Yet another positive review of Erin Hogan's Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West appeared in last Saturday's Chicago Tribune. Spiral Jetta is part travel essay and part art critique, but it's the former that Tribune reviewer Ann Fabian focuses on. With her own daughter getting ready to head to Marfa, Texas, "to seek her fortune as an intern at the late Donald Judd's minimalist art mecca," Fabian found the autobiographical side of Hogan's book most useful:

Marfa was one of the sites that lured Erin Hogan out of Chicago and off on her auto pilgrimage to the big art of the West. It seems to draw folks (like Hogan and my daughter) worn down by city life. I had to read the book.…

We learn about Hogan. She has been working in Chicago too long. She needs to get out of town. She needs to learn to be alone. She heads west in her trusty Volkswagen Jetta, crosses the plains and lands in Utah. She spends the next week looking for art there and in Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.… She talks to men in a bar, loses her wallet under a chair in a hotel lobby, pitches a tent in a windstorm, visits a roadside attraction, drinks beer with some guys and drives her Jetta on rutty dirt roads.…

Hogan's trip is more like what would happen to most of us if we drove around the West to look at art. Motels would be ordinary. Bar food would be lousy. But nothing awful would happen. We might take some notes and write them up. Someone like me might read them and reassure a daughter heading to Marfa that Donald Judd's polished aluminum boxes do not disappoint.

Check out the full review online at the Chicago Tribune website. Also read an excerpt from the book and an interview with the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biography | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article today about the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria discussing, among other topics, a fascinating talk given by Professor Alan Liu—one of the leading theorists focusing on the intersection between digital technology and the humanities, and the author of several books on the subject including, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information and the forthcoming Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database. Writing for the Chronicle William Pannapacker takes note of Liu's talk for its examination of the increasing use of digital information resources like Wikipedia by students, and the problem of its limitations in terms of scholarly authority. Pannapacker writes:

Since it's clear enough that Wikipedia—and other sites based on reader-generated content—are too large and accessible to police themselves effectively, Liu argues that the responsibility for that policing should be adopted by the already existing structures of authority, including academe in particular.

I have to agree: We can't get our students into the libraries; we hardly go there ourselves anymore, as much as we might love them. The time has just about arrived when information that is not online does not exist for most people.…

Of course, Liu's presentation raises more questions than it answers: There are, after all, so many complications about the means by which credibility can be rated. We all know the peer-review system is not perfect.

But Liu's vision of a more public, collaborative, and service-oriented role for professors has considerable appeal to me, and it charts some of the steps that must now be taken into this new world of online knowledge production.

Read the full article online at the Chronicle website, then navigate to the website for the University of Victoria's Digital Humanities Institute to view the archived podcast of Liu's talk.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Film and Media | History and Philosophy of Science | Literature
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Yesterday the Chicago Distribution Center, a division of the University of Chicago Press and one of the nation's largest distributors of scholarly and professional books, issued a press release announcing an agreement with online content packager Tizra to begin selling subscriptions to online books. The University of Chicago Press itself will be one of the first of the CDC's clients to begin offering books online through the new service beginning later this summer. From the press release:

"We're delighted to be in the first group of CDC publishers piloting the CDC/Tizra online service," said Garrett Kiely, Director of the University of Chicago Press. "University of Chicago Press publications appeal to wide audiences: from general readers to educators and scholars. Our readers need to find us from wherever they are, with immediate access to the content they want. Tizra helps us meet that need."

To find out more read the press release, or see this article appearing in today's Publishers Weekly.

Archived in Commentary
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Though it might have passed under most peoples' radar, today, June 25, is the 142nd anniversary of Custer's Last Stand—one of the most important, and bloodiest, battles of the U.S. conquest of Native American territories. Marking the occasion, Michael A. Elliott, author of Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer, has an editorial in today's Los Angeles Times on the battle and the high levels of patriotic sentiment expressed by many Native Americans today, despite their legendary legacy of resistance. From Elliott's article:

The command of about 600 men Custer led into battle in 1876 included about 35 American Indians, mostly Arikaras but also six Crow and a few Santee Sioux. Some of the Indian scouts would die alongside the 7th Cavalry at Little Bighorn. Others would ride away as the fighting began and spend the rest of their lives recounting what little they saw of the battle. What almost no one knows is that men from the same tribes that fought against Custer would, one year later, be riding alongside the U.S. Army as scouts in the campaign against the Nez Perce—or that the Indian scouts who served the Army in the 19th century became one of the precursors to the Army Special Forces, also known as Green Berets.

This history means that patriotism is rarely simple in the Indian country of the American Plains. American Indian communities have some of the highest rates of enlistment in the U.S. military, yet their leaders also defend the principle of tribal sovereignty—which holds that the tribes should enjoy political and economic autonomy. So at the same time that they are sending men and women to fight on behalf of the United States, many American Indian communities continue to claim their independence from it.

Continue reading at the LA Times website. We have an excerpt from Elliot's Custerology.

Also, this fall we will publish Norman Maclean's unfinished work on Custer and the Little Bighorn in The Norman Maclean Reader.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Sociology
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Last week in the June 16 New York Times cultural critic Edward Rothstein had an interesting commentary on the New York Botanical Garden drawing on Robert Pogue Harrison's new book, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, to help him place the concept of the garden in the wider context of western history and demonstrate its enduring cultural and historical importance. Rothstein writes:

From medieval cloisters, botanical gardens made their way into universities, beginning with the University of Pisa in 1544. Later the garden's terrain expanded with botanical expeditions, oceanic trade and imperial adventures. Victorian botanical gardens could be encyclopedic in scope, arranging their displays according to Latin classifications of species by the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus.

Now, in our humid, dry, cooled or heated greenhouses, we shun such systematic display. Instead we replicate ecological niches, miniature worlds that supposedly show nature at work: the desert, the rainforest, the tropical pool. But peel back the environmental stagecraft, and the scientific cultivation continues with even greater passion…

There is something moving about the entire enterprise. In a remarkable new book, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, Robert Pogue Harrison (who wrote similar meditations on cemeteries and on forests) elicits some of the meanings that have accumulated around the idea of a garden, from myths, in which the chosen few "can possess the gift of their bodies without paying the price for the body's passions," to places like Versailles, which reflect "an aesthetic drive to tame, and even humiliate, nature into submission." In those royal gardens Mr. Harrison also finds the urge to encompass and incorporate and comprehend: "the militant humanism of the age."

Our age's humanism is much more modest. We are self-effacing to a fault. We don't seem to be taming nature, but to be permitting its full range of expression. We allow it to express multiple perspectives. We don't permit any habitat to dominate, and we defer to the demands of each. We seem to submit to nature. Of course we are creating images of ourselves.

Read the rest of the article online at the NYT website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | Classics | History | Literature | Philosophy | Religion
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We have posted about Erin Hogan's Spiral Jetta several times already, but we won't apologize for posting about it again. It's a delightful book and it's provoking some interesting reflections on land art. The latest is a thoughtful discussion on Ian Brown's CBC radio program Talking Books, with panelists Lawrence Weschler (director of the New York Institute for the Humanities), Monica Tap (a Toronto artist), and Tom Jokinen (a writer in Ottawa). It's an entertaining and insightful discussion: recommended.

A description of the episode is on Words at Large, a CBC Radio site for book-related programs. A link to the audio is on that page; we couldn't get that link to work, but went direct to the mp3 file.

We also have an excerpt and an interview with the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News
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In Cosmos, John North offers a sweeping overview of the two sciences that define our place in the universe: astronomy and cosmology. Cosmos moves from astronomy's prehistoric beginnings to its use by the great ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, the Americas, and Rome. The innovations of master astronomers is described in detail, along with modern-day developments such as the advent of radio astronomy, the brilliant innovations of Einstein, and the many recent discoveries made with the help of the Hubble telescope. This new edition brings North's seminal book right up to the present day, as North takes a closer look at last year's reclassification of Pluto as a "dwarf" planet and gives a thorough overview of current research.

Read the press release.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases
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In the second half of the program Irene Virag, garden columnist at Newsday and a writer for several gardening magazines, joined the discussion.

You may also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature | Philosophy
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The June 19 Times Higher Education contains reviews of both Andrea Weiss's In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story and William Davies King's new book Collections of Nothing. Writing for THE Robert Gillett praises Weiss's biography of Erika and Klaus Mann for its insightful look inside the lives of writer Thomas Mann's two oldest children, revealing them to be serious artists in their own right, and their extraordinary yet tragic lives a bellwether for the era in which they lived.

And in the same issue reviewer Erika Marie Bsumek comments on the deep psychological self-exploration at the heart of King's Collections of Nothing. Bsumek writes:

Despite the title of this book, King has collected something—and a lot of it. He has collected 44 varieties of tuna-fish labels, 276 varieties of water-bottle labels, and an unstated number of candy wrappers, bacon boxes, cigar bands, luggage tags, envelope liners, cereal boxes and more.

All of these things are meaningful to King, for to him they represent the psychological physicality of his life. Emotionally raw and intellectually honest, Collections of Nothing is part memoir and part chronicle of the human impulse to acquire things. King's own impulse pushes beyond simple acquisition, for he sees value in the things that others overlook. His collecting impulse began, in his own words, with a pre-teen desire to fill up the emptiness in his life and to become "a collector/hero" worthy of his own story.

Read the King review, and read the review of In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain online at the THE website.

We also have an excerpt from Weiss's book on our website.

Archived in Reviews
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Robert Pack is, in the words of Mark Strand, "one of America's most distinguished poets," and Harold Bloom has praised him as "a humane and eloquent poet who follows Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson in a major American tradition." A force in American poetry since the late 1950s, Pack delivers here his nineteenth book of verse, offering many of the elements that his devoted readers have come to admire and expect—both the humorous and the elegiac—while considering themes stretching from biblical concerns to meditations on contemporary science. As always, Pack's poetry, in styles ranging from lyric to narrative, is composed in strongly rhythmic cadences and a diction that is direct and accessible. Ripe with many years, Pack remains a vital presence in American letters, and the power of his poetry still abides. Still Here, Still Now is an affecting and graceful addition to the oeuvre of a poet whose compelling and distinct voice will continue to resonate.

Read the press release.

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This year is the 100th anniversary of the birth of African American author Richard Wright, whose famous novels Black Boy and Native Son redefined race relations in the 20th century. Appropriate to the occasion, the press released a new paperback edition of the authoritative biographical account of Wright's tumultuous life and literary career, Richard Wright: The Life and Times by Hazel Rowley. An illuminating article in the June 11 edition of the Times Literary Supplement references Rowley's book as it delivers a short biography of Wright, describing his rise and fall as one of the "stars" in the early twentieth century's "literary firmament," his complicated relationship to the civil rights movement, and the "hazards of his expatriation to France in the late 1940's." You can read the full article by James Campbell at the TLS Online. And then navigate here to find out more about Rowley's biography.

Archived in Biography | Black Studies | Literature | Reviews
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New in Paperback—Chicago. In the early twentieth century, the mere mention of the name conjured images of stockyards and steel mills, industry and immigration—a sooty mecca for industrialists and laborers who invented and built the American city. Fast-forward one hundred years and you find Chicago at the forefront of another revolution—this time leading the charge to green city spaces. Since 1989, hundreds of thousands of trees have been planted, miles of historic boulevards renovated, and "green roofs" built on over two hundred buildings. Through these efforts and others, Chicago is now known as an innovative force in a global urban greening movement.

Chicago's Urban Nature is a beautifully illustrated guide to the evolution of this green city. At the heart of "urban nature," Sally A. Kitt Chappell demonstrates, is the idea of connection, bringing together buildings and landscapes, culture and nature. With Chicago's Urban Nature in hand, you'll see those connections woven through the fabric of the city.

Read the press release.

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In today's edition of the New York Sun Eric Ormsby reviews two new histories of children's literature including Seth Lerer's new book, Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter. In the review Ormsby praises Lerer for his ability to capture the special role the iconic books of childhood play in the lives of young readers. Ormsby writes:

In Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter Seth Lerer notes that the history of children's books is a study "of books as valued things, crafted and held, lived with and loved." This fundamental insight gives a human touch to what might otherwise have been a dusty foray into long forgotten hornbooks and primers. But Mr. Lerer, a philologist by training — and professor of English at Stanford — loves words, as well as the books made from them, and he is an impassioned reader. Whether he's discussing the grim New England Primer of 1727 or the decisive impact of Darwinism on late-19th-century children's fiction, he has a keen sense of what he nicely calls "the pocket-worlds of childhood.…" As Mr. Lerer says, "the adventures of the child go on in secret spaces: in the purses, pockets, tills, and palms of life." The most successful children's books are those which capture something of that childhood sense of secrecy.

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

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Classics | History | Literature | Reviews
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Mary Pattillo, author of Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City was interviewed yesterday on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show to discuss the gentrification of urban African American communities.

Pattillo's book is an eye-opening sociological exploration of Chicago's North Kenwood–Oakland neighborhood and the community's embattled process of revitalization, where the often conflicting interests of the black middle-class, their less-fortunate neighbors, and the established centers of white economic and political power frame a dramatic tale of the transformation of black communities in the twenty-first century.

In the interview Pattillo touches on many of the issues discussed in her book and fields some interesting questions from WNYC listeners. Listen to the audio on the WNYC website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Black Studies | Chicago | History | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As we've been reminded by the recent outcry over the threat of destructive drilling near Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, the monumental works of land art in the American West have a powerful hold on fans of contemporary art. To Erin Hogan, their very remoteness and precariousness is a crucial part of their appeal—and she knew that to fully understand and appreciate the questions about scale, permanence, and the limits of human activity raised by such works, she would have to actually go see them in person. So in the autumn of 2004, Hogan threw some sunscreen and some sketchy directions into her Volkswagen Jetta and hit the road, leaving the comforts of the city behind and plunging headlong into the vast expanse of the great American desert. Spiral Jetta is the story of that 3,000-mile journey.

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt and an interview with the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Press Releases
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In last Saturday's edition of the Daily Telegraph Robert Douglas-Fairhurst reviewed The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York. In his review Douglas-Fairhurst gives a short overview of the social and historical significance of the "flash" papers—the nineteenth-century weeklies that covered and publicized New York City's extensive sexual underworld—touching on their appeal to readers in the UK and taking an amusing jab at one of the Telegraph's competitors:

"Flash" newspapers offered a titillating guide to the pleasures of urban life that had hitherto been spoken of only in hushed whispers: brothels, pornography, dog fights, playhouses, bare-knuckle boxing and more.

Crammed into a handful of closely printed pages was up-to-date gossip, sexual scandal, handy tips on how to avoid picking up a prostitute with a glass eye (the key, it seemed, was to avoid women wearing veils), and blustering attacks on anyone, such as immigrants or "sodomites", who might have threatened the developing group identity of these cocky young men about town.

By 1842, four rival publications in New York "squawked in competition" for their custom. Adventurous readers could use the Flash, the Whip, the Rake or the Libertine as a map to the seamy corners of a city that was often described, with pride and alarm, as "a modern Sodom.…"

The engagingly written introduction to this anthology argues plausibly that the flash press was the last occasion on which mainstream American journalism tried to titillate as well as entertain its readers.

For a British reader, the spectacle of writing that smacks its lips over the vices it claims to be disgusted by will seem far more familiar. It comes as no surprise, therefore, to discover that many of the most salacious stories printed in the flash press were taken from newspapers originally published in London.

Still, it is a nice historical coincidence that two of the New York papers from which the flash press evolved were called the Star and the Sun, just as it is fun to learn that one of the editors also started up a "frothy weekly with literary pretensions called the Sunday Times."

Read the full review on the Telegraph website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Law | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Newton Minow will be signing books and answering questions at a virtual booksigning this Saturday, June 14th, at 12 noon CDT. Minow is co-author with Craig L. LaMay of the recently released Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future.

The booksigning will be webcast from the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop at 357 West Chicago Avenue in Chicago. You may attend in person or online. The webcast will be available from VirtualBookSigning.net.

On our own site we revisit some of the memorable moments from presidential debates, supplemented with images and links to online videos where available. Nixon sweating, “I knew Jack Kennedy,” presidential scowls and more. We also have an excerpt about the first televised debate between Nixon and Kennedy.

If you're interested in how a virtual booksigning works, take a look at this program from Book-TV.

Archived in Author Events | Film and Media | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 09:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Derek S. Hyra, author of The New Urban Renewal: The Economic Transformation of Harlem and Bronzeville, was interviewed today on the BBC Radio 4 program Thinking Allowed. Host Laurie Taylor, on the ground in Harlem, interviewed Harlem residents and neighborhood leaders, as well as Hyra and other authors to understand both the history of Harlem and the "Second Harlem Renaissance" that is renewing and stressing the neighborhood.

Does gentrification bring upheaval or stability? Is change always good? Who are the winners and who are the losers?

The archived audio is available from the BBC.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Black Studies | Chicago | Sociology
Posted by DB at 04:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jonathan Rosen, editorial director of Nextbook, wrote an appreciative review of Robert Pogue Harrison's Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition for the June 7 edition of the Wall Street Journal. Titled "Paradox Among the Petals," the review begins:

The rabbis of the Talmud counseled that if you are planting a tree and someone tells you that the Messiah has come, you should finish planting your tree and then go out to investigate. Robert Pogue Harrison implies something similar in his rich and beguiling Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Gardens, though they offer peace and repose, are islands of care, he writes, not a refuge from it. That is why they are important, since care is what makes us human.

This is the third book by Harrison that we have published and each has been a meditation on humanity and the natural world. As a professor of Italian literature, Harrison's work is steeped in classical and modern literature, but as the quote above suggests, he also draws deeply from the religious and philosophical traditions. His previous books include The Dominion of the Dead and Forests: The Shadow of Civilization.

Update June 11: Gardens was also reviewed in today's New York Sun by Eric Ormsby.

You may read an excerpt from Gardens.

Archived in Literature | Philosophy | Religion | Reviews
Posted by DB at 02:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?" asked Jack Kerouac. Erin Hogan was going on a solitary tour of the monumental land art of the American West. She says in an interview Saturday in the Salt Lake Tribune that she re-read Kerouac and "definitely felt like I was involving myself in the Great American Road saga."

Reporter Julie Checkoway wonders: why visit land art?

Land art is this arena you walk into, and it changes your sense of space and time. The people who made it were trying to set up a different experience, giving us something. I wanted to experience that, a surprising built environment. But really, the book is mostly a road book. Yeah, I meditate on Michael Fried and the theatricality of landscape, but I'd like to think that someone who didn't study art history like I did would encounter something very beautiful in Spiral Jetty.

Update June 11: Erin Hogan is also interviewed today on ArtInfo.

We have an excerpt from the Spiral Jetty section of the book as well as our own interview with Hogan.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
Posted by DB at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

• Erin Hogan, author of Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West was interviewed by host Sam Weller on WBEZ Chicago's Hello Beautiful! last Sunday to discuss her experiences traveling to remote locations in the American west to visit the monumental land art of the 1970s and 1980s—works like Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels, and Walter De Maria's Lightning Field. You can catch the archived audio on the Chicago Public Radio website. The press also features our own interview with Hogan and an excerpt from her book on our website.

• Richard Cahan, coauthor with Mark Jacobs of Chicago under Glass: Early Photographs from the Chicago Daily News, appeared on the May 28 edition of the ABC World News Webcast. The book includes more than 250 images taken from the archives of the Chicago Daily News dating from 1901-1930, providing a rare glimpse at life in Chicago during one of the most exciting and tumultuous periods in its history. Online video featuring some of the photographs along with some interesting commentary from Cahan is available on the ABC News website.

• Charles Hersch, author of Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans, appeared on Cleveland's public radio station WCPN on the show Around Noon on May 28. Listen to Hersch reading an excerpt over some classic New Orleans jazz and fielding some interesting questions from WCPN's online music director Bobby Jackson on the WCPN website.

• Finally, the Oceana blog has a short blurb about a new exhibit opening at the World Trade Organization, The Deep: Life on the Deep Sea Floor, curated by French journalist and author Claire Nouvian. Nouvian authored, The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss, a fascinating photographic exploration of the deep sea. The exhibit at the WTO, and another which recently closed at the Natural History Museum of Paris, feature many of the same fascinating images featured in the book. You can still check out a fun website made for the exhibit at the Natural History Museum of Paris here, or see our website for the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
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It's time for another Printers Row Book Fair! This weekend June 7-8 from 10am until 6 pm the Printers Row Book Fair, the Midwest's largest literary event, will feature scores of author readings and discussion panels, over one hundred booksellers and exhibitors, and a variety of other fun events for the whole family. Among this year's lineup of University of Chicago Press authors making appearances at the event are:

Richard Cahan and Mark Jacob, authors of Chicago under Glass: Early Photographs from the Chicago Daily News.

Erin Hogan, author of Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West.

Joel Greenberg, author of Of Prairie, Woods, and Water: Two Centuries of Chicago Nature Writing.

Peggy MacNamara, author and illustrator of Architecture by Birds and Insects: A Natural Art.

Newton Minow and Craig LaMay, authors of Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future.

Jonathan Kern, author of Sound Reporting: The NPR Guide to Audio Journalism and Production.

Anne Whiston Spirn, author of Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field.

Gerald Rosenberg, author of The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? Second Edition.

Seth Lerer, author of Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter.

For times and locations navigate to our author events page, or see the Chicago Tribune's official Printers Row Book Fair website for the complete schedule.

The University of Chicago Press will also be exhibiting at the Fair with a fine selection of books for general readers, books about Chicago, and books by authors appearing at the Fair. The Press tent will be at the corner of Congress and Dearborn.

Archived in Author Events
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San Francisco Chronicle reporter Susan Fornoff recently talked with Stanford University professor Robert Pogue Harrison about his new book, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Harrison uses gardens both literally and figuratively for a philosophical exploration from antiquity to the present, showing the connections between horticultural cultivation and the cultivation of the human mind. Fornoff's engaging article appeared today in the Chronicle and discusses gardening, the culture of consumption, and human happiness:

Harrison's … excursion through literature and history revealed a gardening ethic of care that the garden he tends at Stanford University—that of young minds, not plant seedlings—leads him to believe is in some jeopardy.

"This gardening ethic is very much in danger these days, where the emphasis on cultivation has given way to an emphasis on consumption," says Harrison, asserting that a Stanford student would be more inclined to inspect another's backyard on HGTV than to investigate one of the many campus gardens.

"We live in a kind of frenzy of consumerism which forgets that the true source of human happiness is not in the consuming but in the cultivation, in seeing something grow, or caring for something that is not yourself. And I don't know how much we teach the young this ethic of caring for something that is not yourself. Or even caring for things such as an object or a plant. Consumption and cultivation are at war with each other.

If I have any modest expectation for the book, it's just to try to help add to the awareness that consumerism is not a very promising formula for happiness."

The Chronicle article is illustrated with some photos of Kingscote Garden on the grounds of Stanford University, a secret treasure of a garden which Harrison imagines as "the quietly palpitating heart of the university."

Closer to home, Chicago Tribune critic Julia Keller describes herself as "completely besotted" by "this extraordinary, luminous book." Says Keller:

The author has a knack for elucidating complex thoughts with supple skill, so that you never feel lectured to or belittled. His book is sprinkled with references to classic literature, from the Bible to Homer's Odyssey to John Milton's Paradise Lost to Dante's Divine Comedy, but Harrison is such a wonderful teacher that even works you might not know so well go down easy, like the first swallow of chilled lemonade after a hot afternoon spent yanking weeds.

We also have an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Literature | Philosophy | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 03:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The June issue of Downbeat Magazine is running a positive review of George Lewis's new book A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music—the definitive history of one of the most influential avant-garde jazz collectives in existence, the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Writing for Downbeat jazz critic Howard Mandel begins his review:

George Lewis's epic history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians sets a new standard for scholarly writing about the people who make Great Black Music, or any other kind. A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, interweaves interviews with 67 of Lewis's AACM colleagues, select journalistic reports and theoretical writings with the perspective of a trusted insider across a societal portrait worthy of Tolstoy. Lewis dramatizes the story of independent, underfinanced, determined, sophisticated artists from a working-class minority subculture struggling to launch an esthetic movement that emphasizes individuality, continuous exploration and personal development in a world that could hardly care less.

Downbeat magazine seems to be having some technical difficulties with their website, but for now you can read the full unedited version on Howard Mandel's blog Jazz Beyond Jazz.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Black Studies | Chicago | History | Music | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nothing banishes winter's lethargy more quickly than that first sight of the green of spring, as trees bud and our gardens, once again, burst into glorious bloom. For Robert Pogue Harrison, it's not just the depths of winter that gardens help us escape: throughout human history, gardens—both real and imagined—have been essential places of refuge and comfort in the face of a harsh, often violent world.

Employing the richly learned and allusive approach that he brought to his classics, Forests and The Dominion of the Dead, Harrison explores here the central importance of the human urge to nurture and cultivate gardens. Beginning with ancient conceptions of the garden as a place for the quiet work of self-improvement that is crucial to serenity and enlightenment, Harrison then travels widely through the history of Western culture. Enlisting such varied thinkers and writers as Voltaire and Calvino, Boccaccio and Arendt, Harrison profoundly demonstrates the role the garden has long played as a necessary, humanizing check against the degradation and losses of history.

Read the press release.

Archived in Anthropology | Classics | History | Literature | Philosophy | Press Releases | Religion
Posted by TXM at 01:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday the New York Times Sunday Book Review featured an excellent piece on Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz's The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York—a fascinating exhumation and examination of the weekly periodicals that covered and publicized nineteenth-century New York City's extensive sexual underworld. Novelist Nicholson Baker writes for NYTBR:

Cohen, Gilfoyle and a third writer, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz have together produced The Flash Press, the first book-length survey of this strange rock-pool of 1840s profligacy. Readers of Kurt Andersen's recent historical novel Heyday—and indeed everyone interested in knowing what New York City was like before the Civil War—will want to have a peek. The authors have managed to unearth and collate a remarkable amount of enriching detail about a curiously fleshy moment in the history of New York publishing.

Nicholson concludes his review:

Thanks to… the meticulous research of these three scholars, we once again have a way of looking through a tiny, smudged window into New York's long-past illicit life. Oh, and the drawing of the chambermaid and her warming pan is on Page 101.

Read the full review. NYT writer Jennifer Schuessler has a posting on the Paper Cuts blog about the book. We have three excerpts from the flash press on our website.

Archived in History | Law | Literature | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter, Seth Lerer tells us the bedtime story of Western culture's obsession with books for the young. He traces the transformative power of literature across centuries, from the moralizing allegories of antiquity to the swashbuckling epics of the nineteenth century and the acerbic self-awareness of Judy Blume and Weetzie Bat.

Written with the panoramic scope of a distinguished scholar and the affection of a parent and avid reader, Children's Literature reminds us of the sublime power of books in an era when videogames, MySpace, and text messaging compete for the free time of our youth.

Read the press release.

Archived in Classics | History | Literature | Press Releases | Reference and Writing
Posted by TXM at 01:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

New in paperback—Although airports are now best known for interminable waits at check-in counters, liquid restrictions for carry-on luggage, and humiliating shoe-removal rituals at security, they were once the backdrops for jet-setters who strutted, martinis in hand, through curvilinear terminals designed by Eero Saarinen. In the critically acclaimed Naked Airport, Alastair Gordon traces the cultural history of this defining institution from its origins in the muddy fields of flying machines to its frontline position in the struggle against international terrorism.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)