The Chicago Blog

"Yes, we are all lost and wandering in the thick mists. We have no destinations. The city is without outlines. And the drift of figures is a meaningless thing. Figures that are going nowhere and coming from nowhere. A swarm of supernumeraries who are not in the play. Who saunter, dash, scurry, hesitate in search of a part in the play."

Ben Hecht (1894—1964) was a reporter and columnist for the Chicago Daily Journal and the Chicago Daily News as well as a playwright, novelist, short story writer, and scriptwriter.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Literature
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Today's Inside Higher Ed. contains an interview with James C. Garland, author of Saving Alma Mater: A Rescue Plan for America's Public Universities. In the interview Garland discusses the economic difficulties that many public universities currently face, among them declining faculty salaries, dramatic rises in tuition costs, and deferred maintenance that "far exceeds state renovation budgets." More than just fallout from the nation's worst recession since the '30s, as Garland argues "the historic economic model—ample public subsidies resulting in affordable tuition—has broken down and cannot be fixed. The current economic crisis has obviously accelerated the decline, but even after the economy recovers I believe there will be no turning back the clock."

Thus in Saving Alma Mater: A Rescue Plan for America's Public Universities Garland offers readers a timely and comprehensive "rescue plan" for America's public universities that would tie university revenues to their performance and exploit the competitive pressures of the academic marketplace to control costs, rein in tuition, and make schools more responsive to student needs.

In the interview Garland cites four elements to his approach including: turning public universities into autonomous state-owned entities governed by independent boards of trustees; pushing states to redirect taxpayer dollars that previously subsidized campuses to fund grants and scholarships only to eligible students; streamline campus decision-making through financial incentives to encourage professors and administrators to use their time more productively; and lastly, revamping the methods for selecting presidents, chancellors, and trustees to mimic the more informed and rigorous procedures at private institutions.

To find out more about Garland's plan for saving alma mater, read the full interview on the Inside Higher Ed. website and read an excerpt from the book.

Also see the author's blog.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics | Education
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Slam magazine's Aggrey Sam has just published an article based on a conversation with Scott N. Brooks about his fascinating new book about Philly's basketball scene in Black Men Can't Shoot. As Sam notes, Brooks' book is based on the author's "firsthand experiences as a coach for the South Philly in the vaunted Sonny Hill League, mainly through his relationship with two up-and-coming stars in the city," "Jermaine" and "Ray" (not their real names). Brooks' narrative follows these young athletes as they navigate Philly's hyper-competitive basketball circuit—where dreams are made and broken on a daily basis—and many an NBA hopeful must learn not only to manage their game on the court, but to deal with the social and economic obstacles to their success as well. As Sam explains:

It seems pretty simple sometimes—the best players get the most shine. If you're good and you work hard at your craft, you'll get what's coming to you. But with all the pitfalls along the way and the "business of basketball" trickling down to the grassroots level over the years, it's a lot more complicated than that.

Sam's article goes on to discuss the network of "Old Heads"—neighborhood mentors that help guide young athletes—sometimes for better, sometimes for worse—the broader communal structure of grassroots Philly hoops, and the continual "process of making and re-making" oneself that these athletes must endure with each stage of their career if they wish to make it to the top.

Read the complete article on the Slam magazine website. Also, read an excerpt from Black Men Can't Shoot.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
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This Saturday the 20th annual Chicago Humanities Festival kicks off with 12 events in Hyde Park. Titled "Laughter" this year's festival offers events that both analyze and enact humor in the humanities featuring among other events a special edition of the annual Latke-Hamantash debate with University of Chicago professors Philip Gossett and Ted Cohen—both contributors to Ruth Fredman Cernea's The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate—along with James Shapiro and moderator Daniel Libenson. (12:00 pm Mandel Hall)

Other events this Saturday include: a talk by comedy's first and only black/white duo, Tim Reid and Tom Dreesen, authors of Tim and Tom: An American Comedy in Black and White (2:00 pm DuSable Museum of African American History); a talk titled "From Vice to Virtue: Molière's Comedic Mission" by Larry Norman, author of The Public Mirror: Molière and the Social Commerce of Depiction (12:30 pm Court Theatre); and a talk about opera and laughter with Martha Feldman, author of Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy (2:00 pm Mandel Hall).

For more info navigate to the Chicago Humanities Festival website.

Also see an excerpt and recipes from Cernea's The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate and this excerpt from Tim and Tom: An American Comedy in Black and White.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
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For two consecutive nights WTTW's Chicago Tonight has featured interviews with University of Chicago Press authors from our regional list. On Wednesday evening Dominic A. Pacyga was invited on the show to discuss his fascinating new chronicle of our fair city in Chicago: A Biography. A south side native who spent his college years working at the Union Stock Yards, in his new book Pacyga offers a comprehensive catalog of the city's great industrialists, reformers, and politicians, while giving voice to the city's steelyard workers and kill floor operators as well.

And on Thursday, Liam T. A. Ford made an appearance to talk about his account of one of the most prominent of Chicago's landmarks in Soldier Field: A Stadium and Its City. As Ford tells it, the tale of Soldier Field truly is the story of Chicago, filled with political intrigue and civic pride. More than just the home of 'da Bears, Ford's book traces the stadium's multiple roles as both one of the city's most important a cultural centers—drawing crowds of thousands for everything from rodeos and NASCAR races, to Catholic masses, and political rallies—to a bargaining chip for city politicians from the infamous Mayor "Big Bill" Thompson, to Mayor Daley himself, as the stadium played a central (albeit short-lived) role in the city's bid for the 2016 Olympic games.

Check out the videos below or navigate to the Chicago Tonight website to watch.

Also see this gallery of photographs from Pacyga's book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Chicago | History
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Driving through the Midwest without falling asleep at the wheel can be a test despite the ubiquitous presence of Starbucks at nearly every overpass from Nebraska to Chicago. Not that it wouldn't be rather, well, "plane" otherwise, but American industrial agriculture definitely has transformed much of the landscape of the North American interior into a monotonous, homogeneous grid. And the adverse impacts of these short-sighted agricultural practices go far beyond aesthetics, threatening public health, as well as the profitability of other industries that rely on the fragile ecosystems of the American heartland—ecosystems that have, over the last century, been all but obliterated. All the more reason why we should celebrate the hard work of folks like Michael Forsberg whose stunning photographic journey through some of the last remaining wild habitats in the Midwest has just hit the bookstore shelves in Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild.

In a recent article for the Nebraska based publication Prairie Fire, Forsberg himself details some of the trials and tribulations he endured to capture the rare images included in his new book, as well as some of the reasons he has for enduring. Toward the end of his piece Forsberg writes:

Will we as a culture also decide to find equal value and virtue in protecting and restoring our Plains' rich natural heritage, its amazing natural diversity and all the ecosystem services that its nature provides? In the long view, can the Great Plains function as working wilderness?

The contents of this book, and its … photographs, are not sufficient enough to answer these questions, but perhaps it is a sufficient start to a conversation. Time is short. Let's not waste it.

Read the rest on the Prairie Fire website and check out this recent review of the book in Lincoln's Journal Star.

Also see a gallery of photographs and sample pages in PDF format (4.2Mb).

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology
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First appearing in somewhat different form as a series of dispatches on McSweeney's Internet Tendency—an excellent literary site to add to your list of bookmarks—Philip Graham's new book The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon offers readers an exuberant yet introspective account of the author's year long sojourn in Lisbon with his family as they explore Portugal's music, its inventive cuisine, and its vibrant literary culture.

Recently, Graham was interviewed about his book on the Inside Higher Ed. blog, The Education of Oronte Chrum. Here's an interesting passage from the interview wherein Graham answers a question put to him about "writing other cultures" and the "dangers of misrepresentation":

I think the dangers of misrepresentation when describing a conversation you had five minutes ago with a family member or friend are high, too. Because the thoughts of others are unavailable to us, humans have to make do with varying skills of interpretation. We're all fiction writers of a sort, throughout our lives shaping characters out of the selected and often misleading signals we receive from the people we think we know. A spotty business at best, this. But what's the alternative except deepening isolation?

The same goes for travel, since every country on the globe shares a second, secret name of Pitfall. Yet sometimes where you live doesn't give you what you need or want or whatever you're secretly searching for, and when you find a place that does, that becomes the most rewarding travel, the kind where each footstep on the outside is accompanied by an echoing footstep within. These steps are necessarily tentative. In The Moon, Come to Earth, I tried to separate from myself any notion of being an expert. I was and remain simply your run-of-the-mill flawed fellow, awkwardly nosing about another culture, never quite sure what I might come upon, what might resonate inside me, attract or appall me.

Continue reading the full interview on The Education of Oronte Churm blog.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Literature
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The process of getting a manuscript published is often a harrowing one fraught with revising, rewriting, and rejection. But for those few who manage to find a suitable home for their work, the reward of seeing one's ideas in print can be worth the all the head- and heart-ache. As a case in point, William Davies King, whose Collections of Nothing was published by the Press in 2008, has a blog post on the PowellsBooks.Blog detailing his own odyssey through the world of publishing. From the numerous submissions of his manuscript—an oddball autobiographical account of the author's devotion to decades to collecting ephemera and trinkets, otherwise known as trash—to its eventual publication by the Press's executive editor Susan Bielstein, King's tale is a personal and insightful look from an author's point of view at the process of publication.

Read King's posting on the PowellsBooks.Blog, or find out more about his book, Collections of Nothing with this excerpt and essay by the author.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
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NPR's The Picture Show—a blog of sorts that features photos, commentary, and questions from NPR's multimedia team—has today posted a stunning rejoinder to all of those who would write off the Midwestern landscape as a monotonous repetition of corn rows and cattle. Featuring a gallery of selected images from Michael Forsberg's Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild, the posting demonstrates the diversity and abundance of wildlife and habitat still to be found in what was once the largest, but is now perhaps the most endangered, ecosystem in North America. Check out the photos on NPR's The Picture Show blog. And if that's not enough to convince you of the wild spirit and splendor of this irreplaceable part of the planet, the Press's website also hosts a a gallery with even more of Forsberg's spectacular photographs.

Between the fall of 2005 and the winter of 2008, Forsberg traveled roughly 100,000 miles across 12 states and three provinces, from southern Canada to northern Mexico, to complete the photographic fieldwork for this project, underwritten by the Nature Conservancy. Complementing Forsberg's images and firsthand accounts are a forward by former poet laureate Ted Kooser, and essays by Great Plains scholar David Wishart and acclaimed writer Dan O'Brien. Each section of the book begins with a thorough overview by Wishart, while O'Brien—a wildlife biologist and rancher as well as a writer—uses his powerful literary voice to put the Great Plains into a human context, connecting their natural history with man's uses and abuses.

Find out more about the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
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Today marks the 240th birthday of Alexander von Humboldt, an explorer, scientist, writer, and humanist who was the most famous intellectual of the age that began with Napoleon and ended with Darwin. The University of Chicago Press is publishing two books this fall that celebrate this seminal thinker. Laura Dassow Walls's The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America traces Humboldt's ideas from Cosmos—the book that crowned his career—to his 1799 journey to the Americas, where he first experienced the diversity of nature and of the world's peoples—and envisioned a new cosmopolitanism that would link ideas, disciplines, and nations into a global web of knowledge and cultures. That voyage is also at the center of Stephen T. Jackson's edition of Humboldt's Essay on the Geography of Plants.

Walls and Jackson recently collaborated on this appreciation of Humboldt on his 240th anniversary. That Walls is an English professor and Jackson an ecologist would undoubtedly please Humboldt very much; he argued for interdisciplinarity across the humanities and sciences, and this essay is emblematic of that fertile exchange.

Mention "Darwin" to any literate audience in America and eyes will light up with recognition; mention "Humboldt," and most faces will remain blank. Some might recall a Saul Bellow novel, a disappearing river in Nevada, an ocean current off Peru, a college town in California. But 150 years ago, it was Alexander von Humboldt's name that would have lit up the room. A physician in Charleston, a lawyer in Peoria, a poet in Concord, or an army captain in San Francisco—all could have pulled some Humboldt volumes off the shelf and led a lively conversation about the famous German scientist. For in 1859, Humboldt's, not Darwin's, was the name that stamped the century. As Emerson said, "It is the age of Humboldt."

Continue reading "Humboldt's Enduring Legacy" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
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August 2009 marks the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, the seminal festival of the sixties. Remembrances and tributes, not to mention a new film by Ang Lee, have commemorated the event as many participants experienced it: groovy, mythical, and drug-addled.

But not everyone who made it to Yasgur's farm was having a transcendental experience. Poet Alan Shapiro, then a rising senior in high school, was more concerned with honing his basketball skills during the summer of 1969 than he was expanding his consciousness. But yet he found himself a member of Woodstock nation that August, and lived to tell the tale. "Woodstock Puritan," from his 1996 essay collection The Last Happy Occasion, recounts not only the poet's disheartening experience at the concert, but also explores the poetry of Thom Gunn, the importance of pleasing your parents, and, of course, the transcendence of basketball. In honor of the fortieth anniversary of those three days of peace, love, and music, we have excerpted the essay for the first time. Cue up Jimi Hendrix's version of the Star Spangled Banner and transport yourself to another time, forgotten space.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
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Colin Ong-Dean, author of Distinguishing Disability: Parents, Privilege, and Special Education, was an invited guest on KPBS public radio's These Days to discuss how sweeping budget cuts, recently implemented in California as local and state governments try to find their way out of the recession, will affect San Diego's special education programs.

In his book Ong-Dean argues that the benefits of special eduction programs in the United States have historically been unevenly distributed to families with the money, educational background, and confidence needed to make effective claims about their children's disabilities, while those from underserved communities, without the necessary resources to effectively advocate on their child's behalf, tend to receive much less. Now with budgets hit hard by the recession, could the problem get worse?

To find out more about how the recession is affecting special education programs, as well as what parents of children with disabilities can do to push schools to provide more services to students with special needs, listen to archived audio from the show on the KPBS website or find out more about Ong-Dean's Distinguishing Disability.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
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Mary Pattillo, author of Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class and Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City was interviewed recently on Penn State Public Broadcasting's Conversations webcast speaking on the topic of her two books: the American black middle class. In the interview Pattillo talks about the history of the rise of the black middle class and the unique issues that middle class African American's face today in negotiating their place within their communities and in American society at large.

Navigate to the Penn State website to view the episode.

Also read this excerpt from Black on the Block and another from Black Picket Fences.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Black Studies | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
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Last Friday, the world lost an influential philosopher, celebrated scholar, and prolific author when Leszek Kolakowski passed away in Oxford, England, on July 17. During his long career, Kolakowski was a member of the University of Chicago faculty from 1981 until his retirement in 1994. While in Hyde Park, he also became a University of Chicago Press author. Executive Editor T. David Brent knew Kolakowski quite well during his time in Chicago and remembers here the lighter side of the great thinker.

In early fall of 1986, Morris Philipson, then director of the University of Chicago Press, invited Leszek Kolakowski to meet with him and various members of the editorial staff in Philipson's office. The bottle of sherry and fancy sherry glasses on a special silver platter clearly suggested it was a special occasion. Kolakowski arrived dressed in his Oxford best, and Philipson offered him a seat in the fine leather chair reserved for important authors. Kolakowski made himself comfortable and produced a Gauloises Bleu cigarette. Instead of informing Kolakowski that smoking in a University building was not permitted, Philipson told his assistant to bring him an ashtray and offered him a glass of sherry.

Philipson began the conversation. "You are probably wondering why we have asked you to come over to the Press." Kolakowski gave a sideways nod as if to say "Probably I do know but why don't you tell me?" and he took a puff on his cigarette. "I have only one very simple question," Phillipson continued. Again Kolakowski nodded. "Why have you never published a book with the University of Chicago Press?" Kolakowski smiled slightly, took another long puff and said, "A simple question deserves a simple answer. I have never written anything worthy of being published by the University of Chicago Press."

In the course of the wide-ranging conversation that ensued, we learned of out-of-print books and never before translated books, as well as his plans to collect essays and lectures originally written in Polish, German, French, and English, and for original monographs. In short, as a consequence of that meeting, the Press became one of the main English language publishers of Kolakowski's works.

We also learned at the time that Kolakowski had a "little book," regrettably under contract with another publisher at that time, the first sentence of which Mr. Kolakowski recited to us: "A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading." Some fifteen years later the Press published a fresh translation of that book, Metaphysical Horror.

I also find myself recalling another memorable and thoroughly characteristic moment: the opening line of Kolakowski's acceptance speech at the ceremony at which his book, Modernity on Endless Trial, was awarded the Press's Laing Prize for 1991. "I wish to express my deep gratitude to the Press and the Board of University Publications for being given this prestigious award. Of course I don't deserve it, but I would never turn it down for such a flimsy reason."

Whether he was lecturing on the Devil (he was against him), debunking pseudo-scientific theories, or feigning self-deprecation, Kolakowski brought greatness and a good deal of humor to everything he did. He will be sorely missed by all who knew him.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
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We recently asked Joshua Blu Buhs—author of Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend —and Sigrid Schmalzer—author of The People's Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China—to expound upon the similarities and differences between the wildmen of their books. Their far ranging discussion began here and continued here. In Part III, Schmalzer begins by taking up Buhs question of professional vs. popular accounts of wildmen.

Sigrid Schmalzer: I see the most critical issue to be that of differing ideas about authority in knowledge making: in this case, both who is authorized to speak about science and whether science itself should be considered the authoritative way speak about wildmen. In the late 1970s, things in China were changing rapidly, but ideas about science from the Mao era (1949-1976) still held a lot of water. I already mentioned the big emphasis on using science to stamp out "superstition": this suggested that scientists had privileged access to knowledge and that other people (especially people with lower educational levels, like peasants in remote villages) would be authorized to speak only when they were rid of superstition and had embraced science. But at the same time there was another strong current in the other direction: Mao had called on political leaders and intellectuals to "follow the masses," and especially during the more radical periods, this applied to science as much as everything else. The idea was that based on their experience in labor, the working classes had a vast storehouse of knowledge, much surpassing anything found in the ivory tower. So this presented two very different ways of interpreting the value of rural eye-witness reports on yeren. Did they represent just the kind of "superstition" one would expect in backward rural areas? Or were they reliable evidence from the most knowledgeable and trustworthy sources—"the masses" of poor peasants? People who wanted to promote yeren research argued the latter, and you can see in their writings both calls to "follow the masses" and criticism of establishment science as divorced from on-the-ground experience.

By the mid-1980s, I see the emergence of a different attitude, one that questions not just the "ivory tower" but science itself as a source of understanding about the world. Instead of celebrating the power of science to "crack the mysteries" of nature, such sources celebrate yeren as having the power to elude science and remain mysterious, the stuff of legend surviving in an increasingly modern, industrialized world. Good examples of this are the poem I quoted before by Zhou Liangpei and the Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian's novel Soul Mountain and his less well known 1985 play titled Yeren. If people want to understand the cultural significance of yeren in 1980s China, that play is the best single source—other than my book, of course. Although it's fiction, Gao captures all the major themes just as they were playing out among the real historical actors: environmentalism vs. industrialization, elitism vs. anti-elitism, legend vs. science, the use of yeren as a foil to expose the often savage (or "inhuman") behavior of civilized humans, the researcher who abandons his family in search of yeren (and of himself).

Continue reading "Bigfoot and the yeren (Part III): the conversation concludes" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
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We recently asked Joshua Blu Buhs—author of Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend —and Sigrid Schmalzer—author of The People's Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China—to expound upon the similarities and differences between the wildmen of their books. Their far ranging discussion began here. In Part II, Schmalzer begins by asking Buhs about Bigfoot and race.

Sigrid Schmalzer: I wanted to pick up on your mention of the way Bigfoot has naturalized racial hierarchies. Your book offers an effective analysis of racialized imagery in Bigfoot stories and art. I wonder if you had also thought about the possible relationship between anthropological theories about Bigfoot and anthropological theories about race. I was interested to see the anthropologist Carleton Coon appear in your book—not in his usual role as author of one of the most notoriously racist scientific books on human evolution, but for his involvement in Abominable Snowman work (which I don't recall knowing about). He appears in my book in that former role. He argued that separate evolutionary paths had led the modern races to be inherently unequal, and he even sought to bring these ideas to bear on civil rights issues—including Brown v. Board of Education. Perhaps significantly, the key U.S. Bigfooter anthropologist Grover Krantz was also interested in the origin of modern races. He was a proponent of multiregional theory—considerably less offensive than Coon's ideas, but still notable (in contrast with the more widely accepted recent Out-of-Africa theory) for its contention that the modern races separated relatively early in evolutionary history. I wonder what could be made of this connection.

Joshua Blu Buhs: I have thought about the relationship between anthropological theory and Bigfoot—or wildmen more generally, at least from a North American point of view. The connections, as I'm sure you know, are quite numerous. First, there is what might be termed the imperial context. Why were the British in the Himalayas in the first place, looking for the Abominable Snowman? Because conquering Everest was a form of Empire making. And why was Carleton Coon drawn into the discussion about wildmen? Because he was in Asia at the same time that the American oil magnate Tom Slick was leading a hunt for the Yeti. Coon was there on a study for the U.S. Air Force, photographing local peoples so that downed pilots could recognize their position by the physiognomy of the natives. Imperialism in action!

Continue reading "Bigfoot and the yeren (Part II): the conversation continues" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
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In May, the Press published Joshua Blu Buhs's Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, which explored the very real legacy of a mythical creature. (Check out Buhs's recent conversation with the LA Times Jacket Copy blog.) But Buhs's book wasn't the first on our list to consider a legendary wildman. Among the many topics explored in The People's Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China, author Sigrid Schmalzer delves into the meaning and resonance of the yeren, China's answer to the West's Bigfoot.

We recently asked the two scholars to discuss the similarities and differences between the wildmen of their books. The far-ranging discussion that resulted was so fascinating that we're publishing the dialogue in three installments. Part I kicks off below with Buhs remarking on the parallels between the two figures.

Joshua Blu Buhs: There are some amazing similarities between Bigfoot and the yeren, especially in our discussion of them in our books. First, there is the theme of loving the beast and sacrificing friends and family in the hunt for it. Second, there is the way that wildmen represent the possibility of extinction, authenticity, and the horrors of civilization. Third, there are parallel stories about kidnapping, marauding wildmen. The wildman may nor may not be a ubiquitous character-type, and its representation is certainly shaped by the different cultures in which it appears, but these similarities are intriguing. What's your take on this?

Sigrid Schmalzer: I, too, am struck by how many similarities there are both in the yeren and Bigfoot stories themselves and in the stories about the people who search for them. In both cases the wildness of the monsters is crucial to their cultural significance—and this wildness is something to fear but also to embrace. The fear of the "savagery" of the wild runs through stories about wildmen who kidnap—and often rape—humans; these stories have old roots in China. But the wildness of Bigfoot and yeren also emerges in these stories as an antidote to the corruption of modern society. Some of the specifics of what that corruption is understood to be differ between the two cases (e.g., in China, it includes the inhumanity of Mao-era political campaigns), but in both places there is a strong environmentalist theme—a romantic notion that Bigfoot and yeren represent "endangered species" and that they (like Goodall's chimps or Fossey's gorillas) offer the hope of reconnecting with our primeval selves and returning to the more pure world of nature.

Continue reading "Bigfoot and the yeren: a conversation about wildmen" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
Posted by SXH at 01:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last Tuesday the L.A. Times Jacket Copy blog interviewed Joshua Blu Buhs on the topic of his new book, Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend. The interview begins with Buhs discussing his motivation for writing a book about the mythical creature:

Jacket Copy: Straight from the start, you tell us that Bigfoot doesn't exist. Even though you say there is no Bigfoot, why did you choose to pursue this mythical creature in your writing?

Buhs: Initially it was the fact that I didn't think Bigfoot existed, which was interesting to me. It was also about American ideas of what the natural world is. Sort of like: Here's a screen on which people can project their ideas about nature. Though it turned out not to be as much about nature as I originally thought it would be.

And indeed, Buhs fascinating new book uses the story of Bigfoot to gauge everything from our culture's relationship to wilderness, individuality, and class, to modern attitudes towards consumerism and the media as well. Writing with a scientist's skepticism but an enthusiast's deep engagement, Buh's Bigfoot offers the definitive take on this elusive beast, and its profound significance in twentieth century American culture.

For more, read the rest of the interview on the L.A. Times' Jacket Copy blog, read another interview on our own site, or see this excerpt from the book.

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

Just a quick post to point you towards Slate magazines' weekly poem, which is currently featuring Peg Boyers, author of Hard Bread and more recently Honey with Tobacco, reading her poem "The Fate of Pleasure."

Each week Slate's poetry editor Robert Pinsky chooses a poem to be featured on their site and added to the audio archive at Slate's Poetry Podcast. So in the spirit of full disclosure it should also be mentioned that Pinsky has recently released a new book with the Press as well: Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town. Though not a poetry book Thousands of Broadways does offer up some of the fascinating literary insights of its author as he examines the history and character of America's small towns, including reflections on his own time growing up in one.

Find out more about Pinsky's new book and Boyer's poetry on the press's website.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Poetry
Posted by TXM at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Sunday night, the Los Angeles Lakers bested the Orlando Magic 99 to 86 in Game Five to become the 2009 NBA World Champions. Watching the playoffs, Scott Brooks, author of the new book Black Men Can't Shoot—a moving coming-of-age story that counters the belief that basketball only exploits kids and lures them into following empty dreams—reflected on LeBron James, whose team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, eventually fell to the Magic in the Eastern Conference Finals. Long considered the poster boy for "hoop dreams," James was, at the age of 18, the number one pick in the 2003 NBA draft. This season, he was named the league's Most Valuable Player.

Here, Brooks defends James's choice to forgo college to join the ranks of professionals and suggests the real problem isn't black athletes' hoop dreams but a lack of opportunity and educational inequality.

Watching LeBron James play, I'm reminded of commentary about his skipping college to make his "hoop dreams" a reality (a hoop dream is the unrealistic hope and plan for becoming a professional basketball player, typically held by poor black males and their families).

Some people think that NBA players who leave college after only a year or two or who have skipped college altogether have their priorities misplaced. These young players are considered problematic for their supposed anti-education stance.

Black kids with big dreams are not misguided or pathological for wanting a piece of the pie. We don't hear the same commentary about puck dreams or diamond dreams or even Wimbledon dreams and the athletes in these sports are often just as young. Sport is not the savior or the curse, the real problem is the dearth of opportunity and options, the invisibility and unknown paths to other desirable careers, and educational inequality.

These young NBA players are actually getting a degree, an NBA degree, and they've done a very American thing by jumping to the pros. How are hoop dreams much different than dreams of becoming a lawyer or doctor? Isn't it American to have dreams of making it, impossible dreams?

Yet, academics generally warn black men against hoop dreaming, arguing that sport exploits them. Mobility is a moving target and blacks take sports too seriously. It is a sport, not a career. Becoming a professional is highly improbable and statistically irrational. Falling short is economic suicide because there are no jobs to fall back on. It teaches no transferable skills. Sport is over-emphasized, given priority over education.

Do people rely upon statistics to choose a career or do they consider job prestige, access, networks, relative realism (what's realistic for me may not be for you), and rewards? Is an occupation only a good possibility if the chances for earning that occupation are high? Becoming an astronaut is even more rare than an NBA player, yet who discourages kids from pursuing space flight?

As for the argument that athletics doesn't teach transferable skills, what about black coaches, blacks in sports management, and blacks who go to college (and play) and then go professional "in something besides sports" —NCAA's new commercial tagline? I'm not suggesting that kids choose. Kids of all races, ethnicities and ages, female and male, should have the freedom to dream and pursue what they want. At the same time, we all need to push for greater equality in outcomes—education, pay and jobs. It's not an either/or, and most parents understand and push for their kids to do both.

There's more than direct effects (college ball leads to pro ball) to consider. High school athletes have higher grades than nonathletes (same for college athletes), and athletes tend to be less involved in drugs and less delinquent. Success in sports requires years of practicing and playing in pressure situations. This has latent effects, too. Women athletes laud sports for leveling the playing field, empowering them physically and mentally, and giving them opportunities to achieve. Inner-city boys also claim that sports keep them off the corners, out of gangs, and out of trouble.

Last, a discussion of hoop dreams as either good or bad is trite and does the proverbial "blaming the victim." Blacks value and encourage schooling. Blacks have sought for and pushed education for many moons—slaves were beaten for reading, and blacks later fought against segregated and unequal schools.

Hoop dreams are not the creation of poor folks. Blacks' access to playing collegiate and professional basketball cannot be taken for granted. White franchise owners, college administrators and coaches gave opportunities to black athletes with at least two goals in mind: winning and increasing profit. Black males were actively recruited in the 1960s. It was believed that they could make a big difference and this was confirmed when the famed all-black starting five of Texas Western beat Adolph Rupp's Kentucky white dynasty. Professional teams changed their informal and formal rules, drafted black players, and the game changed quickly. The access to college and a high paying job possibility opened up, creating the hoop dream.

LeBron James, the NBA's Most Valuable Player for the 2008-09 season and the youngest athlete to be awarded the distinction, ultimately fell short on his quest to earn his first NBA championship. But in only five years, he has ascended to the top of his profession and is arguably the best player in the world. He spent countless hours in basketball gyms and corporate meetings. He has been inspired by Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan and aspires to be more than just a basketball player—he hosted Warren Buffett and Bill Gates this past summer at the pre-Olympic exhibition games in Las Vegas. LeBron James has clearly gained a first rate education in five years and someday may yet earn his PhD in Hardwood—a championship ring.

Read more about Brooks's book and check out an excerpt from Black Men Can't Shoot.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
Posted by SXH at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A posting on the New Yorker's Book Bench blog last Friday highlights an excerpt from an essay on the life and work of maverick gay poetic icon Thom Gunn that appears in this month's issue of Poetry magazine. The excerpt—taken from the essay "Thom Gunn's New Jerusalem" written by poet Tom Sleigh, and reprinted in its entirety in At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn—offers a candid look at how the various eccentricities and excesses of the poet's life were mirrored in the style and content of the his work. Even as the poet's life demonstrated that, as Sleigh writes, "sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll… aren't necessarily incompatible with personal loyalty, homebodiness, and domestic stability," so too did Gunn's work demonstrate that formal poetry could successfully include new speech rhythms and open forms and that experimental styles could still maintain technical and intellectual rigor. The excerpt from Sleigh's essay, which you can also read online at the Poetry Foundation website, does an excellent job of making both these points while offering a bit of Gunn's poetry mixed in as well. But for a complete critical study of Gunn's oeuvre pick up a copy of At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn, or find out more about these related books:

The Selected Poems of Fulke Greville—edited with an introduction by Thom Gunn, the book is as revealing about Gunn himself, and the reading of earlier English verse in the 1960s, as it is about Greville's own poetic achievement.

Breakfast with Thom Gunn—Randall Mann's newest book of poems invokes Gunn's spirit as the author grapples with dilemmas of the gay self embroiled in—and aroused by—a glittering, unforgiving subculture.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
Posted by TXM at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The revelation that top executives at companies like AIG — after receiving billions in federal "bailout" money—were given generous bonuses, even as millions of low and middle income Americans were losing their jobs, tends to cast public debate about wage and income disparities in the U.S. in black and white. In the light of much of the media coverage of the current economic crisis, it is easy to see America as a nation split into two opposing groups: uncompromising supporters of unfettered free markets and advocates for government solutions to economic problems. But in their new book Class War?: What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality Benjamin I. Page and Lawrence R. Jacobs draw on nearly a century's worth of accumulated polling data to demonstrate that American's views about class are really much more complex and nuanced than commonly thought.

In a recent interview on Minnesota Public Radio's midmorning broadcast Jacobs explains that their data reveals a surprising unity in opinion amongst American's at varying income levels and in both major political parties. According to Jacobs, the majority of Americans in fact embrace a type of conservative egalitarianism — a philosophy that prizes individualism and self-reliance as well as public intervention to help Americans pursue these ideals on a level playing field.

Listen in on the discussion at the Minnesota Public Radio website or find out more about the book on our website, which includes downloadable PDFs containing the survey data files referenced in the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
Posted by TXM at 11:28 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)

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.

Continue reading "Beware contagious historical amnesia" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
Posted by SXH at 09:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Continue reading "Geoffrey Stone on Souter's Resignation" »

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

The New Yorker's books blog yesterday inaugurated "a regular feature in which academics explain their work." First up? Lawrence Rothfield, author of the new The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum.

In addition to explaining the many factors that led to looting of the Iraq Museum—and the "even more disastrous" pillaging of thousands of Mesopotamian sites—Rothfield discusses the research that allowed him to identify those causes.

The interview includes Rothfield's revealing descriptions of the the most memorable interview he conducted in researching the topic, and the the most interesting fact he uncovered that didn't make it into the book.

And, for a taste of the research that did make it into the book, this excerpt is a good place to start.

(Also, see this recent review of the book by Chicago Tribune cultural critic Julia Keller.)

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
Posted by MM at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In April of 2003, in the wake of a violent counter-insurgency, thousands of priceless relics from ancient Mesopotamian civilization were stolen from Iraq's National Museum in Baghdad. Despite the presence of an American tank unit, the pillaging went unchecked, and more than 15,000 artifacts—some of the oldest evidence of human culture—disappeared into the shadowy worldwide market in illicit antiquities. Since then, the looting and vandalism of the world's cultural heritage in Iraq saw an increase as gangs continued to loot artifacts that had previously been unexcavated, and though on February 23, 2009 the museum was reopened by Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, many of its artifacts have yet to be restored. Recently Lawrence Rothfield, author of The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum, joined the Chronicle of Higher Education's David Glenn to discuss the reasons for the failure to protect Iraq's cultural heritage and what might be done to prevent it in the future. From the Chronicle:

Q. Why did the United States do such a bad job of protecting the museum in 2003?

Before the war, nobody except archaeologists was worried about civilians looting the archaeological sites and the museum. And that includes the Iraqi exiles who were advising the State Department's Future of Iraq Project, which was supposed to develop plans for the postwar period. They set up working groups on all sectors of society — but they forgot about culture.

Q. But would it have made a difference if the Future of Iraq Project had paid attention to culture?

No, it wouldn't have made any difference at all, given that the military threw all of their plans in the garbage can anyway.

Now, the military itself was very interested in doing its job in terms of protecting cultural sites and museums. But under international law, its job is defined as not destroying or looting cultural sites itself — not as preventing civilians from destroying sites.

So before the war, they reached out to archaeologists, and they did a perfect job of identifying sites to put on a no-strike list. None of those sites was destroyed in active combat operations.

Unfortunately, they ignored warnings from the same archaeologists they were working with that the museums and sites might be looted by Iraqis. The Pentagon should have known about that issue. Nine museums were looted after the 1991 Gulf War. The military did not learn its lesson from that experience.

Read the rest of the interview on the Chronicle website or on the author's blog, The Punching Bag. Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The White House recently announced that John Q. Easton, the executive director of the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago, will be nominated by President Barack Obama to a six-year term as Director of the Institute of Education Sciences. From the CCSR's press release:

The Institute of Education Sciences is the nation's engine for educational research, evaluation, assessment and statistics — instrumental to scholars, education policy makers and practitioners.

As Director of IES, Easton will oversee four major national centers, a staff of about 200 and partnerships with institutions nationwide. The Institute funds hundreds of research studies on ways to improve academic achievement, conducts large-scale evaluations of federal education programs and reports a wide array of statistics on the condition of education, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Throughout his career, Easton has directed rigorous projects aimed at providing the best evidence about what it takes to spark meaningful policy debate and sustained change in urban schools.

And this fall, some of that evidence will be published in Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago, authored by Easton and his colleagues at CCSR. A groundbreaking study that analyzes a cross section of elementary schools in Chicago to pinpoint the key factors influencing school improvement and accelerated student learning, the book demonstrates Easton's unsurpassed knowledge and insight into urban education and the American educational system.

Find out more about Easton's nomination at the CCSR website or navigate to the press's website to find out more about the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
Posted by TXM at 01:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In 1926 a new magazine graced Chicago newsstands. With its pages filled with witty cartoons, profiles of local personalities, and a whole range of incisive articles, The Chicagoan was a hit, on par with its east coast counterpart The New Yorker, which it was clearly an attempt to emulate. Yet while the New Yorker would grow to achieve a national readership, after only nine years The Chicagoan was defunct and forgotten—that is, until its serendipitous re-discovery in the stacks of the Regenstein Library by University of Chicago Professor of History Neil Harris. Now, Harris has brought the magazine back into the spotlight with The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age—a collection of covers, cartoons, editorials, reviews, and features from the magazine.

Although the book overflows with a variety of historic material from one of the most fascinating eras in the city's history, perhaps the most interest has been generated by its lavish reproductions of the magazine's Art Deco covers and illustrations. We've received more than a few requests for poster-sized prints of the book's art, and recently the Chicago Art Deco Society Magazine even ran a feature article—written by one of the book's contributor's, Teri Edelstein—that focuses on the magazine from the perspective of Art Deco design. In her article Edelstein writes:

The Art Deco style permeated the entire magazine, not only for obvious subjects. Football players, dandies, golfers, and bathing beauties all succumbed to the colorful, abstracting, geometricizing treatments of Arthur Hugh Ruddy in a series of covers. The smoke from the cigarette of a blasé flapper bifurcates a black sky in Nightscape of September 24, 1927, by William Cotant, as she blankly regards a wall of buildings from the Blackstone Hotel to the tower of Montgomery Ward which stretch in orange and yellow cubes. Inflected by Parisian style, the angular Chicagoans of Mervin Gunderson vainly try to retain their hats as the wind even blows over a traffic signal in Boul.Mich from March 10, 1928.

You can check out a gallery of covers and illustrations that includes a few of those Edelstein cites on our website, as well as download these sample pages in PDF (7.0Mb), or read an interview with the author.

And no, we don't currently have any posters for sale, but it sounds like a great idea for any savvy Art Deco entrepreneurs out there!

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Chicago
Posted by TXM at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading "The origins of Apocryphal Lorca" »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology
Posted by TXM at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

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

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

We have a preview of the results.

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

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

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

Continue reading "Outlook for Humanities and Writing Even More Depressing in a Recession" »

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

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

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Chicago
Posted by TXM at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

Check out the archived video online on the WTTW website.

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

Scientists have long counseled against interpreting animal behavior in terms of human emotions, warning that such anthropomorphizing limits our ability to understand animals as they really are. But in a recent opinion piece for Boulder, Colorado's Daily Camera, Marc Bekoff, author of the forthcoming Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, cites numerous examples of animal behavior that he claims would be quite difficult to explain otherwise. Bekoff's article begins:

Do animals have a sense of morality? Do they know right from wrong? In our forthcoming book, Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, philosopher Jessica Pierce and I argue that the answer to both of these questions is a resounding "yes." "Ought" and "should" regarding what's right and what's wrong play important roles in the social interactions of animals, just as they do in ours. …

Consider the following scenarios. A teenage female elephant nursing an injured leg is knocked over by a rambunctious hormone-laden teenage male. An older female sees this happen, chases the male away, and goes back to the younger female and touches her sore leg with her trunk.

Eleven elephants rescue a group of captive antelope in KwaZula-Natal; the matriarch elephant undoes all of the latches on the gates of the enclosure with her trunk and lets the gate swing open so the antelope can escape.

A rat in a cage refuses to push a lever for food when it sees that another rat receives an electric shock as a result. A male Diana monkey who learned to insert a token into a slot to obtain food helps a female who can't get the hang of the trick, inserting the token for her and allowing her to eat the food reward.…

Animals are incredibly adept social actors: they form intricate networks of relationships and live by rules of conduct that maintain social balance, or what we call social homeostasis. Humans should be proud of their citizenship in the animal kingdom. We're not the sole occupants of the moral arena.

Read the rest of the article on the Daily Camera website.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology | Philosophy
Posted by TXM at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chris Otter, author of The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910 is today's guest on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed. On the program Otter joins host Laurie Taylor and Lynda Nead, Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London, to discuss the political and social changes brought about in 19th century Britain by the use of gas lighting. Tune in at the Thinking Allowed website after the live broadcast, or find out more about Otter's book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Literature | Politics and Current Events | Psychology | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In his post yesterday on the arts blog, The Arts Fuse, Bill Marx links to a recent interview he conducted with novelist and poet Ha Jin for Public Radio International's World Books podcast. In the interview, Marx engages Jin in a discussion on the topic of the author's most recent book, The Writer as Migrant.

Marx writes:

The Writer as Migrant looks at the different ways writers have dealt with geographic displacement, from Joseph Conrad and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to V. S. Naipaul. In our conversation, Jin talks about the personal discoveries he made while writing the book, as well as his belief that history is best understood through fiction.

Navigate to the website of PRI's The World to listen and navigate to the press's website to find out more about the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature
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Author Neil Harris, joined Eight Forty-Eight host Richard Steele on this morning's program to discuss how he stumbled upon several issues of the Chicagoan deep in the stacks at the University of Chicago's Regenstein Library and his resurrection of the forgotten 1920's publication in his new coffee table book, The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age.

Listen in on the conversation on the website for Chicago Public Radio's Eight Forty-Eight.

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

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Chicago | History
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Jan R. Van Meter, author of Tippecanoe and Tyler Too: Famous Slogans and Catchphrases in American History, made an appearance earlier today on KCUR public radio's Up to Date with Steve Kraske to discuss his new book and some of the fascinating stories it contains about the various slogans and catch phrases that have helped define American public life. Archived audio of the show will be available on the KCUR website after the show.

And If you're in Kansas City this evening you can catch more of Van Meter this evening at 6:30pm at the Kansas City Public Library, Central Location. Navigate to our author events page or to the Kansas City Public Library website for more info.

Also, read a web feature on contemporary slogans that we'll remember and listen to another audio interview with Van Meter for the Chicago Audio Works podcast.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Politics and Current Events
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The Modern Language Association held its annual meeting in San Francisco December 28 through 30, and its theme, "The Way We Teach Now," was selected by MLA president Gerald Graff, whose classic Professing Literature the Press re-published in 2007 as a 20th anniversary edition. Teaching, as both a concept and an occupation, was a central concern of the convention; for those seeking faculty positions in the humanities, job prospects were bleak: according to the Los Angeles Times, search committees often received upwards of two hundred applications for each vacant position, and many positions were canceled due to funding cuts. But outside the interview rooms, talk of teaching was more intellectual. Among the several conference sessions devoted to the subject, one of the liveliest featured a talk by Marjorie Perloff, "Why Teach Literature Anyway?" Perloff answers the question not, as her fans might expect, by reference to poetic language (the subject of her Wittgenstein's Ladder) or the Futurists (see her The Futurist Moment), but with a compelling close reading of Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father. Professor Perloff kindly granted us permission to reprint her comments here; we hope her take on teaching is instructive, pardon the pun.

The title our convener, Jean-Paul Riquelme chose for this session says it all. Not "how to teach literature," but why. Not "why teach literary criticism or literary theory or literary history" but "teach literature," a phrase that compounds subject matter and discipline, rather as if economics were called money, mathematics were called numbers, or history were called the human past. As for "anyway," defined in the OED, as (#1) "In any manner, to any degree or extent, in any way however imperfect," or, in its more usual current usage (#3), as the adverb conjunction, "however the case may be, in any case," anyway in this context implies impatience, even exasperation: why attend this lecture anyway when you can read it online? Have you ever heard anyone say, "Why teach biochemistry anyway?" or "Why teach constitutional law anyway?"

Continue reading "The Audacity of Literary Studies" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
Posted by SXH at 02:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
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In honor of the publication this month of Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed, author Donald S. Lopez Jr. distills his book into this handy guide.

Six Things You May Not Know about Buddhism and Science

1. Although the statement is widely attributed to him, Albert Einstein never said, "The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs, it would be Buddhism." Einstein appears to have occasionally made passing references to the Buddha in conversation. Yet something compelled someone to concoct this statement and attribute it to Einstein, the Buddha of the Modern Age. And since the time when Einstein didn't say this, intimations of deep connections between Buddhism and science have continued, right up until today.

2. Claims for (and against) the compatibility of Buddhism and science originated in the encounter between Buddhists and Christian missionaries to Asia. One of the first such encounters occurred in 1552, when the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier criticized the Japanese for not knowing that the sun orbits the earth.

3. The traditional Buddhist cosmography describes Mount Meru, a vast mountain located to the north of our continent. It was on the summit of this mountain that the Buddha set forth his system of metaphysics. In a debate with a Methodist minister in 1873, a Sri Lankan monk argued that such a mountain does exist, despite the fact that it does not appear on European maps. His proof? Compasses always point north.

4. Although hailed in Victorian Europe for its rejection of the Indian caste system and its championing of the spiritual potential of all social classes, Buddhism also played a role in the science of race during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1914, the Sinhalese Buddhist Anagarika Dharmapala described the Buddha as "the great Aryan Savior," while explaining that "the life of the Nazarene Jew was not of cosmic usefulness." In 1937, the Chinese Buddhist monk Taixu wrote a letter to Adolf Hitler, recommending Buddhism as the ideal religion for the Aryan race.

5. In 1938, the Tibetan intellectual Gendun Chopel wrote a newspaper article explaining to his compatriots that the world is round, rather than flat, chiding his fellow Tibetans for being the last Buddhists to deny the planet's true shape. He explained that the Buddha himself knew that the world is round but withheld this fact from his disciples because they would not have believed it.

6. Some neuroscientists have made wide-ranging claims for the benefits of Buddhist meditation. Two of the problems faced by such studies are the meaning of "meditation" in this context and the extent to which it is "Buddhist." Another is that the predicted benefits of meditation in laboratory studies (including weight loss, lowering blood pressure, lowering cholesterol, and reducing substance abuse) hardly correspond to the traditional goals of Buddhist meditation: liberation from suffering and rebirth for all beings in the universe.

For more from Donald S. Lopez Jr., visit our page dedicated to his books.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
Posted by SXH at 01:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Jan Van Meter was recently interviewed on CSPAN's BookTV on the topic of his new book Tippecanoe and Tyler Too: Famous Slogans and Catchphrases in American History—a fascinating historical analysis of various catchphrases and slogans, from FDR's "speak softly and carry a big stick," to King's "I have a dream," that have become an indelible part of American public culture. In the interview Van Meter addresses not only the slogans and catchphrases of the past, but also those of the present with Barak Obama's campaign mantra "Yes we can" topping his list. Watch the interview online at the CSPAN website or catch the rebroadcasts on BookTV, Saturday, November 29, at 2:00 PM; Sunday, November 30, at 4:00 AM; and Sunday, November 30, at 3:00 PM.

Also read a web feature on contemporary slogans that we'll remember and listen to another interview with Van Meter for the Chicago Audio Works podcast.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mark C. Taylor on the economic crisis:

Now we can see that the economy is a confidence game. With markets spinning out of control and liquidity frozen, analysts and commentators repeat again and again that the problem is that investors have lost confidence. What they don't adequately stress is that this loss of confidence is fully justified.

In the past several decades, financial markets have become a sophisticated confidence game, and the people in the markets are latter-day versions of Herman Melville's wily character in The Confidence-Man, duping passengers floating down the nation's great artery, the Mississippi River, on the paddle-steamer Fidele. (Melville's novel, appropriately, takes place on April Fool's Day.)

What makes today's crisis of confidence unique is its unprecedented scale, and the threat it poses to the current form of capitalism. In previous forms, industrial and consumer capitalism, people made money by buying and selling labor and material objects. In the modern era of finance capitalism, wealth is created by circulating paper with marks, backed by other symbols and still more symbols behind them, in a regression that is limitless as long as confidence in symbols endures.

This crisis of confidence goes beyond economics. The financial meltdown is a symptom of a profound crisis in our sense of reality, which is endemic to contemporary society and culture.

Continue reading "The economy is a confidence game" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
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Ashley Gilbertson, veteran NYT photographer and author of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War, was featured last Thursday along with first-time Iraq correspondent Campbell Robertson in a videocast for the Times Baghdad Bureau blog. In the video—illustrated with a selection of Gilbertson's Baghdad photographs—the pair discuss the radical changes that have taken place in the city since the beginning of the conflict, noting a decrease in overall violence, the conversion of onetime insurgents into peace keepers, and, perhaps most conspicuously, the relative absence of U. S. troops patrolling the streets.

But while America seems to have been at least marginally successful in transforming the once horrendous conditions in Iraq's capital, the war has also had a transformative effect on America, evidenced by the profound impacts it has had on the lives of all those who have been witness to its violence. For example, Gilbertson himself, who initially supported the war is now adamantly against it, as stated in this recent clip of the author speaking about the war and its often tragic effects on the lives of its veterans—a topic that Gilbertson says is the focus of a new project.

Also see this website for Gilbertson's book featuring another video interview with the author.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 09:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Phillip Adams, host of the Australian news radio show Late Night Live, recently conducted an interview with poet and novelist Ha Jin, a Chinese ex-pat who struggled through his country's Cultural Revolution as an uneducated soldier in the People's Liberation Army to eventually become one of the United States' most admired writers of world literature. Jin has authored numerous semi-fictional books about China and Chinese culture in the English language including his most famous Waiting and War Trash.

In the interview, he discusses his hard fought journey to literary stardom and the new place of literature in a rapidly globalizing world—topics that also take center stage in his most recent book The Writer as Migrant, a book that places his own life as a literary exile alongside those of other migrant writers from Nabokov to Naipaul.

Listen to the archived audio of the interview on the Late Night Live website.

Or, find out more about The Writer as Migrant.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature
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In her most recent book, Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica, anthropologist Gina A. Ulysse explores how a group of entrepreneurial women in the Caribbean have managed to struggle against traditional class, color, and gender codes to carve out a niche for themselves as international traders, importing and exporting goods from the Jamaican port of Kingston. But in her recent article for the Hartford Courant, Ulysse demonstrates that one, of course, needn't to look so far abroad to witness how black women in the modern world are negotiating their way beyond entrenched stereotypes and social expectations to rise to position and power. Ulysse writes:

Recently, interviewer Larry King tried his best to get a rise out of Michelle Obama. Her responses remained cool, collected and focused. She defied the angry black woman stereotype. She was forthright, intelligent, impeccably stylish and obviously happy. With these characteristics, Michelle creates discomfort in many because she raises fundamental questions about society's fixation with categories and how we understand our place within the pecking order of things.…

A versatile black female navigating different social landscapes, Michelle keeps shattering the racial component in the glass ceiling. To get where she is today, she took giant class leaps and succeeded in institutions not made in her image. She also excelled in the corporate world. That took courage and savvy.…

Michelle is warm, funny, beautiful and wholesome. Rather than denying her past—often a prerequisite of socioeconomic mobility—she hails those who paved the way for her success. And like them doesn't sweat the small stuff to keep her eyes on the prize. When she exceeds expectations, it is precisely because she is neither a caricature nor fractured. Indeed, she is something new in popular imagination—a black female as model of completeness. As she told King, another template.

Read the rest of Ulysse's article on the Hartford Courant website.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events
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Listen in as Steven Shapin, author of The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation joins host Chris Gondek on the Chicago Audio Works podcast to discuss the cultural evolution of the scientific vocation from the early twentieth-century origins of corporate research laboratories to the high-flying scientific entrepreneurship of the present. How has this shift affected public perceptions of science? And what demands does this make on the individual character of scientists? Shapin addresses these questions and more in episode three of the Chicago Audio Works podcast.

Chicago Audio Works is produced by Chris Gondek of Heron & Crane and the Invisible Hand. This and previous episodes of Chicago Audio Works are also available from iTunes and other digital media aggregators.

See all audio and video available from the University of Chicago Press.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History and Philosophy of Science
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In the second episode of the Chicago Audio Works podcast we feature an interview with Jan Van Meter, author of Tippecanoe and Tyler Too: Famous Slogans and Catchphrases in American History. Host Chris Gondek talks with Van Meter about the various slogans and catchphrases that permeate our public culture—from Theodore Roosevelt's "speak softly and carry a big stick," to the Virginia Slims marketing slogan "You've come a long way, baby"—and their profound influence on American values, beliefs, and politics.

Chicago Audio Works is produced by Chris Gondek of Heron & Crane and the Invisible Hand. This and previous episodes of Chicago Audio Works are also available from iTunes and other digital media aggregators.

See all audio and video available from the University of Chicago Press.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A few weeks ago, a piece in the New York Times Sunday Business section about Florida sugar and the environmental future of the Everglades caught our eye. We asked our resident sugar expert Gail Hollander, author of Raising Cane in the 'Glades: The Global Sugar Trade and the Transformation of Florida to respond:

Mary Williams Walsh notes with irony that one of key beneficiaries of the proposed buyout (in June, Florida Governor Charlie Crist announced a $1.7 billion buyout of the United States Sugar Corporation.) may very well prove to be the Fanjul family’s company, Florida Crystals. What the state buyout may accomplish, wittingly or not, is the economic rationalization of the regional sugar industry. The state of Florida finds it necessary to trade landholdings with the Fanjuls in order to create a contiguous parcel for the purpose of constructing a flow-way. The Fanjuls thus find themselves in the enviable position of exchanging their “colder” lands (plantations farther from Lake Okeechobee’s moderating influence) for US Sugar’s prized parcels located on the deeper soils adjacent to the lake. The oldest company in the region, United States Sugar Corporation (USSC) and its predecessor, Southern Sugar, had first dibs on the best land when they established the Florida sugar industry in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Yet the irony has deeper historical roots than recent news accounts recognize. The subtext of the narrative is that a formerly Cuban company is flourishing—perhaps unfairly—on US soil. The century-old relationship of the U.S. to the Cuban sugar industry, however, makes the story more interesting and complex. For decades prior to 1960, the Cuban industry—with substantial investment from U.S. and Spanish capitalists as well as Cuban—played the critical role of swing producer for the US, meeting vicissitudes in demand and therefore providing flexibility in an otherwise structured market. From 1934 until 1974, the US sugar market was allocated by the Secretary of Agriculture to both domestic and foreign producers, using state and country quotas, respectively. Throughout that period, U.S. sugar producers in general and Florida producers in particular clamored for larger quotas at the expense of Cuban producers.

Continue reading "Big Sugar and the Future of the Florida Everglades" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics
Posted by SXH at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In an article published this morning on the Politico website, John G. Geer, author of In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns turns a critical eye on this year's presidential campaign to offer some fascinating insights as to why the mudslinging that many argue has sullied this year's elections might not be so bad after all. Geer writes:

Americans do not like negative ads; as much as 80 percent of the public indicates distaste for them. Yet people do not think it's negative for candidates to attack on issues. It's the personal attacks they equate with negative ads. Most commentators include issue attacks as negative, such as McCain's strongly disputed claim that Obama supports sex education for kindergartners. To complicate matters further, most attack ads in presidential campaigns are not personal, they're about issues. That fact rarely gets discussed by the news media. Instead, the news media focus on one or two outrageous ads and fail to look at the broader patterns.

Along these same lines, consider the favorable aspects of negative ads that are rarely mentioned: They are more specific and documented than are positive ads. And they're more likely to be about the important issues facing the nation.

Why is there such a disconnect between perception and reality? My answer will not be popular in some quarters, but the real source of negativity in presidential campaigns is not attack ads themselves but the coverage of them by the news media.

Read the full article on the Politico website.

Also see this special feature, John Geer's Attack Ad Hall of Fame.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the last week, as the Wall Street bailout plan was developed and debated, Americans have struggled to visualize what $700 billion dollars could buy. A popular illustration of that buying power is the now-often-repeated 2200 McDonalds apple pies for every man, woman, and child in the country. This need to tie the intangible and incomprehensible to something more pedestrian and quotidian calls into question what exactly money represents. In order to expound on this "problematic of representation," we called on Mary Poovey, author of Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain to discuss what history and the humanities can teach us about our modern credit crisis:

In Genres of the Credit Economy, I developed a historical argument to show that, in periods in which what I call the problematic of representation became visible, economic, political, and epistemological uncertainty often ensued. When I developed that argument, I never expected to live through such an experience myself. But here we are, in the United States of America, in 2008, facing exactly this kind of uncertainty. With the investment firms of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers now extinct, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs having morphed into (or been purchased by) more ordinary banks, and Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae (the cornerstones of the U.S. mortgage market) in the hands of the U.S. government, we are all now being confronted with the insecurity of the investment models that fueled the economic growth of the nation for the last two decades. We are being forced out of our complacent state of ignorance about how arcane financial instruments work by a plummeting stock market and diminishing retirement accounts. We are being subjected to the frightening televised spectacle of a president, members of Congress, and presidential candidates who manifestly do not know how to handle all this, and whose failure to understand credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations suddenly matters. For me, the only consolation capable of countering the uncertainty we are now experiencing is the knowledge that versions of this have happened before, and national economies have recovered. The recovery has often been painful. But the lessons of history so often are.

Continue reading "Genres of the Credit Crisis" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
Posted by SXH at 02:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last Wednesday, September 10, after 14 years of preparation, scientists at the CERN laboratory switched on the Large Hadron Collider and the world didn't end. To untangle what exactly the LHC is and how it might (or might not) destroy the world, we turned to black hole and dark matter experts David Garfinkle and Richard Garfinkle, author-brothers of the forthcoming Three Steps to the Universe: From the Sun to Black Holes to the Mystery of Dark Matter. They urged calm and offered the following soothing words of wisdom:

Strange as it may sound, scientists are not actually willing to risk destroying the Earth just for a few experimental results. Most of them are fond of the place and would prefer that it still be there after they, as the monster movies say, throw the switch. Yet, somehow, many reports about the startup of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN have included the dire warning that it may create a micro black hole which would eat up the entire world.

In medicine such a risk would be described as contra-indicated. The general reaction in the scientific community if such were really possible would be What are you, crazy?

It's frustrating that this has been a main focus of reporting. To be fair, a decent number of reports have treated this idea with humor, but they have done so without talking in depth about the real scientific purpose of the LHC. As a result, much of what anyone has heard is either, Black hole, we're doomed or Black hole, we're doomed. Yeah, right.

Continue reading "No, the Swiss will not destroy the world" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Mathematics and Physics
Posted by SXH at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A story on sex addiction in the Style section of Sunday's New York Times caught our eye this weekend, so we asked our resident expert on obsessive behaviors, Lennard Davis, author of the forthcoming Obsession: A History, to weigh in on the phenomenon:

Actor David Duchovny, who plays a sex-addicted writer in the TV series Californication, just checked himself into Meadows Rehab in Arizona for being, well, sex addicted in real life. This story is more than just one about life imitating art, it is also about sex addiction imitating drug and alcohol addiction.

While there are a growing number of people who believe you can be addicted to sex—just as you can be addicted to shopping or to work—many psychological practitioners would disagree. Indeed, sex addiction is not currently in the DSM, the standard diagnostic manual for psychiatric disorders. Addiction, according to that guide, has to be an addiction to a substance. If you're an alcoholic, it's booze; if you're a drug addict, it's heroin or Percodans. But if you're addicted to sex, what exactly is the substance?

Continue reading "Sex addiction: The truth is out there" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Commentary | Psychology
Posted by SXH at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

William Davies King, author of Collections of Nothing was interviewed yesterday by Deborah Harper for the Psychjourney website podcast. King's book is an illuminating mediation on the author's own habit of amassing the most unusual collections—everything from cereal boxes to nondescript loops of wire—things which many people might regard as junk, but which King finds that by collecting, he can imbue with meaning, even value.

In the podcast, Harper engages King in a discussion about his book, his collections, and his fascinating insights on the impulse to accumulate. Navigate to the Psychjourney website to listen.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature
Posted by TXM at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The arts and culture website Trickhouse.com is currently featuring an online exhibition of the collages of William Davies King, professor of theater at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of the recently released Collections of Nothing. King's book is a profound meditation on his habit of gathering miscellany—what many would consider junk. But through the careful organization and presentation of his collections, King demonstrates how even the most humble objects are able to accrue new, individualized value. And King's collages, accompanied by an insightful curatorial essay by David Banash, are a particularly interesting example of this phenomenon. Navigate to www.trickhouse.org and click on door #3 to visit the online exhibition.

Also read an excerpt and an essay by the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature
Posted by TXM at 01:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Author William Davies King was interviewed yesterday on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show about the "art of amassing detritus"—a topic thoroughly and insightfully explored in King's newest book, Collections of Nothing. Listen to the archived audio from the program on the WNYC website.

Also, read an excerpt and an essay by the author.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
Posted by TXM at 02:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Michael F. Robinson, author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture has written an interesting piece for the Space Review that draws on his cultural analysis of polar exploration in the nineteenth century to comment on NASA's recent space exploration initiatives. In the article, Robinson notes that sensationalism was often used to justify early polar expeditions rather than their scientific value, and argues that NASA's recent plans to send astronauts to Mars might be an analogous situation. Robinson writes:

A manned mission to Mars, if it happens, will be a dazzling event guaranteed to keep us glued to our televisions. But symbolism alone cannot carry the US space program forward. One hundred years ago, Americans faced the same dilemma on the Arctic frontier. In their relentless pursuit of the North Pole, explorers had abandoned science. After Robert Peary claimed the discovery of the North Pole in 1909, American scientists breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, scientific exploration of the Arctic could begin in earnest. Franz Boas, professor of anthropology at Columbia University, expressed the mood of scientists then, but he could have been expressing the opinion of many scientists now. "We must not forget that the explorer is not expected merely to travel from one point to another, but that we must expect him also to see and to observe things worth seeing."

Read the article on the Space Review website.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History and Philosophy of Science | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
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Jonathan Kern, author of Sound Reporting: The NPR Guide to Audio Journalism and Production, was a guest last Sunday on NPR's Weekend Edition. On the show Kern joined host Liane Hansen in an interesting discussion about broadcast journalism and the phenomenon of the "driveway moment," which the NPR website explains as "a term used to describe a radio story that keeps you in your car after you've reached your destination, just to listen."

You can find a podcast of the show at the NPR website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Film and Media
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Seth Lerer, author of Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter was a featured guest yesterday on WGN radio's Extension 720 with Milt Rosenberg. On the show, Lerer engages Rosenberg in a fascinating discussion of the history of children's literature and its indelible influence on young readers. Listen to the archived podcast on the WGN website.

Lerer's book was also mentioned in an article in yesterday's New Yorker about NYC librarian and critic Anne Carol Moore who, during the early part of the twentieth century, played an important, yet controversial role in bringing children's literature into the mainstream of American literary culture. Read the article online at the New Yorker website.

Also read an excerpt from Lerer's book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
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The Sunday edition of NPR's All Things Considered included a segment on Anne Whiston Spirn and her book, Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field.

The NPR story begins where almost every mention of Lange begins, with the photograph titled "Migrant Mother." Spirn explains why Lange took that photograph and similar images that showed the destitute during the 1930s. Spirn also discusses her favorite Lange photograph, "Migratory Children Living in 'Rambler's Park,'" in which a roll of linoleum figures prominently.

We have an illustrated excerpt from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History
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William O. Beeman, whose book The Great Satan vs. the Mad Mullahs: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other was reprinted last year by the press, teamed up with nuclear scientist Dr. Behrad Nakhai to write an interesting commentary on Iran's nuclear activity posted yesterday to the New American Media website. In the article Beeman argues against rumors in the media about Iran's nuclear weapons capabilities, saying that while "Iran is engaged in peaceful nuclear research" it is still far from being able to produce a nuclear weapon, and suggests that claims to the contrary have been fabricated to bolster Israeli official's "requests for the Bush administration's blessing to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities."

Read the full article on the New American Media website or find out more about Beeman's book here.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events | Religion
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The July 6 Boston Globe published an enlightening interview with Steven Shapin, Harvard professor of the History of Science and author of the forthcoming book The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation. In the interview Shapin discusses his book and its critique of conventional notions about the various motivations and incentives that drive scientific production. Instead, Shapin proposes a much more nuanced picture of of the scientific career and character. From the preface to the interview:

Testifying before congress in 1950, MIT president Karl Compton declared, of American scientists: "I don't know of any other group that has less interest in monetary gain."

That view of scientists might draw a few wry smiles around Kendall Square today. But it also represents a lingering 20th-century ideal: The scientist as a virtuous academic who pursues knowledge as an end in itself. In contrast to that ideal stands the wealth-seeking industrial scientist, a specialist who merely applies science to the problem of putting new products on the market.…

That's the wrong way to think about the whole scientific enterprise, says Steven Shapin.… Scientists, Shapin thinks, do not merely choose between virtue and riches, instead worrying more about where they can pursue their intellectual goals, and thus open up new scientific frontiers.

Thinking otherwise means we fail to understand the very people whose inventions in medicine or computer science are, Shapin writes, "making the worlds to come."

Read the interview on the Boston.com website.

Also see these other books by Steven Shapin previously published by the press:

A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England
The Scientific Revolution

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics | Education | History and Philosophy of Science | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 02:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Seth Lerer was featured on the Wednesday July 2 edition of WBUR's On Point with guest host Jane Clayson to discuss his new book Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter. More than just a historical account of the iconic works of children's literature, as Clayson notes, Lerer's book can be read as a history of childhood itself as children are indelibly molded by the tales they hear and read—stories they will one day share with their own sons and daughters.

Listen to the podcast of their fascinating discussion about children's literature and what it tells us about growing up on the WBUR website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Literature
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The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article today about the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria discussing, among other topics, a fascinating talk given by Professor Alan Liu—one of the leading theorists focusing on the intersection between digital technology and the humanities, and the author of several books on the subject including, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information and the forthcoming Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database. Writing for the Chronicle William Pannapacker takes note of Liu's talk for its examination of the increasing use of digital information resources like Wikipedia by students, and the problem of its limitations in terms of scholarly authority. Pannapacker writes:

Since it's clear enough that Wikipedia—and other sites based on reader-generated content—are too large and accessible to police themselves effectively, Liu argues that the responsibility for that policing should be adopted by the already existing structures of authority, including academe in particular.

I have to agree: We can't get our students into the libraries; we hardly go there ourselves anymore, as much as we might love them. The time has just about arrived when information that is not online does not exist for most people.…

Of course, Liu's presentation raises more questions than it answers: There are, after all, so many complications about the means by which credibility can be rated. We all know the peer-review system is not perfect.

But Liu's vision of a more public, collaborative, and service-oriented role for professors has considerable appeal to me, and it charts some of the steps that must now be taken into this new world of online knowledge production.

Read the full article online at the Chronicle website, then navigate to the website for the University of Victoria's Digital Humanities Institute to view the archived podcast of Liu's talk.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Film and Media | History and Philosophy of Science | Literature
Posted by TXM at 01:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the second half of the program Irene Virag, garden columnist at Newsday and a writer for several gardening magazines, joined the discussion.

You may also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature | Philosophy
Posted by DB at 02:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mary Pattillo, author of Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City was interviewed yesterday on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show to discuss the gentrification of urban African American communities.

Pattillo's book is an eye-opening sociological exploration of Chicago's North Kenwood–Oakland neighborhood and the community's embattled process of revitalization, where the often conflicting interests of the black middle-class, their less-fortunate neighbors, and the established centers of white economic and political power frame a dramatic tale of the transformation of black communities in the twenty-first century.

In the interview Pattillo touches on many of the issues discussed in her book and fields some interesting questions from WNYC listeners. Listen to the audio on the WNYC website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Black Studies | Chicago | History | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Derek S. Hyra, author of The New Urban Renewal: The Economic Transformation of Harlem and Bronzeville, was interviewed today on the BBC Radio 4 program Thinking Allowed. Host Laurie Taylor, on the ground in Harlem, interviewed Harlem residents and neighborhood leaders, as well as Hyra and other authors to understand both the history of Harlem and the "Second Harlem Renaissance" that is renewing and stressing the neighborhood.

Does gentrification bring upheaval or stability? Is change always good? Who are the winners and who are the losers?

The archived audio is available from the BBC.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Black Studies | Chicago | Sociology
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"Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?" asked Jack Kerouac. Erin Hogan was going on a solitary tour of the monumental land art of the American West. She says in an interview Saturday in the Salt Lake Tribune that she re-read Kerouac and "definitely felt like I was involving myself in the Great American Road saga."

Reporter Julie Checkoway wonders: why visit land art?

Land art is this arena you walk into, and it changes your sense of space and time. The people who made it were trying to set up a different experience, giving us something. I wanted to experience that, a surprising built environment. But really, the book is mostly a road book. Yeah, I meditate on Michael Fried and the theatricality of landscape, but I'd like to think that someone who didn't study art history like I did would encounter something very beautiful in Spiral Jetty.

Update June 11: Erin Hogan is also interviewed today on ArtInfo.

We have an excerpt from the Spiral Jetty section of the book as well as our own interview with Hogan.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
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• Erin Hogan, author of Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West was interviewed by host Sam Weller on WBEZ Chicago's Hello Beautiful! last Sunday to discuss her experiences traveling to remote locations in the American west to visit the monumental land art of the 1970s and 1980s—works like Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels, and Walter De Maria's Lightning Field. You can catch the archived audio on the Chicago Public Radio website. The press also features our own interview with Hogan and an excerpt from her book on our website.

• Richard Cahan, coauthor with Mark Jacobs of Chicago under Glass: Early Photographs from the Chicago Daily News, appeared on the May 28 edition of the ABC World News Webcast. The book includes more than 250 images taken from the archives of the Chicago Daily News dating from 1901-1930, providing a rare glimpse at life in Chicago during one of the most exciting and tumultuous periods in its history. Online video featuring some of the photographs along with some interesting commentary from Cahan is available on the ABC News website.

• Charles Hersch, author of Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans, appeared on Cleveland's public radio station WCPN on the show Around Noon on May 28. Listen to Hersch reading an excerpt over some classic New Orleans jazz and fielding some interesting questions from WCPN's online music director Bobby Jackson on the WCPN website.

• Finally, the Oceana blog has a short blurb about a new exhibit opening at the World Trade Organization, The Deep: Life on the Deep Sea Floor, curated by French journalist and author Claire Nouvian. Nouvian authored, The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss, a fascinating photographic exploration of the deep sea. The exhibit at the WTO, and another which recently closed at the Natural History Museum of Paris, feature many of the same fascinating images featured in the book. You can still check out a fun website made for the exhibit at the Natural History Museum of Paris here, or see our website for the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
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Reflecting on an appropriate topic for Memorial Day, journalist, historian, and best selling author Rick Atkinson was interviewed on NPR's Weekend Edition last Saturday to discuss the forthcoming re-publication of the U.S. Army's Instructions for American Servicemen in France during World War II—a guidebook originally issued by the War Department in 1944 to give Allied soldiers invading France "a general idea of the country concerned, to serve as a guide to behavior in relation to the civil population, and to contain a suitable, concise vocabulary." In the interview Atkinson—who wrote the new foreword to the UCP edition—joins host Scott Simon to discuss some of the fascinating insights into the U.S. campaign in France the book has to offer.

Listen to archived audio of the interview on the NPR website.

Also read Atkinson's introduction to the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History
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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.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Philosophy | Sociology
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Marilyn Hacker, award winning poet and translator of over twelve books of contemporary French poetry including Guy Goffette's recent Charlestown Blues: Selected Poems, a Bilingual Edition, has posted a piece on the art of translation to the recently launched Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux poetry blog this week.

In her post she discusses her intimate engagement with the works she translates and her constant struggle to remain true to the original. Hacker writes: "The translator must be faithful to the text's linguistic valence, its connotations, to its music as well as its meaning." And perhaps nowhere else does the translator develop this synergy between sound and sense than in Georgetown Blues where her selection of Geoffette's work all center around the notion of "blue"—the color and the emotion, as well as that quintessentially American style of musical performance. From Charlestown Blues:

Read another poem on the UCP website or see Marilyn Hacker On "The Most Engaged Form Of Reading" on the FSG poetry blog.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Poetry
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John Louis Lucaites, author of No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy has posted an apropos commentary about the Earth Day themed cover image on today's Time Magazine to his No Caption Needed blog. Detailing a photoshopped version of Joe Rosenthal's iconic photograph of WWII troops on Iwo Jima's Mt. Suribachi raising a giant conifer in place of the flag, Lucaites makes the image an occasion to deliver some interesting commentary on the history of the original photograph's appropriation and the particularly fetishistic way that the Time Magazine editors have chosen to use it today. Lucaites writes:

By most accounts Joe Rosenthal's photograph of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima's Mt. Suribachi is the most reproduced photograph of all time—ever!…

Such reproductions have occurred not just in traditional print media, but on stamps (twice), commemorative plates, woodcuts, silk screens, coins, key chains, cigarette lighters, matchbook covers, beer steins, lunchboxes, hats, t-shirts, ties, calendars, comic books, credit cards, trading cards, post cards, and human skin, and in advertisements for everything from car insurance to condoms and strip joints.…

All of this is to say that on the face of things there is nothing particularly noteworthy about Time's appropriation of the image this week to frame and promote its "green" agenda in a special issue on the "War on Global Warming," … but my interest here is in mapping out how the particular appropriation of the original photograph coaches an attitude that seems to rely on tired and clichéd conceptions of American exceptionalism. Put simply, it is not just an appeal to be "green" (although it is that), but it also functions to translate the meaning of being "green" into a symbolic register that both defines environmentalism in terms of U.S. nationalism—"green is the new red, white, and blue"—and, more, makes something of an imperialistic fetish out of it.

Read the rest of Lucaites piece on the No Caption Needed blog, or read an excerpt from Lucaite's book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Film and Media | History | Politics and Current Events
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The University of Chicago News Office has posted a podcast featuring Charles Lipson, author of Succeeding as an International Student in the United States and Canada speaking about his new book. In the podcast, Lipson addresses many of the hot button topics for foreign students trying to adapt to life in the United States and Canada, both in and beyond the classroom. From the norms of classroom participation to obtaining health insurance, Lipson covers what students need to know to have a successful and enjoyable adventure as an international student.

To find out more listen to the podcast or see this special website for the book featuring reviews, info on institutional use, and an excerpt from the book, "Passports and Visas: A Quick Overview."

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Education | Reference and Writing
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Nicole P. Marwell, author of Bargaining for Brooklyn: Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City was recently interviewed on Brian Berger's blog Who Walk In Brooklyn. Berger—co-editor of New York Calling published by Reaktion Books and distributed by UCP—engages Marwell in a discussion of the author's experiences in Brooklyn's Williamsburg and Bushwick neighborhoods studying the social impact of the community based organizations she writes about in her book. From the preface to the interview:

Nicole gets deep into one of the most important & least glamorous aspects of understanding a city of the haves and the ain't-got-shit, the mysterious—to outsiders—world of "community based orgnanizations" (CBOs). In Brooklyn, the best known of these groups is probably ACORN, and even their notoriety is due more to Bertha Lewis' failed devil's bargain with Bruce Ratner on the so-called "Atlantic Yards" project than any of their other, less disputable initiatives.

Not all CBOs are alike, however, and because of this, Nicole spent years working with eight different groups in Williamsburg & Bushwick. Some were secular, some church-based. Both partook of a much less flashy but essential ground-level politics, a very far cry from that of the highly paid lobbyists whom an already-wealthy real estate racket uses to advance its profits at the least cost to themselves. It's been said, from La Lechonera de Coqui in Castle Hill to Angel's Lounge under the elevated BMT tracks on Broadway, that CBOs are born to lose. This may or may not be true; Berger & Marwell have their opinions but I suggest that we also remember the inspirational words of Bennie (Warren Oates) in Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia: "Nobody loses all the time." We shall see, Saltamonte, we shall see.

Read the interview on Berger's Who Walk in Brooklyn blog.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Sociology
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Newton Minow, the current vice chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates and author of Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future was interviewed today on Chicago Public Radio's Eight Forty-Eight. From his time as assistant counsel to Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson when Stevenson first proposed the idea of the debates in 1960, to his stints as cochair of the presidential debates in 1976 and 1980, Minow has played an integral role in transforming them into the major media events we know today. In the interview Minow delivers some fascinating commentary on the history of the debates and addresses some of the criticism leveled against them. You can find the archived audio online at the Chicago Public Radio website.

Also see memorable moments from presidential debates and read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events
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The Shelf, a literary blog associated with the Canadian magazine The Walrus has just posted an interview with Elise Partridge discussing her new book of poems, Chameleon Hours. Partridge, who splits her time between Vancouver, BC, and Washington State, talks with Jared Bland about the reception of her work in the U.S. and, alternatively, how she sees it fitting into a Canadian literary tradition:

Much of your work has been published in the States, including in the New Yorker, and this new book is being simultaneously issued by the University of Chicago Press. In other words, you have more southern exposure than many Canadian poets. Does this effect the way in which you see your work fitting into a Canadian poetic tradition? Not to force you into any immodest comparisons, but what strain of poetic thought do you see your work coming out of?

I think writers inevitably belong in some way to their native countries and languages, but are also often hybrids of their own making, based on their sensibilities, influences, and so on. As an English-speaking North American (a dual citizen of Canada and the United States) I've been influenced by all kinds of literature in English—British, American, Irish, Australian, Canadian—and by literature translated into English, especially Polish, Russian, German, Latin American, and Chinese.…

And as to what Canadian tradition I might fit into—if I can place myself among living poets here, I do feel a bond with many, some older than I am and perhaps even more in the rising generations. I would certainly like to see Canadian poetry get more "southern exposure." I think there is a great deal that could both inspire and invigorate American poetry, and many more readers in the US who might simply enjoy and learn from Canadian poetry.

Read the rest of the interview on The Shelf.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Poetry
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Newton N. Minow and Craig L. LeMay, authors of Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future were interviewed recently on The Biz, the blog of TVGuide editor Stephen Battaglio. In the interview Battaglio engages the authors in a discussion of the presidential debates as "one of the biggest TV attractions of the year" and their ever increasing ability to draw record ratings for broadcast television networks:

TVGuide.com: Your book points out how both Presidents Johnson and Nixon didn't want to debate their challengers…. Now it seems that it would be impossible for a presidential candidate to avoid it.
Minow: Young people who have grown up with presidential debates expect them. I don't think any candidate can escape it.
Lamay: Absolutely. Remember in 1992 when President George H.W. Bush [who balked at debating Bill Clinton and Ross Perot] was followed around on the campaign trail by the guy in the chicken suit? If you avoided a debate today, you'd have millions of virtual chickens [all over the Internet].

TVGuide.com: The first 2004 debate between President Bush and Sen. John Kerry set a record with 62.5 million viewers. Will a meeting between Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. Hillary Clinton top that?
Minow: I think it will, absolutely. It will be higher and the debates will be repeated and distributed in all kinds of new ways on the Internet. Every American will have a chance to see them.

You can read the full interview on The Biz.

Also see these memorable moments from presidential debates and read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Donald S. Lopez Jr., author of several books on Tibetan Buddhism including The Madman's Middle Way: Reflections on Reality of the Tibetan Monk Gendun Chopel and Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West has written an interesting piece for openDemocracy on the recent turmoil in Tibet and the future of the movement for Tibetan independence. Lopez draws a parallel between Tibet's current political relationship with China, and Latvia's former relationship with the USSR. Lopez notes that since the 19th century Latvia, though culturally distinct from Russia, was repeatedly placed under communist control between brief respites of independence, only to gain what Latvians hope will be a lasting independence when the USSR collapsed in 1991. Thus Lopez writes: "Is there anything to do but wait? Latvia regained its independence with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It would seem that Tibet could only regain its independence with the collapse of the Peoples Republic of China. In Buddhism, time is measured not in centuries, but in cycles of creation, abiding, destruction, and vacuity, then creation again."

Read the full article on the openDemocracy website.

Also find out 7 Things You Didn't Know about Tibet, a web feature for Prisoners of Shangri-La.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lt. Col. John A. Nagl is a leading experts on U.S. counterinsurgency operations. Authoring and contributing to several recent books on the topic—Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife and The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual—Nagl has been instrumental in promoting an alternative to conventional counterinsurgency strategy: increasing the U.S. military's advisory role to foreign forces, and "[empowering] our partners to defend and govern their own countries." In an op-ed piece in yesterday's New York Times Nagl takes a look at the ongoing conflict in Iraq and offers his advice on how "to [successfully] shift of the combat load from American forces to the Iraqi and Afghan armies." Nagl writes:

First, United States military and civilian leadership must recognize that resources to support this major shift in strategy have to be re-routed from our regular forces. Left to themselves, the military services will inevitably neglect advisory efforts to sustain conventional forces.…

Second, shifting the burden from our forces to Iraqi and Afghan troops will call for close coordination between our civilian leadership and commanders in the field. Even as American combat forces draw down in favor of adviser-supported local armies, American combat support in the form of firepower, intelligence and logistics will continue to be crucial…

Third, the United States' success depends on the willingness of the Iraqi and Afghan armies to fight with tenacity and skill. Soldiers of both countries are good fighters when well led. But we'll let them down if we don't send more and larger teams to embed with locals.

Finally, the American people must continue to be patient. In the 20th century, the average counterinsurgency campaign took nine years. The campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to run longer, and other commitments loom in this protracted struggle against Al Qaeda and its imitators. Bitter experience has long recognized that only local armies can ultimately prevail in counterinsurgency operations.

Read the rest of the article on the NYT website.

Also read the preface from Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife or Nagl's foreword to the Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The University of Chicago Press, in partnership with the City of Chicago's Mayor's Office of Special Events, announces the launch of a new lecture series—Great Chicago Places and Spaces: Conversations Within Communities. With a goal of fostering dialogue between Chicago citizens and Chicago writers, Conversations within Communities brings award-winning authors Mary Pattillo, Ronne Hartfield, Sally A. Kitt Chappell, Louise W. Knight and Stuart Dybek to the public square. Each author will be featured in free noontime lectures in the Millennium Room at the Chicago Cultural Center, followed by free evening readings at community sites throughout Chicago. All evening readings begin at 6:30 P.M.

For more information call 312.744.3315 or navigate to the city of Chicago's Great Chicago Places and Spaces website.

Read the press release.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
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Eddie Glaude, professor of religion and African American studies at Princeton, and author of the recent In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America was interviewed recently on the Fox News program Hannity and Colmes. In the interview Glaude takes on the conservative half of the Hannity and Colmes duo to debate religion, blackness, and the church in the context of Obama and the recent Jeremiah Wright controversy.

Also read an excerpt from Glaude's book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
Posted by TXM at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday's New York Times ran an interesting op-ed piece by author and sociologist Monica Prasad on recent proposals to impose a tax on industrial emissions of carbon dioxide in an effort to combat global warming and other negative impacts of greenhouse gasses. In the article Prasad—author of the 2005 book The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States—uses her superior knowledge of European economic policy to demonstrate how one European country has made the carbon tax work. Prasad writes:

The very thought of new tax revenue has a way of changing the priorities of the most hard-headed politicians—even Genghis Khan learned to be peaceful, the story goes, when he saw how much more rewarding it was to tax peasants than to kill them. But if we want lower emissions, the goal of a carbon tax is to prompt producers to change their behavior, not to allow them to continue polluting while handing over cash to the government.

How do you get them to change? First, you prevent policy makers from turning the tax into a cash cow. Carbon tax discussions always seem to devolve into gleeful suggestions for ways to spend the revenue. Reduce the income tax? Give the money to low-income consumers? Use it to pay for health care? Everyone seems to forget that the amount of revenue is directly tied to the amount of pollution that is still going on.

Denmark avoids the temptation to maximize the tax revenue by giving the proceeds back to industry, earmarking much of it to subsidize environmental innovation. Danish firms are pushed away from carbon and pulled into environmental innovation, and the country's economy isn't put at a competitive disadvantage. So this is lesson No. 1 from Denmark.

Read the rest of the article online at the NYT website.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to the New York Times, yesterday evening marked a significant checkpoint in the War in Iraq when a roadside bomb exploded killing four more U.S. troops, bringing the total American death toll in Iraq to 4000. With no end in sight and casualties steadily rising, media outlets around the globe have used the 4,000th death as an opportunity to look back on the war and the many soldiers who have lost their lives there since 2003. But providing perhaps one of the most vivid and personal of these retrospectives, is NYT photojournalist and author Ashley Gilbertson's recent Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War. Documenting the conflict from the initial invasion, to Iraq's first national elections, Gilbertson's book tells candidly of his own experience photographing the war and of the lives of the soldiers fighting it.

To preview some of the images from the book navigate to the author's portfolio on the NYT website.

To hear more about the Gilbertson's experience in Iraq, you can navigate to the Press's special website for the book which features and exclusive half-hour interview with the author, or see this archived video from CSPAN's Book TV of Gilbertson's talk earlier this month at a Borders Books & Music in Vienna, Virginia.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
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Podularity.com, a literary blog based in the UK, is running an interesting podcast of an interview with author Martin Kemp on the topic of his recent book The Human Animal in Western Art and Science. Interviewer George Miller engages Kemp in a discussion of the links between humans and animals embedded in Western culture to explore the question; where is the line between animal and human? And, does the line even exist at all? Navigate to Podularity.com to listen.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by TXM at 03:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Nicholas J. G. Winter is publishing his book, Dangerous Frames: How Ideas about Race and Gender Shape Public Opinion at the perfect time, just as these issues are getting their most concrete expression in the political sphere. We asked him to reflect on the the Democratic presidential race in light of the ideas he explores in his book.

The historic presence in the Democratic primary race of both the first woman and the first African American with serious shots at a major party nomination has understandably brought lots of media attention to the roles of gender and race in Americans’ political thinking and voting. Much of this coverage obscures rather than clarifies those roles.

On the one hand, commentators ask whether black and female voters support “one of their own.” Do black voters support Obama? Do women support Clinton?

On the other hand, others ask some version of the question “Are Americans more racist or more sexist?” Is gender more fundamental to American social structure, or is racism more centrally embedded in American politics. More concretely, will white male swing voters be more disinclined to vote for a woman or an African American man in the general election?

Continue reading "Race, Gender, and Politics: Dangerous Frames" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Black Studies | Politics and Current Events
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An interview with Jan Golinsky author of British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment was posted yesterday to Benjamin Cohen and David Ng's science blog, the World's Fair. The interview begins with an interesting synopsis of the book and its unique contribution to both cultural history and the history of science. From the World's Fair:

WORLD'S FAIR: What do we have here? When you sent in the prospectus to Chicago, what did you tell them this would be about?

JAN GOLINSKI: The book explores beliefs about weather and climate in eighteenth-century Britain and its colonies. I argue that these beliefs reflect some of the important social and cultural changes of the period. People began to study the weather in a way that we recognize as more "scientific," but traditional attitudes also survived, even what we might call "superstitions." The tensions between scientific and traditional approaches seemed to me symptomatic of the age, and to some extent of modern attitudes to the natural environment in general.

WF: You're a premier historian of science, respected, influential, articulate, good-humored, don't worry, I'm going somewhere with this…namely, what does a book about the weather contribute to our understanding of the history of science?

JG: I think of it as a combination of history of science with cultural history. I didn't set out to trace the origins and growth of a science of weather, but to place scientific practices like record-keeping and the use of instruments in their cultural context. So, I suppose it contributes to the way we can understand science as a set of practices and beliefs that has developed in specific historical settings.

Read the rest of the interview on the World's Fair blog.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | History and Philosophy of Science
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In an op-ed published in last Sunday's Washington Post Lt. Colonel John A. Nagl, author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam and contributor to the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, draws on his hands-on knowledge of counterinsurgency operations to deliver an insightful analysis of current U.S. strategy in the Middle East. While praising the success of last year's "surge" Nagl warns that it may still be a bit "too soon to take a victory lap." Nagl writes:

The "surge" of five brigades and the extension of Army combat tours in Iraq from 12 to 15 months has strained the Army to the breaking point. Neither the Army nor the Marine Corps has a reserve of ground troops to handle other crises. Meanwhile, the Taliban is regaining strength in Afghanistan and the lawless border regions of Pakistan,… and the foreseeable consequences of a hasty U.S. withdrawal from Iraq… could easily reverse last year's gains and provide a new home for terrorism in the Middle East.

The best short-term solution is rapidly expanding the Iraqi and Afghan security forces to hold towns cleared by U.S. forces. Local forces, stiffened by foreign advisers, have historically been the keys to success in counterinsurgency warfare. As such, I've been among the serving officers and veterans who've urged the U.S. Army to create a standing Adviser Corps.

But even greatly expanding and institutionalizing the role of advisers cannot win the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Insurgencies are ultimately inspired by ideas, and defeating the Iraqi insurgency will require a counter-narrative—backed up by robust economic development, a solid and committed government in Baghdad, and providing the Iraqi people with basic services such as water, electricity and (above all) security. As such, the single most important step the United States could take toward victory is re-creating an information agency to discredit our enemies' narratives and amplify those of our allies.

Read more Nagl in his new preface to Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, or see his foreword to the The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, “The Evolution and Importance of Army/Marine Corps Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency”

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events
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Last Sunday David Shulman author of Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine was interviewed on the CBC's Sunday Edition. Focusing on Shulman's experiences as a member of Ta'ayush—a peace group working to end violence in the West Bank—Shulman recounts the extreme injustices suffered by Israelis and Palestinians as they struggle to survive in an environment of constant violence and upheaval.

You can listen to the complete interview online at the "Sunday Edition" web page. Also read an excerpt from Shulman's book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Politics and Current Events
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Last Wednesday David Grazian, author of On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife was featured on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed with host Laurie Taylor. In the show Taylor and Grazian engage in a fascinating discussion about the various schemes and scams that the nightlife industry employs in order to separate customers from their money, as well as the scams perpetuated by the clientele themselves in their relentless search for sex, self-esteem, and status.

Listen to archived audio from the show on the BBC Radio 4 website.

Also, read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Psychology | Sociology
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Last Wednesday the Drug Law Blog authored by San Francisco attorney Alex Coolman ran an interesting interview with Doris Marie Provine, author of Unequal under Law: Race in the War on Drugs. The interview focuses on the topic of her book, exploring how issues of race have influenced American anti-drug efforts. Coolman prefaces the interview with some positive words about Provine's fascinating new book:

Professor Doris Marie Provine of Arizona State University's School of Justice & Social Inquiry is the author of a really interesting and challenging new book called Unequal Under Law: Race in the War on Drugs. I keep coming back to this book as a reference point for talking about some of the thorniest issues related to the intersection of race with American action—and inaction—on drug policy. These are issues that are so big and obvious that they're almost hard to recognize as issues. Unequal Under Law, however, does a really nice job of emphasizing that we are, in fact, making racial choices in drug policy—both consciously and unconsciously—that profoundly affect the lives of our fellow citizens.

Read the interview on the Drug Law Blog.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Law | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John G. Geer, author of In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaign, argues that negative ads are positive—they focus on important political issues and give voters critical information about differences between candidates. Attack ads do not degrade but enrich the democratic process. See his pick of the genre in John Geer’s Attack Ad Hall of Fame.

Inevitably, Geer himself was swiftboated on Youtube.

Comments on Geer's Hall of Fame selections are welcome.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
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Sarah Sewall, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and author of the introduction to The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual was featured on the Charlie rose show in late December of last year to discuss her part in the development of the manual and the new approach to U. S. counterinsurgency tactics it has helped to develop. You can watch an archive of the video below or by navigating directly to the Charlie Rose website.

Read an excerpt from the Manual, "Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency Operations", or the foreword by John A. Nagl.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
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Primatologists Dorothy Cheney and Richard Seyfarth, authors of the new book Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind were featured last week on NPR's Fresh Air to discuss their years of research in Botswana's Okavango Delta observing baboons and their social world. The results of their studies, available in their book, reveal the surprising complexities of baboon society and the fascinating intelligence that underlies it—and indeed may even give us some valuable insights into our own social behaviors. You can listen to archived audio of the interview online at the NPR website or read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology | Philosophy
Posted by TXM at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ashley Gilbertson, author of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War recently joined fellow photographer Nina Berman on WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show to discuss their recent projects documenting the lives of American soldiers in Iraq and how they manage to cope with their experiences after they come home. As Lopate reveals in his interview, both books offer a candid look into the horrors of modern warfare soldiers are forced to endure and the toll it takes on them both physically and emotionally. Navigate to the WNYC website to listen to archived audio from the show as well as view two photo galleries featuring a small sampling of each photographer's work.

Gilbertson was also recently interviewed by Sandip Roy for NPR's UpFront radio to discuss Gilbertson's personal experiences as a photographer in Iraq. You can find a transcription as well as archived audio of their conversation online at the UpFront website.

Finally, don't miss the UCP's own Whiskey Tango Foxtrot website where you can read more about Gilbertson's book, place an order, and view our own video interview with Gilbertson.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week we mentioned that Barry B. LePatner, author of Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets: How to Fix America's Trillion-Dollar Construction Industry was going to be featured on Chris Gondek's business management podcast, The Invisible Hand. Well, while the podcast officially airs on Mr. Gondek's site this Saturday, he was kind enough to give us a link to the full audio from his talk with LePatner a couple of days in advance.

Listen to The Invisible Hand Podcast Episode 61 (mp3) as LePatner and Gondek engage in a fascinating discussion about how America's fractured construction industry is costing the nation billions of dollars, and what LePatner suggests can be done to fix it.

Also check out LePatner's special website for the book with excerpts and other resources.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics | Law
Posted by TXM at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This essay by Barry B. LePatner, author of Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets: How to Fix America's Trillion-Dollar Construction Industry, is reprinted from the August 12 edition of the Boston Globe.

In April, a gasoline tanker overturned beneath a key stretch of highway in Oakland, Calif., erupting into flames that melted the steel of an overpass and brought a section of road crashing to the ground.

Repairs were projected to cost $5.2 million and snarl Bay Area traffic for months. The state solicited bids for the work, offering a set of bonuses for finishing early, and got a surprising offer: One company said it would take the job for $867,000.

The firm, C.C. Myers, set to work around the clock, working closely with suppliers and fabricators across the country. The repairs took just 18 days, earning the company a $5 million bonus, giving commuters a smooth drive home far sooner than anyone expected—and sending waves of surprise through the industry.

"I haven't encountered anything like this," one union official told the San Francisco Chronicle as he watched the project unfold.

American construction is the industry that time forgot. Over the last century, the nation's other great industries—oil, automobiles, even computers—have undergone waves of profound modernization, breeding competitive, innovative companies where on-time, under-budget projects are nothing unusual. But the construction industry, which at $1.2 trillion in annual revenues constitutes 5 percent of the nation's economic output, remains a bastion of waste and inefficiency.

Protected by a tradition of contracts that insulate them from the costs of their own mistakes, the nation's thousands of construction companies have resisted innovation and now survive as the last large mom-and-pop industry, where each project brings together a new assortment of subcontractors, and nobody—not the lead contractor, not the architect, not the person who is paying for it all—can say in advance how much a particular project will really cost.

This has always been deeply frustrating for anyone wrestling with the industry's unpredictable costs and timelines, but it is now becoming an urgent problem on a national scale. The deadly and dramatic collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis—and the growing tally of troubled roads and bridges—has brought home just how much building must be done to make our infrastructure safe. In Massachusetts alone, the repair tab could be more than $17 billion, according to a recent Pioneer Institute study. Another national study found that by 2030, America faces some $25 trillion in new construction just to build houses, schools, and offices for our growing population. If the construction industry is not reformed, this will lead to waste on an almost unimaginable scale.

Construction touches every part of the economy. It creates the buildings where we live and work, our hospitals and schools, and the roads we use to reach them. Done right, it transforms our cities and towns for the better—but more often, its inefficiency inflates home prices and bogs down corporate growth, fattens our tax bills and delays civic improvements.

Making construction faster, less expensive, and more reliable will free up time and energy for society's higher priorities. Saving even 5 percent on a school project would translate into millions of dollars to spend on books and teacher salaries, or simply return to the taxpayer. It would make home ownership more accessible and make companies more nimble and competitive. And even more broadly, a genuine transformation would give birth to a new American export, a construction industry that can lead the world.

Continue reading "The industry that time forgot" »

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics
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Author Richard Halpern was featured last Friday on NPR's On the Media to discuss the myth of American innocence, and the various cultural forces that contribute to its production. Halpern recently spoke at a New York University symposium on the subject—“Shocked! Shocked!! Just How Many Times Can a Country Lose Its Innocence?”—and is the author of a book on a man he claims is one of the most prolific manufacturers of American naïeveté, Norman Rockwell. In Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence, Halpern argues that Rockwell's art, even as it actively works to create a sentimental American style of innocence, in fact, frequently teems with perverse acts of voyeurism and desire. Listen in as Halpern debunks Rockwell and the American innocence industry online at the NPR website.

Read an excerpt from Halpern's book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Sociology
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Lt. Col. John A. Nagl will be a featured guest this weekend on Book TV's After Words. Nagl will join Sean Naylor, senior writer for the Army Times, to discuss The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Nagl was on the team of writers who created the new Counterinsurgency Manual.

Our edition of the Manual includes Nagl's foreword as well as an introduction by Sarah Sewall, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. We also have online “Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency Operations,” an excerpt from the first chapter.

You can catch Nagl's discussion of the book on C-SPAN2 this Saturday at 9 pm, Sunday at 6 pm and 9 pm, and again Monday at 12 am. (Times are Eastern.) Check the Book TV website for more details.

Nagl is also the author of one of the most influential books on counterinsurgency, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam; we have his preface to the book available.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The online news and media magazine AlterNet has just published a fascinating interview with Kevin Rozario, author of The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America. In the interview Onnesha Roychoudhuri talks with Rozario about everything from the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 to 9/11 to explore some of the ways Americans have responded to such disasters—responses which Rozario argues have played a vital role in shaping the nation that we know today. From the interview:

OR: You argue a broader point in the book that our economy may require this kind of obliteration in order to stay afloat.

KR: Capitalism itself is a system of destruction and creation. You have to keep destroying the old in order to clear space for then new. Otherwise, it achieves stasis, and if it achieves stasis, it dies. It depends on constant expansion just to keep going. But again, to be very clear about this, not all Americans think this is a blessing. This is a process that can be extremely lucrative for businesses, but it's a process that can be extremely destructive for laborers. The benefits of disaster are very unevenly portioned and they go to those with power and influence rather than ordinary Americans.

Read the rest of the interview on the AlterNet website or read an excerpt from Rozario's book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History
Posted by TXM at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With the recent bridge collapse in Minneapolis many have turned their attention to the problems posed by America's aging infrastructure. A potential sinkhole for millions of taxpayer's dollars, the cost of fixing roads, bridges, and other public works sometimes acts to prevent essential repairs from being made, and may result in tragedy. But according to Barry B. LePatner, author of the forthcoming Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets: How to Fix America's Trillion-Dollar Construction Industry, providing a safe and well-maintained infrastructure does not have to mean wasting the taxpayer's money. In an article last Sunday for the Boston Globe LePatner argues that by consolidating a fragmented industry into larger "national construction powerhouses" the business of construction could become much more efficient:

The modern construction business hasn't changed significantly since the first steel-frame skyscrapers began to rise in the early 1900s. Early tall buildings such as the Tribune Tower in Chicago and the Woolworth Building in New York grew too complex to remain under the purview of a single 'master builder,' the architect who knew and supervised every detail of the project. Instead, each required an assembly of specialists—electricians, plumbers, heating contractors, excavators. Dozens, then hundreds of companies arose to handle those systems, each a local family-run shop that drove its truck to one project at a time. Today, in 2007, that's still basically how the business works.…

This fragmentation has enormous costs. It guarantees that any building site will be an assembly of strangers, with a high risk of miscommunication. It traps the industry in conservative practices, ensuring that any new learning will spread slowly, if at all. Splintered into so many firms, the construction industry has never developed the economies of scale, financial cushions, or comfort with risk that would allow it to enter a new phase and truly modernize.

But, LePatner argues, "under a regime of incentives and real accountability, construction companies would begin to transform. The industry would spawn a few winners that, as they prospered, would acquire the capacity to research new techniques, retain skilled employees through down periods, and buy up dozens or even hundreds of small specialized players."

To read the rest of LePatner's article navigate to the Boston Globe website. To find out more about the book, (due out this October), navigate to http://www.brokenbuildings.com/.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics
Posted by TXM at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Would you rather chair your university department or manage an amateur softball team? Edwin Amenta, NYU professor of sociology and author of Professor Baseball: Searching for Redemption and the Perfect Lineup on the Softball Diamonds of Central Park, was pretty sure he'd enjoy the softball team a lot more. In an interesting piece of commentary for the careers section of the Chronicle of Higher Education Amenta relates how he was passed over for departmental chair but then was given the opportunity to spend the summer as manager of the Performing Arts Softball League. But as it turns out Amenta got a little more than he bargained for. Amenta writes:

Near the end of the season, I realized that not only was managing not that much fun, it was not greatly different from being a department chair.

Both jobs provide an undercurrent of excitement, with little crises to attend to all the time. Sometimes there are important general managerial decisions to make—like deciding which players or faculty members to recruit.

But the rest of the work is extensive and thankless. It takes great effort to get teammates and colleagues to do things they should volunteer for, like practicing or serving on committees. Teammates want always to play their favorite positions the way colleagues like to teach their favorite classes.

To improve the team or curriculum requires making a few people angry, while the majority who benefit will barely notice. Winning or success in hiring new faculty members—all that is to be expected and brings little praise. Losing or failing in hiring brings blame.

Navigate to the Chronicle's website to read the rest of Amenta's article or read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lieutenant Col. John A. Nagl was featured yesterday on NPR's All Things Considered to discuss the recent re-publication of the U. S. Army's Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World War II. Nagl—who wrote the forward to the new edition—joins host Michele Norris to discuss the valuable lessons to be found in this small advice manual issued to soldiers serving in Iraq more than 60 years ago; advice which Nagl argues is still very much relevant today. In his interview, Nagl laments the fact that the army had not heeded some of this advice before the current counterinsurgency operations began in 2003, and encourages the adoption of some of the book's suggestions in the context of the United States' current efforts to win Iraqi hearts and minds.

Navigate to the NPR website to listen to archived audio of the show as well as read an illustrated excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mary Pattillo, author of the recently published Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City, penned a fascinating op-ed piece for Sunday's Chicago Tribune on the rapidly changing face of Chicago's black urban communities. Pattillo's article begins:

"No more blacks." That was the forecast of a resident of the Oakland community when asked about the future of her South Side neighborhood.

"No more blacks?" I responded, worried in no small part because my research is about black gentrification.

"[A] couple of blacks" would be left, the woman then allowed. "They got money.

This simple prediction is rich with meaning. For one thing, it helps establish the players in the widespread upscaling of Chicago: The little man. The middleman. And then, The Man.

The prediction also lays out what's at stake, not just in Oakland and North Kenwood on the South Side, but in various Chicago neighborhoods. In the process of "building, breaking, rebuilding" the City of the Big Shoulders, as Chicago's poet Carl Sandburg so eloquently put it, who is going to keep the little man from being left behind? Are Chicago's shoulders big enough to serve, include and celebrate everyone?

Pattillo's article seems to leave this question open ended, but makes a point that it is the rising black middle class who must ultimately shoulder the responsibility of brokering between the lower and upper classes if the future of some of the more underprivileged members of Chicago's black urban communities is to look any brighter.

Also, social historian Arnold Hirsch (Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940-1960) reviewed Pattillo's new book in the July 14 edition of the Tribune. The online version is still up on their website.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Black Studies | Chicago | History
Posted by TXM at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lt. Colonel John A. Nagl, author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam and contributor to the recently published U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, was the subject of an article in Tuesday's Manhattan Mercury discussing the counterinsurgency in Iraq. The article focuses on Nagl's strategies for winning the conflict, which he claims requires a fundamentally different approach than the "conventional large scale World War II search and destroy tactics" that the U.S. military has traditionally employed. Mark Scott writes for the Mercury:

Instead [the U.S. Army] must focus on building up the government, economy and security forces of the host nation. This is essentially the approach being used by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan with the military transition team plan, which embeds American soldiers with Iraqi and Afghan forces to train them to ultimately take over the defense of their country.

"These are long, hard, slow wars," Nagl said. "Ultimate success in Iraq very much depends on the political growth and development of the Iraqi government, which is still enormously young and faces some very severe challenges."

Recently, Nagl has been pushing a proposal for the Army to create a permanent "Army Advisor Corps," that would embed such "transition teams" full-time with Iraqi national security forces. (His proposal has recently been taken up by U.S. Senator John McCain.) Could Nagl have the key to improving what many believe to be a deteriorating situation in Iraq? To find out more get the rest of the article on the Mercury's website.

Also see Nagl's new preface to Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, his foreword to the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, and an excerpt from the Manual, "Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency."

Last Saturday Nagl was a guest speaker at Chicago's Pritzker Military Library. Head on over to their website for an audio podcast of his talk.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The News Hour with Jim Lehrer ran a fascinating piece yesterday featuring author and deep sea explorer Claire Nouvian on her new book, The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss. Nouvian joins Spencer Michels along with a panel of researchers to discuss the many new species scientists are currently discovering in the deep ocean, and the new techniques that make their discoveries possible. On the News Hour website you can listen to a RealAudio podcast of the discussion, archived video of the show, or view a images of some of the fascinating creatures featured in Nouvian's book.

Combining the latest scientific discoveries with astonishing color imagery, The Deep takes readers on a voyage into the darkest realms of the ocean. Revealing nature's oddest and most mesmerizing creatures in crystalline detail, The Deep features more than two hundred color photographs of terrifying sea monsters, living fossils, and ethereal bioluminescent creatures, some photographed here for the very first time. Accompanying these breathtaking photographs are contributions from some of the world's most respected researchers that examine the biology of deep-sea organisms, the ecology of deep-sea habitats, and the history of deep-sea exploration.

See our special website for The Deep which includes a gallery of images and an interview with the author.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology
Posted by TXM at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Prolific literary blogger Marshall Zeringue recently devoted several postings to two fresh voices in Chicago's Phoenix Poets Series: Peter Campion, author of Other People, and Peg Boyers, author of the recently published Honey with Tobacco.

On his blog Writers Read Zeringue invites Campion to discuss some of the books he's currently reading, offering a great chance to listen in on the literary insights of a pro. Zeringue also takes the time to link to Campion's work in Slate magazine where Campion has been reprinted as well as made audio recordings of several of his poems from Other People.

Zeringue also features Peg Boyers discussing her recent book, Honey with Tobacco, on The Page 69 Test—another blog authored and administrated by Zeringue in which he asks an author to quote and briefly discuss whatever text can be found on page 69 of their book (though he does bend the rules a bit for Boyers, whose book weighs in at a short but sweet 64 pages).

You can find out more about Other People and Honey with Tobacco as well as read more excerpts on the UCP website.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Poetry
Posted by TXM at 01:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An essay by David Shulman, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine.

Israeli peace activists don’t expect to be popular. Although by all accounts most Israelis do want peace and would accept any reasonable compromise, they normally react with bitter scorn and hatred for anyone who seems to cross the lines. Organizations like mine, Ta’ayush—“Jewish-Arab Partnership,” one of the most effective of the peace groups operating at the grassroots level in the occupied territories—are viewed as naïve at best, treasonous at worst. Last month’s events in Gaza confirmed everyone’s worst prejudices. “You want to make peace with them?” my neighbors asked me in supercilious tones. “Can’t you see that they’re all violent thugs? Why are you helping them?”

Continue reading "On the West Bank, It's Still Cynicism as Usual" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Robert Hariman and Louis Lucaites, authors of No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy have recently started their own blog at www.nocaptionneeded.com. As a companion resource to their new book, the blog is "dedicated to discussion of the role that photojournalism and other visual practices play in a vital democratic society." Bringing the author's ideas to bear on current issues and new media, almost in real-time, we definitely recommend you check it out.

In No Caption Needed, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites provide the definitive study of the iconic photograph as a dynamic form of public art. Their critical analyses of nine individual icons explore the photographs themselves and their subsequent circulation through an astonishing array of media, including stamps, posters, billboards, editorial cartoons, TV shows, Web pages, tattoos, and more. As these iconic images are reproduced and refashioned by governments, commercial advertisers, journalists, grassroots advocates, bloggers, and artists, their alterations throw key features of political experience into sharp relief. Iconic images are revealed as models of visual eloquence, signposts for collective memory, means of persuasion across the political spectrum, and a crucial resource for critical reflection.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Film and Media | History | Politics and Current Events
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All this week the LA Times will print a running debate between Robert Bruegmann and Gloria Ohland on the topic of urban sprawl and the future of America's urban landscapes. Drawing from his groundbreaking book, Sprawl: A Compact History, Bruegmann overturns many of the common assumptions about America's rapidly expanding suburbs, arguing for the sometimes overlooked benefits of this popular form of urban development. On the other side of the fence, Gloria Ohland, vice president for communications for Reconnecting America—a non-profit organization that promotes best practices in transit-oriented development—responds with an interesting counter argument for higher-density development centered around public transportation. Check out the LA Times website for the first installment of this fascinating debate.

Read an excerpt from Sprawl: a Compact History.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics
Posted by TXM at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Robert Seyfarth, co-author of Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind was recently featured on WHYY Philadelphia 's Radio Times with host Marty Moss-Coane. According to the Radio Times website, Seyfarth draws from his new book to discuss how "baboons relate to each other and understand their place in the world as well as what can we learn from them about human behavior." Archived audio of the radio show is available via the WHYY Radio Times website.

In Baboon Metaphysics Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert Seyfarth aim to fully comprehend the intelligence that underlies baboon's social organization. How do baboons actually conceive of the world and their place in it? Using innovative field experiments, the authors test whether baboons understand kinship relations, how they make use of vocal communication, and how they manage the stress and dangers of life in the wild. They learn that for baboons, just as for humans, family and friends hold the key to mitigating the ill effects of grief, stress, and anxiety.

Written with a scientist's precision and a nature-lover's eye, Baboon Metaphysics gives us an unprecedented and compelling glimpse into the mind of another species.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology
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The authors of When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina recently posted an interesting summary of their book on Jay Rosen's blog Press Think. In the posting W. Lance Bennett, Regina Lawrence, and Steven Livingston outlined their critique of the post 9/11 news media, in which they explore its inability to "resist the ever-present spin of those in power"—focusing especially on the Bush administration's various bids to sell the war in Iraq to the American public.

When the Press Fails was also featured in a recent editorial piece by Don Wycliff in the Chicago Tribune. Wycliff writes:

According to the authors of a new book on press coverage of the Bush administration, the president and his people actually have enjoyed until relatively recently the acquiescence of a timid, compliant, intimidated press.

The Iraq war, which has become possibly the gravest foreign policy blunder in U.S. history, is the most disastrous result of that acquiescence, say political scientists W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence and Steven Livingston in When the Press Fails.

The review continues:

[The authors] are indisputably right about the news media's dereliction in covering the administration's campaign to take the nation to war against Iraq. Professional skepticism in too many cases gave way to an uncritical, post-9/11 patriotism. (Check out the newspaper editorials that appeared in the days just after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's much-anticipated speech at the UN Security Council. Seldom is heard a discouraging word.)

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
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Monday's San Francisco Chronicle featured an interview with author Jeffrey Kripal on the topic of his new book Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. In his interview with the Chronicle's David Ian Miller, Kripal discusses "Esalen's contributions to the evolution of religion, the state of spirituality today, and the importance of maintaining many paths to enlightenment."

Situated on the edge of the pacific coastline, the Esalen institute has long been a world leader in alternative and experiential education, as well as an influential player in the creation of the American counterculture. Popularized by such luminary figures as Aldus Huxley, Ram Das, and Ansel Adams—all of whom either lived at or visited the institute—Esalen has had a long and fascinating intellectual and spiritual legacy that continues to influence American culture to this day.

To learn more about Esalen and its legacy check out Kripal's interview on the SFGate website. We also have an excerpt from the book.

Kripal was also featured Tuesday, May 22, on KQED radio's Forum with Michael Krasney. Get the audio here.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Philosophy | Religion
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Lance Bennett, coauthor of When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina, was interviewed Monday morning on Weekday, a public affairs program from KUOW in Seattle. Bennett discusses with host Steven Scher how the news media covered pivotal events from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina—where the news media succeeded and where it failed. You can find archived audio from the program at KUOW's website.

In When the Press Fails W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston argue that reporters' dependence on official sources has disastrously thwarted coverage of dissenting voices from outside the beltway, especially in terms of recent events such as the response to 9/11, the buildup to war with Iraq, and the Abu Ghraib scandal. A sobering look at the intimate relationship between political power and the news media, When the Press Fails delivers a revealing account of the mass media's willingness to provide critical reportage when we need it most.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 03:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jeffrey Kripal has an interesting essay in the current Chronicle of Higher Education touching on some of the topics of his new book Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. Among other things, the essay examines the intellectual and spiritual roots of the Esalen Institute—the world-famous center for alternative and experiential education that is the focus of Kripal's book.

Kripal points out that the "secular mysticism" cultivated at the institute is a spiritual trend that can be traced deep in the history of American culture—back to nineteenth-century American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. According to Kripal, Emerson was a believer in a "democratic, individualized form of spirituality that is fundamentally open to present and future revelations, not just past ones"; a system of belief which the institute's founders, Michael Murphy and Richard Price, also embraced in a "secular mysticism that is deeply conversant with democracy, religious pluralism, and modern science."

The fame of Esalen, however, bloomed in the the 1960s and '70s when Esalen was made one with American popular culture, becoming more sensational than mystic:

People of all ages come from all over the world to learn, heal, explore, chant, dance, drum, massage, and meditate, and many of them eventually find themselves bathing together in outdoor, cliff-top hot tubs in full view of the sea—swimsuits optional. A parade of colorful characters have written, talked, thought, and sang their way through the Esalen story, people like Henry Miller, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Baez, Fritz Perls, Ida Rolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Terence McKenna (a modern-day shaman who advocated the use of psychotropic plants), to name just a few.

But, says Kripal, "Esalen's activist, intellectual, and metaphysical dimensions have struck me as both the most significant and, oddly, the least-known aspects of its story." As a "research laboratory" for the human potential movement, "Esalen played a catalytic role in gestalt and humanistic psychology in the early 60s, educational reform in the late 60s, the embryonic alternative-medicine movement of the early 70s, and the development of citizen diplomacy with the Soviet Union in the late 70s, 80s, and 90s." Esalen, for instance, was a sponsor of Boris Yeltsin's transformative 1989 tour of the United States. The institute has also played an active role in the environmental movement.

And the hot tubs are still there on the cliffs of Big Sur.

To learn more about this fascinating hothouse of contemporary culture read Kripal's full article online at the Chronicle 's Web site, in preparation for the full experience of Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. We also have an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Philosophy | Religion
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In the March 23rd issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, author Caitlin Zaloom has penned an interesting piece about the late Clifford Geertz, one of the world's leading cultural anthropologists, and a man she calls her intellectual "grandfather." In her article, Zaloom cites Geertz's groundbreaking studies in books such as Peddlers and Princes and Agricultural Involution as the foundation for her own new book, Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London.

Out of the Pits is a fascinating exploration of how the recent trend of online trading is effecting the culture of the marketplace. Zaloom's article states, "even though their publication preceded today's global economy by decades, Clifford Geertz's works on culture and economy can still help us understand the cultural import of the online evolution in the world's marketplace."

Here's a few links to the UCP website where you can find out more about the works of both of these groundbreaking figures in the field of anthropology:

Clifford Geertz by His Colleagues
Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia
The Religion of Java
Kinship in Bali
Peddlers and Princes

We also have an excerpt from Out of the Pits.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Chicago | Sociology
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Susan Basalla May, co-author of So What Are You Going to Do with That?: Finding Careers Outside Academia has posted an interesting FAQ for students preparing for a nonacademic career to the website of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Culled from the question and answer sessions that follow her frequent lectures, Basalla comments on a variety of topics including how to get started as a freelancer and how to explain to potential employers about unfinished dissertations. You can find the full article in the career section of the Chronicle.

A witty, accessible guide full of concrete advice for anyone contemplating the jump from scholarship to the outside world, So What Are You Going to Do with That? covers topics ranging from career counseling to interview etiquette to translating skills learned in the academy into terms an employer can understand and appreciate. Packed with examples and stories from real people who have successfully made this daunting—but potentially rewarding— transition, and written with a deep understanding of both the joys and difficulties of the academic life, this fully revised and up-to-date edition will be indispensable for any graduate student or professor who has ever glanced at her CV, flipped through the want ads, and wondered, "What if?"

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Education | Reference and Writing
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Author Caitlin Zaloom was recently featured on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed discussing her new book Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London. Host Laurie Taylor talks with Zaloom about the stock market's gradual transition from face-to-face exchanges made on the trading room floor to internet based trading and how this move into the digital realm effects the culture and business of global trade markets. You can listen to archived audio of the discussion on the BBC's Thinking Allowed website.

We also have an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Chicago | Economics | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 03:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Every day the website Poetry Daily presents at least one new work from a contemporary poet excerpted from a book, magazine, or journal currently in print, with the goal of exposing the general reader to the wonderful, but often esoteric realm of modern poetics. Last Friday two of Charles Bernstein's poems were featured on the site, including the poem "Thank You for Saying Thank You" from his most recent book Girly Man. Befitting, or perhaps belying Poetry Daily's theme of "poetry for the people" Bernstein's poem begins:

This is a totally
accessible poem.
There is nothing
in this poem
that is in any
way difficult
to understand.
All the words
are simple &
to the point.
There are no new
concepts, no
theories, no
ideas to confuse
you. This poem
has no intellectual
pretensions. It is
purely emotional.

You can check out the rest of this poem as well as Bernstein's "Didn't We" on the Poetry Daily website.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Poetry
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Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author and Princeton University professor of religious studies, was featured on the Tavis Smiley Show last weekend discussing "how his new book, In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America, offers a starting point for examining the upcoming election season through the eyes of African Americans." You can listen to archived audio from the program online at the Tavis Smiley Show website.

With In a Shade of Blue Glaude, one of our nation's rising young African American intellectuals, makes an impassioned plea for black America to address its social problems by recourse to experience and with an eye set on the promise and potential of the future, rather than the fixed ideas and categories of the past. Heady, inspirational, and brimming with practical wisdom, this timely book is a remarkable work of political commentary on a scale rarely seen today. To follow its trajectory is to learn how African Americans arrived at this critical moment in their history and to envision where they might head in the twenty-first century.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Black Studies | Philosophy | Politics and Current Events | Religion | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 03:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, author of the recent Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers, recently penned an interesting article for OpenDemocracy.org discussing Clint Eastwood's Oscar-winning film Letters from Iwo Jima. Eastwood's cinematic exploration of a pivotal battle of World War II, says Ohnuki-Tierney (and others), parallels the objective of her recent book in trying to "undo the demonization of Japanese soldiers that was propagated by the American mass media during and after the Pacific war of 1941-45." And in fact, Eastwood's film not only shares a common objective with Ohnuki-Tierney's book, but also the means of accomplishing that objective. Both the movie and the book focus on the writings of Japanese soldiers during the war as a vehicle through which to arrive at a deeper understanding of who these soldiers were. Ohnuki-Tierney writes:

Clint Eastwood's film Letters from Iwo Jima begins and ends sixty years after the end of the war it depicts. At the start, a team of Japanese investigators is searching for whatever may have been left by Japanese soldiers holed up on Iwo Jima, part of a group of Pacific islands around 1,000 kilometres south of Tokyo. The team finds a large sack buried where the soldiers had made their last headquarters. The closing scene of the film shows hundreds of letters and postcards the soldiers wrote to their families and friends but were never sent spilling out of this sack.

The letters symbolize the frail thread of humanity that these soldiers, facing imminent death and trapped in a war their country soon lost, managed to hold onto.

Likewise, Ohnuki-Tierney's own work focuses on a collection of diaries and letters by the tokkotai (kamikaze pilots) in order to confront the various myths and stereotypes surrounding these tragic figures, and seek out "the humanity behind the brutality of war." Taken in tandem, both of these new works prove to be indispensable corrections to the history of Japan and World War II. Read the preface to the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | History
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In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the death of conductor Arturo Toscanini, WFMT's Critical Thinking with Andrew Patner will feature a two part conversation with Harvey Sachs, editor of The Letters of Arturo Toscanini, which we recently published in paperback. The first show airs on February 26 at 10:00 pm central time and the second on March 5 at the same time. If you're in the Chicago area be sure to catch the show, if you're not, WFMT offers streaming audio, but you'll have to subscribe to listen.

Fifty years after his death, Arturo Toscanini is still considered one of the greatest conductors in history, and probably the most influential. His letters, expertly collected, translated, and edited in The Letters of Arturo Toscanini, will give readers a new depth of insight into his life and work. As Sachs puts it, they "reveal above all else a man whose psychological perceptions in general and self-knowledge in particular were much more acute than most people have thought likely." They are sure to enthrall anyone interested in learning more about one of the great lives of the twentieth century.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Music
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Ruth Fredman Cernea, editor of The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate, was interviewed in the February 20 edition of the Jewish Ledger, a Connecticut weekly. In her conversation with staff writer Judie Jacobson, Cernea talks about the genesis of the University of Chicago's famous Latke-Hamantash debates, some of its notable participants, and the meaning—or lack thereof—in its annual deliberations. From the interview in the Ledger:

Q: When and why did the debate get started?

A: It began more than 60 years ago as an inspired "lark" by three people at the University of Chicago—Professor Sol Tax, an anthropologist; Professor Louis Gottshalk, a historian, and Rabbi Maurice Pekarsky. They were worried about the intellectual and social climate at the university for the numerous Jewish faculty and students there. This was a time when it was not professionally advisable to advertise your ethnic background on campus, when being an objective scientist meant burying the "yid" inside. In fact, many of the faculty had been brought up in homes rich in Eastern European Jewish culture: they knew Yiddish, ate the traditional East European foods, and went to "cheder." In another world they might have become Talmudists. …

The Tax-Gottshalk-Perkarsky spur-of-the-moment idea? A shmooze in the Hillel house, with faculty arguing the merits of familiar traditional foods, just before winter break. It would be a haven in the midst of the Christmas carols on campus. Sol Tax would make latkes. Faculty would let their hair down and speak the in-group vernacular of their childhood homes, Yiddish, and students would experience these forbidding figures as approachable, whole human beings.

Q:Who are some of the people who've participated in the Latke-Hamantash Debate?

A: It's almost easier to list who has not! The book includes papers by two Nobel Prize winners, Milton Friedman and Leon Lederberg; three university presidents, former Chicago President Hanna Grey, former Princeton University President Harold Shapiro, and Barnard's current President Judith Shapiro; and key people from a wide range of academic disciplines. Considering that it takes significant effort to produce an academic paper, spoof or not, it's noteworthy that such serious scholars took the time to write and joke about their lives and their life's work.

Our online feature for the book includes the text and audio of Ted Cohen’s “Consolations of the Latke” as well as recipes for both the immortal pancake and the equally worthy pastry. With Purim about two weeks away, there's still time to learn to make hamantashen.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Education | Literature | Religion
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In the year AD 238, in the capital of the Roman Empire, the scholar Censorinus gave a present to his best friend, the noble Quintus Caerellius. The gift was this charming work, which he called The Birthday Book (De die natali liber). In its few dozen pages, Censorinus sets down everything related to the idea of birthdays. He begins simply, with the right way to sacrifice to one’s birthday spirit. By the time he has finished he has sketched a glorious vision of the universe ruled by harmony and order, where the microcosm of the child in the womb corresponds to the macrocosm of the planets.—From Holt N. Parker’s Preface to The Birthday Book by Censorinus

Part 4, "Seed and Conception"

1. Your lifetime starts on your birthday, but there are also many things before that day which pertain to the origin of humankind. It seems relevant, therefore, to say something first about the things which are themselves first in the order of nature. So I shall briefly set out some of the opinions which the ancients held about the origins of mankind.

2. The first and general question treated by the men of old who were learned in wisdom was this: Everyone agrees that individual humans are created from the seed of their parents and in succession propagate offspring, generation after generation. But some authors have maintained that they were never born from anything except human beings, and that there never had been any beginning or starting point to the human race. Others maintained that there was a time when humans did not exist and that they were allocated a particular point of origin and beginning by Nature.

3. The authorities of the first opinion, that humans have always existed, are Pythagoras of Samos, Ocellus of Lucania, and Archytas of Tarentum, all Pythagoreans; but Plato of Athens, Xenocrates, and Dicaearchus of Messenia and other philosophers of the old academy seem to have held the same opinion. Also Aristotle of Stagira, Theophrastus, and many other important Peripatetic philosophers wrote the same thing. They gave, as illustration of this fact, a puzzle which they said could never be solved: Are birds of eggs created first, since an egg cannot be created without a bird and a bird cannot be created without an egg?

Continue reading "An excerpt from The Birthday Book by Censorinus" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Classics
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David Grene (1913–2002) taught classics for many years at the University of Chicago. He was a founding member of the Committee on Social Thought and coedited The Complete Greek Tragedies. Six months of every year, though, he worked his farm in Ireland. This is an excerpt about how his interest in theatre developed, from Of Farming and Classics: A Memoir.

Until the age of eleven, my only experience of the theater was at the yearly Christmas pantomime, to which our whole family always went. These are not pantomimes in the strict sense of dumb show, but a traditional form of comic entertainment put on at Christmastime. The greatest of them in my time was the one done year after year at the Gaiety under the leadership of Jimmy O'Dea and Maureen Potter. These were a wonderful pair of genuinely amusing comedians, and they ran the show to suit themselves. But prior to them, it was not like that. Most of the theaters in Dublin (the Gaiety, Royal, Queen's, and Olympia) put on a separate pantomime every year. Each pantomime was sketchily based on a folk story—Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Dick Whittington, or others—and there was an intermittent effort to include a few scenes from the original story, especially the finale. All the rest of the show was given up to variety turns such as jugglers, clowns, and animal acts. One curious feature that even then stood out for me was that the hero and heroine were, conventionally, always represented by women. Thus, the principal boy was invariably a girl. I suppose this was for fear that simple sexual relations would creep across the footlights and disturb or corrupt the young. Also in a pantomime such as Cinderella, the two ugly sisters were both played by men. The men's voices, and even on rare occasions somewhat risqué jokes, enclosed an area of a cruder humorous mood suitable to its masculine representation and unthinkable for the delicacy of the women.

Every pantomime was dominated by its particular song, and depending on how catchy it was or how funny, we would hear everyone from businessmen and women to delivery boys whistling and singing it for months. I remember one of them which went like this:

How can a guinea pig wag his tail
If he hasn't got a tail to wag?
All the other animals, you will find,
Have got a little tail to wag behind.
If they'd only put a tail on the guinea pig
And finish up a decent job,
Then the price of a guinea pig would go right up
From a guinea up to thirty bob.

I am afraid that much of the funniness of this depends on knowing that a guinea is twenty-one shillings; as a coin of the realm, it had vanished even when I was a boy. But it was the unit in which you purchased various high-grade goods, such as fancy suits. I am glad to notice that it survives in similar snobbish settings. Christie's in London continued with it until the pound went metric, and you still buy racehorses in guineas in Newmarket. A shilling—twenty to the pound—was vulgarly a bob. I still know the tune of that song.

Continue reading "Dublin Theatre in the 1920s and '30s" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Classics
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David Grene (1913–2002) taught classics for many years at the University of Chicago. He was a founding member of the Committee on Social Thought and coedited The Complete Greek Tragedies. Six months of every year, though, he worked his farm in Ireland. This is an excerpt about his early education from Of Farming and Classics: A Memoir.

The school my parents chose for me was St. Stephen’s Green and was essentially one of these small private Protestant schools. It was not a boarding school, but otherwise the atmosphere was very like that described by George Orwell in Such, Such Were the Joys. The fees in the bigger private schools like High School or St. Andrew’s (where I went toward the end of my schooldays) were certainly rather less than in a place like St. Stephen’s Green, and both varieties cost far more than what my parents should have sensibly entertained as possible for them. I believe that the smaller schools were associated with a more explicit version of gentlemanliness. In the larger private schools quite a few of the pupils came from what was very nearly working class. Anyway, my parents decided that the small and exclusive Stephen’s Green was absolutely best for me, and by scraping and saving they sent me to it.

So during my schooldays—from about eight to seventeen (kindergarten occupied the years from six to eight)—I attended two Dublin private schools. I was in Stephen’s Green for about seven years and St. Andrew’s for two—the years directly before entrance to Trinity College. I certainly learned a great deal of languages in St. Andrew’s and was well taught. But I still do not think that much which formed my mind or my intellectual interests would have happened but for one master in the first school, Dicky Wood. I can still see him, old (though not quite so old as I am now) with a red, round face and one slightly crossed eye, wearing very respectable grey suits. He had been retired from a provincial school, bigger than ours, some years before, and when he came to Dublin had been taken on as a cheap staff member at Stephen’s Green. He was so excessively tenderhearted and so irresolute that he found it very hard to keep order in his class. When the boys made a row, or were talking and inattentive, he was quick to put the offenders’ names in the Detention Book, but almost always succumbed to their pleas before the end of his hour and rubbed the names out again. But give him a small number of impressionable boys, and he was a different being—and his passion was for Greek literature.

Continue reading "Learning Greek and Latin in Dublin Schools" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Classics
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David Grene (1913–2002) taught classics for many years at the University of Chicago. He was a founding member of the Committee on Social Thought and coedited The Complete Greek Tragedies. Six months of every year, though, he worked his farm in Ireland. This is an excerpt about his university education from Of Farming and Classics: A Memoir.

The men who taught Honors Classics in Trinity College had enough of the unusual and exotic to furnish a mysterious element to our education. They were nearly all of the recognizable British eccentric type, something grown much rarer since. There were five or six of them lecturing, or teaching if one preferred that title, and at least three of them—the seniors of the group—combined a well-deserved reputation for scholarship, backed up by a fair amount of scholarly publication, with a remoteness from ordinary life, and manifest loneliness, and very notably an inability to act or speak or dress like any normal members of their class and kind.

There was J. G. Smyly, one of the leading papyrologists of his day. Literary and other texts in Greek were preserved on papyrus for many hundreds of years before people came to use the expensive calfskin and other materials. But papyrus was not very lasting, and most of what has come down to us in papyrus is fragmentary. Indeed, many of the papyrus fragments are not literary at all. An unkind classicist vexed at the intrusion of the archaeologists once angrily discounted the value of learning from the contents of "thousands of washerwomen's bills in Egypt." Smyly and the two Oxford scholars B. P. Grenfell and A. S. hunt had edited a huge body of this material, called the Tebtunis papyri. At the time I came to college Smyly was temporarily doing a job that he found slightly uncomfortable. The professor who was responsible for Indo-European Comparative Philology had died, and the exam paper in the subject, which was always a part of Scholarship in classics—a very difficult and extensive exam in the middle of the Honors classical course—had to be set by someone, and lectures given as a preliminary. Smyly was taken out of retirement for the purpose because of the enormous knowledge of rare Greek words which he had picked up from his readings in the papyri. These words tended to be useful for explaining the various shifts in sound and form in the evolution of the comparative philology process. Smyly certainly knew something about the theoretical side of comparative philology—mostly Antoine Meillet's seminal text of the midtwenties, Introduction à l’étude comparative des langues indo-européennes—but he made quite fascinating the use of the rare words to illustrate Meillet. He made me feel a passionate, almost romantic, interest in comparative linguistics because of his own odd approach.

Continue reading "Honors Classics at Trinity College" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Classics
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Robert Altman died yesterday at the age of 81. To mark his passing and his profound influence on contemporary film, we reprint Roger Ebert's interview of Altman as published in Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert.

I think I’ve interviewed Robert Altman more often than anybody else in the movie business. That has something to do with his method of making a movie, which is to assemble large groups of people and set them all in motion at once. There are always visitors on the set. Altman presides as an impresario or host. He likes to introduce people. I wonder if he dislikes being alone. Kathryn, his wife of forty years, is always somewhere nearby, a coconspirator.

Once we both found ourselves at a film festival in Iowa City that was held only once. We both thought Pauline Kael was going to be there, which was why we’d agreed to come. Pauline later said she’d never been invited. Bob and I sat on a desk in a classroom and discussed the delicately moody Thieves Like Us, one of his most neglected films. Other times, I visited the sets of Health, A Wedding, and Gosford Park, and watched him rehearse the Lyric Opera adaptation of A Wedding years later.

Continue reading "In memory of Robert Altman" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Film and Media
Posted by DB at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

John Brockman's Edge, a Web forum for some of today's most brilliant intellectual outsiders, currently features a long article on Stewart Brand, ‘60s counterculture, and Fred Turner's new book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Brand and the Whole Earth Network formed a group of artists and entrepreneurs who worked to bring together the disparate worlds of high technology and the flower power denizens of the ‘60s and ‘70s. The Edge article includes a fascinating ramble by Brockman on his personal friendship with Brand as well as an extended excerpt from the second chapter of Turner's book. John Brockman writes:

In 1983, Stewart Brand sent Dick Farson and Darryl Iconogle of the Western Behavioral Science Institute to see me in New York about a piece of conferencing software called the Onion, which was being used on a bulletin board system called EIES (Electronic Information Exchange System) and run by Murray Turoff. When I demurred, Stewart told me I could be a player or I could choose to sit out the biggest development of the decade. I chose to sit it out.

Stewart was right and wrong. It is the biggest development of the '90s, not the '80s. Inspired by EIES, in 1984 Stewart co founded The Well (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), a computer teleconference system for the San Francisco Bay Area, considered a bellwether of the genre.

Clearly, some of the interesting thinking about the Internet has its origins in ideas formulated by the artists of the '60s, which, wittingly or unwittingly, were carried forward by the enthusiastic young Lieutenant Brand. Considerations of form and content, context, community, and even the hacker ethic were all presaged in part by activities and discussions during that period.…

In the 1990s, the Los Angeles Times Magazine published a cover story: "Always two steps ahead of others … (he) is the least recognized, most influential thinker in America." The story was about Stewart Brand. The story was absolutely correct: Stewart Brand is the most influential thinker in America.

Read the rest of Brockman's fascinating piece, as well as an excerpt from Fred Turner's book at the Edge. Our own Web site features the book's introduction and an excerpt from chapter four.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

An excerpt from 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration by David Simpson.

The event we call 9/11 has a past that we can rediscover, a present that we must monitor, and a future we can project. Many of us who were addressing even the most circumscribed of publics—our students or fellow academics—felt the urge, in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, to make a statement, to testify, to register a response, to initiate some sort of commemoration. Many of those responses took the form of grief, sorrow, shock, and above all, self-recrimination at the appearance of carrying on as before. The rhetoric veered wildly between sympathy and self-importance—as if it were a moral duty that each of us should speak—but what was notable was the need to register awareness of some sort. Many people all across America, not only those who knew one of the dead or knew someone who knew someone, reported feelings of acute personal anxiety and radical insecurity, but there was never a point at which this response could be analyzed as prior to or outside of its mediation by television and by political manipulation. With the passage of time it may come to appear that 9/11 did not blow away our past in an eruption of the unimaginable but that it refigured that past into patterns open to being made into new and often dangerous forms of sense. Take the date itself. There is now evidence that it was not selected with absolute foresight as both the national emergency telephone number (911) and the anniversary of various momentous other events in the history of the West and its "others," but fastened on late in the planning process as the best conjunction of all sorts of pressures and conditions, some of them short term. But when we rediscover those events, the prospect of a certain paranoid coherence emerges: the assassination of Allende on September 11, 1973; the British Mandate in Palestine on September 11, 1922; the U.S. invasion of Honduras on September 11, 1919; and the defeat of the Ottoman armies before the gates of Vienna on September 11, 1683. If this is not metaphysical irony or the mark of some devilish and well-informed intelligence, then it is a sign that our culture is saturated with such coincidences, that almost any date would bring up other anniversaries, any of which could become significant in the light of a supervening event. Take September 10, the date of John Smith's assumption of the presidency of the Jamestown colony (1608), or of the beginning of the British economic boycott of Iran (1951). Or take September 12, the date of the first major U.S. offensive in Europe (1918), or of the defeat of Persia by Athens at the battle of Marathon (490 BCE), or of the birth of Richard Gatling, inventor of the Gatling gun (1818). These dates are not quite as redolent with significance as that of September 11, but they are not without significance. September 12 comes up on various Internet searches as the beginning of an era, the "September 12 era"; for one webmaster the date is the "ongoing reminder" of the "positive emotions" we are all deemed to have experienced. Fortuitously the FBI attack on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, took place on April 19, 1993—Patriots' Day. So too therefore it was on April 19, 1995, that Timothy McVeigh detonated his bomb in Oklahoma City.

Continue reading "9/11: Past and Future" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Philosophy | Politics and Current Events
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An excerpt from 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration by David Simpson.

The whole play of history and power is disrupted by this event, but so, too, are the conditions of analysis. You have to take your time.
—Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers

Has the world changed since 9/11? If it has, then in what ways? If it has not changed, then who has an interest in claiming that it has? Whose world are we talking about? Acts of commemoration are particularly sensitive occasions for assessing the balance of change and continuity within the culture at large. They often declare their adherence to time-honored and even universally human rituals and needs, but nothing is more amenable to political and commercial manipulation than funerals, monuments, epitaphs, and obituaries. Outpourings of communal or national grief are proposed as spontaneous but are frequently stage-managed: Abraham Lincoln's funeral train made carefully scheduled and choreographed stops on its protracted twelve-day passage from Washington, D.C., to Springfield, Illinois, in the sad spring of 1865.

Continue reading "Time Interrupted" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Philosophy | Politics and Current Events
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Are negative campaign ads bad for voters and the democratic process? The conventional wisdom says yes, but John G. Geer's in-depth analysis of negative political ads from 1960 to 2004 argues that the conventional wisdom is wrong.

Geer appeared on the public radio program On the Media a few days ago to talk about his book In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns. Listen to the audio of the program segment.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
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Chris Gondek has an audio interview with Richard A. Lanham on The Invisible Hand, his weekly podcast devoted to management and business topics.

In The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information, Richard A. Lanham traces our epochal move from an economy of things and objects to an economy of attention. According to Lanham, the central commodity in our new age of information is not stuff but style, for style is what competes for our attention amidst the din and deluge of new media.

We also have our own interview with Lanham and an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature
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At one of the panel presentations at BookExpo America, the annual book publishing trade show, Publishers Weekly editor-in-chief Sara Nelson interviewed Laura J. Miller, author of Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption. Miller responded to questions from Nelson and the audience on the history of bookselling, the conflict between chain and independent bookstores, and her sense of where the industry is headed.

The audio of the discussion is available on a BookExpo site that collects podcasts from the show.

Miller earlier wrote an essay for our blog. We also have an excerpt from her book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Sociology
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	Squaw Peak, which overlooks Phoenix, Arizona, drew the attention of Native American activists, who sought to change the name, and place names purists, who resented the governor‘s attempt at renaming. (From the Sunnyslope, Arizona USGS topographic quadrangle map.)

I‘m surprised few people collect twentieth-century maps, which are more readily available than earlier artifacts, less expensive to acquire, and more varied in content. In contrast to traditional themes like military maps, nautical charts, or a particular mapmaker, the collector of modern maps can easily focus on his or her ancestors, birthplace, travels, hobbies, or occupation. History buffs can concentrate on places prominent in military, diplomatic, industrial, or intellectual history—Gettysburg, Versailles, Thomas Edison‘s Menlo Park (New Jersey), and London‘s Bloomsbury district spring to mind—or on specific types of places, such as battlefields, National Parks, or even disaster sites, which afford intriguing cartographic narratives of affluence, devastation, and recovery. Collectors eager to mix history and design can concentrate on propaganda or transportation maps, while hobbyists fascinated with mapping technology can focus on aerial imagery, engraving techniques, or the effect of computers and computer modeling on map design and content. And young collectors have an excellent chance to see their collections grow in value with rising demand for increasingly rare artifacts.

Place and features names, also called toponyms, make some maps particularly collectable. As I discuss in From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow, twentieth-century American mapmakers inherited a cultural landscape with inflammatory toponyms like Jap Gulch and Nigger Hill, hidden in plain sight on government topographic maps but difficult to remove because of bureaucratic inertia. While the more offensive racial slurs were erased in the 1960s and 1970s by blanket renaming, politically incorrect or raunchy toponyms become controversial when local residents resist efforts to replace names like Squaw Peak and Whorehouse Meadow, with a recognized yet sullied history.

Continue reading "Get these inflammatory toponyms before they're gone" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Cartography and Geography
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An essay by Laura J. Miller, author of Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption.

This past March, the Massachusetts press generated a flurry of reports that Cambridge’s Grolier Poetry Book Shop had found a new owner. The tone of these articles was one of great relief since Grolier, one of the few remaining all-poetry bookstores in the country, had been on the verge of going under for some years. Louisa Solano, Grolier’s long-time owner, was worn down by ill health and the financial difficulties of running a small, independent bookshop in a neighborhood with some of the most expensive commercial real estate in the region. While both local residents and poetry lovers across the nation were cheered by the turn of events, it is actually a rare success story in the recent annals of independent bookselling.

This has been another bad year for independent bookstores. Most weeks I read about bookshops that have or will soon shut down; some are places known primarily in their local communities, while others have national reputations. Among those closing in the last six months were Tatnuck Booksellers of Worcester, Massachusetts, the Athena Bookstore of Kalamazoo, Biblio of Tucson, and Dutton’s Bookstore of North Hollywood. In this second week of May, one of the preeminent bookstores of the country, Cody’s Books of Berkeley, announced that it is closing its main store, a Berkeley institution for close to fifty years. Numerous others bookstores, large and small, some decades old, others relative newcomers, have also shut their doors.

Continue reading "Books: A Different Kind of Commodity" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics | Sociology
Posted by at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

An essay for International Earth Day by Dorrik Stow, professor of ocean and earth science at the University of Southampton, UK, and the author of Oceans: An Illustrated Reference.

Sustainability is neither a fashionable trend that will go away once its media exposure has played out, nor is it an option we can lightly dismiss. Sustainability is every bit as essential to the future of human existence as are the food and water we consume and the air we breathe. April 22 has been designated International Earth Day, a time to focus across the world on planet Earth—her natural resources, environment and future.

Despite being endowed with enormous richness and diversity of natural resources, the United States can only sustain itself at present rates of consumption for about six months of each year. For the remaining half year it is totally reliant on imports. Furthermore, if the global population consumed at the same rate as the American people, the world would require more than five times the total global resource base to survive. The sums simply do not add up. But we are no better here in the UK, so I am not simply pointing an accusing finger from across the Atlantic. Yes, our rates of consumption are somewhat lower, as is the population, but our more limited natural resource base means that we run out of self-sufficiency after only 3½ months in any one year. Collectively, the world is on a fast track to nowhere—resources will simply run out, that is if the environmental havoc we wreak does not first choke us. So, is there a solution?

Continue reading "Oceans and Sustainability" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology
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An essay for International Earth Day by R. Bruce Hull, author of Infinite Nature.

As the saying goes: We live in interesting times. Globalization and fundamentalism seem locked in a death struggle to control world economies and cultures. The biosphere, the thin skin of life that blankets Earth, is now dominated by the products of human creativity. Environmental alarmists look at this domination and see biodiversity loss, a destabilized climate, eroding soils, over-fished oceans, and collapsing ecological systems. Even most skeptical environmentalists—who typically highlight the reliable and abundant supply of food, energy, and other resources—acknowledge serious challenges to meeting exponentially growing demands. Meanwhile, the traditional methods of environmental management are faltering. Rational, centralized environmental planning is an admitted failure in most professional circles, and the science wars have diminished the credibility of all expertise. Environmental issues infrequently find space on the national agenda, and critics say environmentalism’s method and focus must change. These conflicting environmental currents and eddies flow within the larger river of postmodern angst, causing us to rethink answers to our ultimate questions: What does it mean to be human? What is the essence of the natural and supernatural world we live in? How should we relate to that world?

Our success in navigating these currents will depend in large measure on our political will to act. We desperately need an inclusive, deliberative civic dialog about these matters. We need people engaged and mobilized to envision and support sustainable behaviors that create thriving communities. We need to expand the decision space where discussion and political action occurs. Pluralizing nature—celebrating infinite natures—is part of the solution.

Continue reading "The Will to Act on the Environment" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Charles Bernstein is one of America's liveliest advocates and practitioners of radically inventive poetry. So why does he have a beef with National Poetry Month? A nationwide celebration of his craft during the entire month of April—what's not to like? Plenty, says Bernstein. In an essay titled "Against National Poetry Month As Such" he writes:

National Poetry Month is about making poetry safe for readers by promoting examples of the art form at its most bland and its most morally "positive." The message is: Poetry is good for you. But, unfortunately, promoting poetry as if it were an "easy listening" station just reinforces the idea that poetry is culturally irrelevant and has done a disservice not only to poetry deemed too controversial or difficult to promote but also to the poetry it puts forward in this way. "Accessibility" has become a kind of Moral Imperative based on the condescending notion that readers are intellectually challenged, and mustn't be presented with anything but Safe Poetry. As if poetry will turn people off to poetry.

Read the rest of "Against National Poetry Month As Such."

Bernstein is perhaps best known as one of the founders of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement of the 1970s. He is the author of My Way: Speeches and Poems and With Strings. Sometimes comic, sometimes dark, Bernstein's writing is irreverent but always relevant, "not structurally challenged, but structurally challenging."

Visit Charles Bernstein's Web site.