Another round of good reviews has poured in for Kasia Boddy's Boxing: A Cultural History. First up is a short but positive review in the June 19th issue of The Economist. The reviewer notes that "[Boddy] provides much merriment along the way as she explores the ways professional fighters excite the imagination of writers, artists and intellectuals."

Right behind it was a praise-filled review in the June 20th issue of The Times of London. The Times reviewer declared

The merit of Kasia Boddy's meticulously researched and deeply intelligent examination of boxing through the ages is that it refuses to take the pop historian's route of lazy simplification. The political and moral ambiguity of the fights that have played such a seminal role in shaping human consciousness are chronicled in all their rich and equivocal detail. . . . Her volume is one of the most intelligent sporting books of recent times.

The June 23rd review in the Australian paper The Age was a little more lukewarm, but the reviewer notes

Kasia Boddy is no faint-heart. She appears to have tracked down every last reference to boxing in prose, poetry, painting, sculpture, film and video. . . . As Boddy shows at scholarly length, in American books and plays and paintings and films, boxing came to carry a heavy symbolic freight. The gloves and the ring stood for pride and courage, sacrifice and nobility, salvation and redemption. They also stood for corruption, greed, betrayal, pain and death. No other sport - indeed, perhaps no other human activity - has been so fraught with meaning.

Read the full review in The Economist
Read the complete Times review
Read the full review in The Age
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Panikos Panayi's Spicing Up Britain: The Multicultural History of British Food was reviewed in the June 1st issue of the Washington Times. Reviewer Martin Rubin gives the book a good review, concluding

Wearing his twin hats of foodie and social historian, Panikos Panayi can appall as well as engender salivation on his tour d'horizon of the multicultural history of British food. His book demonstrates convincingly that whether drawing on its former colonial and imperial possessions (including the United States, with its ever- popular hamburger and other fast foods) or on its European neighbors, the openness of British society has truly enriched its diet and produced its present-day variegated cuisine.

Read the full review in the Washington Times
Learn more about Spicing Up Britain: The Multicultural History of British Food, newly published by Reaktion Books

Kasia Boddy's newly published Boxing: A Cultural History received several good reviews from the other side of the Atlantic over the last couple weeks:

The Sunday Telegraph enthusiastically praised Boxing in its May 25th issue, noting:

If one author deserves real praise for stamina, it is Kasia Boddy. The research she has put into this book, combined with her awesome understanding of Western culture, is staggering. She can write with authority about everything from classical Rome to the Dada movement of the 1920s, from the work of George Bernard Shaw to Samuel Pepys' diary. . . . Her book is a magnificent achievement.

The New Statesman also had high praise for the book, saying:

Boddy's book is a superb work of scholarship, spanning ancient Greece to Mike Tyson. Its reproduced lithographs and colour plates make the book, in its way, a handsome work of art in itself. . . . Boddy referees this heavyweight 15-rounder with elegance, aplomb and rigour.

The Daily Telegraph wasn't quite as enamored with Boxing in its June 5th issue, but overall, the reviewer called the book "compendious, and thoroughly fascinating" and declared it was "an excellent, well-written and beautifully illustrated book."

Read the full Sunday Telegraph review
Read the entire New Statesman review
Read the complete Daily Telegraph review
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The recently published Best of the Brain from Scientific American: Mind, Matter, and Tomorrow's Brain is reviewed in the June issue of Harper's Magazine. Gary Greenberg discusses the book with several other newly published titles on neuroscience and society in a long and wide-ranging essay. He notes:

If you are going to live, whether you like it or not, in thrall to your brain, then your future belongs in some way to the doctors who claim to be the only people qualified to explain you to yourself. . . . The prominent neuroscientists who contribute to Best of the Brain are sure that a full explication of its operation is just a supersized technical challenge that will soon be met.

Read the full Harper's Magazine review
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Kasia Boddy's Boxing: A Cultural History continues its successful start with a short but laudatory review in the June issue of The Atlantic Monthly. The reviewer praises Boddy's work, saying:

"Boddy intelligently takes up—via art, literature, film, and the media—the many issues that have historically veined the sport: 'nationality, class, race, ethnicity, religion, politics, and different versions of masculinity,' plus dialectics like 'brawn versus brains, boastfulness versus modesty, youth versus experience.' Her reach is considerable, but so is her grasp. The result is a sweeping critical history and a perfect power-to-weight ratio."

Read the full Atlantic Monthly review
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Kasia Boddy's newly published Boxing: A Cultural History has hit the ground running with a review by none other than Joyce Carol Oates in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books. In her relatively positive review, Oates notes:

At nearly five hundred densely packed pages, Boddy's investigation into 'the intricate conceptual and iconographic constructions' that surround boxing has the heft of a work twice its length—the equivalent, in book form, of the old-style championship boxing matches that ran as long as thirty rounds, often in the broiling sun. . . . . Boxing: A Cultural History would seem to include everything that has ever been written, depicted, or in any way recorded about boxing no matter how obscure, whimsical, or trivial; a treasure trove for boxing historians and aficionados that might evoke vertigo in less committed readers. . . .

As Kasia Boddy's masterwork of bricolage sweeps on, there comes to be something wonderfully Joycean—oceanic, indefatigable, slightly deranged—in the very quantity of data she has amassed. . . . To read Boddy's book is to confront dozens—hundreds?—of inspired mini-essays.

Read Joyce Carol Oates' entire New York of Review of Books review
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Donato Ndongo, author of the recently published Shadows of Your Black Memory, was interviewed by the Columbia Missourian about his work as a novelist in exile from his native Equatorial Guinea. The interview is on the Columbia Missourian website.

Read the Columbia Missourian interview of Donato Ndongo
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Gwendolyn Wright, author of the recently published USA: Modern Architectures in History, was interviewed by School Library Journal about her work on PBS's History Detectives. The video of the interview can be viewed on the School Library Journal website.

Watch the School Library Journal interview of Gwendolyn Wright
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Donato Ndongo will read from his novel Shadows of your Black Memory and discuss African literature in Spanish at the Instituto Cevantes of Chicago, 31 W. Ohio St., on April 24, 2008.

Donato Ndongo (born 1950 in Neifang, Equatorial Guinea) is a novelist, essayist, journalist, and part of a movement of young Afro-descended authors who have contributed their African experience and traditions to Hispanic culture. Currently, Ndongo is a visiting scholar at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

The event takes place Thursday, April 24, at 6:30 PM. A reception will follow.

Visit the Cervantes Institute of Chicago

Learn more about Shadows of your Black Memory.

Donato Ndongo's novel Shadows of your Black Memory, recently published in English translation by Swan Isle Press, received a glowing review in the March 2nd issue of The Independent:

This accomplished novel describes the love of something mercilessly elusive: a magical and transitory space floating between the past and the future, an eternal present wherein the moon is 'round and red, stained with the blood of the sun hidden behind the mountains.' Originally written in Spanish, Donato Ndongo's remarkable and strikingly original novel appears now in a subtle and elegant translation by Michael Ugarte, which does full justice to the dreamily poetic nature of the narrative.

Read the full Independent review
Learn more about Shadows of your Black Memory, published by Swan Isle

Donato Ndongo's novel Shadows of your Black Memory, recently published in English translation by Swan Isle Press, was reviewed by Emmanuel Harris in the most recent issue of PALARA:

Ugarte's text brilliantly captures the tone and cadence of the original novel and renders a thoughtful, compassionate narrative that readers will undoubtedly cherish. . . . Ndongo weaves an unforgettable tale that is at once Hispanic, bildungsroman and intensely and undeniably African. . . . Shadows of Your Black Memory is a work of outstanding quality and Donato Ndongo is without question an exceptional talent.

PALARA: Publication of the Afro-Latin/American Research Association

Learn more about Shadows of your Black Memory

Motorcycle authors Suzanne Ferriss and Steven Alford were recently interviewed by Adrian Blake on BlogTalkRadio's "Ride!". Listen to their interview as they talk about their book and modern motorcycling culture.

Listen to the authors' interview on BlogTalkRadio's "Ride!"

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The publicity train keeps rolling for Your Brain on Cubs with a review by acclaimed news columnist George Will in his March 31st Newsweek column. He notes

It is not nice to joke about a neurological affliction. Fortunately, we can now comprehend the condition, thanks to a new book, 'Your Brain on Cubs: Inside the Heads of Players and Fans,' a collection of essays by doctors and others knowledgeable about neuroscience and brain disorders associated with rooting for a team that last won the World Series a century ago.

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Dan Gordon was interviewed today about Your Brain on Cubs on NPR's "Science Friday" hosted by Ira Flatow. In anticipation of Opening Day on Monday, Gordon appeared with several other guests on an hour-long baseball-themed segment of the show to discuss the science and psychology of baseball, fan loyalty, and other intriguing topics.

Listen to the full Science Talk interview
Learn more about Your Brain on Cubs: Inside the Heads of Players and Fans

Your Brain on Cubs: Inside the Heads of Players and Fans continues to receive great coverage with a newly published article on the Cubs's official MLB.com website. Writer Jon Greenberg discusses both the March 10th launch party and the book itself, noting

The avuncular [Aryeh] Routtenberg, a neurobiology/psychology professor at Northwestern and self-avowed former Cubs fan (He declared any serious interest kaput after a particularly painful LaTroy Hawkins appearance in 2004), was one of the panelists earlier this month at a book release party at the Cubby Bear for "Your Brain on Cubs: Inside the Heads of Players and Fans," a look into the minds of sports fans and athletes by doctors, psychologists and medical experts who sometimes moonlight as baseball fans.

Routtenberg was a hit among the 80 or so in attendance at the Wrigleyville bar for the panel discussion on the book sponsored by the Illinois Science Council. At one point he livened up a fairly boring discussion by theorizing that a "toxic chemical" resides in the blades of grass at Wrigley Field and releases "negative karma" at crucial moments, like, say, in Game 6 of the 2003 National League Championship Series.

But half-baked theories like that aren't in the popular science book, which has seven chapters, written by 11 contributors, that link science and sports, from the mental reasoning behind superstitions to the neuroscience of hitting.

Read the full MLB.com article
Learn more about Your Brain on Cubs: Inside the Heads of Players and Fans