The UK's Spectator magazine has published an excellent review of Andrea Weiss's new book In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story, a biographical account of the lives of the two eldest children of renowned writer Thomas Mann. Though Thomas's fame and prestige has often eclipsed the literary and intellectual achievements of his children, as the Spectator's Allan Massie notes, Weiss's new book uncovers their significant contributions to the worlds of art and literature. Massie's review begins:

The subtitle is The Erika and Klaus Mann Story, and the shadow is that cast by their father, Thomas Mann, the greatest German novelist of the 20th century.

Erika and Klaus were the oldest two of his six children, and, while it is fair to say they lived in his shadow, they were not obscured by it, being extraordinary people in their own right, Klaus at least a remarkable writer himself also. Andrea Weiss, an American film-maker as well as writer, an associate professor at the City College of New York, tells their story with enthusiasm, sympathy and insight, in a style mercifully free of the clotted jargon we tend, not always unfairly, to expect from American academics.…

Read the full review on the Spectator website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Reviews
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In the Washington Post's recently published Q&A session with Lt. Col. John A. Nagl, Nagl uses his expertise in U.S. counterinsurgency operations to respond to reader's questions regarding the future of the U.S. military presence in the Middle East. Nagl is author and contributor to several recent books on military counterinsurgency strategy including Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam and The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. He also currently commands the 1st Battalion, 34th Armor at Fort Riley, Kansas. From the Washington Post:

Little Rock, Ark.: We don't get much information regarding the nation-building activities in Afghanistan. Did we meet the rebuilding commitments we made to them when we won the war there?

Lt. Col. John Nagl: Little Rock, the counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan has not received the attention it has deserved. I visited there a little more than a year ago, and was struck most by the abject poverty of the country, even in Kabul. Afghanistan is the fifth-poorest country in the world after three decades of war. It desperately needs international assistance, particularly infrastructure development (roads above all). The Taliban's resurgence has made the development work even harder than we'd anticipated. We still have a lot of work to do there, and I'm pleased that we have decided to commit additional combat forces to Afghanistan next year, as have some of our allies.

Santa Monica, Calif.: What is your take on the newly released report by Pentagon think tank National Defense University's National Institute for Strategic Studies…?

Lt. Col. John Nagl: Santa Monica, the INSS report you reference was written by Col. Joe Collins (Ret.), a good friend and mentor. Press reports on it were somewhat out of context; Joe published a rejoinder on the excellent "Small Wars Journal" Web site (which I commend to anyone interested in the defense community's discussion of counterinsurgency).

That said, there were serious mistakes made early on in Iraq; the decisions to disband the Iraqi Army and to radically de-Baathify the country made the insurgency far stronger than it might have been, and made the tasks of rebuilding the country and recreating the Army harder. However, those mistakes do not mean that we cannot help Iraq become a reasonably stable state that can control what happens within its own borders and that does not present a threat to the region, although doing so will take continued American commitment for a number of years.

Read the rest of the conversation on the Washington Post website.

Also see an excerpt from Learning to eat Soup with a Knife or read Nagl's foreword to the Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 02:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Marilyn Hacker, award winning poet and translator of over twelve books of contemporary French poetry including Guy Goffette's recent Charlestown Blues: Selected Poems, a Bilingual Edition, has posted a piece on the art of translation to the recently launched Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux poetry blog this week.

In her post she discusses her intimate engagement with the works she translates and her constant struggle to remain true to the original. Hacker writes: "The translator must be faithful to the text's linguistic valence, its connotations, to its music as well as its meaning." And perhaps nowhere else does the translator develop this synergy between sound and sense than in Georgetown Blues where her selection of Geoffette's work all center around the notion of "blue"—the color and the emotion, as well as that quintessentially American style of musical performance. From Charlestown Blues:

Read another poem on the UCP website or see Marilyn Hacker On "The Most Engaged Form Of Reading" on the FSG poetry blog.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Poetry
Posted by TXM at 01:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Published last week, Lee Siegel's newest book, Love and the Incredibly Old Man: A Novel scores a long and appreciative review in the April 18th edition of the Times Literary Supplement. Remarking on the unique autobiographical element of Siegel's fiction Stephen Burn's article begins:

Students of American writing have to distinguish between two Lee Siegels. Perhaps the more famous of the two is the New York critic Siegel, who was suspended from the New Republic in 2006 when it was discovered that he had been posting comments on the internet proclaiming his own brilliance. Oddly enough, the other, currently less famous Siegel—who is a professor of religion at the University of Hawaii—has also spent the last ten years writing about himself. His four inventive and amusing novels feature a character, Lee Siegel, who, the author complains, "has consistently tried to pass himself off as me."…

His new novel, Love and the Incredibly Old Man, belongs somewhere in the middle of a continuum running from the experiments of his first two novels to the more transparent style of Who Wrote the Book of Love?, but like all the earlier works it involves a story received from an old man. In this instance the elderly gentleman is extremely elderly: he claims to be Ponce de Léon who, having lived on the waters of the Fountain of Youth for nearly 500 years, now seeks a ghostwriter to record his story before he dies. Having been impressed by references to Ponce in Siegel's fiction, the conquistador hires the novelist to write his life.…

Siegel's achievement is to persuade the reader to care about such a self-involved, and possibly delusional character while staging jokes at his expense and displaying his own verbal dexterity. A creative attitude to the novel is in abundant evidence across all Siegel's fiction; and this new novel is a worthy addition to a body of work which deserves a wider audience.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
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The symptoms are all around us: rising temperatures, increasingly destructive storms, shrinking animal populations, creeping deserts. The earth is slowly dying, poisoned by too much carbon dioxide—and it’s high time we called a doctor. Enter popular science writer and journalist William Calvin, who with Global Fever delivers a grim diagnosis and outlines a radically thorough course of treatment. In stark, straightforward language, Calvin warns us of the mortal danger we face from unanticipated feedback loops as rising temperatures kill off plants and dry up water, leading to ever-faster warming. Every day we put off serious action, the situation becomes more desperate and our possible solutions narrow. If we hope to avoid climate disaster and the scarcely imaginable social upheaval that would accompany it, Calvin argues that we must commit to an aggressive, worldwide effort to switch to clean technologies—from hot rock geothermal power to air-fueled cars—essentially jumpstarting what would amount to a new, green, industrial revolution. The time for half-measures is over; Global Fever is a blueprint for real, comprehensive action.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Economics | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

New in Paperback—Piero Melograni here offers a wholly readable account of Mozart’s remarkable life and times. This masterful biography proceeds from the young Mozart’s earliest years as a wunderkind—the child prodigy who traveled with his family to perform concerts throughout Europe—to his formative years in Vienna, where he absorbed the artistic and intellectual spirit of the Enlightenment, to his deathbed, his unfinished Requiem, and the mystery that still surrounds his burial.

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt.

Archived in History | Music | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What Herman Melville did for the whale, Lee Siegel did for the Kama Sutra with his first critically acclaimed and enormously successful novel, Love in a Dead Language. Here Lee Siegel—no not THAT Lee Siegel, this is the other Lee Seigel, the nice Lee Siegel, the novelist, magician, and sex obsessed Lee Siegel—does the same for eternal love. The premise of this gem of a book is this: down on his luck in both letters and love, a reluctant Lee Siegel is summoned to a remote south Florida town by the conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon, who contrary to both history and legend not only discovered the Fountain of Youth, but has savored its waters for the past 540 years. But Ponce de Leon’s time is short—and it’s his dying wish that Lee Siegel ghostwrite his autobiography, chronicling his numerous romantic conquests, exploits, and misadventures. The result is everything readers have come to expect from this Lee Siegel: a tender, witty, and salacious picaresque of sorts that falls somewhere between Don Quixote, Don Juan, and in a perverse sort of way, Don DeLillo in its evocation of empire’s twilight, the lure of the libertine, and one hopeless romantic’s eternal quest for the ideal. Comic, lusty, and fully engaged with the act of invention, whether in love or on the page, Love and the Incredibly Old Man continues this Lee Siegel’s exuberant exploration of that sentiment which Ponce de Leon confesses has “transported me to the most joyous heights, plunged me to the most dismal depths, and dropped me willy-nilly and dumbfounded at all places in between.”

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

2008 marks the fortieth anniversary of a black mark on American history: the 1968 Democratic Convention and its notorious example of police brutality against demonstrators. The provocative Battleground Chicago offers a new perspective on this tragic event by revealing how-and why-the police attacked antiwar activists at the convention. Working from interviews with eighty former Chicago police officers who were on the scene, Frank Kusch uncovers the other side of the story of ’68, deepening our understanding of a turbulent decade.

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt.

Archived in Chicago | History | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Along with nearly every other facet of life, in the last decade the digital revolution has transformed the book publishing industry. As North America's largest university press, Chicago has been one of the leaders in advancing the use of digital technology in publishing—a fact acknowledged in the cover story of this month's Book Business magazine. Touching on everything from our short-run digital printing program, to the digital publishing services offered by BiblioVault, our digital content repository, Book Business's James Sturdivant talks to UCP director Garrett Kiely and Chicago Digital Distribution Center manager Jeanne Weinkle to learn how Chicago has extended its digital publishing initiatives into the twenty-first century. James Sturdivant writes for Book Business:

Garrett Kiely [is] a 20-year industry veteran who came on as the UCP's 15th director in September 2007. Kiely arrived after an eight-year stint as president of Palgrave Macmillan, where he oversaw e-book conversion projects and other pioneering digital initiatives for a division focused on scholarly and reference titles.

Such experience is crucial to the press's innovative strategy for content distribution. The press offers print-on-demand and digital distribution to a range of academic publishers through its Chicago Distribution Services, positioning itself as the entity best able to serve the needs of noncommercial academic publishers.

"We provide a very good service," Kiely says. "Random House does the best trade distribution, and Chicago is the best university distributor. That's pretty good company to be in."

"For publishers [who work with us] here, I can tell you [that] right away they never have to manage that inventory again," [says Jeanne Weinkle, manager of the Chicago Digital Distribution Center]. "There's no worry about shipping. It's just a nice flow, a nice life cycle." In addition to the 180 new books and approximately 70 paperback reprints published yearly by the UCP, [Chicago Distribution Services] runs fulfillment services for more than 50 outside presses.

Weinkle refers to her clients as "a community of like-minded publishers who have similar financial challenges"—among them, the shifting market for academic materials as university libraries scale back on print purchases, and, in some cases, staff cutbacks that have made it difficult to develop digital distribution and marketing services in-house. … We definitely make a profit here, but that's not what it's about. It's about keeping the books alive," she says.

To learn more about the press's digital services and initiatives, or for those simply interested in how digital technology is affecting the world of academic publishing, read the rest of article on the Book Business website, and see the variety of services offered by the Chicago Distribution Center.

Archived in UCP News
Posted by TXM at 01:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Last year’s report from the National Science Foundation dolefully confirmed what many researchers have suspected for years: while the number of PhD graduates in the sciences continues to increase, tenure-track positions have remained static since the early 1980s. And after spending years in the post-doc trenches, this glut of PhDs is enough to make many would-be scientists wonder about their next steps.

As the founders of their university’s first office for postdoctoral affairs, Victor A. Bloomfield and Esam E. El-Fakahany have first-hand experience with the challenges young scientists face. Together, they’ve mentored thousands of students, and now they’ve combined that experience in teaching, counseling, and research to create The Chicago Guide to Your Career in Science. From preparing a CV and resume, to writing grants and scientific papers, to networking with fellow scientists, The Chicago Guide to Your Career in Science truly is a “toolkit” for aspiring scientists—helping them not just cope but excel at this critical phase in their careers.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Education | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 01:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Germany’s leading literary family during the 20th century was headed by Thomas Mann and composed of six talented children, the most accomplished of which were Erika and Klaus. Long obscured by the fame of their domineering father, Erika and Klaus were prominent writers and artists in their own right who led fascinating, unconventional lives that mirrored the tumult and chaos of their times. In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain is their story. Andrea Weiss’s remarkable biography chronicles Erika and Klaus’s equally remarkable lives. Openly gay during an era of secrecy and repression; defiantly anti-fascist during the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich; intimate friends with such luminaries as W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, André Gide, and Jean Cocteau; performance artists before the phrase had even been coined, In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain is rich in anecdote and eye-opening details, sending the reader spinning and tumbling into the minds of these two extraordinary but neglected literary figures.

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Gay and Lesbian | History | Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 01:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John Louis Lucaites, author of No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy has posted an apropos commentary about the Earth Day themed cover image on today's Time Magazine to his No Caption Needed blog. Detailing a photoshopped version of Joe Rosenthal's iconic photograph of WWII troops on Iwo Jima's Mt. Suribachi raising a giant conifer in place of the flag, Lucaites makes the image an occasion to deliver some interesting commentary on the history of the original photograph's appropriation and the particularly fetishistic way that the Time Magazine editors have chosen to use it today. Lucaites writes:

By most accounts Joe Rosenthal's photograph of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima's Mt. Suribachi is the most reproduced photograph of all time—ever!…

Such reproductions have occurred not just in traditional print media, but on stamps (twice), commemorative plates, woodcuts, silk screens, coins, key chains, cigarette lighters, matchbook covers, beer steins, lunchboxes, hats, t-shirts, ties, calendars, comic books, credit cards, trading cards, post cards, and human skin, and in advertisements for everything from car insurance to condoms and strip joints.…

All of this is to say that on the face of things there is nothing particularly noteworthy about Time's appropriation of the image this week to frame and promote its "green" agenda in a special issue on the "War on Global Warming," … but my interest here is in mapping out how the particular appropriation of the original photograph coaches an attitude that seems to rely on tired and clichéd conceptions of American exceptionalism. Put simply, it is not just an appeal to be "green" (although it is that), but it also functions to translate the meaning of being "green" into a symbolic register that both defines environmentalism in terms of U.S. nationalism—"green is the new red, white, and blue"—and, more, makes something of an imperialistic fetish out of it.

Read the rest of Lucaites piece on the No Caption Needed blog, or read an excerpt from Lucaite's book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Film and Media | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 04:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The University of Chicago News Office has posted a podcast featuring Charles Lipson, author of Succeeding as an International Student in the United States and Canada speaking about his new book. In the podcast, Lipson addresses many of the hot button topics for foreign students trying to adapt to life in the United States and Canada, both in and beyond the classroom. From the norms of classroom participation to obtaining health insurance, Lipson covers what students need to know to have a successful and enjoyable adventure as an international student.

To find out more listen to the podcast or see this special website for the book featuring reviews, info on institutional use, and an excerpt from the book, "Passports and Visas: A Quick Overview."

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Education | Reference and Writing
Posted by TXM at 02:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chicago literature is rife with images of industry and unbridled urban growth. But the tallgrass prairie and dense oak forests that once comprised Chicago’s landscape also inspired local writers. In Of Prairie, Woods, and Water, naturalist Joel Greenberg gathers these voices from the land to present an unexpected portrait of Chicago. Often charming, sometimes heart-wrenching, this anthology of Chicago-area nature writing is scheduled for release on April 22nd—just in time for Earth Day.

Of Prairie, Woods, and Water tells the story of a land in transition, one with abundant, unique, and incredibly lush flora and fauna—a natural history that is quite elusive today. From the journal of a frustrated pioneer who staked a claim in Kankakee marsh to Theodore Drieser’s plea for conservation of the Tippecanoe River, the sources included are as diverse as the nature they describe. Together, they traverse a wide area of the Midwest, from the Illinois River to the Indiana Dunes.

This spring and summer, a series of performances called “Voices from the Land” will bring Of Prairie, Woods, and Water to life. The premiere performance takes place at the Garfield Farm Museum on April 27. For more on this event and others at the Chicago Botanic Garden and the Lincoln Park Zoo, please visit www.press.uchicago.edu/News/ontheroad.html.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Chicago | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bernard Lightman's Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences is a fascinating study of the work of some of the most influential expositors of scientific doctrine during the 19th century—though they are rarely credited as such. The names of the popular science writers of the Victorian era are often overshadowed by those of the scientists they wrote about, but as Jon Turney notes in a recent review for the Times Higher Education, in his new book Lightman skillfully illuminates their cultural and historical importance. Turney writes:

The Victorian explosion of print embraced a diversity of treatments of science and its significance that exhibits many of the tensions that still mark science in public. Who has the right to speak for science, to interpret nature or to have the final word on humans' place in a universe in which God's hand in creation is in question?

As he catalogues the many contributors to the new popular scientific literature, and their works, Lightman illuminates how the different answers to these questions played their part in battles over science's authority and cultural prestige.…

Throughout, Lightman pays detailed attention to publishers and print runs, as well as to the authors' lives and works. The book is a substantial work of scholarship rather than a casual read, and it offers much for historians of science as well as students of popular writing.

Read the rest of the review on the THE website.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Literature | Reviews
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Nicole P. Marwell, author of Bargaining for Brooklyn: Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City was recently interviewed on Brian Berger's blog Who Walk In Brooklyn. Berger—co-editor of New York Calling published by Reaktion Books and distributed by UCP—engages Marwell in a discussion of the author's experiences in Brooklyn's Williamsburg and Bushwick neighborhoods studying the social impact of the community based organizations she writes about in her book. From the preface to the interview:

Nicole gets deep into one of the most important & least glamorous aspects of understanding a city of the haves and the ain't-got-shit, the mysterious—to outsiders—world of "community based orgnanizations" (CBOs). In Brooklyn, the best known of these groups is probably ACORN, and even their notoriety is due more to Bertha Lewis' failed devil's bargain with Bruce Ratner on the so-called "Atlantic Yards" project than any of their other, less disputable initiatives.

Not all CBOs are alike, however, and because of this, Nicole spent years working with eight different groups in Williamsburg & Bushwick. Some were secular, some church-based. Both partook of a much less flashy but essential ground-level politics, a very far cry from that of the highly paid lobbyists whom an already-wealthy real estate racket uses to advance its profits at the least cost to themselves. It's been said, from La Lechonera de Coqui in Castle Hill to Angel's Lounge under the elevated BMT tracks on Broadway, that CBOs are born to lose. This may or may not be true; Berger & Marwell have their opinions but I suggest that we also remember the inspirational words of Bennie (Warren Oates) in Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia: "Nobody loses all the time." We shall see, Saltamonte, we shall see.

Read the interview on Berger's Who Walk in Brooklyn blog.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 02:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tuesday's Los Angeles Times published a review of several recent books about the battle of Little Bighorn, George Armstrong Custer, and the deep impact that this most famous military defeat has had on America's cultural consciousness. Discussing Michael A. Elliott's Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer the Times' Allen Barra writes:

[In researching his book] Elliott traveled from Custer's childhood home in Monroe, Mich., to the Little Bighorn Battlefield in Crow Agency, Mont., and visited every related museum and monument in between. Particularly intriguing is a photograph of the mountainside memorial of Custer's final foe, Crazy Horse, a work in progress, behind a model of the proposed completed sculpture.

The fact that continued fascination with Custer in turn stimulates an increasing interest in Crazy Horse's people is not ignored by Elliott. He writes that for English-born Custer re-enactor Tony Austin, "portraying Custer's life means that one can resurrect an attitude toward American Indians that combines respect with combat, admiration with military opposition."

Custer himself, Elliott claims, "would have never believed that there would be Indians who thought of themselves as Indians in the twenty-first century." Modernity, Custer and his contemporaries believed, would "crush the indigenous population … either physically through extermination or spiritually through assimilation." That the descendants of the warriors of Little Bighorn might be using Custer's life and death "to help them understand what it means to be an Indian in the twenty-first century constitutes one of American history's most elegant, and least appreciated, ironies."

Read the rest of the review on the L.A. Times website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

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

Newton Minow, the current vice chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates and author of Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future was interviewed today on Chicago Public Radio's Eight Forty-Eight. From his time as assistant counsel to Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson when Stevenson first proposed the idea of the debates in 1960, to his stints as cochair of the presidential debates in 1976 and 1980, Minow has played an integral role in transforming them into the major media events we know today. In the interview Minow delivers some fascinating commentary on the history of the debates and addresses some of the criticism leveled against them. You can find the archived audio online at the Chicago Public Radio website.

Also see memorable moments from presidential debates and read an excerpt from the book.

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

The Nashville Scene ran an interesting article recently about John G. Geer's, In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns. Citing Hillary Clinton's recent "red telephone" ad below, Paul Griffith writes for the Scene:

According to Geer, democracy needs below-the-belt imagery like that of the Clinton ad, even if such characterizations can be painful to watch, because negative ads often provide more actual information than warmer, fuzzier bids for support. "For a negative appeal to be effective," he writes, "the sponsor of that appeal must marshal more evidence, on average, than for positive appeals."

Griffith concludes:

Someone should give Hillary Clinton a copy of this book, given recent Democratic calls for her to quit for fear her less-than-positive ads might disrupt party unity.

Read the rest of the article at the Nashville Scene website.

Also see a special feature, John Geer's Attack Ad Hall of Fame.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 02:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Roger Ebert is arguably one of the twentieth century's most influential film critics, and since his departure from the spotlight several years ago, his presence at the helm of his award winning show At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper, or as the Chicago Sun-Times resident film critic, has been missed by film buffs the world over. Now, Ebert will finally make his return, even though, as the New York Time's A. O. Scott reports, he will be leaving TV behind:

One of the guys… who made the crazy idea that movie critics could thrive on TV seem like a no-brainer, recently announced his departure from the airwaves. On April 1 Roger Ebert published a letter to readers of the Chicago Sun-Times that was essentially a farewell to the long-running, widely syndicated weekly program that has made him not simply the best-known movie reviewer in America, but the virtual embodiment of this curious profession.

But the real news in Mr. Ebert's letter was his return to regular written criticism. A recurrence of cancer of the salivary gland in the summer of 2006 might have left him unable to speak—a problem recent surgery failed to solve—but he has hardly lost his voice.…

And you can find some of the best of Ebert's writing in the recent, Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert, featuring reviews, interviews, and essays on everything from The Godfather to GoodFellas, from Cries and Whispers to Crash.

Archived in Books for the News | Film and Media
Posted by TXM at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Disputes over tenure know no ideological bounds.

Controversy surrounds the tenure status of another UCP author, this time with the criticism coming from a different corner of the political arena. John Yoo, author of The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11 is a tenured professor at Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. He has long been under attack for his role in authoring memos while working for the Department of Justice that were used to justify DoJ policies for the detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists (including practices defined in international law as torture). A campaign has developed calling for Yoo's ouster from his academic position.

The story was covered today by the online publication Inside Higher Ed. Last week Christopher Edley, Jr. , the Dean of Boalt Hall, released a statement asserting that he had seen no evidence of wrongdoing that would merit Yoo's dismissal.

When we published his book, Yoo explained his view of executive war powers in an interview.

Updated: The Chronicle of Higher Education has a roundup of blogger commentary on the Yoo case.

Archived in Books for the News | Law
Posted by DB at 03:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We have previously noted the tenure battle over Nadia Abu El-Haj, at the center of which is the book we published in 2001, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society.

Abu El-Haj was granted tenure by Barnard last November. A sort of post-mortem on the whole affair appears in today's issue of the New Yorker. Jane Kramer reviews Abu El-Haj's academic career, the controversy over her tenure decision, and the continuing debate—at Columbia University and elsewhere—over fact and bias in Middle Eastern studies departments.

Throughout the swirl of rhetoric, the articles and editorials, speeches and screeds, petitions and counter-petitions Abu El-Haj remained silent, trying to avoid the distraction. She finally spoke to Kramer for the New Yorker article. "What happened last year—it wasn't about me. I was a cog in the big wheel of the Middle East and Israel."

Only an abstract of the article is online at the New Yorker website. But a pdf has been posted elsewhere. Also, Jane Kramer spoke with Jon Wiener on KPFK's On the Radio (starts about 21 minutes in).

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News
Posted by TXM at 02:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Shelf, a literary blog associated with the Canadian magazine The Walrus has just posted an interview with Elise Partridge discussing her new book of poems, Chameleon Hours. Partridge, who splits her time between Vancouver, BC, and Washington State, talks with Jared Bland about the reception of her work in the U.S. and, alternatively, how she sees it fitting into a Canadian literary tradition:

Much of your work has been published in the States, including in the New Yorker, and this new book is being simultaneously issued by the University of Chicago Press. In other words, you have more southern exposure than many Canadian poets. Does this effect the way in which you see your work fitting into a Canadian poetic tradition? Not to force you into any immodest comparisons, but what strain of poetic thought do you see your work coming out of?

I think writers inevitably belong in some way to their native countries and languages, but are also often hybrids of their own making, based on their sensibilities, influences, and so on. As an English-speaking North American (a dual citizen of Canada and the United States) I've been influenced by all kinds of literature in English—British, American, Irish, Australian, Canadian—and by literature translated into English, especially Polish, Russian, German, Latin American, and Chinese.…

And as to what Canadian tradition I might fit into—if I can place myself among living poets here, I do feel a bond with many, some older than I am and perhaps even more in the rising generations. I would certainly like to see Canadian poetry get more "southern exposure." I think there is a great deal that could both inspire and invigorate American poetry, and many more readers in the US who might simply enjoy and learn from Canadian poetry.

Read the rest of the interview on The Shelf.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Poetry
Posted by TXM at 04:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Newton N. Minow and Craig L. LeMay, authors of Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future were interviewed recently on The Biz, the blog of TVGuide editor Stephen Battaglio. In the interview Battaglio engages the authors in a discussion of the presidential debates as "one of the biggest TV attractions of the year" and their ever increasing ability to draw record ratings for broadcast television networks:

TVGuide.com: Your book points out how both Presidents Johnson and Nixon didn't want to debate their challengers…. Now it seems that it would be impossible for a presidential candidate to avoid it.
Minow: Young people who have grown up with presidential debates expect them. I don't think any candidate can escape it.
Lamay: Absolutely. Remember in 1992 when President George H.W. Bush [who balked at debating Bill Clinton and Ross Perot] was followed around on the campaign trail by the guy in the chicken suit? If you avoided a debate today, you'd have millions of virtual chickens [all over the Internet].

TVGuide.com: The first 2004 debate between President Bush and Sen. John Kerry set a record with 62.5 million viewers. Will a meeting between Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. Hillary Clinton top that?
Minow: I think it will, absolutely. It will be higher and the debates will be repeated and distributed in all kinds of new ways on the Internet. Every American will have a chance to see them.

You can read the full interview on The Biz.

Also see these memorable moments from presidential debates and read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In 1965 a group of Chicago musicians dedicated to exploring the frontiers of American jazz banded together to create the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians—one of the most radical and influential musical collectives in the history of the genre. Now, author George E. Lewis has chronicled the definitive history of the movement in, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, a book music critic Peter Margasak praises in today's Chicago Reader for "[going] deeper into the formation and development of the AACM than any previous history, and as a formal acknowledgment of the group's enormous importance and influence…."

Margasak's article continues:

In the early 60s the marketplace was indifferent or hostile to creative jazz, and the AACM was the first sustained musician-run group to support it, producing legendary artists like Anthony Braxton, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Henry Threadgill. The organization remains active today, led by reedist Douglas Ewart and flutist Nicole Mitchell, and its members still display the fierce determination and brilliant creativity that made its name a seal of quality.

And on Tuesday, April 15, 4:15 pm you'll have a chance to see some of the AACM's brilliant creativity yourself if you head down to the Chicago Cultural Center's Cassidy Theater where the author along with some of AACM's current members will deliver a live performance and discussion of "the history of the AACM and strategies independent artists can use to form similar collectives."

The book is officially slated for release next month, but in the meantime, you can read the rest of the Reader article online, or see an excerpt from the book.

Time Out magazine also weighs in with an article published in their most recent issue. You can find it online here.

Archived in Black Studies | Chicago | History | Music | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 08:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Chicago Tribune ran an article recently featuring James B. Nardi's Life in the Soil: A Guide for Naturalists and Gardeners that gives some great advice on cultivating a bumper crop in your garden this spring. Writing for the Tribune Beth Botts' article begins:

The part of the garden we love is above ground: flowers, leaves, stems, branches, bark, birds, squirrels. But that part can't thrive without the part we hardly notice except when we dig.

James Nardi, an entomologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is so fascinated by that part of the garden that he wrote a field guide to it: Life in the Soil: A Guide for Naturalists and Gardeners.

Some of the organisms he describes break down dead plant matter and release its nutrients to be absorbed by the roots of living plants. Others help make roots more efficient. Some improve the texture of the soil so plant roots can get air and water. And some eat others, maintaining the population balance that keeps the whole underground society—what scientists call the soil food web—humming along.

The article continues citing the best kinds of soils ("loam, with at least two sizes of mineral particles") and what readers can do to help the underground ecosystems in their gardens thrive (compost).

Check out the full article on the Chicago Tribune website.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News
Posted by TXM at 02:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Mark Feeney, arts writer for the Boston Globe and author of Nixon at the Movies: A Book about Belief, has won the Pulitzer prize in criticism for ten of his recent essays on visual culture. In an article posted to the Globe's website Monday afternoon Don Aucoin writes:

Feeney won the Pulitzer for 10 critical essays that suggest the fluency and brio of his writing style, and the range of interests on which he brings that style to bear.

He wrote of the "unheroic loneliness of everyday people'" reflected in the paintings of Edward Hopper, the "pure visual kapow" of aerial photos by Bradford Washburn and Frank Gohlke, the collision between art and celebrity in the work of photographer Annie Leibovitz, the artistic trajectory traveled by filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, and the sense of community in the work of photographer Charles (Teenie) Harris.

The essay on Hopper bears one of Feeney's trademarks, namely, the ability to see connections among disparate works, from high art to low. Feeney alludes to John Updike, Ernest Hemingway, and Alexis de Tocqueville, but then goes on to describe an artistic kinship between Hopper (or at least the world he created) and such figures as lyricist Lorenz Hart, Willy Loman from "Death of a Salesman,'" Elisha Cook Jr. in "The Maltese Falcon,'" Thelma Ritter in "Pickup on South Street,'" and even the Beach Boys.

The Globe has posted links to Feeney's Pulitzer nominated stories on their website.

Also be sure to check out Nixon at the Movies and experience for yourself Feeney's unparalleled ability to draw together seemingly incongruous subject matter into a fascinating critique of American arts and culture.

See a special web feature for the book.

Archived in Awards | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 09:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Haunted by the afterlife of medieval theology and literature yet grounded in distinctly modern quandaries of desire, Connie Voisine’s female speakers reverberate with notes of Marie de France’s tragic heroines. For Voisine, poems are occasions for philosophical wanderings, extended lyrics that revolve around the binding and unbinding of desire, with lonely speakers struggling with the impetus of wanting as well as the necessity of a love affair’s end. With fluency, intelligence, and deeply felt emotional acuity, Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream navigates the heady intersection of obsessive love and searing loss.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Whether writing poems about North American life and landscape; or love poems; or elegies for family and friends; or poems on serious, debilitating illness and the transformations it can effect—Elise Partridge offers in Chameleon Hours words forged by suffering and courage. Full of wit and empathy, Partridge’s poems draw inspiration from sources as whimsical as tortoises and pontoons, as poignant as a homeless woman taking shelter inside a post office on a winter night, and as deeply personal as her own cancer diagnosis at a young age. Chameleon Hours is a book about the rewards of being reminded of one’s own mortality and the lyric expression of life in all its intensity.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Blessings for the Hands follows various speakers—often disabled speakers, who never once figure themselves as objects of complaint or self-pity—through the haunted dreamscape of “normalcy.” Indeed, dreams are continuous presences in this unusually subtle and elegant debut collection that juxtaposes physical circumstances with the vast interior life of the imagination. The subjects of Blessings for the Hands are real and imagined confrontations—and reconciliations—between family members, friends, strangers, and animals.

Matthew Schwartz’s quasi-autobiographical verse complicates and clarifies the emotions waiting just underneath the patterns and expectations of the speakers’ daylight lives, where anger, joy, corporeality, and mortality all seem to collide. For Schwartz, poetry is a sleight of hand that keeps the reader guessing through nearly imperceptible shifts between present vision and absent reality. Blessings for the Hands is a lyric reckoning of the tension between the life we are given and the life we are determined to lead.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This fall on September 26th, Senators Barack Obama and John McCain will face each other in the first of three presidential debates leading up to the general election. Their encounter will carry on a now storied political tradition that dates back to 1960, when Senator John F. Kennedy first debated Vice President Richard M. Nixon. That debate, of course, marked television’s grand entrance into presidential politics and afforded the first real opportunity for voters nationwide to see their candidates square off against each other. But beforehand, as we all now know, Nixon had spent two weeks in the hospital recovering from a seriously injured knee. By the time of the debate, he was nearly 20 pounds underweight and his pallor was poor. To make matters worse, he arrived in studio wearing an ill-fitting shirt, and refused make-up to improve his color and lighten his 5 o’clock shadow. J.F.K., by contrast, had just spent several weeks campaigning in California. He was tan, confident, and well-rested. And the rest, as they say, is history. Though that history has for decades gone unwritten—until now. Enter Newton N. Minow, who here offers a timely behind-the-scenes look at how the presidential debates first came about and the many political and legal battles that have shaped them over the past several decades.

Read the press release.

Also see these memorable moments from presidential debates and read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Economics | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Donald S. Lopez Jr., author of several books on Tibetan Buddhism including The Madman's Middle Way: Reflections on Reality of the Tibetan Monk Gendun Chopel and Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West has written an interesting piece for openDemocracy on the recent turmoil in Tibet and the future of the movement for Tibetan independence. Lopez draws a parallel between Tibet's current political relationship with China, and Latvia's former relationship with the USSR. Lopez notes that since the 19th century Latvia, though culturally distinct from Russia, was repeatedly placed under communist control between brief respites of independence, only to gain what Latvians hope will be a lasting independence when the USSR collapsed in 1991. Thus Lopez writes: "Is there anything to do but wait? Latvia regained its independence with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It would seem that Tibet could only regain its independence with the collapse of the Peoples Republic of China. In Buddhism, time is measured not in centuries, but in cycles of creation, abiding, destruction, and vacuity, then creation again."

Read the full article on the openDemocracy website.

Also find out 7 Things You Didn't Know about Tibet, a web feature for Prisoners of Shangri-La.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lt. Col. John A. Nagl is a leading experts on U.S. counterinsurgency operations. Authoring and contributing to several recent books on the topic—Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife and The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual—Nagl has been instrumental in promoting an alternative to conventional counterinsurgency strategy: increasing the U.S. military's advisory role to foreign forces, and "[empowering] our partners to defend and govern their own countries." In an op-ed piece in yesterday's New York Times Nagl takes a look at the ongoing conflict in Iraq and offers his advice on how "to [successfully] shift of the combat load from American forces to the Iraqi and Afghan armies." Nagl writes:

First, United States military and civilian leadership must recognize that resources to support this major shift in strategy have to be re-routed from our regular forces. Left to themselves, the military services will inevitably neglect advisory efforts to sustain conventional forces.…

Second, shifting the burden from our forces to Iraqi and Afghan troops will call for close coordination between our civilian leadership and commanders in the field. Even as American combat forces draw down in favor of adviser-supported local armies, American combat support in the form of firepower, intelligence and logistics will continue to be crucial…

Third, the United States' success depends on the willingness of the Iraqi and Afghan armies to fight with tenacity and skill. Soldiers of both countries are good fighters when well led. But we'll let them down if we don't send more and larger teams to embed with locals.

Finally, the American people must continue to be patient. In the 20th century, the average counterinsurgency campaign took nine years. The campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to run longer, and other commitments loom in this protracted struggle against Al Qaeda and its imitators. Bitter experience has long recognized that only local armies can ultimately prevail in counterinsurgency operations.

Read the rest of the article on the NYT website.

Also read the preface from Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife or Nagl's foreword to the Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the midst of the dramatic primary debates and what's gearing up to be an embattled general election, Chicago's NBC5 News ran an interview with one of the "pioneers of televised presidential debates," Newton N. Minow, author of the recent Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future. NBC5's political editor Carol Marin begins her report by noting that with his wide range of experience in both television and politics—from his position as chairman of PBS to his current position as vice chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates—"Minow is the only person to be a part of every official presidential debate between the Republican and Democratic nominees since 1960." The interview continues with Minow's comments on the current presidential debates: "'I hope in the 2008 debates, the candidates will actually question each other.' In the end, he said, the most important thing to come out of a debate is really very simple: 'Can you trust that candidate to act in your best interest? To tell you the truth?'"

Watch the archived video of the interview on the NBC5 website.

Also see this web feature on memorable moments from presidential debates and read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The University of Chicago Press, in partnership with the City of Chicago's Mayor's Office of Special Events, announces the launch of a new lecture series—Great Chicago Places and Spaces: Conversations Within Communities. With a goal of fostering dialogue between Chicago citizens and Chicago writers, Conversations within Communities brings award-winning authors Mary Pattillo, Ronne Hartfield, Sally A. Kitt Chappell, Louise W. Knight and Stuart Dybek to the public square. Each author will be featured in free noontime lectures in the Millennium Room at the Chicago Cultural Center, followed by free evening readings at community sites throughout Chicago. All evening readings begin at 6:30 P.M.

For more information call 312.744.3315 or navigate to the city of Chicago's Great Chicago Places and Spaces website.

Read the press release.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
Posted by TXM at 02:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)