The Chicago Blog

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

I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials—many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
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Today's New York Times is running a piece on author George E. Lewis's new book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music—the authoritative historical account of one of America's most influential avant-garde jazz collectives. Founded in 1965, many icons of the avant garde, musicians like Anthony Braxton and Leo Wadada Smith, have joined its ranks. And many of them continue to play as members of the collective today. The NYT article includes information on several upcoming events in NYC including a special book release concert happening next Friday (May 9th) at the Community Church of New York. From the NYT:

The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, [is] an organization that has fostered some of the most vital American avant-garde music of the last 40 years.

Though noncommercial, often pointedly conceptual and unabashedly arcane, this music has had a profound influence over the years on several generations of experimental musicians worldwide.

The scene plays out vividly in A Power Stronger Than Itself: The A.A.C.M. and Experimental Music, an important book by the trombonist-composer-scholar George Lewis due out from the University of Chicago Press this month. Reconstructing that inaugural meeting from audio tapes, Mr. Lewis conveys not only Mr. Abrams's aim but also the vigorous debate begun by his notion of "original music." (Whose music? How original?) From the start, its clear, the association expressed its firm ideals partly through collective discourse.

Next Friday night another sort of discourse will unfold at the Community Church of New York in Murray Hill, when the association convenes a panel discussion with a handful of its current members, including Mr. Lewis, the multireedist Henry Threadgill and the pianist and vocalist Amina Claudine Myers. The conversation will precede a concert featuring Mr. Lewis and Mr. Abrams in an improvising trio with the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith.

You can read the full article on the NYT website, or see an excerpt from the book. To find out more about the show navigate to the AACM's New York chapter website.

Archived in Black Studies | Books for the News | Chicago | History | Music
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In the Washington Post's recently published Q&A session with Lt. Col. John A. Nagl, Nagl uses his expertise in U.S. counterinsurgency operations to respond to reader's questions regarding the future of the U.S. military presence in the Middle East. Nagl is author and contributor to several recent books on military counterinsurgency strategy including Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam and The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. He also currently commands the 1st Battalion, 34th Armor at Fort Riley, Kansas. From the Washington Post:

Little Rock, Ark.: We don't get much information regarding the nation-building activities in Afghanistan. Did we meet the rebuilding commitments we made to them when we won the war there?

Lt. Col. John Nagl: Little Rock, the counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan has not received the attention it has deserved. I visited there a little more than a year ago, and was struck most by the abject poverty of the country, even in Kabul. Afghanistan is the fifth-poorest country in the world after three decades of war. It desperately needs international assistance, particularly infrastructure development (roads above all). The Taliban's resurgence has made the development work even harder than we'd anticipated. We still have a lot of work to do there, and I'm pleased that we have decided to commit additional combat forces to Afghanistan next year, as have some of our allies.

Santa Monica, Calif.: What is your take on the newly released report by Pentagon think tank National Defense University's National Institute for Strategic Studies…?

Lt. Col. John Nagl: Santa Monica, the INSS report you reference was written by Col. Joe Collins (Ret.), a good friend and mentor. Press reports on it were somewhat out of context; Joe published a rejoinder on the excellent "Small Wars Journal" Web site (which I commend to anyone interested in the defense community's discussion of counterinsurgency).

That said, there were serious mistakes made early on in Iraq; the decisions to disband the Iraqi Army and to radically de-Baathify the country made the insurgency far stronger than it might have been, and made the tasks of rebuilding the country and recreating the Army harder. However, those mistakes do not mean that we cannot help Iraq become a reasonably stable state that can control what happens within its own borders and that does not present a threat to the region, although doing so will take continued American commitment for a number of years.

Read the rest of the conversation on the Washington Post website.

Also see an excerpt from Learning to eat Soup with a Knife or read Nagl's foreword to the Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
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The Nashville Scene ran an interesting article recently about John G. Geer's, In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns. Citing Hillary Clinton's recent "red telephone" ad below, Paul Griffith writes for the Scene:

According to Geer, democracy needs below-the-belt imagery like that of the Clinton ad, even if such characterizations can be painful to watch, because negative ads often provide more actual information than warmer, fuzzier bids for support. "For a negative appeal to be effective," he writes, "the sponsor of that appeal must marshal more evidence, on average, than for positive appeals."

Griffith concludes:

Someone should give Hillary Clinton a copy of this book, given recent Democratic calls for her to quit for fear her less-than-positive ads might disrupt party unity.

Read the rest of the article at the Nashville Scene website.

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

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
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Roger Ebert is arguably one of the twentieth century's most influential film critics, and since his departure from the spotlight several years ago, his presence at the helm of his award winning show At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper, or as the Chicago Sun-Times resident film critic, has been missed by film buffs the world over. Now, Ebert will finally make his return, even though, as the New York Time's A. O. Scott reports, he will be leaving TV behind:

One of the guys… who made the crazy idea that movie critics could thrive on TV seem like a no-brainer, recently announced his departure from the airwaves. On April 1 Roger Ebert published a letter to readers of the Chicago Sun-Times that was essentially a farewell to the long-running, widely syndicated weekly program that has made him not simply the best-known movie reviewer in America, but the virtual embodiment of this curious profession.

But the real news in Mr. Ebert's letter was his return to regular written criticism. A recurrence of cancer of the salivary gland in the summer of 2006 might have left him unable to speak—a problem recent surgery failed to solve—but he has hardly lost his voice.…

And you can find some of the best of Ebert's writing in the recent, Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert, featuring reviews, interviews, and essays on everything from The Godfather to GoodFellas, from Cries and Whispers to Crash.

Archived in Books for the News | Film and Media
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Disputes over tenure know no ideological bounds.

Controversy surrounds the tenure status of another UCP author, this time with the criticism coming from a different corner of the political arena. John Yoo, author of The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11 is a tenured professor at Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. He has long been under attack for his role in authoring memos while working for the Department of Justice that were used to justify DoJ policies for the detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists (including practices defined in international law as torture). A campaign has developed calling for Yoo's ouster from his academic position.

The story was covered today by the online publication Inside Higher Ed. Last week Christopher Edley, Jr. , the Dean of Boalt Hall, released a statement asserting that he had seen no evidence of wrongdoing that would merit Yoo's dismissal.

When we published his book, Yoo explained his view of executive war powers in an interview.

Updated: The Chronicle of Higher Education has a roundup of blogger commentary on the Yoo case.

Archived in Books for the News | Law
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We have previously noted the tenure battle over Nadia Abu El-Haj, at the center of which is the book we published in 2001, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society.

Abu El-Haj was granted tenure by Barnard last November. A sort of post-mortem on the whole affair appears in today's issue of the New Yorker. Jane Kramer reviews Abu El-Haj's academic career, the controversy over her tenure decision, and the continuing debate—at Columbia University and elsewhere—over fact and bias in Middle Eastern studies departments.

Throughout the swirl of rhetoric, the articles and editorials, speeches and screeds, petitions and counter-petitions Abu El-Haj remained silent, trying to avoid the distraction. She finally spoke to Kramer for the New Yorker article. "What happened last year—it wasn't about me. I was a cog in the big wheel of the Middle East and Israel."

Only an abstract of the article is online at the New Yorker website. But a pdf has been posted elsewhere. Also, Jane Kramer spoke with Jon Wiener on KPFK's On the Radio (starts about 21 minutes in).

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News
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The Chicago Tribune ran an article recently featuring James B. Nardi's Life in the Soil: A Guide for Naturalists and Gardeners that gives some great advice on cultivating a bumper crop in your garden this spring. Writing for the Tribune Beth Botts' article begins:

The part of the garden we love is above ground: flowers, leaves, stems, branches, bark, birds, squirrels. But that part can't thrive without the part we hardly notice except when we dig.

James Nardi, an entomologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is so fascinated by that part of the garden that he wrote a field guide to it: Life in the Soil: A Guide for Naturalists and Gardeners.

Some of the organisms he describes break down dead plant matter and release its nutrients to be absorbed by the roots of living plants. Others help make roots more efficient. Some improve the texture of the soil so plant roots can get air and water. And some eat others, maintaining the population balance that keeps the whole underground society—what scientists call the soil food web—humming along.

The article continues citing the best kinds of soils ("loam, with at least two sizes of mineral particles") and what readers can do to help the underground ecosystems in their gardens thrive (compost).

Check out the full article on the Chicago Tribune website.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News
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In the midst of the dramatic primary debates and what's gearing up to be an embattled general election, Chicago's NBC5 News ran an interview with one of the "pioneers of televised presidential debates," Newton N. Minow, author of the recent Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future. NBC5's political editor Carol Marin begins her report by noting that with his wide range of experience in both television and politics—from his position as chairman of PBS to his current position as vice chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates—"Minow is the only person to be a part of every official presidential debate between the Republican and Democratic nominees since 1960." The interview continues with Minow's comments on the current presidential debates: "'I hope in the 2008 debates, the candidates will actually question each other.' In the end, he said, the most important thing to come out of a debate is really very simple: 'Can you trust that candidate to act in your best interest? To tell you the truth?'"

Watch the archived video of the interview on the NBC5 website.

Also see this web feature on memorable moments from presidential debates and read an excerpt from the book.

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

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

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

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
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The Chicago Tribune recently ran an article on Steven Simoncic's new play, Heat Wave—a "drama detailing Chicago's 1995 summer meltdown that killed more than 700 people." Based on Eric Klinenberg's book of the same name, the play remains true to its source by detailing, more than just a natural disaster but "the social fault lines that the heat wave revealed." The Tribune's Louis R. Carlozo writes:

As the 100-degree days piled up, so did the corpses. Emergency rooms overcrowded to the breaking point; public officials bickered over whether heat or chronic health ailments caused the deaths. Yet as the heat broiled, no one disputed that temperatures inside many upper-floor apartments reached 125 degrees or more. While city denizens from Lincoln Park to Hyde Park cranked their air conditioners, or else cleared out of town during ComEd's power outages, many with disabilities and the poorest of the poor had no place to go, no one to turn to. They suffered, and succumbed, in silence.…

Quoting Simoncic the article continues:

"As I read Eric's book and ruminated on my drafts—which I did for two and a half years—I started to get protective of the victims. And I became [ticked] off for them. These people died and nobody noticed. Part of the reason for the book, and the play, was to tell the stories of those who were silenced, whose stories weren't told."

Especially relevant in light of recent events like hurricane Katrina, Heat Wave offers a revealing look at the failure of some of America's most trusted social institutions in the face of disaster.

Check out the article online to view an additional multimedia piece that includes an interview with Simoncic, excerpts from the play , and news footage from the 1995 disaster.

Also, see this interview with Klinenberg about the book.

Archived in Books for the News
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After hearing a case about the District of Columbia's handgun ban on Tuesday, the Supreme Court has the opportunity to redefine the legal interpretation of the Second Amendment. As laws controlling handgun ownership have been enacted, such laws have been challenged on constitutional grounds. Control advocates interpret the amendment as creating a collective right—the right of states to form militias and of individuals to participate in the common defense. Control opponents interpret the amendment as creating an individual right to own and use firearms.

John R. Lott Jr., author of the influential and hotly-debated book More Guns, Less Crime, weighs in on the side of the latter interpretation in a commentary in the National Review. You can read the article at the National Review Online.

Also read an interview with the author.

Archived in Books for the News
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In No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy authors Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites undertook a fascinating survey of some of the most iconic images of the last century, analyzing their profound effects on the American political and social landscape. Since the 2007 publication of their book, the authors have also started a blog where they continue their critique of the role that photojournalism and other visual practices play in democratic society, bringing their ideas to bear on current issues and new media in real-time.

Today's posting showcases the work of another UCP author, photographer Ashley Gilbertson and his extraordinary images of the war in Iraq which have illustrated the pages of the New York Times and other publications since the beginning of the U. S. invasion in 2003. The No Caption Needed blog offers a brief slide show of Gilbertson's work taken from his recent book, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War. Navigate to www.nocaptionneeded.com to check it out as well as read the other insightful critiques of visual media the author's offer.

To find out more about Gilbertson's book see the press's special website featuring an exclusive half-hour interview with the author where he relates his experiences photographing the war in Iraq as well as some of the his own ideas about the importance and impact of his images on public culture.

Archived in Books for the News | Film and Media | Politics and Current Events
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Newton Minow is more responsible than any other individual for the televising of presidential debates—an oasis in what he famously termed “a vast wasteland.” From the creation of the Kennedy-Nixon debates to his current service on the Commission on Presidential Debates, he has worked to bring political discussion into the mass media. He is uniquely situated to write the just-released Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future, which he authored with journalism professor Craig L. LaMay.

Minow and LaMay reviewed the history of presidential debates in their book and from their comments we culled some of the memorable moments from past debates, supplemented with images and links to online videos where available. Nixon sweating, “I knew Jack Kennedy,” presidential scowls and more—review them and relive them.

We also have an excerpt about the first televised debate between Nixon and Kennedy.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
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Based on Eric Klinenberg's Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, a new play by Steven Simoncic looks at the 1995 heat wave that hit the city of Chicago with 106 degree temperatures and caused the deaths of over seven hundred people—one of the deadliest disasters in Chicago's history. Reviewing the play for the Chicago Sun-Times theater critic Heidi Weiss writes:

Mayor Daley is known to be an avid theatergoer. But it's unlikely that he, or City Council members, or a slew of officials from major city agencies who were on the job during the summer of 1995, will be stopping in at Pegasus Players in the coming weeks to catch Heat Wave. If they do, they will be subjected to a most uncomfortable two hours.

As for everyone else, this world premiere (produced with Live Bait Theater) will serve as a vivid reminder of a moment when (a decade before Hurricane Katrina) both municipal government and that far more diffuse thing that might be termed "the human safety net" failed miserably.

More about the play is available at the Pegasus players website. More about the book is at our website and in our interview with Eric Klinenberg.

Archived in Books for the News | Chicago | Film and Media | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
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Chicago 10, the innovative documentary that revisits the tumult of the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the Chicago 8/7 conspiracy trial of key antiwar activists a year later, opens Friday in select theaters. The film is directed by Brett Morgen and combines archival footage of the chaos of August 1968 with animated reenactments of scenes from the trial. Plus a soundtrack ranging from Black Sabbath and Steppenwolf to the Beastie Boys and Eminem.

Morgen has been quoted as saying that he "wanted to do the myth of Chicago rather than the history," and "if you want to know the history of what happened in Chicago so long ago, then read a book." Well, we think understanding history is pretty darn important and are happy to oblige.

Twenty years ago we published the most complete account of the events surrounding the 1968 DNC, David Farber's Chicago '68. That book is innovative itself, creating multiple perspectives reflecting both police and demonstrators. Farber shows the developing plans of the antiwar movement for protesting the war in Vietnam during the convention, as the shocks of 1968 shift the ground—the Tet offensive, President Lyndon Johnson's withdrawal from the re-election race, the assassination of Martin Luther King and subsequent riots in cities across the country, and the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

Next month we will release a paperback edition of Battleground Chicago: The Police and the 1968 Democratic National Convention by Frank Kusch. Battleground Chicago is essential for understanding what is completely absent in Chicago 10—any insight into the motivations, thoughts, and feelings of the individual policemen who were enforcing order on the streets of Chicago. (Or, as Mayor Richard J. Daley famously misstated it: "the policeman is there to preserve disorder.") Kusch interviewed eighty former Chicago police officers who were on the scene and uncovered the other side of the story of '68.

If you want to get a taste of 1968, go see Chicago 10. But if you want to understand 1968, read a book.

Update: We now have an excerpt from Battleground Chicago and an excerpt from Chicago '68.

Archived in Books for the News | Chicago | History
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First up is Simon Kitson's new book The Hunt for Nazi Spies: Fighting Espionage in Vichy France, which seems to be receiving a bit of attention lately. Along with a piece in the New York Review of Books, the Literary Review also recently published an enthusiastic review of the book. Nigel Jones writes for the Literary Review:

Despite excitable claims on book jackets, the number of original historical discoveries that truly alter our thinking about the past are few and far between. All the more reason to celebrate, therefore, when the genuine article comes along: Simon Kitson's brief study of a neglected area of the politics of Vichy France is just such a work.…

Our view of Vichy has been a uniformly black and white one—or rather, just black: that the regime presided over by Marshal; Pétain was pro-German, anti-Semitic, reactionary, ultra-Catholic and all in all a thoroughly bad thing. Kitson's work challenges that view in one important aspect: the policy of Vichy's military and police intelligence services was, in secret deed contrasting to its leaders' words, anti-German.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Another revealing new work, David Shulman's Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine was reviewed this week in the Nation:

Dark Hope is a diary of [Shulman's] work, from 2002 to 2006, with Ta'ayush, the Palestinian-Israeli group that has taken up the most difficult and dangerous hands-on work of peacemaking: it brings convoys of medicine and food into the West Bank and helps Palestinian farmers harvest their wheat and olives, its members often placing themselves physically between groups of wild-eyed gun-toting settlers and Palestinian peasants simply trying to sow their fields.… Shulman's book offers the record of a thousand piercing particulars, indignities too "small" to make the headlines but when taken together point directly to a systematic policy of injustice of the largest and most appalling dimensions. It is, indeed, this sense of skewed scale—the activists' humble gestures pitted against a huge military-ideological machine—that makes the book so wrenching.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Publishers Weekly ran a nice review this Monday of Newton N. Minow and Craig L. LaMay's Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future, citing the timeliness and relevance of the book as we head closer to the 2008 presidential elections. Scroll about halfway down the on the PW review web page to find the review.

Chicago Life published a review this week of Chicago under Glass: Early Photographs from the Chicago Daily News, calling Mark Jacob and Richard Cahan's collection of rare photographs from early twentieth-century Chicago "a book made to order for all who love Chicago photography, history, sports, politics—you name it." Read the review on the Chicago Life website.

Last but not least, the February 20th New York Sun ran an interesting review of Ross Hamilton's Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History. In the review Simon Blackburn calls Hamilton's book a "vast and serious canvas" of "accident" as a concept, ranging from the Aristotelian categories of accident and substance, to the modern vernacular understanding—all "brought together by the paradoxical idea that it is the accidents that happen to us that determine our essential nature." Read the review on the New York Sun website.

Archived in Books for the News
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In the most famous defeat in American military history Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer lost his life along with most of the rest of his 7th Cavalry at the now famous Battle of Little Bighorn, also known as Custer's Last Stand.

In the ensuing years the defeat has become a powerful symbol of America's bloody past, with everyone from tourists and historians to Native American activists attempting to interpret and explain the battle in the context of the multicultural present. In the March 6 New York Review of Books, Larry McMurtry reviews Michael A. Elliott's new book Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer and explores the complicated question of why the battle retains such power for Americans today. McMurtry writes:

Even as the sun set for Custer, dawn broke for the Custerologists—as Michael Elliott calls them—whose numbers now darken the sky. If you don't believe me, write yourself some life insurance, then head up to Hardin, Montana, toward the end of June, and you'll be able to take in not one but two reenactments of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, one sponsored by the town of Hardin itself (admission $16) and one put on by the powerful Crow family called the Real Birds (admission $12).

The Crow were scouts for Custer, and fought along with him. I attended the Crow sundance once, which might as well have been held in Harvard Yard, so thick were the white ethnologists on the ground. It would probably have been warmer in Harvard Yard too.

No one should think that because 130 years have passed since the battle the passions between tribes and within tribes have abated. Much of Michael Elliott's book is devoted to explaining that people who might have been expected to calm down in that length of time in fact haven't calmed down at all.

Read the rest of the review on the New York review of Books website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | History | Sociology
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Just in time for the opening of his exhibition at Melbourne's Obscura Gallery, the Australian paper The Age ran an article last Sunday on Ashley Gilbertson and his new book, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War. As the article notes, Gilbertson is himself an Australian native and got his first taste of professional journalism "documenting the lives of Kosovar refugees seeking temporary protection in Australia." The article continues:

The project sparked an interest in the plight of displaced people that led him to West Papua, Afghanistan and eventually Iraq, where he has spent a total of 18 months since 2002.

His early trips to the country were a hand-to-mouth existence, selling stories as he went, often depending on the goodwill of colleagues and strangers.

Towards the end of a trip in 2003 he picked up work for the New York Times. Since he returned from that trip, his work has been exclusively for the US newspaper.

His work while embedded with US marines during the 2004 Fallujah offensive made his name, earning him the prestigious Robert Capa Award for courageous photography from the US Overseas Press Club.

But his experiences have left scars. He watched as Lance Corporal William Miller, a soldier who was escorting him up the stairwell of a minaret, was shot dead by an insurgent. Running out of the mosque under insurgent fire, he wished to die. "I ran out into the street with the marines, hoping I would take a slug," he said.

Read more about Gilbertson's harrowing experiences in Iraq at The Age. Also check out the Obscura Gallery's web page for more information on his exhibition. Finally, see the Whiskey Tango Foxtrot website featuring a full half hour video interview with the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
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George E. Lewis, longtime member of the Chicago based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and author of the forthcoming A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music is the featured guest this month on the Wire's "Invisible Jukebox." In the column the Wire's Brian Morton "plays a musician a series of records which they are asked to identify and comment on—with no prior knowledge of what they're about to hear."

Currently you can only get the rest of the interview with a subscription to the Wire but you can learn more about the AACM as well as pre-order a copy of Lewis's book on their site or ours.

This month's edition of Chicago Magazine is also running several interesting articles featuring UCP books including Eric Klinenberg's Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago and Marcia Lausen's Design for Democracy: Ballot and Election Design.

The Heat Wave piece engages the author and Chicago playwright Steven Simoncic in a discussion about the forthcoming stage adaptation of the book opening February 21 at the Live Bait Theater. (Also see this interview with Eric Klinenberg on our website.)

Meanwhile, Chicago Magazine's Ted Mcclelland has written a quick piece on Marica Lausen's critique of electoral ballot design featuring an interesting graphical representation of her suggestions for building a better ballot.

And while technically this should have been in a posting in last week's remainders we should mention that Matthew Hedman's The Age of Everything: How Science Explores the Past was featured in a review in the February 1 edition of the Independent. Navigate to the Independent website to read the article or read this excerpt from the book.

Also out last Friday was a nice piece in the Chronicle Review by Mark Monmonier, author of From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame. In the article the author describes a little about how he first became interested in maps and his interest in using maps to plot cultural landscapes as well as physical ones. Read an excerpt from the book here.

Archived in Books for the News
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Kevin Rozario's The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America was one of several books in a review essay about America's complex relationship with disaster published in last Friday's Financial Times. Arguing that American's find disaster simultaneously terrifying and entertaining, the FT's Michael Skapinker uses Rozario's book to help explain this social paradox, especially in terms of the way this conflicted attitude is reflected in the media. Skapinker writes:

Kevin Rozario, who teaches American studies at Smith College, Massachusetts, writes astutely about disaster, particularly its relationship with entertainment. As he notes in The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America, the link predates the modern movie industry.

A few months after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the subsequent fires, Lucile Garrett went with her parents to see a re-enactment of the event at a theatre in Minneapolis. "On the stage," she recalled, "was a miniature reproduction of San Francisco, on the night of the fire … Then suddenly we were favoured with a great rumbling! The hills on which the city was built shook and tottered! … Finally the hills cracked open, the tottering buildings fell, and the whole city burst into flames. It continued to burn for some minutes and at last they lowered the curtain on the glorious blaze."

Like the events of September 11 almost a century later, the terrible filmic quality of disasters is often inescapable. Anthony Lane, the New Yorker critic, wrote in the immediate aftermath of 9/11: "Of course you could argue that last Tuesday was an instant dismissal of the fantastic—that people gazed up into the sky and immediately told themselves that this was the real thing. Yet all the evidence suggests the contrary; it was the television commentators as well as those on the ground who resorted to a phrase book culled from the cinema: 'It was like a movie', 'It was like Independence Day.' 'It was like Die Hard.' 'No, Die Hard 2.'

Read the rest of the article on the FT website.

Also, read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Books for the News | Film and Media | History | Sociology
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"The Art of Lee Miller" is a major retrospective of works by and about the artist curated by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The exhibition has now come stateside; it opened a week ago at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in July.

A lengthy critical essay by Judith Thurman was in the January 21 New Yorker, while a nicely illustrated article was in the February 4 issue of Newsweek. Like Carolyn Burke's biography Lee Miller: A Life which we recently released in paperback, the articles deliver a fascinating look at the life and artistry of Miller. She dominated the world of high fashion in the late 1920s, modeling for magazines like Vogue and Vanity Fair, and then became a respected photographer herself, leaving an indelible mark on the worlds of fine art photography and photojournalism. Writing for the New Yorker, Thurman details the pivotal turn in Miller's career from art object to artist:

If one is to believe the story, Condé Nast noticed her crossing the street just in time to pull her from the path of an oncoming vehicle, and this fortuitous collision led to an interview with Edna Chase, Vogue's editor in chief.… She was soon posing for Steichen, Arnold Genthe, and Nickolas Muray, the leading photographers of the day.…

In 1929, with several lovers fighting for the honor of seeing her off, and café society sad to lose its star playgirl, Miller sailed for Europe with the ambition "to enter photography by the back end.…" She planned to do some modeling for George Hoyningen-Huene at Paris Vogue while she apprenticed with Man Ray, a leader of the avant-garde and master of many genres—painting, photography, sculpture, and graphic art.…

Under Man Ray's tutelage, Miller mastered the use of the Graflex camera, with glass plates, and then the Rolleiflex; studio lighting setups; cropping and retouching, improvisation with the viewfinder; and his techniques for developing.

The article goes on to detail Miller's extraordinary, but tumultuous life, and speaks in detail about her groundbreaking work as one of the first female war correspondents during WWII. A theme which the Newsweek article picks up as well:

After she moved [to] London in 1939, she began her most important photography. The cockeyed perspective she'd absorbed from the surrealists served her well in the arresting, absurdist images she captured during the Blitz: a crushed Remington typewriter; a male mannequin standing incongruously in a heap of curbside rubble.… She rode into Germany with the U.S. Army, starkly documenting the corpses and the ovens of Buchenwald and Dachau—and zooming in, almost poetically, on a dead SS guard floating in a canal. She also shot Hitler's apartment in Munich—then got in his tub for her first bath in weeks, a moment caught on film by [Life photographer Dave] Scherman. Her combat boots on the bathmat are still caked with the mud of Dachau from earlier in the day.

The most thorough exploration of Miller's life and career can be found in Burke's 400-plus page biography Lee Miller: A Life. We have an extended excerpt from the book, dealing with Miller's experiences covering the War in France—from the Allied invasion of Normandy to the German surrender.

A slide show is online at the New Yorker.

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

Inevitably, Geer himself was swiftboated on Youtube.

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

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
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The California Literary Review, an online magazine, is running a great selection of photographs from Ashley Gilbertson's recently published Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War. The photos are accompanied by a short essay by the author discussing how he wound up on assignment with the New York Times covering the battle of Falluja—one of the fiercest battles of the conflict:

In March 2004, four American contractors were ambushed in the center of Falluja, a city forty-three miles west of Baghdad. They were dragged from their cars, beaten, and their bodies burnt.… Back in Iraq, furious Marine generals who were supposedly in control of Falluja promised swift vengeance and on April 4 attacked the city with everything they had. Hundreds of Iraqis were killed in a week of intense urban combat.…

My rotation had finished and I was at the bureau packing to leave the country when a scramble ensued to get someone from the paper to cover the battle from the frontlines. Times higher-ups contacted generals and politicians, and eventually we were given two… slots, one of them mine. I repacked my bags, this time including body armor and equipment I needed to file my photos under battle conditions. A few hours Later I boarded an aircraft bound for the dusty Camp Falluja five miles east of the city.

You can find the rest of the article and the accompanying photos online at the California Literary Review website. Also see the website for the book featuring a fascinating video interview with the author discussing his experiences as a war photographer in Iraq.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education is running an article by James M. Lang on the current state of undergraduate education titled "The Myth of First-Year Enlightenment." In the article Lang cites Tim Clydesdale's recent book, The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens after High School to explore modern students' reactions to their first introduction to academe:

You'll recognize this story: Intelligent but naïve high-school graduate heads off to college… [and] discovers how limited her worldview has been. Her consciousness is awakened. She emerges from her first year of college a changed human being, with more thoughtful views on religion, politics, and her own identity.

Our institutions… hawk the tale to prospective students and their parents on Web sites, in brochures, and on campus tours: You will come back from your first year a changed man or woman. You will be on the path to your new and more enlightened life. You will have had the best four years of your life.

Not so, according to Tim Clydesdale, an associate professor of sociology at the College of New Jersey, and author of The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens After High School.… "Most of the mainstream American teens I spoke with neither liberated themselves intellectually nor broadened themselves socially during their first year out," he writes. "What teens actually focus on during the first year out is this: daily life management."

In other words, freshmen spend most of their time and intellectual energy figuring out how to handle life without parental restraints and support: how to deal with money; negotiate newfound freedoms with sex, drugs, and alcohol; and determine how much time to devote to studying, working, and playing.

But what freshmen don't do during their first year of college comes as more of a (perhaps depressing) surprise: "Most American teens keep core identities in an 'identity lockbox' during their first year out and actively resist efforts to examine their self-understandings through classes or to engage their humanity through institutional efforts such as public lectures, the arts, or social activism."

Read the rest of the article on the Chronicle website.

Archived in Books for the News | Education | Philosophy | Religion | Sociology
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David Grazian's entertaining exploration of the bars of Philadelphia in On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife, continues to attract attention. Two new articles have recently been published featuring Grazian's new book—the first appeared in the January 18 Chronicle Review and includes some great praise for the book's revealing look at inner city nightlife:

Grazian's new book is, among other things, a long catalog of confidence games. Nightclub managers strain to persuade the world that their typical patrons are younger, less suburban, and more female than they actually are. For a secret payment of $500 per week, one Philadelphia publicist… will bring four attractive, well-connected friends to a club…

There are also the more-familiar kinds of interpersonal fraud: In bars like Tangerine, people sometimes lie about their ages, their names, their jobs, and their marital statuses. Women give out fake phone numbers to shake off obnoxious suitors. People feign a sexual interest in others in order to score free drinks, to make their lovers jealous, or simply to make the evening less boring.

"What's skillful about the book is that these are settings that people are familiar with, but often don't think very hard about," says Joshua Gamson, a professor of sociology at the University of San Francisco who specializes in commercial culture. "Grazian manages to make them seem new, without trying to oversell his analysis. The book has an appropriate level of seriousness and an appropriate amount of pleasure."

A lengthy review also appeared in the January 20 Toronto Star. Geoff Pevere writes for the Star:

Plunging into clubs, bars, strip-joints and restaurants, [Grazian] collects first-person testimonies from hustlers, horndogs, would-be makeout artists and dozens of variously candid members of Philadelphia's burgeoning night-life industry. While this serves the highly reader-friendly function of leavening his occasionally concrete prose with regular bursts of profane, party-down plain-spokenness, it also brings a welcome humanity to what might otherwise have been a clinical case study in the overall decline of contemporary civilization. And make no mistake: what happens in Philadelphia doesn't stay in Philadelphia. If there's one thing about the book which makes it resonate beyond those city limits, it's that the city he describes is any city where there's an "entertainment district" catering to the largely false promise of sex in the city.

Read an excerpt from the first chapter.

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | Psychology | Sociology
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All the news we can wrap in a Friday afternoon bundle:

French and more French
Vanessa R. Schwartz's It's So French!: Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture got a brief write-up in the January 12 Financial Times. If you'd like more, navigate to the website of UC-Irvine professor of history and KPFK radio host Jon Wiener for archived audio from an interview he conducted with Schwartz for his show on Wednesday.

A new job for John Nagl
Lt. Col. John Nagl was the commander of the 1st Battalion, 34th Armor at Fort Riley. He served in Operation Desert Storm, was the operations officer of a tank battalion task force in Operation Iraqi Freedom, and was on the writing team for The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. But now, according to this article appearing in Wednesday's Washington Post, "he has decided to leave the service to study strategic issues full time at a new Washington think tank."

Nagl was also featured this Wednesday on NPR's Fresh Air discussing his strategy for the future of counterinsurgency operations in Iraq. You can find archived audio here.

Get your personal paparazzi
David Grazian, author of On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife is quoted in an article in Time magazine about the latest twist in America's obsession with fame: paparazzi-for-hire to follow and photograph you and satisfy your desire for a taste of celebrity. From the Time article:

Grazian… calls personal paparazzi reality marketers, who make the act of being photographed more meaningful than the actual photos. "The goal isn't to produce a product," he says. "It's to heighten the experience of the event. In that sense, there doesn't even need to be any film in the camera."

An author's guide to promotion
Reality-based self-promotion is discussed in “How to be an Author” in the Careers section of the Chronicle of Higher Education. The article is by William Germano, himself the author of Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books and From Dissertation to Book. We will release a new edition of Getting It Published late this year that will include new material similar to the CHE article.

The colors of plants
Also reviewed in the January 12 Financial Times was David Lee's Nature's Palette: The Science of Plant Color. The reviews says it is "an elegantly produced and beautifully illustrated cross between personal memoir, botanical miscellany, and student text."

Archived in Books for the News
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Bradford Edwards, the artist whose astonishing collection of Vietnam-era Zippo lighters is featured in Vietnam Zippos: American Soldiers' Engravings and Stories (1965-1973), was interviewed yesterday on All Things Considered by NPR's senior Asian correspondent Michael Sullivan. In the interview, which took place on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, Sullivan explored Edwards unique fascination with these relics of war:

Edwards insists he's not a "Vietnam Zippohead."

"I'm not a Zippo collector. I'm not somebody into the Zippo, per se," he says.…

"I'm not into it because, really, of the war or because of memorabilia or because of any real, I would say, direct historical aspect. I'm in it for the artistic sensibility and the direct emotional expression that you see via text or images," he says.

Edwards calls the Zippos left behind "pure art without ambition"—personal narratives that capture the mixed emotions of a confusing time and place.

Navigate to the NPR website to view photographs of Edwards and displays of Zippos, plus the archived audio and transcript of the interview.

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Sunday's Toronto Star ran an interesting article on sociologist David Grazian's revealing portrait of Philadelphia's thriving club scene in On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife. Summarizing the book the Star's Ryan Bigge writes:

Although Grazian discusses the sophisticated public relations matrix that helps bring in customers, he's more interested in exploring the paradox that club goers allow themselves to be willingly hustled. Making a comparison to movies filled with computer-generated effects, Grazian suggests, "People are willing to suspend their disbelief in order to enjoy a thrilling lie."

Which means the tens of thousands of club goers—the actual number is the subject of considerable contention, but even the lowest two-night estimate is 40,000—that cram Toronto's entertainment district on Friday and Saturday nights, spending millions of dollars per year on drinks, are marks of their own making. Of course, just because the game is rigged, doesn't mean you can't enjoy yourself, as the eternal popularity of Las Vegas demonstrates.

Read the rest of the article on the Toronto Star website or read this excerpt from the first chapter of the book. The press's website also features an interview with Grazian about his previous book on a similar topic, Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs.

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events | Psychology | Sociology
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In a news release from Vanderbilt University's news office, John G. Geer, author of In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns observes that Hillary Clinton's win in New Hampshire may mean that she and her supporters direct fewer negative attacks at Barack Obama. But Geer does not necessarily see this as a good thing:

"The public would be better served if all of the remaining candidates undergo this type of scrutiny.… Many pundits view negative ads as counterproductive, but nothing could be further from the truth."

Geer said that there are many incentives for candidates in both parties to run negative ads that address legitimate issues. "Attack ads contain more substantive information than positive ads," he said. "Therefore, they generate a dialogue that helps voters understand the respective positions of the candidates."

In addition, attack ads toughen up the eventual nominee for the general election, when the attacks will come faster and harder. "How candidates handle the criticism will provide insight to how they might govern, since those who occupy the Oval Office are the frequent target of harsh attacks," he said.

To find out more about Geer's unconventional take on advertising in presidential campaings read the rest of the article on the VU news service website. You may preview a sample of the book on Google Book Search. And, turning the tables, see Geer subjected to an attack ad.

Archived in Books for the News | Film and Media | Politics and Current Events
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Bloomberg.com is running an interesting review of a selection of the many recently published books on the war in Iraq. In the review, Charles Taylor notes the "unexpected treasure" that is the U. S. Army's Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World War II—a small book originally published in 1942 designed to help American soldiers adapt to Iraqi culture, but that perhaps has more relevance today than it did over sixty years ago. Taylor writes:

This small guide for U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq during the Second World War—containing a map of the country, a glossary of useful Arabic phrases and instructions on what to expect and how to act—is the unexpected treasure of the lot. Brief, sensible, written in the kind of clear English that used to be common in American life, the book speaks of a time when thought was given to preparing soldiers for what they would face culturally as well as militarily, and when the importance of the mission was not assumed to grant soldiers the right to swagger like conquerors.

The new foreword by Lieutenant Colonel John A. Nagl sounds both appreciative and rueful, written in the voice of a man who wonders how we ever became embroiled in such a foul-up.

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