The Chicago Blog

Coastal cartography in context

2008-05-15T20:38:41Z

Writing for the May 15th edition of Nature, reviewer Deborah Jean Warner gives a nice summary of Mark Monmonier's new book, Coast Lines: How Mapmakers Frame the World and Chart Environmental Change:

Mark Monmonier, professor of geography at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University in New York, seeks to inform the public about how cartography and society intersect. He wishes us to look closely at maps, to recognize which features are shown or missing, and understand why. In Coast Lines, he offers an assortment of eclectic and fascinating information about how coastlines have been defined, determined and depicted, focusing on the United States in the twentieth century.
Different maps and charts of the same coastal area show different cartographic coastlines. Monmonier calls our attention to four types, explaining that each is a human construct designed to serve a specific purpose, and the result of many observations and assumptions (the latter sometimes gaining the upper hand). One cartographic coastline is the high-water line visible from offshore. Another, introduced in the nineteenth century to aid safe navigation, is the low-water line. Two are more recent: storm surge lines are designed mainly for evacuation planning and flood insurance, and inundation lines describe the plausible effects of changing geological and meteorological conditions.

Read the rest of the review on the Nature website.

Press Release: King, Collections of Nothing

2008-05-15T20:12:10Z

William Davies King makes no bones about it: he's odd. And his collections are odder: loops of wire, skeleton keys, seafood tins, water bottle labels, envelope liners, strips of masking tape, canceled credit cards, boulders—and that's just for starters. You might call it junk, but to King, it's a very special sort of nothing. Suffice it to say, no one on earth has a garage quite like his.

King's unusual collections reflect his belief in the intrinsic value of the discarded, unwanted, and ephemeral—but as he makes clear in Collections of Nothing, the urge that drives his hoarding is not all that different from that which leads a more typical person to prize uncanceled stamps or pristine sets of baseball cards. Both an affecting memoir and an idiosyncratic examination of the desire to accumulate, Collections of Nothing takes us deep inside the soul of the solitary collector. King's life story is deftly interleaved with his insightful meditations on the nature of the acquisitive mind; the result is a book that defies categorization, a unique hybrid that will speak to anyone who has ever found himself bitten by the collecting bug.

Read the press release.

Press Release: Cohen, Gilfoyle, and Horowitz, The Flash Press

2008-05-15T19:34:31Z

If you think you've had your fill of malicious gossip, sex as a route to celebrity, and relentless sports and entertainment news, you might just be reading all about it two centuries too late. Under such headlines as "Whoredome in New York" and "Philadelphia Pimps of Fame," New York's 1840s flash papers served up with nonpareil style and irresistible wit all the news that wasn't fit to print about the city's underworld of brothels, wantons, unfortunate girls, and their all-too-eager customers. Ephemeral publications that also featured gossip about boxing, dog fighting, and the theater scene, the Rake, the Flash, the Whip, and the Libertine were must-reads for sporting men keen to learn about the city's leisure activities and erotic entertainments. Now, in The Flash Press, these papers are once again in print—this time taking the more discrete form of a book that looks under Victorian-era New York's buttoned-up surface to reveal the colorful (read: more interesting) characters teeming beneath.

Read the press release.

The wartime experience in their own words

2008-05-14T19:30:05Z

Monday, May 26 is the official publication date of our paperback edition of Andrew Carroll's Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families. Through a series of eyewitness accounts, private journals, short stories, and letters, the book delivers a fascinating firsthand account of the lives of American servicemen and women in Iraq in their own words.

Operation Homecoming is also Oscar nominated documentary produced for PBS's America at a Crossroads. You can check out the movie trailer on YouTube or navigate to the America at a Crossroads website for local air times and additional media.

Find out more about the book here.

Press Release: Spirn, Daring to Look

2008-05-14T18:20:47Z

Despite the ubiquity of Dorothea Lange's photographs, a surprisingly large number of them have languished in archives, more or less unseen, for decades. With Daring to Look, Anne Whiston Spirn brings nearly 200 of those photos to light, revealing new facets of Lange's celebrated achievement.

Daring to Look is far more than just a book of photos, however. Spirn presents the images—taken in 1939 in California, North Carolina, and the Pacific Northwest—alongside Lange's own field notes and captions, which the photographer considered to be an essential component of her attempt to document the hardscrabble lives of her subjects. Spirn joins that work to an insightful account of Lange's life, as well as a fascinating look at the current state of many of the locations Lange shot. Spirn's own photographs of those towns and farms reflect the changes—and the surprising continuity—over decades, carrying Lange's documentary project into a new century.

Daring to Look brings to life a crucial moment in American history—and illuminates a missing period in the life of one of America's greatest artists.

Read the press release.

Press Release: Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself

2008-05-14T18:12:44Z

Founded in 1965 and still active today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is an American institution with an international reputation. From its working-class roots on the South Side of Chicago, the AACM went on to forge an extensive legacy of cultural and social experimentation, crossing both musical and racial boundaries. The success of individual members and ensembles from Muhal Richard Abrams, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Anthony Braxton to Douglas Ewart, the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, and Nicole Mitchell has been matched by the enormous international influence of the collective itself in inspiring a generation of musical experimentalists.

George E. Lewis, who joined the collective as a teenager in 1971, establishes the full importance and vitality of the AACM with this communal history, written with a symphonic sweep that draws on a cross-generational chorus of voices and a rich collection of rare images.

Read the press release.

Also, read an excerpt from the book.

Audio: Gabriela Mistral's mad poems

2008-05-13T20:49:37Z

Gabriela Mistral was the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1945. Madwomen: The “Locas mujeres” Poems of Gabriela Mistral is the first appearance in English of all twenty-six poems of the “Locas mujeres” series, including those left unpublished at her death.

Randall Couch edited and translated Madwomen and he recently gave a reading of seven poems from the book (together with a reading of the Spanish texts) at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. The complete one-hour reading can be downloaded from the Writers House site.

"Sporting news, theater gossip, humor, and not a little pornography"

2008-05-12T19:47:15Z

Hugely popular in nineteenth century New York, "flash" papers—weeklies like the Flash and the Whip—capitalized on lurid tales of New York City's extensive sexual underworld. But, due in part to the evolution of obscenity laws and libel, their success was short lived and the papers themselves fell into obscurity. Now, as Chronicle of Higher Education reviewer Kacie Glenn notes, the authors of The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York have produced a comprehensive historical document of both the tumultuous history of the papers, and the culture that consumed them. Glenn writes:

The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York, written in association with the antiquarian society by Patricia Cline Cohen, a professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara; Timothy J. Gilfoyle, a professor of history at Loyola University Chicago; and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, a professor of American studies and history at Smith College, has two parts: a critical analysis of the papers' role in society and a collection of excerpts.
The average flash-press reader was both a man about town and a respectable citizen, and the authors aim to decode the texts in light of those conflicting identities. "Ambiguity and deceit" were the rule, they say, so that the weeklies simultaneously celebrated and condemned promiscuity and high-society romps. The Flash Press traces the papers' brief but turbulent run through the litigation and public outcry that eventually shut them down.…

Although the sporting weeklies were short-lived, First-Amendment victories for today's risqué periodicals suggest that the earlier papers were ahead of their time. As the authors of The Flash Press note, "Seen from the perspective of the early 21st century, the editors of the flash press certainly have the last laugh."

The vast wasteland of 1961

2008-05-09T20:51:00Z

On May 9, 1961 Newton N. Minow addressed the National Association of Broadcasters in Washington, DC. President John F. Kennedy had recently appointed Minow to the chair of the Federal Communications Commission. To the assembled executives of broadcast television he said:

I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.
You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials—many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.

You can read the text and listen to the audio of that speech, which took the broadcasters to task for failing to serve the public interest even while they used the public airwaves.

Minow's positive contribution to public-spirited television was the creation of the presidential debates. With co-author Craig L. LaMay he recounts that story in Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future. See some memorable moments from the presidential debates and read an excerpt from the book.

Friday remainders

2008-05-09T20:25:36Z

First off, warmest congratulations to Philip Gossett, whose lovely book Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera was recently awarded the press's Laing Prize. Gossett's book is a fascinating account of how opera comes to the stage, filled with his personal experiences and suffused with his towering and tonic passion for music. In awarding the prize University President Robert Zimmer called Gossett's book "a vivid example of the difference that humanities scholarship can make to the arts with which it is allied." See more about the prize on the U of C News Office website. To find out more about the book read this excerpt.

If you're in the New York area tonight you have the chance to catch some of the original pioneers of avant-garde jazz at the Community Church of New York, 40 East 35th Street. The show doubles as a book release party for author, professor, and trombonist George E. Lewis's A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music—the definitive history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Navigate to the New York Times jazz listings for more details about the show. To learn more about the book read this excerpt, or see Hank Shteamer's article in the current issue of Time Out New York. Shteamer also has a transcript of the interview he used for the TONY piece on his blog.

The remarks of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright were echoed into a cacophony in the mass media, but now that the noise has subsided, more thoughtful conversations about race can perhaps take place. Katherine Cramer Walsh has studied conversations about politics and race for years and is the author of Talking about Race: Community Dialogues and the Politics of Difference. She participated in NPR's Talk of the Nation and discussed the Wright phenomenon and the current state of the dialogue on race in America. Listen to the archived audio here.

Another interesting discussion of race and politics in America appeared on PBS's NewsHour last Wednesday. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, co-author of Presidents Creating the Presidency: Deeds Done in Words—the definitive book on presidential rhetoric for more than a decade—spoke with host Jefferey Brown about the rhetoric surrounding the issue of race in the 2008 campaign. See the streaming video here.

The Britannica blog is running a piece on Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, Robert Pogue Harrison's wide-ranging exploration of the place of forests in Western culture, from the epic of Gilgamesh, to the recent ecological dilemmas that confront us. Harrison turned a similar eye to horticulture in his newest book, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Read an excerpt on the UCP website.

Finally, Andrea Weiss's new book In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story was given a positive assessment by literary critic Kathy Hunt for the May 3 edition of the Australian. Recounting the lives of writer Thomas Mann's two eldest children, Erika and Klaus, Weiss's book sheds light on these two fascinating figures and their adventures traveling through the literary, artistic, and political haute couture of the early twentieth century as well as details their tumultuous relationship with their famous father. Read the article on the Australian website and read an excerpt from the book.

The self-concept of Richard Rorty

2008-05-08T19:50:20Z

Scott McLemee interviewed Neil Gross yesterday for his "Intellectual Affairs" column at Inside Higher Ed. Gross is the author of Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher and he discusses his new book as a work in the sociology of ideas, not just biography and intellectual history. What's the cash value of doing that? Gross explains:

My goal in this book was not simply to write a biography of Rorty, but also to make a theoretical contribution to the sociology of ideas. Surprising as it might sound to some, the leading figures in this area today—to my mind Pierre Bourdieu and Randall Collins—have tended to depict intellectuals as strategic actors who develop their ideas and make career plans and choices with an eye toward accumulating intellectual status and prestige. That kind of depiction naturally raises the ire of those who see intellectual pursuits as more lofty endeavors….
I argue that intellectuals do in fact behave strategically much of the time, but that another important factor influencing their lines of activity is the specific "intellectual self-concept" to which they come to cleave. By this I mean the highly specific narratives of intellectual selfhood that knowledge producers may carry around with them—narratives that characterize them as intellectuals of such and such a type.

In Rorty's case, one of the intellectual self-concepts that came to be terribly important to him was that of a "leftist American patriot." I argue that intellectual self-concepts, thus understood, are important in at least two respects: they may influence the kinds of strategic choices thinkers make (for example, shaping the nature of professional ambition), and they may also directly influence lines of intellectual activity. The growing salience to Rorty of his self-understood identity as a leftist American patriot, for example, was one of the factors that led him back toward pragmatism in the late 1970s and beyond.

Navigate to Insidehighered.com to read the rest of the interview. Also read an excerpt from the book.

An innovative blend of storytelling and scholarship

2008-05-07T20:54:58Z

In a recent review posted to the Bookslut website, Barbara J. King praises anthropologist Richard Price's most recent book Travels with Tooy: History, Memory, and the African American Imagination for its unique ethnographic account of the author's encounter with the enigmatic subject of Tooy—a priest, philosopher, and healer living in a shantytown on the outskirts of Cayenne, French Guiana. Commending the book for drawing not only on Price's ethnographic and archival research, but also on Tooy's teachings, songs, and stories, King writes:

The book glows with knowledge, Tooy's as much as Rich's, as Rich is the first to say; he writes of Tooy with love, as a friend, but also with respect, calling him "a fellow intellectual.…"
The complexity of Rich's analysis sits side by side with the complexity of Tooy's time-and-space travel. As I close the book (and begin to listen to Tooy's voice at Rich's website ), I know that I grasp only a small fraction of what Tooy knows. It's a good feeling, in a peculiar way; after all, that's what inhabiting an unfamiliar reality will do for a person—teach her what she doesn't know, and how to learn something more.

Read the article at Bookslut. Also listen to a selection of archived sound files to accompany the book.

Has a Svengali mesmerized the Pentagon?

2008-05-06T18:07:24Z

The war in Iraq is more than five years old and even though the end is not in sight, the lessons of the war are already being debated within the military.

National Public Radio has a story this morning about the sharpening disagreement in the US Army over how great a role counterinsurgency tactics should play. The story is prompted by an internal Pentagon report that suggests the Army is excessively focused on counterinsurgency training and neglecting conventional force capabilities such as field artillery. The report asserts that 90 percent of artillery units are "unqualified to fire artillery accurately."

We have of course paid a great deal of attention in this space to the rise of counterinsurgency doctrine within the military, since our publication in book form of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Not only is it interesting to see some Army strategists question whether the pendulum has swung too far in the COIN direction, but some of the commentary would seem to implicate our own role in bringing the COIN manual to a wider audience.

NPR reporter Guy Raz quotes a recent lecture by Gian Gentile, chairman of the history department at West Point:

Gentile, who served two tours in Iraq, is perhaps the most outspoken internal critic of what he calls the Army's dangerous obsession with counterinsurgency.

"The high public profile of the new counterinsurgency manual, combined with the perception that its use and practice with the surge in Iraq has lowered the violence, I think has had a Svengali effect on us," Gentile said during the lecture. "It's almost like we have a secret recipe for success now involving counterinsurgency and irregular war."

A five year war would, on the face of it, go quite a ways toward proving that no "secret recipe for success" has been found. But then counterinsurgency is always messy and slow.

Listen to the audio of the NPR story. The discussion will undoubtedly continue at the Small Wars Journal blog.

Uses and abuses of iconic images

2008-05-05T16:59:29Z

In the current edition of the American Interest, reviewer James Rosen delivers a positive assessment of Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites' recent book, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. Praising the book for its thorough treatment of nine case studies involving some of the most influential images of the twentieth century, Rosen writes:

[No Caption Needed] is a penetrating and provocative analysis of the way certain popular photographs, whether produced by professionals or amateurs, acquire the power to change public policy and with it the course of history.… The author's analytical achievement is enabled by an extraordinary feat of research and reporting. They have unearthed hidden facts, from both the backstory and the aftermath, surrounding each of their nine chosen photographs.…
[But] almost as compelling… are the stories of their subsequent appropriation. No Caption Needed details the uses and abuses of these nine iconic photographs by propagandists and peddlers of all kinds, with results that prove alternately haunting, playful, predictable, mercenary, dishonest and sometimes just plain twisted.…

Pick up a copy of the American Interest to read the rest of the review.
Also see the authors' No Caption Needed blog and read an excerpt from the book.

Press Release: Niebuhr, The Irony of American History

2008-05-05T16:39:01Z

Each of the major candidates vying to be the next President of the United States—Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain—has cited Reinhold Niebuhr’s political philosophies as among their most profound influences. Written during the cold war era when America came of age as a world power, The Irony of American History is now back in print and more relevant than ever. Niebuhr’s masterpiece on the incongruity between personal ideals and political reality is both an indictment of American moral complacency and a warning against the arrogance of virtue. Impassioned, eloquent, and deeply perceptive, Niebuhr’s wisdom will cause readers across the political spectrum to rethink their assumptions about right and wrong, war and peace.

Read the press release.