The Chicago Blog

What do you get when you combine one of the world’s most influential economists and one of its most important legal thinkers? Well, when the two men concerned are Gary Becker and Richard Posner, you get sharp commentary, serious analysis, and innovative thinking about a stunning range of contemporary political and social issues.

Week after week for nearly five years, that’s what Becker and Posner have been offering at the Becker-Posner blog, and with Uncommon Sense, they gather the best of the posts and running debates that have informed, surprised, and confounded a host of readers. Arranged by topic, and updated to take account of subsequent developments, the essays in this volume bring an economic perspective to such questions as the sale of human organs, the use of steroids in professional sports, the regulation of CEO compensation, and many more. To watch two such erudite thinkers trade ideas—and even forceful disagreements—is a sheer pleasure, and a testament to the power of minds unfettered by convention and unwilling to settle for received wisdom.

Read the press release.

Archived in Economics | Law | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the tense months that followed the 9/11 attacks, the public’s fears of further terrorism were fanned by the deadly anthrax letters, which seemed to symbolize the ease with which terrorists could kill using biological weapons. But in the subsequent years the United States government has spent billions of dollars on combating bioweapons—so citizens can rest easy, knowing we’re much safer. Or are we?

Far from it, say Lynn Klotz and Edward Sylvester, and with Breeding Bio Insecurity they make a forceful case that not only has all of that money and research not made us safer, it’s made us far more vulnerable. Laying out their case clearly and carefully, they show how the veil of secrecy in which biosecurity researchers have been forced to work—in hundreds of locations across the country, unable to properly share research or compare findings—has caused no end of delays and waste, while vastly multiplying the odds of theft, sabotage, or lethal accident. Meanwhile, our refusal to make this work public causes our allies and enemies alike to regard U.S. biodefense with suspicion. True biosecurity, Klotz and Sylvester explain, will require that the federal government replace fearmongering with a true analysis of risk, while openly involving the public and the scientific community in a joint effort to reduce the threat of bioterror.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Economics | Philosophy | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 03:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Though the telegram may be long gone, the allure of a dispatch from a foreign land remains strong. So when Philip Graham began chronicling his sojourn in Portugal at the popular McSweeney’s Web site, it didn’t take long for his dispatches to attract a following of readers eager to experience the faded glories and living mysteries of Lisbon.

Now Graham has expanded on those dispatches, and the resulting book, The Moon, Come to Earth, is travel writing at its lyrical, introspective best. Whether wandering Lisbon’s cobbled medieval streets or wrestling with complicated local customs on the subway, Graham brings an attentive eye and love of idiosyncrasy to scenes that epitomize the paradox of living in a foreign city: Neither a tourist nor a local, he is forever between cultures, fascinated and admiring, but at the same time separate and uncertain. Through his explorations, the culture of Portugal—its rich literary culture, inventive cuisine, and saudade-drenched music—comes vibrantly to life. The Moon, Come to Earth is both a love letter to Lisbon and a testament to the pleasures and discoveries of travel itself.

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt and see the author's website.

Archived in Anthropology | Biography | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In January we announced the birth of the new series "South Asia Across the Disciplines"—a unique collaborative publication effort between Columbia University Press, the University of California Press, and the University of Chicago Press designed to increase publication opportunities for emerging scholars in the field. We recently unveiled a new website for the project offering more details, including a formal call for submissions and a list of forthcoming publications at www.saacrossdisciplines.org.

According to the SAAD website:

"South Asia Across the Disciplines" publishes work that aims to raise innovative questions in the field. These include the relationship between South Asian studies and the disciplines; the conversation between past and present in South Asia; the history and nature of modernity, especially in relation to cultural change, political transformation, secularism and religion, and globalization. Above all, the series showcases monographs that strive to open up new archives, especially in South Asian languages, and suggest new methods and approaches, while demonstrating that South Asian scholarship can be at once deep in expertise and broad in appeal. We invite manuscripts from art history, history, literary studies, philology or textual studies, philosophy, religion, and the interpretive social sciences, especially those that show an openness to disciplines other than their own.

As a collaboration among leading university presses, "South Asia Across the Disciplines" marks a new approach. Each book in the series is published under the imprint of one of the three presses, but all are promoted as part of the series, sharing in design, advertising, and publicity.

To find out more about this exciting new publication initiative from three of the academy's leading publishers, navigate to www.saacrossdisciplines.org.

Archived in Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Green jobs. Green technology. Green agriculture. Green energy. In the twenty-first century, green—and the environmental consciousness that’s associated with it—is good. But where did the green revolution, and the modern environmental movement, get started? Historian Harriet Ritvo has traced it origins to an unlikely place—a bucolic reservoir in the English Lake District. To look at it today, with its placid sheen, surrounding evergreens, and apparent lack of pollution or development, Thirlmere hardly looks like the site of a revolution. But under its calm surface lurks the enduring legacy of a nineteenth-century conflict that pitted industrial progress against natural conservation—and helped launch the environmental movement as we know it.

Purchased by the city of Manchester in the 1870s, Thirlmere was dammed and converted into a reservoir, its water piped a hundred miles south to the burgeoning industrial city and its workforce. This feat of civil engineering—and of natural resource diversion—inspired one of the first environmental struggles of modern times. The Dawn of Green re-creates the battle for Thirlmere and the clashes between conservationists who wished to preserve the lake and developers eager to supply the needs of industry and a growing urban population. Bringing to vivid life the colorful and strong-minded characters who populated both sides of the debate, Ritvo shows how lessons learned in the Lake District can inform and guide modern environmental and conservation campaigns.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In September, President Obama’s Ocean Policy Task Force released its first report, recommending the creation of a new National Ocean Council to coordinate federal response to ocean pollution, rising sea levels, and ocean acidification, among other problems. With the creation of the NOC, the new administration is signaling that healthy oceans matter. But the task before the council is enormous, given that the sea is, well, sick.

Veteran science journalist Alanna Mitchell reveals just how dire the situation is in Seasick. Here, she dives beneath the surface of the world’s oceans to give readers a sense of how this watery realm has been defiled—and what can be done to manage and preserve it, and with it life on earth. With Mitchell at the helm, readers submerge 3,000 feet to gather sea sponges that may contribute to cancer care, see firsthand the lava lamp—like dead zone covering 17,000 square kilometers in the Gulf of Mexico, and witness the simultaneous spawning of corals under a full moon in Panama.

The first book to look at the planetary environmental crisis through the lens of the global ocean, Seasick takes the reader on an emotional journey through a hidden area of the planet and urges conservation and reverence for the fount from which all life on earth sprang.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In Watch, Greg Miller describes a fresh purposefulness in his life and achieves a new level of poetic thinking and composition in his writing. Artfully combining the religious and secular worldviews in his own sense of human culture, Miller complicates our understanding of all three. The poems in Watch sift layers of natural and human history across several continents, observing paintings, archeological digs, cityscapes, seascapes, landscapes—all in an attempt to envision a clear, grounded spiritual life. Employing an impressive array of traditional meters and various kinds of free verse, Miller’s poems celebrate communities both invented and real.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 01:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An Algebra is an interwoven collection of eight sequences and sixteen individual poems, where images and phrases recur in new contexts, connecting and suspending thoughts, emotions and insights. By turns, the poems leap from the public realm of urban decay and outsourcing to the intimacies of family life, from a street mime to a haunting dream, from elegy to lyric evocation. Wholeness and brokenness intertwine in the book; glimpsed patterns and startling disjunctions drive its explorations.

An Algebra is a work of changing equivalents, a search for balance in a world of transformation and loss. It is a brilliantly constructed, moving book by a poet who has achieved a new level of imaginative expression and skill.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Because Albert Einstein’s equations so accurately describe the world around us, they seem timeless. But in truth, we have only understood how to apply his theory of general relativity for less than fifty years. When Einstein published his description of the effect of gravitation on the shape of space and the flow of time in 1916, few scientists knew what to do with it. Enter Roy Kerr, a twenty-nine-year-old Cambridge graduate who solved the great riddle in 1963. The solution he proposed emerged coincidentally with the discovery of black holes that same year and provided fertile testing ground—at long last—for general relativity. Today scientists routinely cite the Kerr solution, but even among specialists few know the story of how Kerr cracked Einstein’s code.

Part biography, part chronicle of scientific discovery, Cracking the Einstein Code unmasks the history behind the search for a real-world solution to Einstein’s field equations. Offering an eyewitness account of the events leading up to Kerr’s great discovery, Fulvio Melia vividly describes how luminaries such as Karl Schwarzschild, David Hilbert, and Emmy Noether set the stage for the Kerr solution; how Kerr came to make his breakthrough; and how scientists such as Roger Penrose, Kip Thorne, and Stephen Hawking used the accomplishment to refine and expand modern astronomy and physics. Today more than 300 million supermassive black holes are suspected of anchoring their host galaxies across the cosmos, and the Kerr solution is what astronomers and astrophysicists use to describe much of their behavior.

Sometimes dramatic, often exhilarating, but always attuned to the human element, Cracking the Einstein Code is ultimately a showcase of how important science gets done.

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

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Mathematics and Physics | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Spanning the area west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rocky Mountains, the Great Plains once ranked among the most magnificent grasslands on the planet, second only to the Serengeti in sheer size, grandeur, and biodiversity. But today this broad expanse of prairie and steppe is among the most endangered ecosystems in the entire world. Here award-winning photographer Michael Forsberg—a frequent contributor to such publications as National Geographic, Audubon, National Wildlife, and Natural History—reveals the lingering wild that still survives on the Plains and whose diverse natural communities, landscapes, and native flora and fauna together create one extraordinary whole. Featuring contributions from novelist and wildlife biologist Dan O’Brien, noted geographer and environmentalist David Wishart, and American poet laureate Ted Kooser, Great Plains features 150 stunning full-color images along with literary, historical, and scientific passages that bring this extraordinary part of the country into more vivid focus than ever before.

Most Americans know little about the landscape, wildlife, and history of this vast part of our country. But here, the beauty and majesty of the Great Plains come alive in all their quiet glory.

Read the press release. Also see a gallery of photographs from the book, or these sample pages in PDF format.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biology | Cartography and Geography | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the Geneva Conventions to the United Nations to the International Criminal Court, the steady progress of international law has been hailed by politicians and the general public alike, representing a perpetual hope that conflict between nations need not end in belligerence, unilateralism, and war.

Eric Posner believes that’s a naïve—and even dangerous—way of understanding how nations behave, and with The Perils of Global Legalism he lays waste to the illusion that international law will ever offer a meaningful alternative to the reality of nations acting in their own self-interest. After tracing the historical roots of the concept, Posner explains the fundamental problems of legitimacy and enforcement that render international law toothless; then, drawing on examples from land mine bans and free trade to NATO’s invasion of Serbia, he goes on to demonstrate that time and again, when faced with tough choices, leaders have blatantly disregarded international agreements in the name of perceived national interests.

As the Obama administration’s foreign policy—and its approach to international law—faces its first real tests in the coming years, The Perils of Global Legalism will be essential reading.

Read the press release. Also read an excerpt.

Archived in Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As fall beckons with changing leaves and shortening days, one thing is certain: NFL football is back, and Chicagoans everywhere are packing their coolers and grills for a trip to Soldier Field. For decades, the stadium’s signature columns provided an iconic backdrop for the Chicago Bears, but few realize that it has been much more than that. Soldier Field: A Stadium and Its City explores how this amphitheater evolved from a public war memorial into a majestic arena that helped define Chicago.

Chicago Tribune staff writer Liam T. A. Ford led the reporting on the stadium’s 2003 renovation—and simultaneously found himself unearthing a dramatic history. As he tells it, the tale of Soldier Field truly is the story of Chicago, filled with political intrigue and civic pride. Designed by Holabird and Roche, Soldier Field arose through a serendipitous combination of local tax dollars, City Beautiful boosterism, and the machinations of Mayor “Big Bill” Thompson. The result was a stadium that stood at the center of Chicago’s political, cultural, and sporting life for nearly sixty years, long before the arrival of Walter Payton and William “the Refrigerator” Perry.

Ford describes it all in the voice of a seasoned reporter: the high school football games, track and field contests, rodeos, and even NASCAR races. Photographs, including many from the Chicago Park District’s extensive collections, capture remarkable scenes of the swelling crowds at ethnic festivals, Catholic masses, and political rallies. This book will remind readers that Soldier Field hosted such luminaries as Billy Graham and Martin Luther King Jr., Judy Garland and Johnny Cash—as well as the Grateful Dead’s final show.

Now part of the city’s bid for the 2016 Olympic Games, Chicago’s stadium on the lake continues to make dramatic history. Soldier Field captures this history in the making and will captivate armchair historians and sports fans alike.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Chicago | History | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This month marks the 240th anniversary of the birth of Alexander von Humboldt. Although today he is less well known than some of the luminaries he inspired, Humboldt was the most famous intellectual of the age that began with Napoleon and ended with Darwin.

With The Passage to Cosmos, Humboldt remerges for a new age. Here, Laura Dassow Wall traces Humboldt’s ideas for Cosmos, the book that crowned his career, to his 1799 journey to the Americas, where he first experienced the diversity of nature and of the world’s peoples—and envisioned a new cosmopolitanism that would link ideas, disciplines, and nations into a global web of knowledge and cultures. In reclaiming Humboldt’s transcultural and transdisciplinary project, Walls situates America in a lively and contested field of ideas, actions, and interests, and reaches beyond to a new worldview that integrates the natural and social sciences, the arts, and the humanities.

To the end of his life, Humboldt called himself “half an American,” but ironically his legacy has largely faded in the United States. The Passage to Cosmos will reintroduce this seminal thinker to a new audience and return America to its rightful place in the story of his life, work, and enduring legacy.

Read the press release. Also read an excerpt.

Archived in Biology | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Vetted by some of the most distinguished child development researchers in the world, The Child broadens the current scope of knowledge on children and childhood. It is an unparalleled resource for parents, social workers, researchers, educators, and others who work with children.

Each entry in this one-volume encyclopedia begins with a concise and accessible synopsis of the topic at hand. For example, the entry for “adoption” begins with a general definition, followed by a detailed look at adoption in different cultures and at different times, a summary of the associated mental and developmental issues that can arise, and an overview of applicable legal and public policy both within the United States and elsewhere. The Child includes multiple cross-references to guide readers toward related topics and suggestions for further reading.

The Child also includes over forty “Imagining Each Other” essays that present vivid and iconic case studies of child-raising practices in specific cultural settings. In “Work before Play for Yucatec Maya Children,” for example, readers learn of the work responsibilities of some modern-day Mexican children, while in “A Hindu Brahman Boy is Born Again,” they witness a coming-of-age ritual in contemporary India.

Read the press release.

See a website for the book.

Archived in Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Forty years ago this month, the Chicago Cubs were on top of the baseball world, holding an eight-and-a-half-game lead and ready to cruise to their first pennant in more than forty years. But over the course of a few weeks, it all fell apart, with loss after loss culminating in one of the worst collapses in baseball history. The man at the helm of that disaster was the outspoken, cantankerous Leo Durocher, who always seemed to be on the scene of baseball’s most memorable moments throughout a fifty year career as a player or manager.

From riding the bench as a rookie with the ’27 Yankees, to breaking out as a hard-charging shortstop with the Gashouse Gang Cardinals in the 1930s, to managing the previously hapless Dodgers to their first World Series, to watching Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard ’round the world” propel his Giants to the 1951 pennant, to, yes, that horrible Cubs collapse—Durocher saw it all, and in 1975 he told his side of these stories and more in Nice Guys Finish Last. Now the University of Chicago Press is bringing Durocher’s classic back into print for a new generation of baseball fans to enjoy. All the larger-than-life players, the action, and the drama—not to mention the fights and feuds—of baseball’s golden age come to life in Durocher’s inimitable voice, making this the perfect companion for summer’s perfect game.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biography | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

New in Paperback—Giordano Bruno (1548—1600) is one of the great figures of early modern Europe, and one of the least understood. Ingrid D. Rowland's biography establishes him once and for all as a peer of Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Galileo—a thinker whose vision of the world prefigures ours.

Writing with great verve and erudition, Rowland traces Bruno's wanderings through a sixteenth-century Europe where every certainty of religion and philosophy has been called into question, and reveals how he valiantly defended his ideas to the very end, when he was burned at the stake as a heretic on Rome's Campo de' Fiori.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biography | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to the New York Times, Donald Westlake was “one of the most successful and versatile mystery writers in the United States,” with over 100 books to his name. The University of Chicago Press has embarked on a project to return the early volumes of his Parker series, written under the pseudonym Richard Stark, to print for a new generation of readers to discover—and become addicted to. These reprints will feature volumes 1-16 of the incredible series, through Butcher’s Moon.

Stark’s ruthless antihero is one of the most unforgettable characters in hardboiled noir. Lauded by critics for his taut realism, unapologetic amorality, and razor-sharp prose-style—and adored by fans who turn each intoxicating page with increasing urgency—Richard Stark is a master of crime writing, his books as influential as any in the genre.

Read the press release, and read this interview with the author.

Also see our complete list of books currently available in the series.

Archived in Fiction | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The University of Chicago Press is pleased to announce that beginning this month, in partnership with BiblioVault, the digital repository run by Chicago Distribution Services for scholarly presses, we now offer over 700 titles available for direct download through our Web site. No more lugging twenty pounds of books across campus, no more waiting for recalls and interlibrary loans, no more papercuts; just load Adobe's Digital Editions software on your computer or handheld device and start downloading!

The Press currently offers three e-book licensing options: Perpetual ownership at list price, 180-day ownership for about 50% off, and 30-day ownership for just $5.00.

According to Patti O'Shea, executive director of information systems at Chicago, "the limited-time plans will allow students who only need a book for a semester-long course, or for a research paper they're working on, to get the book immediately and own it for only as long as they need it."

If you'd like to test how it works go ahead and download a sample chapter from Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, or for more information see our info page and press release for Chicago Digital Editions.

Archived in Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Maverick gay icon of poetry Thom Gunn (1929—2004) and his body of work have long dared the British and American poetry establishments to either claim or disavow him. To critics in the UK and United States alike, Gunn demonstrated that formal poetry could successfully include new speech rhythms and open forms. Along the way, Gunn’s verse captured the social upheavals of the 1960s, the existential possibilities of the late twentieth century, and the tumult of post-Stonewall gay culture.

The first book-length collection of essays on this major poet, At the Barriers surveys Gunn’s career from his youth in 1930s Britain to his final years in California, bringing together some of the most important poet-critics from both sides of the Atlantic to assess his oeuvre. This landmark volume traces how Gunn, in both his life and his writings, pushed at boundaries of different kinds, be they geographic, sexual, or poetic—and how his influence has only grown since his death.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our new series, American Beginnings will publish original books, written by scholars but accessible to students and a general readership, that address critical issues in American history from the initial period of European contact through the beginning of the twentieth century. The series will focus particularly on questions of power, in all its manifold forms, in the centuries when America evolved from a loose collection of disparate colonies to a full-fledged nation-state. While it will include books on the kinds of institutions typically associated with power— government, legal systems, and voluntary organizations, to name a few—the series also seeks studies that explore expressions of power in more intimate contexts, such as the family and the household.

By affording a broad chronological frame, American Beginnings encourages work that moves beyond conventional periodization and in turn brings new insight to the formative influences on the early American past.

The series will include works by senior and junior scholars from a broad array of subfields, including political history, labor history, African American history, gender history, and financial history. In doing so, it hopes to facilitate novel interdisciplinary discussions about the practices of power in the American past.

For more information, you may contact Edward Gray (egray@fsu.edu), Stephen Mihm (mihm@uga.edu), or Mark Peterson (mark-peterson@berkeley.edu). You may also contact Robert Devens, the Press's editor for American history (rdevens@press.uchicago.edu).

Link to the announcement or download in PDF format.

Archived in History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The lure of a career playing professional basketball—those infamous “hoop dreams”—is often blamed for distracting young African Americans from their studies and pushing them to spend more time on the playground than in school. But this jaundiced view ignores how much these young men can learn on the court—an education that Scott N. Brooks vividly brings to life in Black Men Can’t Shoot.

Brooks coached summer league ball in Philadelphia for four years, becoming intimately involved in the lives of the young black men on his team. Since no one is a born athlete, Brooks shows us that becoming a good player is a learning process—one that transcends the game of basketball and helps mold these kids into responsible adults. He illuminates this process through the stories of two young men, Jermaine and Ray, following them through their high school years, their breakthroughs and frustrations on the court, and their troubles at home. Black Men Can’t Shoot is at once a moving coming-of-age story, a thrilling sports tale, and a clear-eyed look at surviving the ghetto.

Read the press release.

Also, read an excerpt.

Archived in Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Any fan of the public radio show This American Life will remember the classic episode in which host Ira Glass takes Michael Camille, renowned scholar of the Middle Ages, to Medieval Times—the chain of “castles” that offer such attractions as jousting shows and meals served by “wenches.” Glass was “wondering what this academic is going to think,” one of Camille’s colleagues later recalled. “But Michael’s attentive, delighted response captures so much of his pleasure in discovery.” The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame, the last work Camille completed before his passing in 2002, reflects not only that trademark joie de vivre but also the intellectual heft he embodied just as fully.

Constructed in the 1800s, the famous gargoyles represent a later era’s notion of the Middle Ages (not entirely unlike Medieval Times). In his sweeping, comprehensive history of these chimeras, Camille shows for the first time how they transformed an iconic thirteenth-century cathedral into a modern monument. From the nineteenth-century reconstruction of Notre-Dame through the gargoyles’ twentieth-century afterlives, Camille tells a story that will delight anyone whose imagination has been sparked by the enigmatic creatures who gaze at Paris from one of the world’s most celebrated vantage points.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As the monstrous and soon to be infamous Hurricane Katrina approached New Orleans, the National Weather Service issued this dire warning: “Devastating damage expected…. A most powerful hurricane with unprecedented strength…. Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks.“ Few Americans would deny the eerie accuracy of that prediction or forget the destruction wrought by that vicious storm.

Extreme weather like Katrina can be a matter of life and death. But even when it is pleasant—72 degrees and sunny—weather is still central to the lives of all Americans. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a topic of greater collective interest. America has one of the most varied and dynamic weather systems in the world. Every year, the Gulf coast is battered by hurricanes, the Great Plains are ravaged by tornados, the Midwest is pummeled by blizzards, and the temperature in the Southwest reaches a sweltering 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Whether we want to know if we should close the storm shutters or just carry an umbrella to work, we turn to forecasts. But few of us really understand the science behind them.

All that changes with The AMS Weather Book. The most comprehensive and up-to-date guide to our weather and our atmosphere, it is the ultimate resource for anyone who wants to understand how hurricanes form, why tornados twirl, or even why the sky is cerulean blue. Covering everything from daily weather patterns to air pollution and global warming, The AMS Weather Book will help readers make sense of news about the weather, cope with threats, and learn how integral oceanic and atmospheric science are to navigating our place in the physical world.

Written by esteemed science journalist and former USA Today weather editor Jack Williams, The AMS Weather Book explores not only the science behind the weather but also the stories of people coping with severe weather and those who devote their lives to understanding the atmosphere, oceans, and climate. The book’s profiles and historic discussions illustrate how meteorology and the related sciences are interwoven throughout our lives. Words alone, of course, are not adequate to explain many meteorological concepts. To illustrate complex phenomena, The AMS Weather Book is filled with engaging full-color graphics that explain such concepts as why winds blow in a particular direction, how Doppler weather radar works, what happens inside hurricanes, how clouds create wind and snow, and what’s really affecting Earth’s climate.

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

Read the press release.

Also, see a website of supplementary material and sample pages (PDF format, 8.2Mb).

Archived in Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Throughout human history, people have looked to the ancient world for lost knowledge and timeless wisdom—perhaps never more so than in the aftermath of World War I, whose swathe of devastation left millions dead and the Enlightenment dream in ruins. So when British archaeologist Arthur Evans began publishing breathless accounts of the ancient Minoan civilization he was uncovering on Crete—pagan, pacifistic, and matriarchal—it fired the imaginations of a whole generation of artists and intellectuals.

With Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, Cathy Gere tells the story of Evans’s excavations and their wide-ranging influence on the world of Western ideas. Over the first three decades of the twentieth century, Evans’s fanciful depiction of Minoan society drew the fervent attention of writers, artists, and thinkers who were at the forefront of the burgeoning modernist movement, including Robert Graves, H.D., Girgio de Chirico, Sigmund Freud, and James Joyce. As Gere traces the unexpected paths of Evans’s ideas through the lives and works of these figures, what emerges is an unforgettable portrait of an age of wrenching change—and of those who responded to it with intellectual vigor and fervid innovation.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Philosophy | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let’s get this straight from the start: Bigfoot doesn’t exist. All the reported sightings are almost certainly either mistakes or hoaxes. At the same time, Bigfoot is America’s premier homegrown monster, a figure as familiar as—if far hairier than—Uncle Sam. And he remains big news: when two men from rural Georgia claimed last autumn that they’d killed a Bigfoot, reporters and camera crews flocked to their press conference, and more than 1,000 news stories followed worldwide.

Just what makes this shaggy beast so enduring? With Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, Joshua Blu Buhs hacks his way through the forest of myths, mysteries, and pseudoscience surrounding Bigfoot to write a cultural history of this modern monster. Buhs begins his trek in the forests of nineteenth-century America, with tales of wildmen roaming the hills; he then travels to the Himalayas to come to grips (not literally) with the Abominable Snowman, then back to the late 1950s in northern California, where the contemporary creature first emerged as a media marvel. Along the way, we meet hunters and hucksters, charlatans and serious seekers, as Buhs travels the back roads of America in an attempt to understand Bigfoot’’s hold on our imagination. Just what does all the ensuing cryptozoology and craziness say about our modern relationship to wilderness, individuality, and the media?

Though Buhs always keeps his skeptic’s eye open, he writes with an enthusiast’s deep love for his subject; the result is a biography of Bigfoot that will leave other hunters following its footprints for years to come.

Read the press release.

Also, see an excerpt and an interview with the author.

Archived in Biology | History | Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 08:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In 2007, the landmark series Planet Earth made its American debut on the Discovery Channel, garnering massive critical acclaim and enthralling television audiences—and readers—nationwide. Featuring breathtaking sequences of predators and prey, lush vistas of forests from the tops of towering trees, and images of creatures from the ocean’s depths, Planet Earth brought unknown wonders from the natural world straight into our homes in high-def and forever changed the way we see the world.

Enter the highly anticipated follow-up, Nature’s Most Amazing Events, which makes its television debut this spring along with its counterpart, Nature’s Great Events, the same documentary in illustrated book form. Exploring six of the most spectacular natural phenomena on our planet, this series and the book are epic in every sense, charting seasonal and annual events that transform entire ecosystems and the life experiences of the thousands of animals within them, from the largest mammals to the smallest microorganisms. Using groundbreaking filming techniques and state-of-the-art scientific and photographic technologies, Nature’s Great Events shows life in action and across the globe.

The six events include the flooding of the Okavango Delta in Botswana, which turns sprawling swaths of desert into an elaborate maze of lagoons and swamps; the melting of 10 million square kilometers of ice in the Arctic, which imperils polar bears across the region; the migration of the Serengeti, where life is on the edge for both predator and prey and where lions and wildebeest battle to survive; the great salmon run in British Columbia where rivers teem with thousands of fish—and where grizzlies and wolves eagerly await them; the explosion of sea life in Alaska’s coastal waters where countless animals from far and wide brave killer whales to feed; and perhaps the greatest marine spectacle on the planet, the annual tide of sardines along South Africa’s east coast, where the greatest concentration of predators in the world—including sharks, whales, and dolphins—come to feast.

These events are among the processes most important to the survival of life on the planet. Tracking them at every stage with over 400 remarkable photographs, the book follows individual animals as they live and die during these events, often capturing the drama from their unique point of view. The result is an awe-inspiring and truly novel work that brings these events into more brilliant focus than ever before.

Read the press release.

Also, see videos from the BBC series, a gallery of photographs from the book, and sample pages (PDF format, 1.9Mb). The Discovery Channel has a website for the series.

Archived in Biography | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now Available in Paperback— This Wide and Universal Theater explores how Shakespeare’s plays were produced both in his own time and in succeeding centuries. David Bevington brings Shakespeare’s original stagings to life, explaining how the Elizabethan playhouse conveyed a sense of place using minimal scenery, from the Forest of Arden in As You Like It to the tavern in Henry IV, Part I. Moving beyond Shakespeare’s lifetime, Bevington shows the lengths to which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century companies went to produce spectacular effects. To bring the book into the present, Bevington considers recent productions on both stage and screen, when character and language have taken precedence over spectacle. This volume brings a lifetime of study to bear on a remarkably underappreciated aspect of Shakespeare’s art.

Read the press release.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Though he campaigned on a theme of change, in his first months in office, Barack Obama has already asserted inherent presidential power in ways reminiscent of his Republican predecessors. While abandoning some of the Bush Administration’s more audacious claims, President Obama has asserted the state secrets privilege in national security litigation, resisted judicial review of enemy combatant detention in Afghanistan, issued signing statements suggesting constitutional reservations about bills he has signed into law, and pursued the Bush Administration’s Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq, even though it was never approved by Congress.

With Madison’s Nightmare, Peter Shane shows how ambitious assertions of presidential power are the logical outcome of a decades-long trend that has seen presidents of both parties have waged an assault on the basic checks and balances of the U.S. government. Starting with Reagan and the elder Bush, continuing under Clinton, and culminating most spectacularly under the recent Bush administration, this “aggressive presidentialism” has diminished the role of the other branches of government and led to ideological, inappropriate, and sometimes downright illegal actions. If we want our government to work as the Founders intended, simply electing a new president is not enough: both liberals and conservatives must launch a wide-ranging reform effort that will change all levels of government and support a renewed culture of accountability.

Read the press release or read an excerpt.

Archived in Law | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Greenwich Village. Harlem. Bronzeville. Even in this freewheeling, globalized age, the names of these iconic neighborhoods still conjure up an atmosphere of glamour, excitement, and illicit thrills. But long before today’s teens or even yesterday’s beatniks wandered their streets, these neighborhoods exercised a powerful attraction for upright members of the middle class looking for dissipation and disreputable fun.

With Slumming, Chad Heap brings these early havens of hip to life, recreating the long-lost nightlife of early twentieth-century New York and Chicago. From jazz clubs and speakeasies to black-and-tan parties and cabarets, Heap packs Slumming with vivid scenes, fascinating characters, and wild anecdotes of a late-night life on the borders of the forbidden. And while he doesn’t ignore the role of exploitation and voyeurism in slumming—or the resistance it often provoked—he argues that the relatively uninhibited mingling it promoted across bounds of race and class helped to dramatically recast the racial and sexual landscape of burgeoning U.S. cities.

The unforgettable tale of an urban past that continues to resonate in our day, Slumming is a late-night treat for all urbanites and fans of the demi-monde.

Read the press release or read the introduction.

Archived in Black Studies | Gay and Lesbian | History | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In 2006 David S. Brown’s Richard Hofstadter, a sweeping intellectual biography of a man and his era, was published to great acclaim— E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post called it “the most important political book of the year that’s not about politics”—and definitively established the continuing importance of Hofstadter’s work and his legacy as a leader of the Eastern intellectual establishment.

With Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing, Brown returns with a collective biography of the prominent intellectuals—including William Appleman Williams, Charles Beard, and Christopher Lasch—who publicly opposed Hofstadter and the growing interventionist consensus he represented among America’s postwar elite.

Troubled by the burgeoning military-industrial complex and what they saw as America’s reckless fomenting of the cold war, they argued strenuously for a different path: a return to an older American tradition of progressivism and reform. Only that way, they believed, could the individual freedom and self-sufficiency that historically had represented the heart of American democracy survive. And while America’s imperial ambitions clearly remain strong, Brown shows how these ideas remain potent today, animating the work of prominent figures like William Cronon and Thomas Frank.

A fascinating follow-up to Richard Hofstadter, Beyond the Frontier draws timely attention to an intellectual tradition that is currently being rediscovered by conservatives and liberals alike.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biography | Education | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“Some people are vengeful, calling for jail, public humiliation, or even revolution,” the New York Times reported in March, adding to innumerable accounts of outrage at the news that insurance giant A.I.G. planned to use millions of federal bailout dollars for employee bonuses. Punctuated by such anger, the economic crisis has shone a stark light on the growing chasm between America’s haves and have-nots. Striking a timely note of unity, Class War? reveals that both sides of this class divide actually agree to a surprising—and heartening—extent about what government should do to close it.

In fact, Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs argue that at every income level and across geographical and ideological lines, most Americans favor public intervention to narrow the gap between rich and poor and create equal economic opportunities for all. Drawing on more than 70 years of opinion studies, they show that majorities support not only higher minimum wages, improved public education, and greater access to healthcare, but also the use of taxation to fund such programs.

As lawmakers battle over how to heal our ailing economy, Class War? provides undeniable proof of the popular consensus their constituents have been building for decades: that our government must take aggressive action against the iniquity that plagues our nation.

Read the press release.

Archived in Politics and Current Events | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the trial of O. J. Simpson to classic films like 12 Angry Men and the seemingly endless incarnations of Law & Order, jury trials real and imagined continue to play a powerful role in American culture. Their role in American justice, however, is shrinking rapidly, as juries decide a smaller fraction of criminal and civil cases with each passing year. In The Death of the American Trial, Robert Burns warns that this decline could lead not only to the loss of a vaunted institution, but also to the dangerous erosion of American democracy. The trial, Burns argues, is one of our greatest public achievements. Demonstrating how trials have always provided a defense against encroaching secrecy and bureaucracy, he lays out the profound consequences of losing an institution that so perfectly embodies democratic governance. As one federal judge put it, the jury is the ”canary in the mineshaft; if it goes, if our people lose their inherited right to do justice in court, other democratic institutions will lose breath too.“

An impassioned and eloquent case for resuscitation, The Death of the American Trial makes clear that to ensure the future health of the nation, the trial’s unique role must continue to play out not only in the stories we tell ourselves, but also in our halls of justice.

Read the press release.

Archived in Law | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 04:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For decades now, in volume after volume, the celebrated French thinker Rémi Brague has delved deep into the past and emerged, again and again, with fresh insights that sharply illuminate the present. In his acclaimed The Wisdom of the World, for example, Brague showed how modernity stripped the universe of its ethical and sacred wisdom. The Law of God, his last work, added depth and context to current debates about God’s role in worldly affairs. And now, The Legend of the Middle Ages proceeds in Brague’s characteristically brilliant style to unknot the long-tangled strands of our ideas about this misunderstood age.

Recently, the Middle Ages have emerged as the model for a harmonious future—a time when different religions and cultures peacefully coexisted and exchanged ideas. This legend, Brague argues, comes no closer to telling the full story than the Enlightenment-era portrayal of the Middle Ages as a benighted past from which the West had to evolve.

Here, in a penetrating interview and sixteen essays, he marshals nuanced readings of medieval religion and philosophy to reconstruct the true character of this complicated and intellectually rich period. Brague’s vibrant portrait—of an age neither dark nor devoid of conflict—not only makes for compelling intellectual history but also, finally, sorts out the era’s true lessons for our own time.

Read the press release.

Also, read an interview with Brague.

Archived in History | Medieval and Renaissance | Philosophy | Press Releases | Religion
Posted by TXM at 04:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to the New York Times, Donald Westlake was “one of the most successful and versatile mystery writers in the United States,” with over 100 books to his name. The University of Chicago Press has embarked on a project to return the early volumes of his Parker series, written under the pseudonym Richard Stark, to print for a new generation of readers to discover—and become addicted to. Stark’s ruthless antihero is one of the most unforgettable characters in hardboiled noir. Lauded by critics for his taut realism, unapologetic amorality, and razor-sharp prose-style—and adored by fans who turn each intoxicating page with increasing urgency—Richard Stark is a master of crime writing, his books as influential as any in the genre.

“Whatever Stark writes, I read. He’s a stylist, a pro, and I thoroughly enjoy his attitude.” —Elmore Leonard

Parker … lumbers through the pages of Richard Stark’s noir novels scattering dead bodies like peanut shells.… In a complex world [he] makes things simple.” —William Grimes, New York Times

Read the press release or read an interview with the author.

Archived in Fiction | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While other writers contemplated the events of the 1968 Chicago riots from the safety of their hotel rooms, John Schultz was in the city streets, being threatened by police, choking on tear gas, and taking in all the rage, fear, and confusion around him. The result, No One Was Killed, is his account of the contradictions and chaos of convention week—the adrenaline, the sense of drama and history, and how the mainstream press was getting it all wrong.

“A more valuable factual record of events than the city’s white paper, the Walker Report, and Theodore B. White’s Making of a President combined.” —Book Week

“High on my short list of true, lasting, inspired evocations of those whacked-out days when the country was fighting a phantasmagorical war (with real corpses), and police under orders were beating up demonstrators who looked at them funny.” —Todd Gitlin, from the foreword

Read the press release or read an excerpt.

Archived in Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In 1969, the Chicago Seven were charged with intent to “incite, organize, promote, and encourage” antiwar riots during the Democratic National Convention. The Chicago Conspiracy Trial is an electrifying account of the months-long trial that commanded the attention of a divided nation. John Schultz, on assignment for the Evergreen Review, witnessed the whole trial, from the jury selection to the aftermath of the verdict. His vivid account exposes the raw emotions and judicial corruption that came to define one of the most significant legal events in American history.

“A beautiful, compelling, tear-jerking, mind-boggling book.” —William Burroughs

“A probe into the American conscience.” —David Graber, Los Angeles Times

Read the press release or read an excerpt.

Archived in Chicago | History | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Every year around this time, dedicated gardeners tear open packets of seeds and carefully bury them in the rich soil of their gardens, where, months later, they emerge as beautiful flowers, delectable herbs, and nutritious vegetables. All from those tiny, unimpressive seeds …

With An Orchard Invisible, Jonathan Silvertown finally gives the humble seed its due. His richly anecdotal natural history begins with the first appearance of seeds—which evolved from fernlike ancestors nearly 400 million years ago—and from there spans the globe and traverses epochs all the way to the present. Deftly marrying science and culture, Silvertown explores the evolution of seeds and the wide variety of uses to which humans have put them over the centuries, from spices to perfumes, dyes to pharmaceuticals. Along the way, he delves into such unexpected topics as the Salem witch trials and Lyme disease, while never losing sight of the real story behind all the world of seeds: the constant drive of evolution, with its irrepressible habit of stumbling upon new and better solutions to the challenges of life on earth.Writing with winning charm and an eye for unforgettable details, Silvertown has crafted a book sure to delight gardeners and science buffs alike.

Read the press release.

Also, read an excerpt and see the author's website.

Archived in Biology | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

New in paperback!—Marked gives us our first real glimpse into the tremendous difficulties facing ex-offenders in the job market. Devah Pager matched up pairs of young men, randomly assigned them criminal records, then sent them on hundreds of real job searches throughout the city of Milwaukee. Her applicants were attractive, articulate, and capable—yet ex-offenders received less than half the callbacks of the equally qualified applicants without criminal backgrounds.

Young black men, meanwhile, paid a particularly high price: those with clean records fared no better in their job searches than white men just out of prison. Such shocking barriers to legitimate work, Pager contends, are an important reason that many ex-prisoners soon find themselves back in the realm of poverty, underground employment, and crime that led them to prison in the first place.

“Pager shows that ex-offenders, white or black, stand a very poor chance of getting a legitimate job.… Both informative and convincing.” —Library Journal

Read the press release or read an excerpt.

Archived in Black Studies | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 09:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thomas Bewick's (1753-1828) History of British Birds was the first field guide for ordinary people, illustrated with woodcuts of astonishing accuracy and beauty. In Nature's Engraver, Jenny Uglow tells the story of the farmer's son from Tyneside who became one of Britain's greatest and most popular engravers. It is a story of violent change, radical politics, lost ways of life, and the beauty of the wild—a journey to the beginning of our lasting obsession with the natural world.

"A refined and engaging biography, as beautifully wrought, in its way, as Bewick's woodcuts." —New York Times

"Uglow's clear prose sparkles like Bewick's River Tyne." —Los Angeles Times

"This is a lovely book, not just in the quality and sympathy of the writing but in the care of its design and illustration. [Uglow] has turned a rich but undramatic life into a vignette as full of interest and details as one of Bewick's own woodcuts." —Sunday Telegraph

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biography | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Series Editors
William G. Howell
University of Chicago

Jon Pevehouse
University of Chicago

The Chicago Series on International and Domestic Institutions will feature innovative books on how domestic political institutions influence foreign policy, as well as how changes in the international arena influence domestic political dynamics. The series supports research that is geographically and temporally broad, methodologically pluralistic, and that crosses boundaries by engaging theoretical traditions in American, comparative, and international relations.

The series will include works that focus on either international political economy or international security—or both. Topics of interest include:

• The interaction of domestic political institutions and interstate conflict;
• The influence of interest groups on foreign economic policies, including trade and investment;
• The interaction of international institutions and changing domestic political institutions.

If you or a colleague has a project that you think would be appropriate for the series, please feel free to contact the editors at:

whowell@uchicago.edu and pevehouse@uchicago.edu.

You may also contact David Pervin, the Press's senior editor for international relations, economics, and law, at dpervin@press.uchicago.edu.

Read the press release.

Archived in Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In 1993, Dave Hickey published a sharply opinionated book on art called The Invisible Dragon. It was a small volume, but the response was outsized—and, in many cases, outraged. While artists flocked to it, drawn by its forceful call for attention to beauty, huge numbers of more theoretically oriented professional critics absolutely savaged it, calling Hickey everything from naïve to reactionary.

Sixteen years later, Hickey’s back—and time hasn’t dulled his edge. With this new edition of The Invisible Dragon, Hickey has both revised and dramatically expanded his controversial book, addressing his critics and supporters both, while simultaneously placing the book—and the reactions it provoked—firmly in the context of larger cultural battles of the time. Bringing the works of Warhol, Raphael, Caravaggio, and Mapplethorpe to bear on the current situation of contemporary art, museum culture, and art criticism, Hickey argues powerfully for a renewed attention to the inherently democratic—and thus essential—concept of beauty. Writing with a liveliness and excitement rarely seen in serious criticism, Hickey invests The Invisible Dragon with the passion and drama that lie at the heart of great art.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Philosophy | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ever since the U.S. military invaded Iraq in 2003, the nightly news has offered accounts of troops fighting a lethal and adaptive insurgency, where the divisions between enemy and ally are ambiguous at best, and where working with the local population is essential for day-to-day survival. But what does this mean for soldiers on the ground? And how can troops facing deployment quickly adapt to such a hostile environment?

From the lessons they learned during multiple tours of duty in Iraq, two American veterans of the war have written a tactical primer based on the military classic The Defence of Duffer’s Drift. Over the course of six dreams, a young officer deployed for the first time in Iraq fights the same battle again and again, learning each time—the hard way—which misconceptions he needs to discard and which lessons he must learn to defeat a dangerous enemy and achieve a lasting victory.

Accompanied by the Boer War-era novella that inspired it, The Defense of Jisr al-Doreaa offers an invaluable resource for anyone seeking to understand how the United States plans to win the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Read the press release.

Archived in History | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 01:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hollywood & God is a virtuosic performance, filled with crossings back and forth from cinematic chiaroscuro to a kind of unsettling desperation and disturbing—even lurid—hallucination. From the Baltimore Catechism to the great noir films of the last century, from Cotton Mather and a nineteenth-century minstrel boy to B-movie actress Barbara Payton, a female Elvis impersonator, and even Paris Hilton, Polito tracks the stars, rituals, snares, hijinks, and mysteries at the crossroads of American spiritual and media life across a diversity of styles, tones, and eras. Mixing lyric and essay, collage and narrative, memoir and invention, Hollywood & God is an audacious book, as contemporary as it is historical, as sly and witty as it is devastatingly serious.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As President Obama begins the process of bringing America’s six-year occupation of Iraq to an end, it’s important that the public and the military alike learn from the mistakes that dogged the war from the start. Of all those errors, perhaps the most preventable—and irreparable—was the failure to protect Iraq’s unparalleled cultural heritage from the wholesale looting and destruction that followed the invasion and continues to this day.

With The Rape of Mesopotamia, Lawrence Rothfield offers a detailed, judicious account of the failures of planning, understanding, and initiative that led to the looting of the Iraq Museum and the incalculable loss to human culture that followed. Drawing on extensive interviews with soldiers, bureaucrats, war planners, archaeologists, and collectors, Rothfield reveals the breathtaking incompetence and inadequate planning—originating at the highest levels of the U.S. government—that left the troops on the ground unprepared for and unable to stop the looting they saw occurring all around them. At the same time, Rothfield shows, preservation advocates worldwide were insufficiently vocal about the risks the invasion posed to Iraq’s heritage, while the collectors who inhabit the shadowy worldwide market for illicit antiquities ensured the demand that the looters fulfilled.

Ultimately, Rothfield brings his story right to the present, arguing vehemently that the lessons of Iraq have largely been ignored—and that the same mistakes are liable to be repeated in future conflicts.

Read the press release.

Archived in Anthropology | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“Most of us,” writes Scott Norton in his introduction, “enter into book publishing with a romantic idea of the Editor that matches the equally inaccurate notion of the Author as tortured genius.”

As it turns out, editing—especially developmental editing—is hardly romantic. It’s a tricky business, requiring analytical flair and creative panache, the patience of a saint and the vision of a writer. And, of course, the occasional magic trick: Norton can transform a stack of paper into a bestseller, or, at the very least, a book that edifies, enlightens, and entertains.

In Developmental Editing Norton shares his knowledge with the rest of us. Using a series of humorous and relevant “case studies” (election-year polemic, travel guide, even a memoir), he explores the tough work of a developmental editor. From creating content to establishing authorial style, finding the “hook” and editing for pace, sizing up clients and learning when (and how) to sweat the details—Developmental Editing is filled with useful tips for editors, first-time authors, or anyone who fancies themselves a writer.

Read the press release.

See the author's website.

Archived in Press Releases | Reference and Writing
Posted by TXM at 09:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“This author is giving me a fit.”
“I wish that I could just DEMAND the use of the serial comma at all times.”
“My author wants his preface to come at the end of the book. This just seems ridiculous to me. I mean, it’s not a post-face.”

Each year, writers submit over three thousand grammar and style questions to the Q&A page at The Chicago Manual of Style Online—and one woman, Carol Fisher Saller, reads every single one of them.

These writer-editor standoffs are classic, hilarious—and, as Saller points out in her new book, all too common. In The Subversive Copy Editor, Saller asks her readers to become “subversive” in two ways: one, by rethinking their understanding of the author as the enemy, and two, by keeping in mind that it’s okay to break the rules sometimes (like when it benefits the reader). In one chapter, Saller takes on the difficult author, in another she speaks to writers themselves. Throughout, she includes useful tips for prioritizing work, freelancing effectively, organizing computer files, and writing the perfect e-mail. Saller’s fresh emphasis on negotiation and flexibility will surprise many of us who have absorbed—along with the dos and don’ts of our stylebooks—an attitude that our way is the right way. After all, and as Saller puts it, “the point is not how to copyedit, but how to survive doing it.”

Read the press release.

Also, read the introduction to the book and see the author's website.

Archived in Press Releases | Reference and Writing
Posted by TXM at 03:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

George W. Bush has just left office in the midst of widespread public disapproval. But how will his presidency be viewed decades from now? It’s hard to know: the reputations of American presidents, including such recent ones as JFK and Richard Nixon, fluctuate remarkably in the years following their tenure. And as we prepare to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s bicentennial, it’s important to realize that even a figure as eminent as our sixteenth president is not immune to the vicissitudes of public memory. As Barry Schwartz reveals in Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era, in the years between his assassination and World War II, Abraham Lincoln became a sort of secular saint, held up as a model for all Americans. But, Schwartz explains, that was the apogee of Lincoln’s popularity; over the ensuing decades, changes in American culture inexorably diminished Lincoln’s standing. Disenchantment with government, a growing understanding of the plight of racial minorities, and a new focus on diversity all contributed to a climate in which no single figure, including Lincoln, could be comfortably held up as a symbol for all Americans—thus, even as the nation grew ever-closer to living the ideals for which he had served as a symbol, Lincoln himself faded into the background of American life.

But is there any way back from this post-heroic era? Even as we celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s bicentennial, can he still offer salient lessons for us? As America prepares to welcome a new president whose very election testifies to Lincoln’s achievement, Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era offers a thoughtful, measured look at how we’ve understood the man—and the nation he helped save.

Read the press release.

Also, read an excerpt.

Archived in Biography | History | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sight is central to the medium of photography. But what happens when the subjects of photographic portraits cannot look back at the photographer or even see their own image? An in-depth pictorial study of blind school children in Mexico, Look at me draws attention to (and distinctions between) the activity of sight and the consciousness of form.

Combining elements of his earlier, acclaimed street work with an innovative approach to portraiture, Chicago-based photographer Jed Fielding dwells closely on these children’s features and gestures, exploring the enigmatic boundaries between surface and interior, innocence and knowing, beauty and grotesque. Fielding’s work achieves what only great art, and particularly great portraiture can: it launches and then complicates a process of identification across the barriers that separate us from each other. Look at me contains more than sixty arresting images from which we often want to look away, but into which we are nevertheless drawn by their deep humanity and palpable tenderness. This is a monograph of uncommon significance by an important American photographer.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

TV by Design takes us back to the cold war years to witness the rise of two cultural superpowers: modern art and network television. Often mistakenly cast as polar opposites, television and fine art were intimately linked in this period as TV creators and producers drew inspiration from the latest trends in graphic design, avant-garde cinema, pop art, and modernist architecture. By broadcasting art’s cutting edge directly into America’s living rooms, TV gave modern art unprecedented national exposure. Lynn Spigel populates this fascinating history with the stories of the many artists—including Eero Saarinen, Duke Ellington, Ben Shahn, Saul Bass, Andy Warhol, William Golden, and Richard Avedon—that worked in or were influenced by television and illustrates it with an array of photos, ads, and stills from the period. A lively correction to the medium’s reputation as a vast wasteland, TV by Design reveals the dynamic history of the ways television brought entertainment and art into people’s everyday lives.

Read the press release.

Also, read an excerpt.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Film and Media | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Any time we plan a trip, whether it’s as simple as a trek to the other side of town or as complicated as a cross-country drive, our journeys are influenced, guided, and even inspired by maps. Road maps get us to our destinations, while maps of attractions like national parks and wilderness areas entice us to include such wonders in our vacation plans. But do those maps do more than just show off the natural beauties they describe? Could there be hidden agendas at work in even a map as seemingly benign as a National Park Service map of the Grand Canyon?

According to Denis Wood and John Fels, the answer is a resounding yes. Cartographers have agreed for decades that territorial or political maps are far from objective representations of reality; rather, maps can’t help but reflect the agendas and intentions of their creators. Until now, however, maps of nature—from depictions of bird migration routes to state park campground maps—have been left out of this analysis. Both researchers and map users—including many who should know better—have wrongly presumed that such maps are strictly scientific, free from the subtexts or biases that mar other maps. With The Natures of Maps, Wood and Fels are here to show otherwise.

Using stunning full-color reproductions of a wide variety of maps, The Natures of Maps reveals all the hidden ways in which maps make claims about the natural world and our place in it. Looking at everything from color schemes to titles to even the ways maps are folded, Wood and Fels show us the secrets under the surface—and teach us to read the natural world with fresh eyes.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Cartography and Geography | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When you think of the Harlem Renaissance, who comes to mind? Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes? W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey? Whoever it is, chances are that it’s not Alain Locke, despite his deep influence on these and countless other key figures and his definitive anthology The New Negro, from which the movement took its name. Locke’s life story has languished untold until now, but Alain L. Locke—the first biography of this extraordinarily gifted thinker and architect of the Harlem Renaissance—finally reclaims his rightful place in the pantheon of America’s most important minds. In this engaging account, Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth trace Locke’s life and times through his Philadelphia upbringing, his undergraduate years at Harvard—where William James helped spark his influential engagement with pragmatism—and his tenure as the first African American Rhodes Scholar. The heart of their narrative illuminates Locke’s heady years in 1920s New York City and his forty-year career at Howard University, where he helped spearhead the adult education movement of the 1930s and wrote on topics ranging from the philosophy of value to the theory of democracy.

An enthusiastic interlocutor and promoter of cultural figures from John Dewey to Jacob Lawrence, Locke emerges as a brilliant philosopher and a fierce champion of literature and art as means of breaking down barriers between communities—commitments that remain instructive as we continue to sort through our nation’s tangled cultural and political legacies.

Read the press release.

Archived in Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 01:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With the publication of Sleeping Beauty: A One-Artist Dictionary, the University of Chicago Press is proud to announce Project Tango, a new series of experimental collaborations between artists and writers. Exploding the traditional dynamic of the artist's relationship with the critic, Sleeping Beauty inaugurates a genuine dialogue, in which the interlocutors have equal agency. This conversation tests the limits of creative collaboration, bringing new ideas to the process of making books and expanding the possibilities of the medium.

Here, for example, Mieke Bal contributes twenty-six essays—one for each letter of the alphabet—which borrow their organizing principle from the dictionary but reach far beyond the utilitarian purpose of a reference work. Each one enters deeply into John Sparagana's art, illuminating concepts from Abstract to Zestful that inform, underlie, and lend meaning to the exquisitely ruined images he creates by crinkling glossy images from fashion magazines until their sheen disappears and they become soft and elastic. The images, for their part, speak back through Sparagana's unique process of subtraction, which physically rubs away not only ink and material, but also transience and commercial usefulness. The result is an extraordinary first step in Project Tango's unchoreographed dance. We can't wait to see where it leads us.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The mapping of the human genome at the turn of the twenty-first century by the Human Genome Project was a scientific sensation. The media abounded with stories about our new knowledge of the building blocks of human life and the tremendous medical breakthroughs that were sure to follow—while other accounts put a darker spin on the achievement, warning of consequences from genetic discrimination to designer germs.

For the layman, the claims and counterclaims can be dizzying; it's hard to know just what the genomics revolution is likely to mean in our everyday lives. With Genomes and What to Make of Them, Barry Barnes and John Dupré cut through the confusion and offer a smart and straightforward account of what we know, what we can hope for, and what, if anything, we should fear. Opening with a brief history of genetics and genomics, from Mendel to Watson and Crick to Craig Venter, Genomes and What to Make of Them explains what genomics tells us about our evolutionary history and what it can reveal on the individual level, such as our risk of disease. Meanwhile, the authors argue, the dangers of genetic research—from biological warfare to a revived eugenics—are very real, and only a proactive government and a vigilant citizenry can ensure the full life-enhancing potential of this exciting new science. Engagingly written and up-to-date, Genomes and What to Make of Them is both a primer on current knowledge and a road map to an exciting future.

Read the press release. Also, listen to an interview with the author.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“In all the seven seas and the lands bordering thereon there is probably no name which more quickly calls up thoughts of crime, violence, and wickedness than does that of Chicago.” So wrote journalist R. L. Duffus at the height of the Jazz Age—and he was not alone in that opinion. During those heady days, writers and newspapers nationwide lamented Chicago's utter filth and brutality. For most, the Windy City conjured images of slums, squalor, and social pathology. An industrial Gomorrah that made heroes of corrupt politicians, mob bosses, and murderers, Chicago had a serious image problem.

Enter the Chicagoan. Urbane in aspiration and first published just sixteen months after the first appearance of the New Yorker in 1925, the magazine sought passionately to redeem Chicago's unhappy reputation. In its own words, the popular biweekly claimed to represent “a cultural, civilized, and vibrant” city “which needs make no obeisance to Park Avenue, Mayfair, or the Champs-Elysees.” The University of Chicago Press is proud to publish The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age by noted historian Neil Harris. The book brings this forgotten magazine back to brilliant and vivid life for a new generation of readers to enjoy.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Chicago | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 08:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In October, New Scientist reported that large black holes, vestiges from a pre-Milky Way universe, could be floating undetected in our galaxy. If we find them, the magazine suggests, they could help us understand the violent birth of the Milky Way itself. But if the threat of rogue black holes has you a little worried, Three Steps to the Universe is here to bring this, and other recent discoveries involving cosmic phenomena, into clearer focus. Explaining how we know what we know about everything in space—from our familiar sun to black holes and dark matter—David Garfinkle and Richard Garfinkle take readers on an utterly fascinating tour of the universe, revealing along the way how scientists uncover its mysteries.

Read the press release.

Archived in Mathematics and Physics | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 08:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's a fairly common experience: before you visit a place, you read up on it, study its history and culture, plan ahead and prepare … and then when you get there, you realize that no amount of study could have prepared you for the reality that confronts you, the glorious surprises of travel at its best.

But what happens when a true scholar, with peerless knowledge of a place and its people, arrives for a lengthy visit in a place he's studied for decades? Well, if he's as open and alive to wonder as David Shulman, the result is a travel diary like no other. Spring, Heat, Rains chronicles a seven-month sojourn in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, marrying Shulman's lifetime of learning with his joyful astonishment at the details of daily life in one of the world's most ancient societies. With Shulman, author of the critically acclaimed Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine, as our guide, we meet betel-nut vendors, hear singers and epic poets, and clamber over ancient temples. We endure the crippling heat of summer and the desperately desired—but frustratingly inescapable—monsoon rains that follow. And we fall deeply, completely in love with an unforgettable place and the life of its people. Lyrical and lush, Spring, Heat, Rains will enchant anyone who has ever dreamed of India.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biography | Literature | Press Releases | Religion
Posted by TXM at 02:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“Life in Italy is seldom simple. One does not go there for simplicity but for interest: to make the adventure of existence more vivid, more poignant.” Such a life is what Shirley Hazzard found when she first landed on the shore of Naples as a young woman in the early 1950s: underneath the devastation caused by World War II, the city that had bewitched such literary visitors as Byron and Goethe remained intact, ready to charm the patient and attentive traveler.

That sojourn was the first step in a lifelong love affair with Naples. Along with her late husband, Francis Steegmuller, Hazzard made Naples a second home for decades, and The Ancient Shore collects the best of her writings on the city, its people, and its literary heritage. While acknowledging that Naples can be off-putting to the casual tourist, Hazzard takes readers behind the city’s rebarbative face, showing the underlying beauty and unrivaled hospitality that await those who take the time to truly understand its rhythms and its history. A much-loved New Yorker essay by Steegmuller telling the harrowing story of his mugging—and the attentive care he received in its aftermath—rounds out a collection that memorably limns the inherent contradictions of contemporary Naples: prickly but passionate, violent but giving, and always breathtakingly unforgettable. Beautifully illustrated by photographs from such masters as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Herbert List, The Ancient Shore is a lyrical letter to a lifelong love: honest and clear-eyed, yet still fervently, endlessly enchanted.

Read the press release.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From a youth spent as a manual laborer in China’s Cultural Revolution to winning the National Book Award for his novel Waiting, Ha Jin has taken a remarkable journey across eras and continents, one that has left him one of the most admired figures in world literature. Now, in his first work of nonfiction, he reflects on the very circumstance of being a writer in a new land, a representative, willingly or not, of a place one has left—but can never truly leave behind.

In The Writer as Migrant, Ha Jin explores his own life and work alongside those of writers throughout literary history who have found themselves, exiles or immigrants, struggling to find their way in a new place and a new culture. Writing in a clear, almost conversational style, he considers the works of writers from Joseph Conrad to W.G. Sebald, Vladimir Nabokov to V. S. Naipaul, exploring questions of language, politics, duty, and the very concept of home. Some of those writers have served as models for Ha Jin, while others have remained enigmas—or even antagonists—but all have been crucial to his understanding of the complicated place of a migrant writer.

A slim but powerful reflection, The Writer as Migrant introduces us to a new facet of one of our most exciting writers, revealing him to be a thoughtful, penetrating, and generous reader of literature as well.

Read the press release.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It was an unforgettably bizarre image: a beret-clad Patty Hearst, looking for all the world like a brainwashed zombie, toting a submachine gun as she and her erstwhile kidnappers from the Symbionese Liberation Army robbed a San Francisco bank in broad daylight. In that moment, Patty Hearst became one of the indelible symbols of 1970s America—an era suffused with confusion, anomie, and a vague sense of dissolution and decline, the heady promise of the 1960s already seeming impossibly distant.

With Patty’s Got a Gun, William Graebner offers the first full reconsideration of the Patty Hearst story in decades. Setting the abduction, robbery, and the sensational criminal trial that followed fully in the context of the era, he offers us a Patty Hearst who more than anything served as a mirror to her times. Politicians, pundits and reporters saw in Hearst the embodiment (and often the justification) of their own take on the problems of American culture, from feminism to individualism to plain old lax parenting—and the conclusions they drew directly fueled the burgeoning Reaganite retrenchment. Steeped in the culture of the 1970s, Patty’s Got a Gun grippingly recreates the media circus around the Hearst trial—and the single, affectless individual at its heart.

Read the press release.

Also, read an excerpt or listen to an audio interview.

Archived in History | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Could the Buddha possibly have understood the theory of relativity, centuries before Einstein explained it? What about quantum physics? The Big Bang?

If you read enough popular writing on Buddhism and science, you’d certainly be forgiven for thinking so. While Christianity and science have traditionally been viewed as opposing forces, Buddhism and science have been inextricably linked in Western culture for well over a century. With Buddhism and Science, Donald S. Lopez Jr., an expert on the history of Buddhism, offers a fresh look at the question of why the religion has long been viewed as so compatible with—and adaptable to—new scientific discoveries. From the Buddhist conception of the design of the universe to the Dalai Lama’s vocal support of scientific inquiry, Lopez reveals a tradition that has deftly managed to sidestep debates on science and religion.

As new discoveries continue to reshape our understanding of mind and matter, Buddhism and Science will be indispensable reading for those fascinated by religion, science, and their often vexed relation.

Read the press release.

Archived in Press Releases | Religion
Posted by TXM at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With a single slim volume, published when he was in his seventies, Norman Maclean secured his place in American literary history. More than thirty years have passed since the publication of A River Runs through It and Other Stories, and the book is still passed from reader to reader, handed down from parents to children like an heirloom. Maclean’s second book, Young Men and Fire, struck a similar chord with its account of doomed young firefighters—but it was published posthumously, and his many fans have long wished for an addition to his oeuvre.

The Norman Maclean Reader answers that wish, offering longtime fans new insight into his life and career. The highlight of the volume is Maclean’s unfinished history of General Custer from the 1950s. Though he was never able to shape these never-before-published chapters on the Son of the Morning Star into a complete book, to read them now is revelatory—we see Maclean discovering and refining the techniques of personal and historical writing that would serve him so well decades later. Along with excerpts from his classic works, the book also offers Maclean’s witty personal essays; a fascinating selection of letters discussing history, biography, and the craft of writing; and portions of a wide-ranging interview in which Maclean discusses the very family stories that form the basis of his greatest works. Multifarious and moving, the works collected in The Norman Maclean Reader serve as both a summation and a celebration, honoring a beloved and distinctive American voice.

Read the press release.

Our website for Norman Maclean, while still in development, has several things by and about Maclean as well as several image galleries.

Archived in Fiction | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two of the ten camps that the U.S. government established to incarcerate over 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II weren’t out West; they were deep in the Jim Crow South. This sudden arrival of strangers who belonged on neither side of the color line has long been a lost chapter in the history of the war—until now.

Enter Concentration Camps on the Home Front, an incendiary, stirring depiction of life in the camps and its aftermath. John Howard breaks new ground with the first book to tell the story of the Southern camps; the first to reveal government efforts to convert inmates to Christianity; the first to explore prisoners’ acts of resistance and defiance; and the first to expose the calculated dispersal of the prisoners after the war, a move which aimed to prevent the creation of ethnic enclaves in both Northern cities and the Southern countryside.

Howard’s eye-opening account of one of modern American history’s most shameful episodes resonates with current debates over the government’s right to imprison without trial, racial profiling, and a host of other contemporary issues. But this disturbing story makes its greatest impact by bringing to light the widespread and irreversible damage the camps did to individuals, families, and communities.

Read the press release.

Archived in History | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the appropriately titled Mean, Colette LaBouff Atkinson's speakers confront a series of cruel lovers, estranged ex-husbands and ex-ex-wives, neglectful parents, disrespectful children, menacing drunks, would-be rapists, well-meaning but ineffectual teachers, and that annoying kid in first grade who wouldn't leave you alone. Managing to "say" what most of us would only think but never dare speak out loud, this stunning debut collection reveals that the horrors and cruelty we experience in everyday life can turn out to be very real indeed. But Atkinson does not merely rake her subjects across the coals: she deftly exposes, instead, how the world mirrors back to us our own meanness, lending it a truth and a history. In forty-three deadpan, often merciless prose poems that are masterpieces of the form, Mean lays bare the darkness within the narrator's heart as well as in ours.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Join expeditions on the frontiers of research! Listen as eminent men of science tell of their achievements! Just as Watson Davis beckoned listeners to gather around their radios for his broadcast of Adventures in Science, so too does Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette invite readers to travel back in time to the heyday of science programming in Science on the Air.

Before the dawn of television, programs like Our Friend the Atom, The World Is Yours, and Cavalcade of America flourished. But with broadcasting success came the directive to entertain, not just educate. Science on the Air chronicles the efforts of science popularizers as they negotiated topic, content, and tone in order to gain precious time on the air. Offering a new perspective on the collision between science’s idealistic and elitist view of public communication and the unbending economics of broadcasting, LaFollette rewrites the history of the public reception of science in the twentieth century and the role that scientists and their institutions have played in both encouraging and inhibiting popularization. By looking at the broadcasting of the past, Science on the Air raises issues of concern to all those who seek to cultivate a scientifically literate society today.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The University of Chicago Press announces its first public book sale in over twenty years. For two days only—Tuesday, October 7 and Wednesday, October 8—the University of Chicago Press will sell hundreds of different titles at incredibly deep discounts.

The sale will run from 9 AM until 5 PM on Tuesday and Wednesday, in the International House's Assembly Hall on the University of Chicago campus (1414 E. 59th Street, Dorchester Avenue entrance). Over 10,000 books in a variety of subjects—from anthropology to poetry to zoology—will be available for purchase. With both hardcovers and paperbacks priced at only five dollars each, this is a one-of-a-kind opportunity to stock your personal library—or find some unusual gifts for the holiday season. From reference guides to contemporary bestsellers, Beethoven to Mike Royko, this book sale will offer something for everyone. Supplies are limited, so be sure to arrive early for the best selection.

Read the press release.

Archived in Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Replete with shady merchants, scoundrels, hungry mercenaries, scheming nobles, and maneuvering cardinals, The Man Who Believed He Was King of France proves the adage that truth is often stranger than fiction—or at least as entertaining. Cast against the divisive backdrop of the Hundred Years’ War, this book retraces the steps of Giannino di Guccio, the alleged lost heir to Louis X, who was reportedly switched at birth with the son of a Tuscan merchant. Once convinced of his birthright, Giannino claims for himself the name Jean I, king of France, and sets out on a brave—if ultimately ruinous—quest that leads him across Europe to prove his identity.

From Italy to Hungry, then through Germany and France, the would-be king’s unique combination of guile and earnestness seems to command the aid of lords and soldiers, the indulgence of inn-keepers and merchants, and the collusion of priests and rogues along the way. With the skill of a crime scene detective, Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri digs up evidence in the historical record to follow the story of a life so incredible that it was long considered a literary invention of the Italian Renaissance.

Read the press release.

Archived in History | Medieval and Renaissance | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Though the 2008 presidential election campaign serves to remind all of us that race remains a potent issue in American life, it’s important to realize just how far we’ve come as a nation in a few short decades. Back in the late 1960s, the riots and violence stemming from simmering racial inequities threatened to forever rend American society. And it was at that moment that two young men—one white, one black—took to stages across the country and helped America confront its racial divide … by laughing at it.

The story of America’s first and only interracial comedy team, Tim and Tom presents that turbulent era through the eyes of Tim Reid and Tom Dreesen, two young men who trekked from nightclub to nightclub just looking for a laugh—and hoping to make it big. As they delivered frank (and funny) jokes about race, they met with skepticism, resistance, and even violence, and though they won over audiences night after night, they eventually came to realize that they were simply ahead of their time.

An unforgettable mix of showbiz and social change, humor and history, Tim and Tom resurrects a lost chapter in American comedy.

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Biography | Chicago | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

To the average office-dweller, marine scientists seem to have the good life: cruising at sea for weeks at a time, swimming in warm coastal waters, living in tropical paradises. But ocean scientists who go to sea will tell you that it is no vacation. Creature comforts are few and the obstacles seemingly insurmountable, yet an abundance of wonder and discovery still awaits those who take to the ocean. Chasing Science at Sea immerses readers in the world of those who regularly go to sea—aquanauts living underwater, marine biologists seeking unseen life in the deep ocean, and the tall-ship captains at the helm, among others—and tells the fascinating tale of what life—and science—is like at the mercy of Mother Nature.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Military technologies such as Predator drones and devices that protect American troops from Iraqi roadside bombs are in the news every day, but the story behind them is not. Who is responsible for the development of such technologies? Surprisingly, some of the most important new military systems of the past decade have been produced by small firms that beat out their larger competitors to secure government contracts. In Arms and Innovation, defense-industry consultant James Hasik argues that such companies have a number of advantages relative to their bigger competitors, including an entrepreneurial spirit and fewer bureaucratic obstacles, and thus can both be more responsive to changes in the environment and more strategic in their planning. This book will forge a new understanding of how business and the defense industry interact in the post-terror world.

Read the press release.

Archived in Economics | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This year marks the ninetieth anniversary of the Influenza Epidemic of 1918, but the fear of another global viral plague is far from history. As evidenced by the panic in recent years over everything from SARS to drug-resistant tuberculosis, infectious diseases still cause worldwide alarm and remain a significant threat to international health.

Infectious Disease collects thirty of the most exciting, innovative, and significant articles on communicable illness published in the pages of Scientific American magazine since 1993. With sections devoted to viral infections, the immune system, and global management and treatment issues, it provides both general readers and students with an excellent overview of recent research in the field.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

New in Paperback—While observing a family of elephants in the wild, Caitlin O'Connell noticed a peculiar listening behavior—the matriarch lifted her foot and scanned the horizon, causing the other elephants to follow suit, as if they could "hear" the ground. The Elephant's Secret Sense is O'Connell's account of her groundbreaking research into seismic listening and communication, chronicling the extraordinary social lives of elephants over the course of fourteen years in the Namibian wilderness.

This compelling odyssey of scientific discovery is also a frank account of fieldwork in a poverty-stricken, war-ravaged country. In her attempts to study an elephant community, O'Connell encounters corrupt government bureaucrats, deadly lions and rhinos, poachers, farmers fighting for arable land, and profoundly ineffective approaches to wildlife conservation. The Elephant's Secret Sense is ultimately a story of intellectual courage in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Most of us probably think we know how urban gentrification works: rich young whites move into poor, non-white areas and gobble up cheap real estate, eventually forcing longtime residents to move to more affordable but distant locales. Since the late 1990s, however, a surprising new pattern has emerged as a handful of poverty-stricken black neighborhoods have evolved into residential hotspots boasting high-income housing, destination dining, designer boutiques, and even bed-and-breakfasts—all while managing to stay black.

No two neighborhoods in the country exemplify this trend better than Harlem in New York City and Bronzeville in Chicago. In this groundbreaking book, Derek S. Hyra—a resident of both of these neighborhoods—moves from the streets to city hall to corporate boardrooms, tracing the web of factors at play in the remarkable revitalization of these two historic enclaves.

Read the press release.

Archived in Black Studies | Chicago | History | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 02:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

New in Paperback—The University of Chicago Press has embarked on a project to return the early volumes of Richard Stark’s Parker series to print for a new generation of readers to discover—and become addicted to. Stark’s ruthless antihero is one of the most unforgettable characters in hardboiled noir. Lauded by critics for his taut realism, unapologetic amorality, and razor-sharp prose-style—and adored by fans who turn each intoxicating page with increasing urgency—Richard Stark is a master of crime writing, his books as influential as any in the genre.

Novels in the Parker series include:

The Hunter
The Man with the Getaway Face
The Outfit

Read the press release.

Also read an interview with the author.

Archived in Fiction | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When Julius Caesar’s assassins walked out of the Roman Senate, they had no way of knowing that the man whose body they left behind would rise to unparalleled prominence in death, becoming as much a myth as a man. A potent symbol of everything from hubris to the good life, Caesar has become one of the central icons of Western culture, instantly familiar to schoolchildren and scholars alike.

Caesar is classicist Maria Wyke’s witty, irreverent tour of the Caesar legend, a deeply learned but lively look at just what it is about this man that has fascinated us for two millennia. Focusing on key moments from Caesar’s life, Wyke shows how, in era after era, Caesar’s story is reworked and reconfigured to suit the needs of countless cultural and historical figures, from Mussolini to Madison Avenue. Her knowledge is broad and surprising, encompassing Plutarch’s Lives and Xena: Warrior Princess, Caesars Palace and the Annals of Tacitus—and with each reconfiguration of the Caesar story, we get another glimpse of the astonishing power this long-dead dictator still exerts over our cultural imagination.

Filled with anecdotes and thoroughly contemporary, Caesar will entertain and elucidate friends, Romans, and countrymen alike.

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt.

Archived in Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After pulling apart the peonies and deadheading the last of the mums, gardeners will take a long look at their backyards and head indoors to plan for next season. And as the hostas yellow and wilt outside, nature enthusiasts can take shelter with—and inspiration from—the stories in Cathy Jean Maloney’s beautiful new book, Chicago Gardens: The Early History.

Maloney has spent decades researching the city’s horticultural heritage, and her latest book reveals the remarkable story of Chicago’s first gardeners. Challenged by the region’s clay soil and harsh winters, Midwestern pioneers were forced to find imaginative uses for prairie plants, pounding salsify into gravy and grinding grain into coffee. Innovative nurserymen and florists would later develop a market for local fruit and flowers, in part by naming their varieties after Chicago’s well-known: the Mrs. Potter Palmer Carnation, for example, as well as the well-grown: the Bridgeport Chicago Drumhead Cabbage, in honor of the neighborhood’s Irish inhabitants. Gardening was no longer simply a way to fill one’s belly, but also a way to line one’s pockets. By the late 1880’s, Chicago had become the nation’s produce hub.

Today, Chicago earns the limelight as a leader in “green” cities. Chicago Gardens unveils a tradition of horticultural innovation—a story too long hidden under a bushel basket.

Read the press release.

Also see a special web feature for the book, five Chicago gardens.

Archived in Biology | Chicago | Economics | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

New in paperback—Jonathan Silvertown here explores the astonishing diversity of plant life in regions as spectacular as the verdant climes of Japan, the lush grounds of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, the shallow wetlands and teeming freshwaters of Florida, the tropical rainforests of southeast Mexico, and the Canary Islands archipelago, whose evolutionary novelties—and exotic plant life—have earned it the sobriquet “the Galápagos of botany.” Bringing the secret life of plants into more colorful and vivid focus than ever before, Demons in Eden is an empathic and impassioned exploration of modern plant ecology that unlocks evolutionary mysteries of the natural world.

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

Archived in Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

William Davies King makes no bones about it: he's odd. And his collections are odder: loops of wire, skeleton keys, seafood tins, water bottle labels, envelope liners, strips of masking tape, canceled credit cards, boulders—and that's just for starters. You might call it junk, but to King, it's a very special sort of nothing. Suffice it to say, no one on earth has a garage quite like his.

King's unusual collections reflect his belief in the intrinsic value of the discarded, unwanted, and ephemeral—but as he makes clear in Collections of Nothing, the urge that drives his hoarding is not all that different from that which leads a more typical person to prize uncanceled stamps or pristine sets of baseball cards. Both an affecting memoir and an idiosyncratic examination of the desire to accumulate, Collections of Nothing takes us deep inside the soul of the solitary collector. King's life story is deftly interleaved with his insightful meditations on the nature of the acquisitive mind; the result is a book that defies categorization, a unique hybrid that will speak to anyone who has ever found himself bitten by the collecting bug.

Read the press release. Also, read an excerpt and an essay by the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Despite the ubiquity of Dorothea Lange's photographs, a surprisingly large number of them have languished in archives, more or less unseen, for decades. With Daring to Look, Anne Whiston Spirn brings nearly 200 of those photos to light, revealing new facets of Lange's celebrated achievement.

Daring to Look is far more than just a book of photos, however. Spirn presents the images—taken in 1939 in California, North Carolina, and the Pacific Northwest—alongside Lange's own field notes and captions, which the photographer considered to be an essential component of her attempt to document the hardscrabble lives of her subjects. Spirn joins that work to an insightful account of Lange's life, as well as a fascinating look at the current state of many of the locations Lange shot. Spirn's own photographs of those towns and farms reflect the changes—and the surprising continuity—over decades, carrying Lange's documentary project into a new century.

Daring to Look brings to life a crucial moment in American history—and illuminates a missing period in the life of one of America's greatest artists.

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Starting in 1970 with 30 people and an idea for a program, NPR has grown to become one of the world's most trusted major news organizations, with journalists worldwide and 26 million listeners each week. Featuring colorful anecdotes, lively examples, and insights from such award-winning journalists as Robert Siegel and Renee Montagne, this rare insider's tour of public broadcasting reveals how NPR has succeeded as no other medium can in connecting with audiences and capturing the imaginations of its listeners.

Jonathan Kern, a talented guide who has worked in almost every position at NPR News, narrates a day in the life of a host and lays out the nuts and bolts of production with equal wit and warmth. Along the way, he explains the importance of writing the way you speak, reveals how NPR books guests ranging from world leaders to neighborhood newsmakers, and gives sage advice on everything from proposing stories to editors to maintaining balance and objectivity. The result is an unprecedented look at the principles and expertise that have made NPR so integral to American culture.

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Film and Media | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In Cosmos, John North offers a sweeping overview of the two sciences that define our place in the universe: astronomy and cosmology. Cosmos moves from astronomy's prehistoric beginnings to its use by the great ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, the Americas, and Rome. The innovations of master astronomers is described in detail, along with modern-day developments such as the advent of radio astronomy, the brilliant innovations of Einstein, and the many recent discoveries made with the help of the Hubble telescope. This new edition brings North's seminal book right up to the present day, as North takes a closer look at last year's reclassification of Pluto as a "dwarf" planet and gives a thorough overview of current research.

Read the press release.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As we've been reminded by the recent outcry over the threat of destructive drilling near Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, the monumental works of land art in the American West have a powerful hold on fans of contemporary art. To Erin Hogan, their very remoteness and precariousness is a crucial part of their appeal—and she knew that to fully understand and appreciate the questions about scale, permanence, and the limits of human activity raised by such works, she would have to actually go see them in person. So in the autumn of 2004, Hogan threw some sunscreen and some sketchy directions into her Volkswagen Jetta and hit the road, leaving the comforts of the city behind and plunging headlong into the vast expanse of the great American desert. Spiral Jetta is the story of that 3,000-mile journey.

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt and an interview with the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nothing banishes winter's lethargy more quickly than that first sight of the green of spring, as trees bud and our gardens, once again, burst into glorious bloom. For Robert Pogue Harrison, it's not just the depths of winter that gardens help us escape: throughout human history, gardens—both real and imagined—have been essential places of refuge and comfort in the face of a harsh, often violent world.

Employing the richly learned and allusive approach that he brought to his classics, Forests and The Dominion of the Dead, Harrison explores here the central importance of the human urge to nurture and cultivate gardens. Beginning with ancient conceptions of the garden as a place for the quiet work of self-improvement that is crucial to serenity and enlightenment, Harrison then travels widely through the history of Western culture. Enlisting such varied thinkers and writers as Voltaire and Calvino, Boccaccio and Arendt, Harrison profoundly demonstrates the role the garden has long played as a necessary, humanizing check against the degradation and losses of history.

Read the press release.

Archived in Anthropology | Classics | History | Literature | Philosophy | Press Releases | Religion
Posted by TXM at 01:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter, Seth Lerer tells us the bedtime story of Western culture's obsession with books for the young. He traces the transformative power of literature across centuries, from the moralizing allegories of antiquity to the swashbuckling epics of the nineteenth century and the acerbic self-awareness of Judy Blume and Weetzie Bat.

Written with the panoramic scope of a distinguished scholar and the affection of a parent and avid reader, Children's Literature reminds us of the sublime power of books in an era when videogames, MySpace, and text messaging compete for the free time of our youth.

Read the press release.

Archived in Classics | History | Literature | Press Releases | Reference and Writing
Posted by TXM at 01:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

New in paperback—Although airports are now best known for interminable waits at check-in counters, liquid restrictions for carry-on luggage, and humiliating shoe-removal rituals at security, they were once the backdrops for jet-setters who strutted, martinis in hand, through curvilinear terminals designed by Eero Saarinen. In the critically acclaimed Naked Airport, Alastair Gordon traces the cultural history of this defining institution from its origins in the muddy fields of flying machines to its frontline position in the struggle against international terrorism.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As thousands of G.I.'s fought their way through fierce German resistance along the coast of Normandy on D-Day, they carried in their packs an illustrated pamphlet that told them what they'd find—and what would be expected of them—once they had secured their beachholds and begun the liberation of France.

Created by the U.S. War Department under conditions of the highest secrecy—then lying forgotten in archives for decades after the war—Instructions for American Servicemen in France during World War II, presented here in a facsimile edition, is a compact trove of information and reassurance. Written in a comfortable, conversational tone, the book is equal parts propaganda piece, cultural handbook, and travel guide. Though its central aim is to dispel any notions about French weakness—and simultaneously to highlight the nation's historical importance as an ally—from our historical vantage it is the manual’s portrayal of French culture that is the most fascinating: "French beer is flatter and more slippery than our beer but the French like it, when they can get it;" "the neighborhood French café is the most French thing in all France;" "French hotel bills are complicated." For soldiers reading Instructions in 1944, a long road lay ahead—but with each confident description of the once and future life of various French provinces, it's easy to imagine that end seeming just a tiny bit closer.

Read the press release.

Archived in History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Operation Homecoming is the result of a major initiative launched by the National Endowment for the Arts to bring distinguished writers to military bases to inspire U.S. soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, and their families to record their wartime experiences. Encouraged by such authors as Tom Clancy, Tobias Wolff, and Marilyn Nelson, American military personnel and their loved ones wrote candidly about what they saw, heard, and felt while in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as on the home front. These unflinching eyewitness accounts, private journals, short stories, and letters offer an intensely revealing look into extraordinary lives and are an unforgettable contribution to wartime literature.

Read the press release.

Archived in History | Press Releases | Psychology | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Kurdistan was erased from world maps after World War I, when the victorious powers carved up the Middle East, leaving the Kurds without a homeland. Today the Kurds, who live on the land that straddles the borders of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, are by far the largest ethnic group in the world without a state.

Kurdistan is a visual history of a people and a place who have otherwise been denied a national archive. Since its first publication in 1997, Meiselas's lavish compendium of photographs and documents has become a crucial repository of memory for the Kurdish community both in exile and at home. This new edition appears at a time when the world's attention has once again been drawn to the lands of this little-understood but historically consequential people.

Read the press release.

Archived in Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

William Davies King makes no bones about it: he's odd. And his collections are odder: loops of wire, skeleton keys, seafood tins, water bottle labels, envelope liners, strips of masking tape, canceled credit cards, boulders—and that's just for starters. You might call it junk, but to King, it's a very special sort of nothing. Suffice it to say, no one on earth has a garage quite like his.

King's unusual collections reflect his belief in the intrinsic value of the discarded, unwanted, and ephemeral—but as he makes clear in Collections of Nothing, the urge that drives his hoarding is not all that different from that which leads a more typical person to prize uncanceled stamps or pristine sets of baseball cards. Both an affecting memoir and an idiosyncratic examination of the desire to accumulate, Collections of Nothing takes us deep inside the soul of the solitary collector. King's life story is deftly interleaved with his insightful meditations on the nature of the acquisitive mind; the result is a book that defies categorization, a unique hybrid that will speak to anyone who has ever found himself bitten by the collecting bug.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you think you've had your fill of malicious gossip, sex as a route to celebrity, and relentless sports and entertainment news, you might just be reading all about it two centuries too late. Under such headlines as "Whoredome in New York" and "Philadelphia Pimps of Fame," New York's 1840s flash papers served up with nonpareil style and irresistible wit all the news that wasn't fit to print about the city's underworld of brothels, wantons, unfortunate girls, and their all-too-eager customers. Ephemeral publications that also featured gossip about boxing, dog fighting, and the theater scene, the Rake, the Flash, the Whip, and the Libertine were must-reads for sporting men keen to learn about the city's leisure activities and erotic entertainments. Now, in The Flash Press, these papers are once again in print—this time taking the more discrete form of a book that looks under Victorian-era New York's buttoned-up surface to reveal the colorful (read: more interesting) characters teeming beneath.

Read the press release.

Archived in Film and Media | History | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Despite the ubiquity of Dorothea Lange's photographs, a surprisingly large number of them have languished in archives, more or less unseen, for decades. With Daring to Look, Anne Whiston Spirn brings nearly 200 of those photos to light, revealing new facets of Lange's celebrated achievement.

Daring to Look is far more than just a book of photos, however. Spirn presents the images—taken in 1939 in California, North Carolina, and the Pacific Northwest—alongside Lange's own field notes and captions, which the photographer considered to be an essential component of her attempt to document the hardscrabble lives of her subjects. Spirn joins that work to an insightful account of Lange's life, as well as a fascinating look at the current state of many of the locations Lange shot. Spirn's own photographs of those towns and farms reflect the changes—and the surprising continuity—over decades, carrying Lange's documentary project into a new century.

Daring to Look brings to life a crucial moment in American history—and illuminates a missing period in the life of one of America's greatest artists.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biography | Film and Media | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Founded in 1965 and still active today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is an American institution with an international reputation. From its working-class roots on the South Side of Chicago, the AACM went on to forge an extensive legacy of cultural and social experimentation, crossing both musical and racial boundaries. The success of individual members and ensembles from Muhal Richard Abrams, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Anthony Braxton to Douglas Ewart, the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, and Nicole Mitchell has been matched by the enormous international influence of the collective itself in inspiring a generation of musical experimentalists.

George E. Lewis, who joined the collective as a teenager in 1971, establishes the full importance and vitality of the AACM with this communal history, written with a symphonic sweep that draws on a cross-generational chorus of voices and a rich collection of rare images.

Read the press release.

Also, read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Black Studies | Chicago | History | Music | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in History | Press Releases | Religion
Posted by TXM at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in Law | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 01:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Economics | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt.

Archived in History | Music | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.”

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt.

Archived in Chicago | History | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Education | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 01:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Gay and Lesbian | History | Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 01:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Chicago | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

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

Archived in Economics | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

Read the press release.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biography | Black Studies | History | Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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
Posted by DB at 01:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

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

Archived in Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 01:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release. Also read an excerpt.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 03:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in Anthropology | Biology | Press Releases | Psychology
Posted by TXM at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in Law | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 04:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in Classics | Education | History | Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 03:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

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

Archived in Anthropology | Literature | Press Releases | Religion
Posted by TXM at 03:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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
Posted by TXM at 04:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release or an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Biology | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in Film and Media | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Chicago | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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
Posted by TXM at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in Economics | History | Mathematics and Physics | Philosophy | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biography | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in Economics | History | Philosophy | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in Education | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in History | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Cartography and Geography | Chicago | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in Economics | Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in Anthropology | Biography | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Economics | Education | History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

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

Archived in Biology | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“‘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.”

Read the press release.

Archived in Film and Media | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“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

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

Archived in Black Studies | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release. Read a chapter from the book, “The Goodnight Kiss.”

Archived in Biography | Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Barbara Stafford is at the forefront of a growing movement that calls for the humanities to confront the brain's material realities. In Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images she argues that humanists should seize upon the exciting neuroscientific discoveries that are illuminating the underpinnings of cultural objects. In turn, she contends, brain scientists could enrich their investigations of mental activity by incorporating phenomenological considerations—particularly the intricate ways that images focus intentional behavior and allow us to feel thought.

As precise in her discussions of firing neurons as she is about the coordinating dynamics of image making, Stafford locates these major transdisciplinary issues at the intersection of art, science, philosophy, and technology. Ultimately, she makes an impassioned plea for a common purpose—for the acknowledgment that, at the most basic level, these separate projects belong to a single investigation.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Philosophy | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Every day, the media present us with thousands of photographs of world events, accompanying and illuminating the stories of the day. Most of those images are forgotten as soon as the day's paper is discarded—but a very small number take on a larger life, resonating with the public and influencing opinions, emotions, and actions. These iconic images—a cluster of marines struggling to plant the American flag on Iwo Jima, a naked Vietnamese girl running in terror from a napalm attack, an unarmed man stopping a tank in Tiananmen Square—are seared into our brains, instantly calling up emotional memories of the past century's major events. But why are these images so transcendent? Out of innumerable photos, why did these particular ones become icons? And what role should such images, and photojournalism itself, play in public life? In No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites explore the creation, dissemination, and the effects of iconic photographs taking us back to the circumstances in which these photos were taken and setting them in their full historical and cultural contexts.

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

Archived in Art and Architecture | Film and Media | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 04:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The shocking human rights violations at Abu Ghraib and the use of sexual humiliation to interrogate inmates at Guantánamo Bay have become notorious flashpoints in the debate over America's recent interventions in the Arab world. That these abhorrent techniques were specifically adopted for their effectiveness against Arabs points to a racist and sexually charged power dynamic at the root of the U.S. conquest of Iraq—a dynamic born from centuries of Western assumptions about Arab sexuality.

These assumptions have been disputed ever since Edward Said's Orientalism sparked fierce debate over the biases at the heart of Western study of the Arab world. But left out of this argument was the history of how Arabs themselves wrote and thought about their own sexual desires. In Desiring Arabs, Joseph Massad brings to light the other side of the story by investigating a massive compendium of overlooked Arabic writing from the nineteenth century to the present. This unprecedented study is a much-needed look at how Western discourse on sex has shaped the Arab world.

Read the press release.

Archived in Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

On May 1, Mexican immigrants took to the streets in cities across America to demand a living wage, greater access to health care, and an easier path to legal status. Meanwhile, cable news pundits and newspaper columnists breathlessly debated the implications of their growing numbers—they now account for over 28 percent of all foreign-born inhabitants of the United States. But despite the visibility of Mexican immigrants in the media, little is known about their real impact on American society. Why do Mexican immigrants gain citizenship and employment at a slower rate than non-Mexicans? Does their migration to the United States adversely affect the working conditions of lower-skilled workers already residing there? And how rapid is intergenerational mobility among Mexican immigrant families?

Data is needed to answer these questions and inform policymakers and concerned citizens alike about the reality behind the headlines. In Mexican Immigration to the United States, the world's foremost economists report startling new findings on an immigrant influx whose size and character will force us to rethink economic policy for decades to come. For anyone seeking to cut through the rhetoric—and understand the future of social conditions and economic opportunities in both countries—Mexican Immigration to the United States is essential reading.

Read the press release.

Archived in Economics | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Equal parts medical drama, political chronicle, and ringing polemic, Inclusion tells the story of the movement for a more inclusive approach to medical research, from the struggles of advocacy groups in the 1980s to force researchers to diversify their subject pools to the current model, under which drug companies make bold assertions that group differences in society are encoded in our biology. While Epstein appreciates the hope that more inclusive practices offer to traditionally underserved groups, he argues forcefully that these practices can overshadow far more important social inequities and will only make a real difference if tied to a broad-based effort to address health disparities.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

More brittle than glass, at times stronger than steel, at other times flowing like molasses, ice covers 10 percent of the earth’s land and 7 percent of its oceans.

In Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance author Mariana Gosnell explores the history and uses of ice in all its complexity, grandeur, and significance. From the freezing of Pleasant Lake in New Hampshire to the breakup of a Vermont river at the onset of spring, from the frozen Antarctic landscape that emperor penguins inhabit to the cold, watery route bowhead whales take between Arctic ice floes, Gosnell examines icebergs, icicles, and frostbite; sea ice and permafrost; ice on Mars and in the rings of Saturn; and several new forms of ice developed in labs. A record of the scientific surprises, cultural magnitude, and everyday uses of frozen water, Ice is a sparkling illumination of a substance whose ebbs and flows over time have helped form the world we live in.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 06:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On the eve of yet another effort at forging a lasting peace in Israel and Palestine, American-born Israeli David Shulman takes readers into the heart of the long-running conflict with Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine, an eye-opening memoir that reveals the unforgettable human stories behind the angry faces and despairing pronouncements.

A soul-searching memoir, Dark Hope chronicles the efforts of Shulman and his companions—Israeli and Palestinian both—in the peace group Ta'ayush to bring aid to Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. In the face of hostile settlers, police, and soldiers, the members of Ta'ayush work through checkpoints and blockades to deliver food, medicine, and basic human comfort. By focusing on the human dimension of the occupation, Shulman forcefully clarifies its inherent injustice. We meet ardent partisans on both sides—but we also see ordinary people radicalized by conflict. Settlers shoot innocent Palestinians harvesting olives, soldiers blow up houses, police savagely beat nonviolent demonstrators, and families and communities are irrevocably destroyed.

With Dark Hope, Shulman has written an unforgettable book, an attempt to discover how his beloved Israel went wrong—and how it might still be brought back.

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

Archived in Biography | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the 1630s the Netherlands was gripped by tulipmania: a speculative fever unprecedented in scale and, as popular history would have it, folly. We all know the outline of the story—how otherwise sensible merchants, nobles, and artisans spent all they had on tulip bulbs. We have heard how these bulbs changed hands hundreds of times in a single day, and how some bulbs, sold and resold for thousands of guilders, never even existed. Tulipmania is seen as an example of the gullibility of crowds and the dangers of financial speculation.

But it wasn't like that. As Anne Goldgar reveals in Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age, not one of these stories is true. Making use of extensive archival research, she lays waste to the legends, revealing that while the 1630s did see a speculative bubble in tulip prices, neither the height of the bubble nor its bursting were anywhere near as dramatic as we tend to think. By clearing away the accumulated myths, Goldgar is able to show us instead the far more interesting reality: the ways in which tulipmania reflected deep anxieties about the transformation of Dutch society in the Golden Age.

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

Archived in Economics | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Watching primates at zoos is so fascinating because they seem to relate to one another as individuals; we see in their actions and vocalizations signs of friendship, rivalry, and even love. But how much of what we see is just our anthropomorphizing? How do primates really understand their relationships and their place in the world? The fruit of fifteen years living with baboons in their native habitat, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind answers these questions and more, showing us how baboons understand themselves and their world. The drama of rank and kinship, the authors reveal, would be right at home in Jane Austen, as the baboons make and break alliances with friends, relatives, and rivals. Through unprecedented field experiments, Cheney and Seyfarth enable us to understand the intelligence underlying these bonds and the forms of communications baboons employ to manage their relationships—and the dangers and stress of living in the wild. Baboon Metaphysics gives us an unprecedented and compelling glimpse into the mind of this most fascinating species.

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

Archived in Anthropology | Biology | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea Brague takes his readers back three thousand years to trace the idea of divine law in the West from prehistoric religions to modern times. Brague explains how divine law, which served in ancient Greece as a metaphor for natural law, was seen in ancient Israel as divine revelation. Then, in the Middle Ages, it took on different sacred meanings within Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Illuminating these meanings with a wide array of philosophical, political, and religious sources, he goes on to address the recent break in the alliance between law and divinity—when modern societies, far from connecting the two, started to think of law simply as the rule human community gives itself. Powerfully expanding on the project he began with his critically acclaimed The Wisdom of the World, Brague explores what this disconnect means for the contemporary world, ultimately inviting us to re-imagine the implications of our own modernity.

Read the press release.

Archived in History | Law | Press Releases | Religion
Posted by TXM at 04:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Drawing on interviews with Washington insiders and astute analysis of mainstream reportage, When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina argues that the dependence of journalists on government sources has silenced credible voices from all but the highest circles of power—with disastrous results. The authors trace this harmful dependency across the arc of the Bush administration's media-assisted political fortunes, beginning with an unflinching look at why major news outlets neglected to cover evidence against the presence of WMDs in Iraq. They find that such catastrophic blind spots, especially during the Abu Ghraib controversy, stemmed from a dearth of high-level officials within government willing to question the administration publicly.

To remedy this shortcoming, the authors propose new practices aimed at diversifying the kinds of sources that professional conventions allow journalists to use. Seeing promise in the refreshingly balanced coverage of Hurricane Katrina, When the Press Fails ultimately illuminates how the press and the public alike can work toward a new kind of journalism, the emergence of which is absolutely vital to the future of our democracy.

Read the press release.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In The Discovery of Insulin—a brilliant, definitive history of one of the most significant and controversial medical events of modern times—award-winning historian Michael Bliss brings to light a bizarre clash of scientific personalities. When F. G. Banting and J. J. R. Macleod won the 1923 Nobel Prize for discovering and isolating insulin, Banting immediately announced that he was dividing his share of the prize with his young associate, C. H. Best. Macleod divided his share with a fourth member of the team, J. B. Collip. For the next sixty years medical opinion was intensely divided over the allotment of credit for the discovery of insulin. In resolving this controversy, Bliss also offers a wealth of new detail on such subjects as the treatment of diabetes before insulin and the life-and-death struggle to manufacture insulin.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 04:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

"When a film is not a document, it is a dream. … At the editing table, when I run the strip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood." Bergman, who has conveyed this heady sense of wonder and vision to moviegoers for decades, traces his lifelong love affair with film in his breathtakingly visual autobiography, The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography.

More grand mosaic than linear account, Bergman’s vignettes trace his life from a rural Swedish childhood through his work in theater to Hollywood’s golden age, and a tumultuous romantic history that includes five wives and more than a few mistresses. Throughout, Bergman recounts his life in a series of deeply personal flashbacks that document some of the most important moments in twentieth-century filmmaking as well as the private obsessions of the man behind them. Ambitious in scope yet sensitively wrought, The Magic Lantern is a window to the mind of one of our era’s great geniuses.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biography | Film and Media | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 03:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For thousands of years, both scientists and novices alike underestimated the enormous diversity of life in the deep seas. And until recently, they were right—or at least they were not yet proved wrong. Only in the last fifty years or so did the deep sea reveal itself to be a source of unimaginable wonders—Lilliputian fauna on the seafloor; seemingly bizarre life forms at mid-ocean depths; profusion of life at hot vents, cold seeps, and whale falls; and coldwater corals and fisheries on seamounts and deepwater reefs. The deep sea is, indeed, the last unexplored frontier on the planet.

But just as research and exploration are rendering the briny deep accessible, a host of new threats is endangering it—the spread of trawling into the deep ocean, the buildup of humanity's worst pollutants in deepwater life-forms, the potential consequences of climate change and ocean acidification, and the future mining of seabed minerals and methane hydrates for hydrocarbons. The Silent Deep: The Discovery, Ecology, and Conservation of the Deep Sea tells the stories of discovery of the deep sea, the ecologies of its ecosystems, and of the impact of humans, highlighting the importance of global stewardship in keeping this delicate ecosystem alive and well.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 03:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

No story of World War II is more triumphant than the liberation of France, made famous in countless photos of Parisians waving American flags and kissing GIs as columns of troops paraded down the Champs Élysées. But one of the least-known stories from that era is also one of the ugliest chapters in the history of Jim Crow. In The Interpreter, celebrated author Alice Kaplan recovers this story both as eyewitnesses first saw it, and as it still haunts us today.

The American Army executed 70 of its own soldiers between 1943 and 1946—almost all of them black, in an army that was overwhelmingly white. Through the French interpreter Louis Guilloux's eyes, Kaplan narrates two different trials: one of a white officer, one of a black soldier, both accused of murder. Both were court-martialed in the same room, yet the outcomes could not have been more different.

Kaplan's insight into character and setting make The Interpreter an indelible portrait of war, race relations, and the dangers of capital punishment.

"American racism could become deadly for black soldiers on the front. The Interpreter reminds us of this sad component of a heroic chapter in American military history."
Los Angeles Times

"A cross section of a tragedy … This is an extraordinary book."
John Lukacs, Boston Globe

Read the press release.

Archived in Black Studies | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Making the poet available to contemporary readers of poetry without denying him his historical context, Selected Poems of Luis de Góngora represents Góngora as master of many genres and a writer whose life and poetry are closely intertwined. John Dent-Young’s free translations capture Góngora’s intensely musical voice and transmit the individuality and self-assuredness of the poet. The first significant edition of this seminal and challenging poet in many years, Selected Poems of Luis de Góngora puts the Spanish master in his rightful place alongside other masters of the difficult, such as John Donne and Stéphane Mallarmé.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Arctic of towering icebergs and midnight sun, of flaming auroras and endless winter nights, has long provoked flights of the imagination. Now, in The Last Imaginary Place, renowned archaeologist Robert McGhee lifts the veil to reveal the true Arctic world. Based on thirty years of work with native peoples of the Arctic and travel in the region, McGhee's account dispels notions of the frozen land as an exotic, remote world that exists apart from civilization.

Read the press release.

Archived in History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 01:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the face of seemingly relentless American optimism, Eugene O’Neill’s plays reveal an America many would like to ignore, a place of seething resentments, aching desires, and family tragedy, where failure and disappointment are the norm and the American dream a chimera. Though derided by critics during his lifetime, his works resonated with audiences, won him the Nobel Prize and four Pulitzer, and continue to grip theatergoers today. Now in Eugene O’Neill’s America: Desire Under Democracy noted historian John Patrick Diggins offers a masterly biography that both traces O’Neill’s tumultuous life and explains the forceful ideas that form the heart of his unflinching works.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biography | History | Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A capstone to the career of a giant in Shakespearean scholarship, This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now is the first book of its kind: an utterly accessible history of how the works of Shakespeare have been performed, from the Renaissance right up to the present—and even on the silver screen by such directors as Orson Welles, Roman Polanski, and Kenneth Branagh. The world’s leading expert on the subject, Bevington moves from the sparse stage sets of Elizabethan playhouses to the spectacular visual effects of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century productions to the present, which has seen companies employ far more understated approaches, emphasizing character and language in a manner much closer to Shakespeare’s own aims. Bringing a lifetime of study to bear on a remarkably underappreciated aspect of Shakespeare's art, Bevington has crafted a book that will enthrall newcomers and aficionados alike.

Read the press release.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lee Miller's life embodied all the contradictions and complications of the twentieth century: a model and photographer, muse and reporter, sexual adventurer and domestic goddess, she was also America's first female war correspondent. Carolyn Burke, a biographer and art critic, here reveals how the muse who inspired Man Ray, Cocteau, and Picasso could be the same person who unflinchingly photographed the horrors of Buchenwald and Dachau. Burke captures all the verve and energy of Miller's life: from her early childhood trauma to her stint as a Vogue model and art-world ingénue, from her harrowing years as a war correspondent to her unconventional marriages and passion for gourmet cooking. A lavishly illustrated story of art and beauty, sex and power, Modernism and Surrealism, Lee Miller illuminates an astonishing woman's journey from art object to artist.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biography | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An extended meditation on how death affects those left behind, Under Sleep is a skillfully understated, beautifully rendered elegy for the poet’s partner. Formally inventive and technically sophisticated, Daniel Hall attends to the power of death to haunt every perception. The poet’s voice registers as though he were walking on the bottom of the ocean, in a state of mind somewhere "under sleep," in a kind of waking dream. In Hall’s hands, isolated moments of perception bloom into truly touching love elegies.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In 2005 the Boston Globe published an editorial lamenting the lack of English translations of foreign literature. "In a literary global world, one is what one reads. And in the United States, foreign fare is too scarce." The Globe, however, did single out one exemplary program—the National Endowment for the Arts translation grants—and one of its recipients—Patrick Barron, who used his grant money to translate contemporary Italian poet Andrea Zanzotto—as indication that translation is alive and well. Now, all of Barron's translations of this inestimable modern master are available in The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto: A Bilingual Edition.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Early humans lived in the Stone Age. We, it seems, are stuck in the Viagra Age. Turn on the television at any hour and you're likely to be invited to join in a very frank conversation about impotence, as celebrities from Rush Limbaugh and Bob Dole to Jay Leno and Mike Ditka have for a decade been leading America in an orgy of public confessions, pharmaceutical testimonials, and late-night jokes. But as Angus McLaren shows us in Impotence: A Cultural History, the first history of the subject, the failure of men to rise to the occasion has been an irresistible topic since the dawn of humanity.

Read the press release.

Updated May 1: We now have an online feature drawn from the book: "Two Millennia of Impotence Cures." Enjoy!

Archived in History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 07:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mary Pattillo is a Newsweek Woman of the 21st Century because of her critically acclaimed last book, Black Picket Fences, which changed forever the way many of us think about the black middleclass in America today. In Black on the Block, Pattillo returns to the South Side of Chicago to explore how class conflicts within the black community are dramatically changing the shape and terms of racial solidarity. Her focus is the work that more affluent members of the black community are doing to lift historically impoverished and dilapidated neighborhoods out of abject poverty—and the tensions that arise between poorer and middleclass blacks when they do so. Black on the Block explores the often heated battles between haves and have-nots, home owners and apartment dwellers, and newcomers and old timers as they clash over the political implications of gentrification and reaching out to white economic power bases.

Read the press release. We also have an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Black Studies | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 08:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Draft of a Letter is a book about belief—not belief in the unknowable but belief in what seems bewilderingly plain. Pondering the bodies we inhabit, the words we speak, these poems discover infinitude in the most familiar places. The revelation is disorienting and, as a result, these poems talk to themselves, revise themselves, fashioning a dialogue between self and soul that opens outward to include other voices, lovers, children, angels, and ghosts. For James Longenbach, great distance makes the messages we send sweeter. To be divided from ourselves is never to be alone. "If the kingdom is in the sky," says the body to the soul, "Birds will get there before you." "In time," says the awakening soul, "I liked my second / Body better / Than the first." To live, these poems insist, is to arise every day to the strange magnificence of the people and places we thought we knew best. Draft of a Letter is an unsettled and radiant paradiso, imagined in the death-shadowed, birth-haunted middle of a long life.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 07:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hard Bread, Peg Boyers’s debut poetry collection, with verse spoken in the imagined voice of the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, was widely praised for its inspired ventriloquism and brilliant lyricism. In Honey with Tobacco, Boyers’s own intensely personal voice emerges in three strikingly distinctive variants. The first part of the book is the most explicitly autobiographical, bringing together poems that explore the poet’s Cuban American experience and a childhood marked by travel, the tropics, and varieties of disenchantment. The middle sequence of poems concerns a mother, a father, and a son, a postmodern holy family whose ordeals are evoked in a terse, terrifying narrative. The final section of the book confronts age, desire, and regret in a series of personal poems that plumb baser human instincts and the speakers’ determination to dwell in darkness, when necessary, without abandoning the sacred.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 07:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A founding document of modern libertarianism, Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom has in the sixty years since its publication established itself as an unimpeachable classic in political philosophy, intellectual and cultural history, and economics. From the moment of its publication in 1944, when Hayek's passionate warnings about the dangers of collectivism and centralized government ran directly counter to prevailing opinion, The Road to Serfdom has inspired and infuriated politicians, scholars, and general readers. It became a surprise best seller in the year of its release, and it has continued to exercise tremendous influence on political and economic thought ever since. The publication of this new, authoritative edition of The Road to Serfdom will allow adherents and detractors alike to seriously reflect on Hayek, reconsider his legacy, and appraise his continuing relevance in the twenty-first century.

Read the press release. Read an excerpt on the publishing history of the book.

Archived in Economics | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Is it possible to travel without leaving home? Is there a way to be a pilgrim without leaving your life behind? James Attlee answers that question in this thoughtful, savvy, and personal account of his pilgrimage to a place he thought he already knew—the Cowley Road in Oxford, right outside his door. Isolarion takes its title from a type of fifteenth-century map that isolates an area in order to present it in detail, and that's what Attlee, sharp-eyed and armed with tape recorder and notebook, provides for Cowley Road. From a sojourn in a sensory-deprivation tank to a furtive visit to an unmarked pornography emporium, Attlee investigates every aspect of the Cowley Road's appealingly eclectic culture, where halal shops abut craft jewelers and reggae clubs pulsate alongside quiet churchyards. Drawing inspiration from sources ranging from Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy to contemporary art, Attlee is a charming and companionable guide who revels in the extraordinary embedded in the everyday.

Read the press release.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 03:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In March 2007, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that the combined land and ocean temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere for December 2006 through February 2007 were 1.3°F higher than average, based on records dating back to 1880. Climate change has the potential to wreak havoc on oceanic ecosystems, as the contributors to Oceans report. An accessible collection of thirty articles published in Scientific American in the last decade, the collection considers, in addition to global warming and its devastating effects, the origins of the world's oceans, the diversity of life in the water, the state of global fisheries, the dangers of natural disasters, and the future of marine conservation. With a breadth of topics as wide as the ocean is deep, this timely guide offers the nonscientist an opportunity to appreciate the importance of this expansive—and fragile—frontier.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 01:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Combining the latest scientific discoveries with astonishing color imagery, The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss by Claire Nouvian takes readers on a voyage into the darkest realms of the ocean. Revealing nature's oddest and most mesmerizing creatures in crystalline detail, The Deep features more than two hundred color photographs of terrifying sea monsters, living fossils, and ethereal bioluminescent creatures, many of which are photographed here for the first time. Accompanying these breathtaking photographs are contributions from some of the world's most respected researchers that examine the biology of these deep-sea organisms, the ecology of their habitats, and the history of deep-sea exploration. An unforgettable tour of the teeming abyss, The Deep celebrates the incredible diversity of life on Earth and will captivate anyone intrigued by the unseen—and unimaginable—creatures of the deep sea.

Read the press release. A special site for the book—www.thedeepbook.org— has images from the book and much more information.

Archived in Biology | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Seventy years ago, in a small office at the University of Chicago, dissertation secretary Kate L. Turabian changed forever the way research is reported. Asked to provide students with a style guide, she wrote a small pamphlet describing the correct format for writing college dissertations. That pamphlet eventually became A Manual for Writers and has gone on to sell more than eight million copies in six editions. This spring the University of Chicago Press will publish the seventh edition of her widely used and respected Manual—now fully revised to meet the needs of a new generation of students and researchers. The stellar team of Joseph Williams, Gregory Colomb, and Wayne C. Booth, master teachers and authors of the bestselling Craft of Research, have thoroughly updated the Manual while respecting the Turabian tradition. With this careful revision, they have ensured that A Manual for Writers will remain the most valuable handbook for writers at every level—from first-year undergraduates, to dissertation writers, to senior scholars.

Read the press release. Much more information will soon be available at www.turabian.org.

Archived in Press Releases | Reference and Writing
Posted by TXM at 09:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John Dewey once said that every generation has to accomplish democracy for itself, because social justice is something that cannot be handed down from one person to another: it has to be worked out in terms of the needs, problems, and conditions of the present moment and its distinct challenges. In this impassioned and inspirational work, Eddie S. Glaude Jr. puts Dewey’s idea into the service of his fellow African Americans. According to Glaude, black politics have grown increasingly stagnant and even ineffectual because of their basis in the sufferings and indignities of the past instead of the real-live obstacles of the present moment. To remedy this, Glaude here dislodges black politics from the dogmas and fixed ideas of the Civil Rights movement and points them in the direction of more pragmatic solutions rooted in the here and now. Poor health, alarming rates of imprisonment, drugs, and the advanced concentration of poverty in our nation’s cities warrant a form of political engagement that steps out of the shadows of the black freedom struggles of the 1960s and rises to the complexities of the 21st century with more innovative thinking, a greater emphasis on responsibility and personal accountability, and a fuller embrace of education and participatory democracy.

Heady, provocative, and brimming with practical wisdom, In a Shade of Blue is a remarkable work of political commentary on a scale rarely seen today. To follow its trajectory is to learn how African Americans arrived at this critical moment in their history and to envision where they might head next.

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

Archived in Black Studies | Philosophy | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases | Religion
Posted by TXM at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As the recent furor over the publication of O.J. Simpson's "confession" demonstrates, the impact of a high-profile trial doesn’t end with the delivery of the verdict—the emotional, cultural, and political effects can resonate for decades. With The Trial in American Life, distinguished legal scholar Robert Ferguson explores the role of the high-profile trial from America’s earliest days to the present, arguing that far from being mere spectacles, such trials provide an essential forum for discussion of contentious issues.

In a bravura performance that ranges from Aaron Burr to O.J. Simpson, Ferguson traces both the legal implications and the cultural ripples of prominent trials. He brings together courtroom transcripts with newspaper and literary accounts of high-profile trials—including those of John Brown, Lincoln assassination conspirator Mary Surratt, the Haymarket defendants, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—to show what happens when courtrooms are forced to cope with unresolved communal anxieties and make legal decisions that change the American public’s very idea of itself.

Read the press release. Read an excerpt.

Archived in History | Law | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In a December 2006 New York Times editorial (which we reprinted online), Mark C. Taylor wrote that his current manner of thinking and teaching "cultivate[s] a faith in doubt that calls into question every certainty." This philosophy is on elegant display in Taylor's newest book, Mystic Bones. By combining images of weathered bones with philosophical aphorisms, Taylor refigures death in a way that allows life to be seen anew. These haunting photographs speak to themes of ruin, mortality, and ritual, and to a theology based on immanence rather than transcendence. At once a fine art book of great originality and a profound spiritual meditation, Mystic Bones is Taylor's most personal statement yet of after-God theology.

See the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Philosophy | Press Releases | Religion
Posted by TXM at 03:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The only country in the world with a line in its national anthem as desperate as "this people has already suffered for its past and its future," Hungary is a nation defined by poverty, despair, and conflict, but also by creativity and artistic genius. Its history, and especially the history of Hungarian Jews, took of course, an even darker and more tragic turn during World War II and the Holocaust. But the story of the Jews in Hungary is also one of survival, heroism, and even humor—and that is what acclaimed author Adam Biro sets out to recover in One Must Also Be Hungarian, an inspiring and altogether poignant look back at the lives of his family members over the past two hundred years.

Read the press release. Read an excerpt.

Archived in Biography | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As electronic books, on-demand printing, and other innovations proliferate, the role of the publisher in the world of books is deeply uncertain. What value do publishers add to an author's work? In a world where authors are increasingly able to reach readers directly, is a publisher even necessary? Though these questions may seem new, Richard B. Sher demonstrates in The Enlightenment and the Book that they are as old as books themselves. Focusing on the explosion of intellectual activity in eighteenth-century Scotland that saw David Hume, Adam Smith, James Boswell, and others transform almost every field of learning, Sher demonstrates that key thinkers of the Enlightenment saw the book industry as crucial both for the dissemination of their ideas and for their dreams of fame and monetary gain. Similarly, Sher shows how publishers were involved in the project of bookmaking not only to make profits, but in order to advance human knowledge as well. The Enlightenment and the Book explores this tension between creativity and commerce—one that still exists in publishing today. Lavishly illustrated and elegantly conceived, it will be a must read for anyone interested in the history of the book or Enlightenment thought.

Read the press release. Read an excerpt.

Archived in History | Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)