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For decades digital technology has steadily transformed the business of academic publishing, but much of the digitization of the industry has, until more recently, gone on behind the scenes in the form of new printing technologies, databases, design and production tools, etc. Then in the mid-1990s the internet began to change how our customers find out about and purchase our books. And just as the textual media have been transformed by digitization, so the audiovisual media are being changed. Audio and video have become much easier to produce and distribute in the age of digital cameras, formats, and online distribution channels.

No surprise that as our readership encounters more and more visual media online, that is where we—and our university press comrades—want to be found. The higher education media are taking note of the trend.

Continue reading "Scholarly Publishing: Now on Video" »

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | UCP News
Posted by TXM at 03:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday the Chicago Distribution Center, a division of the University of Chicago Press and one of the nation's largest distributors of scholarly and professional books, issued a press release announcing an agreement with online content packager Tizra to begin selling subscriptions to online books. The University of Chicago Press itself will be one of the first of the CDC's clients to begin offering books online through the new service beginning later this summer. From the press release:

"We're delighted to be in the first group of CDC publishers piloting the CDC/Tizra online service," said Garrett Kiely, Director of the University of Chicago Press. "University of Chicago Press publications appeal to wide audiences: from general readers to educators and scholars. Our readers need to find us from wherever they are, with immediate access to the content they want. Tizra helps us meet that need."

To find out more read the press release, or see this article appearing in today's Publishers Weekly.

Archived in Commentary
Posted by TXM at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Microsoft announced today that it would end Live Search Books, just eighteen months after the program was officially launched. Live Search Books, similar to Google Book Search, collaborated with publishers and libraries to make book content searchable and viewable online. However Live Search Books differed in that it included books currently in copyright only if granted permission by the publisher. Google Book Search digitizes books from libraries irrespective of their copyright status, the subject of an ongoing lawsuit.

The announcement from Microsoft held few clues as to why they were pulling the plug. Perhaps the revenue generated by book content didn't fit in with strategic changes that followed the collapse of talks with Yahoo. The announcement said in part: "This past Wednesday we announced our strategy to focus on verticals with high commercial intent, such as travel, and offer users cash back on their purchases from our advertisers." It's difficult to see the majority of books published, much less the books that we produce, fitting into "verticals with high commercial intent."

The University of Chicago Press supported the Live Search Books program by providing more than a thousand books to Microsoft in digital form for inclusion in the program.

It's worth noting that even after more than five years of development and digitization, Google Book Search is still classified as a beta project. Making book content available on the web is, now more than ever, just a work in progress.

Archived in Commentary
Posted by DB at 02:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

How many videos are available on YouTube? That number isn't easy to find. But consider this: ten hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. The simile about drinking from a firehose doesn't do justice to the flood.

How can you find anything worth watching in a collection of content exploding like a super nova? Well, you could rely on the wisdom of the crowd and restrict your YouTube viewing to just those videos that are rated five stars. How many is that? I heard that cited a few weeks ago as seven million, which means it's probably up to eight million now. Have at it. Five stars has got to be good, right?

Or you could be guided by Dan Colman at Open Culture who has assembled a list of "50+ Smart Video Collections on YouTube." We are happy to see our YouTube channel among them.

Colman's list is interesting in a number of ways. A YouTube channel is like a publisher's imprint—it reflects editorial direction and judgment. Gather quality imprints and you have a quality collection of content. The obvious need to compile such a list exhibits the dysfunctional aspects of YouTube: the system of search and recommendation does not work well enough to find relevant, high-quality content.

That's reminiscent of the early days of the worldwide web, when many users compiled and posted lists of worthwhile websites, simply because the existing search engines were so bad at finding good content. On the strength of such recommendations the Google search algorithm gained traction and, eventually, dominance.

Maybe a search engine will be invented that can find quality video content or maybe a critical role will need to be played by producers whose imprimatur signifies quality and the collection-building skills of people like Dan Colman. Or to put it another way: the functionality of Web 2.0 can disintermediate content, but it seems apparent that the navigational skills of publishers and librarians are still needed in the vast sea stretching before us.

Archived in Commentary | Film and Media
Posted by DB at 07:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Joseph M. Williams, Professor Emeritus of English and Linguistics at the University of Chicago, died Friday, February 22 at his home in South Haven, Michigan. Williams will be remembered as the founder of the University's writing program and for his contributions to the development of some of Chicago's most influential books on the teaching of writing. These include his Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, as well as the book he co-authored with the Gregory Colomb and the late Wayne Booth, The Craft of Research—the third edition of which is slated for publication this spring. Williams was also a contributor to Kate L. Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations and was at work on the accompanying Students Guide at the time of his passing.

William's contributions to the University and its students, and to writers and scholars everywhere, will most certainly be missed, as will he himself.

Archived in Chicago | Commentary | Education
Posted by TXM at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Mike Royko would have been 75 today.

Royko was born in Chicago and never left it. He wrote for the Chicago Daily News, then the Sun-Times, and finally for the Tribune. His career should be measured in column inches. He wrote 7,500 columns. You do the math.

The Chicago Outfit is going to jail and the Cubs are in a pennant race. Wonders never cease. Hell freezes over. It would be great to get Royko's take on such bizarre phenomena.

Hoist an extra beer for Royko today. Something domestic. Read and re-read.

Archived in Chicago | Commentary | Film and Media
Posted by DB at 09:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Stephen Braude is no stranger to controversy. Braude is a professor of philosophy who has investigated paranormal phenomena for over thirty years. In the preface to his new book, The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations, he relates what happens when a philosopher who has previously limited his research to language, time, and logic turns to investigating parapsychology:

Some philosophers I expected to be open-minded and intellectually honest instead behaved with surprising rigidity and cowardice. I clearly knew the evidence and issues much better than they did, but they condescendingly pretended to know this material well enough to ridicule my interest in it.… I had really thought that as philosophers—as people presumably devoted to the pursuit of wisdom and truth—my colleagues would actually be willing to admit their ignorance and be curious to learn more. I genuinely believed they'd be excited to discover that certain relevant bits of received wisdom might be mistaken.

Fortunately, at least some revelations were more encouraging. Several philosophers whom I thought would be inflexible or disinterested surprised me with their honesty, courage, and open-mindedness. And some reactions I've never fully understood. One famous philosopher (I won't say who) said to me, "Well if someone has to do this I'm glad it's you." I think that was meant as a compliment, but it's obviously open to multiple interpretations.

We posted an excerpt from Braude's book at the beginning of the month and it's been interesting to see those same kinds of reactions played out in the blogosphere:

Jason Kuznicki at Positive Liberty took us to task, opining that "university presses … have certain responsibilities, including above all scientific rigor." (Gosh, thanks for the reminder.) To his credit, though, he engaged with his critics and has perhaps gained a more complete sense of what rigor requires.

One of those critics was Michael Prescott, who posted a defense of the book on his self-named blog. Taking the other side of the issue is biologist P.Z. Myers, blogging on Pharyngula, who for some reason mixes in a discussion of bottled water with his shoot-from-the-hip criticism.

Reading the excerpt from The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations is no substitute for reading the whole book, but it's a place to start. Just don't make up your mind too fast. Braude brings skepticism to his observations of phenomena purported to be paranormal, but he also brings a willingness to put his fundamental scientific beliefs to the test.

Archived in Commentary | Philosophy | Psychology
Posted by DB at 07:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ten suspects have been arrested for the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya last October. The ten include "five police and Federal Security Service officers and three Chechen brothers," according to the Moscow Times which went on to state that

Prosecutor General Yury Chaika, in announcing the arrests Monday, said Politkovskaya had known and met the person who ordered her killing and that her death was probably carried out on behalf of someone living abroad who wanted to discredit Russia. Those arrested belong to a Moscow-based criminal group specializing in contract killings and led by an ethnic Chechen, Chaika told reporters.

In the New York Times, Dmitry A. Muratov, editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, the independent newspaper where Politkovskaya worked, called the prosecutor's account of the murders' motives "a nightmare.' "Political interference is hindering the investigation," said Muratov in a telephone interview with the newspaper. "The prosecutor general is acting not like a prosecutor general but a politician who works at the instructions of the president."

The Moscow Times also notes:

Politkovskaya was the thirteenth reporter in Russia killed in a contract-style murder since Putin came to power in 2000, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. A lack of convictions in any of those cases has raised doubts about the state's commitment to protecting journalists and a free press.

In 2003, we published Politikovskaya's second book on the Chechen War, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya. We have an excerpt from the book, an article titled "Russia's Secret Heroes."

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This week's Chicago Reader features a front page story titled "Defending Strauss" in which contributor Julie Englander delivers a comprehensive report on the long-running controversy surrounding the former University of Chicago professor of philosophy, Leo Strauss, who died in 1973. As Englander explains, Strauss's name and work have become closely associated with the political practices of some of the neoconservative architects of the war in Iraq, like former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and high-ranking Pentagon official Abram Shulsky, based partly on their association at the University of Chicago. Englander writes:

[The critics argue that] Straussians agreed with their guru, a scholar of Plato, that there are "truths [that] can be comprehended only by a very few, and would be misunderstood by the masses." Thus the "noble lie" (a phrase from Plato's Republic that Strauss liked to use) that [the Bush administration] told the American public: Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, and we've got to go in there, whatever the cost.

But as Englander notes, several writers have recently come to Strauss's aid, arguing that his work has been misinterpreted and misappropriated in the context of America's current political woes:

Figuring enough was enough, in 2006 Michael and Catherine Zuckert published The Truth About Leo Strauss. They described Strauss's encounters with ancient and modern philosophy and pictured him as a skeptic and moderate who had conflicted feelings about modern democracy (as he did about modernism generally) but thought it better than the alternatives. They asked, "Does the Platonic/Straussian doctrine of the noble lie serve to justify the kind of alleged lies critics of Strauss… lay at his doorstep?" They went on, "This is not to say that political leaders do not on occasion do such things, but again, they did not learn to do this from Strauss."

"A lot of stupid and unfair things were said about Strauss," says Michael. "The idea that he had some big political agenda is just nutty."

Yale's Steven Smith concedes in the preface to Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism that Strauss "has always been something of an exotic plant" and is undoubtedly "an acquired taste." But he was "a friend of liberal democracy—one of the best friends democracy has ever had."

To find out more about this thinker and the controversy he stirred up thirty years after his death, read an excerpt from Reading Leo Strauss or read an excerpt from the Zuckert's The Truth about Leo Strauss.

Also be sure to do a quick search on our website to find some of Strauss's own works including Leo Strauss On Plato's Symposium and On Tyranny.

Archived in Commentary | History | Philosophy | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New York Times brought the sad news this morning that Liam Rector, distinguished poet and educator, committed suicide on Wednesday morning at his home in Greenwich Village at the age of 57. According to his bio posted at Poets.org, Rector "was born in Washington, D.C., in 1949. He received an M.A. from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and an M.P.A. from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard."

"Rector taught at Columbia University, The New School, Emerson College, George Mason University, and elsewhere. He founded and directed the graduate Writing Seminars at Bennington College, and administered literary programs at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets."

"His books of poems include The Executive Director of the Fallen World, American Prodigal and The Sorrow of Architecture. His work has also appeared in a variety of distinguished literary publications including Agni, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Ploughshares."

His contributions to the literary community will be sorely missed.

Archived in Commentary | Poetry
Posted by TXM at 09:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This week has been a tragic one in the world of cinema. Both Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, and his colleague Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni passed away within hours of one another this Monday, July 30th 2007; a coincidence that is perhaps indicative of the creative and intellectual space shared by the two masters of modern moviemaking. Both filmmakers became well known for their radically innovative visual styles and insightful explorations of modern society, and both have left behind a legacy of filmmakers and fans heavily influenced by their works, evidenced by the many articles published recently to mark their passing.

The New York Times has published several fascinating retrospectives on the two directors, and Roger Ebert, who discusses Bergman's films in Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert has also posted an article on Bergman to his website. But for those interested in more in-depth study, the press has two new books: the forthcoming The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema—a collection of essays, theory, and autobiographical sketches of Michelangelo Antonioni's life and work, and the recently published The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography—a fascinating portrait of the life of the late Ingmar Bergman. One of our international partners, Amsterdam University Press, has also recently released Ingmar Bergman: A Reference Guide, which at over 1000 pages, qualifies as one of the most comprehensive references on Bergman's work available.

Archived in Commentary | Film and Media
Posted by TXM at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We know that the books we publish inspire scholarship. But it is especially gratifying to see that our books can inspire creativity of a different sort. Poetry instructor Cassie Sparkman recently used photographs from Claire Nouvian's The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss to inspire her writing students at an Evanston summer arts camp. And judging by the output of these amazing young writers, inspire them it did! Sparkman posted her students’ work to the Evanston Arts Camp Poetry! blog.

See our website for the book if you want to be inspired yourself.

Archived in Biology | Commentary
Posted by TXM at 04:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today's issue of the the Chicago Reader—the Spring Books Special—has a nice little feature about the writer of The Chicago Manual of Style Q&A. But if you're hoping that the identity of the Q&A writer will at long last be revealed to all the world … you’ll be disappointed to learn that the woman behind the wit of the Q&A has adopted a pseudonym, Jody Fisher.

Every month new entries are published to the The Chicago Manual of Style Q&A. Here’s one from this month’s lot:

Q. Is it really necessary to include “as” before “per”? For example, “Client has requested, as per original agreement, two hard copies of all reports.” Since “per” means “according to,” can’t we just delete the unnecessary (and wordy-looking) “as”? Thank you, great gurus, for your wisdom!

A. It is not necessary to add “as.” In fact, it used to be considered incorrect, and sticklers still feel superior when they slash through it.

Archived in Commentary | Reference and Writing | UCP News
Posted by DB at 02:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Marshal Zeringue, whose blogging enterprises are clustered at the Campaign for the American Reader, has a daily feature called "The Page 69 Test" in which he asks an author to quote and briefly discuss whatever text can be found on page 69 of their book.

On the basis of the title alone, one could scarcely find an apparently less fit candidate for the rigors of the Page 69 Test than Angus McLaren's Impotence: A Cultural History. But we are pleased to note that Impotence was—yes, we will stoop to this joke—up to the task. The Page 69 Test exhibits, as a test on most any page of this book would, some fascinating material. In fact, page 69 discusses a legal case in Pennsylvania in 1728 in which a woman claimed her husband was impotent. The husband, a George Miller, submits to a virility test and, in due course, proves his manhood. Synchronicity rules.

You may further sample Impotence in a special feature drawn from the book, "Two Millennia of Impotence Cures."

Archived in Commentary | History
Posted by DB at 04:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mike Royko, Pulitzer prize winning journalist and author, died ten years ago today—on April 29, 1997. Royko, a man whom Jimmy Breslin called "the best journalist of his time," was one of the most thorough and incisive chroniclers of the American experience over his long career, writing successively for the Chicago Daily News, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Chicago Tribune.

A few days ago the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum assembled family, friends, and former colleagues for a tribute to Royko. Rick Kogan, Carol Marin, and Sam Sianis (owner of the Billy Goat tavern) were among the speakers.

The Chicagoland blog published by the Chicago Reader had a nice piece about Royko, pointing out the continuing relevance of his progressive views and insightful writing. Tributes have also appeared in, of course, the Tribune and the Sun-Times—pieces that are remarkably different in focus—the Trib on his writing, the Sun-Times on his personality.

The University of Chicago Press was pleased publish two volumes of the best of Royko's columns; One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko and its encore, For the Love of Mike: More of the Best of Mike Royko. You can sample a few classic Royko columns on our website—such as his column on the ex-Cub factor, a discourse on the Chicago hotdog, the day Jackie Robinson came to Wrigley Field, and the unveiling of the Picasso. Read excerpts from One More Time and excerpts from For the Love of Mike.

Archived in Commentary | Film and Media
Posted by TXM at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It is widely known that acclaimed film critic and author Roger Ebert has been fighting a fierce battle with cancer ever since 2002. For four years Ebert was able to endure treatment while continuing to host his TV show as well as publish his most recent book, Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert. But 2006 found him bedridden after undergoing a series of more serious surgeries for his condition. All the while his audiences have eagerly awaited his return to the cinema, and as the Chicago Tribune's Mark Caro reports, they finally received their wish. Caro reports:

It was about 15 minutes before the opening of the 9th Annual Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival when the festival's namesake quietly entered the theater from the back, marking his first public appearance since cancer surgery on his jaw in June. … Several surgeries later, the 64-year-old film critic—who has since appeared only sporadically in the Chicago Sun-Times and not at all on his syndicated television show Ebert & Roeper—still can't speak or completely close his mouth. Yet he was back where he grew up and attended the University of Illinois, wearing a blue blazer with a peach-colored handkerchief in the pocket and walking slowly down the theater aisle dispensing handshakes and hugs to those from near and far who came to see him and the movies he selected for five days of viewing.

We are glad to see that that one of our favorite film critics is back on his feet. And we can't wait for his next book!

Archived in Commentary | Film and Media
Posted by TXM at 09:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The March 30th edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education is running an article about F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents—The Definitive Edition recently published by the Press. The piece details "the story behind the publishing of Hayek's seminal volume" and how close the book's critics came to shutting down publication of one of the Press's most influential and best-selling titles. The article begins:

If the University of Chicago Press had listened to one of its reader's reports, it might not have published one of its best-selling books of all time. The story of how Chicago came to issue The Road to Serfdom, by the Austrian scholar F.A. Hayek, in 1944 is provided in a new definitive edition coming out this month.

As The Road to Serfdom, a seminal volume in modern libertarian thought, was wending its way to publication in Britain, three American university presses turned it down. Chicago decided to go ahead despite a review from a prominent economist at the university who said it wouldn't sell. The original print run was gone in a month, and Chicago went on to sell more than 350,000 copies over the years. Some 600,000 more were distributed in condensed form via Reader's Digest, and the book has been translated into more than 20 languages.

The Chronicle article reprints two of the original readers' reports from Frank H. Knight and Jacob Marschak. You can read the full article including the reports at the Chronicle.

We also have an excerpt from the book entitled "The Publication History of The Road to Serfdom" on our website.

Archived in Commentary | Economics | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 02:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's been a few years since Alan Wolfe said, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, that to understand contemporary politics you have to understand Carl Schmitt. Now it looks like TV critics will have to wrap their minds around political theology as well.

Jerome Eric Copulsky, assistant professor and director of Judaic studies at Virginia Tech, wrote a piece for Sightings, the online journal of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School, in which he calls 24 a "sustained lesson in controversial jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt's decidedly illiberal concept of sovereignty." He continues:

"Sovereign is he who decides upon the exception," Schmitt proclaimed at the beginning of his 1922 treatise Political Theology. To have this power is to stand outside the law, to decide upon the state of exception, when the normal rules do not apply. If we follow Schmitt's claim that "significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts," the human sovereign is the political analogue of the omnipotent God.

What better description could there be of counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer, the hero of 24?

And what better illustration of the mainlining of a philosophical idea?

Our books by Carl Schmitt include Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty and The Concept of the Political. Also relevant: State of Exception by Giorgio Agamben, from which we have an excerpt.

Archived in Commentary | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Publishing the online edition of The Chicago Manual of Style has given us some insight into how people use electronic editions of books, an awareness of the usability issues posed by the online environment, and a renewed appreciation for the simplicity and naturalness of the physical book.

Or at least the physical book seems a simple and intuitive interface. But maybe not. Maybe the first users of the codex had technical difficulties just as computer users have today. Maybe every monastery had a help desk to assist readers and scribes with recalcitrant books. Via YouTube:

According to a comment on YouTube, the clip is from a show called Øystein og meg (Øystein and I) and appeared in 2001 on NRK, the Norwegian television network. The sketch was written by Knut Nærum and performed by Øystein Bache and Rune Gokstad. The spoken language in the clip is Norwegian; the subtitles are in English and Danish.

[Updated February 23: If the video above does not play, try this version from YouTube, which has the advantage of including a bit at the end about reading the manual (RTFM), but the disadvantage of being quite dark. On February 19, NRK had a news story about the worldwide interest in this video.]

Archived in Commentary | Reference and Writing
Posted by DB at 03:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Every month the manuscript editors at the Press field questions submitted to The Chicago Style Q&A, a feature of the new Chicago Manual of Style Online. Our manuscript editors respond to these questions with serious explications of the subtleties of style and usage, although they cannot resist the occasional—well, maybe more than occasional—diversion into delicious irony.

This month's Harper's reprinted some highlights from the Q&A under the appropriately paradoxical title of "Stet Offensive," further described on their Web site as "aggressive advice from the editors of the Chicago Manual of Style." Here are examples of our editors' advice:

Q: When I began learning English grammar from the nuns in 1951, I was taught never to use a comma either before or after independent clauses or compound sentences. Did the rules of English grammar and punctuation change while I was in that three week coma in 1965, or in the years it took to regain my basic and intellectual functioning before I returned to teaching?

A: I'm sorry I can't account for your state of mind, but standard punctuation calls for a comma before a conjunction that joins two independent clauses unless the clauses are very short. I would go further and suggest that it's a good idea to examine any rule you were taught that includes the word "never" or "always."

---

Q: Is there any standard for the usage of emoticons? In particular, is there an accepted practice for the use of emoticons that includes an opening or closing parenthesis as the final token within a set of parenthesis? Should I incorporate the emoticon into the closing of the parenthesis (giving a dual purpose to the closing parenthesis, such as in this case :-); simply leave the emoticon up against the closing parenthesis, ignoring the bizarre visual effect of the doubled closing parenthesis (as I am doing here, producing a double-chin effect :-)); or avoid the situation by using a different emoticon (some emoticons are similar :-D), placing the emoticon elsewhere, or doing without it (i.e., reword to avoid awkwardness)?

A: Until academic standards decline enough to accommodate the use of emoticons, I'm afraid CMOS is unlikely to treat their styling, since the manual is aimed primarily at scholarly publications. And the problems you've posed in this note have given us added incentive to keep our distance.

Read more Q&A and sign up for a free trial of The Chicago Manual of Style Online.

Archived in Commentary | Reference and Writing
Posted by TXM at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Tuesday, Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, posted an interesting comment on his blog about Joshua Weiner's recent book of poems, From the Book of Giants. He notes that Weiner's book includes a cleverly updated version of Martial's epigram 10.47—a poem composed of a list of the things necessary for "the good life."

As Stothard points out, it is a list that has been drawn from and imitated profusely throughout the centuries, translated into new languages and fitted into new meters, but whose underlying significance has retained a particular continuity that reappears almost two thousand years later in Weiner's post-modern verse—indeed it is a telling comment on our society that even a work of poetry as informed by modernity as this one still warrants acknowledgment in terms of its classical predecessors. Find out more about the book and read an excerpted poem on its UCP webpage.

Also, note that Weiner will be doing readings in the next few months, especially in April. See our author events page for particulars.

Archived in Commentary | Poetry
Posted by TXM at 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since 1986 Martin Luther King day has been celebrated as a federal holiday in honor of one of the most influential and effective leaders of the American civil rights movement. And what better way to spend your day off than taking a little time to reflect on the long story of America's struggle toward equality, past and present. The Press has published a comprehensive list of books on civil rights in America, covering everything from the life of Martin Luther King's mentor Bayard Rustin, to more contemporary views on African-American citizenship.

To find more books on the American civil rights movement and the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. see our related complete catalog categories in Black Studies, Politics, and Sociology.

Happy MLK day!

Archived in Black Studies | Commentary
Posted by TXM at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Norman Maclean was born December 23, 1902. He will forever be associated with the mountains and rivers of Montana, but he was born on the rolling plains of Iowa. His family moved to Missoula, Montana in 1909.

Maclean came to the University of Chicago in 1928 to pursue graduate studies in English. Three years later he was hired as an instructor and eventually became the William Rainey Harper Professor of English. He won the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching three times during his UC career and served as an inspiring mentor to generations of students.

Upon his retirement in 1973, Maclean turned to writing, drawing material from his youth in Montana and his fascination with the Mann Gulch Fire of 1949. In 1976 the University of Chicago Press had the good fortune to publish a collection of his work, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. The book was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the title novella was made into a movie in 1992. That same year we published Young Men and Fire which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for best general non-fiction.

Maclean died on August 2, 1990 in Chicago, at the age of 87.

Read the opening pages of A River Runs Through It and an excerpt from Young Men and Fire.

Archived in Commentary | Fiction | Literature
Posted by DB at 09:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Pulling your hair out searching for that last minute gift? You can't go wrong with The Chicago Manual of Style. It might not fall under the category of "fun" gifts, but it won't require two 'C' batteries, or any assembly. It's perfect for the person who has everything and universal enough to be appreciated by everyone from students to professionals—you've got all the bases covered with a shiny new copy of The Chicago Manual of Style. Heck, run down to the local bookstore and pick up two just in case there's anyone you forgot. And remember, The Manual is now available as a CD-ROM and an online version as well—with our online subscription service you won't even have to fight the crowds at the mall to get it.

Want more gift suggestions? Tempt your mind in our gift catalog.

Happy Holidays!

Archived in Commentary | Reference and Writing
Posted by TXM at 02:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"True philosophy leads to the latke."

So proved the great philosopher Ted Cohen in the 1976 Latke-Hamantash Debate at the University of Chicago.

Any night of Hanukkah is an appropriate time for the intellectual and gastronomic delights of The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate, a collection of the best of nearly sixty years of brilliant University of Chicago oratory deployed on behalf of latkes and hamantashen.

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.

Q.E.D.

Archived in Commentary
Posted by DB at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Chicago Manual of Style Online features a Q&A page, where the manuscript editors from the University of Chicago Press interpret the Manual's recommendations and uncoil its intricacies. Our editors receive hundreds of submissions each month and a handful of the most helpful (not to mention entertaining) are selected for publication on the Chicago Style Q&A page. And often there's one too good not to reprint here:

Q. Oh, English-language gurus, is it ever proper to put a question mark and an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence in formal writing? This author is giving me a fit with some of her overkill emphases, and now there is this sentence that has both marks at the end. My everlasting gratitude for letting me know what I should tell this person.

A. In formal writing, we allow both marks only in the event that the author was being physically assaulted while writing. Otherwise, no.

Anyone can post a question and access to the Q&A is free, so go ahead and ask all those hairsplitting questions about English grammar you've been dying to solve!

While you're at it, be sure to check out the loads of other free content like the tools for editors—a collection of sample forms, letters, and style sheets—as well as the Chicago Style Citation Quick Guide for help citing sources.

Archived in Commentary
Posted by TXM at 02:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Normally we try not to draw attention to negative commentary about our authors. But sometimes the commentary is too artful to be ignored. John G. Geer is the author of the recent book In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns, which makes the controversial argument that negative campaign advertising benefits voters and the democratic process. Geer is, then, in no position to object when he becomes the subject of an attack ad:

The video was created by Jeremy D. Mayer, Associate Professor and Director of the Masters of Public Policy Program, School of Public Policy, George Mason University. Mayer was a commenter at a presentation Geer did about his book at the Cato Institute in September. On YouTube Mayer noted:

I made this negative ad as part of my commentary at the Cato Institute on John Geer's new book In Defense of Negativity. His book argues that negative ads are good for democracy. Almost none of the claims in this ad are "true" (for example, he's actually an award winning, popular lecturer—these are the only negative comments up on Ratemyprofessor), although each is based on a shred of truth. John thought it was hilarious. Hope you do too.

(Tip of the hat to Technorati and the blog of television station WKRN in Nashville.)

Archived in Commentary | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 01:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

CBGB, the legendary New York night club that spawned some of the most colorful icons of the punk genre—Patti Smith, Blondie, the Ramones—closed last Sunday, the end of an era in American music. Though the music may no longer be as loud as it was during the club's heyday in the mid-seventies, the powerful influence of the club and the culture that surrounded it continues to permeate nearly every form of popular music today; even the more sophisticated echelons of the avant-garde. A listen to the hipster stylings of contemporary chamber musicians the Kronos Quartet is enough to demonstrate the profound ways that the world of modern art has enthusiastically assimilated the forms and conventions of punk rock.

The collision between low-brow pop artists and the artistic avant-garde was the subject of Bernard Gendron's 2002 book Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde. When we published Gendron's book we posted an excerpt to our Web site focused on the first wave of punk that crested on CBGB's dilapidated stage. The excerpt is an excellent introduction to the early history of CBGB, bands like the Ramones and Talking Heads, and the pop and/or art sensibilities that echoed through their music.

Archived in Commentary | Music
Posted by TXM at 06:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Peter H. Rossi, distinguished sociologist and author, died Saturday at his home in Amherst, MA, where he was professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Massachusetts. In the 1980s Rossi carried out an extensive study of homelessness in Chicago, which formed the empirical basis of his groundbreaking work Down and Out in America: The Origins of Homelessness published by the University of Chicago Press in 1990. His study offered a powerful explanation of the causes of homelessness and documented the striking contrasts between the homeless of the 1950s and 1960s and the homeless population that emerged in the 1980s, which was younger and included more women, children, and minorities.

Rossi is also remembered among the University of Chicago community as former faculty member in the department of sociology and a former director of the National Opinion Research Center where his research ushered in a "golden age" of survey analysis.

Archived in Commentary | Sociology
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Anna Politkovskaya was buried yesterday; thousands attended her funeral service at Troyekurov cemetery in Moscow, a cemetery described by Viktor Erofeyev in the International Herald Tribune as "a sort of branch of the famous Novodevichy cemetery where the big bosses lie. This has its historic paradox, a mixing of the styles of different eras. Stalin, after eliminating yet another of his comrades, liked to give them magnificent funerals."

No one would confuse Stalin with President Vladimir Putin, whose first public remarks about the murder of Politkovskaya were in a phone call to President George W. Bush, in which he pledged that Russian law enforcement agencies would "take all necessary efforts to carry out an objective investigation of the tragic death of Anna Politkovskaya."

One might instead confuse Putin with Captain Renault, the character in Casablanca played by Claude Rains, who rounded up the usual suspects. For all those "necessary efforts" were, in fact, unnecessary for Putin to exonerate the person Politkovskaya was writing about at the time of her death: "Putin told Suddeutsche Zeitung that he ruled out the possibility that government officials, including Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov, could have been behind the murder," reported the Moscow Times.

Most likely we will never know who was responsible for the murder of Politkovskaya. What we will also never know is the story that Politkovskaya was working on last week, and the story she would have written next week, and every story every week thereafter. As Thomas de Waal wrote in the Guardian:

The murder of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya leaves a terrible silence in Russia and an information void about a dark realm that we need to know more about. No one else reported as she did on the Russian north Caucasus and the abuse of human rights there. Her reports made for difficult reading—and Politkovskaya only got where she did by being one of life's difficult people.

Read Politkovskaya's essay "Russia's Secret Heroes." Especially, read this: "A country … where real heroes don't receive the Hero title, is hopeless. It will lose all wars. Because it never encourages the right people."

Archived in Commentary | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 10:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Anna Politkovskaya was found shot dead in her Moscow apartment on Saturday. Politkovskaya was a journalist and longtime critic of the the Russian government, particularly with regard to its policies in Chechnya. She was a special correspondent for the liberal Moscow newspaper Novaya gazeta.

The New York Times reported that Vitaly Yaroshevsky, the deputy editor of Novaya gazeta, said that "Ms. Politkovskaya had been at work on Saturday finishing an article for the Monday paper about torturers in the government of Ramzan A. Kadyrov, the pro-Kremlin premier of Chechnya." Yaroshevsky noted, according to the Times, that "a Makarov 9-millimeter pistol had been dropped at her side, the signature of a contract killing."

Since 1999 Politkovskaya had written many stories about the war in Chechnya, chronicling the killings, abuse, and torture of civilians in Chechnya by Russian soldiers. She was likewise strongly critical of the brutal tactics of the Chechen rebels. An obituary in the Economist catalogs her criticism:

She loathed those responsible for the war: the warlords who had misruled Chechnya during its brief spells of semi-independence, the Islamic extremists who exploited the conflict, the Russian goons and generals, and their local collaborators. She particularly despised the Chechen government installed by Russia, for what she termed their massive looting of reconstruction money, backed up by kidnapping. The worst effect of the Chechen wars, she reckoned, was the corrosion of Russia itself.

In 2003, we published Politikovskaya's second book on the Chechen War, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya. The book offers an insider's view of life in Chechnya since 1999. In this book, as in all her journalism, Politkovskaya centered her stories on the people caught in the crossfire of conflict. The book recounts the horrors of living in the midst of the war, examines how the war has affected Russian society, and takes a hard look at how people on both sides profited from it.

We have an excerpt from the book, an article titled "Russia's Secret Heroes."

Archived in Commentary | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 10:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today, September 27th, is the anniversary of the death of Walter Benjamin. Widely considered to be one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century, Benjamin's work synthesized Marxist philosophy with Jewish mysticism to produce a unique contribution to the fields of philosophy and literary criticism.

The quintessence of a renaissance thinker and outspoken critic of Fascism, Benjamin's work was a powerful response to the totalitarian Nazi regime that plagued his native Germany. Through his writing Benjamin sought to expose the futility of the Fascist belief in historical and political progress by destabilizing the various dogmas underlying it. It was his powerful intellectual condemnation of Fascism that would make him a known target of the Nazi gestapo and eventually lead to his death by suicide on September 27, 1940 in a failed attempt to flee the Vichy regime across the French-Spanish border.

An opponent of the static belief systems that eventually condemned him, he might have appreciated the multitude of philosophical and literary works that have since taken him as their subject and the variety of interpretations each one lends to the significance of his life and death. A most recent and welcomed addition to such works is Michael Taussig's Walter Benjamin's Grave. Through the marvelous essays included in this book, Taussig once again reawakens the inner spirit of Benjamin's finest work, resurrecting the significance of this great thinker for the twenty first century.

We have an excerpt from "Walter Benjamin's Grave", the title essay about the cemetery where Benjamin was buried, eyewitness accounts of his border travails, and the circumstances of his demise.

Archived in Commentary | Literature | Philosophy
Posted by TXM at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple and of Pixar Animation Studios, gave the commencement address to the 2005 class at Stanford. The text of that address has been published in numerous places, online and offline. Toward the end of his address, Jobs said:

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called the Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

The Whole Earth Catalog as internet search engine? Interestingly, this differs only a bit from one of the chapter titles in Fred Turner's book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. The title of Turner's third chapter is "The Whole Earth Catalog as Information Technology." The Whole Earth Catalog, says Turner, "became a network forum":

A comprehensive survey of the Whole Earth Catalog's contents and contributors from its founding in 1968 through 1971 reveals that it featured contributions from four somewhat overlapping social groups: the world of university-, government- and industry-based science and technology; the New York and San Francisco art scenes; the Bay area psychedelic community; and the communes that sprang up across America in the late 1960s. When these groups met in its pages, the Catalog became the single most visible publication in which the technological and intellectual output of industry and high science met the Eastern religion, acid mysticism, and communal social theory of the back-to-the-land movement. It also became the home and emblem of a new, geographically distributed community. As they flipped through and wrote in to its several editions, contributors and readers peered across the social and intellectual fences of their home communities. Like the collaborative researchers of World War II, they became interdisciplinarians, cobbling together new understandings of the ways in which information and technology might reshape social life. Together, they came to argue that technologies should be small-scale, should support the development of individual consciousness, and therefore should be both informational and personal. Readers who wrote in also celebrated entrepreneurial work and heterarchical forms of social organization, promoted disembodied community as an achievable ideal, and suggested that techno-social systems could serve as sites of ecstatic communion.

Over time, both these beliefs and the networks of readers and contributors who developed them, along with the Catalog itself, helped create the cultural conditions under which microcomputers and computer networks could be imagined as tools of liberation.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism explores this transformation of the cultural meaning of computer and network technology—from technologies of dehumanization and centralized bureaucracy to instruments of personal transformation and social revolution. Central to his story are a few influential San Francisco Bay-area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network.

We have two excerpts from Turner's book. You can read the introduction and an excerpt from chapter four about the Whole Earth Catalog and the emergence of digital culture.

Archived in Commentary | History | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by DB at 04:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After the arrests in Britain involving a plot to bomb several airliners bound for the U.S., the Transportation Security Administration says it will train and deploy screeners in airports to identify terrorists using behavioral cues. But is this really the best way to secure the safety of our airways? Bernard L. Harcourt, a University of Chicago professor of law and the author of Language of the Gun, wrote an intriguing op-ed piece for the New York Times in which he discusses the shortcomings of the statistical methods behind behavioral profiling—a discussion that sets the stage for his forthcoming book Against Predicition: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age.

Harcourt's article makes the case that "investing heavily in seemingly high-tech airport security methods like behavioral profiling" is not a viable solution to securing the nation's airways and, in fact, "may make air travel less safe on the whole." Harcourt backs up his claim by citing the "many studies of the ability to detect truth and deception" recently conducted that, he says, have been "largely disappointing."

"A review of the literature," says Harcourt, "published in 2000 found that in experiments where subjects were trying to detect whether others were telling the truth or lying, the subjects had an overall success rate of 56.6 percent—slightly better than a coin toss. In the studies that broke down their data, it was found that subjects were able to determine that they were bieng lied to only 44 percent of the time—meaning that they would have done better closing their eyes and guessing."

In light of such bad odds Harcourt suggests a back-to-basics approach. "Rather than divert hundreds of screeners and untold dollars to high tech-fantasies, we need to invest those resources in hiring more routine screeners and giving them better training in basic," (and unbiased), "searches."

In a social climate that makes it all too easy for law enforcement officials to target and punish individuals without just cause, Mr. Harcourt's book promises to be a timely and significant read. Against Prediction is scheduled for publication early in 2007.

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | Law | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last month at the Association of American University Presses annual meeting, Scott McLemee participated in a session on “Publicity in the Digital Age.” He has posted a version of his remarks on Inside Higher Ed where he writes the Intellectual Affairs column.

Says McLemee: “There may now be more opportunities than ever to connect up readers with the books that will interest them.…The bad news is that, for the most part, it isn’t happening.” The problem, as he sees it, is that “very few people at university presses have made the transition to full engagement with the developing digital public sphere.”

By and large, McLamee believes, university presses are missing the potential publicity available via academic bloggers. Academic bloggers do not receive appropriate review copies of university press books. “It would also help if more publishers were inclined to make extracts from their new books available online,” says McLemee. And “signing up for e-mail notifications of new books from university presses rarely pays off.”

Read the whole piece—it’s worth the time. And, here at Chicago, we’ll try harder.

Archived in Commentary
Posted by DB at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In his June 18 "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine, William Safire gives a nod to Mark Monmonier's new book, From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame. Safire briefly discusses the three "slurs" or "vulgarisms" in the title of the book. (Can you spot them? I knew you could.)

Mr. Safire further nods to us and our colleagues when he says: "This scholarly treatise of topography and cartographic analysis was given a zippy title by the swinging marketers in Chicago." We were taken aback by that word "swinging." Isn't that what the parental units were doing in Ice Storm? Does Mr. Safire know something about the Chicago marketing department that we don't know?

And if "scholarly treatise" sounds a bit dismissive, do yourself the favor of reading an excerpt from Monmonier's zippy little tome.

Archived in Cartography and Geography | Commentary
Posted by DB at 09:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When did restrictions on immigration into the U.S. begin? The first comprehensive legislation to control immigration was enacted in the 1920s. But, as this excerpt from American Immigration by Maldwyn Allen Jones explains, the movement to restrict immigration began decades earlier:

The dedication ceremonies for the Statue of Liberty in October 1886 took place, ironically enough, at precisely the time that Americans were beginning seriously to doubt the wisdom of unrestricted immigration. In the prevailing atmosphere, Emma Lazarus' poetic welcome to the Old World's "huddled masses" struck an almost discordant note. Already the first barriers had been erected against the entry of undesirables. In response to public pressure Congress had suspended Chinese immigration and had taken the first tentative steps to regulate the European influx. Organized nativism, moreover, was just reviving after a lapse of a quarter of a century and would shortly be demanding restrictions of a more drastic and general nature. This renewed agitation was no passing phase. It marked, on the contrary, the opening of a prolonged debate which was not to culminate until the 1920's, when the enactment of a restrictive code brought the era of mass immigration to a close.

Of all this there was barely a hint in the twenty years that followed Appomattox. Know-Nothingism had finally expired in the atmosphere of ethnic unity produced by the Civil War, and the mood of postwar America was such as to militate against a nativist revival. An appearance of social stability precluded any tendency to think of immigrants as a threat to the status quo, and a preoccupation with material growth led Americans rather to emphasize the economic value of immigration. Thus the 1860's and 1870's produced a flood of efforts to encourage immigration rather than to restrict it. Dislike and distrust of immigrants persisted, but remained in most places beneath the surface.

American Immigration is one of the classic texts in the Chicago History of American Civilization series.

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

Okay, we admit to occasionally reading the blog of Mimi Smartypants. She works in Chicago, for one thing, and so we are just trying to stay hip to the blogging scene in Chicago. It's more than that though. As noted by Rebecca J. Roberts in the JournalStar of Lincoln, NE—a town whose hipness is vastly underrated—Ms. Smartypants is "unashamedly articulate and intelligent, with a twisted bent—someone you want to drink yourself silly with on dollar beers while discussing The Chicago Manual of Style and obsessive-compulsive disorder and oral sex, possibly all at the same time."

And you know how we like to talk about The Chicago Manual of Style.

Archived in Chicago | Commentary | Reference and Writing
Posted by DB at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)