The Chicago Blog

Each of the major candidates vying to be the next President of the United States—Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain—has cited Reinhold Niebuhr’s political philosophies as among their most profound influences. Written during the cold war era when America came of age as a world power, The Irony of American History is now back in print and more relevant than ever. Niebuhr’s masterpiece on the incongruity between personal ideals and political reality is both an indictment of American moral complacency and a warning against the arrogance of virtue. Impassioned, eloquent, and deeply perceptive, Niebuhr’s wisdom will cause readers across the political spectrum to rethink their assumptions about right and wrong, war and peace.

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Archived in History | Press Releases | Religion
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Soon after The Hollow Hope’s initial publication, a reviewer declared that “one may not always agree with Rosenberg’s book, but it will be impossible to ignore it. It should set the terms of the debate about the role of the Supreme Court during the last decade of the twentieth century.” Having fulfilled all of this promise and then some during nearly two decades of intense argument over its conclusions, The Hollow Hope now returns—substantially expanded and updated—to chart the course of twenty-first century debate about whether courts can spur political and social reform.

With new chapters that respond to his critics and address the courts’ role in the struggle for same-sex marriage rights, Gerald Rosenberg emphatically reasserts his powerful contention that it’s nearly impossible to generate significant reforms through litigation. The reason? American courts are ineffective and relatively weak—far from the uniquely powerful sources for change they’re often portrayed as. Rosenberg supports this claim by documenting the direct and secondary effects of key court decisions—particularly Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade. Further illuminating these cases, as well as the ongoing fight for same-sex marriage rights, he also marshals impressive evidence to overturn the common assumption that even unsuccessful litigation can advance a cause by raising its profile.

The Hollow Hope has indisputably vindicated another reviewer’s prediction that it would “fundamentally reshape how we see the courts and what questions we ask about them.” As legal battles over hot-button social issues stretch on, the new Hollow Hope is poised to reignite the landmark debate sparked by its first incarnation.

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Archived in Law | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
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Former President Bill Clinton said earlier this year that the choice facing 2008 Democratic primary voters is not “change versus experience,” but rather “words versus deeds, talk versus action, rhetoric versus reality.” No matter who becomes the next President, though, he or she will continue the long presidential tradition of acting through words to increase and sustain the powers of the executive branch. When it comes to shaping the highest office in the land, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson reveal, deeds are done in words, and rhetoric can change reality.

In Presidents Creating the Presidency, Campbell and Jamieson expand and recast their classic Deeds Done in Words for the YouTube era, revealing how our media-saturated age has transformed the continuously evolving rhetorical strategies that increase or deplete political capital by enhancing presidential authority or ceding it to other branches. Covering chief executives from George Washington to George W. Bush, the authors add new analyses of signing statements and national eulogies to their explorations of inaugural addresses, veto messages, and war rhetoric, among other genres of presidential oratory. For two centuries, these rhetorical acts have succeeded brilliantly and failed miserably at satisfying the demands of audience, occasion, and institution. Illuminating the reasons behind each outcome, Campbell and Jamieson draw an authoritative picture of how presidents have used rhetoric to shape the presidency—and how they continue to re-create it.

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Archived in Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
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The symptoms are all around us: rising temperatures, increasingly destructive storms, shrinking animal populations, creeping deserts. The earth is slowly dying, poisoned by too much carbon dioxide—and it’s high time we called a doctor. Enter popular science writer and journalist William Calvin, who with Global Fever delivers a grim diagnosis and outlines a radically thorough course of treatment. In stark, straightforward language, Calvin warns us of the mortal danger we face from unanticipated feedback loops as rising temperatures kill off plants and dry up water, leading to ever-faster warming. Every day we put off serious action, the situation becomes more desperate and our possible solutions narrow. If we hope to avoid climate disaster and the scarcely imaginable social upheaval that would accompany it, Calvin argues that we must commit to an aggressive, worldwide effort to switch to clean technologies—from hot rock geothermal power to air-fueled cars—essentially jumpstarting what would amount to a new, green, industrial revolution. The time for half-measures is over; Global Fever is a blueprint for real, comprehensive action.

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Archived in Biology | Economics | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
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New in Paperback—Piero Melograni here offers a wholly readable account of Mozart’s remarkable life and times. This masterful biography proceeds from the young Mozart’s earliest years as a wunderkind—the child prodigy who traveled with his family to perform concerts throughout Europe—to his formative years in Vienna, where he absorbed the artistic and intellectual spirit of the Enlightenment, to his deathbed, his unfinished Requiem, and the mystery that still surrounds his burial.

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Archived in History | Music | Press Releases
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What Herman Melville did for the whale, Lee Siegel did for the Kama Sutra with his first critically acclaimed and enormously successful novel, Love in a Dead Language. Here Lee Siegel—no not THAT Lee Siegel, this is the other Lee Seigel, the nice Lee Siegel, the novelist, magician, and sex obsessed Lee Siegel—does the same for eternal love. The premise of this gem of a book is this: down on his luck in both letters and love, a reluctant Lee Siegel is summoned to a remote south Florida town by the conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon, who contrary to both history and legend not only discovered the Fountain of Youth, but has savored its waters for the past 540 years. But Ponce de Leon’s time is short—and it’s his dying wish that Lee Siegel ghostwrite his autobiography, chronicling his numerous romantic conquests, exploits, and misadventures. The result is everything readers have come to expect from this Lee Siegel: a tender, witty, and salacious picaresque of sorts that falls somewhere between Don Quixote, Don Juan, and in a perverse sort of way, Don DeLillo in its evocation of empire’s twilight, the lure of the libertine, and one hopeless romantic’s eternal quest for the ideal. Comic, lusty, and fully engaged with the act of invention, whether in love or on the page, Love and the Incredibly Old Man continues this Lee Siegel’s exuberant exploration of that sentiment which Ponce de Leon confesses has “transported me to the most joyous heights, plunged me to the most dismal depths, and dropped me willy-nilly and dumbfounded at all places in between.”

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Archived in Literature | Press Releases
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2008 marks the fortieth anniversary of a black mark on American history: the 1968 Democratic Convention and its notorious example of police brutality against demonstrators. The provocative Battleground Chicago offers a new perspective on this tragic event by revealing how-and why-the police attacked antiwar activists at the convention. Working from interviews with eighty former Chicago police officers who were on the scene, Frank Kusch uncovers the other side of the story of ’68, deepening our understanding of a turbulent decade.

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Archived in Chicago | History | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
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Last year’s report from the National Science Foundation dolefully confirmed what many researchers have suspected for years: while the number of PhD graduates in the sciences continues to increase, tenure-track positions have remained static since the early 1980s. And after spending years in the post-doc trenches, this glut of PhDs is enough to make many would-be scientists wonder about their next steps.

As the founders of their university’s first office for postdoctoral affairs, Victor A. Bloomfield and Esam E. El-Fakahany have first-hand experience with the challenges young scientists face. Together, they’ve mentored thousands of students, and now they’ve combined that experience in teaching, counseling, and research to create The Chicago Guide to Your Career in Science. From preparing a CV and resume, to writing grants and scientific papers, to networking with fellow scientists, The Chicago Guide to Your Career in Science truly is a “toolkit” for aspiring scientists—helping them not just cope but excel at this critical phase in their careers.

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Archived in Biology | Education | Press Releases
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Germany’s leading literary family during the 20th century was headed by Thomas Mann and composed of six talented children, the most accomplished of which were Erika and Klaus. Long obscured by the fame of their domineering father, Erika and Klaus were prominent writers and artists in their own right who led fascinating, unconventional lives that mirrored the tumult and chaos of their times. In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain is their story. Andrea Weiss’s remarkable biography chronicles Erika and Klaus’s equally remarkable lives. Openly gay during an era of secrecy and repression; defiantly anti-fascist during the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich; intimate friends with such luminaries as W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, André Gide, and Jean Cocteau; performance artists before the phrase had even been coined, In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain is rich in anecdote and eye-opening details, sending the reader spinning and tumbling into the minds of these two extraordinary but neglected literary figures.

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Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Gay and Lesbian | History | Literature | Press Releases
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Chicago literature is rife with images of industry and unbridled urban growth. But the tallgrass prairie and dense oak forests that once comprised Chicago’s landscape also inspired local writers. In Of Prairie, Woods, and Water, naturalist Joel Greenberg gathers these voices from the land to present an unexpected portrait of Chicago. Often charming, sometimes heart-wrenching, this anthology of Chicago-area nature writing is scheduled for release on April 22nd—just in time for Earth Day.

Of Prairie, Woods, and Water tells the story of a land in transition, one with abundant, unique, and incredibly lush flora and fauna—a natural history that is quite elusive today. From the journal of a frustrated pioneer who staked a claim in Kankakee marsh to Theodore Drieser’s plea for conservation of the Tippecanoe River, the sources included are as diverse as the nature they describe. Together, they traverse a wide area of the Midwest, from the Illinois River to the Indiana Dunes.

This spring and summer, a series of performances called “Voices from the Land” will bring Of Prairie, Woods, and Water to life. The premiere performance takes place at the Garfield Farm Museum on April 27. For more on this event and others at the Chicago Botanic Garden and the Lincoln Park Zoo, please visit www.press.uchicago.edu/News/ontheroad.html.

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Archived in Biology | Chicago | Press Releases
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Haunted by the afterlife of medieval theology and literature yet grounded in distinctly modern quandaries of desire, Connie Voisine’s female speakers reverberate with notes of Marie de France’s tragic heroines. For Voisine, poems are occasions for philosophical wanderings, extended lyrics that revolve around the binding and unbinding of desire, with lonely speakers struggling with the impetus of wanting as well as the necessity of a love affair’s end. With fluency, intelligence, and deeply felt emotional acuity, Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream navigates the heady intersection of obsessive love and searing loss.

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Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
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Whether writing poems about North American life and landscape; or love poems; or elegies for family and friends; or poems on serious, debilitating illness and the transformations it can effect—Elise Partridge offers in Chameleon Hours words forged by suffering and courage. Full of wit and empathy, Partridge’s poems draw inspiration from sources as whimsical as tortoises and pontoons, as poignant as a homeless woman taking shelter inside a post office on a winter night, and as deeply personal as her own cancer diagnosis at a young age. Chameleon Hours is a book about the rewards of being reminded of one’s own mortality and the lyric expression of life in all its intensity.

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Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
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Blessings for the Hands follows various speakers—often disabled speakers, who never once figure themselves as objects of complaint or self-pity—through the haunted dreamscape of “normalcy.” Indeed, dreams are continuous presences in this unusually subtle and elegant debut collection that juxtaposes physical circumstances with the vast interior life of the imagination. The subjects of Blessings for the Hands are real and imagined confrontations—and reconciliations—between family members, friends, strangers, and animals.

Matthew Schwartz’s quasi-autobiographical verse complicates and clarifies the emotions waiting just underneath the patterns and expectations of the speakers’ daylight lives, where anger, joy, corporeality, and mortality all seem to collide. For Schwartz, poetry is a sleight of hand that keeps the reader guessing through nearly imperceptible shifts between present vision and absent reality. Blessings for the Hands is a lyric reckoning of the tension between the life we are given and the life we are determined to lead.

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Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
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This fall on September 26th, Senators Barack Obama and John McCain will face each other in the first of three presidential debates leading up to the general election. Their encounter will carry on a now storied political tradition that dates back to 1960, when Senator John F. Kennedy first debated Vice President Richard M. Nixon. That debate, of course, marked television’s grand entrance into presidential politics and afforded the first real opportunity for voters nationwide to see their candidates square off against each other. But beforehand, as we all now know, Nixon had spent two weeks in the hospital recovering from a seriously injured knee. By the time of the debate, he was nearly 20 pounds underweight and his pallor was poor. To make matters worse, he arrived in studio wearing an ill-fitting shirt, and refused make-up to improve his color and lighten his 5 o’clock shadow. J.F.K., by contrast, had just spent several weeks campaigning in California. He was tan, confident, and well-rested. And the rest, as they say, is history. Though that history has for decades gone unwritten—until now. Enter Newton N. Minow, who here offers a timely behind-the-scenes look at how the presidential debates first came about and the many political and legal battles that have shaped them over the past several decades.

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

Archived in Economics | Press Releases
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Now Available in Paperback

Peter Dear's intellectual journey begins with a crucial observation: that scientific ambition is, and has been, directed toward two distinct but frequently conflated ends—doing and knowing. Teasing out this tension between doing and knowing during key episodes in the history of science, he reveals how the two principles became formalized into a single enterprise, science, that would be carried out by a new kind of person, the scientist.

“The portraits of individual scientists, from Newton, Boyle, and Faraday to Einstein and Bohr, are vivid and pithy; [Dear] has a good ear for the apt quote that lets us hear their voices.”—Eric Ormsby, New York Sun

“[Dear] shows how mechanistic explanations in physics and chemistry became ever more frequent after the industrial revolution, only to be supplanted by the nihilism of quantum theory in the social turmoil that followed the first world war. It is full of insights into how society, culture and people’s perception interweave across biology, chemistry and physics.”—Adrian Barnett, New Scientist

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Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases
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Consistently an outsider—a child of the fundamentalist South with an eighth-grade education, a self-taught intellectual, a black man married to a white woman—Richard Wright nonetheless became the unparalleled voice of his time. The first full-scale biography of the author best known for his searing novels Black Boy and Native Son, Richard Wright: The Life and Times brings the man and his work—in all their complexity and distinction—to vibrant life. Acclaimed biographer Hazel Rowley chronicles Wright's unprecedented journey from a sharecropper's shack in Mississippi to Chicago's South Side to international renown as a writer and outspoken critic of racism.

Drawing on journals, letters, and eyewitness accounts, Richard Wright probes the author's relationships with Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison, his attraction to Communism, and his so-called exile in France. Skillfully interweaving quotes from Wright's own writings, Rowley deftly portrays a passionate, courageous, and flawed man who would become one of our most enduring literary figures.

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Archived in Biography | Black Studies | History | Literature | Press Releases
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Columbia University Press, University of California Press, and the University of Chicago Press announce a new joint publishing effort in South Asian Studies.

The University Presses of California, Chicago, and Columbia are pleased to announce that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a grant to commence publication of a major book series covering South Asia. Titled “South Asia across the Disciplines” the new series aims to publish six monographs per year, in a collaborative effort across all three University Presses with each press publishing two series books per year.

Each press has long-established roots in the field and is based at a university with outstanding South Asia faculty. In recent years, the market for South Asian studies books has declined along with the broader market for academic monographs in many fields, making it increasingly difficult for emerging scholars to get their work published. “South Asia across the Disciplines” will disseminate and promote new scholarship on South Asia by combining the efforts and resources of the three presses.

Continue reading "A new joint publishing effort for South Asian studies" »

Archived in Press Releases | UCP News
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This year in Forbes magazine's annual ranking of the best cities in the U.S. for singles, Philadelphia cracked the top ten for the first time, and its nightlife was deemed the eighth best in the country. Philly has gone from a city known primarily for Rocky and cheesesteak to a city of the young and rich partying at the hundreds of restaurants, bars, and clubs that have sprung up in the past decade. On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife offers an insiders' tour of Philly's now booming nightlife, revealing a world governed by the art of the hustle. David Grazian, whose last book on the Chicago blues scene explored how nightclubs there package the blues for their patrons, here reveals how patrons of nightclubs package themselves—the lies that men on the prowl use to get phone numbers, the tricks underrage women use to get past the velvet rope, even the ploys that nightclubs use to make theirs the it place to be. An illuminating look at the sophisticated spectacle of a night out—the sets, the stage managers, the actors, and the audience—On the Make is as entertaining as the confessional stories it recounts.

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Archived in Press Releases
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When Frances Ford Coppola was first introduced to Youth Without Youth by his former high school classmate and University of Chicago professor Wendy Doniger, he was inspired to make his first film in ten years. Mircea Eliade's novella, now a major motion picture from Sony Pictures Classics, lies at the intersection of the natural and supernatural, myth and history, dream and science. The psychological thriller features an elderly academic who experiences a cataclysmic transformation that endows him with prodigious powers of memory and comprehension. Sought by the Nazis for medical experiments on the potentially life-prolonging power of electric shocks, Matei flees through Romania, Switzerland, Malta and India in a surreal fantasy that tests the boundaries of genre and imagination.

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Archived in Literature | Press Releases
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Power. Sex. Status. That's pretty much what human life boils down to: a vicious, grasping struggle to get ahead and stay there. We look out for number one, claw for every advantage, and aren't above using—and even betraying—friends and family to get what we want. So just what is it that separates us from the higher primates? Dario Maestripieri would argue that it's less than you may think, and with Macachiavellian Intelligence he draws readers deep into the social life of the world's most common monkey, the rhesus macaque, to show just how much we can learn from them about human life.

Writing with a biting, sardonic wit, Maestripieri draws on primatology, evolutionary biology, economics, politics, and literature to present a wry, rational, and wholly surprising view of our humanity as seen through the monkey in the mirror.

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Archived in Anthropology | Biology | Press Releases | Psychology
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The situation in our surveillance state is such that the government can monitor many of our daily activities, using closed-circuit TV, global positioning systems, and a wide array of other sophisticated technologies—without warning, and at any time. But despite the growing public awareness of these intrusions, our post-9/11 environment of fear makes people reluctant to question them. Yet, as Christopher Slobogin explains in Privacy at Risk, these shocking violations of privacy are often perpetrated by those in positions of power.

This ground-breaking book argues that courts should prod legislatures into enacting more meaningful protection against government overreach by applying the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. Slobogin demonstrates how we can thus preserve rights guaranteed by the Constitution—without compromising the government’s ability to investigate criminal acts—in a book that will intrigue anyone concerned about privacy rights in the digital age.

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Archived in Law | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases | Sociology
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The Sacramento Theatre Company reimagines Euripides' Electra as Electricidad, while off-Broadway's Signature Theatre puts on Iphigenia 2.0 and an Indian director stages Raja Oedipus, an adaptation of the famous Sophocles play featuring Karbi gods and goddesses in place of the original Greek deities: if you've seen any of these recent performances—or one of their countless counterparts on stages across the globe—you've experienced the timelessness, renewed popularity, and ever-broadening reach of Greek tragedy. But how are today's productions different from their ancient peers? What are the best strategies for interpreting these dramas on contemporary stages? In this follow-up to his acclaimed Love, Sex & Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes our Lives, renowned classicist Simon Goldhill responds to these questions (and many others) with his long-awaited guide How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today.

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Archived in Classics | Education | History | Literature | Press Releases
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It's the late 1960s. You're nine years old, living in Bombay, and your family is a bit … complicated. Your mother was born in America, but she has fully adopted Indian dress, customs, and attitudes. Your Indian father, meanwhile, is cynical, worldly, and deeply suspicious of anything that smacks of mysticism or religion—which includes much of Indian culture. Then, out of the blue, your sixteen-year-old brother announces that he's leaving home to go live with a guru and become holy. How on earth are you supposed to go about the business of growing up in such a complicated family?

With My Family and Other Saints, Kirin Narayan shows us how. Her funny, touching memoir tells the story of her brother's quest and its effects, revealing a family full of love, yet always on the verge of disintegration. As their house becomes a waystation for the army of hippies, gurus, and charlatans flooding India, Narayan also brings late-60s Bombay to life, taking us back to a time and place when nearly everyone, it seemed, was embarked on some sort of spiritual quest and Western seekers were obsessed with all things Indian, from yoga to transcendental meditation. Deeply moving, yet frequently hilarious, My Family and Other Saints is a poignant reminder of both the power and the frailty of family bonds in turbulent times.

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Archived in Anthropology | Literature | Press Releases | Religion
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Maps are universal forms of communication, easily understood and appreciated regardless of culture or language. This truly magisterial book introduces readers to the widest range of maps ever considered in one volume. A companion to the most ambitious exhibition on the history of maps ever mounted in North America, Maps will challenge readers to stretch conventional thought about what constitutes a map and how many different ways we can understand graphically the environment in which we live. Collectors, historians, mapmakers and users, and anyone who has ever "gotten lost" in the lines and symbols of a map will find much to love and learn from in this book.

Read the press release. Also see a special website for the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Art and Architecture | Cartography and Geography | History | Press Releases | Religion
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The age of the earth—as well as the age of the stars and the universe—is the subject of great debate. Young Earth Creationists, citing biblical evidence, believe the Earth is between six thousand and 10,000 years old. Scientists, on the other hand, estimate the solar system is much older, around 4.5 billion years. But how do scientists determine the ages of things, especially those which formed so long before human history?

In The Age of Everything, Matthew Hedman lays bare the tricks of the scientist’s trade, revealing how archeologists, biologists, geologists, physicists, astronomers, and cosmologists all reconstruct the distant past. Explaining how scientific inquiry has determined everything from the dates of climate changes to human migration patterns to the age of the universe, The Age of Everything covers a wide range of timescales, from the relatively recent reign of the Mayans to the far-distant birth of stars. A provocative and far-ranging look at the power of modern science to put us in touch with the ancient past, The Age of Everything will be indispensable for anyone with an interest in popular science—and time travel.

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Archived in Biology | History | Press Releases
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The discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1849 triggered the largest overland migration in the world since the Crusades. Overnight, it seemed like everyone was heading west. Though they knew next to nothing about what they’d find along the way, or even at their destination, thousands of families piled their belongings onto wagons and set out, dazzled by visions of a life of wealth and ease.

As Keith Meldahl recounts in Hard Road West, it didn’t take long before the trail disabused the settlers of those notions. Drawing heavily on the diaries and letters of the emigrants, Meldahl reveals their astonishment at their first encounters with the harsh, breathtaking Western landscape, so much less hospitable than the Eastern forests or Midwestern prairies. Meldahl marries that historical and personal perspective to the equally dramatic underlying story of the geology of the West, peeling back the layers of sediment and history to show how centuries of geological activity had a direct effect on the routes taken by the travelers—and the resources and aid available to them along the way.

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Archived in Biology | History | Press Releases
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Our entire voting process, from registering to vote to following instructions at the polling place, can be almost as confusing as those infamous Florida ballots. Tackling this grave problem head-on, Design for Democracy presents adaptable design models that can improve almost every part of the election process by maximizing the clarity and usability of ballots, registration forms, posters and signs, informational brochures and guides, and even administrative materials for pollworkers. This handsome volume also lays out specific guidelines—covering issues like color palette, typography, and image use—that anchor the comprehensive election design system devised by the group of specialists from whose name the book takes its title. Part of a major AIGA strategic program, this group’s prototypes and recommendations have already been used successfully in major Illinois and Oregon elections and, collected here, are poised to spread across the country.

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Archived in Film and Media | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
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So long, Chicago,“ read the headline when the Daily News ran its last edition on March 4, 1978. Winner of thirteen Pulitzers, the Chicago Daily News launched the careers of Carl Sandburg, Ben Hecht, and Mike Royko, just to name a few. It was also one of the first dailies to incorporate eye-catching illustrations, and soon thereafter, black-and-white photography.

Chicago under Glass: Early Photographs from the Chicago Daily News is the breathtaking collection of photographs from those early years, 1901 to 1930. During those three decades, Chicago and America witnessed the invention of the airplane, the repeal of prohibition, and the Great War. Photographers at the Daily News covered these scenes, and then went beyond, capturing news as it broke in front of them.

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Archived in Art and Architecture | Chicago | History | Press Releases
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On a hot summer day in 1876, George Armstrong Custer led the Seventh Cavalry to the most famous defeat in U.S. military history.The Seventh Cavalry lost more than half of the 400 men who rode into the Indian camp, and every soldier under Custer’s direct command was killed.

It’s easy to understand why this tremendous defeat shocked the American public at the time. But in Custerology, Michael A. Elliott tackles the question of why the battle retains such power for Americans today. Weaving vivid historical accounts of Custer at Little Bighorn with contemporary commemorations that range from battle reenactments to the unfinished Crazy Horse memorial, Elliott reveals a Custer and a West whose legacies are still vigorously contested. He takes readers to each of the important places of Custer’s life, from his Civil War home in Michigan to the site of his famous demise, to show how more than a century later, the legacy of Custer still haunts the American imagination.

Read the press release. Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Press Releases | Sociology
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Now available in paperback—Optimists believe this is the best of all possible worlds. And pessimists fear that might really be the case. But what is the best of all possible worlds? How do we define it? Is it the world that operates the most efficiently? Or the one in which most people are comfortable and content? Questions such as these have preoccupied philosophers and theologians for ages, but there was a time, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when scientists and mathematicians felt they could provide the answer.

This book is their story. Ivar Ekeland here takes the reader on a journey through scientific attempts to envision the best of all possible worlds. He begins with the French physicist Maupertuis, whose least action principle asserted that everything in nature occurs in the way that requires the least possible action. This idea, Ekeland shows, was a pivotal breakthrough in mathematics, because it was the first expression of the concept of optimization, or the creation of systems that are the most efficient or functional.

Tracing the profound impact of optimization and the unexpected ways in which it has influenced the study of mathematics, biology, economics, and even politics, Ekeland reveals throughout how the idea of optimization has driven some of our greatest intellectual breakthroughs.

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Archived in Economics | History | Mathematics and Physics | Philosophy | Press Releases
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As troops returning from Iraq begin to tell their harrowing stories of mindless violence, civilian casualties, and lives changed forever by the horrors of war, our society is reminded—yet again—of the psychological battle scars that endure long after a deployment ends. Although Edmund Blunden’s memoirs were first published in 1928, his unforgettable account of World War I trench warfare has never been more relevant.

In steely-eyed prose as richly allusive as any poetry, Blunden tells of the endurance and despair found among the men of his battalion, including the harrowing acts of bravery that won him the Military Cross. Undertones of War, which also includes a selection of Blunden’s war poems that unflinchingly juxtapose death in the trenches with the beauty of Flanders’s fields, deserves a place on anyone’s bookshelf between The Naked and the Dead and The Things They Carried.

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Archived in Biography | History | Press Releases
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Now available in paperback— The Bourgeois Virtues is a magnum opus offering a radical view: capitalism is good for us. Deirdre McCloskey's sweeping, charming, and humorous survey of ethical thought and economic realities—from Plato to Barbara Ehrenreich—overturns every assumption we have about being bourgeois. Can you be virtuous and bourgeois? Do markets improve ethics? Has capitalism made us better as well as richer? Yes, yes, and yes, argues McCloskey, who takes on centuries of capitalism's critics with astonishing erudition and range of reference. Applying a new tradition of "virtue ethics" to our lives in modern economies, she affirms American capitalism without ignoring its faults and celebrates the bourgeois lives we actually live, without supposing that they must be lives without ethical foundations.

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Archived in Economics | History | Philosophy | Press Releases
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Now Available in Paperback—In Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University William Clark argues that the research university—which originated in German Protestant lands and spread globally in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—developed in response to market forces and bureaucracy, producing a new kind of academic whose goal was to establish originality and achieve fame through publication. With an astonishing wealth of research, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University investigates the origins and evolving fixtures of academic life: the lecture catalogue, the library catalog, the grading system, the conduct of oral and written exams, the roles of conversation and the writing of research papers in seminars, the writing and oral defense of the doctoral dissertation, the ethos of "lecturing with applause" and "publish or perish," and the role of reviews and rumor. This is a grand, ambitious book that should be required reading for every academic.

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Archived in Education | History | Press Releases
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Now available in paperback— Jean-Noël Jeanneney, former president of France's Bibliothèque Nationale, here takes aim at what he sees as the most troubling aspect of Google's Library Project: its potential to misrepresent—and even damage—the world's cultural heritage. In this impassioned work, Jeanneney argues that Google's unsystematic digitization of books from a few partner libraries and its reliance on works written mostly in English constitute acts of selection that can only extend the dominance of American culture abroad.

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Archived in History | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
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Now available in paperback— Arguably the most influential document in the history of American 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. Carl Smith's fascinating history reveals the Plan's central role in shaping the ways people envision the cityscape and urban life itself and points out ways the Plan continues to influence debates, even a century after its publication, about how to create a vibrant and habitable urban environment.

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Archived in Art and Architecture | Cartography and Geography | Chicago | History | Press Releases
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Now available in paperback— With all the verve and erudition that have established his earlier books as classics, Richard A. Lanham here traces our epochal move from an economy of things and objects to an economy of attention. According to Lanham, the central commodity in the age of information is not stuff but style. In such an age, intellectual property will become more central to the economy than real property, while the arts and letters will grow to be more crucial than engineering, the physical sciences, and indeed economics as conventionally practiced. The new attention economy, therefore, will anoint a new set of moguls in the business world—masters of attention with a grounding in the humanities and liberal arts.

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Archived in Economics | Literature | Press Releases
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When Charles Montgomery was ten years old, he stumbled upon the memoirs of his great-grandfather, a seafaring missionary in the South Pacific. Twenty years later and a century after that journey, entranced by the world of black magic and savagery the bishop described, Montgomery set out for Melanesia in search of the very spirits and myths his great-grandfather had sought to destroy. In The Shark God, he retraces his ancestor's path through the far-flung islands, exploring the bond between faith and magic, the eerie persistence of the spirit world, and the heavy footprints of the British Empire.

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Archived in Anthropology | Biography | Press Releases
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The biological world under our toes is often unexplored and unappreciated, yet it teems with life. In one square meter of earth, there live trillions of bacteria, millions of nematodes, hundreds of thousands of mites, thousands of insects and worms, and hundreds of snails and slugs. But because of their location and size, many of these creatures are as unfamiliar and bizarre to us as anything found at the bottom of the ocean.

A unique and illustrative introduction to the many unheralded creatures that inhabit our soils and shape our environment aboveground, Life in the Soil covers everything from slime molds and roundworms to woodlice and dung beetles, as well as vertebrates from salamanders to shrews. Lavishly illustrated with nearly three hundred color illustrations and masterfully-rendered black and white drawings, Life in the Soil will inform and enrich the naturalist in all of us.

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Archived in Biology | Press Releases
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The media are awash with stories about increasingly close ties between college science departments and multi-million dollar corporations, but is that relationship endangering science? Have universities, bedazzled by visions of huge profits from biotechnology and drug patents, allowed themselves to be fatally compromised by corporate cash?

With Science for Sale, journalist Daniel S. Greenberg draws on sources developed through his forty years of reporting to paint a clear and detailed picture of the state of university science. Taking on everything from drug tests to the technology transfer offices that have sprung up at many universities, Greenberg reveals that campus capitalism is more complicated—and less profitable—than media reports would suggest.

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Archived in Biology | Economics | Education | History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases
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Concise and accessible, The Middle Path: Avoiding Environmental Catastrophe lays out the current state of research into climate change and considers what must be done if environmental catastrophe is to be avoided. Lambin takes a remarkably balanced approach, free of ideological prejudice, and the result is a surprisingly optimistic take on our prospects. Large-scale systems like the earth’s environment naturally tend toward equilibrium, and Lambin presents a batch of solutions, both global and local, that exploit that tendency. Taken together, they give humanity a real shot at averting this potentially fatal crisis.

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Archived in Biology | Press Releases
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Readers who denounce most contemporary French poetry as self-referential experimentation, word games, exercises in deconstruction, or other kinds of incomprehensible writing disconnected from everyday life—brace yourselves for a revelation. Erotic and urbane, distinguished by formal skill yet marked by the subtlest shades of feeling, Guy Goffette’s unabashedly lyrical poems pay homage to both Verlaine and Rimbaud, whom he counts as his important forbears, with echoes of Auden and Pound, Pavese and Borges.

Long known and admired in France, Guy Goffette’s Charlestown Blues: Selected Poems, a Bilingual Edition is the first English-language collection of his works. Poet and translator Marilyn Hacker’s crystalline, musical renderings will show Anglophones why this poet is considered one of the most important writing in French today.

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Archived in Literature | Press Releases
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“‘A filmmaker is a man like any other; and yet his life is not the same.… This is, I think, a special way of being in contact with reality.’ Or so says Michelangelo Antonioni, the legendary filmmaker behind the stark landscapes and social alienation of Blow-Up and L’Avventura, who here reveals his idiosyncratic relationship with reality. Through autobiographical sketches, theoretical essays, and interviews, The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema explores the director’s unique brand of narrative-defying cinema as well as the motivations and anxieties of the man behind the camera.”

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Archived in Film and Media | Press Releases
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“In 1970, President Nixon announced a massive war on crime. More prisons were built and more people incarcerated than ever before in U.S. history. With the media's portrayal of convicts as demons, the public attitude toward anyone who had ever been arrested became bleak and hostile. According to Pager [Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration], this attitude prevails today, particularly in the job market. Using scholarly research, field research in Milwaukee, and graphics, she shows that ex-offenders, white or black, stand a very poor chance of getting a legitimate job (though black men with clean records fared the same as whites just out of prison). As a result, many live in poverty or return to crime. Pager is not an activist clamoring for reform but instead presents her findings in a clearheaded manner, pointing out the societal consequences of the predicament and suggesting ways for change. Written for the general reader with a nod to the academic audience, the book is both informative and convincing. Highly recommended.”—Library Journal

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Archived in Black Studies | Press Releases | Sociology
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In Search of Lost Time has enthralled lovers of literature for nearly a century. But for diehard fans, its seven volumes are never enough: Proust fans also devour biographies of this most enigmatic of writers, tap guidebooks to navigate his magnum opus, and even sponsor book clubs devoted to plumbing its considerable depths. Here National Book Award nominee Alice Kaplan offers Proust fans the gift they've long been waiting for: a crystalline translation of Madame Proust, the enthralling biography of Proust's mother.

Written by Evelyne Bloch-Dano and originally published in France to lavish critical acclaim, Madame Proust: A Biography explores how Marcel's mother both inspired and informed his legendary novel. Renowned both jokingly and lovingly as the quintessential mama's boy of all of modern literature, Proust was dramatically influenced by his mother, Jeanne Weil, and this intimate portrait of her life and times reveals precisely how, limning their unusually close bonds and the fin de siècle French milieu in which they lived.

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Archived in Biography | Literature | Press Releases
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Vicki Hearne, best known and celebrated today as a writer of strikingly original poetry and prose, was a skillful dog and horse trainer, and sometimes controversial animal advocate. Before her untimely death in 2001, she entrusted her last manuscript to distinguished poet, scholar, and long-time friend John Hollander. This manuscript became Tricks of the Light, the definitive Vicki Hearne collection that spans the entirety of her illustrious career, from the 1980 publication of her first book to never-before-published poems composed on her deathbed.

These poignant meditations on life and death possess a rare combination of philosophical speculation, boundary-shattering lyricism, and an unusually elegant style that became Hearne's trademark. Tricks of the Light—acute, vibrant, and deeply informed—is a sensuous reckoning of the connection between humans and the natural world.

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Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
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As creatures of finite lifespan, capable of both learning about the past and imagining the future, humans are naturally fascinated with the concept of time. Questions of the origins of the earth, the universe, and humanity have been perpetual preoccupations, eliciting some of humanity's most trenchant thought—and most heated debates. With A Natural History of Time, Pascal Richet tells the fascinating story of attempts over centuries to determine the age of the earth. Featuring such luminaries as Hesiod, Leonardo, Descartes, and Newton, A Natural History of Time marries the pleasures of history to the drama of scientific discovery, giving readers a chance to marvel at just how far our knowledge—and our planet—have come.

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Archived in Biology