The Chicago Blog

On Wednesday, the U.S .observed Veterans Day, honoring the men and women who have fought for our country. On Thursday, Liam Ford stopped by the WGN studios to discuss a Chicago monument that serves as a memorial to American soldiers who have perished in war.

Soldier Field, as sports fans nationwide know, is the home of the Chicago Bears. For decades its signature columns provided an iconic backdrop for gridiron matches. But few realize that the stadium has been much more than that. Ford's book Soldier Field: A Stadium and Its City explores how this amphitheater evolved from a public war memorial into a majestic arena that helped define Chicago.

Chicago Tribune staff writer Ford led the reporting on the stadium's controversial 2003 renovation—and simultaneously found himself unearthing a dramatic history. As he tells it, the tale of Soldier Field truly is the story of Chicago, filled with political intrigue and civic pride. Designed by Holabird and Roche, Soldier Field arose through a serendipitous combination of local tax dollars, City Beautiful boosterism, and the machinations of Mayor "Big Bill" Thompson. The result was a stadium that stood at the center of Chicago's political, cultural, and sporting life for nearly sixty years before the arrival of Walter Payton and William "The Refrigerator" Perry.

Ford describes it all in the voice of a seasoned reporter: the high school football games, track and field contests, rodeos, and even NASCAR races. Photographs, including many from the Chicago Park District's own collections, capture these remarkable scenes: the swelling crowds at ethnic festivals, Catholic masses, and political rallies. Few remember that Soldier Field hosted Billy Graham and Martin Luther King Jr., Judy Garland and Johnny Cash—as well as Grateful Dead's final show. Soldier Field captures this history in the making and will captivate armchair historians and sports fans alike.

Check out his interview with Allison Payne below!

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by SXH at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Galbraith years later created a furor at his alma mater [Ontario Agricultural College] by referring to it in a Time interview as in his youth “not only the cheapest but probably the worst college in the English-speaking world.” There was much angry talk in Guelph about rescinding the honorary degree he'd been given as “OAC's greatest living alumnus” … Galbraith eventually backtracked, but only slightly, claiming that his comment applied to OAC in his undergraduate years and that he would allow that Arkansas A&M was no doubt worse, although there was some question whether English was spoken there.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) was a Canadian-American economist whose bestselling books like The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State made him one of the most famous public intellectuals writing on the economic issues of the twentieth century.

Archived in Books for the News
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American consumer activism has a long and colorful history. Lawrence B. Glickman's Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America traces its lineage back to our nation's founding, revealing that Americans used purchasing power to support causes and punish enemies long before the word boycott even entered our lexicon.

Glickman and his book were the subject of an in-depth feature at Rorotoko.com and will be feted soon at the Newberry Library as part of their Newberry Seminars in Labor History. Here are the details:

November 14, 2009—Saturday Symposium: Consumers—The Unknown Social Movement Debating Lawrence Glickman's Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America (University of Chicago Press, 2009). Featuring author Lawrence Glickman, University of South Carolina Commentators: Nan Enstad, University of Wisconsin Madison; Adam Green, University of Chicago; Susan Levine, University of Illinois at Chicago; Nancy MacLean, Northwestern University; and Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland Please Note: The Saturday Symposium will be held from 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM

We hope you can join us at the Newberry!

Archived in Books for the News
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Granta magazine's latest issue is all about our fair city of Chicago, featuring fiction, poetry, literary non-fiction and photography by a number of renown contributors, including Press authors like Nelson Algren, Stuart Dybek, Anne Winters, and Roger Ebert (for the online edition only). Demonstrating the city's role beyond its reputation as "the hog butcher of the world" or the playground of famous gangsters like Al Capone and John Dillinger, Granta's Chicago edition focuses on the city, in acting editor John Freeman's words, "as a microcosm for America" and "a nexus for world culture."

To celebrate the launch of the issue Granta has canvassed some of the best local bookstores and asked them to provide a list of their five favorite books about Chicago. Currently the Granta website is showcasing the selections from 57th Street books. 57th Street's five selections: The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon, Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago by Mike Royko, Division Street: America by Studs Terkel, as well as two recently published by the Press: Neil Harris's The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age, and D. Bradford Hunt's newly released Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing.

With The Chicagoan historian Neil Harris brings the Jazz Age magazine of its title back to life in the pages of his new book which features lavish full-color reproductions of the bi-weekly's art-deco inspired covers and illustrations, as well as reprints of the fascinating editorials and reviews that ran in its pages almost a century ago. And in Blueprint for Disaster Hunt offers a unique perspective on the infamous failure of high rise government housing projects like Cabrini Green and the Robert Taylor Homes that challenges explanations attributing their decline to racial discrimination and real estate interests, arguing instead that Chicago's public housing crisis was a failure of public planning.

See 57th Street Books' list of five "Great Books about Chicago" and find out more about Granta's Chicago issue on the Granta website.

Also on the Press website:

Read an interview with the Neil harris, see a gallery of covers and illustrations from the magazine and sample pages in PDF (7.0Mb) from the book.

Archived in Books for the News | Chicago
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Last week, the Field Museum debuted to much fanfare the renovated Grainger Hall of Gems, where the newest temporary exhibit, "The Nature of Diamonds," will be sparkling through March 28, 2010. But the hall itself, one of the most popular areas of the museum since it opened in 1921, has reemerged polished, shiny, and chock full of dazzling gems. As the Field Musuem notes on its website:

Featured are all the major gemstone varieties, from those known for thousands of years to newcomers discovered in recent decades. You'll behold rare jewels from every era, including an Egyptian garnet necklace more than 3,400 years old; a Chinese jade ornament thought to have been carved about 600 years ago; and a modern pendant created by C.D. Peacock containing a 28.84-carat tanzanite stone—one of the rarest gems in the world. The exhibition combines the beauty of nature with the creativity of human artistry, so don't miss this unique opportunity to follow gems from their raw state to their remarkable setting in stunning jewelry.

To celebrate the reopening of the Grainger Hall, the University of Chicago Press has partnered with the Field Museum to publish Gems and Gemstones: Timeless Natural Beauty of the Mineral World. Featuring nearly 300 color images of the cut gems, precious and semiprecious stones, gem-quality mineral specimens, and fine jewelry on display at the Grainger Hall of Gems, Gems and Gemstones showcases a dazzling array of creations from around the world. Diamonds, sapphires, rubies, amethysts, pearls, topaz, amber—every major gem gets its due in what will be an invaluable source on the subject for years to come.

You can sample pages from the book here or ogle gorgeous jewelry in this birthstone gallery.

Archived in Books for the News
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In July, the Press published At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn, the first book-length study of this major poet. For the book, editor Joshua Weiner gathered together an all-star cast of contributors—including Eavan Boland, David Gewanter, Wendy Lesser, Paul Muldoon, John Peck, Robert Pinsky, and Tom Sleigh&mdash to survey Gunn's career from his youth in 1930s Britain to his final years in California, bringing together some of the most important poet-critics from both sides of the Atlantic to assess his oeuvre.

Now the University of Maryland Library has launched a new digital exhibit, "'Well, I wanted a new vision…': Thom Gunn and 'Misanthropos,'" to celebrate the book's publication. In crafting his essays for the collection, Weiner relied heavily on Maryland's collection of Gunn's papers. My making these materials available, the library offers a rare glimpse into the process of research.

Archived in Books for the News | Poetry
Posted by SXH at 01:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at the Cultural Capital blog (great name, by the way) of the New Statesman, Simon Reid-Henry reflects on philosopher Jacques Derrida on the fifth anniversary of his death. Reid-Henry laments that, "judging by how little noticed the fifth anniversary of his death has been, [Derrida's] star has fallen a long way in the past five years." But he also enthusiastically notes that the great thinker's legacy is being kept alive by publications like the Press's forthcoming The Beast and the Sovereign: "The lectures—which have been gathering dust for the past few years in the archives of the University of California-Irvine—hold out the promise of a more politically relevant Derrida, fit for our times, as they deal with questions of 'force, right and justice'." (He also alludes to "an interview with a fellow intellectual, Mustapha Chérif, shortly before Derrida's death, [in which] he held forth on a range of matters, including Islam, secularism and democracy." Those debates were published last year in the book Islam and the West: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida.)

Despite his mostly gloomy forecast, Reid-Henry ends his remembrance on an optimistic note: "Derrida remains entirely pertinent to the moment." And we here at the Press couldn't agree more. We remain committed to bring the work of this great philosopher to print, and we've already amassed a substantial list. Stay tuned for more!

Archived in Books for the News
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In the wake of the American revolution, world-renowned French naturalist Count Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle opined that the flora and fauna of the New World (humans included) were inferior to European specimens. Buffon's theory of American "degeneracy" began a French and American culture war, as prominent Americans, among them Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, fought to refute the European claims.

As a recent review in Natural History magazine notes, Lee Allen Dugatkin's Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America, vividly recreates these debates, including the amazing story—referenced in the book's title—of Jefferson's shipment of a full-grown moose carcass to Buffon, in the hopes of definitively proving that North American fauna were every bit the equal of Europe's. Laurence A. Marschall writes for Natural History:

He succeeded, with the help of correspondents in New England, who arranged to kill a moose in Vermont, cart it to the coast, and ship its skeleton and skin to Paris, where it arrived around October 1, 1787. Unfortunately, Buffon died within little more than a year of the moose, writing nothing more on the subject, so we will never know if he was convinced of the error of his ways.

Still, though the giant moose may not have made much of an impact on Buffon's Histoire, thanks to Dugatkin's fascinating, not to mention entertaining, chronicle of these debates, we can rest assured that it has found its rightful place in ours.

For more, read Marschall's review in the current issue of Natural History magazine.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News | History | History and Philosophy of Science
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Universities, with their verdant quads and hallowed halls of learning, are celebrated as bastions of ideas and academic freedoms. But more and more often, universities are being operated not as secular temples of education but as corporate business. Gaye Tuchman's exposé of the modern university, Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University, is already wilting the ivy on college walls. Yesterday, Scott Jaschik published a long review of the book on Inside Higher Ed. He writes:

The examples in the book portray an administration much more concerned with making the university look outstanding than actually becoming outstanding. And measures that Tuchman writes are of dubious value (U.S. News & World Report rankings, for example) appear to count much more than the vibrancy of intellectual life or the student learning experience.… Beneath discussions of everything from how academic programs are selected to how faculty members are evaluated, Wannabe is described as a place focused on the bottom line. Administrators talk over and over again (and the book covers periods before the collapse of the economy in the last year) about revenue streams, bringing money into the university, efficiency, etc. "Business-like concerns" dominate the life of the mind, Tuchman writes.

Jaschik notes the reaction of James C. Garland, the retired president of Miami University, in Ohio, who "gave it a mixed review in two posts on his blog. He praises the perspective Tuchman provides as one who is not a decision maker on campus.… [But] he challenges Tuchman on attitudes that he believes are common among professors, and that he thinks unfairly characterize as 'corporate' some policies that may well help students and promote research." Garland, a fellow University of Chicago Press author, also has a book out this fall on the state of education. His Saving Alma Mater: A Rescue Plan for America's Public Universities challenges a change-resistant culture in academia that places too low a premium on efficiency and productivity.

Washington Monthly also joined in the discussion, forecasting Tuchman's ethnography to be "the next higher education book to make a big splash." And Tuchman will appear today on the Colin McEnroe Show on Connecticut Public Radio. With the buzz starting to build, Wannabe U is sure to be one of the more thought-provoking books of the season.

Archived in Books for the News
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This term, the Supreme Court will hear two cases from Florida that call into the question the practice of punishing juvenile offenders with life sentences without the possibility of parole. Bernard E. Harcourt, a professor of law and of political science at the University of Chicago and author of the two books published by the University of Chicago Press—Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy and Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age—published an op-ed piece in this morning's Los Angeles Times calling for the abolition of this practice. He writes:

A 2005 ruling that held the juvenile death penalty unconstitutional, and [the court should] similarly draw a bright line at 18 years of age for imposing life sentences without parole.… The tough-on-crime rhetoric of "lock 'em up and throw away the key" is entirely inappropriate in the case of children. Children's brains, bodies and personalities are still in the process of growing and changing. And many experts in neuroscience and psychology believe that the same changeability that makes young people vulnerable to negative influences and peer pressure also makes them good candidates for reform and rehabilitation.… Juvenile offenders should be given the opportunity to have their sentences reviewed later in life.

For more from Harcourt, be sure to check out his publications from the Press as well as his comprehensive website to learn more about the thinking behind his opinions.

Archived in Books for the News
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If you saw just one episode of the PBS series The National Parks: America's Best Idea, or if you saw them all, you saw certain images repeatedly: brown bears catching salmon at Brooks Falls, a wolf loping across a meadow in Denali, bison lumbering through the snow of Hayden Valley, and Mt. McKinley rising to improbable heights above a cloud bank. These signature images are like a visual glue that Ken Burns used to hold together the multitude of places and people covered in the National Parks series.

These indelible character of these signature images, and all the magnificent images in the series, attest to the remarkable power that photographic images of natural scenery have to create a compelling story and and establish cognitive and emotional connections with the parks as well as with the people who have preserved them. The National Parks series becomes the latest in a long chain of photographic imagery, including the work of Ansel Adams and New Deal filmmakers, to picture nature as a place of grace for the individual and the nation.

This is the subject of a book we published a few years ago, Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform by Finis Dunaway. He tells the story of how visual imagery shaped modern perceptions of the natural world. By examining the relationship between the camera and environmental politics through detailed studies of key artists and activists, Dunaway captures the emotional and spiritual meaning that became associated with the American landscape.

We have an excerpt from the book which discusses the role of coffee-table picture books, especially those published by the Sierra Club under the leadership of David Brower, in creating an environmental consciousness that protected natural areas across the country. One book, This is Dinosaur, played a significant role in the battle over damming the Green River in the area known as Echo Park, in Dinosaur National Monument—a story told in Episode Six of the series. This is Dinosaur, edited by Wallace Stegner, who first called the national parks "the best idea we ever had," was part of the successful campaign to galvanize public and Congressional opinion and defeat the Green River dam project.

Archived in Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science | Literature
Posted by DB at 07:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A recent article for the Chronicle of Higher Education begins with a description of the five and a half months that Timothy S. Pachirat, one of the contributors to Edward Schatz's new book Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power, spent working in a Midwest slaughterhouse—"hanging beef livers on hooks," and using electric prods to move cattle into the holding pens. Such work is not the norm for a PhD in political science. But as the Chronicle's David Glenn explains, a few intrepid individuals in political science (taking a cue from anthropologists) have abandoned reliance on statistics and polls, turning instead to ethnographic fieldwork in order to gain a better understanding of how public opinion is really shaped.

In Pachirat's case, Glenn writes, his fieldwork "allowed him to 'illuminate in tangible ways the political and ethical consequences of the delegation of dirty, dangerous, and demeaning work.' Only participant-observation, [Pachirat] says, can give a full picture of how workers, managers, and federal health inspectors experience power relations." "If nothing else," as Glenn quotes another of the book's contributors, Katherine Cramer Walsh, "such observation might give pollsters intelligent ideas about what questions to ask." (Walsh's own fieldwork on political beliefs can also be found in her books Talking about Race, and Talking About Politics.)

Political Ethnography, discussed at length in the CHE article, is one of the first to analyze the work that results from this new approach to research in political science, and concludes that political ethnography can and should play a central role in the field.

To find out more about this burgeoning trend in poli-sci read David Glenn's article on the Chronicle website or pick up a copy of Edward Shatz's Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power.

Also in the Chronicle recently, three UCP titles made the cut for their recent list of recommend titles in political ethnography:

David D. Laitin, Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change Among the Yoruba

Katherine Cramer Walsh, Talking About Politics: Informal Groups and Social Identity in American Life

And of course,

Edward Schatz, ed., Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
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The Bush presidency may be one of the most criticized in the history of the office, but the one criticism leveled at the previous administration perhaps more often than any is that the former President exploited the threat of terrorism to hurdle constitutional checks and balances on executive power. Arguably, it was the public reaction to Bush's relentless power grab that became one of the driving forces behind the election of the current administration. Yet as New York Times contributor Anand Giridharadas points out in a recent article, President Obama has become the target for some of the very same accusations, as some argue that he too has used the Great Recession, and a renewed terrorist threat from Afghanistan, to push his own left wing agenda.

So with both sides of the aisle directing similar criticisms at one another, do their accusations actually carry any weight? Giridharadas' article cites Peter Alexander Meyers, author of Civic War and the Corruption of the Citizen who argues that in fact, presidential power, regardless of party affiliation, has "been steadily accruing since the nineteenth century, edging both Congress and the public out of decision-making during anything claimed to be a crisis." Giridharadas writes:

Beginning arguably with President Grover Cleveland's clampdown on the railroad strikes using emergency authority, which paved the way for broader regulation of the railroads and eventually of national commerce under subsequent presidents, Mr. Meyers contends that the boundary between foreign war and domestic crisis has slowly blurred in the public mind.

Mr. Meyers is particularly alert to the role of culture in bolstering this trend. As it is, the federal government has limited constitutional authority and ever more intricate problems to manage.

The effect of television and the Internet in an event like 9/11 or the Great Recession, is, he shows, to amplify and rerun and spread the sense of alarm. The result is that citizens have effectively acquiesced over time to two propositions that he believes to be dangerous when held in tandem: that, in crisis, the president knows best; and that a crisis is whatever the president says it is.

Mr. Meyers, also politically sympathetic to Mr. Obama, believes that Mr. Bush did not create on his own the culture of emergency for which his presidency is often blamed, and that Mr. Obama, as a consequence, will not reverse what is not merely one administration's doing.

"It was a monumental mistake to think that 'everything changed on 9/11,'" Mr. Meyers said in an e-mail message. But, he added, "I, with great regret but without surprise, would say that those who think that 'everything changed on November 4' are fooling themselves again."

You can find the complete article on the NYT website.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
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President Barack Obama announced this morning that he is heading to Copenhagen later this week to put in the good word to the International Olympic Committee for his hometown of Chicago, which is competing with Rio, Madrid, and Tokyo to host the 2016 summer games. Meanwhile, Chicago is counting down to the announcement on Friday, which is expected at around 11:30 local time.

It's an exciting week in the Windy City, as the Chicago 2016 bid committee wraps up years of campaigning (which included, as of late, appealing to morning commuters on CTA buses). But no matter what happens Friday, Chicago is undoubtedly a world-class city that deserves the attention and affection of the global community. So, in a last minute appeal to the IOC (who we are sure are loyal readers of The Chicago Blog), the Press presents a reading list that extols Chicago's many virtues. Let friendship shine!

Chicago's motto is "Urbus en Horto," or "City in a Garden." And indeed, modern Chicago more than lives up to its name with an extensive park and beach system (covering more than 7,300 acres). To begin, any city naturalist would do well to check out Sally A. Kitt Chappell's Chicago's Urban Nature:A Guide to the City's Architecture + Landscape. Packed with maps and recommended tours, and bursting with splendid photos, this is an essential guidebook for day-trippers, lifelong Chicago residents, and professionals in landscape architecture, urbanism, and design.

From there, we recommend taking a tour with naturalist Joel Greenberg. His A Natural History of the Chicago Region integrates historical anecdotes and episodes straight from the words of early settlers and naturalists with current scientific information, placing the natural history of the region in a human context, showing how it affects our everyday existence in even the most urbanized landscape of Chicago. (For a more irreverent take on urban nature, check out Jerry Sullivan's Hunting for Frogs on Elston, and Other Tales from Field & Street. And for a more geographical perspective, we recommend John C Hudson's Chicago: A Geography of the City and Its Region.)

If it wins the games, Chicago will be constructing many new stadiums. But in the Chicago River, the city has a built-in venue for rowing and other water sports. David M. Solzman's The Chicago River: An Illustrated History and Guide to the River and Its Waterways, Second Edition is an encyclopedic work—at once guidebook and history—that explores the river's physical character and natural history.

The Windy City is home to some of the country's—and world's—most iconic structures. A site of pilgrimage for many a football fan, Soldier Field is actually much more than a venue for gridiron grudge matches. Liam T. A. Ford explores the landmark's origins and other uses in Soldier Field: A Stadium and Its City, recounting how this amphitheater evolved from a public war memorial into a majestic arena that helped define Chicago.

The Chicago Tribune is one of the city's two dailies, but its headquarters on North Michigan Avenue stands tallest as one of the most unusual buildings in town. The story of how it came to be is recounted in Katherine Solomonson's The Chicago Tribune Tower Competition: Skyscraper Design and Cultural Change in the 1920s. In 1922, the Chicago Tribune sponsored an international competition to design its new corporate headquarters. Both a serious design contest and a brilliant publicity stunt, the competition received worldwide attention for the hundreds of submissions—from the sublime to the ridiculous—it garnered. In this lavishly illustrated book, Solomonson tells the fascinating story of the competition, the diverse architectural designs it attracted, and its lasting impact.

Chicago is home to many celebrated structures, and Franz Schulze and Kevin Harrington's Chicago's Famous Buildings catalogs all of the city's architectural riches. From city's classical legacy of Adler, Sullivan, Burnham, Root, Wright, and Mies van der Rohe to the massive reconstruction of Grant Park around Frank Gehry's Music Pavilion, Schulze and Harrington cover it all, and with a glossary of architectural terms, an extensive index, and more than two hundred new photographs of both old and new buildings, it's comprehensive and illustrative.

Speaking of Grant Park's restoration, Millennium Park was at the center of those efforts, and the resulting public space has quickly become one of the city's newest and most beloved treasures. Born out of civic idealism, raised in political controversy, and maturing into a symbol of the new Chicago, Millennium Park is truly a twenty-first-century landmark, and it now has the history it deserves in Timothy J. Gilfoyle's Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark. Part park, part outdoor art museum, part cultural center, and part performance space, Millennium Park is now an unprecedented combination of distinctive architecture, monumental sculpture, and innovative landscaping.

This city is many things to many people, but to Dominic A. Pacyga it is simply home. Chicago: A Biography is a magisterial account that both considers the famous—from Al Capone and Jane Addams to Mayor Richard J. Daley and President Barack Obama—to the not-so-famous—city's steelyard workers and kill floor operators—and maps the neighborhoods distinguished not by Louis Sullivan masterworks, but by bungalows and corner taverns. Filled with the city's one-of-a-kind characters and all of its defining moments, Chicago: A Biography is as big and boisterous as its namesake—and as ambitious as the men and women who built it.

For an authoritative account of the city, its myths and legends, look no further than the exhaustive Encyclopedia of Chicago. The definitive historical reference on metropolitan Chicago, the Encyclopedia brings together hundreds of historians, journalists, and experts on everything from airlines to Zoroastrians to explore all aspects of the rich world of Chicagoland, from its geological prehistory to the present. (And for more about the city's 230 very different neighborhoods and suburbs, check out Chicago Neighborhoods and Suburbs: A Historical Guide.)

No matter the IOC's decision Friday, Chicago will long prosper as a beacon of life, light, and culture on the prairie. It this continuum—the past, present, and future—that our final two books address. Sometimes it takes an outsider to capture the essence of an individual place. Bessie Louise Pierce's As Others See Chicago: Impressions of Visitors, 1673-1933 collects writings culled from over a thousand men and women who visited the city and commented on the best and worst it had to offer, from the skyscrapers to the stockyards. Taking us back to a time when Chicago was "more astonishing than the wildest visions of the most vagrant imaginations," As Others See Chicago offers an enthralling portrait of an enduring American metropolis.

And finally, Elmer W. Johnson peers into the city's future with Chicago Metropolis 2020: The Chicago Plan for the Twenty-First Century. A guide for those in all spheres of influence who are working to make cities economically and socially vigorous while addressing the greatest problems modern metropolises face, Chicago Metropolis 2020 addresses all facets of urban life, from public education to suburban sprawl, from transportation to social and economic segregation, with the expressed goal of continuing Chicago's tradition of renewal and foresight. An ambitious and necessary plan for a major city at the turn of the century, it aims at nothing less than economic vibrancy, quality of life, and equity of opportunity.

This list is by no means exhaustive, so check out our entire catalog of Chicago-related titles. Undoubtedly the IOC's decision, whatever it is, will factor in a future book about our fair city. So watch this space for exciting developments!

Archived in Books for the News | Chicago
Posted by SXH at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Bright Star, the new film written and directed by Jane Campion, opened in the Chicago area yesterday. Bright Star weaves a story of the romantic love and poetic longing of John Keats and Fanny Brawne during the last three years of Keats' too-short life. Campion's script was, according to today's review in the Chicago Tribune, "inspired by the exceptional Andrew Motion biography Keats," which we published in paperback in 1999.

Motion's biography is an interesting choice for a filmmaker. Andrew Motion is a poet above all; he served as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009. He has numerous books of poetry to his credit, as well as criticism and several other biographies. Keats is a poet's biography of a poet; it is steeped in the words of the poet, shaped primarily by Keats' letters and punctuated by Keats' poems. It is as textual as you can get.

Keats has come down to us, Motion writes, as a poets' poet: the champion of truth and beauty, a sensualist, the archetype of the Romantic poet, who poured out words in a frenetic rush, writing all the poems we know him for in the space of a month or two. But Motion gives us another side of John Keats. Unlike previous biographers, he pays close attention to the social and political worlds Keats inhabited—a young man, trying to climb up from his working class origins, shaped by radical political ideas as well as by notions of truth, beauty, and romantic love.

We have an excerpt from the book which discusses Keats, Fanny Brawne, and Keats' poem to her, "Bright Star."

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | Literature | Poetry
Posted by DB at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week's Chicago Reader has an excellent piece on the failure of Chicago's infamous housing projects and D. Bradford Hunt's new book on the subject Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing. Hunt offers a fresh and insightful look at why the highrise buildings of the Chicago Housing Authority became dilapidated post-apocalyptic wastelands that are now largely demolished. The Reader's Deanna Isaacs writes:

Amid all the unemployment, poverty, and broken families, the institutional racism, political corruption, and bureaucratic incompetence, Hunt believes he's found a relatively simple answer to the question of what went wrong with public housing in Chicago: too many kids. Taking into account all the other influences, he says, that was the single most important factor. The decisions that put multibedroom apartments filled with youngsters into hard-to-access towers were the CHA's blueprint for disaster.

Hunt wants to make it clear that he doesn't blame "families for having lots of kids, or single mothers. The tenants are the victims here," he says. "They wanted what everyone wants: building maintenance, security, and decent schools for their kids—and they fought to make the buildings work." The devil is in "the policy choices." The projects became ungovernable because there weren't enough adults, he says. "This concentration of people under 21 years old was unprecedented in the urban experience."

Hunt argues that these misguided policy decisions—made on both the federal and municipal levels—engendered disorder that pushed out the working class and, consequently, the rents needed to maintain the buildings. The resulting combination of fiscal crisis, managerial incompetence, and social unrest plunged the CHA into a social quagmire in which it still struggles.

To find out more about Hunt's take on the failure of the Chicago projects pick up a copy of this week's Reader or find the article online here.

Archived in Books for the News | Chicago | History | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Football fans nationwide know Soldier Field as the home of the Chicago Bears—where a last-minute field goal defeated the defending champion Pittsburgh Steelers yesterday. But as Liam T. A. Ford's book, Soldier Field: A Stadium and Its City, reminds us, the Bears are latecomers to Soldier Field. For more than half a century before football became the stadium's mainstay, it played host to everything from a worldwide gathering of Catholics, to heavyweight prizefights, and even rodeos—all while playing a pivotal role in the careers of some of Chicago's biggest political bosses as well.

As columnist John Kass notes in a recent article in yesterday's Chicago Tribune, many big names in Chicago politics—Mayor "Big Bill" Thompson and Edward Kelly to name a few—were intimately tied up in the stadium's construction and use as they pushed for the "great public works" that allowed them "to control gargantuan budgets and cement their power."

Drawing an analogy to the city's recent bid for the 2016 Olympic games Kass asks, "Does any of this have the ring of current events?"

As the day for the IOC's decision draws nearer, and debates about the public payoff of the games get louder, as Kass points out, Ford's new book offers some essential insights on the Chicago of today through a revealing look at the past of one of its great civic works.

To find out more read John Kass's article on the Chicago Tribune website.

Archived in Books for the News | Chicago | History
Posted by TXM at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With the flurry of celebrity deaths appearing in the newspapers lately you might think the grim reaper had taken up residence in Hollywood for the season, but in an article for the September 16th Inside Higher Ed Scott McLemee takes note of the passing of a pop cultural icon from the opposite coast in a piece that uses the recent death of author, poet, autobiographer, and punk musician Jim Carroll as a segue into an insightful review of Paul Ricoeur's Living Up to Death—the philosopher's posthumously published meditation on the subject of mortality.

Consisting of one complete essay likely inspired by his wife's approaching death in 1996, and a series of fragments written during the author's own final days, as McLemee notes, the material in Living up to Death is less focused upon an individual's personal experience of dying as it is about "how an individual's death echoes in the memory of others"—a topic particularly relevant to the passing of so many, Jim Carroll included, whose work will likely live on well past their deaths. So for a slightly more insightful perspective on death and dying than most articles on "The Summer of Celebrity Deaths" are likely to offer, read McLemee's article on the Inside Higher Ed website, and pick up a copy of Ricoeur's Living up to Death.

Archived in Books for the News | Philosophy | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Thanks to a certain former governor from Alaska, "death panels" (and the attendant fear that the Obama administration will somehow decide when and how Americans die) have gained increasing currency in the health-care reform debate. Despite repeated assurances from the administration that the bill calls for no such thing (and evidence from fact-checking organizations that dispute Palin's claim), a new poll shows that 41% of Americans believe that "senior citizens or seriously-ill patients would die because government panels would prevent them from getting the medical treatment they needed."

This week, Newsweek magazine devoted its cover to an article (not-so-subtly) titled "The Case for Killing Granny." The piece argues that "the need to spend less money on the elderly at the end of life is the elephant in the room in the health-reform debate" and that in order to rein in health care costs, we, as a nation, despite how uneasy it makes us, are going to need to confront this reality. As the article suggests, "Americans are afraid not just of dying, but of talking and thinking about death. Until Americans learn to contemplate death as more than a scientific challenge to be overcome, our health-care system will remain unfixable." With end-of-life issues at center stage in the health-care reform debate, it's an apt time to look closely at modern death, especially in American hospitals. Medical anthropologist Sharon R. Kaufman does just that in the award-winning And a Time to Die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life.

Over the past thirty years, the way Americans experience death has been dramatically altered. The advent of medical technology capable of sustaining life without restoring health has changed where, when, and how we die. In this revelatory study, medical anthropologist Sharon R. Kaufman examines the powerful center of those changes: the hospital, where most Americans die today. She deftly links the experiences of patients and families, the work of hospital staff, and the ramifications of institutional bureaucracy to show the invisible power of the hospital system in shaping death and our individual experience of it. In doing so, Kaufman also speaks to the ways we understand what it means to be human and to be alive.

As Newsweek notes, "studies show that about 70 percent of people want to die at home—but that about half die in hospitals." Hospitals will continue to be central to the American way of death, and how we die, and who decides when, will be forever linked to the health-care reform debate of 2009, no matter what gets passed into law. Kaufman's book, which you can read an excerpt of here, shines light on the ethical quandaries at the heart of the issue.

Archived in Anthropology | Biology | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by SXH at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New York Times website is running an article and multimedia feature about the first legal wolf hunt in the lower forty-eight states in the last 35 years. Having made an extraordinary comeback in many states, the American gray wolf was recently removed from the list of endangered species by U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar. And in states like Idaho, some claim that the wolf has not only made a comeback, but that its growing populations are now large enough to threaten the lives and livelihoods of ranchers and other rural dwellers. Sportsmen eager to track down these "world class predators" are busy preparing for a unique opportunity in the hunting world while environmental groups like Defenders of Wildlife say that the delisting of wolves will only return the species to near extinction status and destroy an essential part of many ecosystems throughout North America. With both groups claiming that the science supports their point of view, the question of managing wolf populations is a contentious one.

But for the rest of us, L. David Mech and Luigi Boitani's Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation, offers the most systematic, comprehensive overview of wolf biology since 1970. In Wolves, many of the world's leading wolf experts provide state-of-the-art coverage of just about everything you could want to know about these fascinating creatures. Individual chapters cover wolf social ecology, behavior, communication, feeding habits and hunting techniques, population dynamics, physiology and pathology, molecular genetics, evolution and taxonomy, interactions with nonhuman animals such as bears and coyotes, reintroduction, interactions with humans, and conservation and recovery efforts.

Unrivalled in scope and comprehensiveness, Wolves is the definitive resource on these extraordinary animals for scientists and amateurs alike.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News
Posted by TXM at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Millions of children across the country headed back to school this week, and despite some manufactured controversy over President Obama's address to our nation's students, the school year is off to a smooth start. As pupils sharpen pencils and crack spines on new textbooks, teachers and administrators work behind the scenes to ensure a smooth transition to a new school year. Though the focus of the back-to-school push is on the students, we offer here two titles from Dan C. Lortie that focus on the adults in the school building.

When we think about school principals, most of us imagine a figure of vague, yet intimidating authority—for an elementary school student, being sent to the principal's office is roughly on par with a trip to Orwell's Room 101. But with School Principal: Managing in Public, Lortie aims to change that, offering here an intensive and detailed look at principals, painting a compelling portrait of what they do, how they do it, and why.

Lortie begins with a brief history of the job before turning to the daily work of a principal. These men and women, he finds, stand at the center of a constellation of competing interests around and within the school. School district officials, teachers, parents, and students all have needs and demands that frequently clash, and it is the principal's job to manage these conflicting expectations to best serve the public. Unsurprisingly then, Lortie records his subjects' professional dissatisfactions, but he also vividly depicts the pleasures of their work and the pride they take in their accomplishments. Finally, School Principal offers a glimpse of the future with an analysis of current issues and trends in education, including the increasing presence of women in the role and the effects of widespread testing mandated by the government.

Lortie's scope is both broad and deep, offering an eminently useful range of perspectives on his subject. From the day-to-day toil to the long-term course of an entire career, from finding out just what goes on inside that office to mapping out the larger social and organizational context of the job, School Principal is a truly comprehensive account of a little-understood profession.

Upon its initial publication in 1975, Lortie's Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study was heralded as a new classic of the genre; many reviewers dubbed it the best social portrait of the profession since Willard Waller's classic The Sociology of Teaching. In 2002, the Press reissued the book—including a new preface bringing the author's observations up to date. It remains is an essential view into the world and culture of a vitally important profession.

Using a multifaceted approach, Lortie portrays the ethos of the teaching profession—that pattern of orientations and sentiments that is particular to teachers. Schoolteacher opens with a selective history of the structure of the occupation in America, and, with the help of intensive interviews with teachers, observational studies, and surveys, examines how teachers are recruited, socialized, and rewarded in their careers today. Lortie gleans the meanings and feeling teachers attach to their jobs and then connects the forgoing analyzes to provide suggestions for practical actions and further research ideas.

For more titles on education, check out our complete catalog here. Now hit the books!

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by SXH at 01:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last weekend Nevada's Black Rock Desert once again played host to the annual alternative community / neo-pagan festival known as the Burning Man. And since 2005 Katherine K. Chen author of Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event has been there, helping to organize efforts to safely and successfully execute the festival—which can attract upwards of 40,000 people—and organize its participants into a temporary alternative community where (according to the official Burning Man website) "transactions of value take place without money, advertising, or hype…" and "care emerges in place of structural service."

In her book, she draws on her own first-hand experiences of the Burning Man event and its unique community, to offer some fascinating insights into how the event's organizers have managed to pull it off. And beginning this week, she will also be offering her insights on the event as a new guest blogger at orgtheory.net. In her first post she demonstrates how analysis of such "unusual" cases of civic organization such as the Burning Man can be used to understand larger phenomena.

Navigate over to orgtheory.net to read.

Also, visit the author's own Enabling Creative Chaos blog.

Archived in Anthropology | Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Economics | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the Wall Street Journal last week, Allan Meltzer argued that comparisons of the current recession to the Great Depression are "greatly overstated and highly misleading." After explaining why he thinks "many opinion makers insist on inaccurate and frightening analogies that overstate the severity of present conditions," Meltzer goes on to argue that "with recovery in sight,"

A sensible administration would revise its policy. It should start by scrapping what remains of the stimulus. As the world economy recovers, the United States should choose to expand its exports so that it can service its large and growing foreign debts. That means reducing corporate tax rates to increase investment. Instead of implementing policies that increase regulation and raise business costs, we need to increase productivity. And the Fed should soon begin to reduce the massive volume of outstanding bank reserves, which is the raw material for future money growth.

Of course, Meltzer also discusses needed reforms of the financial system in the latest volume of his acclaimed History of the Federal Reserve, which tells the story of one of America's most influential but least understood public institutions. With an eye on the present, Meltzer offers solutions for improving the Federal Reserve, arguing that as a regulator of financial firms and lender of last resort, it should focus more attention on incentives for reform, medium-term consequences, and rule-like behavior for mitigating financial crises.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics
Posted by MM at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At 4:15 this afternoon, Peter Alexander Meyers's Civic War and the Corruption of the Citizen will be the focus of an Author Meets Critics session of the American Political Science Association annual meeting in Toronto. The upcoming event got Toronto Globe & Mail blogger Douglas Bell thinking about Meyers's work, which Bell praised as "the first [book] of what will amount to nothing less than a comprehensive theory of politics." Bell suggested, in fact, that Canadian Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff should pin over his desk a passage from the book:

The hope and flaw of democracy is that it boils down, not to the will of the people, but to the judgment of the Citizen, which is to say the capacity of each person to size up a situation and pitch his or her energies one way or another. The list of impediments and constraints in this practice is as long as a lifetime. This book in its own eccentric way, urges engagement in your own life; lived as it is, this is almost bound to bring you to the position of the Citizen. For every day is something new. Thresholds for action are constantly shifting ground. In the weave of lives lived together with others, the power of the Citizen is as simple as it is unpredictable: Shall I let this pass or shall I stand against it? Is this abuse, this lie, this outrage, the one that will bring me into the streets or will I avert my eyes, my ears again, and close my door.

"Voters long to be treated as Citizens," Bell writes, "not subjects; Barack Obama proved that. This could be Ig's time. But the time it is a wastin'."

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In his book A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music George E. Lewis, the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, has produced the definitive history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Based in Chicago and counting among its members musicians like Anthony Braxton and Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith, the AACM emerged in the '60s as one of the most influential organizations in the history of North American avant-garde music and art. Since then it has become one of Chicago's premier outlets for the edgier side of jazz and has risen to international renown spawning groups like the globe-trotting Art Ensemble of Chicago.

And to this day, largely due to the AACM and its mission to carve out a space in the midst of Chicago's industrial landscape for musical creativity and experimentation, Chicago's avant-garde jazz scene continues to thrive. This Friday you can head on down to the Chicago Jazz Festival at the Petrillo Music Shell to check out the Trio featuring Muhal Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell—both founding AACM members—alongside George Lewis himself on trombone. The Reader's Bill Meyer writes, "putting such uncompromising music on the big stage is a gutsy move by the Jazz Institute, but this may turn out to be the most rewarding set of the festival."

In the meantime, bone up on the history of the jazz in Chicago and all the Great Black Music the AACM helped produce with George E. Lewis's A Power Stronger Than Itself.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Black Studies | Books for the News | Chicago | History | Music
Posted by TXM at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The wildfires in Southern California, which began last week and have yet to be brought under control, now cover 140,000 acres (and can be seen from space). Firefighters continue today to battle the blaze, which comes as California is seized by a budget crisis so severe the governor is putting state property up for sale. (On a local note, the historic Mt. Wilson Observatory, which was once in the path of the flames, seems out of harm's way for the moment. The iconic structure was designed by Daniel Burnham, who also happened to plan our fair city. Burnham's plan of Chicago turns 150 this year, and our book The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City is the current pick for the One Book, One Chicago program.)

Though wildfires grab headlines, the men and women who work tirelessly to fight them are often overlooked. The dangerous profession—two firefighters have already perished in the California blazes—makes for fascinating reading, and it has been the subject of two University of Chicago Press books.

Burning to death is a hellish way to die. Yet every year men and women across the country risk their lives for low pay to fight forest fires. Living in remote encampments and isolated from their friends and family, these firefighters stand ready to chase smoke at a moment's notice. And when a fire does break out, they face a chaotic inferno armed with hand tools, hard hats, and little else. So what motivates them to put their lives on the line and face heat so intense it can melt steel?

In this rugged account of a rugged profession, Matthew Desmond explores the heart and soul of the wildland firefighter. Having joined a firecrew in Northern Arizona as a young man, Desmond relates his experiences with intimate knowledge and native ease, adroitly balancing emotion with analysis, action with insight. On the Fireline shows that these firefighters aren't the adrenaline junkies or romantic heroes they're so often portrayed as. Their choice to take on such hazardous work grows naturally from the values of their rural, working-class upbringing. And the Forest Service cannily taps into—indeed, relies upon—their background as it conditions them to risk their lives and stay calm in the face of danger. Along with exploring how firefighters become acclimated to the hazards of the job, On the Fireline candidly examines the more everyday facets of their lives as well—we hear their jokes, witness their fights, and observe the close bonds they form while waiting for the next alarm to sound.

Matthew Desmond's revealing and often gripping book is truly one of a kind: an immersion into a dangerous world, a moving portrait of the lives of young people, a sophisticated analysis of a high-risk profession—and a captivating read. Read an excerpt here.

Sixty years ago last month, a crew of fifteen of the Forest Service's elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. Two hours after their jump, all but three of these men were dead or mortally burned.

Norman Maclean, best known for authoring the classic A River Runs Through It, spent the final years of his life researching the story of the fire, which for him exemplified a moment when "life takes on the shape of art," whose "remembered remnants… are largely what we come to mean by life and become almost all of what we remember of ourselves." The result is Young Men and Fire, a book which the New York Times Book Review called "a magnificent drama of writing, a tragedy that pays tribute to the dead and offers rescue to the living." For more, you can visit a website dedicated to Maclean, read an excerpt from the book, and hear Smokejumper Bob Sallee tell the story of the fire.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by SXH at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a posting for the Washington Post's Short Stack blog Lawrence B. Glickman, author of Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America weighs in on the recent calls for a Whole Foods boycott in protest of an article written by company executive John Mackey critical of Obama's health care reform program. With a large customer base of progressives ardently in support of reform, many feel betrayed by a company which they assumed would share their political and social agenda.

Glickman's article points out the long history of consumer activism in the United States and the influential role it sometimes plays in American politics (think Boston Tea Party), yet as Glickman writes:

Despite their frequency throughout U.S. history, boycotts have rarely achieved their intended goals.… In the early 1900's, African Americans in twenty-five Southern cities initiated boycotts of segregated streetcars. Most of these campaigns were short-lived, unsuccessful, and lost to history. Yet they marked an early step in the campaign against segregation, which culminated in large measure with another, successful effort—the most famous boycott in the history of the United States: the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and 1956. That movement not only ended Jim Crow transportation in that city but brought the Civil Rights campaign to the forefront of the nation's political agenda and moral consciousness.

Without the early failures, we might never have seen the later and celebrated successes.

Read the complete article on the Washington Post's Short Stack blog.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This past weekend marked the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's deadly landfall on the Gulf Coast. The storm topped New Orleans' levees, wiped out large swaths of the city, and ignited debate about severe weather preparedness as well as racism in modern America.

Though the floodwater has long since receded, the storm will continue to be of sociological, political, and meteorological interest for decades to come. And if the anniversary—not to mention the new storms swirling in the oceans—has you curious about how hurricanes form, travel, and destroy, The AMS Weather Book: The Ultimate Guide to America's Weather is your one-stop shop for information about our country's occasionally violent weather.

Esteemed science journalist and former USA Today weather editor Jack Williams overs everything from daily weather patterns, air pollution, and global warming to the stories of people coping with severe weather and those who devote their lives to understanding the atmosphere, oceans, and climate. Words alone, of course, are not adequate to explain many meteorological concepts, so The AMS Weather Book is filled with engaging full-color graphics that explain such concepts as why winds blow in a particular direction, how Doppler weather radar works, what happens inside hurricanes, how clouds create wind and snow, and what's really affecting the earth's climate.

For Weather Channel junkies, amateur meteorologists, and storm chasers alike, The AMS Weather Book is an invaluable tool for anyone who wants to better understand how weather works and how it affects our lives.

Check out amsweatherbook.com and weatherjackwilliams.com for more information about the book and its author. And don't forget to follow both on Twitter:@amsweatherbook and @weatherjackwill

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by SXH at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rock legend Bob Dylan was stopped by police last month in Long Branch, New Jersey, after anxious homeowners, into whose yard the hooded and sweat-panted troubadour had wandered during a rain storm, reported an "eccentric-looking old man." The reporting officer, a 24-year-old cop, didn't recognize Dylan, who was not carrying identification, and detained him until his identity could be established. The former Robert Zimmerman was in the area on a stopover of his cross-country tour with John Mellencamp and Willie Nelson.

Dylan's run-in with the law provided ample fodder for jokes (even the man himself quipped on his weekly satellite radio show "I am talking to a couple of car companies about possibly being the voice of their GPS system. I think it would be good if you're looking for directions, and you heard my voice, saying something like, "Left at the next street. No, right. You know what? Just go straight.'") and talk-radio discussion about the relevance of 1960s superstars in a twentieth-first century world. But lost in the coverage was a thoughtful debate about small towns—places where everybody knows each other—and the small-mindedness that comes with that insularity. It's a topic that Robert Pinsky takes up in his new book, Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town. And it just so happens that the very small town into which Dylan wandered is Pinsky's birthplace and the focal point of the book.

Thousands of Broadways explores the dreams and nightmares of small towns—their welcoming yet suffocating, warm yet prejudicial character during their heyday, from the early nineteenth century through World War II. The citizens of quintessential small towns know one another extensively and even intimately, but fail to recognize the geniuses and criminal minds in their midst. Bringing the works of such figures as Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Alfred Hitchcock, Thornton Wilder, Willa Cather, and Preston Sturges to bear on this paradox, as well as reflections on his own time growing up in a small town, Pinsky explores how such imperfect knowledge shields communities from the anonymity and alienation of modern life. Along the way, he also considers how small towns can be small minded—in some cases viciously judgmental and oppressively provincial. Ultimately, Pinsky examines the uneasy regard that creative talents like him often have toward the small towns that either nurtured or thwarted their artistic impulses.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by SXH at 01:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today's "Google Doodle" acknowledges the 400th anniversary of the public debut of Galileo Galilei's telescope, commemorating one of the most important technical innovations in the history of science. As the Guardian's Peter Walker writes, it was "exactly 400 years ago today, on 25 August 1609, [that] the Italian astronomer and philosopher Galileo Galilei showed Venetian merchants his new creation, a telescope."

Though a rather crude instrument by today's standards, Galileo's scope allowed him to demonstrate some of the most solid empirical evidence in support of Copernicanism the world had ever seen, producing a revolution, not only in astronomy and cosmology, but in the social fabric of renaissance Italy (and the rest of the western world). With the publication of his observations in Sidereus Nuncius the preeminent scientist immediately found himself at odds with the Vatican and the Medici court, resulting in one of the most famous instances of the intellectual as martyr since Socrates. His struggles to reconcile the troubled relationship between Copernicanism and Scripture, along with his treatment at the hands of the Vatican (put under house arrest for the remainder of his life after being put to trial on suspicion of heresy in 1633), have sparked perennial interest by the writers of the history of science, including Mario Biagioli, professor of history of science at Harvard University, and the author of two books on the subject: Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism and more recently, Galileo's Instruments of Credit: Telescopes, Images, Secrecy.

In Galileo, Courtier Biagioli shows how Galileo attempted to gain acceptance of his scientific ideas by fashioning both his career and his science to the demands of Medici court patronage and its complex systems of wealth, power, and prestige; demonstrating how Galileo's courtly role was integral to his science—the questions he chose to examine, his methods, even his conclusions. And in Galileo's Instruments of Credit Biagioli expands on his previous work to focus on the aspects of Galileo's scientific life that extend beyond the framework of court culture, offering a revisionist account of the different systems of exchanges, communication, and credibility at work in various phases of Galileo's career.

Examining the nexus of science, politics, and power and its inevitable influence on scientific practice, Biagioli's books offer readers a fascinating and insightful look at Galileo and the lasting impact of his discoveries on the occasion of his invention of one of the most important scientific instruments the world has ever known.

For more read two articles on the topic at the Guardian.co.uk or see this excerpt from Galileo's Instruments of Credit.

Archived in Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by TXM at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Edith Wyschogrod, an influential philosopher of religion and Press author, died on July 16 at the age of 79. Over the years, the Press published two of her books, as well as an essay on value in Critical Terms for Religious Studies. Her Saints and Postmodernism was a key book in our Religion and Postmodernism series.

Mark C. Taylor, a long-time Press author, was close friends with Wyschogrod for more than three decades. We asked him for his remembrance of this extraordinary woman, and he offered this thoughtful memorial.

To speak from the burial place is to inhabit a terrain that is not a terrain, an exteriority that is the non-place of ethics, the "space" of authorization of historical narrative.—Edith Wyschogrod, An Ethics of Remembering

Edith Wyschogrod now speaks to us from the burial place—speaks to us from the non-place of ethics she probed so thoughtfully, speaks to us of spirit and ashes, saints and terrorists, calculation and the incalculable, memory and forgetfulness. Memory and forgetting she taught us are never innocent but are ethical acts for which each individual must take responsibility. How to remember? How to forget?

I first met Edith over thirty years ago and for the following three decades we talked every other week. Our conversations ranged from the professional and political to the philosophical and personal. Edith was a person of enormous intelligence, insight, balance and, yes, wisdom. She returned to graduate school after raising a family and over the years rose to positions of considerable influence in the academy. After teaching at City College of New York, Edith moved to Rice University, where she became the J. Netown Razyor Professor of Philosophy and Religion. As her reputation grew, she gained national prominence as a member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the President of the American Academy of Religion. During the years when the culture wars were raging, Edith was often a voice of reason, who was able to persuade the most entrenched opponents to communicate and cooperate.

Though her interests were broad and diverse, consistent issues run through all of her writings. Edith was the first person to introduce the work of Emmanuel Levinas to an American audience. In her 1974 book, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics, she explored the themes of justice, alterity, gift, and ontology in a way that brought together post-Heideggerian continental philosophy with the Jewish tradition. A decade later these issues became the preoccupation of a generation of younger scholars in the study of religion. Her subsequent book, Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger and Man-Made Mass Death (1985), extends her analysis to the relation of modern philosophy to the logic and ideology of twentieth-century death camps. As her interest in contemporary continental philosophy grew, Edith continued to probe ethical questions in unexpected ways. In Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (1990) and An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology and the Nameless Others (1998), she effectively refutes critics who insist postmodernism is blind to ethical questions and is irredeemably nihilistic. In her philosophical writings as in her personal life, Edith always sought to bring together those who deeply disagree. Throughout her entire career, she attempted to establish a civil dialogue between continental and analytic philosophers.

Edith's interests were not, however, limited to philosophy and theology. A life long student of dance and lover of art, she not only analyzed but also drew inspiration from some of the greatest modern artists. Edith steadfastly resisted the trend toward greater specialization and expanded, rather than narrowed, her research, teaching and writing. Her final book, Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy's Others (2006), demonstrates how deeply she immersed herself in the natural sciences and questions related to technology. Though wary of many current developments, Edith's profound understanding of the horrors of the twentieth century did not dim her hope for the possibilities of the twenty-first century.

Books alone do not tell the story of a life. In her devotion to teaching and commitment to family and friends, Edith embodied her ethical commitments in everyday life. In her later years, Edith lectured and wrote about altruism. Having first become interested in this vexing issue in her study of the death camps, she became preoccupied with the logic and motivation of altruistic acts. I suspect she never fully realized the extent to which her investigation of altruism was, in fact, of her own life. Edith was always there when you called and you could trust her absolutely. There are very, very few people of whom I would make that claim.

Part of what made Edith Wyschogrod so special was her sense of proportion. She knew what counts and what doesn't count—and often her calculations were at odds with others. Edith understood what so few in the academic life do not: at the end of the day—and it is now the end of the day—it is more important to discuss baseball with your grandson than it is to discuss philosophy and theology with colleagues.

I am writing these words on a crystal clear August morning as the sun is rising on the beautiful Berkshire Mountains. Edith and I usually would talk early on Saturday mornings. Sometimes our conversations were about our work or the difficulties we were having with colleagues but more often we discussed the seemingly trivial matters that often turn out to be most important. I miss Edith and our long conversations; I still have not accepted that, though I may continue to call, she no longer can answer.—Mark C. Taylor, Columbia University

Archived in Books for the News | Philosophy
Posted by SXH at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week, Rose Friedman, wife of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman and a respected economist in her own right, died at the age of 98. She was preceded in death by her husband of 68 years, who passed in 2006. Rose collaborated with her husband—a leader of the Chicago School of economics—on a number of books, including the classic Capitalism and Freedom, in which Friedman provides the definitive statement of his immensely influential economic philosophy—one in which competitive capitalism serves as both a device for achieving economic freedom and a necessary condition for political freedom.

In 1998, the Press published Two Lucky People: Memoirs, a memorable and lively account of Rose and Milton's lives together, the people they knew, and the work they shared. In its pages, they set the record straight regarding their involvement with world leaders and many of the twentieth century's most important public policy issues. Included in Two Lucky People are previously unpublished documents of significant interest, such as a letter Milton Friedman wrote to General Pinochet in 1975 on his return from Chile along with Pinochet's reply; a memo from Friedman prepared in 1988 for Zhao Zi Yang, the general secretary for the Communist party in China, on economic reform in China; and the transcript of Friedman's subsequent lengthy meeting with Zhao. Together the Friedmans experienced many of the major events that have shaped the history of the modern world—from the Great Depression to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The impact that they have had on world affairs moves their memoirs beyond the merely personal and makes fascinating reading for anyone interested in the history of twentieth-century ideas.

Upon publication, the National Review quipped, "This engaging book recounts the life and contributions of one of America's most influential writers and economists in the second half of the twentieth century. And her husband's no slouch either." Rose was a formidable opponent in policy disagreements, as well; Milton joked when receiving his Medal of Freedom award from George W. Bush in 2002 that she was the only person to ever have won an argument against him.

Rose Friedman exemplified the notion that behind every great man is a great woman. May her legacy live on—and flourish—along with her husband's.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by SXH at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Bibliothèque Nationale de France is reportedly on the verge of a deal with Google to digitize the library's archive. Denis Bruckmann, director of collections, told the Times of London that "the decision was purely financial," for the library, which said it needed more money than France provided for digitizing its collection. "If Google can enable us to go faster and farther, then why not?" Bruckman asked.

Why not Google is a question that Jean-Noël Jeanneney answered several times over during his five-year tenure as president of the BnF, a post from which he argued passionately that the company's mass digitization effort would insidiously extend American cultural dominance abroad. In Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge, he contends that Google's unsystematic approach must be countered by long-term planning on the part of cultural and governmental institutions worldwide—a serious effort to create a truly comprehensive library, one based on the politics of inclusion and multiculturalism.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by MM at 09:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Despite the company's popularity amongst the progressive / environmentally conscious / vegetarian crowd (or as a recent post on the daily KOS notes, all those "willing to shell out three bucks for an organic orange, even in the midst of the worst recession in sixty years") Whole Foods executive John Mackey recently caused a bit of a dilemma for his company's PR department with an article for the Wall Street Journal countering Obama's health care reform program, with a decidedly Republican argument in support of "less government control and more individual empowerment." And while not everyone sees it as an appropriate tactic, the public reaction has by and large been swift and widespread with coverage of the calls for a boycott of the organic grocery chain appearing on news and social networking sites all over the net. (After all, it would be much harder to boycott the health insurance industry itself wouldn't it?)

I've been following the thread on the Whole Foods boycott on The Dish and other sites. My just-published book, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America, which is an examination of boycotts from the American Revolution to the present, offers some historical perspective on some of the issues raised by this boycott. I examine the question of the efficacy of boycotts and argue that two kinds of boycotts are most likely to be successful: very local efforts and national campaigns whose goal is often to score political rather than economic points. (The UFW grape boycott would be a good example.) Aside from their efficacy, I believe that boycotts are an expression of what I call "long distance solidarity" and show that American citizens don't take consumption to be a private or apolitical zone.

Demonstrating how American's have—from the Boston Tea Party to the present—used consumerism as an important component of democratic political involvement, Glickman's Buying Power is an illuminating and timely look at the relationship between political engagement and American consumer culture.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We're used to seeing, usually in the New York Review of Books, J. M. Coetzee's frequent book reviews. And we have first-hand experience (pdf) of what a great job the Notices of the American Mathematical Society does with its book reviews section.

Still, it was a surprise to learn from the complete review that these two reliable patterns of the book reviewing world had combined in such an unexpected way. But perhaps it shouldn't have been surprising at all, because the book Coetzee reviews in the new issue of Notices (pdf) is all about a similar sort of well suited yet not wholly expected pair. About Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics, Coetzee opines that "there are a priori grounds for thinking of poetry and mathematics together, as two rarefied forms of symbolic activity based on the power of the human mind to detect hidden analogies. In other words, an anthology like Strange Attractors, which brings together a hundred and fifty poems with some degree of mathematical content, makes more a priori sense than, say, a collection of famous speeches with some mathematical content."

Well worth reading for reasons beyond its novelty, the review (along with the small matter of that Nobel-winning oeuvre) reminds us for the nth time what a coup it is to have published books both by and about such a brilliant writer.

Archived in Books for the News | Literature | Poetry
Posted by MM at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A recent article in the NYT about a new generation of unmanned combat vehicles being developed by the military features several images of something that appears to be a Roomba outfitted with tank treads and a collection of high-tech sensors, and what looks like an early prototype for one of Darth Vader's hovering imperial drones. And while it is pure speculation as to whether Star Wars actually served as inspiration for the latter, as it turns out the former description is, in fact, accurate. A recent article in the NYT on the military's most recent technological initiatives illustrates how the use of smaller commercial firms like the iRobot company, (which currently sells robots that perform domestic chores like the floor-cleaning Roomba and the Looj gutter cleaning robot), could save the military's modernization initiatives after a broader program dubbed "Future Combat Systems" was scrapped by defense Secretary Robert M. Gates earlier this year. According to the NYT's Christopher Drew:

The changes… illustrate a shift in Pentagon contracting toward more incremental upgrades and a greater use of commercial technologies.… Officials say the new devices will help transform basic infantry brigades, which have shouldered the bulk of the fighting in both wars even though they have far less protection and firepower than armored units.

You can still find the full NYT article on their website, but for a more comprehensive look at the increasing role played by small commercial firms in the the development of military technologies, defense consultant James Hasik's 2008 book Arms and Innovation: Entrepreneurship and Alliances in the Twenty-First Century Defense Industry is a must read.

In Arms and Innovation Hasik argues that smaller firms have a number of advantages relative to their bigger competitors. Such firms are marked by an entrepreneurial spirit and fewer bureaucratic obstacles, and thus can both be more responsive to changes in the environment and more strategic in their planning. This is demonstrated, Hasik shows, by such innovation in military technologies as those that protect troops from roadside bombs in Iraq and the Predator drones that fly over active war zones and that are crucial to our new war on terror.

But for all their advantages, small firms also face significant challenges in access to capital and customers. To overcome such problems, they can form alliances either with each other or with larger companies. Hasik traces the trade-offs of such alliances and provides crucial insight into their promises and pitfalls.

Find out more about Hasik's book on the UCP website.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics
Posted by TXM at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a new review essay on protecting cultural artifacts, n+1's Alexander Bevilacqua singles out Lawrence Rothfield's The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum as "an exposé that is all the more powerful for its calm tone.… His conclusion: Americans in positions of power and responsibility are collectively culpable for the destruction of the Iraqi cultural heritage, a 'pervasive policy failure.'"

Bevilacqua praises Rothfield for delving "deeper into the matter than simply blaming the Bush administration" for the April 2003 looting of the Iraq Museum, when more than 15,000 artifacts—some of the oldest evidence of human culture—disappeared into the shadowy worldwide market in illicit antiquities. In the years since that then, the losses have only mounted, with gangs digging up roughly half a million artifacts that had previously been unexcavated. Bevilacqua writes that:

The US is a global power with no cultural ministry and was not a member of UNESCO from 1984 to late 2003. There were, therefore, structural causes for US negligence in Iraq: for one, "the absence of social networks between cultural heritage advocates and war planners." This, Rothfield notes, stands in contrast to the (otherwise regrettable) British occupation, in which political players had a lively interest in Mesopotamian archaeology and were connected by social networks to scholars. In the American case, within a generally hurried and often inefficient war planning process, protecting cultural sites received little attention. General Tommy Franks was most succinct: "I don't have time for this fucking bullshit." If war planners failed to think of Iraq's heritage, archaeologists and curators share the blame for what came to pass. Archaeologists did not focus on the problem of preserving Iraq's cultural heritage until the fall of 2002. Once they did, they found they had no access to important players in the State and Defense departments.

As a curator and collector tells Rothfield in this excerpt "nobody thought of culture."

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History | Publicity
Posted by MM at 09:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Baseball's pennant races won't heat up for another month, and the crisp fall air that blows in the playoffs is still a far-off fantasy in the sticky humidity of August. But now is a good time to pause and reflect on our national past time, and that's just what Sports Illustrated did earlier this month when it published "25 Things We Miss In Baseball." Among the items SI is nostalgic for—including stirrups, quality mustaches, and World Series day games—the tribute to Bill Veeck, number 18, caught our eye:

We need to stop taking this sport so seriously. The richer baseball becomes as a business, the more protective everyone gets of everything. Fun—the lifeblood and foundation of the game—is being squeezed out. But who in major league baseball with access to the levers of power can make the game pure fun again? Who can give us more innovations like doubleheaders, ivy-covered walls and exploding scoreboards? Nobody. Not anymore, at least. Bill Veeck was an owner, a visionary and, thanks to the 1948 Cleveland Indians, a world champion. He may also have been the last man in the exclusive fraternity of major league baseball who knew that baseball, before it was about multi-million dollar contracts, drug scandals and TV deals, was about fun. That it was a game. And because he did, and because he won anyway, he was one other thing, too: a Hall of Famer.

In addition to all those achievements, Veeck is also, perhaps most improbably, a University of Chicago Press author. Indeed, in 2001, the Press published in paperback Veeck's autobiography, the alliterative Veeck—As In Wreck. An inspired team builder, a consummate showman, and one of the greatest baseball men ever involved in the game, Veeck offers here an uproarious book packed with baseball history and some of the most entertaining stories in all of sports literature. You can read the first chapter, on the career of the first little person to appear in a Major League Baseball game, Eddie Gaedel, here.

And while you're at it, check out an excerpt of Leo "the Lip" Durocher's Nice Guys Finish Last, out next month. Following a five-decade career as a player and manager for baseball's most storied franchises, Durocher offers in Nice Guys Finish Last baseball at its best, brimming with personality and full of all the fights and feuds, triumphs and tricks that made Durocher such a success—and an outsized celebrity.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by SXH at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last weekend marked the fortieth anniversary of the grisly Tate-LaBianca murders perpetuated by the followers of Charles Manson. In the early morning hours of August 9, 1969, four members of the "family" entered the home of Sharon Tate and brutally slaughtered the pregnant actress, her three house guests, and the groundskeeper. The next night, six of Manson's devotees selected their next victims at random, gruesomely executing Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.

Four decades on, the shocking crimes—and the disturbing madman behind them—continue to fascinate. This week, Newsweek magazine dedicated its issue to exploring the appeal of true crime. On the anniversary of the Manson murders, we find ourselves once again asking why such luridly transgressive and horrific individuals are so bewitching. And what compels us to look more closely at these figures when we really want to look away? David Schmid sets out to answer these question and more in his 2005 book Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture.

Considering how serial killers have become lionized in American culture and exploring the consequences of their fame, Schmid ranges from H. H. Holmes, whose killing spree during the 1893 Chicago World's Fair inspired The Devil in the White City, right up to Aileen Wuornos, the lesbian prostitute whose vicious murder of seven men would serve as the basis for the hit film Monster to unveil a new understanding of serial killers by emphasizing both the social dimensions of their crimes and their susceptibility to multiple interpretations and uses. He also explores why serial killers have become endemic in popular culture, ultimately arguing that America needs the perversely familiar figure of the serial killer now more than ever in a post-9/11 world.

Put on the Beatles' White Album, cue up track number 23, and read an excerpt of Schmid's book here.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by SXH at 02:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba and Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso both spoke today at the city's annual August 6 ceremony, held to mark the anniversary of the first atomic bomb attack, which on this day in 1945 decimated Hiroshima and killed or fatally harmed 140,000 people. In today's Daily Telegraph, columnist Kate Day compares the event to past August Sixths with a series of striking photographs that reflect the way the city has incorporated its tragic past into its modern landscape.

John Whittier Treat's Writing Ground Zero delves deep into that process, recounting controversial history of Japanese public discourse around Hiroshima and Nagasaki—a discourse alternatively celebrated and censored—from August 6, 1945, to the present day.

The first complete study of the nuclear theme in Japan's intellectual and artistic life, Writing Ground Zero covers works from the earliest survivor writers, including Hara Tamiki and Ota Yoko, as well as such intellectuals as Oe Kenzaburo and Oda Makoto. Outlining the Japanese contribution to ongoing international debates on ethics and history, it adds a rich context to Prime Minister Taro Aso's hope that, as he put it today, "Japan will … lead the international community toward the abolishment of nuclear weapons and lasting peace."

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | History | Literature
Posted by MM at 09:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sixty years ago today, a crew of fifteen of the United States Forest Service's elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. Two hours after their jump, all but three of these men were dead or mortally burned.

One of those three survivors, Bob Sallee, will speak to the public this week in Montana as part of ceremonies held to observe the anniversary of the conflagration.

Sallee, of course, also figures prominently in Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire, which hauntingly searches out and fits together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy.

In this evocative excerpt, Maclean reflects on how it was that of the crew only Rumsey and Sallee survived.

If you had known ahead of time that only two would survive, you probably never would have picked these two—they were first-year jumpers, this was the first fire they had ever jumped on, Sallee was one year younger than the minimum age, and around the base they were known as roommates who had a pretty good time for themselves. They both became big operators in the world of the woods and prairies, and part of this story will be to find them and ask them why they think they alone survived, but even if ultimately your answer or theirs seems incomplete, this seems a good place to start asking the question. In their statements soon after the fire, both say that the moment Dodge reversed the route of the crew they became alarmed, for, even if they couldn't see the fire, Dodge's order was to run from one. They reacted in seconds or less. They had been traveling at the end of the line because they were carrying unsheathed saws. When the head of the line started its switchback, Rumsey and Sallee left their positions at the end of the line, put on extra speed, and headed straight uphill, connecting with the front of the line to drop into it right behind Dodge.

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | History | Literature
Posted by MM at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Of the stories making today's headlines, the continued technical glitches in the Large Hadron Collider should particularly resonate with some Chicagoans—especially those with PhD's in particle physics. Until the construction of the LHC, the Batavia based Fermilab was home to the world's most powerful supercollider, the Tevatron, so named because of its ability to accelerate particles at energy states of up to one terravolt, (TeV). But since an international consortium of scientists powered up the LHC, which boasts a target operating energy seven times that of the Tevatron, the lab has been preparing to fade into the background as the new collider takes over its position conducting experiments at the cutting edge of particle physics.

But since 2007 several malfunctions have delayed CERN's first sub-atomic smash-ups, and now, as has been widely reported this morning, another malfunction may set those experiments back even further.

As the New York Times notes, this is obviously bad news for researchers and engineers eager to demonstrate the scientific payoff promised by the 15 year, $9 billion dollar project, but for the folks back at Fermilab, it may mean that the Tevatron gets to stay online for a little while longer as scientists whose work doesn't require the full capacity of the LHC return to Batavia during the interim for some good old 1 TeV particle-smashing.

And what better to enhance the experience of Fermilab's return to center-stage, than Lillian Hoddeson, Adrienne W. Kolb, and Catherine Westfall's fascinating historical account of the labs in Fermilab: Physics, the Frontier, and Megascience. Recalling a time when thick glasses and pocket protectors were all the rage and names like Robert R. Wilson and Leon M. Lederman rang throughout the accelerator tunnels, Fermilab takes readers on a fascinating journey through the history of the labs, with a special focus on its early role in the rise of "megascience,"—the collaborative struggle to conduct large-scale international experiments—in the context of the Cold War. Delivering a detailed account of the growth of the modern research laboratory and capturing the drama of human exploration at the cutting edge of science, Fermilab takes an illuminating look at science's past, and perhaps its future as well as scientists return to the labs, granting the accelerator another chance at isolating a Higgs boson, or perhaps shedding some light on the nature of dark matter before the LHC takes over the spotlight—eventually.

For more info see this special website for the book.

Also, for a fascinating look at the life and career of the lab's namesake, who's work also helped set the stage for the research performed there, see this excerpt from Fermi Remembered, edited by James W. Cronin.

Archived in Books for the News | Chicago | History and Philosophy of Science | Mathematics and Physics
Posted by TXM at 01:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ideally suited to mobilization on the shifting terrain of asymmetrical conflict, inherently covert, insidiously plastic, politically potent, irony offers rogue elements a volatile if often overlooked means by which to demoralize opponents and destabilize regimes.

In the "Readings" section of the July issue of Harper's, University of Chicago Press authors Jeff Dolven (Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance) and D. Graham Burnett (Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado) produce a parodic—dare we say ironic?—proposal. In response to aerospace manufacturer and defense contractor Lockheed Martin's request for research initiatives from Princeton University faculty, Dolven and Burnett submitted a plan to remedy the dearth of "sustained, empirical, [and] applied investigation into irony." Their proposal, entitled "The Ironic Cloud" (subscription required), calls for "a sustained three-year, three-pronged, interdisciplinary investigation, drawing on social scientists, engineers, and microbiologists" that will strengthen our defense against "ironizing threat postures" on battlefields across the globe.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, Princeton declined to forward Dolven and Burnett's proposal to Lockheed Martin. However, should other defense contractors wish to become leaders in this "crucial new field of strategic and commericial growth," we publish here, for the first time in print anywhere, Dolven and Burnnett's proposed budget for their ironic project.

Burnett and Dolven — Lockheed Proposal Preliminary Budget

Personnel: $250,000

Outfitting research facilities, by irony type:

Auxesis: $75 Billion
Epitrope: your call
Litotes: .75¢
Mycterismus: $*&#$^
Paralipsis: (never mind)
Sarcasmus: yeah right

Countermeasures and containment:

Botchulism toxin (for immobilizing arched eyebrows etc.): $25,000
Straitjackets (for gesture control): $10,000
Cold showers: $10,000

Total: $750,000
__________

The analysis of irony into its component tropes for the purposes of research has the advantage of refining the vectors and targeting of potential weaponry. We are also mindful of the possibility of siting facilities around the United States to secure broad and ongoing Congressional support: auxesis research in Texas, for example, and litotes in Maine.

Among the principal considerations in irony research is the potential virulence of the subtler strains when released into the general American population. Some epidemiologists recommend that research be conducted in sparsely populated, rural areas, where wide open spaces and a natural resistance to doublespeak can act together to contain outbreaks. Our view—and the basis of our proposal, natch—is that such populations are much more vulnerable than has hitherto been suspected, and we incline therefore to urban sites, where the greater likelihood among cosmopolites of prior exposure in sub-lethal doses makes disabling perplexity less likely. In any case, we recommend that outside of combat situations, irony be handled only by professionals and with "quotation marks."

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by SXH at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week, the New York Times reported on a once-maligned profession making a come back in recession-era Japan: hostessing. It turns out, in the post-boom economy, these high paying jobs are highly coveted and the women who fill them increasingly respected. A few years back, the Press published a book on hostessing called Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club. We called on its author, Anne Allison, to respond to the report. Here's what she had to say:

As the New York Times reported, a profession that once was "scorned" for Japanese women has become much more normalized, even fashionable, in the recent downturn of the economy. This is hostessing: attending to customers by lighting cigarettes, pouring drinks, and massaging egos in a service that is sexual if not sex per se. As a practice, hostess bars and clubs grew up in the high economic growth period of postwar Japan when they were a popular site for business entertainment—trust was built during lavish nights that could cost astronomical sums, all charged on business expense.

It was at the height of the bubble economy that I did my own research on hostess clubs. Interested in how Japanese corporate capitalism was being fed by the fantasy interactions between hostesses and customers, I became a hostess myself, working for four months in a high class hostess club in the Roppongi district of Tokyo. As a graduate student of anthropology at the University of Chicago, this "fieldwork" was the basis of my dissertation, and later book. As I discovered then, a double-standard adhered to the gendering of roles in the hostess world; respectable salarymen treated hostess "play" as a (sanctioned) extension of work, but hostesses who actually worked here (instead of marrying and becoming wives) were stigmatized as socially "dirty."

But things have changed in the post postwar environment of these now recessionary times. Since the bursting of the Bubble in 1991, the economy has been dire, destabilizing jobs particularly for young people (one-half of whom work in so-called irregular jobs characterized by low wages and no security). Women have been harder hit yet (70% are irregularly employed) and, with the job market so depressed, working in what is the current arena of hostessing—kyabakura (cabaret hostess clubs)—has become both a viable and attractive option. Not only are wages higher there, but jobs are more available. But what does it mean that such a profession has become more acceptable for women today in Japan? Is this a sign of a feminist revolution, a greater parity of gender roles and a loosening of the old gendered division of labor (women marry while men work outside)? Hardly, I would say, particularly given that such career options are being driven by the very paucity of viable employment elsewhere in a job market that continues to discriminate against women (and Japan is the worst of all industrialized countries in this regard). Further, while becoming a kyabakura jo (hostess) is seen as desirable by more and more young women, becoming an old-fashioned housewife—staying at home supported by a husband's salary—is even higher-rated for the longer-term economic security such a marriage once assured (but, in reality, is far less likely to today). One of the newest social trends this year, in fact, is konkatsu—hunting for a marriage partner as one does for a job. What women say they are looking for—with marriage and even hostessing too, to a degree—is safety: being comfortable and secure in a material, everyday sense. So, on the one hand, women are still seeking marriages in which men are expected to bring in (more of) the salary. On the other hand, they are taking things into their own hands and working where they can get the best pay—in a realm where the bruised egos of men still need bolstering.

So, a Japan where gender politics is both more of the same, but also beginning to show signs of a change.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by SXH at 03:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This month has been the coldest July in Chicago in 42 years. The temperature—the average reading hovers below 78 degrees—has failed to reach 90 degrees even once. But while the sun may not have brought the heat to Chicago, Jack Williams beamed brightly on the the airwaves yesterday. Williams, the former editor of the USA Today weather page and author of The AMS Weather Book: The Ultimate Guide to America's Weather, appeared with TV weatherman extraordinaire Tom Skilling on the WGN Midday News and with Phil Ponce on Chicago Tonight on WTTW.

Wildly popular local meteorologist Skilling—who is profiled in the book on page 166-167, for all you Cult of Tom members—is especially excited about the book. He writes of it: "Terrific&helllip;The book has received rave reviews from meteorologists, but it is written for anyone with an interest in weather and climate. Its approach is unique among books on these subjects because it introduces its readers to the remarkable people who work in the fields of meteorology and climatology. The product of years of work by one of this country's leading science writers Jack Williams, The AMS Weather Book gives you a first hand look at the weather professionals who fly into hurricanes, the scientists who take arctic ice cores in an attempt to better understand and predict global climate change, the storm chasers who penetrate hurricanes and are in regular pursuit of the nation's tornadoes to the forecasters who devote their work days to predict nature's next move. The book takes the reader into every corner of the meteorological and climatological profession introducing us to those whose life's work is dedicated to producing a better understanding of our weather and climate systems. It's an outstanding book—beautifully illustrated and full of stunning photos of the weather at work."

The video of Skilling's chat with Williams can be seen below:

WIlliams's appearance on Chicago Tonight can be seen here:

For more on the weather (book), head over to amsweatherbook.com for everything we couldn't fit in between the covers. Also be sure to bookmark weatherjackwilliams.com, where Jack opines on all all issues meteorological. And finally, if you are heading to the air show at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh, stop by and say hello to Jack, who will be signing copies of his book—a perfect gift for the pilot in your life—at the author's corner.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by SXH at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Earlier this month at the Brookings Institution, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan talked with former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros about the challenges posed by concentrated poverty and the lessons of recent development initiatives.

In the midst of the discussion, Donovan told Cisneros that:

As I embark on my own path as HUD Secretary, Henry I want to say to you that I'm in the midst of reading Robert Weaver's biography. A great biography that was recently published and I say quite seriously that only in Weaver's example can I find any other HUD Secretary that has brought together the intellectual leadership, the practice, the passion, the commitment that you have brought to the work that you did not only as HUD Secretary, but to literally a lifetime of work in transforming neighborhoods and communities.

The "great biography," of course, can't be any other than Wendell Pritchett's Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City, the first and only biography of the first African American to hold a cabinet position in the federal government. From his role as FDR's "negro advisor" to his appointment, under Lyndon Johnson, as the first secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Robert Clifton Weaver was one of the most influential domestic policy makers and civil rights advocates of the twentieth century. Tracing Weaver's career through the creation, expansion, and contraction of New Deal liberalism, Pritchett's book illuminates his instrumental role in the birth of almost every urban initiative of the period, from public housing and urban renewal to affirmative action and rent control.

We're pleased to know that, in doing so, it's now reached a uniquely important target audience.

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 09:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The NYT published a story today about a new sign of hope for the peaceful co-habitation of the West Bank coming from a group of ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jews living in the outlying communities of Modiin Illit and Beitar Illit. According to the Times, though the rapidly growing populations of their settlements along disputed territories account for much of the Israeli government's claims for the need to expand into Palestinian territory, "these ultra-Orthodox inhabitants often express contempt for the settler movement, with its vows never to move."

The people here, who shun most aspects of modernity, came for three reasons: they needed affordable housing no longer available in and around Jerusalem or Tel Aviv; they were rejected by other Israeli cities as too cult-like; and officials wanted their presence to broaden Israel's narrow border.… Yet they are lumped with everyone else.

With an unsurpassed ideological commitment to their religion, but not to the hardline Zionist movements with which ultra-Orthodox communities are sometimes associated, their desire to divorce themselves from the broader nationalist movement brings new hope for a deal with the Palestinians over many existing land disputes and the possibility of a future in which both groups can co-exist peacefully.

In the summer of 2007 the press also published a book documenting a similar ray of hope for a resolution to the decades long conflict between Israel and Palestine in Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine—an eye-opening chronicle of the author David Shulman's work as a member of the peace group Ta'ayush, which takes its name from the Arabic for "living together." Comprised of both Israeli and Palestinian activists working side by side, Shulman's book documents the group's dogged efforts to pass through Israeli checkpoints to deliver aid, rebuild houses, and physically block the progress of the dividing wall. As they face off against police, soldiers, and hostile Israeli settlers, anger mixes with compassion, moments of kinship alternate with confrontation, and, throughout, Shulman wrestles with his duty to fight the cruelty enabled by "that dependable and devastating human failure to feel."

Offering humanizing accounts of the reality of a people struggling to overcome one of the most complicated conflicts of our era, both the Times article and Shulman's book make for essential reading on the topic.

For more read the complete NYT article or read an excerpt from Shulman's book.

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Donald Westlake, the mystery author who wrote under numerous pseudonyms, including Richard Stark, has been everywhere in the book pages this week. To make sense of this surge in interest in the late great, we called on our colleague and noted Westlake aficionado Levi Stahl.

As one of the characters in his comic crime novels might have put it, for a dead guy, Donald E. Westlake's been pretty busy this past week.

It started on July 17th with the publication by Grand Central of the fourteenth and final volume in Westlake's series of comic novels featuring heister (and schlimazel John Dortmunder, Get Real. All of us fans ran to our local bookshop to pick it up, savoring the very last new Donald Westlake novel we'd ever see … except, as the gloomy and fatalistic Dortmunder himself might have predicted, it's not the last one after all. Charles Ardai, novelist and founder of Hard Case Crime publishers, announced a few days later that he would be publishing a never-before-seen Westlake novel in April: titled Memory, the book tells the story of a man trying to rebuild his life after a savage beating by a cuckolded husband costs him his memory. Written in 1963 and shelved by Westlake after a few failed attempts by his agent to place it with a publisher, the manuscript was passed on to Ardai by Westlake's friend Lawrence Block—who, no great slouch in the crime novel department himself, vouched for its quality in an e-mail to blogger Sarah Weinman; if you don't want to take Block's word for it, you can check out the first chapter at Hard Case Crime's site. Sure, even those of us who are big fans haven't read anywhere near all of Westlake's 100-plus novels (well, except Ethan Iverson, that is), but nonetheless we can't help but be excited at the prospect of an unexpected new one.

To top it all off, today saw the official publication of a Westlake work that's simultaneously new and old: Eisner Award-winning comics artist Darwyn Cooke's graphic adaptation of the first Parker novel, The Hunter, written by Westlake under the name Richard Stark. We've written before about our excitement over this project, and now that we've got a copy, we're definitely not disappointed. The Los Angeles Times's Geoff Boucher praises Cooke's "spare and stylized artwork (think somewhere between the vintage-cool of "Mad Men" and the storytelling flair of Milton Caniff's Steve Canyon comic strips), calling the book "a meticulously faithful adaptation of the 1962 novel of the same name." Parker fans won't want to miss this one; Cooke's definitely done right by the character we've been picturing for ourselves all these years.

And that "1962 novel of the same name?" Well, if you want to see what all the fuss is about, you can still get that one right here, the first installment of our ongoing series of reprints that will take the Parker novels all the way up through 1974's hard-to-find Butcher's Moon. Books seven, eight, and nine in the series--The Handle, The Seventh, and The Rare Coin Score—hit stores last week, all with an introduction by Luc Sante.

With all this going on, Westlake fans might be forgiven for canceling any heists they had planned for the weekend and just settling in with a stack of books.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by SXH at 03:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Flipping through the New York Daily News's slideshow of "The World's Ugliest Animals," we came across more than a few creatures that, in our estimation, certainly do not deserve that dubious distinction (who doesn't love a sloth? or a fish that appears to be wearing lipstick for that matter?) and a few more that definitely do (blobfish, I'm looking at you). But we were surprised to see our old friend the Yeti Crab come in at number six on the list. Connoisseurs of crustaceans will remember the little fellow from the pages of The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss, a veritable treasure trove of the strangest looking lifeforms on earth. While we disagree that the Yeti Crab is ugly—comical and improbable, sure—there are more than a few creatures lurking in the briny fathoms—and the pages of The Deep—that more than earn the insult (scaly dragonfish, anyone?). Check out a gallery of remarkable sea monsters here or order a copy of The Deep for more!

Archived in Books for the News
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The New York Times published an article today on the Senate's striking down of a provision that would expand the rights of gun owners with valid permits to carry concealed weapons across state lines. The provision received support from both sides of the aisle and was only narrowly shot down (pun intended) receiving 58 of the 60 votes required to pass in the Senate. Opposition to the provision came mostly from Democrats who, with the backing of "a number of big-city mayors including Michael R. Bloomberg" have been outspoken about their views that legislation which puts more guns in the hands of citizens is linked to increases in violent crime and homicides, especially in dense urban areas. The NYT article cites Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York and a leading opponent of the amendment:

Lives have been saved with the defeat of this amendment. The passage of this amendment would have done more to threaten the safety of New Yorkers than anything since the repeal of the assault weapons ban.

Other opinions differ. According to John R. Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime—one of the most comprehensive studies of the issue available—it just isn't so. Through his rigorous analysis of years of crime statistics and right-to-carry laws Lott comes to the surprising finding that in fact, more guns equal less crime. Even in dense urban centers like DC and Chicago Lott finds that after these cities instituted rigorous gun control laws banning their possession with city limits, the crime rates in both cities rose.

Now in its second edition, the press is planning the publication of a third edition for early next year with expanded statistics that build upon Lott's previous findings, strengthening an argument that Business Week's Peter Coy has already called "bulletproof." Controversial and hotly debated since its publication, More Guns, Less Crime will continue to define the debate over gun control laws.

For more read our 1996 interview with the author.

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Yesterday news broke of a startling incident that raised troubling questions about racial profiling. Last Thursday, preeminent scholar and respected public intellectual Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was arrested in Cambridge, Mass., where he teaches at Harvard University and directs the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. According to the Associated Press, Gates was arrested after police responded to a call about a possible break-in:

Cambridge police say they responded to the well-maintained two-story home after a woman reported seeing "two black males with backpacks on the porch," with one "wedging his shoulder into the door as if he was trying to force entry."

He was booked for disorderly conduct after "exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior," according to a police report. Gates accused the investigating officer of being a racist and told him he had "no idea who he was messing with,"' the report said.

Gates told the officer that he was being targeted because "I'm a black man in America.'"

The arrest unsettled the university's black community, who voiced concerns about enduring prejudice on and off campus. News that charges against Gates will be dropped (the Cambridge Police Department released a statement today calling the incident "regrettable and unfortunate") will likely do little to calm the roiling tensions.

Gates is best known for his work on African American and multicultural issues as well his commitment to black history and literature. Among his many distinguished publication, he also coedited two volumes issue by the University of Chicago Press. Race, Writing, and Difference is a classic of cultural criticism, providing a broad introduction to the idea of "race" as a meaningful category in the study of literature and the shaping of critical theory. Identities explores such topics as "Gypsies" in the Western imagination, the mobilization of the West in Chinese television, the lesbian identity and the woman's gaze in fashion photography, and the regulation of black women's bodies in early 20th-century urban areas, disrupting the cliché-ridden discourse of identity by exploring the formation of identities and problem of subjectivity.

As the shocking news from Cambridge reveals, race and identity are very much at the heart of Gates arrest and the public outcry in its aftermath. These two books provide a look into Gates's scholarship while anticipating the factors at play in his unfortunate incarceration.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by SXH at 01:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Where were you on July 20, 1969? Newspapers all over the United States posed this question to readers over the past couple of days, generating hundreds of responses that explain how the moon landing, with its worldwide scale, also had countless much more personal dimensions.

"At that moment I had serious doubts about the relevance of our hard work and the ordering of my personal priorities," remembers a then-student archaeologist.

"We had the technology to put a man on the moon," a Vietnam veteran remembers thinking, "yet here I am, dirty and worn out, fighting like it was 1869."

At the National Review Online, John Derbyshire remembers being at work as a bartender in Liverpool when "in a fragile contraption hurled by a spasm of burning gases across a quarter million miles of empty space (and built, as it happens, less than ten miles from my present home), human beings set themselves down on the surface of another world, in an alien landscape."

Though the unfamiliar landscape he traverses is a bit closer to home, and though the moon he writes of is artificial, Phillip Graham's forthcoming The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon has more in common with the lunar landing than its title. In the dispatch from which the book takes its name, Graham remembers walking around the city with his daughter and finding

a huge sphere, like a moon, sitting in the corner of a recessed plaza, made of some sort of durable white canvas; it's lit from within like a giant light bulb, and across its surface are painted stretches of lunar craters and mountain ranges. More than a few of the people passing by stage goofy poses before it, casting themselves as temporary stars of their own remake of E.T.

Perking up, Hannah murmurs, "So pretty." The moon, it appears, has come to earth tonight, magically, just for her, and even if it has left the shifting clouds behind, Hannah radiates concentration and lines up her shots. I decide to give her all the time she needs, suspecting that my daughter must feel some kinship with this fallen moon. After all, they're fellow travelers, taken out of context and isolated. I lean back on a stone bench and marvel at just how private public art can be.

Echoing the wonder expressed by those who thrilled to fuzzy-screened TVs forty years ago, Graham illuminates the intensely personal quality of even our most broadly shared experiences, whether they involve a moon we can reach out and touch, or the one that—except in exceptional circumstances—we can only look up at.

Archived in Anthropology | Biography | Books for the News | History
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The death of human rights worker Natalya Estemirova was widely reported last week as the latest in a string of unsolved murders of members of the small circle of journalists and activists working to expose the extreme brutality of the now decades-old conflict over Chechen independence. Since the 2006 murder of journalist and press author Anna Politkovskaya, whose book A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya offers an eyeopening look at the lives of Chechens caught in the crossfire between violent rebels and an equally violent counterinsurgency, we have followed some of the larger developments in what has been so far an unsuccessful quest to find and try her murderer(s).

And now with the assassination of Estemirova, who according to the UK's Times Online recently "became the first recipient of an award in [Politkovskaya's] name for work for the leading Russian rights group Memorial," the world has also lost one of the most prominent inheritors of Politkovskaya's legacy.

Find out more about Politkovskaya's groundbreaking work in A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya with this excerpt or follow some of the coverage of the assassinations at the New York Times or at the Times Online website.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
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Harry V. Jaffa's Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, first published in 1959, has long been regarded as the standard historiography of the pivotal 1858 debates between Abraham Lincoln during his candidacy for the U.S. Senate and Democratic incumbent Stephen A. Douglas on the issue of slavery. And in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the book's publication, the University of Chicago Press has just reissued a new edition of Jaffa's classic work, acknowledged today by Forbes magazine columnist Peter Robinson in an article that quotes Jaffa himself to demonstrate how the debates "turned on issues that were present at the very founding of western civilization—and that we must face again today."

In the article Jaffa argues that "the issue between Lincoln and Douglas was identical to the issue between Socrates and Thrasymachus in the first book of Plato's Republic." Just as Thrasymachus argues that justice "possesses no independent or objective standing" and is at the mercy of those in power, so too did Douglas argue that "the citizens of Kansas or Nebraska could make slavery acceptable in their states simply by voting in favor of it." The article continues:

Lincoln considered this absurd. "Lincoln thought slavery was wrong," Jaffa explains, "and he did not think a vote of the people could make it right."

Like the Founders, Lincoln believed implicitly in an objective moral order. Today we believe in "values."

"The secretary of state, the president, they all talk about 'values,'" Jaffa says. "A 'value' is a subjective desire, not an objective truth. George Washington said, 'The foundations of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality.' If you had said, 'Oh, Mr. Washington, you mean in our 'values?' Washington would have replied, 'What the hell are you talking about?…'"

Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln. All believed that morality—that goodness and justice—were not merely human constructs but real.

"We have to return to the political thought of the American founders and Abraham Lincoln," Harry Jaffa says. "Nothing is at stake but the salvation of Western civilization."

Naviagte to the Forbes website to read the rest of the article or find out more about the anniversary edition of Jaffa's groundbreaking work. Also see our edition of The Complete Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 edited and with an introduction by Paul M. Angle.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Law | Philosophy | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The City of Chicago is celebrating the five-year anniversary of Millennium Park this week with a series of free outdoor events hosted at the park.

The past five years, though, represent only a tiny fraction of the history of the landmark. And, in Millennium Park, Timothy Gilfoyle tells that story from the beginning, when the site of the park was part of Lake Michigan. To do so, he studied the history of downtown; spent years with the planners, artists, and public officials behind Millennium Park; documented it at every stage of its construction; and traced the skeins of financing through municipal government, global corporations, private foundations, and wealthy civic leaders. As the Chicago Sun-Times observed when the book appeared, "the creation of the $475 million park—which opened in July 2004 four years late and at more than twice its originally projected cost—was fraught with tension among its high-powered participants, including Mayor Richard M. Daley, fund-raiser John H. Bryan and his network of deep-pocket private donors, and architects Frank Gehry and Adrian Smith, among others.… This high-stakes game of push-and-pull forms the dramatic core of historian Timothy J. Gilfoyle's absorbing and lavishly illustrated Millennium Park."

The tribute this lovely book pays to the park will last for many, many birthdays. But our Trivia Quiz based on the book will only be fun before you read Millennium Park and learn all of the answers yourself!

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Chicago | Commentary | History
Posted by MM at 01:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Earlier this month, tensions erupted in the western province of Xinjiang China between the Uighurs, a Turkish-speaking Muslim minority, and the Han Chinese. On July 5, a protest in the capital city Urumqi turned bloody after police tried to break up the demonstration; more than 150 were reported dead and thousands were injured. Sporadic violence in the region continues.

The fighting highlights underlying unrest between China's ethnic minorities and the ruling majority. On Monday, PRI's The World called on Dru Gladney, author of Dislocating China: Muslims, Minorities, and Other Subaltern Subjects, to explain cultural politics in China. You can listen to the story here.

In Dislocating China, Gladney challenges the simplistic view of Western scholars who have tended to accept the Chinese representation of non-Han groups as marginalized minorities, arguing instead that the very oppositions of majority and minority, primitive and modern, are historically constructed and are belied by examination of such disenfranchised groups as Muslims, minorities, or gendered others. Gladney locates China and Chinese culture not in some unchanging, essential "Chinese-ness," but in the context of historical and contemporary multicultural complexity. He investigates how this complexity plays out among a variety of places and groups, examining representations of minorities and majorities in art, movies, and theme parks; the invention of folklore and creation myths; the role of pilgrimages in constructing local identities; and the impact of globalization and economic reforms on non-Han groups such as the Muslim Hui. In the end, Gladney argues that just as peoples in the West have defined themselves against ethnic others, so too have the Chinese defined themselves against marginalized groups in their own society.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by SXH at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At the start of NPR's Bastille Day-inspired story this morning about the music of the French Revolution, listeners were asked to "imagine it's the year 1789 and you are waking up in Paris. You might hear an angry mob outside your window, about to storm the Bastille prison." For those who wish to take this kind of mental journey back in time, Victoria Johnson's Backstage at the Revolution zooms in from the birds-eye view to the street level, where some of that mob is busy searching for weapons—at the Paris Opera.

The Opera, as Johnson tells it, began the Revolution at center stage when a part of the crowd on its way to the Bastille stopped at the opera house for the arms they thought would be stashed inside. The organization's official caterer, Charles Mangin, unlocked the doors and, as he later wrote, "armed the citizens of the District of St. Martin des Champs with halbards, pikes, and sabres belonging to the Opera."

The long story of the Opera's Revolutionary life neither begins nor ends, of course, on that fateful July 14. Johnson's cultural history explains how, despite its reputation for despotism and wasteful extravagance, the Opera survived the Revolution in large part because of its image as a unique icon of French culture.

As NPR's Miles Hoffman surmised in this morning's story, "the people who were in power were aristocrats or members of the upper middle class, and they didn't necessarily have an allergy to high culture. They co-opted classical music. They inspired, or directed, important composers of the time to write great ceremonial pieces for big outdoor celebrations. So music became, in a sense, a tool of the revolution."

Archived in Books for the News | History | Music | Sociology
Posted by MM at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today in Washington, confirmation hearings begin for Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama's choice to replace David Souter on the Supreme Court. If confirmed, Sotomayor will be the first Hispanic justice—and only the third female—to sit on the high court's bench. Despite some conservative outcry over remarks Sotomayor made regarding the wisdom of Latina judges ("I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life"), she is widely believed to be confirmed, barring any unforeseen revelations.

As the court readies to welcome its 111th justice, a refresher on the history of the institution is in order. That's where Robert G. McCloskey's The American Supreme Court comes in handy. The best and most concise account of the Supreme Court and its place in American politics, McCloskey's wonderfully readable book is an essential guide to its past, present, and future prospects of this institution. Revised here in a fourth edition, The American Supreme Court address the Court's most recent decisions, including its controversial ruling in Bush v. Gore and its expansion of sexual privacy in Lawrence v. Texas.

First published more than forty years ago, McCloskey's classic work on the Supreme Court's role in constructing the U.S. Constitution has introduced generations of students to the workings of our nation's highest court. As the Sotomayor hearings get underway, it remains an essential reference for anyone hoping to understand the purpose, scope, and promise of America's highest court.

Be sure also to check out all of our titles on the Supreme Court and the Constitution.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by SXH at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yesterday WBEZ's Worldview invited linguist and author George Lakoff, whose many books include Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, Second Edition and Metaphors We Live By, to discuss the Obama administration's attempts to wage a "political war of words" to combat the conservative political rhetoric that, according to Lakoff, has entrenched itself in the popular American idiom.

In the discussion Lakoff focuses his attention on the radically different rhetoric the Obama administration has used to approach the concepts like torture ("enhanced interrogation techniques" in Cheneyese), and "Islamic terrorism," ("violent extremism" as the Obama administration has phrased it), arguing that in order to win over the American public on many of the hot button issues of the day the president must formulate rhetoric that reconnects them to the personal realities of the issue they face.

Listen to the archived audio of the conversation on the WBEZ website or find out more about Lakoff's books on our website including this excerpt from Moral Politics.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

About a week ago or so, Newsweek devoted quite a few pages of the magazine to listing and briefly describing "which books—new or old, fiction or nonfiction—open a window on the times we live in, whether they deal directly with the issues of today or simply help us see ourselves in new and surprising ways."

It was a surprisingly eclectic list of fifty, opening with The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope before moving on to Lawrence Wright's book on "how 9/11 happened, and why." We can't take responsibility for any of the titles on the Newsweek list (though we do have the best edition of the book at #24, Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley).

A couple of our authors do have books on the list, however: David Hickey at #15, and Edmund S. Morgan at #20.

Beyond the gaze of Newsweek, we have a fairly clear idea which books we've published are opening new windows for our readers, because they are surging in sales beyond expectations. Lots of readers are looking for perspectives on socialism (The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek], on capitalism (Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman), and on America's role in the world (The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr). That's the zeitgeist so far as we can see it.

Archived in Books for the News
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Sixty years ago this August, a crew of fifteen of the Forest Service's elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. Two hours after their jump, all but three of these men were dead or mortally burned.

Bob Sallee, then just seventeen, was one of the survivors. In a new radio interview for American Public Media's The Story Sallee relates the harrowing tale of how he survived the blaze that raced up Mann Gulch. For years Sallee declined to talk about that day, until Norman Maclean—best known for authoring the classic story, A River Runs Through It—contacted Sallee in the course of research for Young Men and Fire.

Maclean, an English professor at the University of Chicago and a former wilderness firefighter, spent the final years of his life researching the story which, for him exemplified a moment when "life takes on the shape of art," whose "remembered remnants… are largely what we come to mean by life and become almost all of what we remember of ourselves."

Listen to the archived audio from Sallee's interview and see our website for Maclean, including an excerpt of the decisive moment of Young Men and Fire.

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | Literature
Posted by TXM at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth apologized yesterday after news broke about the company's now-canceled plan to host a series of sponsored dinners that would have offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record access to Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper's editorial staff.

The sponsorships, advertised as costing between $25,000 and $250,000, had generated waves of criticism. "If it's ugly for a Washington Post reporter to lobby for lobbyists," Slate's Jack Shafer, for one, argued, "it's doubly ugly for the publisher to do the same." Even if dinners had taken place, though, the lobbying they might have facilitated would have stood a high chance of failing.

As the authors of Lobbying and Policy Change point out, sixty percent of recent lobbying campaigns failed to change policy despite millions of dollars spent trying. After examining nearly one hundred issues, the authors found that resources explained less than five percent of the difference between successful and unsuccessful lobbying efforts.

But that doesn't mean, of course, that lobbies don't have any impact at all. When advocates for a given issue do finally succeed, the authors found, policy tends to change significantly—which corresponds with the argument coauthor Frank Baumgartner made with Bryan Jones in their classic Agendas and Instability in American Politics. In the newly updated second edition, Baumgartner and Jones take the long view of several issues—including nuclear energy, urban affairs, smoking, and auto safety—to demonstrate that bursts of rapid, unpredictable policy change punctuate the patterns of stability more frequently associated with government.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at the New York Times' Room for Debate blog, the editors have assembled a star-studded panel to discuss the age old question: What are master's degrees worth? In this economic climate, many students are opting to stay in or return to the university system, rather than face unemployment or underemployment in the "real world." But MA programs are rarely as well-funded as their PhD counterparts (indeed, many programs exist to fund doctorate students), and, upon graduation, newly-minted masters often face crippling student debt. So are MAs worth the cost?

One panelist, Mark C. Taylor, says, well, it depends. Taylor, a longtime Chicago author whose books include After God, Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World without Redemption, and The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture, last made waves in the pages of the Times in April when he called for the university to be "rigorously regulated and completely restructured." Now, Taylor urges caveat emptor:

As a lifelong educator, I believe more education is always a good thing, but buyers must beware. The debt crisis is not limited to governments and universities but extends to students and their families. Far too many students come out of college with substantial debts that plague them for years.

While Taylor urges potential grad students to think carefully about their costs and critically about their needs, other panelists offer other viewpoints. One suggests that while MAs may not make you rich, they can make you more interesting (which sounds like a decent payoff to this masters of humanities degree holder); another says it's probably not worth the debt; and yet another says it depends on the kind of degree.

Whether you are a doctor of philosophy or merely a master of humanity, you can find books here about higher education—as well as its discontents—from Chicago. For those determined to make a go of it in the ivory tower, check out The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career: A Portable Mentor for Scholars from Graduate School through Tenure and read this handy guide to entering graduate school. But, of course, if you've been there, done that, and are now thinking, "Now what?," Susan Basalla and Maggie Debeliu''s guide to life beyond the doctorate, "So What Are You Going to Do with That?": Finding Careers Outside Academia, may be the better guide for your academic afterlife. Whichever route you chose, we have the books to help you along your way.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by SXH at 01:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Chicago Public Library has just announced that Carl Smith's The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City has been selected for its One Book, One Chicago program starting this Fall. According to the CPL website the "One Book, One Chicago encourages all Chicagoans to read the same book at the same time, offering events, discussions, exhibits and more to enhance the experience." And what better topic to bring together our diverse city than the fascinating story of how it all began?

Arguably the most influential document in the history of urban planning, Daniel Burnham's 1909 Plan of Chicago, coauthored by Edward Bennett and produced in collaboration with the Commercial Club of Chicago, proposed many of the city's most distinctive features, including its lakefront parks and roadways, the Magnificent Mile, and Navy Pier. And as Carl Smith's fascinating history points out, the Plan continues to influence debates, even a century after its publication, about how to create a vibrant and habitable urban environment.

Beginning this August, we'll be blogging here, and at our Plan of Chicago Facebook page to keep you updated on all the forthcoming One Book, One Chicago events and discussions. You can also find out more about the program at the Chicago Public Library website.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Chicago | History
Posted by TXM at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Humboldt Park native Michael Mann's new film Public Enemies, which portrays the life and death of one of the Chicago's most notorious criminals, John Dillinger, premiers in theaters this weekend. And in all likelihood, similar to last year's summer blockbuster Batman, you can be sure that thousands of Chicagoans, eager to see their city—or at least bits and pieces of their city—up on the big screen will be packing the theaters.

In light of such predictable crowds most reasonable people will choose to pass on Public Enemies in favor of some more edifying cultural experience this Fourth of July weekend. But, as David E. Ruth's Inventing the Public Enemy: The Gangster in American Culture, 1918-1934 demonstrates, with the right frame of mind—and the right book—Public Enemies might be as edifying as it gets. In Inventing the Public Enemy Ruth scrutinizes innumerable newspaper and magazine articles, scores of novels, and hundreds of Hollywood movies, to show how the media's "gangsters" are less a reflection of reality than a projection created from Americans' values, concerns, and ideas about what sells.

Ruth takes us through a media landscape filled with efficient criminal executives demonstrating the multifarious uses of organization; dapper, big-spending gangsters highlighting the promises and perils of an emerging consumer society; and gunmen and molls guiding an uncertain public through the shifting terrain of modern gender roles. In this fascinating study, Ruth reveals how the public enemy provides a far-ranging and insightful critique of modern culture.

Read more about the book here.

Archived in Books for the News | Chicago | History
Posted by TXM at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

People who live in fear of airplane accidents, flu pandemics, and other such disasters are often cast as alarmist or paranoid, despite the painful fruition of their fears in such incidents as the crash of a Yemeni jet this morning into the Indian Ocean (the second major plane crash this month), the lethal explosion last night of a freight train in northern Italy, and the collision last week of two Washington, D.C., Metro trains.

In Worst Cases, Lee Clark confirms that such individuals are more reasonable and prescient than they're given credit for. Surveying the full range of possible catastrophes that animate and dominate the popular imagination—from toxic spills and terrorism to plane crashes and pandemics—he explores how the ubiquity of worst cases in everyday life has stripped them of some of their ability to shock us. Fear and dread, Clarke argues, have actually become too rare: only when the public has more substantial information and more credible warnings will it take worst cases as seriously as it should. A timely and necessary look into how we think about the unthinkable, Worst Cases is essential reading for anyone attuned to our current climate of threat and fear.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Film and Media | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by MM at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This morning, Bernard Madoff, convicted master-mind of a giant Ponzi scheme that swindled investors out of $65 billion, was sentenced to 150 years in jail. Over the course of two decades, the financier perpetuated a fraud that has erupted into one of the largest scandals of modern Wall Street history. Madoff's name has become synonymous with greed and corruption, but despite his high-profile crimes, he is not symbolic of the country as a whole. In fact, despite recent corporate scandals, the United States is among the world's least corrupt nations.

This wasn't the case, however, in the nineteenth century. Then, municipal governments and robber barons alike found new ways to steal from taxpayers and swindle investors. In fact, in those days, the degree of fraud and corruption in America approached that of today's most unscrupulous developing nations. Exploring this shadowy period of United States history in search of better methods to fight corruption worldwide today, the contributors to Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America's Economic History reveal the measurement and consequences of fraud and corruption and the forces that ultimately led to their decline within the United States. They show that various approaches to reducing corruption have met with success, such as deregulation, particularly "free banking," in the 1830s. In the 1930s, corruption was kept in check when new federal bureaucracies replaced local administrations in doling out relief. Another deterrent to corruption was the independent press, which kept a watchful eye over government and business.

Though the Madoff scandal may seem to herald a new era of American financial malfeasance, it's reassuring to know that corruption is less prevalent now than ever before in our nation's history. And now that the monster behind the massive bamboozlement is behind bars, we can hope for a new age of honesty on Wall Street.

Archived in Books for the News
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After being arrested in October of 2006 for the murder of acclaimed Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, three men—two Chechen brothers and a former police investigator—were found not guilty by a jury on charges that they provided logistical support for her killing. But today's New York Times reports that Russia's Supreme Court has now overturned their acquittals, as well as the acquittal of "a fourth defendant, a former colonel in the F.S.B., the successor to the K.G.B., who faced lesser charges," on the grounds that "there had been procedural violations by the judges and the defense during the first trial." According to the NYT:

Ms. Politkovskaya's colleagues said they were not surprised by the court's decision but said they feared that the new trial would be a distraction from their central concern: finding the gunman and the mastermind in the crime.… Investigators say they believe that Rustam Makhmudov, a brother of the two Chechen defendants, carried out the murder, shooting Ms. Politkovskaya, 48, with a Makarov 9-millimeter pistol on Oct. 7, 2006, in the hallway of her apartment building as she returned home.

He is thought to be in hiding abroad. The person or people who ordered the killing have not been found.

But, the article quotes Sergei Sokolov, deputy editor of the Novya Gazeta where Ms. Politkovskaya worked, saying that whoever ordered the killing, "it is obvious that the one who ordered it is a very prominent person." It has been widely speculated that the motive for Politkovskaya's murder was her outspoken criticism of the Russia's handling of its bloody conflict with Chechnya that began with the movement for Chechen independence in 1991 and continues to the present day. Her second book on the subject, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya was published by the press in 2003. In the book Politkovskaya 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 are profiting from it. A powerful account of what is acknowledged as one of the most dangerous and least understood conflicts on the planet, Politkovskaya's book offers one of the world's only window's into this region and its troubles.

For more on the Politkovskaya's book read this excerpt. Also see our past posts on Politkovskaya's murder and the ensuing trial, or follow the NYT's coverage here.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
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At the press conference he held yesterday to explain his now-infamous weekend jaunt to Argentina, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford seemed to be trying to say "that he screwed up, in the biggest possible way, because he lost his bearings. He lost his self-control. He was indulgent. He forgot that there were other humans in the world." That, at least, is how Slate's John Dickerson tried to explain what others described as Sanford's "rambling" and "strange" apology for the trip and the extramarital affair that prompted it.

Though the governor's behavior may indeed be unorthodox, the scandal itself is, of course, not. A quick survey of news from Italy to Japan to the UK reconfirms that he shares indulgent behavior and loss of self-control with politicians the world over.

While these kinds of antics are mostly painful and costly, the silver lining to their global reach is that they can offer a singularly revealing means of comparing cultures. Mark D. West uses just such a method in Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle, in which he organizes the seemingly random worlds of Japanese and American scandal to explore well-ingrained similarities and contrasts in law and society.

His study of scandals ranging from corporate fraud and baseball cheaters to political corruption and celebrity sexcapades approaches this inherently fascinating phenomenon from an entirely fresh angle. And it will be, if history is any guide, perennially timely.

Archived in Books for the News | Sociology
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This Friday evening, the Chicago officers who policed the 1968 Democratic Convention will reunite for the first time in 41 years. The gathering, billed by organizers as an occasion for the "Chicago Police [to] be honored and recognized for their contributions to maintaining law and order—and for taking a stand against Anarchy," has rankled veterans of the anti-war demonstrations. As the Chicago Tribune reports

Don Rose, a former spokesman for the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, condemned the reunion at a City Hall press conference held by Chicago Copwatch, a community group that is organizing a march to the Fraternal Order of Police hall—where the event is being held—on the night of the reunion.

Rose took issue with the "provocative language" used by reunion organizers. . .

"They seem to be seeking to rewrite history," Rose said. "These were unprovoked assaults by the police."

A counterprotest is planned.

John Schultz, a former professor and chair of the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College, was in the middle of the action on those tumultuous August days. While other writers contemplated the events of the 1968 Chicago riots from the safety of their hotel rooms, Schultz was in the city streets, being threatened by police, choking on tear gas, and listening to all the rage, fear, and confusion around him. We recently reissued the book that resulted from his experience of the protests, No One Was Killed: The Democratic National Convention, August 1968. The book is Schultz's account of the contradictions and chaos of convention week, the adrenalin, the sense of drama and history, and how the mainstream press was getting it all wrong. Read an excerpt.

Also relevant to any discussion of the role of the police in the 1968 DNC protests is Frank Kusch's book Battleground Chicago: The Police and the 1968 Democratic National Convention the only book on Chicago '68 that gives voice to the officers on the street. You can also read an excerpt from that one.

Archived in Books for the News | History
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From nameless Gitmo detainees to warrantless wiretaps, the abuse of executive power by successive presidents continues to make headlines. Even NPR's This American Life entered the fray with a piece that aired last weekend about the 1953 U.S. Supreme Court case that created a "state secret privilege" permitting the executive branch to derail normal judicial procedures for cases it claimed would disclose national security secrets. The TAL story reveals that the original 1953 case, in fact, contained no state secrets at all—calling into question not only the government's motives for moving to dismiss that trial, but undermining the legal basis for the string of cases shut down since—up through the Bush administrations and, unfortunately, the current administration as well.

If this were not enough to concern the ordinary citizen, Peter M. Shane, professor of law at Ohio State University and author of the new book, Madison's Nightmare: How Executive Power Threatens American Democracy argues in a recent article for George Mason University's History News Network that the most systematic White House power grab has garnered much less publicity.

Over the past thirty years, Shane argues, the White House has taken increasing control over "domestic rulemaking activity by administrative agencies"—agencies responsible for regulating everything from the air we breathe to discrimination in schools and entitlements to health care— by subjecting them to intensive scrutiny by the president's Office of Management and Budget. Along with torture, domestic surveillance, and executive secrecy—which Shane also discusses in his book—he sees rulemaking by the executive branch as a significant threat. Shane writes:

The move towards centralization of policy control in OMB should worry Americans for three reasons. First, a tightly controlled bureaucracy is actually less responsive to public sentiment than a bureaucracy in which administrators enjoy some room for independent judgment. This seems counterintuitive because we elect presidents, but not bureaucrats. The problem, however, is that the President is unlikely to reflect the views of the median voter on each and every issue of significant public concern. Because the President chooses agency heads, they will all share his general policy outlook, but each agency head is somewhat more inclined than the President to respect the median voter's view on the particular issues that his or her specific agency addresses.

Second, the system is potentially less accountable to the public. The more decision making is concentrated in the White House, the easier it becomes to use executive privilege as a shield against disclosure of the decision making process. To be fair, recent Presidents have taken some significant steps to make White House regulatory review more open and transparent than it was in the 1980s, but the potential for changing course towards more secrecy is always present.

Third, the system adds months of delay to the process of issuing new regulations. As I detail in Madison's Nightmare, it has never been demonstrated that the reduction in regulatory costs produced by White House review has adequately compensated for the value of benefits foregone by delaying new health, safety and environmental regulations for periods often lasting six months or longer.

Shane concludes:

I wrote Madison's Nightmare partly in the hope of explaining persuasively … how aggressive presidentialism undermines good governance. Much of the book deals with the dramatic questions of torture, domestic surveillance, and executive secrecy that are so often in the news. I hope that the book also brings at least some greater attention to the centralization of presidential policy making control, which deserves far more public attention and debate than it has seen since its inception.

Read the complete article on the History News Network and read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
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Fifteen years ago this month, police in California charged O. J. Simpson with murdering his former wife and her friend, then chased him for about 50 miles before he surrendered, starting a process that would lead to one of the most famous trials in recent memory.

As Robert Ferguson reminds us in The Trial in American Life, an estimated 150 million Americans, the largest TV audience ever, watched the verdict, which arrived "only after thirteen months of media frenzy." These excesses were, well, particularly excessive—but they are not unique. In his fascinating investigation of prominent trials in American history, Ferguson points out that "media frenzies during noteworthy trials have become such a staple of our times that dozens of instances will come to mind."

But despite its cultural prominence, the trial is, in reality, almost extinct. In 2002, less than 2 percent of federal civil cases culminated in a trial, down from 12 percent forty years earlier. And the number of criminal trials also dropped dramatically, from 9 percent of cases in 1976 to only 3 percent in 2002. In his new The Death of the American Trial, Robert Burns warns that this decline could lead not only to the loss of a vaunted institution, but also to the dangerous erosion of American democracy.

Discussing his book in a recent post, the Virginia Quarterly Review blog noted that

high-profile lawsuits with a controversial verdict—the OJ Simpson trial, for example—may have affected social perceptions about the value of decisions delivered by jury, but as Burns demonstrates in his book, the trial is actually a fundamental component of American democracy.… The 20th century has left us with a legacy of famous trials and Supreme Court verdicts that have shaped our history as a country. As we move into the 21st century with even greater challenges ahead, let us hope that this part of our legal system does not come to exist only in television reruns.

Archived in Books for the News | Law
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Debate is already raging over the Consumer Financial Protection Agency just proposed as part of the Obama Administration's plans for regulating the financial system. Yesterday afternoon, the Los Angeles Times blog Money & Co. highlighted representative arguments of those battling on each side of the issue:

"Providing this much power to one agency is truly frightening as they will get to set the rules and pick the winners/losers for the financial sector," the LAT quotes Andrew Busch, a markets strategist at BMO Capital Markets in Chicago, as writing.

The California Public Interest Research Group, on the other hand, argued that "the CFPA would ensure the safety, fairness and sustainability of credit.… The president's proposal addresses a glaring oversight in the regulatory structure by creating an agency designed to monitor the safety of financial products from the viewpoint of the consumer."

As Larry Glickman, author of the forthcoming Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America, might point out, this isn't the first time Americans have argued at high pitch over regulations designed to protect consumers. In Buying Power, he tells the story of the decade-long—and ultimately successful—campaign that conservatives launched in the late 1960s against proposed legislation to create a Consumer Protection Agency.

"Although the fight over the CPA is little remembered today," Glickman writes, "it was front page news throughout much of the 1960s and 1970s, and it sheds light on both the decline of Great Society liberalism and the rise of a new and ascendant style of conservatism."

He concludes, however, that though "Great Society liberalism was defeated in large measure because of its association with consumerism (and visa versa), there is reason to believe that [a] new wave of consumer activism may contribute to an emergent liberalism, one which uses the nexus of the market and the internet to remind people that consumption is a vital component of citizenship in a global society."

Indeed, especially in the current economic climate—as Glickman pointed out recently in the New York Times—Americans are once again aware of the importance of consumer demand.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
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In celebration of Bloomsday, the anniversary of the single day on which the whole of James Joyce's Ulysses unfolds, fans are dressing as characters from the novel, adapting it for Twitter, and engaging in festivities around the world.

What inspires such devotion? "The book carried me through to the far side of my body," the novelist Colum McCann writes in his Bloomsday op-ed in today's New York Times. "[It] made me alive in another time."

Indeed, the novel's time-capsule-like qualities are, in part, what made it such a rich source for Cathy Gere's Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, in which she observes that "it is the astonishing achievement of Joyce's prose—his ear for the exact cadence of people's speech, his memory for the precise texture of everyday life, and his powers of description—that it can carry the reader back one hundred years to experience the labyrinth of modernism in its living, breathing actuality."

Joyce accomplishes this vividness, Gere points out, though a method perhaps best illuminated by T. S. Eliot:

In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him.… It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy that is contemporary history.

But Eliot did not acknowledge, she adds, that the archaeology of Bronze Age Greece had already been using a mythical method of controlling, ordering, and giving shape to prehistoric remains. With Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism Gere unearths this fascinating story, beginning with British archaeologist Arthur Evans's excavation of the palace of Knossos on Crete and tracing and its long-term effects on Western culture. Gere shows how Evans's often-fanciful account of ancient Minoan society fired the imaginations of a generation of intellectuals and artists, including Freud, Georgio de Chirico, Robert Graves, H.D.—and, of course, the father of Bloomsday himself.

Archived in Books for the News
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Over the course of seven years, from 1998 to 2005, Chicago photographer Jed Fielding made nine trips to Mexico City to take pictures at four schools for the blind. Using the directive "Look at me," Fielding got his subjects to turn their faces to his voice; the resulting images draw attention to (and distinctions between) the activity of sight and the consciousness of form.

The photographs Fielding made in Mexico compose the new book from the Press Look at me and are currently on display at the Chicago Cultural Center through July 5.

Michael Weinstein writes of Fielding's work in New City: "An eerie brutality that is not entirely sadistic yet is deeply unsettling haunts Jed Fielding's lucid and shadowed black-and-white portraits of blind children in Mexico, whose expressions run a gamut from joy, through tranquility, sadness, bewilderment and awe, to outright horror. In all cases, the subjects' emotions are sharply delineated, seeming to lack self-conscious control over their release, and conveying a sense of vulnerability, which, of course, is fitting."

And Jen Hazen writes on Chicagoist.com: "Fielding's human exploration of vision, perspective and vitality are captured by his acute detail to light and shadow, surface, and design, where documentary-style street photography meets portraiture. Some may feel that the aesthetics of Fielding's photographs are disturbing, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder, isn't it? And maybe that notion should be questioned more often."

Fielding's work is also being exhibited concurrently at the Catherine Edelman Gallery through July 3. Jed Fielding: 30 Years in the Street assembles the photographer's work from Naples and Mexico City. Writing on thechiguide.com, Ginny Berg notes: "His subjects (both young and old) gesticulate and flirt—showing defiance, playfulness & resilience, and revealing glimpses of lives frozen by Fielding's camera. Fielding transports viewers to a very real and very gritty world that exists in our own time, far away from gallery openings and art shows." You can watch a video of Fielding discussing his work at the Edelman Gallery here.

Archived in Books for the News
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With the re-election of its controversial incumbent Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinijad, Iran has been thrown into turmoil as hundreds of thousands of opposition supporters rally against what they claim to be a rigged election—even causing the government to go so far as to shut down some communications channels in hopes of averting coordinated protests. Meanwhile, the international community, including the United States, remains circumspect in hopes of allowing the Iranian electorate to resolve the dispute on its own terms. Yet despite the White House's perceived restraint, in an article by Sharon Schmickle published today on the website, MinnPost.com, William O. Beeman, author of, The Great Satan vs. the Mad Mullahs: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other, is quoted extensively arguing that Obama's conciliatory diplomatic stance towards the Middle East has, in fact, had a powerful effect on the political climate of Iran. Here's a quick excerpt:

Even while personal liberties were sorely lacking in Iran, there was deep pride in a tradition of reasonably fair elections. Iranians often touted their process as superior to that in Egypt where elections are presumed to be phony.

"So to risk that reputation would require some extreme sense of danger," Beeman said.

Obama poses that danger in his own way.

After he riveted the Muslim world with a major speech this month in Cairo, a pro-Western coalition won Lebanon's elections. Many analysts credited Obama with making a difference there and predicted that Ahmadinejad could be vulnerable to the Obama effect.

For his part, Obama seemed to invite the comparison. Speaking from the White House Rose Garden on Iran's election day, he said: "Ultimately, the election is for the Iranians to decide, but just as has been true in Lebanon, what can be true in Iran as well is that you're seeing people looking at new possibilities."

Continue reading at Minnpost.com or find out more about Beeman's book.

Archived in Books for the News
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Considering the future of the history profession, an article in yesterday's New York Times notes that, to some, "there is no doubt that the days when diplomatic history dominated the profession are gone. — The shift in focus began in the late 1960s and early '70s, when a generation of academics began looking into the roles of people generally missing from history books — women, minorities, immigrants, workers. Social and cultural history, often referred to as bottom-up history, offered fresh subjects."

A definitive account of this dominant trend in U.S. historical writing, The Cultural Turn in U.S. History showcases its freshest and most revealing examples, covering topics that range from nineteenth-century anxieties about greenback dollars to confidence games in 1920s Harlem, from Shirley Temple's career to the story of a Chicano community in San Diego that created a public park under a local freeway.

As Anthony Grafton observed when the NYT interviewed him for the story,

traditional fields aren't disappearing, they are shifting focus. Military history, for example, has switched from battlefield strategy to subjects like "the way soldiers thought about what they were fighting for," he said.

The Cultural Turn in U.S. History at once explains the origins and harnesses the vitality of such approaches, offering a glimpse of the profession's shape in years to come.

Offering a more personal take on the evolution of the discipline, Becoming Historians collects the memoirs of eleven influential historians who came of age just before the upheavals of the 1960s and '70s and helped to transform how history is studied. The self-inventions they chronicle led, in many cases, to the invention of such fields as women's and gender history, social history, and public history, clearing paths in the academy and making the study of the past more capacious and broadly relevant.

As New Books in History editor Marshall Poe said in the introduction to his interview with the book's editors, "academic history ain't what it used to be. If you want to know how and why, read this book."

Archived in Books for the News | History | Reviews
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Monday, June 8, was the inaugural observance of the United Nations' World Oceans Day. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said about the celebration, "The first observance of World Oceans Day allows us to highlight the many ways in which oceans contribute to society. It is also an opportunity to recognize the considerable challenges we face in maintaining their capacity to regulate the global climate, supply essential ecosystem services and provide sustainable livelihoods and safe recreation."

It's hard to believe, but for thousands of years, the world's oceans were considered unimportant—at most a means of global travel and a source of food, at least a dumping ground for trash. We now know that the ecosystem that makes up 99 percent of living space on Earth is our life-support system, regulating the planet’s temperatures, climate, and key chemical cycles. With this global commemoration of our planet's most fragile ecosystem, the world oceans are at last getting the attention they need and deserve.

The University of Chicago Press has long recognized the important role our oceans play in our planet's health. In honor of World Oceans Day, we present this maritime reading list.

Four billion years old, the oceans formed as the Earth's scorching surface cooled, the primordial atmosphere condensed, and torrential rains fell. Their color is the unique signature of our blue planet, their composition a chemical cocktail of remarkable variety, their waters a theater of constant change. Oceans: An Illustrated Reference tells the story of this last great frontier. With hundreds of beautiful full-color photographs and explanatory diagrams, charts, and maps, Oceans combines the visual splendor of ocean life with up-to-date scientific information to provide an invaluable and fascinating resource on this vital realm. Although the oceans are vast, their resources are finite. Oceans clearly presents the future challenge to us all--that of ensuring that our common ocean heritage is duly respected, wisely managed, and carefully harnessed for the benefit of the whole planet.

The deep sea, closed until recently to exploration, was long dismissed as lifeless and uninteresting. Only in the last fifty years or so did the deep sea—with its Lilliputian fauna on the seafloor; its seemingly bizarre life forms at mid-ocean depths; its profusion of life at hot vents, cold seeps, and whale falls; and its coldwater corals and fisheries on seamounts and deepwater reefs—reveal itself to be a source of scientific wonderment and, indeed, the planet’s last unexplored frontier. But just as research and exploration are rendering the briny deep accessible, a host of new threats is endangering it—the spread of trawling into the deep ocean, the buildup of humanity’s worst pollutants in deepwater life-forms, the potential consequences of climate change and ocean acidification, and the future mining of seabed minerals and methane hydrates for hydrocarbons. The Silent Deep tells the stories of discovery of the deep sea, the ecologies of its ecosystems, and of the impact of humans, highlighting the importance of global stewardship in keeping this delicate ecosystem alive and well. Written by world renowned deep-sea ecologist Tony Koslow, The Silent Deep is a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the state of the deep sea today, accessible to anyone interested in ocean science, the story of scientific discovery, and conservation of the earth’s most threatened ecosystems.

If Koslow's book fails to convince you of the need to protect the diversity of life in the deep sea, take one look at the Dumbo Octopus and you'll probably have a change of heart. That little guy is just one of the hundreds of bizarre and beautiful creatures featured in this photographic tour of the briny abyss. 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. An unforgettable visual and scientific tour of the teeming abyss, The Deep celebrates the incredible diversity of life on Earth and will captivate anyone intrigued by the unseen—and unimaginable—creatures of the deep sea.

This fall, the Press will publish Alanna Mitchell's Seasick: Ocean Change and the Extinction of Life on Earth, which is already a runaway bestseller in Canada. Here, veteran science journalist Mitchell dives beneath the surface to the sublime depths of sea and science to give readers a sense of how this watery realm can be managed and preserved, and so with it life on earth. Seasick follows scientists working to understand the oceans, and each chapter features a different group of researchers who introduce readers to the importance of ocean currents, the building of coral structures, and the effects of acidification. With Mitchell at the helm, readers are submersed 3000 feet to gather sea sponges that may contribute to cancer care, see firsthand the lava-lamp-like blob of dead zone covering 17000 square kilometers in the Gulf of Mexico, and witness the simultaneous spawning of corals under a full moon in Panama. The first book to look at the planetary environmental crisis through the lens of the global ocean, Seasick takes the reader on an emotional journey across a remarkable landscape and urges conversation and reverence for the fount from which all life on earth sprang.

Be sure to check out all our books on the ocean. May your seas always be smooth!

Archived in Biology | Books for the News
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Today is the anniversary of the birth of a man who needs no introduction, at least around these parts. On this day in 1867, Frank Lloyd Wright was born in Wisconsin and went on, over a long lifetime, to create some of the most enduring icons of American architecture. One of Wright's most celebrated buildings, the Robie House, sits just a few block from the Press building, and indeed, Wright's prairie-style homes dot the landscape of the South Side and all of Chicagoland. So it is only appropriate, given our proximity to so many of his landmarks, that the Press has issued its share of books on Wright. What follows is a Wright reading list, in honor of his 142nd birthday:

Indispensable for anyone with a passion for Wright's standing architecture, William Allin Storrer's The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright: A Complete Catalog is now available in an updated third edition. Fully revised, Storrer's guidebook features full-color photographs of all extant work along with a description of each building and its history. Storrer also provides full addresses, GPS coordinates, and maps of locations throughout the United States, England, and Japan, indicating the shortest route to each building—perfect for Wright aficionados on the go. See the entries for the Robie and Heller Houses here.

Storrer's The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion, Revised Edition treats the full range of Wright's architecture—from vacation cottages in Montana and Michigan, to such monuments of modernism as the Johnson Wax Building and the Guggenheim Museum, to buildings completed after Wright's death in 1959. Organized chronologically, The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion features a description of each building that details the history of its design, construction, and ownership. Floor plans allow readers intimate access to each of Wright's built works. With nearly 1,000 photographs (many new to this edition), elevations, historical images, and floor plans that show changes in Wright's preliminary plans, this reference is unmatched in its authority.

If you are interested in the man behind the manors, Meryle Secrest's inside look at the architect will not disappoint. Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography focuses on Wright's family history, personal adventures, and colorful friends and family. Secrest had unprecedented access to an archive of over one hundred thousand of Wright's letters, photographs, drawings, and books. She also interviewed surviving devotees, students, and relatives. The result is an explicit portrait of both the genius architect and the provocative con-man.

For more on Wright, be sure to check out all of these Press titles:
The Robie House of Frank Lloyd Wright by Joseph Conners
Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin Building: Myth and Fact by Jack Quinan
Frank Lloyd Wright—the Lost Years, 1910-1922: A Study of Influence by Anthony Alofsin
The Charnley House: Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Making of Chicago's Gold Coast edited by Richard Longstreth
A Guide to Oak Park's Frank Lloyd Wright and Prairie School Historic District by the Oak Park Historic Preservation Committee, Illinois

And check out this excerpt from Cathy Jean Maloney's Chicago Gardens: The Early Years that considers the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Garden.

Happy birthday to an American master!

Archived in Books for the News
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It has been more than five days since Air France Flight 447, en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro, disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean, and the fate of the plane, and its 228 passengers, is still a mystery. Despite a massive sea search, debris from the crash has been difficult to locate, and today Brazilian officials announced what had been pulled from the ocean thus far was likely not from the doomed flight. The cause of the catastrophe, as well, remains a topic of heated speculation: the flight encountered bad weather and turbulence four hours into its journey, but was that enough to cause a modern jet to plunge into the sea?

Our weather and aviation expert Jack Williams, author of The AMS Weather Book: The Ultimate Guide to America's Weather, is back to discuss how his book can help everyone—from reporters and pilots to lay men and women—better understand the weather related to the crash.

Most news stories about the June 1 crash of Air France Flight 447 into the Atlantic Ocean mention that it was flying through an area of thunderstorms when it went down, but these stories leave readers hungry for more information.

The crash has also left many reporters, producers, and editors hungry for the weather knowledge they can use as they try to explain the crash to readers and viewers.

Tim Vasquez, who was an Air Force forecaster who worked in the tropics, is satisfying this hunger for reliable information with his detailed meteorological analysis of the crash on his Web site. As many news stories have noted, the thunderstorms that might have brought down the Air France Airbus were too far from land to be seen by weather radar.

The jet's onboard radar would have seen the storms, but not in the detail that land-based Doppler weather radar would have. In his analysis, Vasquez explains why their air-borne radar might not have given pilots a real appreciation of the conditions they seem to have flown into.

Vasquez uses satellite images, conventional weather charts, and his meteorological knowledge to come up with his informed opinion of what the Air France jet ran into.

In brief, he says the jet was flying through the kind of weather system known as a mesoscale convective system (MCS). As I explain on Page 215 of The AMS Weather Book, "…'mesoscale' refers to weather on a middle-size scale [a few miles to a few hundred miles across]. 'Convective' indicates that convection, the vertical air movements at the heart of thunderstorms, is involved. 'System' means that each storm in a line or cluster of thunderstorms is part of something larger, not just one of several storms that happen to be near each other."

Broadcast meteorologists who read Vasquez's analysis will know what he's talking about. Other reporters, producers, or editors, or men and women who want to understand more about what could have caused the crash will be lost by terms and statements in his report. These include "CAPE," "intertropical convergence zone," and "enhanced evaporational cooling in the upper troposphere enhancing downdraft production."

The AMS Weather Book explains all of these terms and more, such as how Doppler weather radar works and why it can't "see" over the horizon, what weather satellites see, and why thunderstorms are especially dangerous to aircraft.

It is a must-have reference to reporters and editors who want to understand what meteorological terms mean when they are part of a breaking, important news story. As the Air France crash shows, one never knows when the atmosphere will become a key part of an important, breaking news story.

For more on Jack Williams and The AMS Weather Book, follow them on Twitter: @weatherjackwill and @amsweatherbook. And for more from the book, check out supplemental material on this website.

Archived in Books for the News
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Tomorrow, June 5, marks the twentieth anniversary of one of the most famous images in recent memory. On this day in 1989, the Los Angeles Times was probably the first American newspaper to publish a photograph that continued (and still continues) to appear on countless TV screens and in publications around the world: that of an anonymous man who had stepped in front of a row of tanks near the embattled Tiananmen Square.

Four photographers captured this now-iconic moment, and in commemoration of its anniversary they reflect on the the encounter at the New York Times's Lens blog. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, authors of No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, have also reflected—extensively—on the definitive image. In their chapter devoted to Tiananmen imagery, they reconsider its meaning, arguing that the photo can be seen as both a progressive celebration of human rights and as a societal vision limited by individualism. "The choice between the individual and the authoritarian state is any easy one," they conclude, "but either way you get the empty street."

In addition to their extensive discussion in No Caption Needed, Hariman and Lucaites also have discussed the matter on their blog of the same name, where they've posted about, among other things, a Chick-fil-A ad that parodied the Tank Man image.

Archived in Books for the News | Film and Media | History | Politics and Current Events
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With yesterday's passing of legendary blues singer Koko Taylor Chicago has lost one of it's most endearing and authentic blues masters whose career spanned the golden era of the Chicago blues all the way to the present. Though born in Tennessee, Taylor relocated to Chicago in 1952 and called the Windy City home for the rest of her life, releasing her first hit single "Wang Dang Doodle" on Chicago's famous Chess Records alongside other blues icons including Howlin' Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller), Little Walter Jacobs and Muddy Waters. And though most of the aforementioned musicians passed on years ago, for many Taylor's passing is another reminder of the passing of an era when one could still seek out and find the real Chicago blues—when run-down dimly lit clubs were a matter of necessity and not aesthetics, and the heartbreak and loss were real and not feigned for the amusement of high tipping tourists.

In his book Blue Chicago David Grazian undertakes a fascinating study of this sea change in the Chicago blues scene, uncovering how the "authentic" blues experience is today manufactured and sold to contemporary music fans and audiences. Drawing on countless nights in dozens of blues clubs throughout Chicago, Grazian explores the ways in which professional and amateur musicians, club owners, and city boosters define authenticity and dish it out to tourists and bar regulars. He also tracks the changing relations between race and the blues over the past several decades, including the increased frustrations of black musicians forced to slog through the same set of overplayed blues standards for mainly white audiences night after night. In the end, Grazian finds that authenticity lies in the eye of the beholder: a nocturnal fantasy to some, an essential way of life to others, and a frustrating burden to the rest.

From B.L.U.E.S. and the Checkerboard Lounge to the Chicago Blues Festival itself, Grazian's gritty and often sobering tour in Blue Chicago shows us not what the blues is all about, but why we care so much about that question.

Find out more about the book and read an interview with the author on the press website. Or, for an interesting retrospective on Koko Taylor's life and career, check out this article published today on Rolling Stone's Rock & Roll Daily blog.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by TXM at 09:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Roberto Benigni, last seen around these parts leaping over chairs at the Academy Awards to accept his Oscar for the film Life is Beautiful and threatening to kiss everybody, is back stateside with a new project. In his one-man show TuttoDante, Benigni channels his natural ebullience to celebrate his love of the Divine Comedy; all in two hours, the Italian actor riffs on current events and his colorful mangling of English before launching into a verse-by-verse analysis of the fifth canto of the "Inferno," which he then, in a climactic finale, recites, in its entirety, in Italian.

Long known for bridging seemingly incongruous genres (remember, this is the man who directed a comedy about the Holocaust), Benigni here combines stand-up comedy with critical exegesis of a fourteenth century epic poem, which, despite the long odds against it, apparently makes for riveting live theater. Widely popular in his native Italy, the show is now drawing sell-out crowds in San Francisco (where, according to this review, he ran laps around the stage and said, "I feel like to undress myself and to jump on you.") and New York. If your appreciation of Dante's masterwork is, well, a little less exuberant than Benigni's, perhaps a refresher is in order before he comes to your town and, in his endearingly broken English, shames you for dozing during your Medieval Literature survey in college. For a task like this, we recommend you enter Danteworlds.

Your tour guide will be Guy P. Raffa, an associate professor of Italian at the University of Texas at Austin who has been teaching the poem for many years to undergraduates, and your itinerary will adhere closely to the path taken by Dante himself through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The Complete Danteworlds: A Reader's Guide to the Divine Comedy takes both a textual and geographical approach to the work and, canto by canto, region by region, provides readers with a map of the entire poem. With Raffa's able assistance, readers struggling to make sense of the epic's multitudinous characters, references, and themes at last have a suitable resource to help them navigate Dante's underworld.

We recommend tucking a copy of The Complete Danteworlds into your pocket or purse to refer to during the next performance of TuttoDante. Between Raffa and Beningi, we're assured you'll have a new outlook on the old poem. Meglio tardi che mai!!

Archived in Books for the News
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In his column for today's New York Times, John Tierney reports on a recent study that provided what researcher Ben Hayden touted as "the first evidence that monkeys, like people, have 'would-have, could-have, should-have' thoughts. "

Hayden and two other researchers scanned the brains of monkeys who were "trying to win a large prize of juice by guessing where it was hidden. When the monkeys picked wrongly and were shown the location of the prize, the neurons in their brain clearly registered what might have been."

Weighing in on these findings, Mark Bekoff, author of the new Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, told Tierney that "these animals are not as emotionally sophisticated as humans, but they have to know what's right and wrong because it's the only way their social groups can work. Regret is essential, especially in the wild. Humans are very forgiving to their pets, but if a coyote in the wild gets a reputation as a cheater, he's ignored or ostracized, and he ends up leaving the group. "

In fact, as Bekoff and coauthor Jessica Pierce reveal in Wild Justice, animals exhibit a broad repertoire of such behaviors, including fairness, empathy, trust, and reciprocity. Underlying these behaviors, the authors argue, is a complex and nuanced range of emotions, backed by a high degree of intelligence and surprising behavioral flexibility.

In this excerpt, they put it even more succinctly, arguing "in short, that animals have morality."

Archived in Biology | Books for the News
Posted by MM at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This morning, news of the missing Air France plane en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro, which disappeared from radar following an electrical systems breakdown as it flew through heavy turbulence Sunday night, has led some to speculate that the jet was brought down by a lightning strike. Our weather and aviation expert Jack Williams weighs in:

Today’s disappearance of an Air France Airbus 330 over the Atlantic Ocean has led to speculation that it was hit by lightning. While it’s possible that lightning could have been involved in the crash, reporters and commentators shouldn’t jump to this conclusion.

When lightning hits an airplane in the air the electrical current flows through the metal skin and back into the air, almost always doing little more than leaving burn marks on the skin.

The last lightning-caused crash of an airliner in the United States was on December 8, 1962 when lightning hit a Pan American Boeing 707 flying in a holding pattern over Elkton, Maryland. It caused a spark that ignited fuel vapor in a tank. The resulting explosion brought the airplane down, killing all 81 aboard.

The Pan Am crash and others somewhat like it elsewhere in the world led the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and similar agencies in other nations to require that airplanes be built to prevent such explosions and other serious damage.

Requirements put into effect in the 1960s aimed to ensure that lightning’s electrical currents won’t cause sparks in aircraft fuel systems, including the tanks and lines. As aircraft became more complex, governments have upgraded certification requirements to require shielding and other protective measures to guard electronics systems from lightning.

When an electrical current, including one created by lightning, travels through any electrical conductor such as an airplane’s skin, it creates a magnetic field. When such a magnetic field expands and collapses across an electrical conductor, such as a wire inside the airplane, it induces an unwanted electrical current in the conductor.

Currents induced by lightning that knock out an airplane’s navigation and communication radios would be bad enough. Induced currents that caused an airplane’s “fly-by-wire” computers, such as those on the Airbus 330, to give an unwanted control command could be catastrophic.

But government agencies and other researchers have put great effort into projects designed to find ways to prevent such catastrophes.

For instance, from 1979 into 1986, NASA flew an F-106B packed with instruments to measure the results of lightning strikes. This fighter jet, based at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, flew into thunderstorms 1,496 times and was hit by lighting 714 times.

In December 2007 Elizabeth Vargas of ABC’s 20/20 interviewed Bruce Fisher, lead researcher for the Storms Hazards Program, for a program on travel myths. She questioned him about whether lightning could cause an airliner to crash. Fisher flew in the back seat of the F-106 monitoring the instruments as lightning hit the jet. He estimated that he was in the airplane for more than 200 lightning strikes. The flights and the data gathered were “better than sitting at a desk and doing computations,” Fisher said. “The lightning was the fun part of the mission… You know, we would go up and go down, plus or minus 3,000 or 4,000 feet with the updrafts and the downdrafts and allow the aircraft to do that.”

He assured viewers that when lightning hits an airliner “you’re not going to run into a risk at all. The lightning current does not get inside to the individuals or the equipment inside. The aircraft are designed to keep the lightning on the outside of the plane.”

The biggest lightning threat to aircraft is on the ground. Lightning near an airport causes officials to suspend ground services such as refueling and loading luggage, which can be a major cause of airline delays, especially in Florida and other areas where lightning is common during warm weather.

(This report is based on Williams's “The Weather Never Sleeps” column in the March 2008 issue of Flight Training magazine published by the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association.)

For more information, Jack suggests the following links:

Scientific American: What happens when lightning strikes an airplane?

USATODAY.com Answers: Does lightning hit airplanes?

And, of course, be sure to check out Chapter 8 of The AMS Weather Book for an extensive discussion of the science of lightning, the history of lightning research, and the dangers of lightning.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by SXH at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Archived in Books for the News | History | Psychology
Posted by SXH at 12:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read an excerpt from What Color Is the Sacred?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Law | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 03:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

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

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

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

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

You can read an interview with the author.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Archived in Books for the News | Literature
Posted by TXM at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

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

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

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

Continue reading "Succeeding Souter: what about executive power?" »

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary
Posted by MM at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

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

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

On Monday we alerted you to Mark C. Taylor's op-ed in the Sunday New York Times. Since then, it has been the number one most emailed story at nytimes.com for three days running. And, as we noted on Monday, reaction has been shift and vocal. The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a rebuttal of Taylor's call to action by mid-morning Monday (which engendered a lively debate that played out in the comments), and Michael Bérubé chimed in on Crooked Timber yesterday afternoon. Elsewhere in the blogosphere, responses have been sprouting up hourly.

Whether you are with him or against him, Taylor has long been known for his provocative approach to emerging network culture. Over a long career, Taylor has argued that everything from art to religion can be viewed through and better understood through this lens. The University of Chicago Press has long published Taylor's interdisciplinary works, and there is no better place to begin to understand Taylor's philosophy and criticism than with these primary resources. If his New York Times piece got you thinking, imagine what his books can offer!

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by SXH at 08:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since the onslaught of the financial crisis, the federal government has bailed out Wall Street and Detroit. But at least one more venerable institution now needs saving, according to polymath and long-time UCP author Mark C. Taylor: the University. In an op-ed contribution published yesterday in the New York Times, Taylor lays out a six-point plan for restructuring higher education in this country. Among the many controversial recommendations Taylor offers—including dissolving academic departments and abolishing tenure—is a prescriptive that affects the publishing community in general and the academic press world in particular: the publication of dissertations. Taylor suggests that graduate students produce "analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games" instead of traditional "books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text." Whether or not that evolution comes to pass, Taylor's call to critically examine the state of the modern university has been met with vociferous debate in the Times' online comment forum.

Many of the ideas that Taylor espouses in the piece, especially that of complex adaptive networks, have been explored in books ranging from The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture to Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World without Redemption to After God. For more on Taylor's unique approach to knowledge, understanding, and faith in a modern world, read an excerpt from his uniquely interdisciplinary scholarship.

Archived in Books for the News | Education
Posted by SXH at 01:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The rapid migration of the potentially deadly strain of H1N1 flu virus, recently discovered to have originated in Mexico, is a potent reminder of the new and pressing challenges to public health in the global age. With documented cases already appearing in the U.S. and Europe, and over 1800 suspected cases worldwide, health officials—including the World Health Organization—are still waiting to assess the potential of the swine flu to transform itself into a pandemic.

Among the factors most concerning to those monitoring the outbreak is the virus's relatively high mortality rate among the cases documented in Mexico, and, as the Washington Post recently noted, its tendency to affect "relatively young adults, presumably among the population's most healthy"—a feature which some already are connecting to the 1919 Spanish flu pandemic. Caused by a strain of influenza that killed via a cytokine storm (overreaction of the body's immune system), victims of the Spanish flu were also younger and healthier than those normally thought most susceptible. The strong immune systems of young adults ravaged the body, whereas the weaker immune systems of children and middle-aged adults caused fewer deaths.

But while the 1919 pandemic resulted so many fatalities, it has also provided scientists with an invaluable source of information to prevent similar tragedies today. One of the most comprehensive of these studies available to the general reader was published by the press last year in Infectious Disease: A Scientific American Reader. In the study, "Capturing a Killer Flu Virus," Jeffrey K. Taubenberger, Ann H. Reid and Thomas G. Fanning undertake a thorough investigation of the 1919 Spanish flu outbreak, suggest treatments, and recommend preventative measures. Set alongside 29 more of the most significant articles on communicable illness published in the pages of Scientific American magazine since 1993, Infectious Disease is the essential sourcebook for anyone looking for the science behind today's headlines.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News
Posted by TXM at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The "Home & Garden" section of today's New York Times features a story on a group of horticulturalists who have dedicated themselves to a unique gardening project that combines antiquarianism, botany, and a bit of banditry to preserve the heirloom roses of New York City.

According to the article, roses "captured the hearts of early New Yorkers" prompting many amateur rosarians in the city to breed and cultivate their own varieties, many of which gained world wide popularity during the late nineteenth century. But while horticulturalists one hundred years ago took the availability of a wide variety of cultivars for granted, more recently the mass production of the more profitable "hybrid tea roses," to the exclusion of everything else, has drastically decreased the available selection. Now, rose enthusiasts like Douglas Brenner, Stephen Scanniello, and Betty Vickers—the so called "rose rustlers" featured in the NYT article—have made it their task to seek out and re-propagate the antique species, often by raiding old estates and cemeteries and to take cuttings of feral plants.

Back in 2002 we reprinted the classic story of antique rose collectors and their crusade in Thomas Christopher's In Search of Lost Roses. Detailing the heritage of 2,500 years of breeding and gardening, and the eccentric personalities determined to preserve and protect it, In Search of Lost Roses offers a fun and edifying tale perfect for spring reading.

To find out more about the book read this excerpt and an interview with the author.

Read the rest of the article about the resurgence of New York's heirloom roses on the NYT website.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News | History
Posted by TXM at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Scott McLemee's column this week for Inside Higher Ed, titled "Stop the Insani-Tea!", starts by noting some of the rhetorical dissonances of last week's tax-day tea-party demonstrations: "'No taxation without representation!' they demanded, having evidently hibernated through the recent election cycle."

But the real point of the column is to call into question the anti-tax crowd assumption that Joe the Plumber's opinions coincide with those of a majority of citizens. McLemee uses Benjamin I. Page and Lawrence R. Jacobs' new book Class War?: What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality to "help to clarify why alarmist denunciations of higher taxation and (shudder!) 'redistribution of the wealth' just won't cut it." McLemee, quoting Page and Jacobs, writes:

"Even Democrats and lower-income workers harbor rather conservative views about free enterprise, the value of material incentives to motivate work, individual self-reliance, and a generalized suspicion of government waste and unresponsiveness." Their survey found that 58 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of low-income earners agreed that "large differences in pay are probably necessary to get people to work hard."

But at the same time they report a widespread concern that the gap between extremes of wealth and poverty is growing and poses a danger. "Although Americans accept the idea that unequal pay motivates hard work," they find, "a solid majority (59 percent) disagree with the proposition that large differences in income are 'necessary for America's prosperity.…'"

Page and Jacobs are doubtless correct to describe the default setting of American public opinion as a kind of "conservative egalitarianism." Citizens "want opportunities for economic success," they write, "and want individuals to take care of themselves when possible. But they also want genuine opportunity for themselves and others, and a measure of economic security to pursue opportunity and to insure themselves and their neighbors against disasters beyond their control."

Read the rest of the article on the Inside Higher Ed. website or check out some of the survey data files referenced in the book.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 02:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today is Earth Day, a time to reflect on the wonders and fragility of our planet's diverse environments. As CNN.com reported this morning, more than one billion people are expected to commemorate the occasion in 175 countries. Both the New York Times and the Environmental Protection Agency are encouraging Earthlings to appreciate their home by taking photographs of it. And it is in that vein that we present books that contain of astonishing images of the planet and the various creatures with whom we share it.

On dry land, most organisms are confined to the surface, or at most to altitudes of a hundred meters—the height of the tallest trees. In the oceans, though, living space has both vertical and horizontal dimensions: with an average depth of 3800 meters, the oceans offer 99% of the space on Earth where life can develop. And the deep sea, which has been immersed in total darkness since the dawn of time, occupies 85% of ocean space, forming the planet's largest habitat. Yet these depths abound with mystery. The deep sea is mostly uncharted—only about 5 percent of the seafloor has been mapped with any reasonable degree of detail—and we know very little about the creatures that call it home. Current estimates about the number of species yet to be found vary between ten and thirty million. The deep sea no longer has anything to prove; it is without doubt Earth's largest reservoir of life. 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. Check out images on the book's website.

Our planet is host to some of nature's most amazing events—both stunning and deadly. Take for instance the flooding of the Okavango Delta in Botswana, which turns sprawling swaths of desert into an elaborate maze of lagoons and swamps. Or the melting of 10 million square kilometers of ice in the Arctic, which imperils polar bears across the region. The lavishly illustrated counterpart to the Discovery Channel's landmark wildlife documentary, Nature's Most Amazing Events (to air May 29-31), Nature's Great Events charts six seasonal events that transform entire ecosystems and the life experiences of the thousands of animals within them, from the largest mammals to the smallest microorganisms. These include the migration of the Serengeti, where life is on the edge for both predator and prey and where lions and wildebeest battle to survive; the great salmon run in British Columbia, where rivers teem with thousands of fish—and where grizzlies and wolves eagerly await them; the explosion of sea life in Alaska's coastal waters, where countless animals from far and wide brave killer whales to feed; and the greatest marine spectacle on the planet, the annual tide of sardines along South Africa's east coast, where the greatest concentration of predators—including sharks and dolphins—come to feast. Using groundbreaking filming techniques and state-of-the-art scientific technologies, the book and the documentary on which it is based are epic in every sense. See videos from the BBC series and sample pages (PDF format, 1.9Mb).

So remember, this Earth Day: Reuse, recycle, read.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by SXH at 08:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday, NPR's All Things Considered reported on a three-mile long lake in central Massachusetts with a name that's nearly as big. Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, known in daily conversation as the easier-on-the-tongue Lake Webster, is, according to local lore, named for a Native American phrase that means "You fish on your side, I'll fish on my side and nobody fishes in the middle." In 1954, the lake achieved immortally with a catchy ditty by Ethel Merman and Ray Bolger called the "The Lake Song" and it's back in the news today: apparently, two local signs that misspelled the lake's name are now being corrected.

Geographer Mark Monmonier loves scanning maps for unusual place names, and a few years back, he published a book on odd toponyms called From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame. After hearing Robert Seigel's story yesterday, we dipped back into Monmonier's tome and found the lake on page 80; alas, it was too long, it seems, to print more than once, lest our ink budget be depleted in one word. But never fear. From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow is full of unusual places names and the stories behind them; it is, indeed, as Publisher's Weekly noted, a "a trove of giggle-inducing lore." If you've ever wondered what's in a name, or, more appropriately, what's in a place name, Monmonier has the history. In Dago Gulch, Montana and Jap Valley, California, he finds, it's a legacy of racial pejoratives. In Mollys Nipple, Utah, and Outhouse Draw, Nevada, it's a reminder of an age before political correctness. And in Intercourse, Blue Ball, and Bird-in-Hand—all in Pennsylvania—it's an opportunity to guffaw. The first book to laugh in response to the obvious humor and reflect the contentious history of place names—not to mention the cartographic and political imbroglios they engender—From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow is must-reading for anyone who has ever wondered how places get their names. Read an excerpt.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by SXH at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

MIT linguist and long-time critic of US foreign and domestic policy Noam Chomsky made a recent appearance on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! to discuss the ongoing socialization of corporate debt in the context of US foreign policy — policy which, even under the current administration, Chomsky argues, hypocritically pushes a radical free market agenda on many foreign third-world economies. In the discussion, Chomsky points to Thomas Ferguson's Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems to help explain how the influence of corporate interests on the American political system perpetuates this double standard between U.S. foreign and domestic economic policy.

Ferguson himself was also recently featured on The Real News Network delivering an insightful critique of the bailout plan, arguing that the plan's structure supports the interests of corporate moguls over long term global economic health. Navigate to the Real News Network website to watch the archived video, or navigate to our website to find out more about Ferguson's book.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics
Posted by TXM at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's April 15. Do you know where your tax return is? If it's still in your to-do pile, we recommend sharpening your pencils, preparing a stiff drink, and researching local post office branches with extended hours. If you've already filed, we suggest you kick back with this Tax Day reading list, stiff drink (with celebratory cocktail umbrella) optional.

As Benjamin Franklin famously observed, "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." But if you want to get the scoop on the second most famous quote about taxes (later parodied by Dana Carvey on Saturday Night Live), you should read Jan R. Van Meter's lips. In this addenda to his book Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too: Famous Slogans and Catchphrases in American History, he expounds upon W's dad's famous 1988 pledge:

George Herbert Walker Bush needed to prove he was tough, tough enough to win the presidential election against the Democrat Michael Dukakis, tough enough to continue the legacy of the outgoing president Ronald Reagan, tough enough to erase his lingering reputation as an effete aristocrat and long-time government insider.

The Bush campaign staff wanted to demonstrate his toughness, his devotion to the Reagan ideals, and his strong conservative convictions. And so, in his acceptance speech to the GOP Convention, Bush stared directly into the lens of the television cameras and grimly said:

My opponent won't rule out raising taxes. But I will. And the Congress will push me to raise taxes and I'll say no. and they'll push, and I'll say no, and they'll push again, and I'll say to them, "Read my lips: no new taxes."

Bush was elected, but less than two years later, with the federal deficit reaching record levels, Bush was forced to raise some taxes as well as cut spending. He was never forgiven by his own party's conservatives or by the media. Though Bush's approval ratings with the public improved following the first Gulf War, his slogan became a byword for political untrustworthiness.

If the thought of paying taxes makes you anxious to summon your militia, secede from the US, and form an agrarian nation deep in the north woods, perhaps there is a better option: don't leave the system, change the system. After all, everyone knows that the current tax system is unfair. Some of the richest people in America pay no tax, while a huge share of the tax burden falls on the rest of us. A mere glance at the tax code confirms that it is far too complex, with volumes of rules that no ordinary person could possibly comprehend. What is to be done? Some conservatives have called for a so-called flat tax. But a flat tax is not necessarily a simple tax, and "flat" means "more" for most taxpayers: a rise in middle-class taxes to finance tax cuts for the rich. In clear, easy-to-understand language, Edward J. McCaffery proposes a straightforward and fair alternative. Simpler, more efficient, fairer, and more reflective of America's current social values, McCaffery's "fair not flat" tax could help get us out of the tax mess that politicians and special interests have gotten us into, improving the whole country in the process.

For more from McCaffery, read an interview with the author here. And check out his earlier book on gender biases in current tax structures, Taxing Women.

Sure, the hassle of paying taxes and the headaches induced by arcane language on the forms are more than enough to put most Americans off from careers in accounting. But, looking deeper, most Americans would probably concede that our distaste for taxes is rooted in our distrust of government. This aversion has a long history. In Robin L. Einhorn's history of tax policy and debates about slavery, she finds that our attitudes towards taxation have more to do with the history of American slavery than the history of American freedom. American Taxation, American Slavery shows the deep, broad, and continuous influence of slavery on ideas in American politics. She argues that heated battles over taxation, the power to tax, and the distribution of tax burdens were rooted not in debates over personal liberty but rather in the rights of slaveholders to hold human beings as property.

For more, read Einhorn's essay about the tax aversion and the legacy of slavery here.

Wishing everyone many happy and sizable returns! (Get it? Returns? Thanks, I'm here Mondays and Wednesdays. Don't forget to tip your bartender.)

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by SXH at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In one of the many articles that have appeared recently about higher education during the recession—covering everything from increased applications to the reshuffled popularity of different fields—Slate asks whether advanced education really pays off during times like these. Laurel, one of the many students whose experiences the article cites in formulating an answer, has a familiar story:

"Many of the academic jobs that I applied to were cancelled," Laurel writes. "I've been scouring Craigslist but thus far I haven't found a position that requests familiarity with obscure art historical literature from the 18th century written in Serbo-Croatian.… I am hurdling toward being the saddest type of graduate student—the one who has finished and is at a loss for what to do next. I'm going to be the one sitting on the front steps of that Ivory Tower with my elbows on my knees and my chin in my hands just begging to be let back in."

But Laurel has other options, as Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius point out in "So What Are You Going to Do with That?"—which explains why the paths leading away from the Ivory Tower can be just as rewarding for the tens of thousands of Ph.D.'s and M.A.'s who leave grad school every year. Designed for anyone contemplating the jump from scholarship to the outside world—whether by choice or necessity—"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.

And that's a skill whose value any new graduate can appreciate.

Archived in Books for the News | Literature | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

News leaked over the weekend about the resolution of a months-long national debate: who would become the Obama's First Dog? The answer arrived Sunday, resplendent in his fluffy black fur: Bo, a six-month-old Portuguese water dog. A gift from Senator Edward Kennedy, a Portuguese water dog enthusiast, Bo will not be officially introduced to the nation until Tuesday, but already, photographs of the newest chew-toy destroyer in chief have the country sighing "awww!" Given that the headlines dominating the news today have gone to the dogs (sorry), we thought we'd offer a canine reading list to honor and welcome Bo.

Lest Bo should learn to dislike the national spotlight, he may take comfort in Roger Grenier's conclusion that it's not always easy to be a dog. On this literary dog walk, Grenier visits the great dogs of history and legend In forty-three self-contained and lovingly crafted vignettes. Beginning at the beginning, with Ulysses and his dog, Argos, the only creature to recognize him after years of absence, Grenier continues on to Virginia Woolf, who became the self-appointed biographer of Flush, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel, to André Gide, whose diary records his bemusement at his dog's propensity to mount his ancient cat. Grenier also surveys the opinions, writings, and experiences of men and women throughout history for clues to the mysterious symbiosis between people and dogs. He introduces us to Freud's chow Lün, who was able to make him understand he was about to die; to Fala, FDR's Scottish terrier, who now has his own statue in Washington; and to Michael and Jerry, the heroes of Jack London's novels. We learn of the dog who shared Napoleon's bed and of the dogs collected and deported from the city of Constantinople in 1910, sent to a desert island without food or water. Along the way, Grenier tells us about a few of the dogs who have occupied his own life and heart. Though the rapport between dogs and people remains a mystery, it is also, for him, the source of the purest form of love. (Read an excerpt here.)

Should Bo ever feel a little, well, depressed, he would do well to turn to Alice Kuzniar's Melacholia's Dog. Bred to provide human companionship, dogs eclipse all other species when it comes to reading the body language of people. Dog owners hunger for a complete rapport with their pets; in the dog the fantasy of empathetic resonance finds its ideal. But cross-species communication is never easy. Dog love can be a precious but melancholy thing. An attempt to understand human attachment to the canis familiaris in terms of reciprocity and empathy, Melancholia's Dog tackles such difficult concepts as intimacy and kinship with dogs, the shame associated with identification with their suffering, and the reasons for the profound mourning over their deaths. In addition to philosophy and psychoanalysis, Alice A. Kuzniar turns to the insights and images offered by the literary and visual arts—the short stories of Ivan Turgenev and Franz Kafka, the novels of J. M. Coetzee and Rebecca Brown, the photography of Sally Mann and William Wegman, and the artwork of David Hockney and Sue Coe. Without falling into sentimentality or anthropomorphization, Kuzniar honors and learns from our canine companions, above all attending the silences and sadness brought on by the effort to represent the dog as perfectly and faithfully as it is said to love.

But judging from those precious first portraits, Bo will prove to be a happy pup and a best friend to the President. He might, in the end, prefer the irreverence of Mark Derr's Dog's Best Friend. A comprehensive, humane, and bemused tour of the dog-human relationship, the book combines anecdote, research, and reportage to illuminate our complex rapport with our cherished canine companions. Tracking our national obsession with an animal that now outnumbers children in American households, Derr chronicles the evolution of "the culture of the dog" from the prehistoric domestication of tamed wolves to the modern horrors of overbreeding and inbreeding. Passionate about his subject and intent on sharing his zeal, Derr defends dogs with wit and flare, producing here a quirky, informative, and fitting tribute to our love affair with canines big and small.

Welcome Bo! You are the nation's dog now.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by SXH at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Gay-rights supporters are celebrating momentous victories this week in the fight for marriage equality. Following a ruling in Iowa by the state's Supreme Court that a law limiting marriage to a man and a woman was unconstitutional (paving the way for same-sex marriages to begin by the end of April), Vermont became the first state to legalize gay marriage with a legislature's vote, overturning Governor Jim Douglas' veto, and the Washington, DC, city council voted unanimously to recognize gay marriages performed elsewhere (many of which may now take place in Iowa because that state does not require marriage license seekers to prove residency). Given the historic rulings and unprecedented momentum (even dictionaries are adapting to the times), we thought it would be a good time to offer a same-sex marriage reading list.

The Politics of Same-Sex Marriage brings together an esteemed list of scholars to explore all facets of this heated issue, including the ideologies and strategies on both sides of the argument, the public's response, the use of the issue in political campaigns, and how same-sex marriage fits into the broad context of policy cycles and windows of political opportunity. With comprehensive coverage from a variety of different approaches, this volume will be a vital sourcebook for activists, politicians, and scholars alike.

Why is it so much harder for American same-sex couples to get married than it is for them to adopt children? And why does our military prevent gays from serving openly even though jurisdictions nationwide continue to render such discrimination illegal? Illuminating the conditions that engender these contradictory policies, Same Sex, Different Politics explains why gay rights advocates have achieved dramatically different levels of success from one policy area to another. The first book to compare results across a wide range of gay rights struggles, this volume explores debates over laws governing military service, homosexual conduct, adoption, marriage and partner recognition, hate crimes, and civil rights. It reveals that in each area, the gay rights movement's achievements depend both on Americans' perceptions of its demands and on the political venue in which the conflict plays out. Adoption policy, for example, generally takes shape in a decentralized system of courts that enables couples to target sympathetic judges, while fights for gay marriage generally culminate in legislation or ballot referenda against which it is easier to mount opposition.

With the average cost of a wedding these days topping the ticket price for tuition at most Ivy League schools, matrimony, and the industry of planners, florists, and caterers that has sprouted up to support it, has strayed long and far from distinctly Christian aspirations. Why then, asks noted gay commentator Mark D. Jordan, are so many churches vehemently opposed to blessing same-sex unions? In this incisive work, Jordan shows how carefully selected ideals of Christian marriage have come to dominate recent debates over same-sex unions. Opponents of gay marriage, he reveals, too often confuse simplified ideals of matrimony with historical facts. They suppose, for instance, that there has been a stable Christian tradition of marriage across millennia, when in reality Christians have quarreled among themselves for centuries about even the most basic elements of marital theology, authorizing experiments like polygamy and divorce. Arguing that no matter what the courts do, Christian churches will have to decide for themselves whether to accept gay marriage, Blessing Same-Sex Unions will be a must-read for both sides of the debate over gay marriage in America today.

In Equality for Same-Sex Couples, Yuval Merin presents the first comparative study of the legal regulation of same-sex partnerships worldwide, as well as a unique survey of the status of same-sex couples in Europe. Merin begins by providing a historical overview of the transformation of marriage from antiquity to the present. He then identifies and critically compares four principal models for the legal regulation and recognition of same-sex partnerships: civil marriage, registered partnership, domestic partnership, and cohabitation. Merin concludes that all of the models except civil marriage discriminate against gays and lesbians just as the "separate but equal" doctrine discriminated against African Americans; thus, so-called alternatives to marriage, even if they provide the same rights and benefits as marriage, are inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional.

For more books that will bring readers a fuller understanding of what's at sake in the fight for marriage equality, check out our books on marriage and family as well as our esteemed list of titles in gay and lesbian studies.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by SXH at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After disasters like Monday's earthquake in central Italy, attention often turns to the puzzle of predicting and preparing for such tragedies.

Maps, Mark Monmonier points out, play an important role in this process. In Cartographies of Danger, he explains that maps can tell us a lot about where to anticipate certain hazards — but they can also be dangerously misleading. California, for example, takes earthquakes seriously, with a comprehensive program of seismic mapping. But as 1994's Northridge earthquake demonstrated, even reliable seismic-hazard maps can deceive anyone who misinterprets "known fault-lines" as the only places vulnerable to earthquakes.

How should we go about making the safest decisions?

Upon the book's publication, NBC News recommended that "no one should buy a home, rent an apartment, or even drink the local water without having read this fascinating cartographic alert on the dangers that lurk in our everyday lives." We recommend that you start here, with Monmonier's list of Ten Risky Places.

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

Today marks the beginning of one season and the end of another, at least in the world of sports. Baseball is off to a chilly start (the threat of snow has postponed the Chicago White Sox opener against the Kansas City Royals and more delays seem likely) but inclement weather won't stop the NCAA from crowning a basketball champion tonight, when Michigan State takes on Obama-favored North Carolina in Detroit. In honor of this momentous day, the Press brings you a brief Opening Day/"One Shining Moment" reading list, suitable for quick browsing between TV time-outs and the seventh inning stretch.

For those of you out there who are more comfortable at the lectern than on the pitching mound, Edward Amenta's coming-of-middle-age story will have you rooting for the underdog. For this short, wild-haired, bespectacled professor, playing softball in New York's Central Park is one last chance to heal the nagging wounds of Little League trauma before the rust of decline and the relentless responsibilities of fatherhood set in. As rookie manager of the Performing Arts Softball League's doormat Sharkeys, he reverses softball's usual brawn-over-brains formula. He coaxes his skeptical teammates to follow his sabermetric and sociological approach, based equally on Bill James and Max Weber, which in the heady days of early success he dubs "Eddy Ball." But Amenta soon learns that his teammates' attachments to favorite positions and time-honored (if ineffective) strategies are hard to break—especially when the team begins losing. Professor Baseball is packed with colorful personalities, dramatic games, and the bustle of New York life, and captures with humor and wit the yearly emergence of packs of beer-bellied men with gloves and aluminum bats, putting their middle-aged bodies to the test on the softball diamond. For more, check out an excerpt from the book or Amenta's essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Legendary baseball franchise owner and promoter Bill Veeck is best remembered today for his publicity stunts—which included sending a midget to bat in a St. Louis Browns game and orchestrating the infamous Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park. But luckily, we have the man in his own words to relive his unmatched contribution to the game. The classic autobiography, written with the talented sportswriter Ed Linn, Veeck—As In Wreck is an uproarious book packed with information about the history of baseball and tales of players and owners, including some of the most entertaining stories in all of sports literature. Read the first chapter (on the career of that aforementioned baseball-playing dwarf) here.

And finally, for those basketball fans, Scott N. Brooks takes us to inner-city Philadelphia to watch two promising young men, Jermaine and Ray, as they navigate their high school years and experience breakthroughs and frustrations on the court and at home. We witness them negotiating the pitfalls of forging a career and a path out of poverty, we see their triumphs and setbacks, and we hear from the network of people invested in their fates. Black Men Can't Shoot has all the hallmarks of a classic sports book, with a climactic championship game and a suspenseful ending as we wait to find out if Jermaine and Ray will be recruited. Brooks's moving coming-of-age story counters the belief that basketball only exploits kids and lures them into following empty dreams—and shows us that by playing ball, some of these young black men have already begun their education even before they get to college.

Whatever your sport, we're sure you'll enjoy these books. Now pass the nachos!

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

Marking Nelson Algren's 100th b-day, the Chicago Reader is running a-never-before-published short story by the famous writer, titled Entrapment, and featured on the cover of their current issue. The story is part of a larger collection of Algren's unpublished work which previously resided in the archives at Ohio State University and is now available from NYC publishers Seven Stories Press (there will also be a reading from the book at Steppenwolf on Monday). But despite his latest work being published in New York the most enthusiastic audience for Algren's writing is right here in Chicago—Algren's home for many years and the source of inspiration for much of his work. The most prominent example in his oeuvre is Algren's prose poem, Chicago: City on the Make—published by the press in a newly annotated 50th Anniversary Edition in 2001—which is today widely regarded as the definitive literary portrait of the city. Providing a gritty juxtaposition to other paeans to "the city of the big shoulders" like Carl Sandberg's famous poem, as a review New York Herald Tribune once noted: Chicago: City on the Make "is both a social document and a love poem, a script in which a lover explains his city's recurring ruthlessness and latent power; in which an artist recognizes that these are portents not of death, but of life."

In tandem with the re-release of Algren's Chicago the press also published Conversations with Nelson Algren—offering first-hand insight into the author's life and work, and demonstrating the profound impact of the Windy City on the writing of one of Chicago's most rebellious, and authentic literary figures.

Find out more about Chicago: City on the Make and Conversations with Nelson Algren or check out the complete text of Entrapment on the Chicago Reader website.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by TXM at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April is National Poetry Month and on the first day of celebration, we wanted to highlight some of the fine poetic offerings Chicago is publishing this month. With three new volumes in our esteemed Phoenix Poets series, a new edition of a classic collection, and new titles in criticism, UCP has everything you need for a successful, and stimulating, poetry month!

With Hollywood & God, Robert Polito delivers a virtuosic performance, filled with crossings back and forth from cinematic chiaroscuro to a kind of unsettling desperation and disturbing—even lurid—hallucination. From the Baltimore Catechism to the great noir films of the last century to today's Elvis impersonators and Paris Hilton (an impersonator of a different sort), Polito tracks the snares, abrasions, and hijinks of personal identities in our society of the spectacle, a place where who we say we are, and who (we think) we think we are fade in and out of consciousness, like flickers of light dancing tantalizingly on the silver screen. Mixing lyric and essay, collage and narrative, memoir and invention, Hollywood & God is an audacious book, as contemporary as it is historical, as sly and witty as it is devastatingly serious.

Read a poem from the book or check out an excerpt from Polito's earlier book, Doubles.

In The Lions, Peter Campion writes about the struggle of making a life in America, about the urge "to carve a space" for love and family from out of the vast sweep of modern life. Coursing between the political and personal with astonishing ease, Campion writes at one moment of his disturbing connection to the public political structure, symbolized by Robert McNamara (who makes a startling appearance in the title poem), then in the next, of a haunting reverie beneath a magnolia tree, representing his impulse to escape the culture altogether. He moves through various forms just as effortlessly, as confident in rhymed quatrains as in slender, tensed free verse. In The Lions, Campion achieves a fusion of narrative structure and lyric intensity that proves him to be one of the very best poets of his generation.

Read a poem from the book or check out Campion's earlier collection, Other People.

Randall Mann's Breakfast with Thom Gunn is a work both direct and unsettling. Haunted by the afterlife of Thom Gunn (1929-2004), one of the most beloved gay literary icons of the twentieth century, the poems are moored in Florida and California, but the backdrop is "pitiless," the trees "thin and bloodless," the words "like the icy water" of the San Francisco Bay. Mann, fiercely intelligent, open yet elusive, draws on the "graceful erosion" of both landscape and the body, on the beauty that lies in unbeauty. With audacity, anxiety, and unbridled desire, this gifted lyric poet grapples with dilemmas of the gay self embroiled in—and aroused by—a glittering, unforgiving subculture. Breakfast with Thom Gunn is at once formal and free, forging a sublime integrity in the fire of wit, intensity, and betrayal.

Read a poem from the book or check out our blog post on what Mann was up to before he sat down for breakfast with Gunn.

Speaking of Thom Gunn, in 1968, the Press published the Selected Poems of Fulke Greville, which Gunn edited. This month, we are reissuing the book in paperback with a new foreword by Bradin Cormack. Although Greville's poems, long out of print, are today less well known than those of Sidney, Spenser, or Shakespeare, Greville nevertheless left an indelible mark on the world of Renaissance poetry, both in his love poems, which ably work within the English Petrarchan tradition, and in his religious meditations, which, along with the work of Donne and Herbert, stand as a highpoint of early Protestant poetics. Back in print for a new generation of scholars and readers, Gunn's selection of Greville's short poems includes the whole of Greville's lyric sequence, Caelica, along with choruses from some of Greville's verse dramas. Gunn's introduction places Greville's thought in historical context and in relation to the existential anxieties that came to preoccupy writers in the twentieth century. It 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. This reissue of Selected Poems of Fulke Greville is an event of the first order both for students of early British literature and for readers of Thom Gunn and English poetry generally.

Check out our blog post on Greville. Robert Pinsky, whose Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town will be out later this month, loves to get down to the Fulke Greville (doesn't it sound like a jaunty jig?).

Recent Bollingen Prize winner Allen Grossman explores in True-Love poetry's singular mission is to bind love and truth together—love that desires the beloved's continued life, knotted with the truth of life's contingency—to help make us more present to each other. In the spirit of Blake's vow of "mental fight," Grossman contends with challenges to the validity of the poetic imagination, from Adorno's maxim "No poetry after Auschwitz," to the claims of religious authority upon truth, and the ultimate challenge posed by the fact of death itself. To these challenges he responds with eloquent and rigorous arguments, drawing on wide resources of learning and his experience as master-poet and teacher. Grossman's readings of Wordsworth, Hart Crane, Paul Celan, and others focus on poems that interrogate the real or enact the hard bargains that literary representation demands. True-Love is destined to become an essential book wherever poetry and criticism sustain one another.

And finally, Jonathan Ma