks to disguise.

Read the rest of the review on the Boston Review website.

Archived in Poetry | Reviews
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First up is Simon Kitson's new book The Hunt for Nazi Spies: Fighting Espionage in Vichy France, which seems to be receiving a bit of attention lately. Along with a piece in the New York Review of Books, the Literary Review also recently published an enthusiastic review of the book. Nigel Jones writes for the Literary Review:

Despite excitable claims on book jackets, the number of original historical discoveries that truly alter our thinking about the past are few and far between. All the more reason to celebrate, therefore, when the genuine article comes along: Simon Kitson's brief study of a neglected area of the politics of Vichy France is just such a work.…

Our view of Vichy has been a uniformly black and white one—or rather, just black: that the regime presided over by Marshal; Pétain was pro-German, anti-Semitic, reactionary, ultra-Catholic and all in all a thoroughly bad thing. Kitson's work challenges that view in one important aspect: the policy of Vichy's military and police intelligence services was, in secret deed contrasting to its leaders' words, anti-German.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Another revealing new work, David Shulman's Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine was reviewed this week in the Nation:

Dark Hope is a diary of [Shulman's] work, from 2002 to 2006, with Ta'ayush, the Palestinian-Israeli group that has taken up the most difficult and dangerous hands-on work of peacemaking: it brings convoys of medicine and food into the West Bank and helps Palestinian farmers harvest their wheat and olives, its members often placing themselves physically between groups of wild-eyed gun-toting settlers and Palestinian peasants simply trying to sow their fields.… Shulman's book offers the record of a thousand piercing particulars, indignities too "small" to make the headlines but when taken together point directly to a systematic policy of injustice of the largest and most appalling dimensions. It is, indeed, this sense of skewed scale—the activists' humble gestures pitted against a huge military-ideological machine—that makes the book so wrenching.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Publishers Weekly ran a nice review this Monday of Newton N. Minow and Craig L. LaMay's Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future, citing the timeliness and relevance of the book as we head closer to the 2008 presidential elections. Scroll about halfway down the on the PW review web page to find the review.

Chicago Life published a review this week of Chicago under Glass: Early Photographs from the Chicago Daily News, calling Mark Jacob and Richard Cahan's collection of rare photographs from early twentieth-century Chicago "a book made to order for all who love Chicago photography, history, sports, politics—you name it." Read the review on the Chicago Life website.

Last but not least, the February 20th New York Sun ran an interesting review of Ross Hamilton's Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History. In the review Simon Blackburn calls Hamilton's book a "vast and serious canvas" of "accident" as a concept, ranging from the Aristotelian categories of accident and substance, to the modern vernacular understanding—all "brought together by the paradoxical idea that it is the accidents that happen to us that determine our essential nature." Read the review on the New York Sun website.

Archived in Books for the News
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Another review appearing in the March 6 New York Review of Books delivers a fine exposition of Simon Kitson's new book The Hunt for Nazi Spies: Fighting Espionage in Vichy France. Writing for the NYRB Robert O. Paxton explains how Kitson's book reveals a new dimension of the Vichy government's complex and often strained relationship with the Nazi forces with which it collaborated. Paxton's review begins:

At first it sounds implausible. Did Marshal Pétain's Vichy French government, notoriously ready to collaborate with Nazi Germany, actually arrest and execute Nazi spies? Simon Kitson, a young British scholar at the University of Birmingham, shows that it did. His exhaustive search of French military, police, and judicial archives found that between 1940 and 1942 Vichy police and counterintelligence officers arrested between 1,500 and 2,000 agents working for Nazi Germany. Some 80 percent of them were French nationals. About forty German agents were executed, though none of them appears to have been a German citizen; some German citizens were imprisoned, however. The arrests stopped in November 1942 when the German army overran the unoccupied southern half of France, following the American landing in North Africa.

These facts were not entirely unknown. But no one had looked seriously into this cobwebby corner before Simon Kitson (and a few of his French contemporaries such as Sébastien Laurent) gained access to military and judicial archives concerning French counterintelligence activities for the years 1940—1944, and grasped that the subject was more than a passing curiosity.

Continue reading the rest of the article on the NYRB website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
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In the most famous defeat in American military history Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer lost his life along with most of the rest of his 7th Cavalry at the now famous Battle of Little Bighorn, also known as Custer's Last Stand.

In the ensuing years the defeat has become a powerful symbol of America's bloody past, with everyone from tourists and historians to Native American activists attempting to interpret and explain the battle in the context of the multicultural present. In the March 6 New York Review of Books, Larry McMurtry reviews Michael A. Elliott's new book Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer and explores the complicated question of why the battle retains such power for Americans today. McMurtry writes:

Even as the sun set for Custer, dawn broke for the Custerologists—as Michael Elliott calls them—whose numbers now darken the sky. If you don't believe me, write yourself some life insurance, then head up to Hardin, Montana, toward the end of June, and you'll be able to take in not one but two reenactments of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, one sponsored by the town of Hardin itself (admission $16) and one put on by the powerful Crow family called the Real Birds (admission $12).

The Crow were scouts for Custer, and fought along with him. I attended the Crow sundance once, which might as well have been held in Harvard Yard, so thick were the white ethnologists on the ground. It would probably have been warmer in Harvard Yard too.

No one should think that because 130 years have passed since the battle the passions between tribes and within tribes have abated. Much of Michael Elliott's book is devoted to explaining that people who might have been expected to calm down in that length of time in fact haven't calmed down at all.

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

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | History | Sociology
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Writing for this month's edition of Natural History magazine Laurence A. Marschall reviews two recent books in the history of science: Pierre Laszlo's exploration of the cultural and culinary phenomenon of citrus fruit in Citrus: A History, and Pascal Richet's historical account of the various ways humans have attempted to record the age of the earth in A Natural History of Time.

Marschall writes of Citrus:

Can one describe a work of nonfiction as being happy? Well, this one is. Pierre Laszlo, a retired chemistry professor turned science writer, has approached the lore of citrus fruit with the élan of a master chef (the man is French, after all), mixing history, economics, biology, and chemistry to produce a book that will bring a smile to readers of every taste. Until reading Citrus, in fact, I had not realized just how many tastes the title implied: lemon, lime, orange, and grapefruit, of course, but also citron, tangerine, kumquat, calamondin, and the self-descriptive Ugli, not to mention such variants as bergamot, mandarin, Valencia, ortanique, and Honey Murcott. Laszlo's literary method is to present them as characters in an unfolding story. He begins with the domestication of the citron in Persia and the early history of citrus horticulture, then moves to the establishment and growth of the citrus industry in Florida, California, and Brazil, and finally, after many diversions and digressions, arrives at a final section that explores the place of citrus in literature, art, religion, and the culture of cuisine.

And the praise continues for Richet's A Natural History of Time:

Looking at the sandy New England pond outside our summer house, I can readily imagine the glacial remnant that lay there some 12,000 years ago, melting in the warming rays of the Holocene sun. I know, too, that a few hundred million years ago, before continental drift split us apart, Europe and this bit of North American real estate were joined. And I'm well aware that 5 billion years ago, this sand and this water, indeed the Earth itself and everything on it, were part of an interstellar cloud that was condensing into our solar system. Deep time is just one of those things I take for granted.

But as geophysicist Pascal Richet demonstrates in this readable popular history of chronology, the geologic calendar implicit in today's view of nature was not shared by earlier generations. Written accounts from ancient civilizations depict prehistory as a foggy dreamtime. Most authors made little attempt to assign dates or durations other than “in the beginning.…”

Only the fine details of the Earth's timeline are matters of contention any more.… Yet precisely because the current well-grounded chronology seems so natural to most scientifically literate people, Richet's authoritative review of Earth's history is particularly welcome. Rather than fret about polls that show how many citizens still hold to the chronology of the Holy Book, he invites us to marvel at the efforts of science to read the book of nature itself.

Read both reviews on the Natural History magazine website. Also navigate to our special Citrus web page featuring six tasty citrus recipes.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biology | Economics | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just in time for the opening of his exhibition at Melbourne's Obscura Gallery, the Australian paper The Age ran an article last Sunday on Ashley Gilbertson and his new book, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War. As the article notes, Gilbertson is himself an Australian native and got his first taste of professional journalism "documenting the lives of Kosovar refugees seeking temporary protection in Australia." The article continues:

The project sparked an interest in the plight of displaced people that led him to West Papua, Afghanistan and eventually Iraq, where he has spent a total of 18 months since 2002.

His early trips to the country were a hand-to-mouth existence, selling stories as he went, often depending on the goodwill of colleagues and strangers.

Towards the end of a trip in 2003 he picked up work for the New York Times. Since he returned from that trip, his work has been exclusively for the US newspaper.

His work while embedded with US marines during the 2004 Fallujah offensive made his name, earning him the prestigious Robert Capa Award for courageous photography from the US Overseas Press Club.

But his experiences have left scars. He watched as Lance Corporal William Miller, a soldier who was escorting him up the stairwell of a minaret, was shot dead by an insurgent. Running out of the mosque under insurgent fire, he wished to die. "I ran out into the street with the marines, hoping I would take a slug," he said.

Read more about Gilbertson's harrowing experiences in Iraq at The Age. Also check out the Obscura Gallery's web page for more information on his exhibition. Finally, see the Whiskey Tango Foxtrot website featuring a full half hour video interview with the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last Sunday David Shulman author of Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine was interviewed on the CBC's Sunday Edition. Focusing on Shulman's experiences as a member of Ta'ayush—a peace group working to end violence in the West Bank—Shulman recounts the extreme injustices suffered by Israelis and Palestinians as they struggle to survive in an environment of constant violence and upheaval.

You can listen to the complete interview online at the "Sunday Edition" web page. Also read an excerpt from Shulman's book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Robert Pinsky's "Poet's Choice" column in Last Sunday's Washington Post featured a nice review of Elise Partridge's new book of poems, Chameleon Hours. Pinsky's column quotes several of Partridge's poems and praises her unique vision that allows her to transform even her darkest hours into cause for linguistic celebration. Pinsky writes:

Some readers will recognize Partridge's name and recall her poems about cancer treatment that appeared in the New Yorker in recent years, including "Chemo Side Effects: Vision." That poem, collected in this book, begins by saying how printed words "fizzle" as "gnats in dervish clouds." Those phrases about temporarily impaired vision have so much energy that the feeling is almost gleeful, as if to say that even this deterioration can occasion the thrill of language. The same poem contains the lines:

Eyes that have brought me so many words,

are you too dim for the world to keep courting?

Days, lay out your wares in the honking bazaar!

The "wares" of daily, physical experience are humdrum and desired, gaudy and precious. What an ironic word "dim" is for the sharp, bright way this poet sees. In their ample, embracing, nuanced appetite for sensory experience, her poems achieve an ardent, compassionate and unsentimental vision.

Read the rest of "Poet's Choice" including another poem, "In the Barn," on the Washington Post website.

Archived in Poetry | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Consistently an outsider—a child of the fundamentalist South with an eighth-grade education, a self-taught intellectual, a black man married to a white woman—Richard Wright nonetheless became the unparalleled voice of his time. The first full-scale biography of the author best known for his searing novels Black Boy and Native Son, Richard Wright: The Life and Times brings the man and his work—in all their complexity and distinction—to vibrant life. Acclaimed biographer Hazel Rowley chronicles Wright's unprecedented journey from a sharecropper's shack in Mississippi to Chicago's South Side to international renown as a writer and outspoken critic of racism.

Drawing on journals, letters, and eyewitness accounts, Richard Wright probes the author's relationships with Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison, his attraction to Communism, and his so-called exile in France. Skillfully interweaving quotes from Wright's own writings, Rowley deftly portrays a passionate, courageous, and flawed man who would become one of our most enduring literary figures.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biography | Black Studies | History | Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This month's issue of the journal Nature is running a nice review of Richard Owen's nineteenth century treatise on biological forms On the Nature of Limbs—one of the foundational works contributing to the development of modern evolutionary theory—newly reprinted in a facsimile edition edited by Ronald Amundson. Michael Coates writes for Nature:

A decade before Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Owen very nearly sketched a theory of evolutionary transformation, fragments of which appear here. However, as Padian describes, such were the sociopolitical and philosophical strains on Owen's position that he stalled at the final intellectual leap. Owen's patrons were of the Oxbridge-educated establishment—adherents to the natural theology of the 'argument from design' (for the existence of God) as advocated most influentially by William Paley (now sadly repackaged with a molecular gloss by the proponents of 'intelligent design').… But it remains an excellent source for those interested in how we identify and interpret pattern in nature. A dissertation on similarity, conservation and variability in form, it addresses issues of enduring interest to systematic biologists as well as to the revitalized field of evolutionary developmental biology.…

Read the rest of the review on the Nature website.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Marcia Lausen's recent book, Design for Democracy: Ballot and Election Design took center stage in an article on ballot design appearing in last Sunday's International Herald Tribune. Noting the relevance of Lausen's book, Alice Rawsthorn writes for the IHT:

With Super Tuesday now behind us, and the November 2008 presidential election looming, it seems timely to consider how to avoid a repetition of the 2000 punch-card catastrophe. Marcia Lausen, a graphic designer and professor of graphic design at the University of Illinois at Chicago, does so in the book Design for Democracy: Ballot and Election Design. As well as analyzing what went wrong in Florida eight years ago, she suggests how the design of ballots and the rest of the voting process could be improved in the future.…

Often, good information design is rooted in sticking to simple rules. Obvious though many of those rules may seem, the U.S. electoral debacle of 2000 illustrates the peril of ignoring them, while Lausen's book shows how effective they can be.

Read the rest of the article on the IHT website.

Also see the Design for Democracy website produced by the book's co-publishers, the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

Archived in Film and Media | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

George E. Lewis, longtime member of the Chicago based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and author of the forthcoming A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music is the featured guest this month on the Wire's "Invisible Jukebox." In the column the Wire's Brian Morton "plays a musician a series of records which they are asked to identify and comment on—with no prior knowledge of what they're about to hear."

Currently you can only get the rest of the interview with a subscription to the Wire but you can learn more about the AACM as well as pre-order a copy of Lewis's book on their site or ours.

This month's edition of Chicago Magazine is also running several interesting articles featuring UCP books including Eric Klinenberg's Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago and Marcia Lausen's Design for Democracy: Ballot and Election Design.

The Heat Wave piece engages the author and Chicago playwright Steven Simoncic in a discussion about the forthcoming stage adaptation of the book opening February 21 at the Live Bait Theater. (Also see this interview with Eric Klinenberg on our website.)

Meanwhile, Chicago Magazine's Ted Mcclelland has written a quick piece on Marica Lausen's critique of electoral ballot design featuring an interesting graphical representation of her suggestions for building a better ballot.

And while technically this should have been in a posting in last week's remainders we should mention that Matthew Hedman's The Age of Everything: How Science Explores the Past was featured in a review in the February 1 edition of the Independent. Navigate to the Independent website to read the article or read this excerpt from the book.

Also out last Friday was a nice piece in the Chronicle Review by Mark Monmonier, author of From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame. In the article the author describes a little about how he first became interested in maps and his interest in using maps to plot cultural landscapes as well as physical ones. Read an excerpt from the book here.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by TXM at 01:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Anchorage Daily News is currently running a great review of James B. Nardi's new book, Life in the Soil: A Guide for Naturalists and Gardeners. Jeff Lowenfels author of another recent gardner's guide to the ecosystem, writes:

Consider this column a strong recommendation to go out and get this book, not from the library but from a store. It is well worth owning. Not only did I find it a great read, but it is a reference book I will turn to often.…

Nardi is a skilled scientific illustrator as well as a biologist. Almost every page has a detailed picture of the organisms (with size reference) he is describing, often showing not only the animal but its habitat, including those it eats or those that eat it. You will surely recognize animals you have seen before but were not able to identify.…

Birders have their Petersons and Sibleys. There are guides to snakes, butterflies, mammals and all sorts of other natural things. Now we gardeners have a guide to the critters that make up the soil food web.

Read the rest of the review on the Anchorage Daily News website.

Archived in Biology | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last Wednesday David Grazian, author of On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife was featured on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed with host Laurie Taylor. In the show Taylor and Grazian engage in a fascinating discussion about the various schemes and scams that the nightlife industry employs in order to separate customers from their money, as well as the scams perpetuated by the clientele themselves in their relentless search for sex, self-esteem, and status.

Listen to archived audio from the show on the BBC Radio 4 website.

Also, read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Psychology | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last Wednesday the Drug Law Blog authored by San Francisco attorney Alex Coolman ran an interesting interview with Doris Marie Provine, author of Unequal under Law: Race in the War on Drugs. The interview focuses on the topic of her book, exploring how issues of race have influenced American anti-drug efforts. Coolman prefaces the interview with some positive words about Provine's fascinating new book:

Professor Doris Marie Provine of Arizona State University's School of Justice & Social Inquiry is the author of a really interesting and challenging new book called Unequal Under Law: Race in the War on Drugs. I keep coming back to this book as a reference point for talking about some of the thorniest issues related to the intersection of race with American action—and inaction—on drug policy. These are issues that are so big and obvious that they're almost hard to recognize as issues. Unequal Under Law, however, does a really nice job of emphasizing that we are, in fact, making racial choices in drug policy—both consciously and unconsciously—that profoundly affect the lives of our fellow citizens.

Read the interview on the Drug Law Blog.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Law | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Kevin Rozario's The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America was one of several books in a review essay about America's complex relationship with disaster published in last Friday's Financial Times. Arguing that American's find disaster simultaneously terrifying and entertaining, the FT's Michael Skapinker uses Rozario's book to help explain this social paradox, especially in terms of the way this conflicted attitude is reflected in the media. Skapinker writes:

Kevin Rozario, who teaches American studies at Smith College, Massachusetts, writes astutely about disaster, particularly its relationship with entertainment. As he notes in The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America, the link predates the modern movie industry.

A few months after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the subsequent fires, Lucile Garrett went with her parents to see a re-enactment of the event at a theatre in Minneapolis. "On the stage," she recalled, "was a miniature reproduction of San Francisco, on the night of the fire … Then suddenly we were favoured with a great rumbling! The hills on which the city was built shook and tottered! … Finally the hills cracked open, the tottering buildings fell, and the whole city burst into flames. It continued to burn for some minutes and at last they lowered the curtain on the glorious blaze."

Like the events of September 11 almost a century later, the terrible filmic quality of disasters is often inescapable. Anthony Lane, the New Yorker critic, wrote in the immediate aftermath of 9/11: "Of course you could argue that last Tuesday was an instant dismissal of the fantastic—that people gazed up into the sky and immediately told themselves that this was the real thing. Yet all the evidence suggests the contrary; it was the television commentators as well as those on the ground who resorted to a phrase book culled from the cinema: 'It was like a movie', 'It was like Independence Day.' 'It was like Die Hard.' 'No, Die Hard 2.'

Read the rest of the article on the FT website.

Also, read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Books for the News | Film and Media | History | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"The Art of Lee Miller" is a major retrospective of works by and about the artist curated by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The exhibition has now come stateside; it opened a week ago at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in July.

A lengthy critical essay by Judith Thurman was in the January 21 New Yorker, while a nicely illustrated article was in the February 4 issue of Newsweek. Like Carolyn Burke's biography Lee Miller: A Life which we recently released in paperback, the articles deliver a fascinating look at the life and artistry of Miller. She dominated the world of high fashion in the late 1920s, modeling for magazines like Vogue and Vanity Fair, and then became a respected photographer herself, leaving an indelible mark on the worlds of fine art photography and photojournalism. Writing for the New Yorker, Thurman details the pivotal turn in Miller's career from art object to artist:

If one is to believe the story, Condé Nast noticed her crossing the street just in time to pull her from the path of an oncoming vehicle, and this fortuitous collision led to an interview with Edna Chase, Vogue's editor in chief.… She was soon posing for Steichen, Arnold Genthe, and Nickolas Muray, the leading photographers of the day.…

In 1929, with several lovers fighting for the honor of seeing her off, and café society sad to lose its star playgirl, Miller sailed for Europe with the ambition "to enter photography by the back end.…" She planned to do some modeling for George Hoyningen-Huene at Paris Vogue while she apprenticed with Man Ray, a leader of the avant-garde and master of many genres—painting, photography, sculpture, and graphic art.…

Under Man Ray's tutelage, Miller mastered the use of the Graflex camera, with glass plates, and then the Rolleiflex; studio lighting setups; cropping and retouching, improvisation with the viewfinder; and his techniques for developing.

The article goes on to detail Miller's extraordinary, but tumultuous life, and speaks in detail about her groundbreaking work as one of the first female war correspondents during WWII. A theme which the Newsweek article picks up as well:

After she moved [to] London in 1939, she began her most important photography. The cockeyed perspective she'd absorbed from the surrealists served her well in the arresting, absurdist images she captured during the Blitz: a crushed Remington typewriter; a male mannequin standing incongruously in a heap of curbside rubble.… She rode into Germany with the U.S. Army, starkly documenting the corpses and the ovens of Buchenwald and Dachau—and zooming in, almost poetically, on a dead SS guard floating in a canal. She also shot Hitler's apartment in Munich—then got in his tub for her first bath in weeks, a moment caught on film by [Life photographer Dave] Scherman. Her combat boots on the bathmat are still caked with the mud of Dachau from earlier in the day.

The most thorough exploration of Miller's life and career can be found in Burke's 400-plus page biography Lee Miller: A Life. We have an extended excerpt from the book, dealing with Miller's experiences covering the War in France—from the Allied invasion of Normandy to the German surrender.

A slide show is online at the New Yorker.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biography | Books for the News
Posted by TXM at 03:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John G. Geer, author of In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaign, argues that negative ads are positive—they focus on important political issues and give voters critical information about differences between candidates. Attack ads do not degrade but enrich the democratic process. See his pick of the genre in John Geer’s Attack Ad Hall of Fame.

Inevitably, Geer himself was swiftboated on Youtube.

Comments on Geer's Hall of Fame selections are welcome.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 02:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)