When you think of the Harlem Renaissance, who comes to mind? Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes? W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey? Whoever it is, chances are that it’s not Alain Locke, despite his deep influence on these and countless other key figures and his definitive anthology The New Negro, from which the movement took its name. Locke’s life story has languished untold until now, but Alain L. Locke—the first biography of this extraordinarily gifted thinker and architect of the Harlem Renaissance—finally reclaims his rightful place in the pantheon of America’s most important minds. In this engaging account, Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth trace Locke’s life and times through his Philadelphia upbringing, his undergraduate years at Harvard—where William James helped spark his influential engagement with pragmatism—and his tenure as the first African American Rhodes Scholar. The heart of their narrative illuminates Locke’s heady years in 1920s New York City and his forty-year career at Howard University, where he helped spearhead the adult education movement of the 1930s and wrote on topics ranging from the philosophy of value to the theory of democracy.

An enthusiastic interlocutor and promoter of cultural figures from John Dewey to Jacob Lawrence, Locke emerges as a brilliant philosopher and a fierce champion of literature and art as means of breaking down barriers between communities—commitments that remain instructive as we continue to sort through our nation’s tangled cultural and political legacies.

Read the press release.

Archived in Press Releases
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William Davies King, author of Collections of Nothing, was the featured guest for a call-in session this Monday on NPR's Talk of the Nation. In the show, Davies discusses his unusual passion for collecting, and what's even more unusual, his passion for collecting items that most would consider junk. Davies describes his habit as a way of coping with difficulties in his life and a profound meditation on how and why we value things the way we do—and listening to the callers describe their own peculiar collections, apparently he's not the only one. Listen to King's radio appearance, and read an excerpt from his book on the NPR website.

Also, read another excerpt and an essay by the author on the press's site.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature
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It was a quiet holiday week here in Chicago. The president-elect went on vacation and the governor seems to have stayed off the telephone. The most exciting thing, really, was the weather: bitter cold, a blizzard, a temperature climb of 60 degrees, lots of rain and flooding. No wonder they call Chicago a meteorologist's nightmare. Or should.

What's been in the news? Ha Jin's The Writer as Migrant—his meditation on language, migration, and the place of literature in a rapidly globalizing world—has turned up everywhere. In the Washington Post, in the Times Higher Education, and on the Bookslut blog. Francine Prose writes for the Post:

In The Writer as Migrant, the Chinese-born Ha Jin, whose novel Waiting won the National Book Award in 1999, discusses the ways in which nationality and culture, exile and emigration affect the course of a writer's life and career, and influence the work he produces. He considers the cases, at once exemplary and unique, of Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov, who both wrote in a second language (as he does), and of others, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, forced to leave their native land, causing a rupture from which they never fully recovered.…

[The book demands] to be read slowly, and savored. You may find yourself pausing frequently to think about some especially trenchant observation and to reflect on the generosity and intelligence with which these writers help us understand what makes us different from, and similar to, the people with whom we co-exist on our endlessly fascinating, precious and increasingly populated world.

The Terezín Album of Mariánka Zadikow—an facsimile edition of an keepsake album Zadikow kept in the Terezín (Theresienstadt) concentration camp—also garnered some holiday attention. The Jewish Exponent says it is "a remarkable document … beautifully reconstructed."

Archived in Reviews
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Okay, so maybe you're not as ambitious as the recent Southern California group that, to celebrate the first day of Hanukkah, made the world's largest latke cooked by a solar oven. For equally delicious but smaller-scale potato pancakes, you might try this delicious recipe culled from The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate. (There's also a hamantashen recipe, if that's the side on which you find yourself in said debate.)

But, of course, the book's main attractions are not the recipes but the performances by members of elite American academies who attack the latke-versus-hamantash question with intellectual panache and an unerring sense of humor, if not chutzpah. This great latke-hamantash debate, occurring every November for the past six decades, brings Nobel laureates, university presidents, and notable scholars together to debate whether the potato pancake or the triangular Purim pastry is in fact the worthier food. What began as an informal gathering at the University of Chicago is now an institution that has been replicated on campuses nationwide.

If you didn't make your local debate this year, you can have a taste of what you missed by reading (or listening to) Ted Cohen's “Consolations of the Latke”—or, of course, by giving yourself a copy for Hannukah.

Archived in Books for the News | Chicago
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Conor Cruise O'Brien, Irish intellectual, politician, diplomat, writer, critic, professor, journalist, historian, and playwright, died yesterday in Dublin at the age of 91. He had been in ill health since suffering a stroke in 1998.

The scope of O'Brien's life and career can only be gestured at in this space. He was a special representative to Dag Hammarskjöld, secretary-general of the United Nations, in the Congo crisis of 1961. He was chancellor of the University of Ghana as well as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New York University. He was Ireland's Minister for Posts and Telegraphs. He was editor-in-chief of the London-based newspaper the Observer. At the age when most retire from work, he taught and lectured at numerous universities around the world. And throughout he wrote many books.

The University of Chicago Press is honored to have published:

• The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke, which historian Paul Johnson described as "a book by the greatest living Irishman on the greatest Irishman who ever lived."
• The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800, which critic Richard Brookhiser said "should be read by anyone interested in Jefferson—or in a good fight."
• Ancestral Voices: Religion and Nationalism in Ireland, in which O'Brien draws his own life experiences to interpret Ireland's past and present, its conflicts, politics, and "sacred nationalism."

Archived in Books for the News | History
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The Bible famously states that Christians cannot serve both God and mammon, and that it is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a pin than for a rich man to enter heaven. But clearly, believers, as well as non-believers, benefited from the economic boom years just as surely as they’ve felt the pinch since the collapse. But how can Christian thought help us better understand the recession? To answer this question, we turned to religion and economic scholar Stewart Davenport, whose recent book, Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon: Northern Christians and Market Capitalism, 1815–1860 examines how antebellum Protestants reconciled their faith with the developing American economy.

The Economic Crisis: What Would Jesus Do?

To begin, I’d like to point out the folly of asking this question in the first place. “What would Jesus do?”—although a catchy slogan—is obviously not a substantive ethical question. “WWJD?” makes for good bracelets to sell to teenagers, in other words, but is thoroughly inadequate for the serious reflection of complex ethical dilemmas. I only wanted to include it in the title here so I could have the opportunity to distance myself from it. In what follows I will briefly explain why, and then move on to what I hope are the real options for understanding our current economic climate from the perspective of Christian faith.

As one who takes the incarnation seriously—that Jesus lived in a particular historical place and a particular historical time for a particular theological purpose—“WWJD?” is nearly nonsensical. We simply don’t know what Jesus would do when faced with options that are unique to our modern historical moment. Should I drive an SUV? WWJD? Should I invest in the S&P 500? WWJD? Should I pay for piano lessons for my children or give the money to UNICEF? WWJD? We do not know and cannot speculate, and are in dangerous territory when we—or anyone else for that matter—claim to have iron-clad categorical answers to these thoroughly modern questions.

The same is true for the Christian’s ethical evaluation of global capitalism—an evaluation that always becomes more salient and more focused in times of crisis like the present. While the Bible clearly and consistently sides with the poor and disparages the rich, it has very little to say about whole economic systems—for better or for worse. What the ethical seeker is left with therefore are general evaluative guidelines and not simple answers. The Christian realist Reinhold Niebuhr similarly reached the “general conclusion that there is no ‘Christian’ economic or political system.” Rather, he spoke of “a Christian attitude toward all systems” consisting of one part theological skepticism and one part earthy acceptance. In other words, Christians should hold at arm’s length all economic and political systems and ask “whether they will contribute to justice in a concrete situation.” But this distancing does not mean that Christians should entirely eschew such systems just because they do not (and never will) contribute to justice perfectly. In other words (and this is Christian realism encapsulated), the right answer is somewhere in the messy middle—avoiding on the one hand the ugly triumphalism that comes when believers mistake a political or economic system for the Kingdom of God; but also avoiding the quixotic self-righteousness of those who never deign to be involved in the often dirty affairs of the world. Such is the life of the Christian pilgrim, and such is the stance Christians should adopt toward the world of filthy lucre and global capitalism. We are undeniably in-between, working out our salvation with fear and trembling in the imperfect economic landscape of the 401k, the S&P 500, CNBC, and the regular booms and busts of the business cycle.

This brings us to the present global economic crisis, where hopefully some lessons from history will prove illuminating. Like today, the stock market collapse of 1929 and the financial Panic of 1837 had both individual and systemic causes. On the personal level, in all three instances, greed-driven investors over-inflated the market. In 1837 it was speculation in the lands of the American West; in 1929 it was the seemingly unstoppable stock market; and most recently it has been in real estate. So in this sense, it is true that we have reaped what we have sown, and we are suffering perhaps rightly for our past sins of avarice. But it also true that each of these economic contractions is not just the bad fruit that results after greed gone wild. Bad policy has its role to play as well. In 1837 it was President Andrew Jackson’s Specie Circular. In 1929 it was uninsured banks lending to market speculators, followed by the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Today, it appears to be the deceitful and unregulated practice of “bundling” mortgages for sale to investment banks, in addition to the well-intentioned but now clearly disastrous desire to increase low-income home ownership by lowering lending standards, thus swelling beyond systemic capacity the ranks of sub-prime borrowers.

So what is the earnest Christian to make of all this? After much reflection I have come to the conclusion that it is best to think about capitalism in the way that Winston Churchill thought about democracy—that it is the worst system except for all the others. Clearly it has not ushered in a paradise on earth, but neither is it an unmitigated hell, even in tough times such as these. Imperfect? Yes. Improvable? Yes. Replaceable? Not really—at least this side of glory. It is also worth pointing out that while our real hope should be in more than a resurgent market (“in Dow we trust”), these painful contractions do not last forever, and that just as other recessions and even depressions have ended, so too will this one. All we have to do is be patient—and who knows, maybe that is what Jesus would do.

Archived in Economics | History and Philosophy of Science | Religion
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A prominent promoter of Darwin in Germany, Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) was a pioneering biologist in his own right: he gave currency to the idea of the "missing link" between apes and man, formulated the concept of ecology, and promulgated the "biogenetic law"—the idea that the embryo of an advanced species recapitulates the stages the species went through in its evolutionary descent. But today, with detractors ranging from paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould to modern-day creationists and advocates of Intelligent Design, Haeckel is dogged by accusations of forgery and unfortunate associations with National Socialism. The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought aims to rehabilitate this tattered reputation, and, as the Times Literary Supplement noted earlier this year, "[Robert J.] Richards suceeds brilliantly in re-establishing Haeckel as a significant scientist and a major figure in the history of evolutionary thought."

In the field, a sketch pad was as essential to Haeckel as a microscope, and his extraordinary scientific illustrations—of undulating siphonophorae and crouched embryos—remain icons of biological art. And, at least according to John Holbo over at Crooked Timber, they are perfect for seasons greetings. Holbo has created a Flickr gallery featuring manipulations of plates from Haeckel's 1904 Kunstformen der Natur [Artforms of Nature] bathed in green and red, complete with charming lines of holiday cheer. And he even has set up a Cafepress store. For the evolutionary biologist in your life, might I suggest sending a card featuring a yule discomedusa with a copy of, naturally, The Tragic Sense of Life? Happy holidays!

Archived in Biology | Commentary
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Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature, delivered his Nobel Lecture on December 7th at the Swedish Academy, Stockholm. Navigate to www.Nobelprize.org to view video from the lecture (French language only) or download an English translation in PDF. The lecture begins:

Why do we write? I imagine that each of us has his or her own response to this simple question. One has predispositions, a milieu, circumstances. Shortcomings, too. If we are writing, it means that we are not acting. That we find ourselves in difficulty when we are faced with reality, and so we have chosen another way to react, another way to communicate, a certain distance, a time for reflection. If I examine the circumstances which inspired me to write—and this is not mere self-indulgence, but a desire for accuracy—I see clearly that the starting point of it all for me was war.

The site also features a variety of other media including an interview with Le Clézio , a video clip of the author reading from one of his novels, and a photo gallery.

In 1993 the Press published Le Clézio's The Mexican Dream: Or, The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilizations, translated into English by Teresa Lavendar Fagan. Le Clézio's haunting book takes its readers deep into the religion of the Aztecs, powerfully evoking the dreams that made and unmade their ancient culture.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature
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President-elect Obama's nomination of Arne Duncan as Education Secretary has put U.S. education policy—and educational reform in the Chicago system—in the national and international spotlight.

With all the global tumult in the news, these headlines will, inevitably, recede, but our growing list of education titles will sustain anyone's continuing interest in education and the people for whom it's not a passing news story but a way of life. Dan C. Lortie's Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study, for example, has been dubbed one of the best portraits available of the world and culture of this vitally important profession. And we are excited to announce that, this spring, Lortie will follow up his classic text with School Principal: Managing in Public, a compelling look at what principals do, how they do it, and why. Examining a third group of people vital to children's education, Parents and Schools: The 150-Year Struggle for Control in American Education is an invaluable guide to understanding how parent-teacher cooperation, which is essential for our children's educational success, might be achieved.

And if your interest in education runs deep enough that you choose to pursue it as a career? We publish a slew of books in curriculum and methodology as well as Requirements for Certification, the most complete and current listings of the requirements for certification of a wide range of educational professionals at the elementary and secondary levels.

Archived in Books for the News | Education
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Author Neil Harris appeared yesterday evening on WFMT's Critical Thinking with Andrew Patner for the first of two conversations about his new book, The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age. You can catch the second part of the conversation on WFMT next Monday, December 22. But until then, listen to the archived audio from yesterday's show and after each broadcast from the Critical Thinking webpage.

The Windy City's lost counterpart to the New Yorker, the Chicagoan sought to transform the city's reputation for organized crime, political mayhem, and industrial squalor by demonstrating the presence of style and sophistication in the Midwest. But after nine years of publication that straddled the roaring 20s and the Great Depression, the magazine folded and was forgotten. Now, Harris's book, featuring a stunning collection of articles, illustrations, and covers, resurrects the magazine in all its brilliance offering a window into one of the most exciting chapters in the city's history.

Also, read an interview with the author, see a gallery of covers and illustrations from the magazine and sample pages in PDF (7mb) from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Chicago | History
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With the publication of Sleeping Beauty: A One-Artist Dictionary, the University of Chicago Press is proud to announce Project Tango, a new series of experimental collaborations between artists and writers. Exploding the traditional dynamic of the artist's relationship with the critic, Sleeping Beauty inaugurates a genuine dialogue, in which the interlocutors have equal agency. This conversation tests the limits of creative collaboration, bringing new ideas to the process of making books and expanding the possibilities of the medium.

Here, for example, Mieke Bal contributes twenty-six essays—one for each letter of the alphabet—which borrow their organizing principle from the dictionary but reach far beyond the utilitarian purpose of a reference work. Each one enters deeply into John Sparagana's art, illuminating concepts from Abstract to Zestful that inform, underlie, and lend meaning to the exquisitely ruined images he creates by crinkling glossy images from fashion magazines until their sheen disappears and they become soft and elastic. The images, for their part, speak back through Sparagana's unique process of subtraction, which physically rubs away not only ink and material, but also transience and commercial usefulness. The result is an extraordinary first step in Project Tango's unchoreographed dance. We can't wait to see where it leads us.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Press Releases
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More than 300,000 veterans of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or other major depression and an estimated 550 to 650 commit suicide every month. In the fall issue of The Virgina Quarterly Review, Ashley Gilbertson, award-winning photographer and author of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War , zooms in on one young man who comprises part of that terrifying statistic. "The Life and Lonely Death of Noah Pierce" examines the suicide of a twenty-three-year-old Iraq vet who took his life with a handgun in July 2007. VQR's Waldo Jaquith interviewed Gilbertson about what it's like to write about and photograph difficult topics. The audio can be heard here.

Gilbertson's reporting is not the only notable achievement in that issue of the VQR. Time magazine recently announced its list of the top ten magazine covers of 2008 and the Fall issue, featuring Gilberston's portrait of Pierce's sister's tattooed shoulder, made the cut. The art director of Time, Arthur Hochstein, had this to say about the cover:

Often cited by professional organizations for its content, The Virginia Quarterly Review also has consistently inventive covers. One of its secrets is the simple, strong format, which never varies from issue to issue. This particular cover isolates, for maximum effect, the stark black-and-white photo of a woman sleeping, dreamily out of focus. In focus is a tattoo on her shoulder of her deceased brother, who committed suicide after his second tour of duty in Iraq. And this focal shift turns reality inside-out: The dead victim is vivid and alive in the dream of his sister, whose life may have lost focus because of her profound loss. Regardless of one's position on the Iraq War, this is a searingly sad cover that provokes equal parts sympathy and outrage.

For more from Gilbertson, check out more of his work featured in the VQR and a website devoted to WTF.

Archived in Commentary
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The December 10 edition of the Nation contains a fascinating article about the long and colorful history of New Orleans that enlists Shannon Lee Dawdy's new book Building the Devil's Empire: French Colonial New Orleans to help explain how New Orleans acquired it's "rogue character" and became the unique, multicultural city we know today. Joshua Jelly-Schapiro writes for the Nation:

Effectively abandoned by the French crown in 1731, the colony was governed from that time by local elites, its levee becoming a bustling free-for-all of traders peddling everything from Mississippi furs to Martinique sugar and Mexican ceramics and maize. New Orleans's reputation as a low swamp of race-mixing and sin was present from the start and—as Shannon Lee Dawdy shows in Building the Devil's Empire, her penetrating study of the colony's founding—cited frequently as the explanation for its "failure."

In French New Orleans, "smuggling not only helped fill the gaps of collapsed mercantilism," Dawdy writes, "it was the basis of the local political economy.…" Dawdy shows clearly how Nouvelle-Orléans—with its intra-American trade and tenuous ties to the metropole—became, by the 1740s, a self-consciously Creole place.… That Creole identity informed France's decision to let the estranged colony go, as Louis XV handed it off to his cousin Carlos III and Spain, who in 1768 encountered a Creole revolt—a sign that this "rogue colony" (Dawdy's phrase) would not be an easy rule.

Continue reading on the Nation's website.

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | History | Sociology
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The New York Times reports today that president elect Barack Obama has chosen Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, for the position of energy secretary in his new administration. The Times article quotes Scott Segal, director of an industry group called the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council saying: "[Chu's] experience seems to dovetail perfectly with the president-elect's commitment to bringing new energy technology to market in a timely fashion… An understanding of the art of the possible in energy technology will be critical to the development of a cost-effective climate change policy."

But while Chu might be garnering positive publicity now, it wasn't so long ago that he was at the center of a heated controversy at Berkeley concerning his support of a deal with British Petroleum to provide partial funding for a new Energy Biosciences Institute that would grant the company unprecedented rights to the intellectual property it produces. A 2007 article about the deal for the Chronicle of Higher Education quotes Daniel S. Greenberg, author of Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism saying "universities have been so eager to enter into business deals with industry, they will do quite stupid things." Critics of the deal have also raised concerns over "whether the biofuels institute will be too influenced by BP's corporate agenda.…" According to the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights "because four of the eight seats on the governing board will be controlled by BP, the company can block proposed research from going forward." Proponents however argue that BP's support will significantly boost research aimed at the production of new and cleaner energy and get those technologies more quickly into the hands of consumers. Now, with Chu in a prime position to further enmesh the private and public spheres in planning for the nation's energy future, one can only speculate as to how high the stakes in the debate have been raised.

For more on the controversial role modern scientists play in transforming knowledge into power and profit checkout some of Greenberg's other books including Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion or The Politics of Pure Science.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Perhaps the only person mentioned as frequently as Rod Blagojevich in the deluge of news about our governor's alleged political crime spree is Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney prosecuting the case. Most recently in the news for prosecuting Dick Cheney's former aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Fitzgerald's investigation of Blagojevich has made him the subject of several recent profiles, which refer to him in such terms as a "folk hero in a state beleaguered by official crime" and "totally and completely dedicated." Some of the stories even speculate that Fitzgerald could become the chief of the Justice Department's Criminal Division, the deputy attorney general, or the next FBI director after Robert Mueller's term ends.

All this reminded us that in addition to (and probably because of) its now-worldwide reputation for political corruption, our state also has a long history of launching the prominent careers of corruption fighters. Illinois Justice: The Scandal of 1969 and the Rise of John Paul Stevens tells the story of one such rise to fame.

Expertly narrating this dramatic tale, Kenneth Manaster begins in 1969, when citizen gadfly Sherman Skolnick accused the chief justice and another Illinois Supreme Court justice of accepting valuable bank stock from an influential Chicago lawyer in exchange for deciding an important case in the lawyer's favor. The feverish media coverage that resulted—a scandalous story in its own right, as Manaster reveals—prompted the state supreme court to appoint a special commission to investigate. Within six weeks and on a shoestring budget, the commission gathered a small volunteer staff and revealed the true facts. Stevens, then a relatively unknown Chicago lawyer, served as chief counsel. His work on this investigation would launch him into the public spotlight and, eventually, onto the Supreme Court.

So how will Fitzgerald's story proceed? The New York Times notes that "partly because of the long history of corruption cases in Chicago, United States attorneys there have often been more prominent than in most cities. Some have used the post as a step to the governor's mansion or other political perches. But friends say that Mr. Fitzgerald … is a natural for pursuing criminals."

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In early December, the Village Voice asked a panel of literary heavyweights (Ethan Hawke notwithstanding) to opine on their favorite obscure book. Robert Pinsky's selection was a book called Caelica from "the greatest poet unknown to many readers," Fulke Greville. In addition to being, as Pinsky notes, "an upper-class Englishman with a funny name," (or, in your correspondent's humble opinion, a moniker ripe for filching by a newly-formed indie rock band) Greville (1554–1628) was an important member of the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Although his poems, long out of print, are today less well known than those of Sidney, Spenser, or Shakespeare, Greville left an indelible mark on the world of Renaissance poetry, both in his love poems, which ably work within the English Petrarchan tradition, and in his religious meditations, which, along with the work of Donne and Herbert, stand as a highpoint of early Protestant poetics.

Pinsky, who, in addition to his many and varied achievements, including a stint as United States poet laureate and a cameo on The Simpsons, is a University of Chicago Press author (his Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town will be published this Spring), will undoubtedly be delighted to know Greville may find his elusive audience at last. In April, the Press will publish in paperback The Selected Poems of Fulke Greville, edited and with an introduction by Thom Gunn and a new afterword by Bradin Cormack, which includes the whole of the lyric sequence, Caelica. Back in print for a new generation of scholars and readers, Gunn's selection of Greville's short poems, along with choruses from some of Greville's verse dramas, and his thoughtful introduction to the poet is an event of the first order that is certain to rescue Greville from the ranks of the obscure.

There's more Gunn on our spring list, as well. At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn, edited by Joshua Weiner, brings together essays (including one from Pinsky) that explore Gunn's pressure on the boundaries of different kinds, be they geographic, sexual, or poetic, in both his life and his work. And in our Phoenix Poets, Randall Mann imagines Breakfast with Thom Gunn.

Whether you are seeking an overlooked sixteenth century bard or a twentieth-century gay literary icon, our Spring list will satisfy all.

Archived in Commentary | Literature | Poetry
Posted by at 02:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Set in the tumultuous Los Angeles of 1968, Romain Gary's novel White Dog is the French writer's fictional memoir of his ill-fated attempt to re-train a lost police K9 programmed to respond visciously to the sight of black men. Offering a unique and insightful critique of racism in America, the book was originally published in 1970 and reissued in 2004 by the Press.

The book was adapted for a 1982 feature film directed by Samuel Fuller. But due the controversial subject matter, it was initially withheld from release. Now the Criterion Collection has released a remastered DVD of the film it calls a "throat-grabbing exposé on American racism" and "a tragic portrait of the evil done by that most corruptible of animals: the human being." To find out more about the film navigate to the Criterion Collection's website, or experience Gary's groundbreaking work in its purest form by picking up a copy of the book.

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | Fiction
Posted by TXM at 01:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On November 23, 2008, the long-awaited new album by Guns N’ Roses, Chinese Democracy, was finally released. Over its decade-and-a-half gestational period, the mythic album devolved into the butt of many jokes, and Axl Rose, the legendary GN’R front man, frequently corn-rowed and bloated, ascended to the high chair in the pantheon of monomania. We asked our resident expert on all things obsessional, Lennard J. Davis, author of the new book Obsession: A History where Axl ranks with the great obsessive artists of all time. Here’s what he had to say:

The 15-year run of suspense is over. Guns N’ Roses fans, and anyone who has followed the release of “Chinese Democracy,” Axl Rose’s grand obsession, can now buy the album. But the general consensus is that after all the obsessive work, perfectionism, and endless tinkering Rose has brought forth an over-worked and over-produced misadventure, with a hash of lyrics and every instrument and musical style in the world rolled into one mediocre album. In the course of his compulsive perfectionism, Rose went through three recording studios, four producers, and a slew of musicians. In doing so he ran up more than $13 million in production costs, making his album the most expensive recording never released.

In some ways, we might regard this as the latest act of a tortured genius in the great tradition of other tortured geniuses. The nineteenth century abounded with them, from Captain Ahab and his obsessive quest of his white whale to Frenhofer, Balzac’s tortured painter, and Claude Lantier, Emile Zola’s novelistic representation of Cezanne. What these driven people have in common is the desire to create, to capture, and to produce something extraordinary. And yet, they all end up ruining the thing they want and destroying themselves in the process.

Balzac’s Frenhofer works laboriously and endlessly on one painting in secret for years. He even manages to get a student to force his unwilling wife to pose nude for the great painter. Yet when the painting is finally revealed, it is so overworked that the central image of the nude beauty can’t be seen by anyone except the deluded artist himself.

Zola’s Claude Lantier in the novel The Masterpiece paints his nude with such fury and determination that it takes over his life. He alternately falls in love with it, hates it, gouges the painting, scrapes it, tears it with a knife, and finally in an act of desperation and love, hangs himself in front of it.

Is there something inherently obsessive and self-consuming about creating art, and especially trying to create the ultimate work? If you aim high and pledge yourself to perfection, can you in fact destroy perfection? Axl Rose seem to have found the fatal flaw of failed art—the belief that you can force a work into being by sheer persistence over time.

Bob Dylan often wrote his songs in one sitting, while Axl took years. Is there a split between those artists who create effortlessly and those who labor unto death to produce something? In the former case, artists rely on that intuitive and obsessionless state called “flow” in which creativity happens effortlessly. But in the latter case creating can be excruciating and endless—and only obsession and compulsion can carry them through.

But in the case of Rose, his obsessive-compulsive nature didn’t produce a masterpiece, it produced a disaster.

For more from Lennard Davis, listen to a podcast or read an interview. For more from Axl Rose, you may have to wait a while.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
Posted by at 01:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you're busy trying to figure out how to survive the market meltdown, then at some point you might also begin wondering about how, and why, it all started in the first place. In a recent article for the Washington Monthly Greg Anrig takes note of Lawrence D. Brown and Lawrence R. Jacobs timely new book, The Private Abuse of the Public Interest: Market Myths and Policy Muddles for offering an insightful answer. Anrig writes:

In the waning days of the Bush administration, as venerable Wall Street firms collapsed, credit markets froze, stocks crashed, and economic indicators deteriorated, free market, antiregulatory Republicans found themselves with no choice but to partially nationalize the banking industry. It was a Shakespearean denouement for the conservative movement. For nearly thirty years, the right had dominated political debate on the strength of the simple argument that government was the problem and free markets the solution.…

[But] as Lawrence D. Brown and Lawrence R. Jacobs demonstrate in The Private Abuse of the Public Interest: Market Myths and Policy Muddles, the era of conservative dominance has wrought a cyclical pattern: first comes the fervent advocacy of market-based policy ideas, followed by their implementation, which causes damage that can [ironically] only be fixed by extensive governmental intervention.…

Brown and Jacobs discern five phases…in the cycle. First, conservatives deem the central problem in every arena to be an insufficient reliance on markets.… Second, conservative policy experts propose a simple solution: a substitution of market forces for government.… The third step in Brown and Jacobs's framework is legislative action to implement the ideas proposed by the market worshippers.… The fourth phase is when the seductive simplicity of free market theory meets complicated institutional reality.… The final stage is when political backlash forces policymakers to respond to the unintended consequences and failures of the market-based approaches—causing government to grow and thereby subverting the original goals of the pro-market adherents.…

With a presidential candidate openly campaigning for more rather than less regulation, as Barack Obama has just done successfully, the United States has clearly entered a new era. When the inevitable reaction pushing for a return to free markets comes back around, the lesson of this insightful book is clear: don't go there unless you want even bigger government to clean up after the failures that are sure to follow.

Read the full article on the Washington Monthly website.

Archived in Economics | Politics and Current Events | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With universities across the country slashing budgets and implementing hiring freezes, the job market for many PhDs seems to be, as the Chronicle of Higher Education recently put it, cloudy.

But our career guides can serve as sturdy life rafts in this storm of bad news. Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius's "So What Are You Going to Do with That?", for example, covers topics ranging from career counseling to interview etiquette to translating skills learned in the academy into terms an employer can understand and appreciate. A witty, accessible guide full of concrete advice for anyone contemplating the jump from scholarship to the outside world, "So What Are You Going to Do with That?" is packed with examples and stories from real people who have successfully made this daunting—but potentially rewarding—transition.

Taking a more specific approach, The Chicago Guide to Landing a Job in Academic Biology is designed to help students and post-docs navigate the tricky terrain of an academic job search—from the first year of a graduate program to the final negotiations of a job offer. In the process, it covers everything from how to pack an overnight bag without wrinkling a suit to selecting the right job to apply for in the first place.

And when you do land that job? The world of scientific research is, of course, a competitive one, with grants and good jobs increasingly hard to find, but The Chicago Guide to Your Career in Science is intended to help scientists not just cope but excel at the critical early phases of their careers.

Finally, no matter which discipline you're in, The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career offers frank answers to the profession's most enduring questions. Its three distinguished authors—with more than 75 years of combined experience—talk openly about what's good and what's not so good about academia, as a place to work and a way of life. Written as an informal conversation among colleagues, the book is packed with inside information—about finding a mentor, avoiding pitfalls when writing a dissertation, negotiating the job listings, and much more.

Archived in Books for the News | Education | Reference and Writing
Posted by at 01:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you're living in the northern U.S. it is likely that your garden is presently covered under several inches of snow, but as a recent article in the New York Times demonstrates, through the long winter months many gardeners never cease thinking about them. Writing for yesterday's "Sunday Book Review" Dominique Browning offers a list of a few of her favorite gardening books for midwinter reading that includes Robert Pogue Harrison's new book, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Browning writes:

The year's most thought-provoking, original and weighty garden book (though the lightest in heft) is Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, by Robert Pogue Harrison. Here the author of Forests: The Shadow of Civilization and The Dominion of the Dead, a book about cemeteries and burial practices, turns his thoughts to the garden as "sanctuary of repose." Making a garden fulfills, as Harrison puts it, "a distinctly human need, as opposed to shelter, which is a distinctly animal need." Burrowing into a more refined issue than what makes a garden, he meditates on why we garden. It's impossible to summarize the answer, overflowing as his book is with eccentric connections and voracious readings, ranging over centuries and across continents. Part of what makes it exciting is the way Harrison sets up surprise encounters with unexpected writers, who spring up as though self-seeded among the perennials. Who knew Camus had something to say about gardens?…

Reading Harrison's book is like strolling down a path through a well cultivated, richly sown, light-dappled woodland. There's no point of arrival, though there may be resting places here and there. Just as in the making of a garden, there's no end to the wonder; the journey is everything. You don't have to be a gardener to love this book, but by the end you'll be asking yourself why on earth you aren't.

Read the rest of the review on the NYT website.

Also, read an excerpt.

Archived in Anthropology | History | Literature | Philosophy | Religion | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Topping this Friday's publicity round-up we have an interview with Brian Ladd, author of the timely new book, Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age, for the Patt Morrison show on Southern California's KPCC radio. In the interview, Ladd gives a fascinating historical account of how the American addiction to the automobile, (and by proxy the currently imperiled automobile industry) has come to be. For more read an excerpt and listen to another audio interview with Ladd for the Chicago Audio Works podcast.

The Nota Bene section of the December 5 Chronicle of Higher Education contains a succinct synopsis of Mustapha Chérif's Islam and the West: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. One of Derrida's last intellectual engagements before his death in 2004, the book includes the Algerian born philosopher's definitive take on Islam and, as the Chronicle notes, the pressing need given the current state of world affairs, to "deconstruct the European intellectual construct of Islam" and rediscover the "reciprocal fertilization of the Greek, the Arab, and the Jew."

If you haven't made plans for your Friday night, stay warm, stay home, and watch Tim Reid and Tom Dreesen, author's of Tim & Tom: an American comedy in Black and White on the Jay Leno Show discussing (and maybe even cracking some jokes) about their experience touring 1960 's America as the nation's first interracial comedy team. Two nice articles about the book have also appeared in the papers recently. One in suburban Chicago's Daily Herald and another in the Canadian paper the London Free Press. Check out the links above to read the articles or read this excerpt from the book.

And while it might be freezing cold here in Chicago it's always summer somewhere. This time of year that somewhere would be Australia, where Peter Craven, writing for the Monthly has listed both Andrea Weiss's In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story, and Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller's The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples, as his picks for the "best books for summer." Read an excerpt from In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain.

Last but not least, USA Today's Dan Vergano makes note of Dorrik Stow's Oceans: An Illustrated Reference in his article "Stunning science books for holiday giving". Vergano writes: "Dorrik Stow mixes full-color photographs with encyclopedic entries covering every aspect of the world's seas from their origins during the Earth's formation, to their tides and currents, to the sea life now under threat from overfishing in so many locales. A solid reference for the mariner, real or imagined, in your life."

Archived in Commentary
Posted by TXM at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Historian Neil Harris, author of The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age, will speak at the Harold Washington Library Center next Wednesday, December 10.

The Chicagoan ("a book you'll want to own, a coffee-table book nicer and better made than most coffee tables," said Matt Weiland in the NYTBR) will be available for purchase and signing afterward.

The Harold Washington Library Center is at 400 S. State Street in Chicago—right next to the "L" and just a hop, skip, and a jump from commuter train lines. The lecture is in the Cindy Pritzker Auditorium at 6 PM and is free and open to the public. If you're interested in Chicago history, the Jazz Age, or need a gift for somebody who is, Harris's talk is not to be missed!

If you're not in Chicago, you can listen to this interview he did for last week's installment of the Book Show on Australia's ABC National Radio. In the interview, Harris joins host Ramona Koval to discuss how he discovered a set of Chicagoan magazines deep in the stacks of the University of Chicago's Regenstein library, and how the story of the magazine's rise and fall opens a window into one of the most vibrant and fascinating era's in Chicago history.

Also read our interview with the author and see a gallery of covers and illustrations from the magazine.

Archived in Author Events | Chicago
Posted by TXM at 01:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The auto industry's struggles have headlined national news for the past couple of weeks, but they have been a local story for much longer than that. Michigan has been in recession for the past five years and has seen a steady loss of jobs every year since 2000. While policy makers in Washington continue to debate possible solutions to these kinds of problems, what's going on at the local level, and what can be done about it?

Guian McKee's new The Problem of Jobs provides a germane history lesson. With a focus on Philadelphia, it illuminates the central role of local political and policy struggles in shaping the fortunes of city and citizen alike. In the process, it tells the remarkable story of how Philadelphia’s policymakers and community activists energetically worked to challenge deindustrialization through an innovative series of job retention initiatives, training programs, inner-city business development projects, and early affirmative action programs. Interpreting economic decline as an arena for intervention rather than a historical inevitability, The Problem of Jobs serves as a timely reminder of policy’s potential to combat inequality and joblessness.

A complementary local history of deindustrialization, Kathryn Marie Dudley's The End of the Line tells the story of the 1988 closing of the Chrysler assembly plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Dudley uses interviews with residents to chart the often confusing process of change that deindustrialization forced on every corner of the community. This honest portrait of one town's radical shift from a manufacturing to a postindustrial economy illuminates the kinds of human stories that continue to play out behind the financial headlines.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by at 01:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In his November 30th review for the L. A. Times critic Art Winslow delivers an insightful assessment of the Norman Maclean Reader, which includes both previously unpublished Maclean material as well as selections from his two published works. The Reader, Winslow writes, offers Maclean fans invaluable insight into the author's life and works and exposes the deeply tragic themes that underlie them both.

There is a river that runs through Maclean's work, a strong and dark current of defeat, and if we needed further proof of that, both from his self-testimony and as evidenced in previously unpublished writing, it has arrived in the form of The Norman Maclean Reader.

Those who have read Young Men and Fire, Maclean's nonfiction reconstruction of the 1949 Mann Gulch fire in Montana, in which 13 smokejumpers were burned to death, may recall the multiple parallels Maclean drew between their fate and that of the 7th Cavalry troops under George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn, another death-dealing Montana site.… The surprise here is to learn that the Custer comparisons were hardly incidental: From 1959 to 1963, primarily, Maclean struggled to write a book about the battle of the Little Bighorn and its cultural afterlife, and The Norman Maclean Reader presents five heretofore unpublished extracts from his manuscript, including sections of what was to be his conclusion, titled "Shrine to Defeat".…

[In both works] Maclean's attempt to construct a narrative in tragic form, in accordance with Aristotelian ideas, can be seen as underpinning… his [writing].

In one of the letters that constitute the latter portion of this reader, he is found confiding to the Western historian Robert Utley that "I am trying to show that our psychological need to deal with defeat is an ultimate common magnetic power that has drawn so many people to this rather small encounter in military history," an idea he universalized in the "Shrine to Defeat" section of his manuscript, where he asserts that "much of seemingly ordinary and uneventful life is spent marching and counter-marching over the scenes of previous defeats and in fortifying ourselves against those to come."

Here, of course, one thinks of Maclean's novella A River Runs Through It, the story of a trinity—a father and two sons—;broken by the murder of one son at its end, which closely parallels the real-life trauma Maclean and his father suffered over the murder of Norman's younger brother, Paul (the name borne by his fictional counterpart as well).… He says of himself and his father, "In the end all we knew—really knew—about him [Paul] was that he was beautiful and dead and we had not helped." A comment of his father's in life—"It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us"—appears verbatim in the fiction (not in the portion excerpted) as the novella closes.…

The biggest tragedy of all, one that underlies the mystery of Maclean's brother's life, the unknowns surrounding Custer's actions and the questions embedded in the crosses at Mann Gulch, is pointed to by Maclean in one of his letters when he admitted, "It is clear to me now that the universe in its truculence doesn't permit itself to be that well known."

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

Also, see our Norman Maclean website.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Heads of the Big 3 automakers were back in Washington, D.C. this week to ask Congress for a bailout to to forestall financial collapse. After a disastrous visit to Congress in mid-November—to which the chief executives of Ford, Chrysler, and GM flew in private jets—the representatives from Detroit returned to plead their case for $34 billion in loans, much of it taxpayer funded. The very survival of an American industry—and an American product—hangs in the balance.

But the controversy the plan—and the conduct of the execs—has engendered is nothing new. In fact, paradox of the passion we have for our cars—the independence and the freedom they represent—and the conclusion they are the scourge of civilization—responsible for suburban sprawl, urban decay, environmental devastation, rampant climate change, and dependence on foreign oil—is not a recent development. Brian Ladd's new book Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age reveals that this vexed relationship with the automobile is nothing new—in fact, debates over whether cars are good or evil have raged ever since the automobile was invented. And, in a new age of automaker bailouts, this love/hate relationship will extend beyond the boundaries of our dashboards to executives who make the decisions in Detroit.

Ladd's been logging lots of miles recently for Autophobia. He appeared on KERA's Think Tuesday to discuss the book (listen to a podcast of the episode here) and will be a guest on KPCC's Patt Morrison program on Thursday. And Ladd's got a piece up on Slate today explaining how the Big Three's lost clout in Washington may actually help the auto industry.

For more Autophobia, read an excerpt , listen to an interview with the author, or check out last month's New York Times Books Review. Enjoy the ride!

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by at 01:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A couple of months ago, we noted that Chicago's Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame planned to induct Jane Addams, whose life story Louise Knight vividly recounts in Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy.

In commemoration of that honor, the new Lambda Literary Salon features an essay by Louise Knight, which eloquently explores the role of love in Addams's life.

"I believe that love was Jane Addams's most absorbing passion," Knight writes. "She was one of those rare people who was thinking about the importance of love all the time—not always succeeding in being loving, of course, but steadily trying." Focusing in particular on Addams's experiences with romantic, intimate love, Knight concludes that "it has been a revelation and a joy to learn about the remarkable contributions gay men and lesbian women have made to the United States. We all want to see ourselves reflected in the great accomplishments of history; now, finally, the gay and lesbian communities are beginning to be able to have that deeply human satisfaction. Jane Addams, too, belongs to lesbian history."

For more reading, we also have an excerpt from Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy.

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | Gay and Lesbian
Posted by at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The mapping of the human genome at the turn of the twenty-first century by the Human Genome Project was a scientific sensation. The media abounded with stories about our new knowledge of the building blocks of human life and the tremendous medical breakthroughs that were sure to follow—while other accounts put a darker spin on the achievement, warning of consequences from genetic discrimination to designer germs.

For the layman, the claims and counterclaims can be dizzying; it's hard to know just what the genomics revolution is likely to mean in our everyday lives. With Genomes and What to Make of Them, Barry Barnes and John Dupré cut through the confusion and offer a smart and straightforward account of what we know, what we can hope for, and what, if anything, we should fear. Opening with a brief history of genetics and genomics, from Mendel to Watson and Crick to Craig Venter, Genomes and What to Make of Them explains what genomics tells us about our evolutionary history and what it can reveal on the individual level, such as our risk of disease. Meanwhile, the authors argue, the dangers of genetic research—from biological warfare to a revived eugenics—are very real, and only a proactive government and a vigilant citizenry can ensure the full life-enhancing potential of this exciting new science. Engagingly written and up-to-date, Genomes and What to Make of Them is both a primer on current knowledge and a road map to an exciting future.

Read the press release. Also, listen to an interview with the author.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At 3:25 p.m. on December 2, 1942, the Atomic Age began just a few blocks from the Press on the grounds on Stagg Field on campus at the University of Chicago. That day, Enrico Fermi engineered the first controlled nuclear fission chain reaction, ushering in an age of nuclear weaponry and power. The world changed forever that day, and 66 years later, Fermi's achievements and persona loom large over many institutions at the University and beyond. His legacy is also alive in many of the books the Press publishes in physics and nuclear science. Here are just two:

On the occasion of the centenary of his birth, University of Chicago physicist and Nobel laureate James W. Cronin edited a tender tribute to Fermi. A collection of essays and newly commissioned reminiscences combined with private material from Fermi's research notebooks, correspondence, speech outlines, and teaching Fermi Remembered documents the profound and enduring significance of the great scientist's life and labors. Read an excerpt here.

The lab that bears his name will finally get the book length-history it deserves when Fermilab: Physics, the Frontier, and Megascience by Lillian Hoddeson, Adrienne W. Kolb, and Catherine Westfall is published later this month. Since 1972, when the laboratory's original particle accelerator began producing the world's highest-energy protons for research, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has stood at the frontier of high-energy physics for nearly forty years. Hoddeson, Kolb, and Westfall offer in Fermilab is the first history of this laboratory and of its powerful accelerators told from the point of view of the people who built and used them for scientific discovery.

For more books on theoretical physics, including several by the man himself, visit Chicago's catalog.

Archived in Commentary
Posted by at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cultural critic Julia Keller has written an interesting article about Lennard J. Davis's new book Obsession: A History for the lifestyle section of the Sunday Chicago Tribune. In her article, Keller notes how "obsessive" behavior has come to define our culture, though in a very polarized way. We admire those whose drive leads them to professional or athletic success. But we also might recommend someone who can't stop washing their hands every five minutes, or spends hours straightening the picture frames in their living room, to go find a good psychologist to help them with their OCD. In her article Keller quotes Davis:

"To be obsessive is to be American, to be modern."

Yet the term has never been a stable category. When does an eccentricity become an obsession? When does a quirk become a pathology? You can't understand obsession, the professor believes, without considering "the social, cultural, historical, anthropological and political" swirl in which it lives.

And in Obsession Davis does just that, tracing the evolution of obsessive behavior from a social and religious fact of life into a medical and psychiatric problem. From obsessive aspects of professional specialization to obsessive sex and nymphomania, no variety of obsession eludes Davis's graceful cultural analysis.

To find out more read Keller's article on the Tribune's website. Also read an interview with Davis or listen to his appearance on the Chicago Audio Works podcast.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History and Philosophy of Science | Psychology | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)