For the past eight years the term "intellectual" has been frequently interpreted by the media as a piece of anti-populist or elitist rhetoric. But in a recent article for the New Republic Ross Posnock notes that Obama's presidency has rehabilitated the term as one of praise rather than opprobrium, and with it interest in the history of black intellectualism in America. Tapping into this renewed interest, Posnock cites Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth's new book, Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher for its revealing look at the life and thought of its highly influential, yet often neglected subject.

Inheriting the role of the leading spokesperson for black intellectualism from such figures as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Boise, the authors show how Alain L. Locke both continued their legacy of leadership but also vitally updated the role. Posnock writes: Harris and Molesworth's book "brings alive [Locke's] distinctive fashioning of the role of black intellectual" demonstrating his unique ability to operate as "a race man," but also as "an apolitical aesthete," keeping "up the pressure on both roles, as his thought continually refined itself and deepened." Thus, expanding the influence of black intellectuals in American culture Harris and Molesworth deliver fascinating evidence of Locke's profound impact as the "father of the Harlem Renaissance," promoting and sparring with such diverse 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 among others.

To find out more about Locke's unique and important contributions to American culture read Posnock's article at the New Republic website, then pick up a copy of Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth's, Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher.

Archived in Biography | Black Studies | History | Literature | Philosophy | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 03:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In his second collection of poems, Peter Campion writes about the struggle of making a life in America, about the urge “to carve a space” for love and family from out of the vast sweep of modern life. Coursing between the political and personal with astonishing ease, Campion writes at one moment of his disturbing connection to the public political structure, symbolized by Robert McNamara, then in the next, of a haunting reverie beneath a magnolia tree, representing his impulse to escape the culture altogether. He moves through various forms just as effortlessly, as confident in rhymed quatrains as in slender, tensed free verse. In The Lions, Campion achieves a fusion of narrative structure and lyric intensity that proves him to be one of the very best poets of his generation.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 01:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a story this weekend about Barack Obama's ubiquity, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette asked Kathleen Hall Jamieson's expert opinion about whether he's overexposed in the media. She said no: Obama's "target audience is that vast swath in the middle," Jamison explained. "The audience that's able to be persuaded is the ESPN audience, the Leno audience and the national audience that watches him in prime time.… If he'd had Internet and cable, Reagan would have done the rest of what Obama is doing."

As we've noted, Jamieson—a coauthor of Presidents Creating the Presidency—is no stranger to broad exposure herself. On the heels of her expert election commentary on the NewsHour, among dozens of other outlets, she's now turned to illuminating Obama's presidency and the issues his administration faces. This weekend alone, her wisdom appeared not only in the Post-Gazette but also in the National Journal's assessment of Obama's economic message and on "On the Media," where she reflected on the "War on Terror."

As the new president continues to use rhetoric to shape the presidency, Jamieson's Presidents Creating the Presidency holds more timely insights about the continuing re-creation of the nation's highest office.

Archived in Commentary | Politics and Current Events
Posted by at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hollywood & God is a virtuosic performance, filled with crossings back and forth from cinematic chiaroscuro to a kind of unsettling desperation and disturbing—even lurid—hallucination. From the Baltimore Catechism to the great noir films of the last century, from Cotton Mather and a nineteenth-century minstrel boy to B-movie actress Barbara Payton, a female Elvis impersonator, and even Paris Hilton, Polito tracks the stars, rituals, snares, hijinks, and mysteries at the crossroads of American spiritual and media life across a diversity of styles, tones, and eras. Mixing lyric and essay, collage and narrative, memoir and invention, Hollywood & God is an audacious book, as contemporary as it is historical, as sly and witty as it is devastatingly serious.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
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As President Obama begins the process of bringing America’s six-year occupation of Iraq to an end, it’s important that the public and the military alike learn from the mistakes that dogged the war from the start. Of all those errors, perhaps the most preventable—and irreparable—was the failure to protect Iraq’s unparalleled cultural heritage from the wholesale looting and destruction that followed the invasion and continues to this day.

With The Rape of Mesopotamia, Lawrence Rothfield offers a detailed, judicious account of the failures of planning, understanding, and initiative that led to the looting of the Iraq Museum and the incalculable loss to human culture that followed. Drawing on extensive interviews with soldiers, bureaucrats, war planners, archaeologists, and collectors, Rothfield reveals the breathtaking incompetence and inadequate planning—originating at the highest levels of the U.S. government—that left the troops on the ground unprepared for and unable to stop the looting they saw occurring all around them. At the same time, Rothfield shows, preservation advocates worldwide were insufficiently vocal about the risks the invasion posed to Iraq’s heritage, while the collectors who inhabit the shadowy worldwide market for illicit antiquities ensured the demand that the looters fulfilled.

Ultimately, Rothfield brings his story right to the present, arguing vehemently that the lessons of Iraq have largely been ignored—and that the same mistakes are liable to be repeated in future conflicts.

Read the press release.

Archived in Anthropology | Press Releases | Sociology
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Saturday was the anniversary of the death, in jail, of Spanish poet Miguel Hernández (1910-1942). In the Spanish-speaking world, Miguel Hernández is regarded as one of the most important poets of the twentieth century, equal in distinction to Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz. He has never received his just acclaim, however, in the English-speaking world, a victim of the artistic oppression exercised during the period of Francisco Franco's totalitarian regime. Determined to silence the writer Neruda fondly referred to as his "wonderful boy," Franco sentenced Hernández to death, citing as his crime only that he was "poet and soldier to the mother country." Despite the fact that complete and accurate versions of his work were difficult to obtain even in Spanish for nearly fifty years, Hernández went on to achieve legendary status.

In 2001, the Press published The Selected Poems of Miguel Hernández, offering to English-speaking readers the poet's extraordinary oeuvre in an authoritative bilingual edition. Featuring some of the most tender and vigorous poetry on war, death, and social injustice written in the past century, nearly half of the poems in this volume appear in English for the first time, making it the most comprehensive bilingual collection of Hernández's work available. Arranged chronologically, it presents Hernández's remarkable emotional range as well as his stylistic evolution from the Romantic shepherd poet to poet of the prison cell. Thorough annotations and introductory essays illuminate the biographical basis for many of Hernández's poems, while a foreword by Robert Bly and an afterword by Octavio Paz provide a striking frame for the work of this essential poet.

To commemorate the poet's passing, read three poems, translated by Ted Genoways, from the collection to experience verse that poet Edward Hirsch (to which the quote in the blog title is also attributed) heralded in the Washington Post Book World as "emotionally charged poetry, which is so filled with human difficulties, so full of the earth and the spirit of freedom."

Archived in Commentary
Posted by at 09:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year was announced today and the winner is…drum roll please…not Baboon Metaphysics. The title (no pun intended) went to The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-miligram Containers of Fromage Frais. But, good news, baboon loyalists: we're #2! Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth's book commanded 22% of the vote to earn the coveted position of runner-up. (The title comes from Darwin, who wrote in his diaries in 1838, "He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.")

Despite our also-ran status, the Press can claim this: ours is the oddest book title written by actual humans. You see, The 2009-2014 World Outlook was not authored by Philip M. Parker, as the byline on the cover suggests. Parker, as Noam Cohen wrote last year in the New York Times, "has developed computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject — broad or obscure — and, aided by his 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into books in a range of genres, many of them in the range of 150 pages and printed only when a customer buys one." Which means, essentially, the book was written by a computer. As the Times reports today, "The work, actually a statistical report rather than a proper book, was written by Parker, a professor of marketing, who uses econometric models to publish niche reports in the thousands." Horace Bent, a diarist on thebookseller.com, goes on: "And why did he choose to invent such a machine? Well, according to his submission to the United States Patent and Trademark Office: 'There is a need for an automated system that eliminates, or substantially reduces the costs associated with human labour, such as authors, editors…' However, given that fromage frais comes in 60-gram containers (NOT milli-gram), a copy editor would have been quite useful when it came to the text, one observes." And just as the text is computer-generated, so, too, is the title. The official announcement from thebookseller.com explains: "Parker's automated authoring invention … produces a title on the basis of complex internet and database searches."

So here's to the real, live authors out there who come up with odd book titles. And here's to the real, live marketing and sales staffs who OK them. You're all #1 in our hearts.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Next month, the Press will publish Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch by Jonathan Mayhew. Exploring the afterlife of this legendary Spanish writer in the poetic culture of the United States, Mayhew examines how Lorca in English translation has become a specifically American poet, adapted to American cultural and ideological desiderata—one that bears little resemblance to the original corpus, or even to Lorca's Spanish legacy. An assessment of Lorca's considerable influence on the American literary scene of the latter half of the twentieth century, the book uncovers fundamental truths about contemporary poetry, the uses and abuses of translation, and Lorca himself.

Although Mayhew wrote the book in a single academic year, he says he'd been preparing to write it for most of his life. Here, he gives us insight into his process of conceiving, researching, and creating Apocryphal Lorca:

The beginnings of Apocryphal Lorca go back to my puzzlement over Kenneth Koch's "Some South American Poets," which I first read in the mid-1970s. Like many aspiring poets of my generation, I was beginning to read Lorca, Aleixandre, and Neruda in translation and to learn Spanish to read them in the original. Koch's translations, however, were of imaginary poets—as I discovered when I looked up their names, one by one, in the card catalogue of my local university library. My first published poem referred to this episode. It began like this:

There is no need to invent imaginary
Latin American poets! Real poets exist,
Waiting to be translated!

What was the point of Koch's literary invention? I sensed that the intent was parodic, but what, exactly, was he parodying? My book is an attempt to answer this question some thirty years later.

My desire to read these poets in their own words led me, eventually, to become a Spanish professor, specializing in twentieth century peninsular poetry. Many years later, I felt the need to go back and understand a period of American literary history that I had experienced in my late teens, but had understood only partially. The vogue for translations of Spanish language poetry, which reached its height in the 1970s, had its beginnings with the American fascination with the figure of the Spanish playwright and poet Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), whose death at the hands of the rebels in Granada at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War reverberated throughout the 1930s and the Cold War Period. I knew that Langston Hughes had translated the Gypsy Ballads, that Jack Spicer had written After Lorca, a book mixing translations of Lorca poems with apocryphal translations, that Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, and Robert Duncan had admired Lorca. I was confident that I could gather enough material for an article about Lorca in US poetry, but as I began to research the topic I realized that I needed to write a book. With the generous help of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the encouragement of the University of Chicago Press, I set to work.

The idea of apocrypha soon became central to this project: Robert Creeley's 1952 poem "After Lorca" was not based on any extant Lorca poem, anticipating Spicer's later project. I looked at Paul Blackburn's posthumously published Lorca/Blackburn and noticed that he had translated songs from the popular tradition that were not written by Lorca at all. And then there were Koch's "South American Poets." Conversations about Koch with his long-time assistant, the poet Jordan Davis, confirmed my intuition Koch might have been parodying Lorca's duende with the concept of the hasos.

My most difficult task was to find the story that I wanted to tell. I decided that Lorca was a key figure in the development of an alternative version of "American Exceptionalism" during the Cold War period. Lorca became a celebrated figure at the same time as Eisenhower's State Department sent Dizzy Gillespie and other jazz musicians on good will tours to Africa and the Soviet Union. It is easy to see now that cultural vitality of this period owed more to Dizzy and Miles, to Allen Ginsberg and Jackson Pollock, than to the mainstream conservative institutions of this period. In some sense even the political elite of the period intuited this as well. A cartoon the New Yorker carried showed officials sitting around a table with the caption: "This is a mission of utmost delicacy. The question is, who's the best man for it—John Foster Dulles or Satchmo?" In the 1950s and 1960s, Lorca seemed to show up wherever poets and musicians were attempting to define specifically American identity at the margins of official culture. Allen Ginsberg's "Van Gogh's Ear," for example, evokes the Spanish poet in connection to the Cold War (McCarthyism), the American poetic tradition (Whitman, Crane), and the Russian futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose suicide represents the lost promise of the Russian Revolution with the rise of Stalinism:

Poet is Priest
 
Money has reckoned the soul of America
Congress has broken thru to the precipice of Eternity
the President built a War machine which will vomit and rear up Russia out of Kansas
The American Century betrayed by a mad Senate which no longer sleeps with its wife
Franco has murdered Lorca the fairy son of Whitman
just as Mayakovsky committed suicide to avoid Russia
Hart Crane distinguished Platonist committed suicide to cave in the wrong America

Translation theorist Lawrence Venuti argues that translation almost always serves a domestic agenda, a set of interests specific to the cultural context of the place where the translation takes place. Because Lorca was called upon to serve a broad range of uniquely American interests, from opposition to McCarthyism and African-American identity politics to gay liberation and "deep image" poetics, Lorca himself remains elusive. But of course there is no real Lorca, no authentic version unmediated by ideology. To study the reception of Lorca in Spain in the years since death would be to come to terms with another, equally contested domestic agenda.

American poets eventually settled on a single concept that would explain Lorca's poetics: the duende. Everyone from Harold Bloom and Edward Hirsch to Kenneth Koch, Robert Bly, Denise Levertov, and Hilda Morley have celebrated Lorca's evocation of a mysterious spirit force emanating from the earth. My own instinct was to take the opposite approach from Hirsch, who in his 2002 book The Demon and the Angel deploys the concept of the duende to explain "the source of artistic inspiration." I treat the American duende, instead, as a reduction of Lorca's complexity into an easily digested concept. The duende, shocking to say, is the form taken by Lorquian kitsch. The more varied political and cultural appropriations of Lorca during the Cold War period maintain a certain freshness. Once the duende became to dominant concept in Lorca's American reception, however, a certain fossilization set in.

Although I wrote most of this book in a single academic year, from August to March, I had really been preparing to write it my entire life. There are scholars like Andrew Anderson and Christopher Maurer who know a great deal more about Lorca than I do, but it is safe to say that very few professors of Spanish can match my level of engagement with contemporary American poetry. "The dead are notoriously hard to please," as Jack Spicer has Lorca write in the preface to After Lorca, but I feel that my ultimate goal is to do justice to the Lorca's legacy. One reader of my blog pointed out to me the word APOCRYPHAL is a perfect anagram of HAPPY LORCA. I took this as a sign that my examination of the apocryphal Lorcas of American poetry and poetics was ultimately a felicitous one. — Jonathan Mayhew

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
Posted by at 09:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Historian John Hope Franklin, professor emeritus at Duke University, passed away early Wednesday morning at the age of 94. He was professor in the department of history at the University of Chicago from 1964 to 1982, chair of the department from 1967 to 1970, and John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor from 1969 to 1982.

An outspoken champion of the Civil Rights movement, Franklin was involved in many of the pivotal issues regarding racial equality during the twentieth century, including, as NPR's Debbie Elliott recently noted, "helping Thurgood Marshall and his team craft their landmark Brown v. Board of Education case against school segregation." Professionally, he was regarded as a pioneering scholar in African American history and during his lifetime produced a host of definitive works on the subject. The Press is proud to have published Racial Equality in America (1976), George Washington Williams: A Biography (1985), as well as his Reconstruction after the Civil War, now in a third edition.

Among the many awards and honors he has received in recognition of his groundbreaking work, Franklin was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995, and in 2006, the John W. Kluge Prize for lifetime achievement in the humanities. He was also an avid horticulturalist and orchid collector, a pursuit recognized in the form of the orchid named in his honor in 1976.

Archived in Commentary | History
Posted by TXM at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the face-off pitting North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms against the National Endowment for the Arts and Robert Mapplethorpe, who also died twenty years ago this month. Deeming Mapplethorpe's photography obscene and indecent and seeking to halt an exhibition of his work, Helms helped enact a law that prevented the NEA from using government funds "to promote, disseminate, or produce materials which in the judgment of [the NEA] may be considered obscene, including but not limited to, depictions of sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the sexual exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts and which, when taken as a whole, do not have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."

Largely in response to this controversy, Dave Hickey began thinking about beauty. Helms, for all his misguided grandstanding, was right—Mapplethorpe's powerful, disruptive art was obscene, and the art world's defense of Mapplethorpe obfuscated the role of beauty in the power of art. Far from defending Helms's action, Hickey, a personal friend of and fan of Mapplethorpe's, instead sought to refocus the conversation. The result, a little book of only 64 pages, published in 1993, was championed by artists for its forceful call for a reconsideration of beauty—and savaged by more theoretically oriented critics who dismissed the very concept of beauty as naive, igniting a debate that has shown no sign of flagging.

Now, The Invisible Dragon is back. Revised and expanded, Hickey's controversial book has not mellowed with age. More manifesto than polite discussion, more call to action than criticism, The Invisible Dragon aims squarely at the hyper-institutionalism that, in Hickey's view, denies the real pleasures that draw us to art in the first place. Deploying the artworks of Warhol, Raphael, Caravaggio, and Mapplethorpe and the writings of Ruskin, Shakespeare, Deleuze, and Foucault, Hickey takes on museum culture, arid academicism, sclerotic politics, and more—all in the service of making readers rethink the nature of art. A new introduction provides a context for earlier essays—what Hickey calls his "intellectual temper tantrums." A new essay, "American Beauty," concludes the volume with a historical argument that is a rousing paean to the inherently democratic nature of attention to beauty.

This week, Aimee Walleston of the New York Times interviewed Hickey on the eve of the rerelease. A highlight:

Q: Are you OK with being "the beauty guy" again, for a little while? Seems like there are worse things to be.

A: Why not? For a while, I was simultaneously the "Mapplethorpe guy" and the "Norman Rockwell guy." I asked myself. "Who would still be a famous artist if the art world disappeared?" I came up with Robert and Rockwell. Whatever is a little off kilter, I'm your guy.

And earlier this month, Newsweek praised the reissue as "both a time capsule of a period when dirty pictures could dismantle institutions and a provocation to reignite the conversation about the purpose of art." And of course, just as the book remains relevant and incendiary today, so too does its author. "One thing is clear: Dave Hickey still knows how to breathe fire."

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by at 07:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In this week's issue of New Scientist, Marc Bekoff reflects on the animal behavior and conservation biology course he's taught for the past ten years at the Boulder County Jail in Colorado:

The inmates have often had enough of "nature red in tooth and claw": many lament that their own "animal behavior" is what got them into trouble in the first place. I teach that though there is competition and aggression in the animal kingdom, there is also a lot of cooperation, empathy, compassion and reciprocity. I explain that these behaviors are examples of "wild justice", and this idea makes them rethink what it means to be an animal.

Bekoff's forthcoming book, coauthored with Jessica Pierce and aptly titled Wild Justice, will make us all rethink what it means. Revealing that animals exhibit a broad repertoire of moral behaviors, including fairness, empathy, trust, and reciprocity, they make the provocative case that there is no moral gap between humans and other species—that morality is an evolved trait that we unquestionably share with other social mammals.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
Posted by at 01:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Carol Fisher Saller, assistant managing editor at the Press and the editor of the Chicago Manual of Style Q&A, is featured in the latest installment of the Chicago Audio Works Podcast with her new book The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago (or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships with Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and Yourself). In her book Saller distills her years of experience working with authors and their book manuscripts to produce a one-of-a-kind reference for copy editors that goes beyond the nuts and bolts of the job, to offer a detailed how-to on producing top quality writing, while maintaining positive and productive writer-editor relationships. For our podcast, Saller reads several passages as well as fields some classic questions from the Q&A. Listen in on the Chicago Audio Works Podcast.

To find out more read the introduction to the book or navigate to the author's website at www.subversivecopyeditor.com.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
Posted by TXM at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Earlier this month the Mellon Foundation named Tom Gunning—Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago, editor of the press's Cinema and Modernity series, and a former member of the University's Board of Publications—as one of four recipients of their 2008 Distinguished Achievement Awards. According to an article in the Chicago Chronicle, "the three-year award, given annually to distinguished scholars in the humanities, provides as much as $1.5 million to the recipients and their institutions in order to deepen and extend humanistic research." The Chronicle notes that the Mellon funding will boost work on Gunning's current project titled "Poetics of the Moving Image" as well as "subsidize a wide variety of activities related to the project, including archival research, a visiting professorship, graduate student research, public conferences on such topics as 'Cinema and Magic' and 'The Optical Uncanny,' as well as performances." For more information read the article in the Chicago Chronicle or navigate to the press release on the Mellon Foundation website.

—Congratulations!

Archived in Awards | Film and Media
Posted by TXM at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This piece on Slate Video recently caught our eye. In it, Jon Cohen visits the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, a research facility where inquiries into the cognitive and communication abilities of bonobos, orangutans, and apes continue on while most of the rest of the scientific community has abandoned its search for language in our closest relatives. A fascinating topic, no doubt, but check out that well-thumbed and post-it-laden book Cohen holds at minute mark 1:20—that's our very own title, The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate about Animal Language by Gregory Radick. For those fascinated by Cohen's report, Radick's book offers a detailed history behind the kind of research that continues today in Iowa.

In the early 1890s an amateur scientist named Richard L. Garner used the a phonograph to record monkey calls, play them back to the monkeys, and observe their reactions. From these experiments, Garner judged that he had discovered "the simian tongue," made up of words he was beginning to translate, which contained the rudiments out of which human language evolved. His experiments made him famous; but his reputation was damaged irreparably after a trip to Africa led to accusations of research fraud. For most of the next century, the simian tongue and the means for its study existed at the scientific periphery. Both returned to great acclaim only in the early 1980s, after the ethologist Peter Marler and his junior associates Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney announced that experimental playback showed certain African monkeys to have rudimentarily meaningful, calls.

Charting the scientific conversation about and controversy over the evolution of language from Darwin's day to our own, Gregory Radick offers in The Simian Tongue the first comprehensive history of a debate whose reverberations shaped modern psychology, anthropology, and other sciences of behavior. Drawing on archives and interviews, Radick reconstructs the remarkable trajectory of this "primate playback experiment" and accounts for its shifts of fortune. Stretching from the 1830s to the 1980s, the book resurrects the largely forgotten debts of the modern behavioral sciences to a Victorian debate about the animal roots of human language.

Called by the Times Literary Supplement a "masterwork in the history of science," The Simian Tongue reminds us, reviewer Barbara J. King notes, "that science is a spiral staircase; new techniques and theories emerge, not always in linear fashion, from the old. It shows, too, science's power to shape ways we humans think of, and act towards, our fellow creatures." For the history behind the techniques at work at the Great Ape Trust, turn to Radick for a thorough primer on the long search for animal language.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“Most of us,” writes Scott Norton in his introduction, “enter into book publishing with a romantic idea of the Editor that matches the equally inaccurate notion of the Author as tortured genius.”

As it turns out, editing—especially developmental editing—is hardly romantic. It’s a tricky business, requiring analytical flair and creative panache, the patience of a saint and the vision of a writer. And, of course, the occasional magic trick: Norton can transform a stack of paper into a bestseller, or, at the very least, a book that edifies, enlightens, and entertains.

In Developmental Editing Norton shares his knowledge with the rest of us. Using a series of humorous and relevant “case studies” (election-year polemic, travel guide, even a memoir), he explores the tough work of a developmental editor. From creating content to establishing authorial style, finding the “hook” and editing for pace, sizing up clients and learning when (and how) to sweat the details—Developmental Editing is filled with useful tips for editors, first-time authors, or anyone who fancies themselves a writer.

Read the press release.

See the author's website.

Archived in Press Releases | Reference and Writing
Posted by TXM at 09:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John A. Nagl, who retired from the Army last year to become president of the Center for a New American Security, appeared on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC last Monday to discuss the future of U.S. engagement in Afghanistan and the need for more troops—U.S. and Afghan—to contain the Taliban.

The strategy outlined in the The Counterinsurgency Field Manual, which Nagl co-authored, indicates the need for the long-term presence of a greater number of troops in Afghanistan, perhaps even by a factor of ten. To find out more about Nagl's startling projections of the cost of the conflict and the future of the Middle East, watch the online video of the show.

Also read Nagl's foreword to The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
Posted by TXM at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The alchemist's quest to transform base metals into gold lasted over 2500 years beginning with the ancient Egyptians and culminating with eighteenth century European and American alchemists like George Starkey and his apprentice Robert Boyle. As Stephen Heuser writes in a recent article for The Boston Globe: "Centuries of work and scholarship had been plowed into alchemical pursuits, and for what? Countless ruined cauldrons, a long trail of empty mystical symbols, and precisely zero ounces of transmuted gold. As a legacy, alchemy ranks above even fantasy baseball as a great human icon of misspent mental energy." But, Heuser asks, "was it really such a waste?"

In his article Heuser cites the rising number of scholars who would answer that question in the negative—including Press authors Bernard Lightman, Tara Nummedal, William R. Newman, and Lawrence M. Principe—all of whom have joined the ranks of historians, humanists, and philosophers of science that cite alchemy's profound influence on the beginnings of modern chemistry in calling for a reappraisal of its historical significance. Heuser's article continues:

Alchemists, they are finding, can take credit for a long roster of genuine chemical achievements, as well as the techniques that would prove essential to the birth of modern lab science[Robert Boyle is also today widely regarded as one of the founders of modern chemistry]. In alchemists' intricate notes and diagrams, they see the early attempt to codify and hand down experimental knowledge. In the practices of alchemical workshops, they find a masterly refinement of distillation, sublimation, and other techniques still important in modern laboratories.…

Bringing alchemy under the tent of science does more than illuminate a turning point in a distant history, however: It suggests a different way to think about science in our own time. Science might be the most productive tool ever invented for understanding the world, but despite its claims on truth, it is still just that: a tool, and a man-made one. Alchemy is an important reminder that modern science [also] has a context…

Isaac Newton, the first great physicist, reached for alchemy when he tried to formulate a theory of the universe that could account for everything from plant life to gravity. Albert Einstein tried, and failed, to cap his career by formulating a single theory that explained all the universe's forces. And at the cutting edge of modern physics, string theory purports to offer a complete but possibly unprovable explanation of the universe based on 11 dimensions and imperceptibly tiny strings.

Alchemists wouldn't recognize the mathematics behind the theory. But in its grandeur, in its claim to total authority, in its unprovability, they would surely recognize its spirit.

Read the rest of Heuser's article on the Boston Chronicle's website Boston.com. Or click on our author's names above to find our more about their books and the revival of alchemy studies.

Archived in Books for the News | Chicago | History and Philosophy of Science | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 03:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week, the journal Nature featured a cover story about Homo erectus, known familiarly as Peking Man. Although its age has been debated for decades, researchers recently used a new technique to date the deposits to about 770,000 years—about 300,000 years earlier than previously thought. Further research has prompted researchers to reevaluate the range of the species in Asia. As the BBC reports, "The discovery should help define a more accurate timeline for early humans arriving in North-East Asia."

Peking Man is, of course, the richest evidence of evolution the world has ever seen. Unearthed in the 1920s by an international team of scientists and miners, the fragmentary remains add up to much more than a picture of what human life looked like three-quarters of a million years ago. For historian of science Sigrid Schmalzer, Peking Man has as much to tell us about role of science in twentieth-century China and it does about human evolution.

The People's Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China is a skilled social history of twentieth-century Chinese paleoanthropology and a compelling cultural—and at times comparative—history of assumptions and debates about what it means to be human. Situating the Peking Man firmly in the era in which he was discovered, Sigrid shows that after the communist revolution of 1949 Peking Man became a prominent figure in the movement to bring science to the people. In a new state with twin goals of crushing "superstition" and establishing a socialist society, the story of human evolution was the first lesson in Marxist philosophy offered to the masses. But, at the same time, even Mao's populist commitment to mass participation in science failed to account for the power of popular culture—represented most strikingly in legends about the Bigfoot-like Wild Man—to reshape ideas about human nature. In the In the new picture Schmalzer presents of recent Chinese history, human identity is central to cultural and political change. By focusing on issues that push against the boundaries of science and politics, The People's Peking Man offers an innovative approach to modern Chinese history and the history of science.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by at 08:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“This author is giving me a fit.”
“I wish that I could just DEMAND the use of the serial comma at all times.”
“My author wants his preface to come at the end of the book. This just seems ridiculous to me. I mean, it’s not a post-face.”

Each year, writers submit over three thousand grammar and style questions to the Q&A page at The Chicago Manual of Style Online—and one woman, Carol Fisher Saller, reads every single one of them.

These writer-editor standoffs are classic, hilarious—and, as Saller points out in her new book, all too common. In The Subversive Copy Editor, Saller asks her readers to become “subversive” in two ways: one, by rethinking their understanding of the author as the enemy, and two, by keeping in mind that it’s okay to break the rules sometimes (like when it benefits the reader). In one chapter, Saller takes on the difficult author, in another she speaks to writers themselves. Throughout, she includes useful tips for prioritizing work, freelancing effectively, organizing computer files, and writing the perfect e-mail. Saller’s fresh emphasis on negotiation and flexibility will surprise many of us who have absorbed—along with the dos and don’ts of our stylebooks—an attitude that our way is the right way. After all, and as Saller puts it, “the point is not how to copyedit, but how to survive doing it.”

Read the press release.

Also, read the introduction to the book and see the author's website.

Archived in Press Releases | Reference and Writing
Posted by TXM at 03:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Lambda Literary Foundation has just announced the finalists for its annual Lambda Literary Awards—and we're pleased note that two Chicago books are in the running for best book in LGBT studies.

One contender, Amin Ghaziani's The Dividends of Dissent, chronicles the late twentieth century's four major gay and lesbian marches on Washington—demonstrations, he argues, that helped define what it means to be gay in the United States.

The other, Regina Kunzel's Criminal Intimacy, investigates a less public realm of American life. By exploring the sexual lives of prisoners and the sexual culture of prisons over the past two centuries—along with the impact of a range of issues, including race, class, and gender; sexual violence; prisoners' rights activism; and the HIV epidemic—Kunzel discovers a world whose surprising plurality and mutability reveals the fissures and fault lines beneath modern sexuality itself.

Congratulations to both authors, who continue the nomination streak Mark Padilla's Caribbean Pleasure Industry started last year.

Archived in Awards
Posted by at 03:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Author Joel Berger did an interview last Saturday for the Bob Edwards Weekend show about his new book, The Better to Eat You With: Fear in the Animal World. Berger begins by citing his experience watching several wolves—recently reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park after a sixty-year absence—as they stalked and killed an elk that, to Berger's surprise, remained oblivious to the danger until it was too late. This lead Berger to the hypothesis that after only six decades, the elk had forgotten to fear a species that had survived by eating them for millennia. In the interview Berger expands on this idea citing a distinctly non-genetic aspect of the animal's fear response that he attributes instead to a cultural element within the animal kingdom, comparing the elk's behavior to a hypothetical naive tourist wandering through a tough neighborhood. Listen to the archived podcast of the show at podcast.com.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology
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Today is St. Patrick's Day; what color are you wearing? This weekend, the Chicago River, in an annual tradition, was dyed a brilliant green hue (ironically, the dye itself is orange, another color long associated with Ireland) and, in a nod to the new occupants' home town, today the White House fountains were tinted in honor of St. Pat. The Chicago Tribune offers a fascinating top ten list of things you might not know about the color green (Including the fact that women's faces are more green than men's. Who knew?), but if you really want to see the world through, pardon the pun, green-tinted glasses, we recommend Bruce R. Smith's The Key of Green.

It turns out we've been crazy about the color for hundreds of years (and not just on St. Patrick's Day). During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the color green was curiously prominent and resonant in English culture: it was the most common color of household goods, the recommended wall color against which to view paintings, the hue that was supposed to appear in alchemical processes at the moment base metal turned to gold, and the color most frequently associated with human passions of all sorts. Smith studies this curiosity, considering the significance of the color in the literature, visual arts and popular culture of early modern England. Contending that color is a matter of both sensation and emotion, he examines Renaissance culture through the lens of sense perception and aesthetic pleasure, while offering thoughts on the nature of consciousness, perception, and emotion.

So when you're drinking the green beer this evening, don't forget to make a toast to this fascinating color. Sláinte!

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Writer Philip Connors reviews The Norman Maclean Reader in the March 30 issue of The Nation. Connors, who acknowledges that his life has certain similarities with Maclean's, recounts Maclean's life and literary works: the one book published in his lifetime (A River Runs Through It and Other Stories) and another published posthumously (Young Men and Fire).

"His career," writes Connors, "is one of the strangest in American letters." He relates some of the memorable moments of Maclean's publishing history, including the letter he wrote to a publisher who was trying to court the writer after the publication of A River Runs Through It. Connors continues:

It's not as if Maclean didn't know his stories were strange. He often said he wrote them in part so the world would know of what artistry men and women were capable in the woods of his youth, before helicopters and chain saws rendered obsolete the ancient skills of packing with mules and felling trees with crosscut saws. Artistry, specifically artistry with one's hands, was for him among life's most refined achievements.

Read the whole review; there are some interesting reflections on the religious resonances of Maclean's works.

We have a website for Norman Maclean.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
Posted by DB at 02:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

First in today's roundup: tips for the road. Time Out Chicago recently featured some "essential trunk items every Chicagoan should carry." Alongside your $50 in quarters for downtown parking meters, a siphon in case of painful increases in gas prices, and a tire inflator for unfortunate encounters with gaping potholes, The Encyclopedia of Chicago is the savvy commuter's book of choice for whiling away hours stuck in Chicago's third-in-the-nation-worst traffic.

See a special website for The Encyclopedia of Chicago.

Two of our books were reviewed in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books. Stephen Shapin's The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation is given the once-over by H. Allen Orr who ultimately produces a favorable assessment of what Orr describes as Shapin's natural history of the American scientist. A revealing look at the disjunction between dominant sociological views of science and its realities, as Orr writes, Shapin's treatment is "a major contribution to a fascinating topic."

Read an interview with Shapin and listen to an audio interview he did for the Chicago Audio Works podcast.

Reinhold Niebuhr's The Irony of American History was referenced along with several other books about the pre-eminent 20th century intellectual in a review essay by Brian Urquhart, who begins his article by noting Barack Obama's admiration for Niebuhr's work:

A fog of know-nothing ideology, anti-intellectualism, cronyism, incompetence, and cynicism has, for eight years, enveloped the executive branch of the United States government. That fog is now being dispersed, and the vast intellectual and managerial resources of the United States are once again being mobilized.

A blessing of this time of liberation and hope is that serious works of political analysis and philosophy may contribute to the new administration's approach to its daunting agenda of global and national problems. That Barack Obama has made clear his admiration for one of the books under review—Reinhold Niebuhr's The Irony of American History—is in itself reassuring.

Read an excerpt from The Irony of American History.

Have a relaxing weekend.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by TXM at 02:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We have a winner. The National Book Critics Circle announced the winners of their 2008 awards today and we are happy to congratulate Seth Lerer on his win in the criticism category for Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter.

A few days ago NBCC board member Carlin Romano described, in a posting to Critical Mass, the achievements of the book and the fairy-tale-like spell it cast on the committee:

Lerer brought to his subject both the critical acuity and unlimited openness it deserved. He insisted on placing a complex literature within the history of childhood, a story both contested and blessedly clear. He took into account the cavalcade of publishing history, without permitting it to trample the imaginative "transformations" wrought by the books. He understood that his terrain included not just books written for children, but books read by them, driving home the critical spine signaled by his subtitle.

Lerer accomplished much else in his fairy-tale feat of levitating a University of Chicago Press study, despite its small type, to a possible national prize from critics beleaguered by eye strain.… Members of the NBCC Board swallowed whole this splendid meditation on the literature that changes us most, and lived happily ever after.

Our warmest congratulations to Seth Lerer.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Awards | Literature
Posted by DB at 05:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Perhaps you can remember those halcyon days when the rules of style and grammar ingrained in us by our school teachers offered a reliable framework for writing, and a concrete set of rules to follow when approaching the work of others. But if you can remember that far back, you can also remember how that sense of order and justice was inevitably crushed as one ventured into the grammatical complexities and gray areas of reality. Navigating the diverse and dynamic world of the English language has presented many a writer with a difficult challenge.

The copy editor is the writer's guide through the pitfalls and minefields of language. Among the best of these is Carol Fisher Saller, who's tough yet tolerant approach—both in her career as senior manuscript editor at the press and as the wit behind the Chicago Style Q&A—has improved writers and editors alike. Now, with The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago (or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships with Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and Yourself), Saller offers her guidance and knowledge in book form, tailored to all those frazzled wordsmiths in need of more than just a guide to grammar, but a guide to a life working with words (minus the nervous breakdown). A recent article in Timeout Chicago quotes Saller as she explains her approach: "''I wanted to subvert the idea that editors and writers have to be locked in battle rather than serving the reader.…' Authors often have good reasons for making exceptions, she says, and whatever best communicates to the reader, wins."

With an emphasis on negotiation and flexibility that will surprise those who have absorbed the dos and don'ts of their stylebooks, Saller's The Subversive Copy Editor offers a rare peace of mind in the midst of the too often contentious world of the copy editor.

John A. McIntyre, writer for the Baltimore Sun, also discusses Saller's book on his blog, You Don't Say.

Read the introduction to the book on the Press website; Saller has her own website for the book, too.

Archived in Books for the News | Reference and Writing
Posted by TXM at 03:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The blog First Book Interviews is running an interview with Randall Mann, just in time for the publication of his second collection of poems, Breakfast with Thom Gunn.

In addition to giving readers an unvarnished look at the early stages of a poet's career, Mann discusses how his work has evolved between the publication of his first book, Complaint in the Garden, and his new volume, which comes out next month.

"As I have grown more ragged and unsure, so have my poems," he told First Book editor Keith Montesano. "The poems are mostly set in San Francisco. There is a queer, I hope unforgiving, anxiety, and a harsher take on love and loss and landscape. I worked on the book for nine years."

We have a preview of the results.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
Posted by at 03:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As various media outlets reported yesterday, a new portrait of Shakespeare, discovered in the collection of the aristocratic Cobbe family who owned it for nearly 300 years, is the only known likeness of the Bard produced during his lifetime. According to the Associated Press, Paul Edmondson, director of learning at the Shakespeare Learning Trust, offered good odds that the unidentified sitter in the painting is indeed the great playwright. "We're 90 percent sure that it's Shakespeare. You'll never be entirely certain. There will always be voices of dissent."

But there is no argument on this matter—this Shakespeare (with youthful skin, rugged stubble, and beckoning eyes) is a fox. As the Guardian notes, Will was likely 46-years-old when the portrait was made. So why does he look like a strapping young lad in his mid-twenties? As Mark Broch, curator of the Cobbe family's collection, suggested, "polish[ing] out the wrinkles and increas[ing] the size of the pearls" may indeed be the Elizabethan equivalent of modern airbrushing techniques.

All of this excitement reminds us that whether in portraiture or scholarship, the question of identity is central to modern Shakespeare studies. The Press has published several books in recent years that grapple with this issue. In Shylock is Shakespeare, Kenneth Gross argues, as the title suggests, that Shylock is such an enduring character because he is the voice of Shakespeare himself. In the classic Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt examines the structure of selfhood as evidenced in major literary figures of the English Renaissance and finds that in the early modern period new questions surrounding the nature of identity heavily influenced the literature of the era. And this fall, the Press will publish Jeffrey Knapp's critical examination of contested authorship, Shakespeare Only.

The dispute about Shakespearean identity and authorship will continue to define the field for years to come, and the authenticity of the portrait and its subject will likely become a potent symbol of the debate. For more from the Press on the Bard, check out our complete list of titles in Shakespeare Studies.

Archived in Commentary
Posted by at 09:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In response to the fall of consumer confidence "to its lowest level in more than three decades," the New York Times's Room for Debate blog asked a few experts on the subject: How fast do spending habits change and are they affected by cultural pressures? Are new habits of thrift likely to last past an economic recovery?

Lawrence Glickman, author of the forthcoming Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America, responds that an ethos of "recognizing consumer power even as people buy less" is resurfacing.

"Americans are once again aware of the importance of consumer demand now that we're in recessionary times," Glickman writes.

Indeed, in recent months, shopping has been cast as something akin to political action.

This is nothing new. The attempt to turn economic clout into political power has been an important element of our political culture ever since the American Revolution. Even as Americans have been enthusiastic shoppers, they have also been avid in coordinating purchasing power for political purposes. No decade in American history saw more consumer activism than the Depression decade of the 1930s.

Although one might think that the intensity of consumer protest would correlate with prosperity, Americans during the Depression engaged in a host of boycotts, large and small, including "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" campaigns of African Americans and the boycott of the products of Nazi Germany organized by some Jewish American organizations.

This upsurge in politicized consumption, which at first might seem counterintuitive (after all, Americans had fewer resources to shop), makes sense when we realize that during economically depressed periods, people are far more aware of the power of their dollars.

Read the rest of Glickman's commentary. And follow it up with his definitive history of American consumer activism, which comes out in July.

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | History
Posted by at 08:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The National Book Critics Circle will announce its awards this Thursday. Among the many distinguished books and authors nominated—Roberto Bolaño, Marilynne Robinson, Dexter Filkins included—our own Seth Lerer and his book Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter is up for best book in literary criticism. Charting the makings of the Western literary imagination from Aesop's fables to Mother Goose, from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to Peter Pan, from Where the Wild Things Are to Harry Potter, Lerer explores the iconic books, ancient and contemporary alike, that have forged a lifelong love of literature in young readers during their formative years.

Since its publication in June 2008, Lerer's book has received heaps of glowing critical praise. A starred review in Library Journal noted "Lerer has accomplished something magical. Unlike the many handbooks to children's literature that synopsize, evaluate, or otherwise guide adults in the selection of materials for children, this work presents a true critical history of the genre.&hellilp; Scholarly, erudite, and all but exhaustive, it is also entertaining and accessible. Lerer takes his subject seriously without making it dull." The San Francisco Chronicle raves "Lerer's history reminds us of the wealth of literature written during the past 2,600 years.… With his vast and multidimensional knowledge of literature, he underscores the vital role it plays in forming a child's imagination. We are made, he suggests, by the books we read." And on Critical Mass, the blog of the NBCC, board member Carlin Romano described the fairy-tale-like spell Lerer's book cast on the committee: "Members of the NBCC Board swallowed whole this splendid meditation on the literature that changes us most, and lived happily ever after."

For more on Lerer and his book, read an excerpt from the book or check out this profile from the San Diego Union Tribune. And please join us in congratulating Professor Lerer on this honor. We wish him much luck on Thursday!

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last Monday, the Los Angeles Times announced the 2008 nominees for the annual L. A. Times Book Prize. We were pleased to find Connie Voisine's Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream among the nominees in the poetry category while Martin J. S. Rudwick's Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform was also nominated in the science & technology category. There are nine competitive award categories in all—biography, current interest, fiction, the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, history, mystery/thriller, poetry, science and technology, young adult—each with five nominees. All awards will be presented in a ceremony on April 24, kicking off the L.A. Times Festival of Books. Click on over to the L.A. Times website to see the complete list of all 45 of this year's nominees, and congrats to our authors!

Also, a tip of the hat to Biblical Scholar Robert Alter, author of 22 acclaimed works on the Bible, literary modernism and contemporary Hebrew (many of which have been published by the Harvard University Press) and the 2008 winner of the Book Prize's Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement.

Archived in Awards
Posted by TXM at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Brian Eno may take a back seat to the likes of Bono or the Edge in terms of superstardom, yet for the last couple of decades he's been instrumental in creating the sound behind megaband U2's biggest hits, also recently producing Coldplay's Viva La Vida—last year's biggest selling album. Now he's gearing up for another pop-rock release with U2 titled, No Line On The Horizon. But Eno's also made a name for himself on his own as one of the pioneer's of early ambient electronic music, releasing several solo albums in the seventies and eighties that have since come to define the genre.

If your familiar with that work with its Gregorian-chant-like monophonic drones, it might make sense that Eno also enjoys reading about medieval culture. Our publicist in the UK, Whitney Linder, noticed next to a recent interview with Eno in the Telegraph a boxed feature titled "What Eno's Reading at the Moment"—one of his five titles: A Day in a Medieval City by Chiara Frugoni.

The little feature on Eno's reading material isn't available online, so, unless you've got last Saturday's Telegraph lining your birdcage, you'll have to take our word for it. Take a look at the interview though, to find out who wrote that 3.25 second burst of music "that announces that Windows on your computer is springing to life."

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by TXM at 04:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The California Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments today on Proposition 8, the successful ballot measure that amended the state's constitution to ban gay marriage. The Los Angeles Times reports that supporters of gay marriage "seek to overturn Proposition 8 by saying it isn't a constitutional amendment at all, but a constitutional revision that should have been required to go through a much more rigorous process to become law."

Whatever the court decides, it seems safe to predict that this is only one of many battles to come between two sides of an issue that—as the authors of The Politics of Same-Sex Marriage point out—has waxed and waned in the public sphere since the passing of the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act. In fact, same-sex couples filed suit Tuesday against the federal government over portions of the act. The suit is expected to take several years to make its way through the federal court system—which leaves a lot of time for reading up on the issue in the meantime.

The Politics of Same-Sex Marriage, a great place to start, brings together an esteemed list of scholars to explore all facets of this heated issue, including the ideologies and strategies on both sides of the argument, the public's response, the use of the issue in political campaigns, and how same-sex marriage fits into the broad context of policy cycles and windows of political opportunity.

And Same Sex, Different Politics brings an illuminating comparative approach to gay rights issues. It's the first book to compare results across struggles over laws governing military service, homosexual conduct, adoption, marriage and partner recognition, hate crimes, and civil rights. In each area, Gary Mucciaroni found, the gay rights movement's achievements depended both on Americans' perceptions of its demands and on the political venue in which the conflict plays out. Adoption policy, for example, generally takes shape in a decentralized system of courts that enables couples to target sympathetic judges, while fights for gay marriage generally culminate in legislation or ballot referenda—Proposition 8 comes to mind—against which it is easier to mount opposition.

Archived in Books for the News | Gay and Lesbian | Law | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by at 09:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's National Grammar Day, brought to you by the fine folks at the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, and, as you prepare for a raucous celebration tonight (just don't drink too many grammartinis or you may be commatose tomorrow! *rimshot*), we wanted to spotlight a book that will help you embody SPOGG's mission of speaking well, writing well, and helping others do the same. After all, as publisher of The Chicago Manual of Style, we take good grammar very seriously.

The A in response to all those Qs on The Chicago Manual of Style Online, Carol Fisher Saller is the gatekeeper of good grammar. In The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago (or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships with Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and Yourself), Saller offers a practical guide to being a prose perfectionist in a world of dangling prepositions and misplaced modifiers. A companion to grammar stylebooks, The Subversive Copy Editor emphasizes habits of carefulness, transparency, and flexibility while encouraging anybody who works with words to build an environment of trust, cooperation, and, of course, good grammar. Full of good humor, good advice, and, most of all, good writing, Saller's wry and refreshing tome is the perfect book for National Grammar Day.

Craving more? Read the introduction, visit the author's website, and check out all of Chicago's Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing.

Archived in Books for the News | Reference and Writing
Posted by at 01:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It has been widely reported recently that Illinois hasn't yet revealed any concrete plans for the cash allotted to it for highway, bridge and transit projects via the President's economic stimulus bill. And this morning, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood issued a warning that time is running out. Washington is required to distribute funds by the 10th. Combined with Illinois' recently bolstered reputation for political corruption and mismanagement, the report seems at once predictable and worrisome, bringing to the fore the central pitfall of Obama's attempts to jump-start the economy—the potential for local governments to simply squander billions of taxpayer dollars—a problem that Barry B. LePatner, author of Broken Buildings, busted Budgets, argues is compounded by a construction industry that "is just as broken as the infrastructure it's charged with building and repairing." In his article, "Five Points the Government MUST Consider Before Doling Out Billions to the Construction Industry" LePatner delivers a critical assessment of the construction industry and its inefficiencies, and outlines the steps a responsible government must take to ensure the money from one of the biggest spending programs in history is used wisely. Read the article on the American Surveyor website, or find out more about LePatner's book at www.brokenbuildings.com.

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

As the New York Times reported last week, economic downturns usually spell doom for the humanities: "In this new era of lengthening unemployment lines and shrinking university endowments, questions about the importance of the humanities in a complex and technologically demanding world have taken on new urgency." Anyone who attended 2008's Modern Language Association conference in San Francisco (when the Dow hovered at a relatively rosy 8600) could sense the palpable tension as newly-minted humanities PhDs wandered, dazed, through a convention where news of canceled interviews, hiring freezes, and staff cuts dampened the usually festive atmosphere. Two months and a thousand point on the Dow later, certified and aspiring MFAs descended on Chicago for the annual meeting of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. The state of the economy—and possibly pharmaceuticals—was on everyone's minds. Our intrepid Phoenix Poet David Gewanter reports from the trenches:

In Chicago, the "hog-butcher of the world" as Carl Sandburg calls it, the abattoir known by the guttural acronym AWP Conference is open for business. Burly, heavy-coated, scalded by the cold outside, eight thousand writers bump and shuffle through the glittering halls of the Chicago Hilton, and suspiciously eye the stuffed elevators, lest they be shoved next to some needy graduate from the Depression State U. writing program. Yet if it is an abattoir, where porcelain flesh is cut, heads dangle loosely, and trotters twitch, still there is no blood. Not this year: no money, no blood.

The US economy is in a free fall, and universities are selling off their art collections (Brandeis), taking three-day furloughs (U. Maryland), or watching their well-endowed holdings droop and shrink by several billion dollars (Harvard). The economy is falling, and every writer thinks that it is about to fall upon him. On more precisely, upon his next book—the breakthrough work, the one to put his face before the public at last, and to purge from memory the presence of those other writers (the pretenders; the dissemblers; the yeasty attitudinizers). Will the Press cut his next book? For the magic paper mountain—the magazines, booklists, promotional copies, blurbspeak and bromide—this great beast is sagging under the weight of the US Recession, an economic reality so palpable that it punctures the finely cultivated, and eternally fecund Depression of the writer. Or nearly so.

Everyone carries a black conference bag of books and festschrift, and shuttles from Pedagogy talks ("The Family Verse-Novel"; "Put Punch in Your Plays") to the many Tributes for the Recently Dead, where Mark Antony speeches are delivered by the deceased's students, spouses, and amanuenses, themselves looking a coppery green under faint chandeliers. After promising to attend each other's talks, most participants sneak out to the Edvard Munch exhibit at the nearby Chicago Art Institute, where an overmedicated curator has labored to persuade us that Munch merely constructed a persona of despair and remorse, that he only said Death stood by my cradle because it helped create an audience for his paintings: as if the "Anxiety" series or "The Scream" were actually the droppings of a bon vivant, some virtuous American dieter and tennis-player. Surely, our American positivism must crash into a tree sometime, so that the Scream is caused by the painting looking at the writers looking back at it, with all their terrors and insufficiencies written in their faces. At the AWP, if a painting really saw the cost of Art on a life, it would scream.

Back at the Conference, in the airless, infernally hot basement, the ranks and ranks of bookstalls. It looks like an ugly debutante's ball; no one buys the journals or reads through them. Behind the table sits the editor, kindly, underfed, and with tattoos peeping from the collar; he writes for other journals but not his own and jokes with a writer thumbing through his own story or essay in the journal, and who preens and presses for more exposure, more copies. Didn't Larkin say that replication was not increase? The hubbub is tremendous, a field of giant crickets rubbing their wings—but only for the noise: no sex here. Soon, this year or next, many of these journals will go bankrupt, their remainders sent to the Limbo of betterworldbooks.com or directly to the afterlife, where they are wetted, shredded, and pulped for phone books.

At last the cricketer shambles off to his own panel, another half-empty ballroom where he will be listened to in the fullness of his sentence and sensibility. Every author, a chirping monad, a bubble-boy of language; and besides, shouldn't you be listening to me, isn't this MY time at last, the magic moment in which I, no longer the phantom of the underappreciated writer, now claim the rostrum? A Socrates making his peroration among the snoozing dinner guests. A Joyce holding his book praying, Hoc est corpus meum. An Emily Dickinson nearly saying, "I'm Nobody—Who the hell are You?"

Yet even as the warm breeze of recognition freshens the deeps of writers' Dis, the wing of despair shadows all. In the foyer, Senior Novelist to Young Writer: "I just finished reading your book, it was really terrific!" Young Writer: "I haven't written a book." And it's the young writer who feels ashamed. Meanwhile, our eyes dart here and there, hoping to glimpse the deus ex machina, the great money machine of poetry: John Barr, the former corporate executive, present poet, and head of the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation, which some years ago received $100 million from the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical company, and thus became the envy of all. So many great causes and writers: will the Poetry Foundation give out its rings and life-savers? The Death Valley Parnassians need a leg-up. The Center for Peripheral Studies must relocate. Yet Mr. Barr never crosses the Hilton threshold; a remote and kindly wizard of Oz justifiably fearful of crowds. Still, the Poetry Foundation has prompted so much complaint that my friend says the money should go back to the drug company, so that they could better medicate us.

The last day of the conference is literally on Valentine's Day, except that every day is Valentine's Day for the writer, a day of affectionate self-regard. This morning, each writer gives himself a flower(y speech), and grabs a (chocolate) kiss from another failing literary mag, from Hambone Quarterly or Lemon Sphincter Review; but the very materiality of these self-gifts tends to wear on each soul, so that by the time ‘happy' hour arrives (noon), people begin to feel grumpy with themselves, begin to ignore themselves, and even to bicker slightly—or maybe they are muttering into invisible cell-phones—so that by evening, they blurt out some unforgiveable remark, sit like absinthe drinkers through a silent dinner, and finally retreat to the chaste gloom of their hotel rooms, where the porn channels await them, the eternal pleasure dome of ardent faces and evident pleasures; where every stroke is real, every gesture of praise brings a stiff and sincere response; where every open mouth is either stuffed or moaning like Orpheus.

For more from David Gewanter, check out his collections The Sleep of Reason and In the Belly.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
Posted by at 07:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An article in yesterday's New York Times reveals some not so startling facts about corporate interests infiltrating the ivory tower at Harvard's Medical School where the American Medical Student Association recently brought the school under national scrutiny by giving it an F grade in terms of how well it monitors and controls drug industry money. The article begins with one entering medical student's tale of innocence lost:

In a first-year pharmacology class at Harvard Medical School, Matt Zerden grew wary as the professor promoted the benefits of cholesterol drugs and seemed to belittle a student who asked about side effects.

Mr. Zerden later discovered something by searching online that he began sharing with his classmates. The professor was not only a full-time member of the Harvard Medical faculty, but a paid consultant to 10 drug companies, including five makers of cholesterol treatments.

"I felt really violated," Mr. Zerden, now a fourth-year student, recently recalled. "Here we have 160 open minds trying to learn the basics in a protected space, and the information he was giving wasn't as pure as I think it should be."

But on the other side of the issue are many arguments about the enabling funding that drug companies provide, made all the more enticing to school faculty and administrators in the context of the current economic downturn. The NYT article cites: Dr. Thomas P. Stossel, "a Harvard Medical professor who has served on advisory boards for Merck, Biogen Idec and Dyax, and has written widely on academic-industry ties. 'I think if you look at it with intellectual honesty, you see industry interaction has produced far more good than harm.'"

You can read the rest of the article on the NYT website, but for a more thorough treatment of these contentious issues we offer acclaimed journalist Daniel S. Greenberg's Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism. In his book, Greenberg reveals a middle path, suggesting that while the threat has been overhyped, the need for oversight is real and a valuable asset to the integrity of academic science. From research that has shifted overseas so corporations can avoid regulations to conflicts of interest in scientific publishing, Greenberg argues that the temptations of money will always be a threat, but they can be effectively countered through the vigilance of scientists, the press, and the public. Based on extensive, candid interviews with scientists and administrators, Science for Sale is an indispensable resource for anyone who cares about the future of scientific research.

Find out more about the book on the UCP website or read the rest of the article.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News | Economics | Education | History
Posted by TXM at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's election day in Illinois. Voters are heading to the polls today to fill the 5th district congressional seat vacated by Rahm Emanuel, the new White House Chief of Staff to President Barack Obama. It's a crowded field. As the Chicago Tribune reported this morning, "With 23 different names on the various party ballots, city election officials say it is the largest number of candidates in one congressional race in Chicago in roughly the last 50 years." The field consists of twelve Democrats, six Republicans and five Green Party candidates—and one Press author. Labor lawyer Tom Geoghegan, who was endorsed by beloved local watering-hole The Hideout in the Huffington Post, as well as by a who's who of Illinois progressives, is also the author of The Secret Lives of Citizens: Pursuing the Promise of American Life. A witty combination of memoir and observation, The Secret Lives of Citizens addresses the widespread cynicism about our government and explores what it means to be a "national" civil servant and a "local" citizen. There is still time to read it before the polls close at 7 p.m.!

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It won't be easy to fix "sorry state of retirement in the U.S.," Robert Powell acknowledges in his MarketWatch column. "But thankfully, someone has a roadmap." That someone is Annamaria Lusardi, editor of the just-published Overcoming the Savings Slump: How to Increase the Effectiveness of Financial Education and Saving Programs.

Powell explains in user-friendly detail Lusardi's eight-step plan for solving the nation's retirement-savings crisis. From "identifying barriers to saving" to "keeping it simple," Lusardi's recommendations aim to make financial education and savings programs more effective. And a common thread in many of these ideas is her emphasis on the diversity of Americans' saving needs and abilities.

"There is not a simple way to help people save," she notes in a blog posting Powell cites. " . . . We should not assume that people have all the necessary, basic information at their fingertips. I have also learned that people are very different and that those differences should be taken into account when devising saving initiatives."

In Overcoming the Savings Slump, Lusardi's coauthors join her in exploring the considerable challenges of devising and managing such initiatives during a transition from the traditional defined benefit pension system to one that requires more individual responsibility.

Read the introduction to the book.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics
Posted by at 01:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you've tried to "Google" anything recently you've probably noticed that they've once again transformed their logo. This time, in honor of the birthday of Theodor Seuss Geisel aka Dr. Seuss, born 105 years ago today. From The Cat in the Hat, to Green Eggs and Ham, Dr. Suess's titles have become some of the most the iconic children's books of the twentieth century, influencing generations of readers, and ranked among the best selling children's books of all time. Indeed, with such widespread popularity, as the NYT's A.O. Scott once wrote "with Starbellied Sneetches and blibber-blubber verse, Dr. Seuss invented the modern idea of childhood."

Enter Seth Lerer's, Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter—a fascinating book that looks at the history of such children's books as inseparable from the history of childhood itself, examining their profound influence on everything from family life and human growth, schooling and scholarship, to publishing and politics. In the only single-volume work to capture the rich and diverse history of children's literature in its full panorama, Lerer explores how children are indelibly molded by the tales they hear and read—stories they will one day share with their own sons and daughters—in an exhilarating quest across centuries, continents, and genres to discover how, and why, we first fall in love with the written word.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by TXM at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)