From this month's Chicago Style Q&A:

Q. "The first of which is better." I said this is a sentence fragment, but a student pointed out that it has a subject and predicate. Who's correct?

A. You both are. A sentence fragment can have a subject and predicate, but it's a fragment if it's dependent on another clause. Your fragment can't stand alone grammatically; it needs a main clause to lean on: "The choice is between a hamantash and a latke, the first of which is better."

Thus, with an emphasis on negotiation and flexibility, Carol Fisher Saller, assistant managing editor at the University of Chicago Press and the unfailing wit behind the Chicago Manual of Style Q&A, has established herself as a subversive exception to the stereotype of the manuscript-editor-as-quibbler. And now, as Jennifer Balderama has noted in a recent appreciation for the New York Time's Paper Cuts blog, with her newly released book The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago (or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships with Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and Yourself) Saller takes the next big step in advancing her mission to revolutionize the way people think about the dialectic of manuscript editing. From the Paper Cuts blog:

This is a "relationship" book, writes its author, Carol Fisher Saller, doyenne of The Chicago Manual of Style Online's Q&A. Here, she hopes to "soothe and encourage and lend power" to editors who have too long suffered "from the oppression of unhelpful habits and attitudes." This is the book Oprah would write if her vocation were saving writers from embarrassment, rather than saving the whole world.

To which I say: finally. I've got dozens of books concerned with the nuts and bolts of copy-editing, but this is the only one that teaches the fine art of chilling out.… Saller's project, in about 100 pages, is to (a) civilize the editing process, and (b) keep copy editors—meticulous and learned and hard-working, but also stubborn and obsessive, sometimes injuriously so…—from going insane. She reminds us that the reader is Priority 1 and that while standards are crucial ("I'm not going to suggest that you toss out your stylebook"), so is flexibility (sometimes "a style is just a style").

Continue reading the posting on the NYT's Paper Cuts blog, or read the introduction to the book.

The author has also created her own website, check it out at www.subversivecopyeditor.com.

Archived in Reference and Writing | Reviews
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Kate L. Turabian, author of the A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, now in its 7th edition, would have celebrated her 116th birthday today. The guidelines she championed for the successful completion and submission of academic papers have become the gold standard for generations of students and their teachers, and with more than 8 million copies sold to date, her Manual is one of the bestselling writing references on record.

Turabian died in 1987 at the age of 94. John Marshall, now the books editor for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, wrote a warm tribute in the October 27, 1987 edition:

Kate L. Turabian was our trusted guide and mentor, the absolute authority, the one who knew all there was to know about the strange world of proper term papers.… A Manual for Writers was one of the first books we bought in college and it was one of the only books we kept with us through all four years and probably beyond. To write a term paper without a well-worn copy of Turabian handy was unthinkable. Our writing on term papers might be weak, our research haphazard, our insights sophomoric, but, thanks to Kate L. Turabian, our footnotes could always be absolutely flawless.

We have more info about Kate on our Turabian website.

Archived in Reference and Writing | UCP News
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In the latest installment of the series "The Science of YouTube," the folks over at Popular Science investigate why videos of cute things--sleepy kittens, fluffy puppies, and sneezing baby pandas—are so popular and compelling. It turns out that Konrad Lorenz, Austrian ethologist, Nobel-prize winner, and subject of Richard W. Burkhardt Jr.'s Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology, had some theories about cuteness nearly sixty years before YouTube would become the internet's repository of all videos prosh. Lorenz theorized that certain "infantile features"—like big heads, large eyes, button noses, and round bodies—trigger a nurturing response in adults. Evolutionarily, this makes us more likely to care for our offspring, but our preference for cuteness is so strong it spills over to other species. So, the next time you catch yourself browsing cuteoverload.com, remember, resistance is futile—you are evolutionarily hard wired to say "awwwwwww."

For more on Konrad Lorenz and the science of ethology, check out Burkhardt's award-winning book.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News
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On April 10, 2003, as the world watched a statue of Saddam Hussein come crashing down in the heart of Baghdad, a mob of looters attacked the Iraq National Museum. Despite the presence of an American tank unit, the pillaging went unchecked, and more than 15,000 artifacts—some of the oldest evidence of human culture—disappeared into the shadowy worldwide market in illicit antiquities.

On Monday, Iraq's National Museum reopened six years after the looting that came to characterize the inept handling of the occupation. More than half of the exhibition space is closed, and thousands of priceless works from its collection remain missing. As the New York Times notes, "Symbol it was, and symbol it remains—not only of how much Iraq has improved, but of how far it has to go.… [T]he museum is only one institution in a place where little functions as it should—not electricity or even sewerage—nearly six years after the beginning of the war that toppled Saddam Hussein. The museum, like life here, may be more secure than at any other time since then, but it is not normal."

Arriving just in time for the museum's reopening, Lawrence Rothfield's The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum offers a detailed, judicious account of the failures of planning, understanding, and initiative that led to the plunder and the incalculable loss of Iraq's unparalleled cultural heritage. Drawing on extensive interviews with soldiers, bureaucrats, war planners, archaeologists, and collectors, Rothfield reveals the widespread incompetence and miscommunication on the part of the Pentagon, unchecked by the disappointingly weak advocacy efforts of worldwide preservation advocates, that left troops on the ground unprepared for and unable to stop the looting. At the same time, Rothfield shows, preservation advocates were insufficiently vocal about the risks the invasion posed to the museum, while collectors and dealer who inhabit the shadowy world of the illicit antiquities trade snapped up the looters booty.

In the end, Rothfield argues forcefully that the international community has yet to learn the lessons of Iraq—and that what happened there is liable to be repeated in future conflicts. A powerful, infuriating chronicle of the disastrous conjunction of military adventure and cultural destruction, The Rape of Mesopotamia is essential reading for all concerned with the future of our past.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Books for the News
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As coverage of New York Fashion Week shifts to coverage of London's week in the fashion spotlight, some of the stories reflect a debate over whether attending fashion shows in the midst of global economic turmoil is "something you shouldn't be doing" (as one fashion editor told the New York Times) or something that provides needed support for a struggling yet important global industry.

Diana Crane's Fashion and Its Social Agendas examines fashion in the context of this global marketplace. Trendsetters, she shows, are no longer confined to elites but instead are drawn from many social groups. Drawing a contrast with nineteenth-century France, where designers created fashions that suited lifestyles of Paris elites but that were also widely adopted outside France, Crane argues that lifestyle, gender, sexual orientation, age, and ethnicity took on more meaning in twentieth-century America.

In Fashion, Culture, and Identity, Fred Davis delves into related ideas, addressing such questions as what our clothes say about who we are or who we think we are, how the way we dress communicates our identity, and how fashions change.

And in Ready-Made Democracy, Michael Zakim studies one such change in particular by tracing the evolution of homespun nineteenth-century American clothing into its ostensible opposite—the woolen coats, vests, and pantaloons that were "ready-made" for sale and wear across the country. In doing so, he demonstrates how traditional notions of work and property actually helped give birth to the modern industrial order. For Zakim, the history of men's dress in America mirrored this transformation of the nation's social and material landscape: profit-seeking in newly expanded markets, organizing a waged labor system in the city, shopping at "single-prices," and standardizing a business persona. From several different angles, then, fashion and economics appear to go hand in hand.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics
Posted by at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Last Thursday's Times Higher Education contains a review of Victoria Johnson's Backstage at the Revolution: How the Royal Paris Opera Survived the End of the Old Regime in which reviewer Brian Vick praises the book for its "unique, insightful and colorful perspective on the French Revolution and the Paris Opera's early history." Spanning academic disciplines to combine "early modern French cultural history with the theory of organizations and entrepreneurship" Johnson provides a novel explanation for how the Paris Opera not only managed to escape destruction during the French Revolution, but was protected by French revolutionary officials, despite its long association with the royal court and ostentatious displays of aristocratic opulence. Exploring beyond the context of the revolution itself, Johnson's book uncovers the roots of the Opera's survival in its identity as a uniquely privileged icon of French culture—an identity established during its founding one hundred years earlier under Louis XIV. Thus, Vick concludes, more than just an account of the revolution, "the work provides a full and persuasive history of the early Paris Opera…at once scholarly and for the most part engagingly written, the book could be worth keeping in mind as reading matter the next time one is thinking of 'chunnelling' over to Paris to catch a performance of the Opera."

More recently, the author joined host Bryn Terfel on BBC Radio 3's Music Matters to discuss her work with several other experts on the topic including Tim Blanning, Professor of History at Cambridge, and opera historian Sarah Lenton. Archived audio of the conversation should be available online at the Music Matters website for the next couple of days, or read the rest of Vick's review at the THE website.

Archived in History | Music | Reviews | Sociology
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On Thursday, the New York Post issued an apology for a cartoon "meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill." Caricaturing last week's police shooting of a chimpanzee in Connecticut, the cartoon caused an uproar after some observers felt the image was racist. Over at the New York Times' City Room blog, Press author Andrew Rojecki weighed in on the cartoon: "The cartoonist, whether he did this consciously or not, was drawing upon a very historically deep source of images about African-Americans that African-Americans do not have a lot of control over."

Rojecki is an expert in racial patterns in the mass media and how they shape the ambivalent attitudes of Whites toward Blacks. In his book The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America, which he coauthored with Robert M. Entman, he uses the media, and especially television, as barometers of race relations, going beyond the treatment of African Americans on network and local news to incisively uncover the messages sent about race by the entertainment industry—from prime-time dramas and sitcoms to commercials and Hollywood movies. While the authors find very little in the media that intentionally promotes racism, they find even less that advances racial harmony. They reveal instead a subtle pattern of images that, while making room for Blacks, implies a racial hierarchy with Whites on top and promotes a sense of difference and conflict. Commercials, for example, feature plenty of Black characters. But unlike Whites, they rarely speak to or touch one another. In prime time, the few Blacks who escape sitcom buffoonery rarely enjoy informal, friendly contact with White colleagues—perhaps reinforcing social distance in real life.

Entman and Rojecki interweave such astute observations with candid interviews of White Americans that make clear how these images of racial difference insinuate themselves into Whites' thinking. Despite its disturbing readings of television and film, the book's cogent analyses and proposed policy guidelines offer hope that America's powerful mediated racial separation can be successfully bridged.

For more on the subject, check out the The Entman-Rojecki Index of Race and the Media.

Archived in Books for the News
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A review of Brian Ladd's Autophobia published in Friday's Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune begins by noting the relevance of the book's topic to the nation's current economic crisis—a crisis spearheaded by rapid changes to our auto-centric culture like "volatile gas prices, car-oriented subdivisions in foreclosure," and "an auto industry in free fall." But then, wasn't it just yesterday that this very same car culture was the driving force behind one of the biggest economic booms in our nation's history? As reviewer Jim Foti notes, Ladd's book offers up ample evidence that since its invention, the automobile has played an integral role in America's successes, as well as its failures, provoking heated debates over whether they are sources of good or evil—markers of progress, or signs of the apocalypse. And while many might argue for the latter considering our current state of affairs, Foti notes that "as Ladd points out, so far the car's doomsayers have been wrong every time."

On Saturday, Chicago Tribune cultural critic Julia Keller also reviewed Ladd's book, along with another insightful critique of America's automotive culture, Cotten Seiler's Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America. Praising both books, she takes special note of Republic of Drivers writing: "Seiler's book is written with grace and authority and finely wrought insight. He points out how the language of driving and the language of capitalism both employ 'tropes of motion:' moving, hustling. Cars, he says, 'are products of a highly specific conception of what it means to be modern and free.' We may believe that we're in the driver's seat, that is, but in point of fact, cars took control of the cultural steering wheel before we even hit the city limits."

For more insights on America's car culture read an excerpt from Autophobia and listen to an audio interview with the author.

Archived in History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

We are bemused to note that our book Baboon Metaphysics is shortlisted for the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year, an annual competition conducted by The Bookseller in the UK. The Diagram Prize, perhaps the least-coveted award in the publishing industry, began at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1978 when it was won by the memorable Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice. Close to thirty books have since been honored. The Press is usually named as the publisher of the 1988 winner, Versailles: The View From Sweden, though we only distributed that book for its publisher, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. (And, no, the book was not about high-powered telescopes.)

Previous winners of the Diagram Prize have tended toward the obscure (The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling), the suggestive (The Joy of Sex, the Pocket Edition), and the obscurely suggestive (Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality). The current competition is no exception, including shortlisted titles such as The Large Sieve and its Applications, Strip and Knit with Style, and Curbside Consultation of the Colon.

The winner of the Diagram Prize will be decided by a public vote on The Bookseller website. Please vote early and vote often.

Our honored title—as you can learn in an excerpt— is derived from a quote by Charles Darwin: "He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke."

Archived in Awards | Biology
Posted by DB at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Several news agencies are reporting this morning on a Russian court's acquittal of three men who had been accused of participating in the 2006 murder of Anna Politkovskaya, the renowned investigative journalist who reported on the brutal tactics used by Russian leaders to quell Chechen uprisings during the past several years.

A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya collects many of Politkovskaya's articles and columns on Chechnya's prolonged and bloody conflict with Russia, from which it declared independence in 1991. The book recounts the horrors of living in the midst of the war, examines how the war has affected Russian society, and takes a hard look at how people on both sides are profiting from it, from the guards who accept bribes from Chechens out after curfew to the United Nations. The result is a powerful and honest account of a dangerous and little-understood conflict. We have an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This spring, the University of Chicago Press will proudly publish True-Love: Essays on Poetry and Valuing by revered poet-critic Allen Grossman. In advance of this publication, we are very excited to announce that Professor Grossman has been awarded Yale University's Bollingen Prize in American Poetry.

A three-judge panel—composed of Frank Bidart, poet and winner of the 2007 Bollingen Prize in American Poetry, Peter Cole, poet and visiting professor at Yale University, and Susan Stewart, poet and professor of English at Princeton University (and Press author of the National Book Critics Circle award-winning Columbarium and, more recently, Red Rover, among many others)—described Grossman as "a profoundly original American poet whose work embraces the co-existence of comedy and tragedy, exploring the intersection of high poetic style and an often startling vernacular.… A distinguished teacher of poetics and literature, Grossman has influenced three generations of American writers. He has characterized the lyric poet as an individual who, 'by means of this art, seeks to speak with the utmost seriousness about the totality of what he experiences,' and Grossman himself has been refreshingly restless in that pursuit."

Reached for comment, Judith Grossman responded: "Allen feels deeply honored by this award. The Bollingen is the most prestigious prize for American poetry, and the list of honorees is extraordinary--it includes Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and virtually all the major poets of the modern era. The first Bollingen prize winner was Ezra Pound--a controversial choice. However, he was a mentor to James Laughlin, founder of New Directions Press, which has published many of Allen Grossman's books, so that there is a closing of the circle here."

The Bollingen Prize in American Poetry, established by Paul Mellon in 1949, is awarded biennially by the Yale University Library to an American poet for the best book published during the previous two years or for lifetime achievement in poetry. Previous winners include Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, E. E. Cummings, Louise Glück, Adrienne Rich, and Jay Wright. The prize includes a cash award of $100,000.

Congratulations to Professor Grossman on a lifetime of poetic achievement!

Archived in Awards
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The latest issue of ArtForum magazine contains an interesting review of Lynn Spigel's new book, TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television. The review, which builds upon the positive assessment given by Andy Battaglia in his recent article for the magazine's sister publication BookForum, praises the work for "contradicting our peculiar amnesia" regarding TV's early links to the urbane world of modern art.

As Spigel aptly demonstrates, from the 1940's through the '60s TV served as an exciting new platform for the arts, inviting the participation of architects and designers like and Eero Saarinen and Saul Bass, to fine artists like Andy Warhol. Offering a stark contradiction to former FCC chairman Newton Minow's characterization of the medium as a "vast wasteland," Spigel's account even suggests that their work actually profited from their relationship with the "vulgar medium."

As ArtForum's Matthew Brannon writes, "since advertisers take it for granted that their job is to sell, they are denied that most dangerously available solipsistic avenue that fine art borders: I don't care what you think.…" Thus Brannon concludes that advertising offered these artists a lesson in visual communication: "how to say much with little [and] how to persuade someone without insulting them. I'm as interested in tact as I am in taste."

Pick up a copy of ArtForum to read the rest of Brannon's review, or read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Film and Media | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

NPR aired a story last week about the impending destruction of Shanghai's Little Vienna, a Jewish neighborhood that arose in the 1930s as almost 20,000 refugees fled from Europe to Shanghai during Hitler's rise.

According to the story, the Chinese government plans to knock down several buildings in this district to make way for a widened road. As conservationist Ruan Yisan told NPR, "Normal people all want these buildings knocked down, the government wants to knock them down, the developers want to knock them down. It's only us conservationists who want to keep them."

Whether or not the physical record of this community survives, its written record lives on in such volumes as Voices from Shanghai, a remarkable collection of the letters, diary entries, poems, and short stories composed by Jewish refugees in the years after they landed in China. Recovered from archives, private collections, and now-defunct newspapers, these fascinating accounts make their English-language debut in this new volume.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by at 09:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University recently hosted a very engaging discussion between David Brooks and E.J. Dionne on Reinhold Niebuhr, the impact of Niebuhr's writings on Barack Obama, and relevance of Niebuhr's thought for our current situation. Niebuhr's ideas, especially those contained in his influential work The Irony of American History, have circled back into public discourse, primarily because of Obama's acknowledgment of Niebuhr's profound influence on his world view.

In the conversation Brooks and Dionne discussed Niebuhr's liberalism, his simultaneous appeal to both liberals and conservatives, and the significance of his resurgence in popularity on the American political scene.

The program was moderated by Krista Tippett, host of the American Public Media program Speaking of Faith. Her crew also created an excellent website for the event, which has complete audio and video of the discussion, plus much more.

Also read an excerpt from The Irony of American History, "The Ironic Element in the American Situation."

Archived in Books for the News
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As the cacophonous celebrations of Darwin's bicentenary wind down, another important, though less well known, evolutionary theorist celebrates a milestone birthday. Today marks the 175th anniversary of the birth of Ernst Haeckel (1834—1919), the eminent German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, and artist. A great champion of Darwin, Haeckel helped popularize the theory of evolution in Germany; indeed, prior to the First World War, more people learned of evolution from Haeckel's voluminous writings than through any other source, including the writings of Darwin himself. In addition, Haeckel 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, with detractors ranging from paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould to modern-day creationists and advocates of Intelligent Design, Haeckel is better known as a divisive figure than as a pioneering biologist and today, Haeckel remains obscured by the shadow of the man whose theories he worked so tirelessly to promote.

Last June, University of Chicago historian of science Robert J. Richards delivered an early birthday present for Haeckel, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought . An intellectual biography that rehabilitates Haeckel and provides the most accurate measure of his science and art yet written, it is the definitive account of Darwin's greatest intellectual heir. Praised by the Times Literary Supplement as "a fitting testament to a complex and contradictory character", The Tragic Sense of Life examines the intellectual context as well as the intimate experiences and profound convictions that allowed Darwin's message to become almost a religious calling for Haeckel. Far from shying away from the many controversies that marked Haeckel's life and career, Richards engages Haeckel's many challengers and dissenters, whose accusations against him range from the charge that he falsified some of his famous drawings to the supposedly proto-Nazi quality of his biological theories. Reappraising Haeckel's accomplishments, artistic endeavors, many battles, personal relationships, and searing loves, Richards convincingly demonstrates the enormous impact Haeckel had on biology and larger scientific affairs during the last half of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries.

Happy birthday, Ernst Haeckel.

Archived in Books for the News
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Offering a tale of passion, vivacity, and beauty appropriate for some Valentines weekend reading, Shirley Hazzard's new book The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples eloquently recounts the author's love affair with a city, which, ironically, has recently gained more notoriety for the proliferation of both its crime, and its trash. But as reviewer Judith Martin notes in her article for this Sunday's NYT Book Review, while acknowledging the city's more contemporary conundrums, Hazzard's insight into Naples' rich history and culture is more than enough to redeem its romantic soul. From Martin's review:

Shirley Hazzard, the noted Australian writer, lives in New York but has spent long stretches of time in a house on Capri. She counts herself as one of the few living Anglo-Americans with a lifelong crush on Naples, rather than the usual Italian cities: Florence, Rome or (as in my case) Venice. In Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples, she writes poetically about the lure of an intimate daily relationship with the architectural remains of Naples many rich historical epochs.…

She loves visiting other centuries, a lure that every history-hungry traveler will recognize, and beautifully describes the wonders strewn everywhere about the region. Her sense of the presence of past visitors like Augustus Caesar, Goethe, and Lord Byron should resonate with any lover of Italy.

See this Sunday's New York Times to read the complete review, also read the introduction to the book, "Italian Hours."

Archived in Biography | History | Literature | Reviews | Sociology
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As Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday is celebrated everywhere from Illinois to Australia, Barry Schwartz's Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era takes on a special resonance.

Charting the rise and fall of Lincoln's status as an unquestioned American hero, Schwartz explains how Americans have looked at Lincoln differently as our circumstances and attitudes have shifted. Schwartz starts his story at the beginning of the Great Depression, because "if every era sees itself in Abraham Lincoln and reveals itself in what it says about him, the Lincoln of the Depression and World War II was unique. This Lincoln was the last of its kind, taking American history's heroic genre as far as it would ever go. He must be the benchmark against which imaginations of subsequent Lincolns are gauged."

As we live through a period that many people have compared to the Depression under a president who identifies with and often speaks of Lincoln, it's particularly interesting to consider, in light of Schwartz's insight, what our era is saying about itself right now by way of what we say about the 16th president.

And it's hard to imagine that we'll ever say more than what we've collectively said today—at least until 2109.

Archived in Books for the News | History
Posted by at 01:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

George W. Bush has just left office in the midst of widespread public disapproval. But how will his presidency be viewed decades from now? It’s hard to know: the reputations of American presidents, including such recent ones as JFK and Richard Nixon, fluctuate remarkably in the years following their tenure. And as we prepare to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s bicentennial, it’s important to realize that even a figure as eminent as our sixteenth president is not immune to the vicissitudes of public memory. As Barry Schwartz reveals in Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era, in the years between his assassination and World War II, Abraham Lincoln became a sort of secular saint, held up as a model for all Americans. But, Schwartz explains, that was the apogee of Lincoln’s popularity; over the ensuing decades, changes in American culture inexorably diminished Lincoln’s standing. Disenchantment with government, a growing understanding of the plight of racial minorities, and a new focus on diversity all contributed to a climate in which no single figure, including Lincoln, could be comfortably held up as a symbol for all Americans—thus, even as the nation grew ever-closer to living the ideals for which he had served as a symbol, Lincoln himself faded into the background of American life.

But is there any way back from this post-heroic era? Even as we celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s bicentennial, can he still offer salient lessons for us? As America prepares to welcome a new president whose very election testifies to Lincoln’s achievement, Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era offers a thoughtful, measured look at how we’ve understood the man—and the nation he helped save.

Read the press release.

Also, read an excerpt.

Archived in Biography | History | Press Releases | Sociology
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The second week of February offers much to celebrate for the presidential historians and evolution scholars among us. But, in addition to marking the bicentennial of both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin's birth, this week also has something for the romantics at heart. This Saturday is Valentine's Day, and, as you are frantically arranging last minute dinner reservations, ordering flowers for your beloved, and selecting decadent chocolates to satisfy his or her sweet tooth, the University of Chicago Press offers this Valentine's Day reading list that celebrates love in all its forms.

For the poetry lover, may we suggest the poetry of love of the absurd? Sure, love poetry includes descriptions of the beloved and images of a fantastic idyll complete with falling stars, the sound of the sea, and beautiful countryside. But, in the hands of Surrealists, love poetry also includes gravediggers and murderers, dice and garbage, snakeskin purses and "the drunken kisses of cyclones." Surrealism, the movement founded in the 1920s on the ashes of Dada's nihilism, embraced absurdity, contradiction, and, to a supreme extent, passion and desire. From André Breton's battle cry of "Mad Love" to the quiet lyricism of Robert Desnos, Surrealist writers and artists obsessively expressed the permutations of that fundamental human state, love, and they did so with the vocabulary of the natural and unnatural world, the explicit language of sex, and a great deal of humor.

Editor and translator Mary Ann Caws brings together sixty poems—many of them translated into English for the first time—by Surrealists who charged their work through with all forms of eroticism. Within these pages you will read the magnificent love poems of Desnos, which rank among the greatest in twentieth-century poetry, and hear the voices of lesser known "poets" such as Salvador Dalí and Frida Kahlo. Poems by familiar Surrealists such as Breton, the movement's leader, and Paul Eluard join work by Octavio Paz and Philippe Soupault. Interspersed with the poetry are photographs by Man Ray, Lee Miller, and Claude Cahun. Surrealist Love Poems seeks to demonstrate the truth of Breton's words, that "the embrace of poetry like that of bodies/As long as it lasts/Shuts out all the woes of the world."

Check out three poems from the book. And for more love poetry (and literary criticism thereof), check out Doreen Gildroy's Human Love and Allen Grossman's True-Love.

For those who want to get their love on in prose form and aren't shy about the more, uh, vulgar aspects of physical romance, look no further than the novels of Lee Siegel. Love in a Dead Language is a love story, a translation of an Indian sex manual, an erotic farce, and a murder mystery rolled into one. Enticing the reader to follow both victims and celebrants of romantic love on their hypertextual voyage of folly and lust-through movie posters, upside-down pages, the Kamasutra: Game of Love board game, and even a proposed CD-ROM, Love in a Dead Language exposes the complicities between the carnal and the intellectual, the erotic and the exotic and, in the end, is an outrageous operatic portrayal of romantic love.

Who Wrote the Book of Love? is a comedic chronicle of the sexual life of an American boy in Southern California in the 1950s. Starting at the beginning of the decade, in the year that Stalin announced that the Soviet Union had developed an atomic bomb, the book opens with a child's first memory of himself. Closing at the end of the decade, when Pat Boone's guide to dating, 'Twixt Twelve and Twenty, topped the bestseller list, the book culminates just moments before the boy experiences for the first time what he had learned from a book read to him by his mother was called "coitus or sexual intercourse or sometimes, less formally, just making love." Between the initial overwhelmingly erotic recollection and the final climactic moment, all is sex—beguiling and intractable, naughty and sweet. Who Wrote the Book of Love? is about the subversive sexual imaginations of children. And, as such, it is about the origins of love.

In Love and the Incredibly Old Man, a professor and novelist named Lee Siegel finds himself in Eagle Springs, Florida, attempting to give form to the life of an elderly, irascible, conquistador-costumed man claiming to be the 540-year-old Juan Ponce de León. Spending humid days listening to the romantic ramblings of the old man and sleepless nights doubting yet trying to craft these reminiscences into a narrative that will satisfy the literary aspirations of his subject, Siegel the ghostwriter spins an improbable tale filled with Native Americans, insatiable monarchs, philandering cantors, deliriously passionate nuns, delicate actresses, androgynous artists, and deceptions small and large. For de León, and for Siegel too, centuries of conquest and colonialism, fortune and identity, are all refracted through the memories of the conquistador's lovers, each and every one of them adored "more than any other woman ever."

To ready yourself for romance, read excerpts from Siegel's Love in a Dead Language, Who Wrote the Book of Love?, and Love and the Incredibly Old Man.

For the old marrieds (or chronic cohabitators) among us, Marriage and Cohabitation is a window into modern unions. In an era when half of marriages end in divorce, cohabitation has become more commonplace and those who do get married are doing so at an older age. So why do people marry when they do? And why do some couples choose to cohabit?

Situating their argument in the context of the Western world's 500-year history of marriage, the authors reveal what factors encourage marriage and cohabitation in a contemporary society where the end of adolescence is no longer signaled by entry into the marital home. While some people still choose to marry young, others elect to cohabit with varying degrees of commitment or intentions of eventual marriage. The authors' controversial findings suggest that family history, religious affiliation, values, projected education, lifetime earnings, and career aspirations all tip the scales in favor of either cohabitation or marriage.

For other takes on marriage—in all its forms—check out our full subject list.

For those who enjoy receiving fresh blossoms on Valentine's Day, perhaps a primer on the history of flowers is in order? In Flower Chronicles, E. Buckner Hollingsworth draws on folklore, poetry, annals of medicine, and gardening manuals to report essential historical information on the domestication of garden favorites before they were grown as ornamental plants. Organized by species, Flower Chronicles brims with literary and historical references, anecdotes, and digressions on the lives of merchants, housewives, perfumers, and surgeons.

If Hollingsworth leaves you eager for more botanical books, try The Rose's Kiss and Wily Violets and Underground Orchids, both by Peter Bernhardt.

And finally, lest the Press be accused of having a hetero bias, we offer books on love that transcends genders. In Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality, Jonathan Ned Katz presents stories of men's intimacies with men during the nineteenth century—including those of Abraham Lincoln—drawing flesh-and-blood portraits of intimate friendships and the ways in which men struggled to name, define, and defend their sexual feelings for one another. In a world before "gay" and "straight" referred to sexuality, men like Walt Whitman and John Addington Symonds created new ways to name and conceive of their erotic relationships with other men. Katz, diving into history through diaries, letters, newspapers, and poems, offers us a clearer picture than ever before of how men navigated the uncharted territory of male-male desire.

For the ladies, Intimate Friends offers a fascinating look at the erotic friendships of educated English and American women over a 150-year period, culminating in the 1928 publication of The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall's scandalous novel of lesbian love. Martha Vicinus explores all-female communities, husband-wife couples, liaisons between younger and older women, female rakes, and mother-daughter affection. Women, she reveals, drew upon a rich religious vocabulary to describe elusive and complex erotic feelings. In vivid and colorful prose, Intimate Friends offers a remarkable picture of women navigating the uncharted territory of same-sex desire.

For more on homosexual love, check out our full list of titles in gay and lesbian studies.

Will you be the University of Chicago Press's valentine?

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Nigel Beale, author of the Nota Bene Books blog, recently posted the audio from an interesting interview he conducted with the press's publicity manager, Levi Stahl. The interview offers a rare insider's perspective on book marketing and publicity, touching on everything from coordinating book tours and dealing with the media, to writing promotional copy, to the industry's shift towards online marketing strategies. The pair top off the interview with a discussion of Stahl's recent efforts in getting the UCP to re-issue the Parker novels, Richard Stark's famous hardboiled noir mystery series. Listen in on the discussion at Nigel Beale's Nota Bene Books blog.

Archived in UCP News
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Martin Buber is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Based on the overwhelming anecdotal evidence, this week must have one of the highest-ever concentrations of famous birthdays. In addition to the Lincoln bicentennial to which it seems we've been building up—especially in Illinois—for over a year now, Darwin's equally talked-about 200th birthday also occurs on February 12.

In recognition of the occasion, the New York Times devotes today's Science Times to a suite of stories about Darwin and his lasting influence, not the least of which is this column on "Charles Darwin: Live & In Concert."

The Darwin special inspired our own roundup, which begins with Darwin's own The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, a volume which, as today's Times put it, traces "connections between humans and animals in the muscles used to express emotions such as grief and terror."

In Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior, Robert Richards discusses the celebrated scientist's ideas about instinct, reason, and morality, against the background of Darwin's personality, training, scientific and cultural concerns, and intellectual community.

The relationship between science and religion is, of course, one of the issues most popularly discussed today in light of Darwin's work, and David Sloan Wilson's Darwin's Cathedral takes the radical step of joining the two, but not in the usual fashion. The key, Wilson argues, is to think of society as an organism-one in which morality and religion are adaptations that allow groups of humans to function as a coherent whole.

The Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism takes a more specifically focused approach to this issue, exploring how Jewish discussions of evolution have been shaped by the intersections of faith, science, philosophy, and ideology in specific historical contexts.

And, finally, Keith Stanovich's The Robot's Rebellion (excerpt) responds to decades of research in evolutionary biology and cognitive science that have led many esteemed scientists to the conclusion that, according to the precepts of universal Darwinism, humans are merely the hosts for two replicators (genes and memes) that have no interest in us except as conduits for replication. Accepting and now forcefully responding to this decentering and disturbing idea, Stanovich provides the tools for the "robot's rebellion," a program of cognitive reform necessary to advance human interests over the limited interest of the replicators and define our own autonomous goals as individual human beings.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News
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Sight is central to the medium of photography. But what happens when the subjects of photographic portraits cannot look back at the photographer or even see their own image? An in-depth pictorial study of blind school children in Mexico, Look at me draws attention to (and distinctions between) the activity of sight and the consciousness of form.

Combining elements of his earlier, acclaimed street work with an innovative approach to portraiture, Chicago-based photographer Jed Fielding dwells closely on these children’s features and gestures, exploring the enigmatic boundaries between surface and interior, innocence and knowing, beauty and grotesque. Fielding’s work achieves what only great art, and particularly great portraiture can: it launches and then complicates a process of identification across the barriers that separate us from each other. Look at me contains more than sixty arresting images from which we often want to look away, but into which we are nevertheless drawn by their deep humanity and palpable tenderness. This is a monograph of uncommon significance by an important American photographer.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Press Releases
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The latest issue of Time magazine is running a noteworthy review of Sherry Buchanan's new book, Mekong Diaries: Viet Cong Drawings and Stories, 1964-1975—a collection of works by ten artists recruited by the Viet Cong during the U.S. conflict to carry their sketchbooks, ink, and watercolors into combat. Buchanan traveled across Vietnam to gather some of this never-before-published material, and as the Time review notes, the resulting book is a fascinating departure from the "common American narrative," offering "extraordinary insight into Vietnamese hearts, military and civilian."

To find out more read the article on the Time magazine website or see these sample pages [PDF format] featuring a selection of artworks form the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Reviews
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February 8 marked the 131th anniversary of the birth of Martin Buber, theologian, philosopher, and political radical. Buber (1878–1965) was actively committed to a fundamental economic and political reconstruction of society as well as the pursuit of international peace. In his voluminous writings on Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine, Buber united his religious and philosophical teachings with his politics, which he felt were essential to a life of public dialogue and service to God.

Buber's presences looms large over the Chicago Jewish studies list; in addition to Buber's own writings in print, the Press also recently published a study analyzing his interpretation of Hasidic spirituality as a form of cultural criticism. In honor of this influential thinker's life and work, we offer a Martin Buber reading list.

A Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs
Martin Buber, Edited with Commentary and a new Preface by Paul Mendes-Flohr

Collected in A Land of Two Peoples are the private and open letters, addresses, and essays in which Buber advocated binationalism as a solution to the conflict in the Middle East. A committed Zionist, Buber steadfastly articulated the moral necessity for reconciliation and accommodation between the Arabs and Jews. From the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 to his death in 1965, he campaigned passionately for a "one state solution." With the Middle East embroiled in religious and ethnic chaos, A Land of Two Peoples remains as relevant today as it was when it was first published more than twenty years ago. This timely reprint, which includes a new preface by Paul Mendes-Flohr, offers context and depth to current affairs and will be welcomed by those interested in Middle Eastern studies and political theory.

On Intersubjectivity and Cultural Creativity
Martin Buber, Edited and with an Introduction by S. N. Eisenstadt

One of the foremost religious and social philosophers of the twentieth century, Buber also wrote extensively on sociological subjects, particularly as these affected his philosophical concerns. Collected here, these writings—touching on education, religion, the state, and charismatic leadership—offer essential insights into the human condition as it is expressed in culture and society.

Buber's central focus in his sociological work is the relation between social interaction, or intersubjectivity, and the process of human creativity. Specifically, Buber seeks to define the nature and conditions of creativity, the conditions of authentic intersubjective social relations that nurture creativity in society and culture. He attempts to identify situations favorable to creativity that he believes exist to some extent in all cultures, though their fullest development occurs only rarely.

Buber considers the combination of open dialogue between human and human and a dialogue between man and God to be necessary for the crystallization of the common discourse that is essential for holding a free, just, and open society together.

Aesthetics of Renewal: Martin Buber's Early Representation of Hasidism as Kulturkritik
Martina Urban

Buber's embrace of Hasidism at the start of the twentieth century was instrumental to the revival of this popular form of Jewish mysticism. Hoping to instigate a Jewish cultural and spiritual renaissance, he published a series of anthologies of Hasidic teachings written in German to introduce the tradition to a wide audience. In Aesthetics of Renewal, Martina Urban closely analyzes Buber's writings and sources to explore his interpretation of Hasidic spirituality as a form of cultural criticism.

For Buber, Hasidic legends and teachings were not a static, canonical body of knowledge, but were dynamic and open to continuous reinterpretation. Urban argues that this representation of Hasidism was essential to the Zionist effort to restore a sense of unity across the Jewish diaspora as purely religious traditions weakened—and that Buber's anthologies in turn played a vital part in the broad movement to use cultural memory as a means to reconstruct a collective identity for Jews. As Urban unravels the rich layers of Buber's vision of Hasidism in this insightful book, he emerges as one of the preeminent thinkers on the place of religion in modern culture.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events | Religion
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Black History Month offers an occasion to highlight some the nation's most influential African-American scholars, activists, and leaders. Mostly, the focus is on the usual list of iconic figures—Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and now, Barack Obama. But this year authors Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth offer a timely tribute to one of the lesser known, yet most influential African American intellectuals of the twentieth century with their new book, Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher. A fascinating look at the life of a man often called the "father of the Harlem Renaissance" and whom the authors dub "the most influential African American intellectual born between W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr.," as book critic Carlin Romano writes in his review for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the untold story of Locke's profound impact on twentieth-century American culture and thought has been long overdue. From the review:

This long-overdue book—astoundingly, the first full biography ever of a thinker for whom schools, prizes and societies across America are named—closes a project [Harris and Molesworth] decided to do together after originally embarking on separate lives of their subject.

Why has it taken so long for a definitive biography of Locke to appear, when works on comparable black intellectuals abound?…

Locke scholar Russell J. Linnemann once offered a celebratory explanation. Noting Locke's extraordinary interests in "anthropology, art, music, literature, education, political theory, sociology and African studies," Linnemann speculated that few "potential biographers" possessed the "intellectual breadth" to "fulfill the task properly."

Yet Harris and Molesworth also draw back the curtain on other factors. Perhaps the largest is that Locke was gay and closeted, though people of any acuity understood his sexuality.…

Harris and Molesworth close that gap, not going into Locke's intimacies with the detail of Harris' essay, but explaining how they shaped the philosopher's prodigious aesthetic sensibilities.

The third important obstacle to a Locke biography was its subject's personality. Harris and Molesworth's adjectives for their subject, such as "aloof" and "elitist," confirm that Locke, as they report, "did not suffer fools gladly," and was always more respected than loved.

Harris and Molesworth's book thus unfolds as no hagiography, but a critical, contextualized understanding of a singular thinker who did not fit the stereotype of many black intellectuals.…

A memo, then, to students, teachers and staff at Philadelphia's Alain Locke Elementary School, their colleagues at all Locke schools elsewhere, and to winners of the Alain Locke Prize at Harvard, given to the student with the highest GPA in African American studies:

That "Alain Locke" with his name on the wall was also a living, breathing, peculiar character at the very top of his talented tenth. This, finally, is his story.

Read the rest of Romano's article on the Philly.com website.

Archived in Biography | Philosophy | Reviews
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Comedians Tim Reid and Tom Dreesen, authors of Tim and Tom: An American Comedy in Black and White, were interviewed Wednesday on NPR's News & Notes. In the interview Tim and Tom join host Tony Cox to talk about the trials and tribulations they faced touring the country in the late 60's as the nation's first—and last—interracial comedy duo, as well as some of their more recent experiences touring with their new book. Listen to the archived audio of the interview on the NPR website or see the video on the News & Views blog. We have an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Chicago
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As U.S. senators continue to debate the economic stimulus package on which they could vote as early as tonight, their deliberation over such a huge bill heightens the implications of the questions Gary Mucciaroni and Paul Quirk pose in Deliberative Choices: Debating Public Policy in Congress. Does debate genuinely inform members of Congress and the public? Or does it mostly mislead and manipulate them?

Mucciaroni and Quirk argue that in fashioning the claims they use in debate, legislators make a strategic trade-off between boosting their rhetorical force and ensuring their ability to withstand scrutiny. They show how legislators' varying responses to such a trade-off shape the issues they focus on, the claims they make, and the information they provide in support of those claims.

Mucciaroni and Quirk conclude that congressional debate generally is only moderately realistic and informed. It often trades in half-truths, omissions, and sometimes even outright falsehoods. Yet some debates are highly informative. We can only hope today's will fall into this last category. But in any case, it's always possible to improve deliberation, and the authors recommend reforms designed to do so.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
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Judging for the 2009 American Association of University Press's Book, Jacket and Journal Show—a competition that recognizes meritorious achievement in the design, production, and manufacture of books, jackets, and journals by members of the university press community—took place last month at the AAUP Office in New York City. Approximately 289 books, 292 jacket and covers, and 7 journals competed, and 53 books, 36 jackets/covers, and one journal were chosen by the jurors as the very best examples from this pool of excellent design.

The University of Chicago Press is proud to announce that it had eleven winning entries in the show. Congratulations to the winners!

Design Category: Scholarly Typographic
Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz by Georges Didi-Huberman
Designer: Maia Wright

Design Category: Scholarly Illustrated
Cutting a Figure:Fashioning Black Portraiture by Richard J. Powell
Designer: Matt Avery

Design Category: Scholarly Illustrated
The Terezín Album of Mariánka Zadikow Annotated by Debórah Dwork
Designer: Jill Simabukuro

Design Category: Trade Typographic
Collections of Nothing by William Davies King
Designer: Jill Shimabukuro

Design Category: Trade Illustrated
The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age by Neil Harris
Designer: Maia Wright

Design Category: Trade Illustrated
Sleeping Beauty: A One-Artist Dictionary by John Sparagana and Mieke Bal
Designer: Jill Shimabukuro

Design Category: Poetry and Literature
Voices from Shanghai: Jewish Exiles in Wartime China Edited by Irene Eber
Designer: Matt Avery

Design Category: Jackets and Covers
Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twentieth-Century America by Barry Schwartz
Designer/Art Director: Matt Avery

Design Category: Jackets and Covers
Islam and the West: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida by Mustapha Chérif
Designer: Dustin Kilgore, Art Director: Jill Shimabukuro

Design Category: Jackets and Covers
Memory's Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England by Jennifer Summit
Designer: Natalie F. Smith, Art Director: Jill Shimabukuro

Design Category: Jackets and Covers
Obsession: A History by Lennard J. Davis
Designers: Isaac Tobin and Lauren Nassef, Art Director: Jill Shimabukuro

Archived in UCP News
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Thirty-five years ago today, on February 4, 1974, 19-year-old Patty Hearst, daughter of newspaper magnate Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped from her Berkeley, Calif., apartment by armed members of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Nine weeks later, Hearst, along with her captors and conspirators, robbed a San Francisco bank. After more than a year on the lam, Hearst was captured on September 18, 1975 and convicted of armed robbery in March 1976. She served only twenty-one months of her seven-year sentence before it was commuted by President Jimmy Carter. In 2001, Patty Hearst was pardoned by President Bill Clinton.

The bizarre story of brainwashed heiress captured a nation's attention, and, even today, the sensational tale seems to defy belief. But William Graebner sees the robbery—and the spectacular 1976 trial that ended with Hearst's criminal conviction—as oddly appropriate to the troubled mood of the nation at the time, an instant exemplar of a turbulent era.

In Patty's Got a Gun: Patricia Hearst in 1970s America, the first substantial reconsideration of Patty Hearst's story in more than twenty-five years, Graebner vividly re-creates the atmosphere of uncertainty and frustration of mid-1970s America. Drawing on copious media accounts of the robbery and trial—as well as cultural artifacts from glam rock to Invasion of the Body Snatchers—Graebner paints a compelling portrait of a nation confused and frightened by the upheavals of 1960s liberalism and beginning to tip over into what would become Reagan-era conservatism, with its invocations of individual responsibility and the heroic. Trapped in the middle of that shift, the affectless, zombielike Hearst was a ready-made symbol of all that seemed to have gone wrong with the sixties—the inevitable result, some said, of rampant permissiveness, feckless elitism, the loss of moral clarity, and feminism run amok.

By offering a fresh look at Patty Hearst and her trial—for the first time free from the agendas of the day, yet set fully in their cultural context—Patty's Got a Gun delivers a nuanced portrait of both an unforgettable moment and an entire era, one whose repercussions continue to be felt today.

Read an excerpt of the book and listen to an interview with the author.

Archived in Books for the News | History
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In this morning's story about the new version of Google Earth, which for the first time lets users explore Earth's oceans, the New York Times notes that "organizations seeking to reconnect people directly with nature expressed guarded optimism when the new features of Google Earth were described."

"Electronic images can boost awareness and sometimes even inspire, but there's no substitute for direct experience in nature," Cheryl Charles, president of Children and Nature Network, told the paper. "Hopefully those exploring Google's virtual oceans, especially children, can still find the time to get wet, as well."

While it's too cold in many parts of the world to make that a pleasant prospect, we have what is perhaps the next-best thing: beautiful books on the oceans and marine life that—long before Google Earth—literally put in our hands a new view of ocean depths around the globe, giving us a glimpse of worlds rarely seen.

With hundreds of beautiful full-color photographs and explanatory diagrams, charts, and maps, Dorrik Stow's Oceans combines the visual splendor of ocean life with up-to-date scientific information to provide an invaluable and fascinating resource on this vital realm.

Tony Koslow's The Silent Deep, meanwhile, tells the story of the exploration and discovery of the deep sea, the ecology of its diverse environments, and the impact of humans, highlighting the importance of global stewardship in keeping this delicate ecosystem alive and well.

And, of course, we couldn't talk about this topic without mentioning Claire Nouvian's The Deep, which features more than two hundred color photographs of terrifying sea monsters, living fossils, and ethereal bioluminescent creatures, some photographed for the very first time. Though turning the book's glossy pages to reveal each new creature is an experience we wouldn't want you to miss, these electronic images are pretty cool, too.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News | Cartography and Geography
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TV by Design takes us back to the cold war years to witness the rise of two cultural superpowers: modern art and network television. Often mistakenly cast as polar opposites, television and fine art were intimately linked in this period as TV creators and producers drew inspiration from the latest trends in graphic design, avant-garde cinema, pop art, and modernist architecture. By broadcasting art’s cutting edge directly into America’s living rooms, TV gave modern art unprecedented national exposure. Lynn Spigel populates this fascinating history with the stories of the many artists—including Eero Saarinen, Duke Ellington, Ben Shahn, Saul Bass, Andy Warhol, William Golden, and Richard Avedon—that worked in or were influenced by television and illustrates it with an array of photos, ads, and stills from the period. A lively correction to the medium’s reputation as a vast wasteland, TV by Design reveals the dynamic history of the ways television brought entertainment and art into people’s everyday lives.

Read the press release.

Also, read an excerpt.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Film and Media | History | Press Releases
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February is Black History Month, and this year, with this first African-American President hard at work in the White House, the observance has added meaning. And, along with Obama's inauguration, 2009 also marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the NAACP. Despite some calls to end Black History Month, Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, warns in USA Today, "We won't be post-racial until we are post-racism." With the struggles of the past and the glorious achievement of the present in mind, we offer a reading list for Black History Month.

Tim Reid and Tom Dreesen with Ron Rapoport, Tim and Tom: An American Comedy in Black and White

As the heady promise of the 1960s sagged under the weight of widespread violence, rioting, and racial unrest, two young men—one black and one white—took to stages across the nation to help Americans confront their racial divide: by laughing at it. Tim and Tom tells the story of that pioneering duo, the first interracial comedy team in the history of show business—and the last. Tim Reid and Tom Dreesen polished their act in the nightclubs of Chicago, then took it on the road, not only in the North, but in the still-simmering South as well, developing routines that even today remain surprisingly frank—and remarkably funny—about race. Most nights, the shock of seeing an integrated comedy team quickly dissipated in uproarious laughter, but on some occasions the audience's confusion and discomfort led to racist heckling, threats, and even violence. Though Tim and Tom perpetually seemed on the verge of making it big throughout their five years together, they grudgingly came to realize that they were ahead of their time: America was not yet ready to laugh at its own failed promise. By turns revealing, shocking, and riotously funny, Tim and Tom unearths a largely forgotten chapter in the history of comedy and race.

Read an excerpt and visit the book's website.

Eddie S. Glaude Jr., In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America

In this provocative book, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., celebrated by Cornel West as "the towering public intellectual of his generation," makes an impassioned plea for black America to address its social problems by recourse to experience and with an eye set on the promise and potential of the future, rather than the fixed ideas and categories of the past. Central to Glaude's mission is a rehabilitation of philosopher John Dewey, whose ideas, he argues, can be fruitfully applied to a renewal of African American politics. In a Shade of Blue is a remarkable work of political commentary and to follow its trajectory is to learn how African Americans arrived at this critical moment in their cultural and political history and to envision where they might head in the twenty-first century.

Read an excerpt from the introduction here and check out all of Glaude's books from the Press.

Mary Pattillo, Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City

There was a time when Chicago's North Kenwood-Oakland neighborhood was plagued by gangs, drugs, violence, and the font of poverty from which they sprang. But in the late 1980s, activists rose up to tackle the social problems that had plagued the area for decades. Black on the Block tells the remarkable story of how these residents laid the groundwork for a revitalized and self-consciously black neighborhood that continues to flourish today. But theirs is not a tale of easy consensus and political unity, and here Mary Pattillo—a Newsweek Woman of the 21st Century—teases out the divergent class interests that have come to define black communities like North Kenwood-Oakland. She explores the often heated battles between haves and have-nots, home owners and apartment dwellers, and newcomers and old-timers as they clash over the social implications of gentrification. Along the way, Pattillo highlights the conflicted but crucial role that middle-class blacks play in transforming such districts as they negotiate between established centers of white economic and political power and the needs of their less fortunate black neighbors.

Read an excerpt and take a look at Pattillo's Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class.

Wendell E. Pritchett, Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City: The Life and Times of an Urban Reformer

From his role as FDR's "negro advisor" to his appointment, under Lyndon Johnson, as the first secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Robert Clifton Weaver was one of the most influential domestic policy makers and civil rights advocates of the twentieth century. This volume, the first biography of the first African American to hold a cabinet position in the federal government, rescues from obscurity the story of a man whose legacy continues to impact American race relations and the cities in which they largely play out. Tracing Weaver's career through the creation, expansion, and contraction of New Deal liberalism, Wendell Pritchett illuminates his instrumental role in the birth of almost every urban initiative of the period, from public housing and urban renewal to affirmative action and rent control. Beyond these policy achievements, Weaver also founded racial liberalism, a new approach to race relations that propelled him through a series of high-level positions in public and private agencies working to promote racial cooperation in American cities. But Pritchett shows that despite Weaver's efforts to make race irrelevant, white and black Americans continued to call on him to mediate between the races—a position that grew increasingly untenable as Weaver remained caught between the white power structure to which he pledged his allegiance and the African Americans whose lives he devoted his career to improving.

Read an excerpt and check out Wendell Pritchett's Brownsville, Brooklyn:Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto

Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth, Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher

Alain L. Locke (1886-1954), in his famous 1925 anthology The New Negro, declared that "the pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem." Often called the father of the Harlem Renaissance, Locke had his finger directly on that pulse, promoting, influencing, and sparring with such figures as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jacob Lawrence, Richmond Barthé, William Grant Still, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, and John Dewey. The long-awaited first biography of this extraordinarily gifted philosopher and writer, Alain L. Locke narrates the untold story of his profound impact on twentieth-century America's cultural and intellectual life. Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth trace this story through Locke's 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 multifaceted portrait that emerges from this engaging account effectively reclaims Locke's rightful place in the pantheon of America's most important minds.

For more, check out all the Press's books on African American and black studies.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by at 01:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Anne Durkin Keating, author of Chicago Neighborhoods and Suburbs: A Historical Guide made an appearance recently on WTTW's Chicago Tonight. On the show Durkin joined host Phil Ponce to discuss all things concerning the urban demography and geography of Chicagoland including whether Obama's house is really in Hyde Park, how the Olympics might impact the South Side, and a 149 year old Methodist summer camp in Des Plains.

Check out the archived video online on the WTTW website.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Cartography and Geography | Chicago | History | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)