The research reported in Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce's provocative book Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals is getting coverage around the world.

Bekoff and Pierce argue that animals can act with compassion, altruism, and empathy. Rats, for instance, will not take food if their actions will cause visible pain to another rat. In a chimpanzee group in a Florida zoo, a chimp handicapped by cerebral palsy is rarely subjected to displays of aggression by other males. Elephants help injured or ill members of their herd, and have even show such compassion for members of other species.

Feature articles about the claims made in the book have appeared recently in Australia in The Age ("Puppies may share our moral conscience"), in the UK (from whence we took our title) in the Daily Telegraph and in the Daily Mail, and closer to home in the less-whimsical Denver Post ("Canine emotions raise theological questions.")

Read an excerpt from the book and treat the animals you meet with new respect.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News | Philosophy
Posted by DB at 02:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A CNN story today offers a reminder that "if President Obama has his way, health care reform will be finalized this year.… And while the specifics of how to fix the nation's health care system are far from final, the debate over how to pull it off will turn on a key question: How to pay for it."

That's precisely the question Jonathan Oberlander, author of The Political Life of Medicare, takes up in the last issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. "All the funding options," Oberlander concludes, "contain various levels of political poison. Indeed, financing will probably have to be patched together from a combination of controversial sources."

Explaining the costs and benefits of these sources, Oberlander investigates ideas such as increasing "sin taxes" on tobacco and alcohol, taxing some employer-paid insurance premiums, expanding health insurance coverage to cover more people, and making cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. This last option, of course, is one to which Oberlander has also written a comprehensive backstory, revealing in The Political Life of Medicare how Medicare politics and policies have developed since the program's enactment in 1965.

And, as his NEJM piece reminds us, Oberlander's accessible analyses continue to provide an excellent starting point for those involved with what he calls the "extraordinary challenge" of "assembling a workable financing plan" for health care reform.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Did you catch the premiere Monday night of A&E's new candid reality show Obsessed? (If you missed it, you can watch full episodes at AETV.) The program follows sufferers of obsessive-compulsive disorder, an anxiety disorder that, according to the title cards at the beginning of the show, affects 3.3 million Americans. In the first episode, Helen, who suffers panic attacks while driving and must check and recheck her alarm clock before bed, and Scott, a germaphobe who sleeps on his couch because making the bed perfectly every morning would prove too insurmountable, get relief from their debilitating rituals through intensive behavioral therapy. At the end of the episode, viewers learn than Helen can now drive on the freeway and Scott has welcomed a new housemate—a dog.

With this television show's debut, OCD had entered the living rooms of all cable subscribers. And chances are, many viewers will recognize a bit of themselves in the participants portrayed on their screens. But OCD wasn't always so prevalent. The psychological disorder was considered very rare—afflicting perhaps one in twenty thousand—only thirty years ago. So how did we go from that to a world where OCD gets its own reality show so quickly?

Lennard J. Davis answers that question—and poses many others—in Obsession: A History. Beginning with its roots in demonic possession and its secular successors, Davis gracefully tracks the evolution of obsessive behavior from a social and religious fact of life into a medical and psychiatric problem. In compiling the biography of this disease, Davis examines the often contradictory faces of the condition: obsession is not only a phenomenon of modern existence but also a medical category—both a pathology and a goal.

For more from Davis on obsession, read an interview with the author, listen to a podcast, or watch a video of the author delivering a lecture on the subject at New York University.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Psychology
Posted by at 12:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Now that President Obama has officially announced his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor as the replacement for retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter, reaction to his decision abounds. Most of the responses look forward—to the looming confirmation process or to how she'll adjudicate—but some investigate what went into the decision in the first place.

That's where David Yalof comes in. The author of Pursuit of Justices: Presidential Politics and the Selection of Supreme Court Nominees, Yalof was a sought-after commentator in the run up to Obama's announcement this morning, with organizations from PBS's NewsHour to CNN asking him to weigh in.

In Pursuit of Justices, Yalof's investigations go even deeper than his recent commentaries, as he takes the reader behind the scenes of what happens before the Senate hearings to show how presidents go about deciding who will sit on the highest court in the land. In the process, he disputes much conventional wisdom about the selection process, including the widely held view that presidents choose nominees primarily to influence future decisions of the high court.

Archived in Books for the News | Law | Politics and Current Events
Posted by at 01:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In his new American Boundaries: The Nation, the States, the Rectangular Survey, the first book to chart the growth of the United States using the boundary as a political and cultural focus, Bill Hubbard Jr. makes a point of recounting February 24, 1863—the day Congress created a new Arizona Territory from the western half of New Mexico Territory.

"By tying the Arizona-New Mexico border directly to the southwestern corner of Colorado," Hubbard writes, "Congress ensured our right as Americans to travel to the Four Corners National Monument and put one foot or hand into each of four different states."

But as it turns out, the many Americans who have since done so may have been a bit misguided. As the Discovery Channel's Global Science Blog (among other sources) points out, recent reports suggest that "the Four Corners monument was built at least 1,800 feet from the technically correct spot where four states meet."

How did this happen? USA Today notes that "the area was first surveyed by the U.S. government in 1868, but it turns out that surveying errors misplaced the spot of the popular monument."

Errors aside, though, surveyors made great and often unheralded contributions to the way we experience our country. And in American Boundaries, Hubbard brings those contributions to life, explaining how the rectangular survey spread outward from its origins in Ohio, with surveyors drawing straight lines across the face of the continent.

Mapping how each state came to have its current shape, Hubbard's chronicle travels far beyond the four corners, telling the stories not only of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah, but of all fifty distinctive jigsaw puzzle pieces that make up United States.

Archived in Books for the News | Cartography and Geography
Posted by at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Throughout human history, people have looked to the ancient world for lost knowledge and timeless wisdom—perhaps never more so than in the aftermath of World War I, whose swathe of devastation left millions dead and the Enlightenment dream in ruins. So when British archaeologist Arthur Evans began publishing breathless accounts of the ancient Minoan civilization he was uncovering on Crete—pagan, pacifistic, and matriarchal—it fired the imaginations of a whole generation of artists and intellectuals.

With Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, Cathy Gere tells the story of Evans’s excavations and their wide-ranging influence on the world of Western ideas. Over the first three decades of the twentieth century, Evans’s fanciful depiction of Minoan society drew the fervent attention of writers, artists, and thinkers who were at the forefront of the burgeoning modernist movement, including Robert Graves, H.D., Girgio de Chirico, Sigmund Freud, and James Joyce. As Gere traces the unexpected paths of Evans’s ideas through the lives and works of these figures, what emerges is an unforgettable portrait of an age of wrenching change—and of those who responded to it with intellectual vigor and fervid innovation.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Philosophy | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As was widely reported today, the so-called "missing link"—the piece in the evolutionary puzzle that definitively ties humans to apes—was identified in Germany. And her name is "Ida." Reports the New York Times:

Fossil remains of a 47-million-year-old animal, found years ago in Germany, have been analyzed more thoroughly and determined to be an extremely early primate close to the emergence of the evolutionary branch leading to monkeys, apes and humans, scientists said in interviews this week.

Described as the “most complete fossil primate ever discovered,” the specimen is a juvenile female the size of a small monkey.

But just as soon as the discovery was announced, accusations of showmanship and exaggeration were lobbied at the scientific team behind the findings. (It's hard not to wonder whether Google, long famous for its sparse homepage, changed its logo to celebrate the discovery or as part of a larger publicity campaign.) In unpacking the implications of scientific discovery in an age of social media and orchestrated press events, the Christian Science Monitor wrote:

But almost as dazzling as the find itself was the way in which it was unveiled. The announcement was made with great fanfare at the Museum of Natural History in New York, and coincided with a peer-reviewed article about the discovery. And like any good reality television star, [Jorn] Hurum was thinking “cross-platform”: his team has a sleek website, an exclusive interview arrangement with ABC News, a book aimed at mainstream audiences, a deal with the History Channel, and a full-length movie about little “Ida.”

This troubling commingling of science and media has worried some observers. But far from being a modern phenomenon, earth scientists have long had a reputation for creating hype. Ralph O'Connor's 2008 book The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856 reveals how shrewd science-writers marketed spectacular visions of past worlds, piquing the public imagination with glimpses of man-eating mammoths, talking dinosaurs, and sea-dragons spawned by Satan himself. These authors—including men of science, women, clergymen, biblical literalists, hack writers, blackmailers, and prophets—borrowed freely from the Bible, modern poetry, and the urban entertainment industry, creating new forms of literature in order to transport their readers into a vanished and alien past. Although "Ida" passed through a peer-review process, unlike the specimens proffered by hypemen of the Victorian era, the over-the-top nature of her unveiling certainly resembles the tactics of the discredited showmen of O'Connor's book.

Whether you want to learn more about fantastic monsters of deep time or the men behind the discovery of geohistory, Chicago's books on paleontology and earth science are the missing link in your personal collection. Check out all of our books in these related fields and decide for yourself if Ida answers more questions than she raises.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by at 01:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Reuters reported Monday evening that "after 100 years in business and 10 months of frenzied but failed restructuring," General Motors is "weeks from the bankruptcy filing experts say will be required to complete the Obama administration's bid to reshape a fallen icon of American industry."

Understandably, the uncertain climate has given rise to nostalgia for the man who made the company such an icon. Alfred P. Sloan Jr. became the president of General Motors in 1923 and stepped down as its CEO in 1946. During this time, he led GM past the Ford Motor Company and on to international business triumph by virtue of his brilliant managerial practices and his insights into the new consumer economy he and GM helped to produce.

With that economy—and GM itself—now on shakier footing, David Farber's Sloan Rules: Alfred P. Sloan and the Triumph of General Motors offers an instructive explanation of the strengths of our corporate-based economic system and the weaknesses of our corporate-influenced politics.

And in this interview, Farber offers a taste of the many ways in which Sloan's life can help us think about not only the economy, but also "about American public life and the shape of democracy in the United States."

Archived in Biography | Economics
Posted by at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As Sir Arthur Evans unearthed the ruins of an ancient Cretan civilization in the early twentieth century he claimed to have discovered a culture that was pacifist and matriarchal, pagan and cosmic—so very unlike his native England. Freud, Joyce, Picasso, and many others embraced this vision of a lost paradise.

Reviews have begun to arrive for Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism in which Cathy Gere explores how disillusioned modernists sought—and created—an ancient culture that offered an alternative to the one they inhabited. A review in Harper's notes that Gere uncovers a century of "bizarre misreadings of the nearly unknown ancient culture of Crete, and in so doing has produced that rarest of literary surprises: a genuinely hilarious work of Minoan historiography." The review continues:

[Gere traces] the unexpected genealogy of the ancient Cretans in the modern imagination, from the time they were first unearthed beneath a modest hillock at the end of the nineteenth century to their emergence as peaceful pastoralists who worshiped a goddess, pirouetted over bulls, and displayed suspicious tendency to reflect in great detail the moral, political, and even sexual preoccupations of Sir Arthur Evans, the English millionaire who led the excavation for almost half a century.

Gere locates the original impulse for "Minoan modernism" in Nietzsche's theories of the birth of tragedyand in the "excavations" the charlatan Heinrich Schliemann carried out at Mycenae and Troy. Schliemann breathed into the nascent discipline of archaeology a fairy-tale atmosphere of childhood longing and quasi-supernatural wish-fulfillment… that runs through Gere's series of portraits of those writers and artists "who would make the ancient world urgently relevant to literary and artistic modernism…"

The book has also just been reviewed in the Economist, which begins by drily noting that "archaeology is an inexact science." Find out more about Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism on our website.

Archived in History | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 09:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let’s get this straight from the start: Bigfoot doesn’t exist. All the reported sightings are almost certainly either mistakes or hoaxes. At the same time, Bigfoot is America’s premier homegrown monster, a figure as familiar as—if far hairier than—Uncle Sam. And he remains big news: when two men from rural Georgia claimed last autumn that they’d killed a Bigfoot, reporters and camera crews flocked to their press conference, and more than 1,000 news stories followed worldwide.

Just what makes this shaggy beast so enduring? With Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, Joshua Blu Buhs hacks his way through the forest of myths, mysteries, and pseudoscience surrounding Bigfoot to write a cultural history of this modern monster. Buhs begins his trek in the forests of nineteenth-century America, with tales of wildmen roaming the hills; he then travels to the Himalayas to come to grips (not literally) with the Abominable Snowman, then back to the late 1950s in northern California, where the contemporary creature first emerged as a media marvel. Along the way, we meet hunters and hucksters, charlatans and serious seekers, as Buhs travels the back roads of America in an attempt to understand Bigfoot’’s hold on our imagination. Just what does all the ensuing cryptozoology and craziness say about our modern relationship to wilderness, individuality, and the media?

Though Buhs always keeps his skeptic’s eye open, he writes with an enthusiast’s deep love for his subject; the result is a biography of Bigfoot that will leave other hunters following its footprints for years to come.

Read the press release.

Also, see an excerpt and an interview with the author.

Archived in Biology | History | Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 08:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Michael Taussig is no stranger to attention from the New York press. A 2001 profile of the rogue Columbia anthropologist in the New York Times art section began:

Among students at Columbia University, Michael Taussig has a glamorous reputation. An anthropologist who specializes in South America, he has hung out with shamans and tripped on yagé, a potent hallucinogen, dozens of times. He keeps an enormous rainbow-colored hammock in his campus office. And his lectures are famous for their dramatic flourishes; he once gave a talk with his head in a paper bag (a homage to a Dadaist artist). Not surprisingly, his classes are always filled to capacity. "He's like a rock star," said one graduate student in anthropology. "He's the professor that all the students think is cool."

And late last year, Taussig was among the few academics/fashion models featured in the Times magazine's feature "The Class Acts."

Now, with a new book just out, he is once again the talk of the town. Literally. The May 18 issue of The New Yorker features a short piece in the Talk of the Town on Taussig's graduate seminar on the apocalypse (official title: "Preëmptive Apocalyptic Thought: The Angel of History Reconsidered in Light of Climate Change, the War on Terror, and Financial Meltdown"). Says writer Julia Ioffe:

Taussig, who is the author of such texts as My Cocaine Museum and What Color Is the Sacred?, is the foremost practitioner of a technique called "fictocriticism," which the Times has called "gonzo anthropology. " Trained as a physician in Australia, Taussig discovered his calling in the jungles of Colombia, where he travelled in 1969, inspired by the struggles of Marxist guerrillas. (He also discovered there the hallucinogenic properties of yagé.) He is tall, with steel-gray hair, and he had on a jungle-print shirt and linen pants.

So who is the man behind the wardrobe and the hallucinogens? He's a Chicago author, naturally. He's published many books with the Press—including an examination of the Indian shaman as Wild Man, a literary memorial to Walter Benjamin, and a diary of terror in Colombia—and his latest continues to concern itself with connections between ideas, thinkers, and things.

Following his interest in magic and surrealism, his earlier work on mimesis, and his recent discussion of heat, gold, and cocaine in My Cocaine Museum, What Color Is the Sacred? uses color to explore further dimensions of what Taussig calls "the bodily unconscious" in an age of global warming. Drawing on classic ethnography as well as the work of Benjamin, Burroughs, and Proust, he takes up the notion that color invites the viewer into images and into the world. Yet, as Taussig makes clear, color has a history—a manifestly colonial history rooted in the West's discomfort with color, especially bright color, and its associations with the so-called primitive.

He begins by noting Goethe's belief that Europeans are physically averse to vivid color while the uncivilized revel in it, which prompts Taussig to reconsider colonialism as a tension between chromophobes and chromophiliacs. And he ends with the strange story of coal, which, he argues, displaced colonial color by giving birth to synthetic colors, organic chemistry, and IG Farben, the giant chemical corporation behind the Third Reich. Nietzsche once wrote, "So far, all that has given colour to existence still lacks a history." With What Color Is the Sacred? Taussig has taken up that challenge with all the radiant intelligence and inspiration we've come to expect from him.

Read an excerpt from What Color Is the Sacred?

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by at 02:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In 2007, the landmark series Planet Earth made its American debut on the Discovery Channel, garnering massive critical acclaim and enthralling television audiences—and readers—nationwide. Featuring breathtaking sequences of predators and prey, lush vistas of forests from the tops of towering trees, and images of creatures from the ocean’s depths, Planet Earth brought unknown wonders from the natural world straight into our homes in high-def and forever changed the way we see the world.

Enter the highly anticipated follow-up, Nature’s Most Amazing Events, which makes its television debut this spring along with its counterpart, Nature’s Great Events, the same documentary in illustrated book form. Exploring six of the most spectacular natural phenomena on our planet, this series and the book are epic in every sense, charting seasonal and annual events that transform entire ecosystems and the life experiences of the thousands of animals within them, from the largest mammals to the smallest microorganisms. Using groundbreaking filming techniques and state-of-the-art scientific and photographic technologies, Nature’s Great Events shows life in action and across the globe.

The six events include the flooding of the Okavango Delta in Botswana, which turns sprawling swaths of desert into an elaborate maze of lagoons and swamps; the melting of 10 million square kilometers of ice in the Arctic, which imperils polar bears across the region; the migration of the Serengeti, where life is on the edge for both predator and prey and where lions and wildebeest battle to survive; the great salmon run in British Columbia where rivers teem with thousands of fish—and where grizzlies and wolves eagerly await them; the explosion of sea life in Alaska’s coastal waters where countless animals from far and wide brave killer whales to feed; and perhaps the greatest marine spectacle on the planet, the annual tide of sardines along South Africa’s east coast, where the greatest concentration of predators in the world—including sharks, whales, and dolphins—come to feast.

These events are among the processes most important to the survival of life on the planet. Tracking them at every stage with over 400 remarkable photographs, the book follows individual animals as they live and die during these events, often capturing the drama from their unique point of view. The result is an awe-inspiring and truly novel work that brings these events into more brilliant focus than ever before.

Read the press release.

Also, see videos from the BBC series, a gallery of photographs from the book, and sample pages (PDF format, 1.9Mb). The Discovery Channel has a website for the series.

Archived in Biography | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now Available in Paperback— This Wide and Universal Theater explores how Shakespeare’s plays were produced both in his own time and in succeeding centuries. David Bevington brings Shakespeare’s original stagings to life, explaining how the Elizabethan playhouse conveyed a sense of place using minimal scenery, from the Forest of Arden in As You Like It to the tavern in Henry IV, Part I. Moving beyond Shakespeare’s lifetime, Bevington shows the lengths to which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century companies went to produce spectacular effects. To bring the book into the present, Bevington considers recent productions on both stage and screen, when character and language have taken precedence over spectacle. This volume brings a lifetime of study to bear on a remarkably underappreciated aspect of Shakespeare’s art.

Read the press release.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Whether we're waiting for the El, reading virtually any local publication, or—of course—walking along South Michigan Avenue, Chicagoans can't help but remember that the Art Institute of Chicago's much-anticipated Modern Wing opens this weekend.

But we are not, of course, the only ones paying attention. Joining the many stories that have already begun to appear about the event, New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussof noted in his review Wednesday that "the addition manages to weave the various strands of Chicago's rich architectural history into a cohesive vision."

So what, exactly, are those strands? Whether you can talk about them endlessly or are still trying to sort them out, our deep list of architecture books will bring you up to speed on everything from our most iconic structures to alternative takes on the city's architectural history.

This weekend, for example, those lucky enough to try out the new bridgeway connecting the Modern Wing with Millennium Park might wonder about the history of this particular destination. Needless to say, we've got that covered.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Commentary
Posted by at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Though he campaigned on a theme of change, in his first months in office, Barack Obama has already asserted inherent presidential power in ways reminiscent of his Republican predecessors. While abandoning some of the Bush Administration’s more audacious claims, President Obama has asserted the state secrets privilege in national security litigation, resisted judicial review of enemy combatant detention in Afghanistan, issued signing statements suggesting constitutional reservations about bills he has signed into law, and pursued the Bush Administration’s Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq, even though it was never approved by Congress.

With Madison’s Nightmare, Peter Shane shows how ambitious assertions of presidential power are the logical outcome of a decades-long trend that has seen presidents of both parties have waged an assault on the basic checks and balances of the U.S. government. Starting with Reagan and the elder Bush, continuing under Clinton, and culminating most spectacularly under the recent Bush administration, this “aggressive presidentialism” has diminished the role of the other branches of government and led to ideological, inappropriate, and sometimes downright illegal actions. If we want our government to work as the Founders intended, simply electing a new president is not enough: both liberals and conservatives must launch a wide-ranging reform effort that will change all levels of government and support a renewed culture of accountability.

Read the press release or read an excerpt.

Archived in Law | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In an article published online Monday for the The National Law Journal Dan L. Burk and Mark A. Lemley, authors of The Patent Crisis and How the Courts Can Solve It, deliver an interesting critique of current patent law, arguing that because of the conflicting needs of different industries in the patent system, Congress should leave it up to the courts to dynamically interpret patent law on a contextual basis, rather than trying to tailor the statutes themselves.

The need for patent system reform has become more visible recently because of the controversy over corporations' ability to patent human genomes, a practice which was challenged in a suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union Tuesday. The ACLU litigation cites the story of breast cancer survivor Genae Girard, who was denied a second opinion on her cancer diagnosis because only one company owns the patent on the genes associated with breast and ovarian cancer, prohibiting other corporations from developing similar tests, and stifling competitive innovation in the field. According to a recent article in the NYT, the company makes the counterargument that the current patent system already promotes innovation by giving companies a temporary monopoly that rewards their substantial investment in research and development.

But what is perhaps most clear from the argument, as Burk and Lemley's article points out, is that the patent regulations for biogenetics should not necessarily be the same as those for, say, software or semiconductors, and that there is a pressing need for patents to be calibrated to the specifics of particular industries.

Read Burk and Lemley's article on The National Law Journal's website, or find out more about their new book, The Patent Crisis and How the Courts Can Solve It.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
Posted by TXM at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Greenwich Village. Harlem. Bronzeville. Even in this freewheeling, globalized age, the names of these iconic neighborhoods still conjure up an atmosphere of glamour, excitement, and illicit thrills. But long before today’s teens or even yesterday’s beatniks wandered their streets, these neighborhoods exercised a powerful attraction for upright members of the middle class looking for dissipation and disreputable fun.

With Slumming, Chad Heap brings these early havens of hip to life, recreating the long-lost nightlife of early twentieth-century New York and Chicago. From jazz clubs and speakeasies to black-and-tan parties and cabarets, Heap packs Slumming with vivid scenes, fascinating characters, and wild anecdotes of a late-night life on the borders of the forbidden. And while he doesn’t ignore the role of exploitation and voyeurism in slumming—or the resistance it often provoked—he argues that the relatively uninhibited mingling it promoted across bounds of race and class helped to dramatically recast the racial and sexual landscape of burgeoning U.S. cities.

The unforgettable tale of an urban past that continues to resonate in our day, Slumming is a late-night treat for all urbanites and fans of the demi-monde.

Read the press release or read the introduction.

Archived in Black Studies | Gay and Lesbian | History | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last Fall, the University of Chicago Press began republishing the Parker novels, a series of hardboiled noir thrillers starring the eponymous one-named thief, by Richard Stark (one of the many pseudonyms used by prolific mystery writer Donald Westlake, who died last December). So far, the Press has nine titles, and more are in the pipeline. Everyone, from the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times to Time Out and Entertainment Weekly, has heralded the return of these books. Already immortalized in film by Lee Marvin, Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall, and Mel Gibson, now Parker is set to appear in a more graphic form.

A graphic novel, that is. The Comics Reporter features an interview with artist Darwyn Cooke, who is converting the first Parker novel, The Hunter, into comic form. It's a fascinating and broad-ranging conversation about collaboration, Westlake's vast oeuvre, and how to draw Parker. After you check that out, read an interview with the late, great Westlake. And then get yourself a copy of The Hunter—or any of the Parker novels—and decide whether the mysterious thief looks more like Lee Marvin or Jack Palance for yourself.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs started writing Class War?: What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality before we entered the recession that has made the wealth gap all the more visible. But their findings, of course, have manifold implications for today's economic problems and how to solve them.

In a lively discussion over the weekend at the Firedoglake Book Salon, Page had the chance to address some of the connections between today's headlines and his and Jacobs's sometimes prescient research.

About the issue of executive compensation, for example, Page noted that they "asked several good questions before it become a hot issue.… It turns out that most Americans wildly underestimate the size of CEO salaries ($500,000 median guess vs. $14 million actual for S&P 500 companies). But even so, they want CEOs paid LESS and factory workers and clerks paid more."

When Salon host David Wakins noted that, in light of recent news stories, "people might estimate CEO salaries higher now," Page attempted to put things in perspective:

Yes, more, but I'm afraid they still have little clue, for example, about the five or so hedge fund managers who made more than $1 BILLION each in '07. That is far beyond the average person's imagination. In many cases where members of the public are unaware or confused—including this one—I suspect that they are being deliberately misled. Or at least that the mainstream media don't help much. Shouldn't $1 billion incomes be subjects of a big story?

What are some possible solutions for the chasm between income brackets? One point of agreement among some of the discussants was that, as Page put it, "the bankers need some tough love, with an emphasis on the tough part."

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by at 09:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week the Boulder newspaper The Daily Camera published an interesting article about Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce's provocative new book Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals. The review begins:

[The authors] waste no time in getting to the point: "(W)e argue that animals feel empathy for each other, treat one another fairly, cooperate toward common goals, and help each other out of trouble," they write in the first sentence. "We argue, in short, that animals have morality."

Advancing bioethicist's arguments about the moral treatment of animals to posit animals themselves as moral agents, the author's place moral behavior firmly within an evolutionary context demonstrating how a variety of species are in fact incredibly adept social beings, relying on rules of conduct to navigate intricate social networks that are essential to their survival. The Daily Camera's Clay Evans continues:

Most of the species examined by the authors are notably "intelligent" and social. Hyenas, wolves, elephants and primates predominate, though other, "lesser" species like rats have their moments on stage. Bekoff is always a pleasant read, but the book's tales of animal cooperation will bring a smile to many readers' faces (or a tear to their eyes).…

For readers hardened into anthropocentric views, it will seem like nonsense easily attributed to wishful thinking. To others it will raise uncomfortable questions about the way we treat animals, as well as concepts of human uniqueness and "superiority."

And who knows? Decades hence, Bekoff might prove a powerful prophet, and we'll wonder how we could have ever treated cognizant, emotional, moral beings with such cruelty.

Read the rest if the review on the Daily Camera website.

Archived in Biology | Philosophy | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Several sources reported this morning that the head of the Justice Department's antitrust division under the Obama administration, Christine A. Varney, plans to toughen up on monopolistic and predatory business practices—especially by large enterprises attempting to exploit the weakened positions of smaller companies struggling through the current recession. A Bloomberg article quotes Varney suggesting that "a more vigorous antitrust policy in the financial markets may have helped avert the current economic crisis: 'Is too big to fail," she asks, "'a failure of antitrust?'"

According to the New York Times Varney's plans would restore the same sort of Clinton-era antitrust policy that led to the landmark antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft and Intel in the 1990s, and which has since sparked heated debate in Washington about how best to foster a healthy economy that functions in the interests of consumers. Making an important contribution to that debate, William H. Page and John E. Lopatka's 2007 book The Microsoft Case: Antitrust, High Technology, and Consumer Welfare offers the contrarian argument that consumers are, in fact, rarely served by antitrust intervention. Both the government and the courts, Page and Lopatka contend, were unduly influenced by the harms that Microsoft's practices would have on its rivals—though they did not harm consumers and may even have benefited them. Highlighting critical points during the Microsoft litigation where they say the system failed consumers by overrating government's ability to influence outcomes in a dynamic market, theirs remains one of the most essential books on the topic.

You can read more about the Obama administration's planned shift in antitrust policy at the NYT website or find our more about Page and Lopatka's The Microsoft Case.

Also of interest from the press: Antitrust Law, Second Edition, by Richard A. Posner—an influential critique of antitrust law from the perspective of law and economics.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Law | Politics and Current Events
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A little over a year ago, on a return flight from Boston, your correspondent became engaged in a conversation with her seatmate, who offered her samples of some kind of dark chocolate with seemingly miraculous health benefits. I began to fidget and reached for my book in the seat-back pocket in front of me when she procured a brochure from her carry-on and proceeded to tell me how I could make extra money each month selling these chocolates to my friends and coworkers. The marketing materials went unread and the chocolates uneaten.

But, it turns out that others, including Real Housewife of New York City Jill Zarin have become chocolate acolytes. In a trend piece about the product, which has been turning up in the hoity-toity echelons of Manhattan society, the New York Times reported yesterday, "Xoçai (pronounced show-SIGH) is a cousin of the humble Amway products, [and is] among the newest in a seemingly endless series of network-marketing ventures." To understand the new acceptance of this Tupperware-party-like marketing scheme in ladies-who-lunch New York, the Times turned to our very own Peter M. Birkeland:

Peter M. Birkeland, an adjunct professor at the University of Chicago and author of Franchising Dreams: The Lure of Entrepreneurship in America (University of Chicago Press, 2002), said New Yorkers have been historically loath to try similar businesses in the past.

“I think New York has always kind of looked down its nose at something that’s lowbrow, that’s crass,” Professor Birkeland said. “They can make their money in other ways.”

But evidently, this has changed. And Birkeland is an expert on emerging consumer and business trends. Birkeland's book follows the rise of franchising in America. One-third of the U.S. gross domestic product flows through franchises, and one out of every sixteen workers is employed by one. But how did franchising come to play such a dominant role in the American economy? What are the day-to-day experiences of franchisees and franchisers in the workplace? What challenges and pitfalls await them as they stake their claim to prosperity? Franchising Dreams, a documentary-like look into the frustrations and uncertainties that entrepreneurs face in their pursuit of the American dream, answers these questions and more. Through extensive interviews and research, Birkeland not only discovers what makes franchisees succeed or fail, he uncovers the difficulties in running a business according to someone else's system and values. Bearing witness to a market flooded with fierce competitors and dependent on the inscrutable whims of consumers, he uncovers the numerous challenges that franchisees face in making their businesses succeed.

You can read an interview with the author.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by at 09:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On April 20, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences announced its new class of fellows and foreign honorary members. Among the 231 newest members of one of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies are some very famous folks, including Dustin Hoffman, James Earl Jones, Dame Judi Dench, Bono, Colin Powell, and Emmylou Harris. But these marquee names are nothing compared to the real celebs on the list: the University of Chicago Press author brigade! Congratulations to Andrew Abbott, Danielle Allen, Alice Kaplan, T. J. Jackson Lears, Steven Shapin, Mary Ann Caws, Robert von Hallberg, Ruth Bernard Yeazell, and honorary member Simon Goldhill.

In other academy news, the Academy of Arts and Letters announced its annual awards on April 14. Among the many deserving honorees are a handful of University of Chicago Press authors. Phoenix Poets Michael Collier and Susan Stewart were awarded an Academy Award in Literature, given to encourage creative work. Sharon Cameron won a Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award in Literature in recognition of the quality of the prose in her recent book Impersonality: Seven Essays. And poet Peter Campion was awarded the Rome Fellowship in Literature, given to young writers of exceptional promise for a year's residence at the American Academy in Rome.

Three cheers for all our award winners!

Archived in Awards
Posted by at 01:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The last issue of the Chicago Reader contains a special section on new Spring books with a couple of interesting articles profiling Asian American writers and their new works, including the latest from novelist and poet Ha Jin. The Writer as Migrant is a collection of three interconnected essays that draw both on his own experiences as a Chinese immigrant living in the U.S., as well as the writing of other famous literary exiles, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lin Yutang, and Joseph Conrad, to illustrate the unique obstacles and opportunities that face those writing in a foreign language, and in a foreign land. The Reader article focuses on Jin's personal struggles between feelings of alienation from his native Chinese language and culture, and the greater intellectual freedoms he has experienced writing in the U.S.:

When he started writing, Jin says, "I viewed myself as a Chinese writer who would write in English on behalf of the downtrodden Chinese." But how could he write on behalf of a people if he couldn't also address them? Since his books often deal with the politics of modern China—his first volume of poems, Between Silences: A Voice From China, is based on his experiences in the Chinese army—most of them haven't been published there. One exception is Waiting, his best-known and least political novel—and even that's been condemned by some as anti-China.

Of course, had he returned to China he could have written in Chinese. Then again, he might not be writing at all. Jin thinks he'd have become a translator or critic or maybe a professor, but wouldn't have written much. When he was starting out in the U.S., he says, writing was a matter of survival: he was on the tenure track at Emory and had to publish to keep his job. But writing in English offers another sort of survival as well. It's "a way for me to do meaningful work in a language that's not controlled by authorities. In that way it's a matter of artistic survival."

So he writes in English, even though he argues in the book's second essay, "The Language of Betrayal," that "no matter how the writer attempts to rationalize and justify adopting a foreign language, it is an act of betrayal that alienates him from his mother tongue.…"

Read the rest of the article online at the Chicago Reader website.

Archived in Books for the News | Literature
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A conservative legal activist told the New York Times recently that same-sex marriage, gun rights, religious rights, and the death penalty are "the issues that are really in play" in the expected fight over the nomination of a Supreme Court justice to replace the retiring David Souter. No matter where one's political affiliations lie, that list probably looks familiar. But Peter M. Shane, author of the new Madison's Nightmare: How Executive Power Threatens American Democracy (excerpt) has noticed that such lists of issues that dominate debates about future Supreme Court Justices often leave out what are "undoubtedly the most important constitutional questions raised by the last Administration and perhaps the most important set going forward: issues surrounding the scope of presidential power."

We asked Shane to reflect on the issue in light of Souter's imminent replacement:

During the second Bush Administration, a change of one vote on the Supreme Court would have deprived military detainees of habeas corpus rights or extended procedural protections so minimal as to be laughable.

The Supreme Court currently boasts a solid right-wing bloc of Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, all of whom are strong defenders of executive power. What does this mean for the choice of a successor to Justice Souter?

President Obama is now poised to select his first appointee to the Court. For constitutional progressives, it would obviously be a disaster if he appointed a Justice who would join the four hard conservatives to cut back the right to privacy, impose tighter limits on affirmative action, make environmental laws harder to enforce, or eviscerate our antidiscrimination laws.

None of that is likely. All of these issues are front-and-center in the Democratic Party and high on the President’s agenda. The chances of a reactionary Obama appointee on these issues are slim to none.

But it is conceivable that the next couple of Supreme Court terms will bring the Court cases on the scope of state secrets privilege, the power of Congress to regulate executive branch wiretapping, the application of anti-torture law in wartime, and the scope of due process for alleged enemy combatants. It is critical that any nominee’s stance on such issues be part of the debate about Justice Souter successor.

The Los Angeles Times offered an acute assessment of Justice Souter’s role on the Court. It wrote, in a May 2, 2009, editorial: “Souter isn't associated with majority opinions in transformative cases.… Still, … [he] consistently has supported the rights of women, minorities (including gays) and criminal defendants as well as the separation of church and state and freedom from overweening executive power. His finest hour may have been his opinion in the 2004 case of Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld, in which the court held that a U.S. citizen detained by the Bush administration as a suspected terrorist had a right to challenge his confinement.”

In other words, handing the Souter seat to an Associate Justice who embraces an aggressive view of presidential power could work a major change in our constitutional jurisprudence.

Historically, executive power is not a left-versus-right issue. The fact that a lawyer or judge may be liberal on individual rights issues does not guarantee equal vigilance against unilateral presidentialism. One of the most important contemporary defenses of a strong unitary presidency was authored by Professors Larry Lessig and Cass Sunstein, two brilliant scholars whose work in many other areas I deeply admire. Likewise, it was the administration of Lyndon Johnson—perhaps the most liberal in history—that asserted:

Under the Constitution, the President, in addition to being Chief Executive, is Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy. [His] duties carry very broad powers, including the power to deploy American forces abroad and commit them to military operations when the President deems such action necessary to maintain the security and defense of the United States.

In contrast, the late Chief Justice Rehnquist, a conservative by any definition, was a moderate on executive power issues. In 1988, he authored the Court’s opinion in Morrison v. Olson, which upheld the independent counsel law against arguments that it infringed on presidential prerogative. He also wrote Webster v. Doe, in which the court held that a CIA clerk was entitled to judicial review of the revocation of a security clearance because of his homosexuality. Over a sarcastic Scalia dissent, Rehnquist held that the clerk was entitled at least to the benefit of a longtime presumption that Congress wants federal courts to decide constitutional challenges in federal cases involving individual rights. The court would not lightly accept executive immunity from constitutional review.

Rehnquist even joined the plurality opinion in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld holding that U.S. citizens are entitled to administrative due process in determining their status as "enemy combatants" and may challenge in federal courts the legality of their detention.

Indeed, one of the most influential judicial opinions in U.S. history regarding presidential authority—an opinion concurring in the Court’s judgment in Youngstown Sheet & Steel v. Sawyer, which overturned President Truman’s seizure of the steel mills—was written by a conservative Justice, Robert Jackson.

It is not just the size of the Gang of Four that warrants concern about a fifth vote in favor of presidential unilateralism. It is also the fact that the protection of executive power has been a central theme in the legal and judicial career of three of these Justices—Roberts, Scalia, and Alito. Executive power is very much an issue at the top of their agendas. Given the opportunity to expand presidential power, there is no reason to doubt they will seize it.

The past three decades—and most especially the last eight years—have witnessed nothing less than an all-out executive branch assault on checks and balances, and a consequent threat to the constitutional design our framers intended. Legal disputes spawned by that assault may be Supreme Court fodder for years to come. Justice Souter and the country deserve a successor no less vigilant than he about these issues.

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary
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The Subversive Copy Editor "may be the best copy editor's companion since the CMS, the AP Style Guide and that dog-eared xerox of copy editing marks you keep tacked up on the cubicle wall," is how Publishers Weekly begins its starred review of the magazine's Web Pick of the Week.

And PW is in the majority opinion. An article in Sunday's Chicago-Sun Times also is full of appreciation for Saller's "conversational style and insights into interactions between writers and copy editors," which "make reading her book an entertaining trip even for those who never plan to lift a red pen or use the editing feature of a word-processing program."

That might sound surprising: editing guide as beside reading? But it will make perfect sense to anyone who's had a taste of the indispensably helpful and pleasingly witty advice Saller has been dishing out for years for the Q&A feature of The Chicago Manual of Style Online.

Archived in Reference and Writing
Posted by at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since the Obama administration began to pump billions of dollars into some of the most troubled sectors of the U.S. economy including struggling financial institutions and automakers, the markets seem to be making a gradual but definite come back—a fact which some take as evidence that the administration's plan will ultimately be successful in turning around, or at least stabilizing the economy. But in an editorial piece for last Sunday's New York Times, Allan H. Meltzer, professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University and author of the multi-volume A History of the Federal Reserve, offers a thoughtful critique of the possible longer-term consequences of the Obama administration's fiscal strategy.

Meltzer argues that the Federal Reserve's strategy of reducing interest rates while flooding the economy with cash from bailouts and government subsidies will cause inflation to rise over the next few years, potentially undoing many of the benefits of the administration's plan. Read Meltzer's piece online at the NYT website, or navigate to the press's website to find out about Meltzer's books, including History of the Federal Reserve, Volume 1: 1913-1951. The two books comprising the second volume of Meltzer's work will be published later this year.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics
Posted by TXM at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Swine flu has been reported in 30 states and 20 countries, and face mask sales continue to soar. But this morning, health officials at the Centers for Disease Control remained "cautiously optimistic" that the swine flu virus is not as virulent as initially feared.

All of the hysteria about the disease got scholar of English Renaissance literature Ernest B. Gilman thinking. Perhaps, he argues, we need to protect ourselves against something potentially more damaging than the H1N1 flu strain: historical amnesia. After all, plagues, he notes, "have devastated the human race almost without intermission from the time that we began to cluster in large groups and mingle our own microorganism with those of our domesticated animals" and they show no signs of abating. In his forthcoming Plague Writing in Early Modern England, Gilman explores the sermons, medical tracts, pious exhortations, satirical pamphlets, and political commentary written in response to the three epidemics of bubonic plagues that devastated London in the seventeenth century. By revealing how people made sense of such catastrophe, he holds up a distant mirror to reflect our own condition in the age of AIDS, super viruses, multidrug resistant tuberculosis, and the hovering threat of a global flu pandemic. Here, he offers his thoughts on the current swine flu outbreak.

To the coughs, fevers, and other symptoms associated with the current outbreak of "swine flu" should be added one that most of us suffer from without knowing it: historical amnesia. We know that bird flu seems to be one of Asia's most reliable annual exports to the west. We know that we live in the age of AIDS, and, that despite advances in treatment in the "developed" world, there are still more than 35 million people living with the infection mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. And thanks alike to apocalyptic headlines about exotic new diseases and to the Hollywood image factories that exploit our anxieties in such films as 28 Days Later and Doomsday ("Few could have foreseen the terror that the microorganism known as 'Reaper' would unleash upon the unsuspecting population"), we know about SARS, Ebola, Marburg, "flesh-eating" bacteria and other "superbugs," not to mention MDR-TB and its more lethal variant X-TB.

The symptom of what we don't know—or rather, what we are likely to forget—presents itself in our disbelief that such a thing could be happening now. All these "new" diseases, each scarier than the last, spring up in a way that may seem both unprecedented and extraordinary. Hadn't we ("we" here means anyone over fifty) done our part as "Polio Pioneers" in the battle to conquer infectious disease once and for all? Were we not assured that with the development of vaccines that would prevent nearly all the once-inevitable childhood illnesses—and with an armory of antibiotic drugs to take care of those that managed to sneak past the defenses—even the most virulent epidemic diseases like cholera, smallpox, and bubonic plague were virtually extinct? In the glory days following the development first of sulfa, then of the first-generation drugs like isoniazid that actually cured tuberculosis, and then of the host of anti-bacterial and anti-viral medications to follow, it was easy for the most cautious epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists to buy into a narrative that begins with Lister and Pasteur, does homage to Salk and Sabin, and ends with heroic AIDS researchers like Drs. Anthony Fauci and Robert Gallo. The name of that story is "The Triumph of Modern Medicine."

That narrative is now exposed as exhausted, and no one should be surprised even as we mourn its passing. The truth is that, to put it clearly, plagues have devastated the human race almost without intermission from the time that we began to cluster in large groups and mingle our own microorganism with those of our domesticated animals.

This insight has been popularized most recently by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel but it has been no secret to historians, especially those specializing in the history of Africa and the tropics. The notorious example of the "Black Death" of the fourteenth century is chronicled in every schoolbook. But it's less well known that far from disappearing, the bubonic plague continued to ravage Western Europe for the next four centuries. In the England of Shakespeare and Milton, the period I study, witnessed three major pandemics—in 1603, 1625, and 1665. Each time, between a quarter and a third of the population of London was wiped out. In antiquity, a wave of epidemics—traveling along the Mediterranean trade routs, or in the company of returning legions—devastated the city of Rome. It is just as likely that Rome was already falling to germs before it finally fell to the Germans.

We have "forgotten" these things for two reasons, one psychological and the other a byproduct of the writing of history itself. School-book history, reflecting a long-standing set of narrative conventions, focuses on kings and revolutions and presidential elections, on the "rise" of this or that, or the "development" of something else. That more soldiers died of disease than in combat during the Civil War (indeed, in almost every war before World War II) seems coincidental, or accidental or at least far less exciting than a stirring account of the Battle of Gettysburg. History is smooth and consequential. Epidemics are interruptions in the order of things, and so often are left out of orderly accounts of events.

The psychological reason is more compelling. Those who have studied trauma—whether that of individuals involved in car crashes, of communities of flood victims and holocaust survivors, or of those who have lived through an epidemic—point to "forgetting" as a necessary part of the process of recovery. We do not speak of it; we push it into some far recess of being (perchance to revisit it in dreams, or re-live it the form of traumatic symptoms) and we "go on with our lives." But the healing is balanced by a sense of shock when something like that happens again—and especially if it happens to us after so many years in which the story of medical progress was so encouraging.

At the moment, it's sobering but necessary to keep the following hard facts in mind: First, just as epidemics have never been absent from human history for at least the last 100,000 years, there is no reason to believe that they will not recur in the future. The microbes were there before us, as the late Stephen J. Gould liked to point out, and they will likely be there long after we as a species are extinct. To be sure, diseases themselves go extinct: during the Renaissance there was an epidemic of something called 'The Sweats' whose recorded symptoms match those of no disease organism around today. But for the same reason, pathogens have the ability to modify themselves by natural selection, to adapt to new environments and new hosts, and to do so at a much more rapid rate than their large-bodied life companions (like us). For this reason, too, disease organisms will always be one step ahead any step we may take to head them off—remember, this year's flu vaccine works against last year's flu virus.

Responsible experts at the CDC will tell you, off the record, that we are almost surely headed for a Malthusian correction within the next century (possibly within the next generation, and maybe this week). The math is simple: population increases geometrically, but the food supply only arithmetically. It took the world until the year 2000 to produce a global population of six billion people. By 2050, the number is expected to top nine billion, even though the rate of increase has flattened out slightly. In the respected journal Population and Environment, David Price wrote in 1998 that "The impending crisis caused by unchecked consumption of nonrenewable resources and population growth is of such magnitude today that few are willing to accept its inevitability." That prediction seems even more certain today. Famine and war (the other two traditional members of the population control squad) will surely continue to take their toll, especially in the "developing" world, but infectious disease—no respecter of treaties or frontiers—will likely finish the job of bringing the global population back into balance with the resources of food and energy needed to sustain it.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
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In a brief letter sent to the President Obama today, Supreme Court Justice David Souter announced his intention to retire from active service when the Court goes into summer recess. The New York Times reports that Obama has pledged to nominate a new justice in time for him or her to be confirmed by October, when the Court reconvenes. As speculation commences and the guessing game picks up steam, Geoffrey R. Stone, Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Law School and Press author (he served as coeditor, with Richard A. Epstein and Cass R. Sunstein, of The Bill of Rights in the Modern States, and with Lee C. Bollinger of Eternally Vigilant: Free Speech in the Modern Era; Stone has also edited the Supreme Court Review series since 1991) penned a tribute to the justice who once told him "he regarded himself as 'the luckiest guy in the world' because of the opportunity he had in this way to serve his country." It was first published on the Huffington Post and the Faculty Blog of the U of C Law School. Professor Stone has graciously permitted us to reprint his words here:

It would appear from the latest news reports that Justice David Souter is about to part ways with the Supreme Court after a nineteen-year tenure. At the time of his nomination by President George H. W. Bush, David Souter was a virtual unknown. In his long career as a justice on the New Hampshire Supreme Court, a judge on the New Hampshire trial court, and New Hampshire’s attorney general, he seldom had occasion to express his views on controversial constitutional issues. Many critics of the nomination complained that President Bush had found a “stealth candidate” who had no “paper trail” but was secretly a rock-solid conservative determined to overturn Roe v. Wade and to outlaw affirmative action. It didn’t turn out quite that way.

Although at the time of his appointment Souter had little experience in constitutional adjudication, no one doubted his intellectual credentials. A Rhodes Scholar, Souter was a serious thinker, a prodigious reader, a hard worker, and a scrupulously careful lawyer. One public official in New Hampshire—a Democrat—described Souter as a 135 pound man, with “120 pounds of brain.” Before being tapped for the Supreme Court, he lived by himself in a ramshackle farmhouse filled with books. He lived a quiet, somewhat sheltered, contemplative life.

David Souter took the seat previously held by Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., one of the liberal lions of the Warren Court. Souter and Brennan formed a close and even touching friendship, and Brennan, ever the persuader, sought to share with his successor his own powerful vision of the unique responsibilities of the Supreme Court and the fundamental role of constitutional law in the American system of government.

We may never know what influence Brennan, then in his eighties, may have had on Justice Souter. What we do know is that Souter soon showed himself to be not the anticipated right-wing ideologue, but rather a thoughtful, moderate, independent thinker who sought to discern the central meaning of the Constitution. For David Souter, the Constitution was about the rule of law, shaped by a profound national commitment to fairness, justice, equality and individual dignity.

On issue after issue David Souter disappointed those who hoped he would be a Scalia sidekick. Souter rejected the rigid originalism and so-called “strict construction” of Robert Bork and former Attorney General Ed Meese in favor of a more textured commitment to the core values of our Constitution. In case after case, Souter parted company with Justices like Scalia, Rehnquist and Thomas, and made for himself a truly distinguished and surprisingly “liberal” record on such issues as freedom of religion, freedom of speech, due process, search and seizure, racial and gender equality, affirmative action, the rights of gays and lesbians, executive power, cruel and unusual punishment, abortion, and the rights of persons accused of crime. A man of deep civility and understatement, his opinions are soft-spoken and gentle, but they resonate with conviction. His opinions are precise, nuanced, and carefully reasoned. There is no bombast, sarcasm or disrespect in David Souter.

I just said that Souter has a “liberal” record, but that is not true. Souter has often appeared to be a “liberal.” But appearances are deceiving. Against the background of his brethren—most notably Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, Roberts and Alito—Souter is clearly on the more liberal side of the Court on most controversial issues. But as I’m sure David Souter would himself acknowledge, he is no William Brennan or Earl Warren. He is, in fact, a moderate. But because the majority of the colleagues against whom he is judged are among the most ideologically conservative justices to serve in the past seventy-five years, he appears to be “liberal.”

It is an old saw that Supreme Court justices often seem to get more “liberal” over time. This was arguably true, for example, of Lewis Powell, Harry Blackmun, Sandra Day O’Connor, and John Paul Stevens, to name only a few. In fact, I think this is a real phenomenon. Those justices who are not rigidly affixed to a particular ideology do tend over the years to drift to the left. This was also true of David Souter.

Why does this happen? My theory is that as justices from widely diverse backgrounds see the endless stream of cases that flow to the Court, they come gradually to appreciate more deeply the injustices that still exist in our society and they come to better understand the unique role and responsibility of the Supreme Court in addressing those injustices.

It is the more open-minded justices, those who can reassess their beliefs, empathize with the outsiders in our society, and learn to appreciate the distinctive capacity of the judiciary to enforce the guarantees of our Constitution, who grow in the depth of their understanding of their responsibilities. David Souter was one of those justices.

It is no secret that David Souter was not always happy as a Supreme Court justice. He was often disappointed in his colleagues, most especially for their decision in Bush v. Gore, which he regarded as a “tragedy.” He never warmed to the social whirl and glitz of the nation’s capital, and he certainly missed the simplicity and calm of his New Hampshire farmhouse. But he also felt deeply privileged to serve on the Supreme Court. He once told me that he regarded himself as “the luckiest guy in the world” because of the opportunity he had in this way to serve his country.

David Souter has all the qualities of a great Justice. He is a voice of reason. He is decent, thoughtful, brilliant, caring, and modest. During his tenure on the Court, he has grown steadily both as a man and as a justice. He has thought hard about the ways in which the law touches individual lives and he has preserved and protected the fundamental principles of liberty, equality and democracy upon which our nation is based. Justice Brennan would be proud of him.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
Posted by at 04:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last weekend Lennard J. Davis, author of Obsession: A History was interviewed on ABC Australia's radio program Saturday Extra. In the interview host Geraldine Doogue talks to Davis about his new book which explores the role obsession plays in our 21st century lives. From obsessive aspects of professional specialization, to obsessive compulsive disorder and nymphomania, as Davis shows, obsession plays an important yet paradoxical role in the western mindset. Addressing the full spectrum of obsessive behavior, Davis's graceful analysis describes the fascinating historical and contemporary role of obsession as both a pathology and a goal.

Navigate to the Saturday Extra website to listen, or navigate to the press's website to check out our own interviews with Davis—one in audio and another in text.

A detail from an image of one of Norman Maclean's favorite fly lures that graces the cover of A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition was featured in this week's installment of the New Yorker Book Bench Blog's covers contest in which reader's try and guess the identity of a book based on small snippet of its cover graphic. You can play along by guessing what books the rest of the covers belong to, (they've already chosen the winners for this week's contest though). Or just click here to see the full covers from this week's contest and get ready for next Wednesday's installment.

David Berreby, author of Us and Them: The Science of Identity was cited earlier last week in an article in the "Fashion & Style" section of a recent edition of the New York Times. The article quotes Berreby in a discussion of the recent Britain's Got Talent phenom, Susan Boyle—the "frumpy 47-year-old unemployed church volunteer who lived alone with her cat," who stunned audiences with her apparently quite talented singing on the show. And while many critics have since cited the episode as an example of modern society's tendency to "judge a book by its cover," many social scientists, including Berreby, reveal that such stereotyping is in fact deeply rooted in human social evolution. From the article:

One reason our brains persist in using stereotypes, experts say, is that often they give us broadly accurate information, even if all the details don't line up. Ms. Boyle's looks, for example, accurately telegraphed much about her biography, including her socioeconomic level and lack of worldly experience.

Her behavior on stage reinforced an outsider image. David Berreby, author of Us and Them, about why people categorize one another, said the TV audience may have also judged her harshly because, in banter with the judges before singing, she appeared to be trying, awkwardly, to fit in.

"She tried to be chipper, and when they asked her age, she did this little shimmy," as though she assumed that on such programs "you're supposed to be kind of sexy and personable, and she got it wrong," Mr. Berreby said. "Nothing sort of triggers our contempt more than something trying to be acceptable and then failing.…"

"[Stereotyping's] not something we came up with because of TV or the car. It's not connected to modern life at all. It is inherent in the mind."

Read the rest of the article on the NYT website.

Archived in Commentary
Posted by TXM at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In 2006 David S. Brown’s Richard Hofstadter, a sweeping intellectual biography of a man and his era, was published to great acclaim— E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post called it “the most important political book of the year that’s not about politics”—and definitively established the continuing importance of Hofstadter’s work and his legacy as a leader of the Eastern intellectual establishment.

With Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing, Brown returns with a collective biography of the prominent intellectuals—including William Appleman Williams, Charles Beard, and Christopher Lasch—who publicly opposed Hofstadter and the growing interventionist consensus he represented among America’s postwar elite.

Troubled by the burgeoning military-industrial complex and what they saw as America’s reckless fomenting of the cold war, they argued strenuously for a different path: a return to an older American tradition of progressivism and reform. Only that way, they believed, could the individual freedom and self-sufficiency that historically had represented the heart of American democracy survive. And while America’s imperial ambitions clearly remain strong, Brown shows how these ideas remain potent today, animating the work of prominent figures like William Cronon and Thomas Frank.

A fascinating follow-up to Richard Hofstadter, Beyond the Frontier draws timely attention to an intellectual tradition that is currently being rediscovered by conservatives and liberals alike.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biography | Education | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)