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In a recent review posted to the Bookslut website, Barbara J. King praises anthropologist Richard Price's most recent book Travels with Tooy: History, Memory, and the African American Imagination for its unique ethnographic account of the author's encounter with the enigmatic subject of Tooy—a priest, philosopher, and healer living in a shantytown on the outskirts of Cayenne, French Guiana. Commending the book for drawing not only on Price's ethnographic and archival research, but also on Tooy's teachings, songs, and stories, King writes:

The book glows with knowledge, Tooy's as much as Rich's, as Rich is the first to say; he writes of Tooy with love, as a friend, but also with respect, calling him "a fellow intellectual.…"

The complexity of Rich's analysis sits side by side with the complexity of Tooy's time-and-space travel. As I close the book (and begin to listen to Tooy's voice at Rich's website ), I know that I grasp only a small fraction of what Tooy knows. It's a good feeling, in a peculiar way; after all, that's what inhabiting an unfamiliar reality will do for a person—teach her what she doesn't know, and how to learn something more.

Read the article at Bookslut. Also listen to a selection of archived sound files to accompany the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Black Studies | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the current edition of the American Interest, reviewer James Rosen delivers a positive assessment of Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites' recent book, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. Praising the book for its thorough treatment of nine case studies involving some of the most influential images of the twentieth century, Rosen writes:

[No Caption Needed] is a penetrating and provocative analysis of the way certain popular photographs, whether produced by professionals or amateurs, acquire the power to change public policy and with it the course of history.… The author's analytical achievement is enabled by an extraordinary feat of research and reporting. They have unearthed hidden facts, from both the backstory and the aftermath, surrounding each of their nine chosen photographs.…

[But] almost as compelling… are the stories of their subsequent appropriation. No Caption Needed details the uses and abuses of these nine iconic photographs by propagandists and peddlers of all kinds, with results that prove alternately haunting, playful, predictable, mercenary, dishonest and sometimes just plain twisted.…

Pick up a copy of the American Interest to read the rest of the review.
Also see the authors' No Caption Needed blog and read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Film and Media | History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews | Sociology
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Writing for the May 15 New York Review of Books A.C. Grayling begins his review of several books on primatology with a brief retrospective of the work of Dr. Jane Goodall. Along with several of her contemporaries—Grayling cites paleoanthropologist Louis Leaky, and zoologist Dian Fossey among others—Goodall's research on primate's social behavior helped to shed light on the connections between humanity and our nearest living ancestors. And since her groundbreaking study at Tanzania's Gombe National Park, many other scientists have continued in the same vein, gaining further insights into primates social lives and, in turn, giving us new and deeper insights into our own. As a worthy example Grayling cites Robert M. Seyfarth and Dorothy L. Cheney's most recent book Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. Grayling writes:

Baboon Metaphysics, by Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, shows how far ethology has come since Jane Goodall's early years at Gombe. An account of Cheney's and Seyfarth's field research into the social interactions of baboons, this is an impressive story, not just because of the care that went into the observations and experiments they record, but also in the philosophical sophistication of their thinking about the mental life of baboons.

Cheney and Seyfarth cite a remark from one of Darwin's notebooks as the starting point for their work: "He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke." By "baboon" Darwin undoubtedly meant the language, or at least the system of communication, of baboons, and by "metaphysics" he did not mean quite what this word now denotes (namely, inquiry into the fundamental nature of reality) but philosophy in general—especially ethics and the nature and sources of knowledge.… Reconstructing the intention of Darwin's remark, we see what he had in mind: now that religious explanations will no longer do, the significance and value of things human must be understood by placing mankind squarely in nature, and learning as much as possible from mankind's closest relatives about how we came to be what we are. Thus understood, Darwinian metaphysics is sociobiology as applied to human beings.

For Cheney and Seyfarth the implication of Darwin's dictum is that ethological study of monkeys and apes can yield clues to the nature of the mind.…

The review ends on a provocative note:

One thing is clear: whereas human self-importance once placed human beings outside nature, everything that has followed from research of the kind done by Jane Goodall and Cheney and Seyfarth makes it impossible to think in such terms any longer. This point should by now be a mere commonplace; yet there are many millions of people whose faith-based ways of viewing the world lead them to think otherwise.

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

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Biology | Economics | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 04:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The UK's Spectator magazine has published an excellent review of Andrea Weiss's new book In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story, a biographical account of the lives of the two eldest children of renowned writer Thomas Mann. Though Thomas's fame and prestige has often eclipsed the literary and intellectual achievements of his children, as the Spectator's Allan Massie notes, Weiss's new book uncovers their significant contributions to the worlds of art and literature. Massie's review begins:

The subtitle is The Erika and Klaus Mann Story, and the shadow is that cast by their father, Thomas Mann, the greatest German novelist of the 20th century.

Erika and Klaus were the oldest two of his six children, and, while it is fair to say they lived in his shadow, they were not obscured by it, being extraordinary people in their own right, Klaus at least a remarkable writer himself also. Andrea Weiss, an American film-maker as well as writer, an associate professor at the City College of New York, tells their story with enthusiasm, sympathy and insight, in a style mercifully free of the clotted jargon we tend, not always unfairly, to expect from American academics.…

Read the full review on the Spectator website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Reviews
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Published last week, Lee Siegel's newest book, Love and the Incredibly Old Man: A Novel scores a long and appreciative review in the April 18th edition of the Times Literary Supplement. Remarking on the unique autobiographical element of Siegel's fiction Stephen Burn's article begins:

Students of American writing have to distinguish between two Lee Siegels. Perhaps the more famous of the two is the New York critic Siegel, who was suspended from the New Republic in 2006 when it was discovered that he had been posting comments on the internet proclaiming his own brilliance. Oddly enough, the other, currently less famous Siegel—who is a professor of religion at the University of Hawaii—has also spent the last ten years writing about himself. His four inventive and amusing novels feature a character, Lee Siegel, who, the author complains, "has consistently tried to pass himself off as me."…

His new novel, Love and the Incredibly Old Man, belongs somewhere in the middle of a continuum running from the experiments of his first two novels to the more transparent style of Who Wrote the Book of Love?, but like all the earlier works it involves a story received from an old man. In this instance the elderly gentleman is extremely elderly: he claims to be Ponce de Léon who, having lived on the waters of the Fountain of Youth for nearly 500 years, now seeks a ghostwriter to record his story before he dies. Having been impressed by references to Ponce in Siegel's fiction, the conquistador hires the novelist to write his life.…

Siegel's achievement is to persuade the reader to care about such a self-involved, and possibly delusional character while staging jokes at his expense and displaying his own verbal dexterity. A creative attitude to the novel is in abundant evidence across all Siegel's fiction; and this new novel is a worthy addition to a body of work which deserves a wider audience.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bernard Lightman's Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences is a fascinating study of the work of some of the most influential expositors of scientific doctrine during the 19th century—though they are rarely credited as such. The names of the popular science writers of the Victorian era are often overshadowed by those of the scientists they wrote about, but as Jon Turney notes in a recent review for the Times Higher Education, in his new book Lightman skillfully illuminates their cultural and historical importance. Turney writes:

The Victorian explosion of print embraced a diversity of treatments of science and its significance that exhibits many of the tensions that still mark science in public. Who has the right to speak for science, to interpret nature or to have the final word on humans' place in a universe in which God's hand in creation is in question?

As he catalogues the many contributors to the new popular scientific literature, and their works, Lightman illuminates how the different answers to these questions played their part in battles over science's authority and cultural prestige.…

Throughout, Lightman pays detailed attention to publishers and print runs, as well as to the authors' lives and works. The book is a substantial work of scholarship rather than a casual read, and it offers much for historians of science as well as students of popular writing.

Read the rest of the review on the THE website.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Literature | Reviews
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Tuesday's Los Angeles Times published a review of several recent books about the battle of Little Bighorn, George Armstrong Custer, and the deep impact that this most famous military defeat has had on America's cultural consciousness. Discussing Michael A. Elliott's Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer the Times' Allen Barra writes:

[In researching his book] Elliott traveled from Custer's childhood home in Monroe, Mich., to the Little Bighorn Battlefield in Crow Agency, Mont., and visited every related museum and monument in between. Particularly intriguing is a photograph of the mountainside memorial of Custer's final foe, Crazy Horse, a work in progress, behind a model of the proposed completed sculpture.

The fact that continued fascination with Custer in turn stimulates an increasing interest in Crazy Horse's people is not ignored by Elliott. He writes that for English-born Custer re-enactor Tony Austin, "portraying Custer's life means that one can resurrect an attitude toward American Indians that combines respect with combat, admiration with military opposition."

Custer himself, Elliott claims, "would have never believed that there would be Indians who thought of themselves as Indians in the twenty-first century." Modernity, Custer and his contemporaries believed, would "crush the indigenous population … either physically through extermination or spiritually through assimilation." That the descendants of the warriors of Little Bighorn might be using Custer's life and death "to help them understand what it means to be an Indian in the twenty-first century constitutes one of American history's most elegant, and least appreciated, ironies."

Read the rest of the review on the L.A. Times website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 09:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In 1965 a group of Chicago musicians dedicated to exploring the frontiers of American jazz banded together to create the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians—one of the most radical and influential musical collectives in the history of the genre. Now, author George E. Lewis has chronicled the definitive history of the movement in, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, a book music critic Peter Margasak praises in today's Chicago Reader for "[going] deeper into the formation and development of the AACM than any previous history, and as a formal acknowledgment of the group's enormous importance and influence…."

Margasak's article continues:

In the early 60s the marketplace was indifferent or hostile to creative jazz, and the AACM was the first sustained musician-run group to support it, producing legendary artists like Anthony Braxton, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Henry Threadgill. The organization remains active today, led by reedist Douglas Ewart and flutist Nicole Mitchell, and its members still display the fierce determination and brilliant creativity that made its name a seal of quality.

And on Tuesday, April 15, 4:15 pm you'll have a chance to see some of the AACM's brilliant creativity yourself if you head down to the Chicago Cultural Center's Cassidy Theater where the author along with some of AACM's current members will deliver a live performance and discussion of "the history of the AACM and strategies independent artists can use to form similar collectives."

The book is officially slated for release next month, but in the meantime, you can read the rest of the Reader article online, or see an excerpt from the book.

Time Out magazine also weighs in with an article published in their most recent issue. You can find it online here.

Archived in Black Studies | Chicago | History | Music | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 08:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

German intellectual Thomas Mann left behind not only the legacy of his extraordinary literary career, but six children who—though often overshadowed by their father's fame—became literary and artistic figures in their own right. In her new book In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story Andrea Weiss delivers a dual biography of Mann's two eldest, Erika and Clause, whose literary, political, and artistic exploits she recounts in vivid detail. In a review running in the April edition of Harper's, John Leonard notes that in delivering its candid portrait of the Mann children's dramatic lives, the book also provides a revealing look inside the elite literary and artistic circles which the Mann children traversed. Leonard writes:

The years of exile, war, and America are an extravagance of highbrow gossip, with such raisins in the cake as André Gide, Bertolt Brecht, Sybille Bedford, Jean Cocteau, Stefan Zweig, Muriel Rukeyser, Christopher Isherwood, Janet Flanner, James Baldwin, and Carson McCullers. Erika wrote magazine articles and children's books; Klaus wrote novels, plays, and film scripts; and the two of them collaborated on travel books, all while the FBI and the INS were hot on their trail for "premature anti-Fascism."

Pick up the current issue of Harper's to find out more, or read an excerpt.

Archived in Gay and Lesbian | History | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 03:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An interesting piece on David Grazian's new book On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife is running as the cover story in the current edition of the independent Philadelphia weekly City Paper. A.D. Amorosi's article begins by comparing Grazian's sociological study of Philly's nightlife to Damon Grunyon's scabrous tales of prohibition era New York:

When David Grazian started working on his most recent book, he wanted to find the skin and bones of Philly's latest nightlife renaissance. Now that it's finished, On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife paints the scene like something out of a Damon Runyon novel, full of schemers and suckers born every minute.

Flirty waitresses, winking hostesses and grinning bouncers make appearances in On the Make. So do PR consultants, drinking wing men, snobby DJs, event planners and paid partiers—the mod equivalent of Runyon's bookies and mooches. (No one in On the Make is named "Nathan Detroit" or "Sky Masterson," but a name like "Nicole Cashman" does the trick.) You can't help but expect a chorus of "Luck Be a Lady" to come swinging through the text.

Both entertaining and illuminating On the Make offers a riveting look at the various gambles, hustles, and put-ons that drive Philadelphia's bustling nightlife scene.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Anthropology | Psychology | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The April/May issue of Bookforum is running an early review of Erin Hogan's unconventional new travelogue, Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West. (The book will release in mid-April.) Noting the author's willingness to trek off the beaten path to experience first-hand the unique blending of landscape and sculpture in American land art reviewer Nico Israel writes:

Earth art, that consummately American movement that sprang up during the high-Vietnam War era, combined a steely-eyed commitment to the truth of materials and to the power of basic geometric forms with a desire to get off the grid or at the very least "expand the field" of sculpture. Sometimes called environmental or land art, or Earthworks, depending on its practitioner, it demanded of its actual, physical viewers—"fit, though few," as John Milton might have said—a pilgrim's willingness to go on the road to remote places in order to see the works and experience the landscapes that they reframed and illuminated.…

Enter self-described "recovering art historian" Erin Hogan, whose book Spiral Jetta records her retrospective responses to a highway journey in her Volkswagen, in which, over the course of about three weeks, she visited Spiral Jetty, Michael Heizer's Double Negative, Walter De Maria's Lightning Field, and Donald Judd's various Marfa projects.… Along the way, she offers compelling descriptions of the landscape of the American West, of the pilgrimage's contradictions—she is sharp when noting what expensive-eyeglass-wearing visitors to Sun Tunnels or Lightning Field must look like to the hardscrabble locals—and of getting lost (which seems an inevitable part of visiting Earth art).

Read the rest of the review on the Bookforum website.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Vicki Hearne's (1946-2001) posthumously published Tricks of the Light: New and Selected Poems has received a positive review in this month's issue of Poetry magazine by critic Joel Brouwer. Praising her work for transforming her practical knowledge of the dogs and horses she trained into a unique philosophical exploration of "language and the mind," Brouwer writes:

Nearly all of Hearne's writing, regardless of genre or audience, drew upon her work as a professional horse and dog trainer. But to think of this poet in those terms alone would be as misguided as thinking of E.O. Wilson as an entomologist. Communicating with animals helped Hearne to think through a variety of philosophical concerns, particularly questions of representation. What stories do we tell ourselves about our relationships with the animals we live and work with, feed and eat, love and fear? What really happens, and what do we imagine happens, when two species with fundamentally differing consciousnesses and languages—people and dogs, say—attempt to communicate? Above all, how might our investigation of such questions lead us to more general insights about representation and reality?

The review concludes: "Hearne's verse is … rigorously intelligent, rhetorically supple, wholly unafraid of complexity, formally deft, and, … liable to begin to glow with tricks of light."

Read the review on the Poetry magazine website.

Archived in Poetry | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a short review running in the April edition of the Atlantic Monthly reviewer Peter Hoey praises Richard B. Sher's The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America for its revealing account of the essential role publishers played in fostering the explosion of intellectual activity in Enlightenment Europe:

The marriage of commerce and culture is always fraught with difficulties, but when it works, its issue can indeed be remarkable. Nowhere was this truer than in Scotland during the late 18th century, when such writers as David Hume, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, James Boswell, and Robert Burns worked in creative cooperation with their equally enlightened publishers, disseminating their revolutionary works throughout Britain, Europe and most tellingly, the Americas. Discerningly illustrated, at once scholarly and accessible, this is an essential addition not only to 18th-century studies but also to the history of the book—a poignant subject in our post-book age.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Writing for the February 28 New England Journal of Medicine Dr. Chris Feudtner reviews our new edition of Michael Bliss's The Discovery of Insulin, a fascinating account of the struggle of four Canadian scientists—Frederick Banting, J.J.R. Macleod, Charles Best, and J.B. Collip—to make one of the most important medical discoveries of the modern age. Feudtner writes:

During the past century, medical science has produced numerous remarkable therapeutic achievements, but few accomplishments can rival—in terms of importance or drama—the development of insulin in 1921 and 1922.…

Twenty-five years ago, the historian Michael Bliss composed his remarkably illuminating recounting of this saga. It has proved to be the definitive account. Bliss, now a university professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, has also written highly regarded biographies of the inimitable physician Sir William Osler, the polymath surgeon Harvey Cushing, and the fascinating, albeit mercurial, Banting. But as Bliss confides, "The Discovery of Insulin is my favourite," and the book has now been released in a 25th anniversary edition, with a new preface and an updated concluding chapter.

You can find the full text of the review on the New England Journal of Medicine website, or find out more about the book here.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Daniel S. Greenberg's Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism has already generated much interest in the U. S. where the effect of the marketplace on academic science has been news for quite some time. But last Friday London's Physics Today ran a positive review of Greenberg's insightful analysis of campus capitalism as well, noting the book's applicability to science policy in the UK. Greg Parker writes for Physics Today:

When I joined the University of Southampton's microelectronics group in 1987 after spending 10 years in industry, I shared some of my commercial ideas for advancing the group into the 21st century with my academic colleagues. To say that my personal vision of paradise was close to their vision of hell is probably a pretty accurate observation. Two decades on, I now understand why they felt that way. Science for Sale contains a lot of information that explains this vast difference in perception, and the book also does a good job of highlighting how academia and industry differ on practical and ethical levels.

Parker continues:

My first worry on picking up the book was that it would be almost totally inapplicable to the current situation in the UK. Daniel Greenberg is a US journalist who usually writes about American science policy and practice, so I was expecting to find very little overlap with the reality of academic and business life in the UK. Much to my surprise, however, the overlap was almost 100%…

[T]his book does an excellent job of listing in detail the problems and the successes of trying to link the industrial world with academia.…

Archived in Biology | Economics | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a review appearing in last Sunday's edition of the Toronto Star Christine Sisimondo begins:

In academia, generally, food writing is relegated to… 'the kind of thing you might find in a newspaper'—not in the hallowed halls of higher ed.… But of late, "that's been changing. Anthropology and environmental science departments are beginning to redefine the study of food, as not just about nutrition and shortages through the ages but as a serious cultural indicator.

Laszlo is a chemistry professor who is probably best known for his previous book, Salt: Grain of Life, and has now moved on to one of the next great essential staples, citrus.

Laszlo has a truly charming way of telling the story, weaving his personal biography into the tale of the migration of various fruits around the world.

He is careful, though (and tells us he is worried about overstepping his bounds), to never let the personal overshadow the story of lemons, limes, grapefruits, oranges and, of course, such exotics as ugli fruit, kumquats and yuzu.…

[And] while there's … plenty of great history in Laszlo's account, it's [also] interdisciplinary, adding to his personal tale and all that lore discussions on chemistry and three great chapters on the symbolic meanings of citrus and the image of these fruits in poetry and art.

Laszlo proves that citrus is a serious matter, worthy of real academic study.

Read the rest of the article on the Toronto Star website. Also read six citrus recipies from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biology | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This month's Boston Review is running a nice piece on Liam Rector's The Executive Director of the Fallen World—the last book of poetry Rector would publish before taking his own life in late August of 2007 after battling both colon cancer and heart disease. But as reviewer Robert Schnall notes, though the poet may be gone, his poetry continues to have a profound effect upon its readers with its "hard-won insight and incandescent gallows humor… intermixing pathos with practical wisdom, tragedy with relentless sass." The review continues:

Often his mordant irony and slang diction prove to be his best defenses against despair, as in "So We'll Go No More," which presents a dying speaker's valediction to his lover: "Cancer, heart attack, bypass—all // In the same year? My chances / Are 20%! And I'm f—g well / Ready, ready to go." For Rector's speakers, the past is a looming presence. "Now" presents a tender, comic, and ultimately beautiful overview of life as a lesson in disheartenment from early childhood to death, while "First Marriage," "Beautiful, Sane Women," and "Our Last Period Together" all document failed relationships with a humor so delicate that it can barely conceal the vulnerability it seeks to disguise.

Read the rest of the review on the Boston Review website.

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

Another review appearing in the March 6 New York Review of Books delivers a fine exposition of Simon Kitson's new book The Hunt for Nazi Spies: Fighting Espionage in Vichy France. Writing for the NYRB Robert O. Paxton explains how Kitson's book reveals a new dimension of the Vichy government's complex and often strained relationship with the Nazi forces with which it collaborated. Paxton's review begins:

At first it sounds implausible. Did Marshal Pétain's Vichy French government, notoriously ready to collaborate with Nazi Germany, actually arrest and execute Nazi spies? Simon Kitson, a young British scholar at the University of Birmingham, shows that it did. His exhaustive search of French military, police, and judicial archives found that between 1940 and 1942 Vichy police and counterintelligence officers arrested between 1,500 and 2,000 agents working for Nazi Germany. Some 80 percent of them were French nationals. About forty German agents were executed, though none of them appears to have been a German citizen; some German citizens were imprisoned, however. The arrests stopped in November 1942 when the German army overran the unoccupied southern half of France, following the American landing in North Africa.

These facts were not entirely unknown. But no one had looked seriously into this cobwebby corner before Simon Kitson (and a few of his French contemporaries such as Sébastien Laurent) gained access to military and judicial archives concerning French counterintelligence activities for the years 1940—1944, and grasped that the subject was more than a passing curiosity.

Continue reading the rest of the article on the NYRB website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Writing for this month's edition of Natural History magazine Laurence A. Marschall reviews two recent books in the history of science: Pierre Laszlo's exploration of the cultural and culinary phenomenon of citrus fruit in Citrus: A History, and Pascal Richet's historical account of the various ways humans have attempted to record the age of the earth in A Natural History of Time.

Marschall writes of Citrus:

Can one describe a work of nonfiction as being happy? Well, this one is. Pierre Laszlo, a retired chemistry professor turned science writer, has approached the lore of citrus fruit with the élan of a master chef (the man is French, after all), mixing history, economics, biology, and chemistry to produce a book that will bring a smile to readers of every taste. Until reading Citrus, in fact, I had not realized just how many tastes the title implied: lemon, lime, orange, and grapefruit, of course, but also citron, tangerine, kumquat, calamondin, and the self-descriptive Ugli, not to mention such variants as bergamot, mandarin, Valencia, ortanique, and Honey Murcott. Laszlo's literary method is to present them as characters in an unfolding story. He begins with the domestication of the citron in Persia and the early history of citrus horticulture, then moves to the establishment and growth of the citrus industry in Florida, California, and Brazil, and finally, after many diversions and digressions, arrives at a final section that explores the place of citrus in literature, art, religion, and the culture of cuisine.

And the praise continues for Richet's A Natural History of Time:

Looking at the sandy New England pond outside our summer house, I can readily imagine the glacial remnant that lay there some 12,000 years ago, melting in the warming rays of the Holocene sun. I know, too, that a few hundred million years ago, before continental drift split us apart, Europe and this bit of North American real estate were joined. And I'm well aware that 5 billion years ago, this sand and this water, indeed the Earth itself and everything on it, were part of an interstellar cloud that was condensing into our solar system. Deep time is just one of those things I take for granted.

But as geophysicist Pascal Richet demonstrates in this readable popular history of chronology, the geologic calendar implicit in today's view of nature was not shared by earlier generations. Written accounts from ancient civilizations depict prehistory as a foggy dreamtime. Most authors made little attempt to assign dates or durations other than “in the beginning.…”

Only the fine details of the Earth's timeline are matters of contention any more.… Yet precisely because the current well-grounded chronology seems so natural to most scientifically literate people, Richet's authoritative review of Earth's history is particularly welcome. Rather than fret about polls that show how many citizens still hold to the chronology of the Holy Book, he invites us to marvel at the efforts of science to read the book of nature itself.

Read both reviews on the Natural History magazine website. Also navigate to our special Citrus web page featuring six tasty citrus recipes.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biology | Economics | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Robert Pinsky's "Poet's Choice" column in Last Sunday's Washington Post featured a nice review of Elise Partridge's new book of poems, Chameleon Hours. Pinsky's column quotes several of Partridge's poems and praises her unique vision that allows her to transform even her darkest hours into cause for linguistic celebration. Pinsky writes:

Some readers will recognize Partridge's name and recall her poems about cancer treatment that appeared in the New Yorker in recent years, including "Chemo Side Effects: Vision." That poem, collected in this book, begins by saying how printed words "fizzle" as "gnats in dervish clouds." Those phrases about temporarily impaired vision have so much energy that the feeling is almost gleeful, as if to say that even this deterioration can occasion the thrill of language. The same poem contains the lines:

Eyes that have brought me so many words,

are you too dim for the world to keep courting?

Days, lay out your wares in the honking bazaar!

The "wares" of daily, physical experience are humdrum and desired, gaudy and precious. What an ironic word "dim" is for the sharp, bright way this poet sees. In their ample, embracing, nuanced appetite for sensory experience, her poems achieve an ardent, compassionate and unsentimental vision.

Read the rest of "Poet's Choice" including another poem, "In the Barn," on the Washington Post website.

Archived in Poetry | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This month's issue of the journal Nature is running a nice review of Richard Owen's nineteenth century treatise on biological forms On the Nature of Limbs—one of the foundational works contributing to the development of modern evolutionary theory—newly reprinted in a facsimile edition edited by Ronald Amundson. Michael Coates writes for Nature:

A decade before Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Owen very nearly sketched a theory of evolutionary transformation, fragments of which appear here. However, as Padian describes, such were the sociopolitical and philosophical strains on Owen's position that he stalled at the final intellectual leap. Owen's patrons were of the Oxbridge-educated establishment—adherents to the natural theology of the 'argument from design' (for the existence of God) as advocated most influentially by William Paley (now sadly repackaged with a molecular gloss by the proponents of 'intelligent design').… But it remains an excellent source for those interested in how we identify and interpret pattern in nature. A dissertation on similarity, conservation and variability in form, it addresses issues of enduring interest to systematic biologists as well as to the revitalized field of evolutionary developmental biology.…

Read the rest of the review on the Nature website.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Marcia Lausen's recent book, Design for Democracy: Ballot and Election Design took center stage in an article on ballot design appearing in last Sunday's International Herald Tribune. Noting the relevance of Lausen's book, Alice Rawsthorn writes for the IHT:

With Super Tuesday now behind us, and the November 2008 presidential election looming, it seems timely to consider how to avoid a repetition of the 2000 punch-card catastrophe. Marcia Lausen, a graphic designer and professor of graphic design at the University of Illinois at Chicago, does so in the book Design for Democracy: Ballot and Election Design. As well as analyzing what went wrong in Florida eight years ago, she suggests how the design of ballots and the rest of the voting process could be improved in the future.…

Often, good information design is rooted in sticking to simple rules. Obvious though many of those rules may seem, the U.S. electoral debacle of 2000 illustrates the peril of ignoring them, while Lausen's book shows how effective they can be.

Read the rest of the article on the IHT website.

Also see the Design for Democracy website produced by the book's co-publishers, the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

Archived in Film and Media | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Anchorage Daily News is currently running a great review of James B. Nardi's new book, Life in the Soil: A Guide for Naturalists and Gardeners. Jeff Lowenfels author of another recent gardner's guide to the ecosystem, writes:

Consider this column a strong recommendation to go out and get this book, not from the library but from a store. It is well worth owning. Not only did I find it a great read, but it is a reference book I will turn to often.…

Nardi is a skilled scientific illustrator as well as a biologist. Almost every page has a detailed picture of the organisms (with size reference) he is describing, often showing not only the animal but its habitat, including those it eats or those that eat it. You will surely recognize animals you have seen before but were not able to identify.…

Birders have their Petersons and Sibleys. There are guides to snakes, butterflies, mammals and all sorts of other natural things. Now we gardeners have a guide to the critters that make up the soil food web.

Read the rest of the review on the Anchorage Daily News website.

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

James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow Jr.'s Maps: Finding Our Place in the World has been given quite a positive review in this month's issue of the British science and technology magazine, BBC Focus. Praising the book for its thoughtful exploration of maps and the many divergent purposes they have served throughout human history, reviewer Nick Smith writes:

If you though maps were merely aerial drawings of places that help us get from point A to B, you will be astonished by the depth and breadth of this book.

The editors have cleverly set out the book's structure in terms of what function maps perform, instead of ranging from continent to continent as with traditional atlases. There is macro-mapping throughout the ages and maps portraying land use, as well as those concerned with commerce, art, advertising, entertainment and national identity. There is plant distribution, cartographic analysis of the geology of the US and even the "distribution of the slave population of the Southern States.…" Fascinating stuff.

See a collection of unusual maps from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Art and Architecture | History | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last Thursday the Times Higher Education ran an enthusiastic review of Vanessa R. Schwartz's new book It's So French!: Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture. In the review THE contributor and professor of film studies Ginette Vincendeau notes how the thesis of Schwartz's book makes a fascinating departure from conventional views about the relationship between the postwar French and American film industries. Vincendeau's review begins:

In this provocative and original book, the American cultural historian Vanessa Schwartz revisits the vexed question of Franco-American cinematic relations in the postwar period. Much has been written on the subject, but Schwartz has no time for clichés about French "protectionism" or American "imperialism". Instead, the central thesis of It's so French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture is that the French and the Americans were much more receptive (even affectionate) towards each other than Cold War-inspired rhetoric has made out. Furthermore, France as represented in American and French films of the 1950s and 1960s was key to the development of "cosmopolitan film culture".

Contrary to the common view that pits French art cinema against commercial Hollywood films, Schwartz claims that from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s American representations of Frenchness successfully merged high art and popular culture, and French cinema meant more than highbrow auteur films. This she demonstrates via a set of major French cultural icons, from belle époque Paris to Brigitte Bardot.

The review concludes:

It's so French!, based on impressive scholarship and superbly illustrated, builds a solid case for France's role in the growth of "cosmopolitan film culture".

The book is a stimulating corrective to entrenched views of Franco-American cinematic relations as necessarily conflictual.

Read the rest of the review on the THE website.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Film and Media | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two recently published science books were reviewed earlier this week in the January 19 edition of the UK daily, the Guardian. The longer of the two reviews gives a nice synopsis of David Lee's new book, Nature's Palette: The Science of Plant Color:

Ceaseless activity hums through David Lee's book, which is about the chemicals and light-bending growth-layers that plants produce; zillions of minute brews of organic dyes allow preferred wavelengths in the visible spectrum of solar radiation to pass through them, strike the plant tissues, be scattered and reflected back as colours…

Once you've followed him through a basic course… in molecular chemistry, plant biology and optic operations, he gets to wondering exactly what job the colours and patterns do in and for each growth. The leafy stuff is easy—chlorophyll absorbs all of the visible wavelengths, except green, to turn light energy to chemical energy as sugar through photosynthesis.… [But] beyond green chlorophyll [Lee explores] the other great chemical families—the yellow-orange carotenoids and the pink-red flavonoids, especially the anthocyanins—and a swatch of minor concoctions, including indigo indoles, and quinone methides that redden the hearts of rosewood and sandalwood.

Read the rest of the article or navigate to our website to find out more about the book.

The Guardian also ran a shorter piece on Pascal Richet's A Natural History of Time. Steven Poole writes for the Guardian:

What is time? How much of it has there been? This magisterial history begins with ancient myth, passing through Genesis, the Greeks, Arabic mathematics, and then European science through the centuries. The central question pursued by its protagonists is that of the age of the Earth. How to measure it? Count the generations in the Old Testament; count strata of rock or fossils; count how much salt there is in the sea; count how much time it would take for a large body to cool down; count how much uranium has decayed into lead. At last, in the 1950s, we arrive at a reliable age for the Earth of about 4.55 billion years.…

The book is gorgeously written, finding almost as much beauty in wrong theories as right ones; and Pascal Richet (himself a geophysicist) pays highly sympathetic attention to the subjects of his numerous thumbnail biographies.

Read the rest of the review.

Archived in Biology | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today's New York Times is running an article titled "Political Animals," comparing the current presidential candidates election politics to the complex social dynamics found in other species like elephants, whales, and rhesus macaques—the latter of which are the subject of Dario Maestripieri's new book Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World. In the article, the NYT's Natalie Angier cites Maestripieri's book as she compares the political behavior of these prolific primates to our own:

As the candidates have shown us in the succulent telenovela that is the 2008 presidential race, there are many ways to parry for political power.… [And] just as there are myriad strategies open to the human political animal with White House ambitions, so there are a number of nonhuman animals that behave like textbook politicians.…

As Dr. Maestripieri sees it, rhesus monkeys embody the concept "Machiavellian" (and he accordingly named his recent popular book about the macaques Macachiavellian Intelligence).

"Individuals don't fight for food, space or resources," Dr. Maestripieri explained. "They fight for power." With power and status, he added, "they'll have control over everything else.…"

"Rhesus males are quintessential opportunists," Dr. Maestripieri said. "They pretend they're helping others, but they only help adults, not infants. They only help those who are higher in rank than they are, not lower. They intervene in fights where they know they're going to win anyway and where the risk of being injured is small."

We may not know whence humans are descended but as for politicians it's pretty clear, read the rest of the article here.

Archived in Anthropology | Biology | Psychology | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Another review from the Times Literary Supplement: in the January 4 edition Peter Hainsworth takes on two recent translations of twentieth century Italian poetry, The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto and The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni—both are the first substantial translations of these masters of Italian poetry for English speaking audiences.

In the review Hainsworth delivers an enthusiastic appraisal of the two works:

Sereni and Zanzotto … embraced negatives and contradictions more wholeheartedly and more energetically than … the poets of the previous generation.… The result in both cases is a particularly adventurous and exciting body of work, constantly in evolution, sometimes (especially in the case of Zanzotto) on the edge of flamboyant avant-gardism, but somehow generally able to keep its poetic balance. What also gives both poets and others of their generation substance is the fact that they have something to say. Sereni's mature poetry is constantly probing issues of commitment, choice and understanding, often through a multiplicity of voices, criss-crossing and overlaying each other, with back references to his favorite poets or his own previous work.… They represent and enact the often dramatic confrontation of differing, often irreconcilable viewpoints and constantly changing perspectives.

Zanzotto's dizzying changes of tack and tone between nonsense, parody, and high literariness are similarly rooted in the sense of things being impossible to pin down in words, but take on concrete urgency through being clustered around a host of contemporary issues (ranging from war and environmental degradation to school teaching and lunar exploration).

Find out more about the work of these two remarkable poets on the UCP website:

The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto: A Bilingual Edition

The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni: A Bilingual Edition

Archived in Literature | Poetry | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the January 9 issue of the Times Literary Supplement reviewer Richard A. Fortey takes note of Pascal Richet's new book, A Natural History of Time for its fascinating tale of the scientific quest to discover the age of the earth. Fortey writes:

Pascal Richet is a geophysicist, and well able to explain the complexities of the discoveries that led from Crooke's tube through to those of Pierre and Marie Curie, and on to the discovery of isotopes of lead and uranium. Richet never short-changes the reader on the science, and his grasp of more than a thousand years of speculation about our origins is unfailingly impressive.…

My own pleasure, and this may be perverse, was in discovering some of the forgotten figures, like M Le Bon and his black light, or Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, who thought that "there was nothing strange in assuming that rocks had semen." In a curious way, the doomed aberrations of science mark out the changes in zeitgeist more effectively than the triumphs of the famous names. Newton's obsession with chronology is as informative of the times in which he lived as his triumphs in mathematical physics.…

I cannot imagine a better attempt at such a broad sweep through science and history.

Read the rest of the review on the TLS website.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature magazine is currently running a review of two recent historical accounts of popular science in the Victorian period, Bernard Lightman's Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences and Ralph O'Connor's The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856. Writing for Nature, historian Frank A. L. James notes how both books make important contributions to our understanding of how science has influenced the western public and perhaps some insights into current debates about public education and engagement with the sciences. James writes:

The popularization of science has become a growth area for historical study. It is a natural continuation of the historian's quest to understand the social and cultural context and impact of science, and a consequence of scientists' admonitions over the past 20 years that the public should be better informed.

Implied is that the efforts of earlier generations of scientists fell short of making their work accessible to the public. But Lightman's and O'Connor's books paint a very different picture, at least with respect to the nineteenth century.

Lightman maps the careers of some 30 popularizers, many sparsely covered before, who derived their income from writing science books.… O'Connor shows that promoting knowledge about geology was then similar to the marketing of other types of literature and art—science was an integral part of culture.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Chronicle of Higher Education is currently running a great article on Stephen E. Braude and his new book, The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations—a fascinating not to mention entertaining exploration of the paranormal from an academic's point of view. Scott Carlson writes for the Chronicle:

A professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, Braude is a past president of the Parapsychological Association, an organization that gathers academics and others interested in phenomena like ESP and psychokinesis, and he has published a series of books with well-known academic presses on such topics.

His latest, The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations, is sort of a summing up of his career, filled with stories of people who claimed to have otherworldly abilities. The writing is so fluid that the book at times seems made for a screen adaptation. (In fact, Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files, contributes a blurb to the back of the book. Braude advised Carter on a screenplay he is writing.) But Braude also includes some dense philosophical arguments—especially in a chapter about synchronicity, in which he ponders whether humans can orchestrate unlikely coincidences through psychokinesis, the ability to move or influence objects with the mind.

Read the rest of the piece online at the Chronicle website. Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Philosophy | Psychology | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New York Sun is running a review of Simon Kitson's recent book The Hunt for Nazi Spies: Fighting Espionage in Vichy France in today's "Arts and Letters" section of the paper. Praising the book for it's captivating account of the French predicament under German occupation reviewer and spy novelist Claire Berlinski writes:

The Hunt for Nazi Spies: Fighting Espionage in Vichy France is history, not a novel, and Mr. Kitson is a historian's historian: a patient, meticulous master of the archives, a disciplined analyst, a servant of the evidence. His study of the French counterintelligence service's pursuit of German spies during the collaboration is not calculated to appeal to a mass market. Yet the imaginative reader will find the germ here of at least a dozen characters to populate a sensational spy novel.

The review goes on to address the central question of the book: why was the collaborationist Vichy regime hunting and imprisoning Nazi spies at all?

Mr. Kitson is fascinated by this paradox. [Does this phenomenon] suggest a deep vein of anti-Vichy, pro-resistance sentiment among the French secret services, as some of its veterans have suggested in their memoirs? No, Mr. Kitson answers. This is by no means an exonerating story: The overarching goals of the Vichy regime, in whose service, he concludes, the Vichy spy-hunters were most certainly acting, was the defense of French sovereignty and the preservation of a state monopoly on collaboration. These unauthorized collaborators were a threat to both, and thus were they neutralized.

Read the rest of the review on the New York Sun website. Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The exhibition Maps: Finding Our Place in the World will be at the Field Museum in Chicago only until January 27. Then it moves to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, where it opens on March 16. The book with the same name, though, can be visited at any time for as long as you want. Like a map of a city or river or mountain range that you once visited, or dream of visiting, the book fixes the memory or fills in the imagination.

Patrick Reardon reviewed the book in Sunday's Chicago Tribune. He called the book "a meaty work that sweeps back and forth across the centuries and millenniums, spans the continents and ranges from the micro-details of a 19th Century London neighborhood to an ancient Aztec rendering of the cosmos." It is also a thing of beauty.

Our web feature for the book presents some unusual maps. A couple of those maps recently caught the attention of a few bloggers, like the Edge of the American West, Matthew Yglesias, and Metafilter.

Resolve to see the exhibit and get the book.

Archived in Cartography and Geography | Reviews
Posted by DB at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

William Grimes reviewed Kirin Narayan's memoir of growing up in India, My Family and Other Saints, in yesterday's New York Times:

Families can be so embarrassing. Imagine the agonies of an adolescent girl whose house has become infested with India-besotted hippies from all over the globe, whose sarcastic father stumbles around in an alcoholic haze and whose mother kneels at the feet of every swami she meets. And let us not forget grandma, who holds long conversations with her cow and once met a 1,000-year-old cobra with a ruby in its forehead and a mustache on its albino face.

Gods, gurus and eccentric relatives compete for primacy in Kirin Narayan's enchanting memoir of her childhood in Bombay (present-day Mumbai). The title, which alludes to Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, originated as an act of revenge. Ms. Narayan, fed up with the family penchant for ashrams and spiritual quests, turned to her mother and warned, "When I grow up I'm going to write a book called My Family and Other Saints and put you in it." And so she did.

Narayan's memoir captures a time and place when nearly everyone, it seemed, was embarked on some sort of spiritual quest. And a family full of love, yet always on the verge of disintegration.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Biography | Religion | Reviews
Posted by DB at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last Saturday Michael Bywater had an interesting take on Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World by Dario Maestripieri in the Daily Telegraph:

Primate books are good for us. They remind us that we're primates, too. And the embarrassing primate books are best. Macachiavellian Intelligence is an excellently embarrassing primate book, and just the thing to make us blush and shuffle our feet.

How to write an embarrassing primate book? Focus on "the notorious 'weed monkey', the rhesus macaque."

Rhesus macaques, in short, are sods. They are despotic and nepotistic; their power structures are matrilineal. The males hang around sullenly, get into fights, emigrate to other groups, get into more fights and lead lives of violence and aggression which, as Maestripieri explains, is because they want raw power. Power gets you everything. It's worth the price.

Rhesus macaques are—after homo sapiens of course—the most successful primates on the planet, judged by population size and distribution. Is violence and aggression the reason for our success? Maestripieri's understanding of rhesus society has much to say to our own.

(Bywater also gives a passing mention to another book on primates, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind by Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth. We have an excerpt from that book.)

Archived in Biology | Reviews
Posted by DB at 01:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"You don't have to travel to the Brazilian rain forest to luxuriate in the biodiversity at our feet," says Adrian Higgins in a Washington Post review of James B. Nardi's Life in the Soil: A Guide for Naturalists and Gardeners. Even now, under that blanket of snow outside the window, a veritable holiday feast is underway: "organisms that can be seen by us, such as wood lice, and those that cannot, such as bacteria, set into motion a hidden, primal banquet featuring hordes of revelers and many courses."

It's the first day of winter and life in the soil is teeming. "We as a species," says Higgins, "have been largely ignorant of this universe for so long." Nardi's book "is a must-read for anyone who wants a better understanding of this world and how to protect it." Even creatures grubby and small.

Archived in Biology | Reviews
Posted by DB at 04:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a book we published a few years back, British classicist Simon Goldhill explained the Greek and Roman roots of everything in contemporary Western culture, from our political systems to the quest for the perfect body. Still, we have traveled some ways from those classic roots, which perhaps accounts for why the works of Greek dramatists can seem so ancient and foreign when performed on a modern stage. Most of the action takes place offstage, the characters do more speechifying than dialogue, and a chorus shuffles on and off.

Goldhill's latest book, How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today, tackles this problem. Writing in a Commentary magazine blog, the Horizon, drama critic Terry Teachout discussed the bo