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A Philosophical Exploration of Art and Humanity

As Bert Archer notes in his book review for Monday's Globe and Mail, Ben-Ami Scharfstein, professor emeritus of philosophy at Tel Aviv University, "has spent decades studying and publishing on Chinese, Japanese, African, European, American, South American and Pacific island culture." And in his new book, Art Without Borders: A Philosophical Exploration of Art and Humanity, Scharfstein brings the full force of his arsenal of cultural knowledge to bear in a fascinating study of art as a universal part of human experience. Archer writes for the Globe:

[Scharfstein's encyclopedic erudition] has given him a fluency of reference that allows him to efficiently, easily and convincingly compare a 16th-century Chinese artist with Picasso, use Yanagi Sôetsu's take on art in the age of mechanical reproduction to add to the usual Benjamin version, and describe second millennium BC Egyptian art in ways that recall Andy Warhol films such as Blow Job.
Indeed, this breadth of references is an inherent part of the book's argument. When Scharfstein uses a Congolese proverb to remind us that history is written by the victors, Nigeria's Prince Twins Seven-Seven as an example of a surreal artist, or the 11th-century Chinese forger Mi Fu to discuss the nature of authenticity, he is reinforcing the point that art's big issues are universal and at the same time expanding our own comparatively anemic cultural frames of reference and highlighting the fact that art crosses historical and cultural borders rather easily.

…

"Art everywhere has aesthetic values that are available to persons everywhere else," he says, and we believe him because he has shown us.

A profound and personal meditation on the human hunger for art, Art Without Borders unearths those essential elements that make artistic production a global endeavor, and articulates a common framework for cross-cultural artistic appreciation.

To find out more read the review online or see this excerpt.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 09:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Changing history

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back and forth on Bigfoot

Brian Switek's Laelaps blog ran an appreciative review of Joshua Blu Buhs' Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend last Monday, noting the book's cultural analysis that seeks to understand the how and why the beast has sparked such unflagging interest amongst the American public.

As Buhs explains, the most devoted of the Sasquatch devotees appear to have been "white working class males." According to Buhs, during the social upheaval of the sixties and seventies, these men gravitated towards the myth in response the perceived threats of consumerism, civil rites, and feminization." For them, writes Switek, "Bigfoot often represented the elusive vestige of 'true' masculinity that could only be found in the wild."

But as time went on the myth of Bigfoot—once a symbol of resistance towards the establishment—was appropriated by mainstream consumer culture and employed, as Switek writes, as "a desexualized symbol used to purvey goods from beer to beef jerky." And with that one might think the story of Bigfoot mania would have come to an end. Yet, two men in rural Georgia announced last summer that they had killed Bigfoot and drew instant, feverish attention leading to more than 1,000 news stories worldwide. And for further evidence that the myth is still a hot topic in some circles, check out the lively discussion on Switek's blog (including several posts by Buhs). Here's an excerpt from a true believer:

Although I'm not going to be suckered into buying and reading a book that is so completely misleading, I think it is time to recommend that Joshua [do] better "research" before he makes such unfounded, speculative conclusions. Like others writers who clearly approached this topic with a rather shallow conclusion in mind, anyone who thinks this subject is perpetuated by social needs, rather than persistent direct sightings and encounters with these animals, is a fool.

To which Buhs eventually replies:

My book is not about eyewitnesses, the evidence for Bigfoot, or the evidence against Bigfoot. I state my skepticism about Bigfoot's existence at the beginning of the book because that seemed like good form.
But the question I ask is, Why all the fuss?…

There are many legendary creatures which don't get nearly as much attention—sea serpents, for example, haven't captured the American public's attention. There are plenty of reports of them in Lake Champlain, Ogopogo, and elsewhere. They are inherently interesting—gigantic creatures living in our midst—and yet they haven't generated a lot of buzz since the late nineteenth century.

See the Laelaps blog.

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

Archived in Biology | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 03:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

NYT Sunday Book Review: Bigfoot

NYT contributor Florence Williams begins her review of Joshua Blu Buhs' new book for this weekend's Sunday Book Review:

Because I watched TV in the 1970s, I have an image of Bigfoot stamped on my brain like a paw print. He resembles Chewbacca (minus the bandolier) walking through a grainy forest, scowling over his shoulder at the camera. But your Bigfoot image might be different, because for a while the hairy hominid was everywhere, in B movies and liquor advertisements and docu- and mocumentaries. He also starred in some "real" footage taken in 1967. That one was actually a she, complete with pendulous breasts.
Why did this ginormous, nonexistent ape capture our collective imaginations for five decades, and what does our infatuation say about us? Joshua Blu Buhs, the author of a previous book, about fire ants, takes up these questions in Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend.

Writing with a scientist's skepticism but an enthusiast's deep engagement in Bigfoot Buhs traces the wild and wooly story of America's favorite homegrown monster beginning with nineteenth-century accounts of wildmen roaming the forests of America and treks to the Himalayas to reckon with the Abominable Snowman, all the way to northern California in 1958, when reports of a hairy hominid loping through remote woodlands marked Bigfoot's emergence as a modern marvel. But more than just an entertaining history of the Sasquatch, Buhs book also focuses its attention on a fascinating cultural critique of "the white working-class men who were the beast's advocates, hoaxers, hunters and most ardent consumers." As Williams explains:

Buhs argues compellingly that Bigfoot's heyday in the 1960s and '70s was a difficult time for white, rural men in America. They were threatened by women's rights, civil rights and service-oriented, materialist culture that didn't value working with one's hands or backwoods know-how. Believing in Bigfoot was a way to snub effete, skeptical scientists. Hunting him re-engaged their imperiled backcountry survival skills.… Bigfoot, even in its fakery, was "representative of the really real, the world beyond the facade, a world of life and death and vital things.…"

Insightfully illuminating what this monster say about our modern relationship to wilderness, individuality, class, consumerism, and the media, Buhs' Bigfoot offers definitive take on this elusive beast.

Read the rest of the article in the upcoming New York Times Sunday Book Review or online here. Also see this excerpt from the book and an interview with the author.

The definitive wildman

Two recent reviews of Joshua Blu Buhs' new book, Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend focus attention on the author's ability to extract a penetrating cultural critique from his book's unlikely subject. From nineteenth-century accounts of wildmen roaming the forests of America, right up to the claims of two hunters in rural Georgia last August that they killed Bigfoot, Buhs traces the cultural transformation of the myth from its early days when "Bigfoot hunting was a means by which white working class men could… [prove] their manhood in difficult conditions," to its various modern uses as a highly effective marketing tool.

Delivering an insightful exploration of what our fascination with this monster says about our modern relationship to wilderness, individuality, class, consumerism, and the media, Buhs' Bigfoot offers the definitive history of the legendary wildman.

Check out the reviews on the Bookslut website and on John Rimmer's Magonia blog. ("Magonia"—I'll save you a trip to Wikipedia—is a magical land that is described in French folktales.)

Also, read an excerpt from the book and an interview with the author.

North America's lost abundance

Two new reviews of Steve Nicholls' Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery begin by offering a picture of the North American wilderness before European settlement—rivers teaming with more salmon than water, "colonies of nesting seabirds in nearly unimaginable numbers," and "great herds of ruminants" grazing their way across endless plains—a far cry from the American landscape that most of see today. But while the reality of this unspoiled natural habitat maybe forever lost, both reviews point out that in Paradise Found Nicholls has managed to successfully reproduce its fascinating history. With the benefit of the copious records left behind by the first European settlers, Nicholls employs both historical narrative and scientific inquiry to produce an enthralling description of just what an amazing place North America was and how it looked when the explorers first found it. But more than a celebration of what once was, as Gregory McNamee notes in the Washington Post , Nicholls' book also serves as a potent reminder of how much we have lost along the way, and an urgent call to action for future generations. McNamee writes:

Nicholls's book is an effort at making a blueprint of sorts, a plan by which to rebuild a house whose dimensions we can only guess at. The abundance of nature was what made American independence possible in the first place; our present poverty on so many fronts is a consequence of our maltreatment of that nature. But the knowledge of what we have done, chronicled so carefully in this lucid book, may be the first step toward recovering that squandered wealth.

And Bill McKibben writes in the Boston Globe:

This is a book worth owning, especially since our attack on abundance has happened just slowly enough that we've readjusted our sights ("changing baseline" is Nicholls's phrase) with each generation, never really letting the sheer horror of it all sink in. If we had a time machine, he insists, "I'm convinced that every person alive today would be overawed by the true vitality of nature." Books like this are as close as we're going to get.

To read the full reviews navigate to Boston.com or the Washington Post website. Also, read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Biology | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A hilarious work of Minoan historiography

As Sir Arthur Evans unearthed the ruins of an ancient Cretan civilization in the early twentieth century he claimed to have discovered a culture that was pacifist and matriarchal, pagan and cosmic—so very unlike his native England. Freud, Joyce, Picasso, and many others embraced this vision of a lost paradise.

Reviews have begun to arrive for Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism in which Cathy Gere explores how disillusioned modernists sought—and created—an ancient culture that offered an alternative to the one they inhabited. A review in Harper's notes that Gere uncovers a century of "bizarre misreadings of the nearly unknown ancient culture of Crete, and in so doing has produced that rarest of literary surprises: a genuinely hilarious work of Minoan historiography." The review continues:

[Gere traces] the unexpected genealogy of the ancient Cretans in the modern imagination, from the time they were first unearthed beneath a modest hillock at the end of the nineteenth century to their emergence as peaceful pastoralists who worshiped a goddess, pirouetted over bulls, and displayed suspicious tendency to reflect in great detail the moral, political, and even sexual preoccupations of Sir Arthur Evans, the English millionaire who led the excavation for almost half a century.
Gere locates the original impulse for "Minoan modernism" in Nietzsche's theories of the birth of tragedyand in the "excavations" the charlatan Heinrich Schliemann carried out at Mycenae and Troy. Schliemann breathed into the nascent discipline of archaeology a fairy-tale atmosphere of childhood longing and quasi-supernatural wish-fulfillment… that runs through Gere's series of portraits of those writers and artists "who would make the ancient world urgently relevant to literary and artistic modernism…"

The book has also just been reviewed in the Economist, which begins by drily noting that "archaeology is an inexact science." Find out more about Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism on our website.

Archived in History | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 09:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Do animals have moral intelligence?

Last week the Boulder newspaper The Daily Camera published an interesting article about Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce's provocative new book Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals. The review begins:

[The authors] waste no time in getting to the point: "(W)e argue that animals feel empathy for each other, treat one another fairly, cooperate toward common goals, and help each other out of trouble," they write in the first sentence. "We argue, in short, that animals have morality."

Advancing bioethicist's arguments about the moral treatment of animals to posit animals themselves as moral agents, the author's place moral behavior firmly within an evolutionary context demonstrating how a variety of species are in fact incredibly adept social beings, relying on rules of conduct to navigate intricate social networks that are essential to their survival. The Daily Camera's Clay Evans continues:

Most of the species examined by the authors are notably "intelligent" and social. Hyenas, wolves, elephants and primates predominate, though other, "lesser" species like rats have their moments on stage. Bekoff is always a pleasant read, but the book's tales of animal cooperation will bring a smile to many readers' faces (or a tear to their eyes).…
For readers hardened into anthropocentric views, it will seem like nonsense easily attributed to wishful thinking. To others it will raise uncomfortable questions about the way we treat animals, as well as concepts of human uniqueness and "superiority."

And who knows? Decades hence, Bekoff might prove a powerful prophet, and we'll wonder how we could have ever treated cognizant, emotional, moral beings with such cruelty.

Read the rest if the review on the Daily Camera website.

Archived in Biology | Philosophy | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A lighthearted but scholarly guide to the lingual dimension

jacket image In his On Language column for Sunday's New York Times Magazine, William Safire features Carol Fisher Saller's The Subversive Copy Editor in a survey of new langlit.

Applauding Saller's "good advice," Safire notes that "the editor of The Chicago Manual of Style Online's Q&A has written a book out of her Web experience, in contrast to those who take to the Web to blog-flog a book." That said, Saller's famous (among editors, at least!) online presence stretches from long before to, we hope, long after her new book's appearance.

But this is The Subversive Copy Editor's moment, and we, like Safire, can't help but give her the last witty word: "There's no end to the amount of fussing you can do with a manuscript, whereas there's a limit to the amount of money someone will pay you to do it. At some point it has to be good enough, and you have to stop."

(Before we stop, though, we should point out that at our Web site you can sample and listen to Saller read from the book. And, if you happen to be in Minneapolis, Chicago, or Paris next month, you can hear her talk about the book in person.)

Archived in Reference and Writing | Reviews
Posted by MM at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The wild man in academe

So if the Gold Leaf Lady can prove to be a fruitful subject for academic inquiry, why not Bigfoot as well?

As a recent article in the The Chronicle of Higher Education notes, Joshua Blu Buhs, author of Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, doesn't make any arguments about the existence of the legendary Sasquatch, but as a cultural phenomenon, Bigfoot, the author shows, proves a substantial subject. Summarizing Buh's fascinating account "of how the trope of the wild man has figured culturally since ancient times," Nina C. Ayoub writes for the Chronicle:

[Buhs'] travels deep into the Himalayas where Bigfoot's Asian cousin, the Yeti, has been pursued. He describes how even seasoned mountaineers could be taken in by high-altitude conditions of sun and "sublimated" snow that can turn a fox print into a sprawling hominid-like track and explores the creature's appeal to the nonindigenous. "The Yeti was untouched by the materialism of modern life," he writes. Years after conquering Everest, Edmund Hillary led an expedition with a side goal of investigating the Yeti. He concluded that the beast was a myth. "Snowman melted," said The New York Times in 1961.
Yet even as Yeti stock went down, Bigfoot currency rose, and the focus turned to the Pacific Northwest. New reports of footprints in Bluff Creek, Calif., in 1958 sparked a furor that brought in such outsiders as Ivan Sanderson, a Scottish naturalist and Fortean, one of a group that investigated bizarre phenomena — "damned things," as the anomaly specialist Charles Fort (1874-1932) called them.

Throughout Bigfoot, Buhs emphasizes the fascination with the creature among midcentury white working-class men. "To proclaim Bigfoot's existence," he argues, "was to insist upon one's dignity against a world that either denied it, or, worse, went on spinning about its axis as though dignity did not even matter." Buhs shows how Bigfoot's hunters and believers figured in the culture of men's adventure magazines. "Readers didn't mind that their True (or Real) was full of lies," he says. "Truth in these magazines was not about facts or correspondence with reality but resisting changing values and valorizing an older tradition."

Thus, using Bigfoot to comment on our modern relationships to wilderness, individuality, class, consumerism, and the media, Buhs new book offers readers the definitive take on this elusive beast.

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

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The story of seeds

As Chicago finally begins to see some springlike weather, the bits of color beginning to make their way back into the landscape serve as a reminder of the abundance of dormant life that's been waiting patiently beneath the soot and the snow for the last six months. Thus, there is perhaps no other book on the press's frontlist more apropos to the season than Jonathan Silvertown's An Orchard Invisible: A Natural History of Seeds—a book that presents the oft-ignored seed with the natural history it deserves, one nearly as varied and surprising as the springtime flora itself. As a review in yesterday's Seattle Times notes, the book approaches its subject from a variety of angles "among them sexuality, pollination, dispersal, germination, predators and diseases, and the use of seeds, in all their glory, in gastronomy" (see this an excerpt on barley seeds and beer brewing). But the author never lets us forget that the driving force behind the story of seeds—its theme, even—is evolution, with its irrepressible habit of stumbling upon new solutions to the challenges of life.

Written with a scientist's knowledge and a gardener's delight, An Orchard Invisible offers those wonders in a package that will be irresistible to science buffs and green thumbs alike.

To find out more about An Orchard Invisible and other books by Jonathan Silvertown navigate to the press's website, or to see some of the author's other projects, navigate to his website at www.jonathansilvertown.com.

Archived in Biology | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The definitive take on Bigfoot

Do a quick Google search for "Bigfoot" or "Sasquatch" and near the top of the results you'll find more than a few links to websites like this one, dedicated to the "scientific" exploration of the Bigfoot/Sasquatch mystery, offering everything from geographical data and personal accounts of the latest sightings, to some of the coolest t-shirts money can buy—evidence that Bigfoot mania still grips some not insignificant segment of the American population. But while other folks might consider serious inquiry into the existence of the Sasquatch to be an exercise in futility, as Sumit Paul-Choudhury notes in a recent review for the New Scientist Joshua Blu Buhs' new book investigating the social significance of the myth itself proves quite worthwhile. Paul-Choudhury writes:

That belief in mythical animals is a product of social change is central to [Joshua Blu Buh's] Bigfoot, an exhaustive study of wild-man myth-making in the 20th century. Buhs's book starts out… suggesting that the Himalayan legend of the yeti became "folklore for an industrial age" because it meshed well with Britain's post-colonial concerns and drew on popular fascination with far-flung places.…
Buhs goes on to describe how the search for Bigfoot and Sasquatch was dominated by the concerns of white, working-class men. For this disenfranchised group the quest was a validation of their lifestyle, skills and knowledge, which they perceived as being threatened by mass media, formal education and popular culture. The hunters' desire to be accepted as scientific, while simultaneously disparaging the scientific establishment, makes for thought-provoking reading: there are obvious parallels with the attitudes of intelligent-design enthusiasts and climate change skeptics.

Thus drawing fascinating connections between the myth of Bigfoot and modern Americans' relationship to wilderness, individuality, class, consumerism, and the media, Buhs new book offers the definitive take on this elusive beast.

Find out more about the book on our website or read Sumit Paul-Choudhury's full review in the New Scientist.

Rehabilitating intellectualism

For the past eight years the term "intellectual" has been frequently interpreted by the media as a piece of anti-populist or elitist rhetoric. But in a recent article for the New Republic Ross Posnock notes that Obama's presidency has rehabilitated the term as one of praise rather than opprobrium, and with it interest in the history of black intellectualism in America. Tapping into this renewed interest, Posnock cites Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth's new book, Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher for its revealing look at the life and thought of its highly influential, yet often neglected subject.

Inheriting the role of the leading spokesperson for black intellectualism from such figures as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Boise, the authors show how Alain L. Locke both continued their legacy of leadership but also vitally updated the role. Posnock writes: Harris and Molesworth's book "brings alive [Locke's] distinctive fashioning of the role of black intellectual" demonstrating his unique ability to operate as "a race man," but also as "an apolitical aesthete," keeping "up the pressure on both roles, as his thought continually refined itself and deepened." Thus, expanding the influence of black intellectuals in American culture Harris and Molesworth deliver fascinating evidence of Locke's profound impact as the "father of the Harlem Renaissance," promoting and sparring with such diverse figures as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jacob Lawrence, Richmond Barthé, William Grant Still, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, and John Dewey among others.

To find out more about Locke's unique and important contributions to American culture read Posnock's article at the New Republic website, then pick up a copy of Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth's, Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher.

Maclean's strange artistry

Writer Philip Connors reviews The Norman Maclean Reader in the March 30 issue of The Nation. Connors, who acknowledges that his life has certain similarities with Maclean's, recounts Maclean's life and literary works: the one book published in his lifetime (A River Runs Through It and Other Stories) and another published posthumously (Young Men and Fire).

"His career," writes Connors, "is one of the strangest in American letters." He relates some of the memorable moments of Maclean's publishing history, including the letter he wrote to a publisher who was trying to court the writer after the publication of A River Runs Through It. Connors continues:

It's not as if Maclean didn't know his stories were strange. He often said he wrote them in part so the world would know of what artistry men and women were capable in the woods of his youth, before helicopters and chain saws rendered obsolete the ancient skills of packing with mules and felling trees with crosscut saws. Artistry, specifically artistry with one's hands, was for him among life's most refined achievements.

Read the whole review; there are some interesting reflections on the religious resonances of Maclean's works.

We have a website for Norman Maclean.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
Posted by DB at 02:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Copy editing and the fine art of chilling out

From this month's Chicago Style Q&A:

Q. "The first of which is better." I said this is a sentence fragment, but a student pointed out that it has a subject and predicate. Who's correct?
A. You both are. A sentence fragment can have a subject and predicate, but it's a fragment if it's dependent on another clause. Your fragment can't stand alone grammatically; it needs a main clause to lean on: "The choice is between a hamantash and a latke, the first of which is better."

Thus, with an emphasis on negotiation and flexibility, Carol Fisher Saller, assistant managing editor at the University of Chicago Press and the unfailing wit behind the Chicago Manual of Style Q&A, has established herself as a subversive exception to the stereotype of the manuscript-editor-as-quibbler. And now, as Jennifer Balderama has noted in a recent appreciation for the New York Time's Paper Cuts blog, with her newly released book The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago (or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships with Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and Yourself) Saller takes the next big step in advancing her mission to revolutionize the way people think about the dialectic of manuscript editing. From the Paper Cuts blog:

This is a "relationship" book, writes its author, Carol Fisher Saller, doyenne of The Chicago Manual of Style Online's Q&A. Here, she hopes to "soothe and encourage and lend power" to editors who have too long suffered "from the oppression of unhelpful habits and attitudes." This is the book Oprah would write if her vocation were saving writers from embarrassment, rather than saving the whole world.
To which I say: finally. I've got dozens of books concerned with the nuts and bolts of copy-editing, but this is the only one that teaches the fine art of chilling out.… Saller's project, in about 100 pages, is to (a) civilize the editing process, and (b) keep copy editors—meticulous and learned and hard-working, but also stubborn and obsessive, sometimes injuriously so…—from going insane. She reminds us that the reader is Priority 1 and that while standards are crucial ("I'm not going to suggest that you toss out your stylebook"), so is flexibility (sometimes "a style is just a style").

Continue reading the posting on the NYT's Paper Cuts blog, or read the introduction to the book.

The author has also created her own website, check it out at www.subversivecopyeditor.com.

Archived in Reference and Writing | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 03:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The perdurance of the Paris Opera

Last Thursday's Times Higher Education contains a review of Victoria Johnson's Backstage at the Revolution: How the Royal Paris Opera Survived the End of the Old Regime in which reviewer Brian Vick praises the book for its "unique, insightful and colorful perspective on the French Revolution and the Paris Opera's early history." Spanning academic disciplines to combine "early modern French cultural history with the theory of organizations and entrepreneurship" Johnson provides a novel explanation for how the Paris Opera not only managed to escape destruction during the French Revolution, but was protected by French revolutionary officials, despite its long association with the royal court and ostentatious displays of aristocratic opulence. Exploring beyond the context of the revolution itself, Johnson's book uncovers the roots of the Opera's survival in its identity as a uniquely privileged icon of French culture—an identity established during its founding one hundred years earlier under Louis XIV. Thus, Vick concludes, more than just an account of the revolution, "the work provides a full and persuasive history of the early Paris Opera…at once scholarly and for the most part engagingly written, the book could be worth keeping in mind as reading matter the next time one is thinking of 'chunnelling' over to Paris to catch a performance of the Opera."

More recently, the author joined host Bryn Terfel on BBC Radio 3's Music Matters to discuss her work with several other experts on the topic including Tim Blanning, Professor of History at Cambridge, and opera historian Sarah Lenton. Archived audio of the conversation should be available online at the Music Matters website for the next couple of days, or read the rest of Vick's review at the THE website.

The end of car culture?

A review of Brian Ladd's Autophobia published in Friday's Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune begins by noting the relevance of the book's topic to the nation's current economic crisis—a crisis spearheaded by rapid changes to our auto-centric culture like "volatile gas prices, car-oriented subdivisions in foreclosure," and "an auto industry in free fall." But then, wasn't it just yesterday that this very same car culture was the driving force behind one of the biggest economic booms in our nation's history? As reviewer Jim Foti notes, Ladd's book offers up ample evidence that since its invention, the automobile has played an integral role in America's successes, as well as its failures, provoking heated debates over whether they are sources of good or evil—markers of progress, or signs of the apocalypse. And while many might argue for the latter considering our current state of affairs, Foti notes that "as Ladd points out, so far the car's doomsayers have been wrong every time."

On Saturday, Chicago Tribune cultural critic Julia Keller also reviewed Ladd's book, along with another insightful critique of America's automotive culture, Cotten Seiler's Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America. Praising both books, she takes special note of Republic of Drivers writing: "Seiler's book is written with grace and authority and finely wrought insight. He points out how the language of driving and the language of capitalism both employ 'tropes of motion:' moving, hustling. Cars, he says, 'are products of a highly specific conception of what it means to be modern and free.' We may believe that we're in the driver's seat, that is, but in point of fact, cars took control of the cultural steering wheel before we even hit the city limits."

For more insights on America's car culture read an excerpt from Autophobia and listen to an audio interview with the author.

Archived in History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Art on TV

The latest issue of ArtForum magazine contains an interesting review of Lynn Spigel's new book, TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television. The review, which builds upon the positive assessment given by Andy Battaglia in his recent article for the magazine's sister publication BookForum, praises the work for "contradicting our peculiar amnesia" regarding TV's early links to the urbane world of modern art.

As Spigel aptly demonstrates, from the 1940's through the '60s TV served as an exciting new platform for the arts, inviting the participation of architects and designers like and Eero Saarinen and Saul Bass, to fine artists like Andy Warhol. Offering a stark contradiction to former FCC chairman Newton Minow's characterization of the medium as a "vast wasteland," Spigel's account even suggests that their work actually profited from their relationship with the "vulgar medium."

As ArtForum's Matthew Brannon writes, "since advertisers take it for granted that their job is to sell, they are denied that most dangerously available solipsistic avenue that fine art borders: I don't care what you think.…" Thus Brannon concludes that advertising offered these artists a lesson in visual communication: "how to say much with little [and] how to persuade someone without insulting them. I'm as interested in tact as I am in taste."

Pick up a copy of ArtForum to read the rest of Brannon's review, or read an excerpt from the book.

A love affair with Naples

Offering a tale of passion, vivacity, and beauty appropriate for some Valentines weekend reading, Shirley Hazzard's new book The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples eloquently recounts the author's love affair with a city, which, ironically, has recently gained more notoriety for the proliferation of both its crime, and its trash. But as reviewer Judith Martin notes in her article for this Sunday's NYT Book Review, while acknowledging the city's more contemporary conundrums, Hazzard's insight into Naples' rich history and culture is more than enough to redeem its romantic soul. From Martin's review:

Shirley Hazzard, the noted Australian writer, lives in New York but has spent long stretches of time in a house on Capri. She counts herself as one of the few living Anglo-Americans with a lifelong crush on Naples, rather than the usual Italian cities: Florence, Rome or (as in my case) Venice. In Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples, she writes poetically about the lure of an intimate daily relationship with the architectural remains of Naples many rich historical epochs.…
She loves visiting other centuries, a lure that every history-hungry traveler will recognize, and beautifully describes the wonders strewn everywhere about the region. Her sense of the presence of past visitors like Augustus Caesar, Goethe, and Lord Byron should resonate with any lover of Italy.

See this Sunday's New York Times to read the complete review, also read the introduction to the book, "Italian Hours."

The soldier-artists of the Mekong Delta

The latest issue of Time magazine is running a noteworthy review of Sherry Buchanan's new book, Mekong Diaries: Viet Cong Drawings and Stories, 1964-1975—a collection of works by ten artists recruited by the Viet Cong during the U.S. conflict to carry their sketchbooks, ink, and watercolors into combat. Buchanan traveled across Vietnam to gather some of this never-before-published material, and as the Time review notes, the resulting book is a fascinating departure from the "common American narrative," offering "extraordinary insight into Vietnamese hearts, military and civilian."

To find out more read the article on the Time magazine website or see these sample pages [PDF format] featuring a selection of artworks form the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 04:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The untold story of an influential African American intellectual

Black History Month offers an occasion to highlight some the nation's most influential African-American scholars, activists, and leaders. Mostly, the focus is on the usual list of iconic figures—Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and now, Barack Obama. But this year authors Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth offer a timely tribute to one of the lesser known, yet most influential African American intellectuals of the twentieth century with their new book, Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher. A fascinating look at the life of a man often called the "father of the Harlem Renaissance" and whom the authors dub "the most influential African American intellectual born between W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr.," as book critic Carlin Romano writes in his review for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the untold story of Locke's profound impact on twentieth-century American culture and thought has been long overdue. From the review:

This long-overdue book—astoundingly, the first full biography ever of a thinker for whom schools, prizes and societies across America are named—closes a project [Harris and Molesworth] decided to do together after originally embarking on separate lives of their subject.
Why has it taken so long for a definitive biography of Locke to appear, when works on comparable black intellectuals abound?…

Locke scholar Russell J. Linnemann once offered a celebratory explanation. Noting Locke's extraordinary interests in "anthropology, art, music, literature, education, political theory, sociology and African studies," Linnemann speculated that few "potential biographers" possessed the "intellectual breadth" to "fulfill the task properly."

Yet Harris and Molesworth also draw back the curtain on other factors. Perhaps the largest is that Locke was gay and closeted, though people of any acuity understood his sexuality.…

Harris and Molesworth close that gap, not going into Locke's intimacies with the detail of Harris' essay, but explaining how they shaped the philosopher's prodigious aesthetic sensibilities.

The third important obstacle to a Locke biography was its subject's personality. Harris and Molesworth's adjectives for their subject, such as "aloof" and "elitist," confirm that Locke, as they report, "did not suffer fools gladly," and was always more respected than loved.

Harris and Molesworth's book thus unfolds as no hagiography, but a critical, contextualized understanding of a singular thinker who did not fit the stereotype of many black intellectuals.…

A memo, then, to students, teachers and staff at Philadelphia's Alain Locke Elementary School, their colleagues at all Locke schools elsewhere, and to winners of the Alain Locke Prize at Harvard, given to the student with the highest GPA in African American studies:

That "Alain Locke" with his name on the wall was also a living, breathing, peculiar character at the very top of his talented tenth. This, finally, is his story.

Read the rest of Romano's article on the Philly.com website.

Archived in Biography | Philosophy | Reviews
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Publicity news from all over

Obama reads Some news of note from all around the world wide web:

Over at ReadySteadyBook, Sharon Cameron's Impersonality: Seven Essays has been selected as a book of the month for January.

After the New Yorker's Book Bench blog posted on Guy P. Raffa's Danteworlds:A Reader's Guide to the Inferno, the Los Angeles Times Jacket Copy blog picked up on the thread. All of this excitement comes as the Press prepares to issue Raffa's The Complete Danteworlds: A Reader's Guide to the Divine Comedy in June.

Elsewhere on the blogosphere, Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth's Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher is subjected to the page 99 test.

Ann Southworth, author of Lawyers of the Right: Professionalizing the Conservative Coalition has been guest-blogging about her book this week on the Volokh Conspiracy blog.

The twelve books of A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell collectively occupied spot number 32 on the Telegraph's list of 100 novels everyone should read.

And finally, in the wake of the Obama inauguration, suggestions for books to occupy the coveted space on the new President's bedside table have been circulating. In Washington Monthly, Andrew J. Bacevich recommends more from Reinhold Niebuhr, whom Obama has called "one of my favorite philosophers" and singles out our Irony of American History as "one volume that deserves a careful second reading."

Archived in Literature | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by SXH at 03:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Writing on deadline

Each day is another deadline. Then there is that ultimate deadline at the end of our lives. Our sense of the passage of time, and how our experience is shaped by the complexities of multiple deadlines, is the subject of Harald Weinrich's book, On Borrowed Time: The Art and Economy of Living with Deadlines. John Gilbey reviewed the book for the Times Higher Education:

Any tome that starts with a discussion of Hippocrates, Socrates, and Plato and ends with an analysis of the 1998 film Run Lola Run has to be worthy of closer study. This one does not disappoint.
Weinrich gives himself a very broad canvas—the impact that shortness of time has had on humanity across history—and he fills it well. He uses an unhurried, easy, and assured narrative style to tease out the complex nature of how we perceive time in natural and contrived situations.

Gilbey goes so far as to venture:

I believe that the structure and style of this book would lend itself well to being adapted for the screen, either as a single banquet or as a selection of very tasty snacks. If there is anyone out there looking to produce a high-quality, slightly quirky philosophical programme with a recognisably European flavour, then I strongly suggest that you take a look at this book and seek to secure the rights.

Rights of course can be sought through our Rights Department.

Conveniently, Times Higher Education served up quite a spread of Chicago books in their latest issue. The repast also includes:
Margaret Linley reviews The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910
Howard Segal reviews Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America
Peter J. Smith reviews Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness
and Caroline Bruzelius reviews Believing and Seeing: The Art of Gothic Cathedrals

Artistry of the Viet Cong

Arts and culture blog truthdig.com posted a review last week of Sherry Buchanan's recent book, Mekong Diaries: Viet Cong Drawings and Stories, 1964-1975—a collection of work by ten Vietnamese soldier-artists that, as truthdig contributor Christian G. Appy notes, offers the western world new insight into the experiences of those on the other side of the Vietnam War and the resilience of those soldiers in the face of the much better equipped U. S. military. Appy's article begins by quoting a Chicago novelist:

"We lost the war because the Vietnamese just flat out beat us. And we lost the war because we didn't understand that they were poets." I was offered this Delphic explanation of American defeat in Vietnam by Larry Heinemann, a novelist who survived some of the war's fiercest fighting in 1967 and 1968 as a soldier with the 25th Infantry Division near the Cambodian border in Tay Ninh province.… But how could poetry, or any kind of art, help explain one of history's most astonishing victories? I think what Heinemann meant was that the Communist-led cause in Vietnam mobilized not just bodies, but souls.…
To maintain morale, the government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) deployed hundreds of artists, writers, actors, singers, photographers, puppeteers and dancers. These members of the "Literature and Arts" section of the military (Van Nghe) did not just visit combat troops, or lecture to them; they lived with them, moved with them, camped with them, and sometimes fought along with them. They were military artists in residence, only the residence was a war zone, not a campus. When combat was imminent they might move to the rear, but, when necessary, they picked up arms and fought, and died.…

Sherry Buchanan's new book, Mekong Diaries: Viet Cong Drawings & Stories, 1964-1975, gives us a stunning look at some of the wartime art produced by the Vietnamese soldier-artists who served in the "American War" to drive out the U.S., topple the American-backed government in Saigon and reunite Vietnam. The book's title is a bit misleading. This is not a collection of diaries. There are a few scraps of moving wartime correspondence and some wartime poems by Nguyen Duy, but this is, primarily, a collection of watercolors and sketches created during the war by soldier-artists.

And you can preview a selection of these watercolors and sketches in PDF format here , or continue reading Christian Appy's article on Mekong Diaries on the truthdig blog.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Reviews
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TV as fine art

In a speech before the National Association of Broadcasters in 1961, the then-chairman of the FCC Newton N. Minow famously dubbed TV a "vast wasteland." And as Andy Battaglia notes in his article for the February/March issue of Bookforum, "ambassadors of high culture voiced similar worries almost from the moment the first televised image was broadcast to a putatively unwitting and undereducated public." But in her new book TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television, author Lynn Spigel offers an alternative account of the medium's history that "upends talk of early television as an empty enterprise," by demonstrating a surprising partnership between television and the world of modern art that transformed the way Americans experienced the world visually. Battaglia writes:

Focusing on broadcasting's formative era, the '40s through the '70s, Lynn Spigel… looks at the ways in which the new medium got in bed with various disciplines—in the fine arts as well as more utilitarian modes of graphic design—thought to be of higher mind.…
Valuable chapters survey developments in visionary set design and avant-garde programming (including "silent" broadcasts by comic Ernie Kovacs and provocatively awkward ones by Andy Warhol), but the book mainly focuses on the more general task laid out in its epilogue's title, "Framing TV, Unframing Art." "Although broadcast historians aren't wrong," Spigel writes, "the singular focus on programs blinds us to the variety of visual experiences that early TV actually offered." Part of that variety involved simply watching shows in a decidedly modern zoned-out state, to be sure. But part of it helped prod the masses to contemplate what it meant to look, at art and at everything else. Just think of the recent scene in Mad Men in which a young ad exec stares up at a Rothko and says, "Maybe you're just supposed to experience it."

The January 13th edition of the Village Voice also ran a short review praising Spigel's work for its revelatory account of television's symbiotic relationship with fine art. And rumor has it that another review will be appearing in Bookforum's sister publication, Artforum soon.

Read an excerpt from chapter two of Spigel's book: "An Eye for Design: Corporate Modernism at CBS."

Through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise—and now cyberspace

With Danteworlds: A Reader's Guide to the Inferno, Guy P. Raffa decoded Dante's epic poem for a new generation of readers. And with the forthcoming The Complete Danteworlds: A Reader's Guide to the Divine Comedy Raffa has expanded his project to encompass the entire text, through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise—and into cyberspace. As the New Yorker's Vicky Raab notes in a recent article, Raffa's online version of Danteworlds offers "an integrated multimedia journey" through Dante's Divine Comedy, perfectly marrying medium with message to launch the reader "right into the allegorical action, heightening rather than dulling appreciation and comprehension." Raab continues:

Canto by canto, as Virgil and then Beatrice lead the benighted Dante through "circles of Hell, terraces of Purgatory, spheres of Paradise," so the clear-eyed Guy P. Raffa, a classics professor at the University of Texas at Austin who conceived and developed the site, leads students in Dante's steps, urging them to click on regions within each realm. I go straight to Circle Nine, of course, the lowest depths of the Inferno, peopled by the grisliest creatures: the giants Nimrod, Ephialtes, and Antaeus, the cannibalistic Ugolino, who eats the back of Ruggiero's head, "so that one head to the other was a hat," and, of course, the supersized, winged, tri-colored Beelzebub.

Continue reading Raab's article on the New Yorker website, or navigate to http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/ and check out the cyber version of Danteworlds for yourself.

Holiday wrap

It was a quiet holiday week here in Chicago. The president-elect went on vacation and the governor seems to have stayed off the telephone. The most exciting thing, really, was the weather: bitter cold, a blizzard, a temperature climb of 60 degrees, lots of rain and flooding. No wonder they call Chicago a meteorologist's nightmare. Or should.

What's been in the news? Ha Jin's The Writer as Migrant—his meditation on language, migration, and the place of literature in a rapidly globalizing world—has turned up everywhere. In the Washington Post, in the Times Higher Education, and on the Bookslut blog. Francine Prose writes for the Post:

In The Writer as Migrant, the Chinese-born Ha Jin, whose novel Waiting won the National Book Award in 1999, discusses the ways in which nationality and culture, exile and emigration affect the course of a writer's life and career, and influence the work he produces. He considers the cases, at once exemplary and unique, of Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov, who both wrote in a second language (as he does), and of others, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, forced to leave their native land, causing a rupture from which they never fully recovered.…
[The book demands] to be read slowly, and savored. You may find yourself pausing frequently to think about some especially trenchant observation and to reflect on the generosity and intelligence with which these writers help us understand what makes us different from, and similar to, the people with whom we co-exist on our endlessly fascinating, precious and increasingly populated world.

The Terezín Album of Mariánka Zadikow—an facsimile edition of an keepsake album Zadikow kept in the Terezín (Theresienstadt) concentration camp—also garnered some holiday attention. The Jewish Exponent says it is "a remarkable document … beautifully reconstructed."

Archived in Reviews
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So how did we get in this mess in the first place?

If you're busy trying to figure out how to survive the market meltdown, then at some point you might also begin wondering about how, and why, it all started in the first place. In a recent article for the Washington Monthly Greg Anrig takes note of Lawrence D. Brown and Lawrence R. Jacobs timely new book, The Private Abuse of the Public Interest: Market Myths and Policy Muddles for offering an insightful answer. Anrig writes:

In the waning days of the Bush administration, as venerable Wall Street firms collapsed, credit markets froze, stocks crashed, and economic indicators deteriorated, free market, antiregulatory Republicans found themselves with no choice but to partially nationalize the banking industry. It was a Shakespearean denouement for the conservative movement. For nearly thirty years, the right had dominated political debate on the strength of the simple argument that government was the problem and free markets the solution.…
[But] as Lawrence D. Brown and Lawrence R. Jacobs demonstrate in The Private Abuse of the Public Interest: Market Myths and Policy Muddles, the era of conservative dominance has wrought a cyclical pattern: first comes the fervent advocacy of market-based policy ideas, followed by their implementation, which causes damage that can [ironically] only be fixed by extensive governmental intervention.…

Brown and Jacobs discern five phases…in the cycle. First, conservatives deem the central problem in every arena to be an insufficient reliance on markets.… Second, conservative policy experts propose a simple solution: a substitution of market forces for government.… The third step in Brown and Jacobs's framework is legislative action to implement the ideas proposed by the market worshippers.… The fourth phase is when the seductive simplicity of free market theory meets complicated institutional reality.… The final stage is when political backlash forces policymakers to respond to the unintended consequences and failures of the market-based approaches—causing government to grow and thereby subverting the original goals of the pro-market adherents.…

With a presidential candidate openly campaigning for more rather than less regulation, as Barack Obama has just done successfully, the United States has clearly entered a new era. When the inevitable reaction pushing for a return to free markets comes back around, the lesson of this insightful book is clear: don't go there unless you want even bigger government to clean up after the failures that are sure to follow.

Read the full article on the Washington Monthly website.

"Who knew Camus had something to say about gardens?"

If you're living in the northern U.S. it is likely that your garden is presently covered under several inches of snow, but as a recent article in the New York Times demonstrates, through the long winter months many gardeners never cease thinking about them. Writing for yesterday's "Sunday Book Review" Dominique Browning offers a list of a few of her favorite gardening books for midwinter reading that includes Robert Pogue Harrison's new book, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Browning writes:

The year's most thought-provoking, original and weighty garden book (though the lightest in heft) is Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, by Robert Pogue Harrison. Here the author of Forests: The Shadow of Civilization and The Dominion of the Dead, a book about cemeteries and burial practices, turns his thoughts to the garden as "sanctuary of repose." Making a garden fulfills, as Harrison puts it, "a distinctly human need, as opposed to shelter, which is a distinctly animal need." Burrowing into a more refined issue than what makes a garden, he meditates on why we garden. It's impossible to summarize the answer, overflowing as his book is with eccentric connections and voracious readings, ranging over centuries and across continents. Part of what makes it exciting is the way Harrison sets up surprise encounters with unexpected writers, who spring up as though self-seeded among the perennials. Who knew Camus had something to say about gardens?…
Reading Harrison's book is like strolling down a path through a well cultivated, richly sown, light-dappled woodland. There's no point of arrival, though there may be resting places here and there. Just as in the making of a garden, there's no end to the wonder; the journey is everything. You don't have to be a gardener to love this book, but by the end you'll be asking yourself why on earth you aren't.

Read the rest of the review on the NYT website.

Also, read an excerpt.

Defeat runs through it

In his November 30th review for the L. A. Times critic Art Winslow delivers an insightful assessment of the Norman Maclean Reader, which includes both previously unpublished Maclean material as well as selections from his two published works. The Reader, Winslow writes, offers Maclean fans invaluable insight into the author's life and works and exposes the deeply tragic themes that underlie them both.

There is a river that runs through Maclean's work, a strong and dark current of defeat, and if we needed further proof of that, both from his self-testimony and as evidenced in previously unpublished writing, it has arrived in the form of The Norman Maclean Reader.
Those who have read Young Men and Fire, Maclean's nonfiction reconstruction of the 1949 Mann Gulch fire in Montana, in which 13 smokejumpers were burned to death, may recall the multiple parallels Maclean drew between their fate and that of the 7th Cavalry troops under George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn, another death-dealing Montana site.… The surprise here is to learn that the Custer comparisons were hardly incidental: From 1959 to 1963, primarily, Maclean struggled to write a book about the battle of the Little Bighorn and its cultural afterlife, and The Norman Maclean Reader presents five heretofore unpublished extracts from his manuscript, including sections of what was to be his conclusion, titled "Shrine to Defeat".…

[In both works] Maclean's attempt to construct a narrative in tragic form, in accordance with Aristotelian ideas, can be seen as underpinning… his [writing].

Continue reading "Defeat runs through it" »

Archived in Literature | Reviews
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We live in an age of obsession

Cultural critic Julia Keller has written an interesting article about Lennard J. Davis's new book Obsession: A History for the lifestyle section of the Sunday Chicago Tribune. In her article, Keller notes how "obsessive" behavior has come to define our culture, though in a very polarized way. We admire those whose drive leads them to professional or athletic success. But we also might recommend someone who can't stop washing their hands every five minutes, or spends hours straightening the picture frames in their living room, to go find a good psychologist to help them with their OCD. In her article Keller quotes Davis:

"To be obsessive is to be American, to be modern."
Yet the term has never been a stable category. When does an eccentricity become an obsession? When does a quirk become a pathology? You can't understand obsession, the professor believes, without considering "the social, cultural, historical, anthropological and political" swirl in which it lives.

And in Obsession Davis does just that, tracing the evolution of obsessive behavior from a social and religious fact of life into a medical and psychiatric problem. From obsessive aspects of professional specialization to obsessive sex and nymphomania, no variety of obsession eludes Davis's graceful cultural analysis.

To find out more read Keller's article on the Tribune's website. Also read an interview with Davis or listen to his appearance on the Chicago Audio Works podcast.

A lost magazine of the jazz age

Last Sunday's New York Times Book Review closes with a noteworthy piece by Matt Weiland on Neil Harris's, The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age. Weiland praises the book for its handsome resurrection of one of Chicago's most stylish publications, offered here for a whole new age to enjoy:

[The Chicagoan] was founded in 1926 by a group of Chicagoans inflamed by the example and success of the New Yorker, which had begun the year before. It was published every two weeks, and before long Time magazine was heralding it for having the "finish and flair worthy of a national publication." But its readership began to decline as the Great Depression set in, its frequency was reduced to monthly, and in 1935 it died a quiet death. Somehow this vibrant magazine was completely forgotten until a few years ago, when the distinguished cultural historian Neil Harris came upon a set of the magazine's run in the library of the University of Chicago. It has now been brought back into print, if not to life, by the University of Chicago Press.
What a marvelous job they have done! This is a book you will want to own, a coffee-table book nicer and better than most coffee tables. The University of Chicago Press has swung for the fences, producing the book to the highest standards—a nearly 400-page oversize volume, designed with care and attentiveness, to period detail and featuring loads of full-color images. It's a pleasure to see the ball sail into the bleachers… Thanks to Neil Harris's serendipitous discovery and the University of Chicago Press's superb effort, The Chicagoan takes its rightful place on the top shelf.

Read the review on the NYT website. We have a gallery of covers and illustrations from the magazine and sample pages in PDF (7mb) from the book.

Collections of something

A mid-week, off-radar publicity round-up:

William Davies King, author of Collections of Nothing, continues to write about collecting and one of his other obsessions, Eugene O'Neill, in an essay just published in ZYZZYVA, the journal of West Coast writers and artists. "Hammerman's O'Neill" profiles the prodigious O'Neill collector, Dr. Harley Hammerman. Read the essay here, and check out an excerpt from King's book here.

King may be obsessed with collecting and Eugene O'Neill, but the king of obsession around here is Lennard Davis, author of Obsession: A History. Listen to a podcast with the author from Psychjourney.

And if the rise of podcasts have you reminiscing about the good old days around the wireless, listen in on Inquiry as Marcel Chotkowski Lafollette discusses her book Science on the Air: Popularizers and Personalities on Radio and Early Television.

And speaking of radio, retired Army Lt. Col. John Nagl, author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam and author of a foreword to The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, dropped by NPR's All Things Considered to discuss a "new spirit" of determination to eradicate counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.

Finally, a shout-out to Cristina Henríquez, the former occupant of the very chair from which your humble correspondent now dispatches, with wit and verve, these ephemeral musings. Cristina, author of a short-story collection, Come Together, Fall Apart and a debut novel, The World in Half, out next year, is the next contestant in The Books of the States project at Omnivoracious. Her list of essential Texas books is as comprehensive as the state is large. And here's to hoping that some of her magic is left in this humble office chair, from where I bid you happy reading.

Archived in Reviews
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Automobility—addiction or affliction?

I'll be honest, I drive to work nearly every day. But every time I see a politician's stump speech or an oil industry executive advocating the expansion of drilling into the Alaskan wilderness, or beneath the rapidly diminishing polar caps, I can't help but cringe—simultaneously in outrage at what the long term environmental effects of such actions might be, and guilt for my own complicity. But according to Brian Ladd, author of Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age I'm not alone. In fact, as the NYT's Tom Vanderbilt points out in the Sunday Book Review, Americans have had quite a conflicted relationship to the automobile almost since its very inception, and in his new book, Ladd gives some insightful reasons why:

[Recently] the car has certainly lost some of its luster, lending credence to the words of an English observer: "From being the plaything of society," the car "has come to dominate society. It is now our tyrant, so that at last we have turned in revolt against it, and begun to protest against its arrogant ways."
The only problem with this incipient revolt is that these words actually date to 1911, the shaky toddler years of American motorization. That they could have been uttered in 1973, or perhaps yesterday, is what animates Brian Ladd's Autophobia. People have been predicting the death, or at least severe retrenchment, of the car virtually since its invention. But while the literature may be filled with books like Dead End, Car Trouble and Autokind vs. Mankind—among many others—the roads are filled with ever more traffic. The car, since it began, has seemingly been driven by Beckett: It can't go on, it goes on.…

Throughout the car's life, Ladd argues, its critics have often "failed to appreciate the depth of the automobile's hold on ordinary people," reaching for conspiracies to help explain the ubiquity of car culture when the answers seem far simpler. The car, beyond any symbolic power, is usually the fastest—if far from the healthiest—way to get around. But this itself contains a point that the car's boosters, Ladd argues, often ignore—a so-called path dependence. Once you started to make room for the car in the landscape—doing things that made the car "an easy, convenient, even necessary, but not always wise choice"—it was hard to turn back.

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

Also read this excerpt from the book and listen to an audio interview with the author.

Archived in History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Chic" Chicago

In 1926 a colorful new magazine appeared on newsstands and in magazine racks across Chicago. The Chicagoan was the Windy City's attempt at an arts and culture magazine to rival the sophistication of the New Yorker, whose first issue was published only months before. But while the New Yorker would grow to reach a national audience, maintaining a wide circulation even in today's anti-print climate, after nine short but exciting years that straddled "prohibition, the depression and the jazz age," the Chicagoan folded and was forgotten—until now. Enter Neil Harris's new book The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age—a fascinating collection of articles, photographs, and illustrations that, as a recent review in the UK's Spectator magazine notes, brings the heyday of the publication—and the city—back to life:

Think quiz. 'A crescent-shaped town, 26 miles by 15, along a great lake. An unchallenged murder record—a splendid university—hobo capital to the country—and the finest of grand opera. Altogether the most zestful spectacle on this earth.' Where are we? In case of doubt, the city's short-lived house magazine spelled out the answer in 48 point type, 'Chi - CA - go.' Actually the emphasis should have been on the Chic, because as demonstrated by this elegant collection of covers, illustrations and stories from the Chicagoan, in its heyday Chicago was the most stylish, exciting and quintessentially American of all the cities that encircle the United States landmass. New York looked over its shoulder to Europe, New Orleans pretended to be French, San Francisco was a rootless amalgam of Spanish mission and Pacific piracy, but Chicago sucked pure Americana out of the corn, cattle and railroads of the mid-West to create a culture that was unique to the continent. Forget Al Capone and the stench of the stockyards, this is where Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman made an art out of jazz, where Frank Lloyd Wright created modern architecture, where skyscrapers, city parks and suburbs were born.

Even the New Yorker itself has published a brief review acknowledging its long-lost counterpart's return to the stage.

Also, see this special website for the book featuring a gallery of sample cover images.

Archived in Chicago | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A modern music missed by modern scholarship

The Chronicle of Higher Education's Peter Monaghan has written several interesting articles recently about the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, "a celebrated avant-garde collective that began in the poorest neighborhoods of Chicago in the 1960s," and the subject of George E. Lewis's recent A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. In both articles Monaghan notes the significance of Lewis's book as the first academic treatment of the AACM and the highly influential experimental music it produced, and ponders the question, put forth in Lewis's book, of why such a groundbreaking group of artists hasn't received more attention by mainstream academics:

In his book, both social history and critical study, Lewis makes a claim that devotees of the AACM have long embraced but that is discomforting some composers and critics: The jazz-related collective, which emerged from black, working-class areas of Chicago in the 1960s, became one of the most significant artistic forces of the 20th century—yet histories of American musical experimentalism almost never say so.…
Lewis cites the historian Jon D. Cruz's observation that criticism of the new music as "just noise" recalled many slave owners' earlier obliviousness to the significations of slave songs. "Similarly," writes Lewis, "the noisy anger of the new musicians seemed strange, surprising, and unfathomable to many critics, along with the idea that blacks might actually have something to be angry about."

As a result, Lewis contends, music historians have failed to acknowledge the influence of the "transgressive new black music" of the AACM and other innovators like Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Cecil Taylor, dispatching them to the ranks of mere jazz oddballs.

Lewis's critique of American avant-gardism is "profoundly important and long overdue," according to a specialist in American and 20th-century music, Amy C. Beal, an associate professor of music at the University of California at Santa Cruz. "Histories of 20th-century music and jazz are racially segregated, and there are various institutional reasons why that happens," she says, "It's time we started examining them."

You can read both Monaghan's pieces —"Thoroughly Modern Music" and "Experimental Music and Academe"—online at the Chronicle.com website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Ha Jin on creating Chinese culture

The San Francisco Chronicle recently published an interesting review of The Writer as Migrant—the latest book from award winning poet, novelist, and Chinese expat, Ha Jin. Consisting of a series of essays that explore the significance of writing outside of one's homeland and in a foreign language, the book focuses not only on the author's own experience but also considers those of other famous exiles—like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Chinese novelist Lin Yutang—examining how each grapples "with issues of identity and tradition," and their capacity to act as sounding boards for the voices of their native countries. From the review:

In the preface to Between Silences, his first book of poetry, published in 1990, Ha Jin proclaimed that he spoke for those who suffered and endured, those fooled or ruined by history—a Chinese writer who wrote in English on behalf of the downtrodden Chinese.
Nearly two decades later, Jin says that he has come to see the "silliness of that ambition.…"

"[T]oo much sincerity is a dangerous thing. It can overheat one's brain," he drolly notes in his compelling new collection of essays, The Writer as Migrant.…

"Just as a creative writer should aspire to be not a broker but a creator of culture, a great novel does not only present a culture but also makes culture; such a work does not only bring news of the world but also evokes the reader's empathy and reminds him of his own existential condition."

Read the rest of the review on the San Francisco Chronicle's companion website, SFGate.com.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The perfect writer

Chicago Tribune cultural critic Julia Keller reviewed The Norman Maclean Reader last Saturday. Maclean published only one book, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, during his lifetime, but that one book—published when he was 74—assured his place in American literature.

Keller talks about why he didn't publish more:

Whether living in Illinois or Montana, though, Maclean wrote constantly; it was his perfectionism that kept him from publishing until he was in his seventh decade, his sense that a work could always be made better, the ideas sharper, the images more telling.
Because he cared so much about getting it just right, writing never came easy for him. In a 1986 interview reprinted in The Norman Maclean Reader, he said of literature, "It's a highly disciplined art. It's costly. You have to give up a lot of yourself to do it well. It's like anything you do that's rather beautiful."

We have a website for Norman Maclean.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
Posted by DB at 02:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Economist on Patty's Got a Gun

Does the election of Barack Obama signal the end of the culture wars, the end of the politics of polarization? If you can't sink a candidacy with the ankle weight of a '60s-era bomber, has that decade's grip on our politics finally been broken?

Once the partisans have been cleared out of the way, the historians are unencumbered. For instance, William Graebner in Patty's Got a Gun: Patricia Hearst in 1970s America.

In April 1974, twenty-year-old newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst robbed a San Francisco bank in the company of members of the Symbionese Liberation Army—who had kidnapped her nine weeks earlier. What was she? Traumatized victim, brainwashed zombie, or domestic terrorist? From a review yesterday in the Economist:

What makes this book worth reading is not so much the first half, a compelling enough account of Ms. Hearst's kidnapping and subsequent time in the headlines, as the second half: an attempt to put the Hearst affair in the context of an America struggling to emerge from the Vietnam quagmire and the ignominy of Watergate. The America of the 1970s, he argues, was ridding itself of the legacy of the "permissive" 1960s, and was preparing for the rightward shift of Reaganism and an emphasis in the 1980s on the individual.… As Mr. Graebner puts it, it is possible that in a different decade Ms. Hearst might well have been acquitted.

We also have an excerpt from the book and an audio interview with the author.

The Erika and Klaus Mann Story

The November 6 edition of the London Review of Books contains a fascinating article about the legacy of renowned writer Thomas Mann—but, perhaps surprisingly, it's not about his novels—it's about his two eldest children, Erika and Klaus Mann. In his article Colm Tóibín draws upon Andrea Weiss's recent biography In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story to describe the unconventional and dramatic lives of the Mann siblings, both of whom were talented artists in their own right, and whose unique experiences offer an abundance of captivating new insights on the history of the twentieth century. Read the full article on the London Review of Books website. Or, read this excerpt from In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story.

Archived in Reviews
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The Economist on Obsession

In a review titled “The double face of single-mindedness” The Economist yesterday reviewed Obsession: A History by Lennard J. Davis. In our own age, notes the review,

obsession is both a common mental illness and a cultural ideal. The two are connected, thinks Mr. Davis: twin results of a single process, and perhaps the inevitable consequence of modernity. In just a few decades "obsessive-compulsive disorder' has gone from extremely rare—affecting one person in 2,000 according to a 1973 estimate—to extremely common, affecting two or three people in 100.

Obsessiveness as an ideal has been with us for several centuries at least. The reviewer takes note of Davis' chapter on "graphomania—the madness of incessant writing." Nineteenth-century novelists like Balzac and Zola devoted themselves to "the continuous, cumulative production of words." In the words of the reviewer: "These writers knew they were sacrificing their lives to obsession, but they accepted the price and others lionized them for it."

A bit like some bloggers we know.

Read an interview with Davis or listen to a podcast episode.

Archived in History | Reviews
Posted by DB at 02:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Time catches up with Ebert and Scorsese

S. James Snyder has a review in Time of Roger Ebert's new book, Scorsese by Ebert—a collection of the esteemed critic's writing on every feature film in Scorsese's oeuvre, accompanied by his new reconsiderations of the director's work, plus interviews and Scorsese's own insights on his films.

In his review, Snyder gives the book a thumbs-up, highlighting some of the more passionate of Ebert's critiques, and remarking on the critic's profound ability to identify with Scorsese's work. Snyder writes:

In his foreword, Scorsese acknowledges that Ebert closely shares his love of film, his religious roots, and his moralistic worldview. Ebert picks up on that theme in his introduction: "We were born five months apart in 1942 … We were children of working-class parents … We attended Roman Catholic schools … We memorized the Latin of the Mass … We went to the movies all the time.…" Long before they ever met each other, these two were kindred spirits. Scorsese's films spoke with a tone that Ebert had never heard before, and Ebert was Scorsese's champion well before the director became a household name. As the two have grown old and famous together, this back-and-forth has become a compelling—perhaps even defining—dialogue in their careers.

Read the review at Time.com. Also, read an excerpt from the book.

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

A lost magazine from an elegant era

In the early part of the twentieth century H. G. Wells pronounced the city of Chicago "a great industrial desolation" and a "nineteenth century nightmare." Often noted by outsiders only for its slums, squalor, and stockyards, during the twenties and thirties Chicago fought hard to transform its image into one of a sophisticated urban center, struggling for cultural superiority with it's arch rival to the east, and the burgeoning megalopolis in the west. One of the city's weapons in this struggle was a new publication which, in its own words, claimed to represent "a cultural, civilized, and vibrant" city "which needs make no obeisance to Park Avenue, Mayfair, or the Champs Elysees." Urbane in aspiration and first published just sixteen months after the 1925 appearance of the New Yorker, the Chicagoan sought passionately to redeem the Windy City's unhappy reputation by demonstrating the presence of style and sophistication in the Midwest. Nevertheless, for all it's elegance and flair the magazine had a life span of less than a decade, forgotten as the boom years of the Jazz age lapsed into the Great Depression.

Now, as Julia Keller notes in a recent review for the Chicago Tribune, "thanks to the archival detective work of Neil Harris, emeritus professor at the University of Chicago, we can glide our way back to an era when elegance mattered—not only in dress and deportment, but also in sentence and image. In the The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age… a hefty, gorgeous hunk of a book that reproduces one entire issue as well as 149 covers and many articles, a vanished era returns. It comes back in all of its fussy glory, its daffy humor, its gentle insistence that even a city best known for gangsters and stockyards could yearn for beauty and glamor."

Keller continues:

Harris dug out the issues, tracked down the identities of the artists, writers and editors who created them and put the whole enterprise into historical context in the spirited essays that precede each section. With its vivid covers, its book and theater and concert reviews, its whimsical cartoons, and its cheeky profiles, The Chicagoan sought to convey "the personality of its namesake city," Harris writes, billing itself as "the only oracle of smart Chicago.…" It tried to suggest that a city's cultural life was key, that the Midwest wasn't just a holding pen for cows and crooked politicians. The place had style. The place had charm. The place was here to stay—even if The Chicagoan, sadly, wasn't.

See our online gallery for The Chicagoan, including two dozen covers and interior images from the magazine. Read Keller's review on the Chicago Tribune website.

When Roger met Martin

This Friday marks the beginning of the second week of the Chicago International Film Festival—the city's largest screening of independent and foreign films—offering Chicagoans a unique opportunity to get a sneak peek at some of cinema's best emerging new talent. In fact, over its 42 years the festival has introduced a number of films from now famous directors, not the least of which is Martin Scorsese, whose first film Who's That Knocking at My Door screened at the festival in 1967 and marked the starting point of the director's long and storied career. But another career in film was also shaped that day. Roger Ebert in the first months of his career was present at the screening, and wrote the first published review of a Scorsese film—beginning a back-and-forth between director and critic that Time Out Chicago's Hank Sartin writes, was the occasion for "some of the critic's most thought-provoking reviews."

In his new book Scorsese by Ebert Ebert offers the first record of his engagement with the works of America's greatest living director chronicling every single feature film in Scorsese's considerable oeuvre, from his aforementioned debut to his 2008 release, the Rolling Stones documentary, Shine a Light. The book also includes a number of new and unpublished essays as well as Scorsese's own insights on both his accomplishments and disappointments.

Find out more about the book with Hank Sartin's recent review in Time Out Chicago, or read an excerpt.

Also don't forget to hit up the Chicago International Film Festival running this weekend through the 29th of October.

Archived in Film and Media | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Review: Atkinson, Mean

Los Angeles Times book review editor David L. Ulin has written an approving review of Colette Labouff Atkinson's new book of poems, Mean, for last Sunday's edition of the paper. Remarking on what Ulin calls the "exquisite tension" between intimacy and distance in Labouff's work Ulin writes:

[The] 43 vignettes [in Mean] add up to an emotional autobiography. In the title piece, Atkinson describes her husband's former wife, a stripper. "He traded her in for me," she writes. "To people I don't know, I say she was a dancer. I watch them, puzzled, wonder how anyone could not love a ballerina. And you have to question a guy like that: trading in a sweet stripper for me."
The irony is that we are people she doesn't know, but this is part of the book's exquisite tension. Again and again, Atkinson reveals intimacies in an offhand way. "Gain" describes her great-uncle, a columnist for the ILWU Warehouse News, who "[b]etween the lines, be wise—organize—"composes a fairy tale about a pony made of gold. "For God's Sake, Get Out" recalls "The Amityville Horror," then morphs into a meditation on how houses can be haunted by disappointment and loss.

Read the review on the LA Times website.

Archived in Poetry | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some spots of time in the life of Norman Maclean

Since its publication in 1976, Norman Maclean's novella A River Runs Through It has become an American classic, earning him comparison to the likes of Thoreau and Hemingway. Maclean published only three short works of fiction during his lifetime, one of which was A River Runs Through It. None were published until after he retired, at the age of 71, from his career as a professor at the University of Chicago.

In a recent article for the Wall Street Journal Joseph Rago asks: "how did this retired professor bring off such accomplished work on his first attempt? And how did he then manage, just as remarkably, to produce a haunting work of nonfiction, the posthumously published Young Men and Fire, Maclean's exploration of a deadly Montana forest fire in 1949?" Rago continues:

The Norman Maclean Reader points us toward an answer. Smartly edited by O. Alan Weltzien of the University of Montana, the book brings together manuscripts and letters found among Maclean's papers after his death in 1990, as well as hard-to-find essays, lectures and interviews. Maclean did not draw a distinction between his life and his fiction, and the material in the Reader, much of it available for the first time, burnishes his achievement.
Maclean was deeply influenced by Wordsworth's notion of "spots of time," or the moments that give life shape and meaning, "as if an artist had made them," in Maclean's words. But he never went in for sentimentality or pointless nostalgia—he was trying, rather, to lend such epiphanies the permanence of literature. …

Read the rest of the article on the Wall Street Journal website. Our website for Norman Maclean, while still in development, has several things by and about Maclean.

Archived in Fiction | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Revealing the watery world of ocean scientists

Last Saturday's Wall Street Journal contains an enthusiastic review of Ellen Prager's new book Chasing Science at Sea: Racing Hurricanes, Stalking Sharks, and Living Undersea with Ocean Experts. Writing for the WSJ Michael J. Ybarra begins his review:

Ellen Prager would seem to have an enviable job: traveling the world to unravel the mysteries of the deep. "For the uninitiated, spending days doing research while cruising aboard a ship or living on a remote tropical island sounds glamorous, a vacation of sorts," she writes in Chasing Science at Sea. "Glamour rarely comes into it."
Ms. Prager, the chief scientist at Aquarius Reef Base in the Florida Keys, the world's only undersea research station, uses breezy, accessible prose to evoke the beauty and magic of the underwater world—as well as the banalities of working as a scientist in an alien environment. She describes collecting fish poop, writing grant proposals (the competition among ocean scientists for money "is fierce"), and battling seasickness and skin rash from prolonged immersion. And Ms. Prager decries the alarming changes she perceives in the world's oceans, including dying coral reefs, decimated fish stocks and the spread of algae blooms that "can kill fish and render the sea unlivable." The reasons for such aquatic degradation, she says, include pollution, over-fishing and global warming.

But Chasing Science at Sea is hardly dominated by eco-lamentation; Ms. Prager is too intoxicated with her job for that. "I've encountered equipment-stealing sea lions in the Galápagos, worked with ex-NFL football players turned underwater shark-wrestling stuntmen, nearly capsized on a trawler while entering a dangerous inlet, faced a hurricane at sea with a boat full of undergraduates, and stood waist-deep in steaming mud as turkey vultures circled overhead."

Read the rest of the review on the Wall Street Journal website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Biology | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Parker novels in Time Out Chicago

This week's edition of Time Out Chicago features a great story on the press's re-publication of the Parker novels—a series of crime novels by Donald Westlake (aka Richard Stark) that follow the exploits of a master thief known only as Parker.

Jonathan Messinger talked to the press's publicity manager, Levi Stahl, and Maggie Hivnor, the press's reprints editor, about why they decided to get Stark's classics back in print:

Over the more than 40 years that Richard Stark has been writing his Parker noir novels, heavyweights have lined up to praise his work: Booker-winner John Banville called the books "among the most poised and polished fictions… of any time," and Guggenheim fellow Luc Sante called them "a brilliant invention." And yet, if you wanted to quantify how much these champions have done for their pet cause, neither of them would stack up to someone you've likely never heard of: Levi Stahl, publicity manager at the University of Chicago Press.
Stahl, a rabid mystery fan, had read praise of the Parker novels but only recently decided to check them out.… "Last fall, I tried one," he says. "They're like candy. I read one, and suddenly I'm reading a dozen. I read all of the ones I could get my hands on, but the early ones were out of print and surprisingly hard to find."

Stahl went to Maggie Hivnor, the press's paperback-reprints editor, and suggested they get the books back into print.… Now, a year later, University of Chicago Press has rereleased the first three Parker novels, The Hunter, The Man With the Getaway Face and The Outfit.…

Messinger continues:

What's most interesting, perhaps, is that the University of Chicago Press has resurrected these classics of the genre.… Westlake is one of crime writing's most revered practitioners, and yet his important—and popular—work had fallen out of print. We tried to talk to Hivnor about the role of a university press in serving the public good, acting on an archival instinct to keep the Parker novels on the shelves. But she was having none of it.
"To be honest, we're doing them because they're so fun," she says, and echoes Stahl. "Once you read one, you want to read a dozen."

Read the rest of the article on the Time Out website. Also, read an interview with Donald Westlake.

Archived in Fiction | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The power of a few plain jottings

A few days ago the New York Sun's staff reporter Adam Kirsch reviewed The Terezín Album of Mariánka Zadikow:

The book itself could not be more ordinary: It is a high-quality facsimile, with translations, of an autograph album belonging to a teenage girl. As usual with such albums, it is full of her friends' signatures and messages, along with the occasional poem or drawing. For page after page, reading it is just like reading a high school yearbook: "All the very best for the future, little cousin!" writes Marianka's cousin Lotte; "Marianka! Should you be bored, remember your colleague," writes Regina; "I wish you lots of happiness, Marianka!" writes Hana.
What makes all this ordinariness so gripping is the fact that this particular album was kept by a Jewish prisoner in the Nazi camp at Terezin, known in German as Theresienstadt.…

In these lines, you can already see the principle that writers like Primo Levi would establish as the cardinal rule of writing about the Holocaust. Only directness and simplicity are eloquent in this context; the more "impressive" the language, the less of an impression it makes.

Read the full review on the New York Sun website.

Archived in History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Reconstructing geohistory

The current issue of Science magazine contains a glowing review of Martin J. S. Rudwick's latest book, Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform. Reviewer Ralph J. O'Conner notes that Worlds Before Adam follows up on Rudwick's previous book, Bursting the Limits of Time, to cover the second phase (1820-1845) of a revolutionary period in the history of science in which scientists began to make important discoveries that transformed their conception of geological history and redefined human understanding of our place in the natural world. Praising both books for their clarity and insight O'Connor writes:

Like [Bursting the Limits of Time], Worlds Before Adam is the product of painstaking research. It appears dauntingly long but is a delight to read. Rudwick's style is lucid and engaging throughout, and he is unfailingly courteous to his nonspecialist readers, ensuring that all terms and concepts are fully explained and avoiding unnecessary jargon. The book's strictly chronological arrangement gives it a strong narrative thrust, and its many beautifully printed illustrations and generous quotations from original sources enhance the sense of primary contact with the evidence.…
In these two graceful and judicious volumes, Rudwick has restored geology to its rightful historical place at the heart of modern scientific culture. More than this, he enables readers to experience geology as a new science. By immersing us in the investigations, reflections, and debates of the time, he lifts us out of our present-day perspective so that we see the objects of geology afresh, through the astonished eyes of those who created it.

Navigate to the Science website to read the review.

Also see all our titles by Martin J. S. Rudwick.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The L.A. Times reviews the Parker novels

The Los Angeles Times' Richard Rayner has written an excellent review of the Parker novels—a noir crime series written by Donald Westlake under the pseudonym Richard Stark, that follows the exploits of master thief Parker as he cheats, steals, and murders his way through page after intoxicating page to get what he wants. From the review:

Writing a couple of years ago in Bookforum, the Irish novelist and Man Booker Prize winner John Banville reckoned the Parker novels to be "among the most poised and polished fictions of their time and, in fact, of any time."
That's high praise from an impeccable source, and Banville is right to single out the technical excellence of these books. The Parkers read with the speed of pulp while unfolding with almost Nabokovian wit and flair. Stark loves to shift character points of view, not only to advance the story but to go back inside the action and examine it for further angles and riches. The result is noir that drives forward relentlessly while feeling kaleidoscopic and reflective.…

The first three novels—The Hunter (filmed as Point Blank with Lee Marvin and, later, less successfully, as Payback with Mel Gibson), The Man With the Getaway Face and The Outfit—constitute a trilogy in which Parker first regroups, gets himself a new face and then takes on the organization, the Mob, which had supported his enemy, Mal Resnick, the guy who betrayed him.…

Original editions of these books, and even later reprints, change hands for scores or hundreds of dollars on the Net, and it's excellent to have them readily available again—not so much masterpieces of genre, just masterpieces, period.

You can read Raynor's review in this Sunday's L.A. Times book review, or online now at their website.

Rain Taxi reviews A Power Stronger than Itself

The Fall 2008 print edition of the Rain Taxi Review of Books published a positive review of George E. Lewis's new book A Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. Rain Taxi contributor W. C. Bamberger begins:

Founded in 1965, the AACM … seeks to enable black composers and performers of experimental music to take control of its presentation and recording. For more than forty years the name and acronym have been appearing in the liner notes of recordings by The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Muhal Richard Abrams, and many others, but information about the group has always been rather hazy, a frustration that George E. Lewis's impressive sociological-historical study more than remedies.
Lewis, a trombonist and electronic musician, is also an AACM member and past president, and so brings an insider's perspective to his analysis. He also conducted nearly 100 interviews with musicians and writers and presents their memories and views, some of them clashing, in hopes that "a useful story might be realized out of the many voices heard in this book, the maelstrom of heteroglossia in which we nervously tread water." There is no picket fencing here: Lewis doesn't utilize the high point or famous member system, so many too-little known musicians have their say. This is in part to give credit where credit is due, and to refuse "stars" exclusive rights to the AACM's history.…

Others in his wake will find this a valuable resource, and will also find it difficult to match Lewis for depth and critical insight.

Pick up a copy of the Fall 2008 edition of Rain Taxi to read the review.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

A new look at Dorothea Lange's Depression-era photographs

Both the Times Higher Education and the New Yorker's book blog, the Book Bench have recently published positive reviews of Anne Whiston Spirn's, Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field. Book Bench contributor Eliza Honey writes:

Daring to Look is a collection of photographs, many of them previously unpublished, taken by Dorothea Lange, in 1939, for the Farm Security Administration. Though Lange's shots of Depression-era individuals and families are well known, many of her negatives of empty home interiors have spent the past decades in archives, until Anne Whiston Spirn, the editor of this volume, unearthed them. Like Lange's portraits, her interiors are gentle reflections of a quiet and stark way of life.
Though the book looks deceivingly like it's meant for a coffee table, Spirn's accompanying text reveals much more. It's so engrossing, in fact, that, had the book not been so heavy, I would have taken it to the park during my lunch break.

And from the THE:

This first presentation of Lange's 1939 photographs with their accompanying texts provides a very valuable scholarly resource. Spirn's personal contribution, for anyone interested in Lange, comes in the third and final section, which both brings us up to date and reflects upon history, as she photographs sites and descendants of Lange's 1939 subjects.
From her broad knowledge base and sympathetic understanding of the history of the locale, Spirn offers a rich study of past and present life and landscape.

Read the rest of the Book Bench review, or read the THE review.

Also see this illustrated excerpt from the book.

The "coming home" of the black midle class

Julia Vitullo-Martin has an interesting review of Derek S. Hyra's new book, The New Urban Renewal: The Economic Transformation of Harlem and Bronzeville, in Sunday's New York Post. In his book Hyra looks at the nation's two most important historic, urban black neighborhoods—New York's Harlem and Chicago's Bronzeville—to explore the shifting dynamics of class and race as these two iconic black communities undergo an unprecedented period of gentrification. From the Post review:

Hyra's most fundamental concern: As these neighborhoods come back economically, what will happen to their poor residents? Hyra notes that both Bronzeville and Harlem are "revitalizing without drastic racial changeover." In the last 10 years, Central Harlem's white population increased to 2% from 1.5%, and the white proportion in Bronzeville increased to 4% from 2.5%.
Yet while Hyra is very worried about the displacement of the poor, he argues that class antagonism is actually important to the redevelopment of formerly impoverished communities. Black middle-class values translate into effective political activity and organizations, including block clubs, planning boards and religiously affiliated community development corporations. The problem, as he sees it, is that the "coming home" of the black middle class will produce a neighborhood in which poor blacks are no longer welcome.

Is he correct? Only time will tell. After all, the new, large, urban black middle class is itself a new phenomenon. How its development will affect the historic neighborhoods it treasures is an open question.

Read the rest of the article on the New York Post website.

Kurdistan—understanding the Middle East

Last Wednesday the New York Times' Papercuts blog posted a short article on the Kurds and their important role in the complicated culture and politics of the Middle East. In the post, Papercuts contributor Barry Gewen cites several useful books on the subject including Susan Meiselas' Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History, Second Edition. Gewen writes:

The hour of the Kurds has come round again. They are the great success story of the Iraq war, what the Bush administration always hoped for across the entire country. They have a functioning, popularly supported regional government. Their economy is booming. Religion has little retrograde or divisive influence on their public institutions. Women are respected (there have been many important female leaders in Kurdish history) and Israel is viewed approvingly. Terrorism is generally unknown in the Kurdish areas of Iraq. What's more, the Kurds are ready to defend themselves and what they have achieved. Anyone who wants to understand the future of Iraq and the Middle East in general has to take them into account.
Two new books help us to do just that. Actually, one of them isn't new. Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History by the photographer Susan Meiselas first appeared in 1998 and is now being reissued in an updated edition by the University of Chicago Press. It's an extraordinarily handsome volume. In a labor of love, Meiselas spent six years combing libraries, archives and family collections for old photographs, postcards, documents, newspaper clippings, whatever, to produce a visually stunning montage designed to prick the conscience of the world.

Read the posting on the NYT's Papercuts blog.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Illuminating the ordinary

The Popmatters website recently posted an interesting review of William Davies King's new book Collections of Nothing. In the review David Banash praises King for using an introspective meditation on his own habit of collecting to produce a revelatory look at the everyday objects that fill our lives. Banash writes:

In his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction… [Walter] Benjamin suggests that the power of the camera to bring our world into focus dramatically alters our perception of it, most often by slowing things down or getting us much closer to them, and King's fascinating habit of collecting does, I think, something much the same.…
King is one of the few people who have taken the time to really look at our world of disposable objects. His practice of collecting has slowed him down and shifted him into a new mode of consciousness, and he thus allows us something like a close-up, slow-motion pan across all the objects that we so quickly turn away from that they never really register with us as the things that they are. King's altered consciousness is not a gateway into some other world, but a blinding illumination of our everyday unconscious.

Read the review on the Popmatters website.

Also read an excerpt and an essay by the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The costs of urban transformation

In yesterday's New York Sun Harvard economist Edward Glaeser reviewed Derek Hyra's new book The New Urban Renewal: The Economic Transformation of Harlem and Bronzeville. Hyra's book looks at urban gentrification in two neighborhoods—Chicago's Bronzeville and New York's Harlem—and its impact on various socio-economic groups, revealing a sharp divide between middle-income and less affluent residents in benefiting from such transformations. As Glaeser explains:

A dynamic private sector… has made New York and Chicago increasingly prosperous places over the last 15 years.… As these cities have done well, demand for space has exploded. We see rising demand in the skyrocketing price of space in Manhattan and in the cranes that seem to be a permanent feature of Chicago's Lake Shore Drive skyline. Booming demand has also increased the desire among middle-class people to move to formerly poor areas such as Harlem and Bronzeville: Upwardly mobile urbanites, priced out of more expensive areas, have become urban pioneers "gentrifying" areas that used to be poor. But just as the real pioneers weren't always such a blessing for the American Indians on the frontier, gentrifiers aren't always a boon for the established residents of an area.…

Continue reading the article on the New York Sun website.

A Caesar for our own time

An interesting review of Maria Wyke's new book Caesar: A Life in Western Culture appeared in the August 18 edition of the Wall Street Journal. In the review, Peter Stothard praises the book for its insightful exploration of the various ways in which modern culture has invoked and appropriated Caesar and his legacy—from Mussolini, seeking a Caesarian mandate for this own grand ambitions, to Caesars Palace, Las Vegas:

Ms. Wyke's concern is how we have created and adapted Caesar's image and historical importance over the past 2,000 years… The principle behind this kind of study is known as "reception theory." Its typical proponent is skeptical of how much we can know of what someone like Caesar and his contemporaries did and thought; a reception theorist is much more confident of how we have come to use and think about them ourselves. A comic book can thus be as important as a commander's campsite. A bust loudly but unconvincingly proclaimed by its discoverer to be authentic is as significant as a newly interpreted paragraph from "De Bello Gallico." The skill of a reception theorist such as Ms. Wyke lies in what she chooses to include and what she chooses to leave out.…
Ms. Wyke, however, is a sophisticated practitioner of her craft, a professor of Latin at University College London and a graduate of the British Film Institute. She is the pre-eminent British authority on the relationship between modern film and classical history. She wittily describes how Bernard Shaw's distaste for the "deification of Love" in his play "Caesar and Cleopatra" was overridden for the 1945 movie version—and for all later movie attempts on the same theme. She also notes that the Caesars Palace Casino, built in 1966 and inspired by the sword-and-sandal movies of the era, came deliberately without apostrophe: Everyone could be a Caesar.…

Read the rest of the review on the Wall Street Journal website.

Prison Intimacies

The August 21 edition of the Times Higher Education includes a review of Regina Kunzel's new book, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality. The THE's Lynne Segal writes:

Being a product of "situational" aberrations, same-sex activity in prisons is of little interest to historians of sexuality, the psychiatrist and historian Vernon Rosario believes. He is quite wrong, according to feminist historian Regina Kunzel. In her latest book, Criminal Intimacy, Kunzel argues persuasively that the increasingly open secrets of prison life, although usually officially buried, expose the perennial fault-lines of many of our understandings of modern sexuality. As she illustrates, the hallmark of modern discourses of sexuality is the move from sexual acts, seen as decent or indecent, to sexual identities, seen as normal or perverse, generated from within. Sex behind bars, however, has always provided evidence that fails to mirror this account, leaving its occurrence apparently cut off in some anachronistic space all its own.

Read the review on the THE website.

The 1968 Democratic National Convention Revisited

This week's edition of the Chicago Reader is running an interesting review of Frank Kusch's Battleground Chicago—an unconventional look at the 1968 'police riots' at the Democratic National Convention. The event has become infamous for the brutality of the police in attempting to control the groups of anti-war protesters demonstrating at the convention. But Kusch's book goes beyond this stereotypical image using seldom heard accounts of the event from the police's point of view to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of how and why they acted as they did. The Reader's Barry Wightman writes:

Kusch… constructs his narrative from interviews he conducted with 80 former Chicago policemen who were on the street during the convention. These are regular guys who fought in World War II and Korea, lived in the bungalow belt, and found themselves on the fault line during one of the tectonic shifts of the period. And every time one of them is quoted, the story comes alive.…

Read the review from the Reader. Also read an excerpt from the book.

Finding Our Place in the World

Conventionally, people tend to thing of maps as useful tools with which to physically orient ourselves within a landscape, yet in their recent book, Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, editors James A. Ackerman and Robert W. Karrow demonstrate that throughout the ages maps have had a much greater range of utility. The August edition of the The Art Book features a review of Maps that praises the editors for their insightful exploration of maps' varying purposes—from maps that orient us geographically, to those that orient us historically and even culturally. From the Art Book:

[In Maps] essays by distinguished contributors break the boundaries of chronology and the limitations of conventional Western geography to consider instead a cluster of maps' varying purposes.…
The extensive first essay, 'Finding our way' by Akerman (organiser of a splendid Newberry exhibition on American road maps), addresses most observers' experiences of maps, i.e. as instructions for directed travel.… Allegorical pathways, clearly charted for religious or fantasy realms, are reserved for a fine later essay, 'Imaginary worlds', by Ricardo Padron. Another fascinating essay, on the conceptual or thematic use of maps (including geological or astronomical maps), often with statistical graphs to convey data, is provided by Michael Friendly and Gilles Palsky.… More particular maps of cities or regions, including property or military maps, are surveyed by Matthew Edney, who links their spatial uses to 'expansive' societies with expansive economic activity and social stratification. He notes that 'social needs, power relations, and cultural conventions underpin the production and use of all maps'.…

Ultimately, Maps:Finding Our Place in the World shows clearly how interdisciplinary and visual the study of maps can be.

Read the article or see a collection of unusual maps from the book.

Review: North, Cosmos

The August 16 edition of the Guardian published a short but positive review of John D. North's Cosmos: An Illustrated History of Astronomy and Cosmology. The review praises the book for its comprehensive exploration of these two sciences, and their integral role in helping mankind to define his place within the universe. From the Guardian:

At nearly 900 pages, this is a suitably monumental book about the biggest subject of all: the cosmos.… From Stonehenge and ancient China, where sunspots were first recorded in 28BC (European astronomers didn't spot them until the 17th century), to today's search for dark matter, Machos and Wimps, this remarkable work brings together the global history, theories, people and technologies of astronomy to tell a story that "has very few intellectual parallels in the whole of human history."

See the review on the Guardian website.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Mathematics and Physics | Reviews
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The problems and possibilities of human intimacy

Yesterday's Financial Times ran a positive review of Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips' psychoanalytic exploration of human intimacy in their new book, Intimacies. Summarizing the work the FT's Salley Vickers writes:

Taking the form of a conversation between this congenial but not necessarily like-minded pair, Intimacies explores the pitfalls and possibilities of human intimacy and the damage that a zeal to know ourselves and others can wreak. The exchange of views reflects the authors' philosophies: differences are the source, not the stumbling blocks, of intimacy; distance should enhance not diminish pleasure in others' company; and it is disastrous to take things personally.

Read the full review on the Financial Times website.

Review: Fenske, The Skyscraper and the City

The August 16 edition of the Wall Street Journal ran a short but positive review of Gail Fenske's new book, The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York. Fenske's book uses an in-depth architectural analysis of New York's Woolworth building as a lens through which to view the city's distinctive urban culture. As WSJ reviewer Nicholas Desai writes: "The building's style, inside and out, is hybrid, almost a pastiche, offering Tudor, Byzantine and Gothic elements—modern but not modernist," and Fenske's book insightfully connects this unique eclecticism to the cultural contradictions that defined New York City's modernity.

Desai's review continues praising Fenske's prose as "academic but clear, enlivened by her interest in the cultural moment" and calls her work "a definitive take on a 20th-century classic."

Read it online at the WSJ website.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 09:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The labyrinthine world of copyright law

Eugene G. Schwartz offers an excellent review of Susan Bielstein's guide through the labyrinthine world of visual image copyright law, Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property, for his latest posting on ForeWord magazine's Publishing Matters blog:

Before the internet, and especially before desk top publishing, you pretty much had to work with physical copies of things.… This imposed a variety of practical barriers that kept the leakage of rights to a minimum and concentrated its more substantial flow in the hands of professional thieves.
All of that has changed—and with the low cost and ubiquity of scanners, [and] cell phone cameras… gate-keeping the rights of images is like keeping a safe deposit box in a room with an open window.

Nonetheless, the publishing industry still relies on copyright law as the foundation of its economic viability. As all who read ForeWord well know, publishers have struggled to cope with establishing rights in an electronic world, and authors and agents have been pushing back while warily going with the flow.

All of this leads to a book I'd like to recommend to any of you who are interested in the subject, and especially if you deal with pictures as well as intellectual property and copyright in general: Permissions, A Survival Guide. Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property, by Susan M. Bielstein.

The author is the executive editor for art, architecture, classical studies and film at the University of Chicago Press.… The practical value of this work is that it draws on the author's experience and she takes you through the details of everything from choosing the size and format of digital files that you may be ordering to how to negotiate on price with museums. There is also a useful bibliography and a short list of image banks and artist's rights organizations.

The real meat on the bone of this work, however, is the author's blending of anecdotal experience, procedural advice and a critical effort to point the way out of the box that electronic reproduction and increasing layers of rights control are putting the users of creative assets—adding thickets of procedural obstacles and barriers of cost that lead either to shrinking use and availability or increasing use without permission.

Read the rest of the review on the Publishing Matters blog.

Also, read an excerpt from the book.

The return of the Parker novels

Donald E. Westlake (aka Richard Stark) published The Hunter, the first book in his long-running series about the master thief Parker, in 1962. Since then The Hunter has been adapted for film twice and become a classic amongst fans of hard boiled noir. But until recently the book has been neglected by publishing houses, going in and out of print, while used copies fetched high prices. Now, the Press has brought the Parker novels back to life with the republication of the first three books in the series including, The Hunter, The Man with the Getaway Face, and The Outfit—and word is getting out. Recently the Independent Crime blog posted about the books' resurgence, hailing Westlake as "one of the best crime writers to ever put pen to paper, and… [maybe] one of the best writers of the last century period." The post continues:

It's a long way from the paperback racks in drugstores to the world of academic presses, and U of C Press' decision to pick up Westlake's series certainly goes a long way toward validating the opinion of many that Westlake, with his Parker novels, has earned a place in hard boiled fiction up there with Hammett or Chandler, both of whom have been considered worthy of academic attention for some time.

More recently drama and literary critic Terry Teachout also praised the press's re-issue of Westlake's novels on Commentary magazine's Contentions blog, writing:

I'm delighted to advise readers in need of tough-minded vacation fare that… the first three [Parker] volumes are now available.… The Hunter, The Man with the Getaway Face, and The Outfit are handsomely designed, tightly bound trade-paperback volumes that have been freshly set from new type rather than reprinted from older editions. All of this strongly suggests that the University of Chicago Press is in it for the long haul, which is a good thing, since the uniform Parker is a multi-year project whose subsequent installments are to be published at unspecified intervals. Be patient.

Read an interview with the author.

Archived in Fiction | Reviews
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NPR reviews A Power Stronger Than Itself

Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead reviewed George E. Lewis's new book A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music for the July 29 edition of NPR's Fresh Air. In the review, Whitehead outlines the book's captivating scholarly portrait of the Chicago avant-garde jazz collective known as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which, since its inception in 1965, has counted among its ranks internationally acclaimed artists such as Anthony Braxton, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Muhal Richard Abrams, and gained world wide recognition as one of the defining forces in the avant-garde jazz scene.

Listen to the archived audio on the NPR website.

Also, read an excerpt from the book.

Finding something in a whole lot of nothing

Henry Alford reviewed William Davies King's book, Collections of Nothing, in Sunday's New York Times Book Review. King, writes Alford, inspires a certain wariness in the reader:

We're talking about a man who once collected worn strips of masking tape that he pulled off the floor of a gymnasium, a man who collects the business cards of business card printers, even though he himself carries no business card.…
Part memoir and part disquisition on the psychological impulses behind the urge to accumulate, Collections of Nothing is a wonderfully frank and engaging look at one man's detritus-fueled pathology. King's honesty and ambivalence about his pastime only increases his emotional connection to the reader. I wanted, by turns, to breast-feed and strangle him.

King believes that the impulse to collect comes "partly from a wound we feel deep inside this richest, most materialistic of all societies." But he also considers other possibilities—"It finds order in things, virtue in preservation, knowledge in obscurity, and above all it discovers and even creates value." His own fondness is for "the mute, meager, practically valueless object. … What I like is the potency of the impotent thing, the renewed and adorable life I find in the dead and despised object." For him, there's "something in nothing." A lot of nothing

Read the rest of the review and read an excerpt and an essay by the author.

Loved the ride

A great review of Erin Hogan's Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West appeared in yesterday's New York Times Book Review. Reviewer Tom Vanderbilt has traveled some of the same Western highways as Hogan in his search for atomic bomb sites. He appreciates Hogan's candor about her quest to see the monuments of American land art—works like Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels, and Walter De Maria's Lightning Field:

A prototypical urbanite, surrounded by friends and noise, Hogan says she was beset by an “early midlife crisis,” wondering if there wasn't more to life than meetings and e-mail. “I wanted to learn to enjoy being alone,” she writes. And as a “recovering art historian,” she longed to experience works she had only known refracted through art criticism and seminar slide shows.
So Hogan packed up her Volkswagen Jetta and headed west.…

I can attest to the anomie of motels that still advertise color TV, the dread of cracked roads with “No Services” signs, and the difficulties in being the only stranger in a bar. As a woman alone—Thelma sans Louise—Hogan faces this even more intensely. She tells a tale, by turns humorous and almost harrowing…

Vanderbilt concludes:

I was never quite sure what Hogan was looking for when she set out—self-fulfillment or some new insights into what art is, or what it is for—or indeed whether she found it. But I loved the ride. In Spiral Jetta, an unashamedly honest, slyly uproarious, ever-probing book, art doesn't magically have the power to change lives, but it can, perhaps no less powerfully, change ways of seeing. As one guide tells Hogan while they look at art in Marfa, Tex., “You're supposed to draw your own conclusions.”

Read the rest of the review on the New York Times website. The Sunday edition of the Chicago Sun-Times also ran a review of Spiral Jetta.

We have an excerpt from the book and an interview with the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Reviews
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The Skyscraper and the City on the Cityroom Blog

The New York Time's City Room blog published a post this morning on Gail Fenske's new book, The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York. City Room contributor Sewall Chan writes:

The book provides a new perspective on some of the most notable aspects of the Woolworth Building, like its eclectic design—Beaux-Arts with Gothic ornamentation, over steel-frame engineering.…
Its Gothic gestures suggested comfort, "moralizing evocations" of the old world from which many of Woolworth's customers had come, [and] by turning to Beaux-Arts design, Professor Fenske writes, Gilbert and Woolworth "resisted the forces of sensationalism and spectacle" associated with advertising and mass culture.…

Summarizing the legacy of the Woolworth Building, Professor Fenske writes:

"Woolworth and Gilbert's project represented in the eyes of contemporaries more than a vulgar contraption for producing a profit, and more than a dubious expression of corporate power, egregious advertising, or an aggressive assault on New York's new signature skyline."

As the building approaches its centennial, she argues, New Yorkers should recognize not only its "aesthetic distinction" but also how "it reflected and refracted the many dreams and obsessions of the urban society that produced it."

Read the full posting on the NYT's City Room blog.

Archived in Reviews
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The other side of nineteenth-century NYC

Writing for the July 17 Times Higher Eduction Laurel Brake delivers an enthusiastic review of The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York—a book whose look at the provocative weeklies that proliferated in mid-nineteenth century NYC Brake notes, reveals an important, yet often overlooked, aspect of the city's history and culture. From the review:

Generically, [the "flash" papers] mostly seem to be saucily illustrated weeklies, ranging from titillating to soft porn, including simple woodcuts, more than 50 of which are reproduced here. Their distribution points (which included hawker-newsboys, saloons, oyster bars, barber shops, steamboats and theatres), sporting connections and maps and accounts of brothels suggest that most were aimed at a bachelor subculture. An exception is the Whip and Satirist, whose detailed woman's fashion column implies that it both sought female readers and employed women writers.
Commentary and excerpts support the authors' contention that the existence of this genre in antebellum New York establishes the city as cultural capital of the republic in low culture as well as high and indicates a dimension of this period and its press neglected in hegemonic accounts of this "Victorian" city.

Read the review on the THE website. Also, read an excerpt from the book.

Physics for sale?

In the July issue of Physics Today William H. Wing reviews Daniel S. Greenberg's recent book Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism—a revealing look at academic science and its commoditization in the hands of private interests. From the review:

Greenberg's research is extensive. His knowledge of the institutions, policymakers, and industries involved in the development of marketable science, and their effects on the science community and public policy, is vast.…
[But] many of Greenberg's examples pertain to the biomedical sciences. Some difficulties he describes—the complex ethical issues involved in human-subject research, extensive regulations, and massive documentation requirements—are issues that physical scientists rarely encounter. Thus those scientists may infer that the book is not relevant to them. They should not. Results in the physical sciences can have enormous human and societal impacts and can raise knotty moral problems, as history has shown. Science for Sale is a cautionary tale that should provoke thoughtful discussions among researchers and academic administrators.

Read the review on the Physics Today website.

The economics of war

Jurgen Brauer and Hubert van Tuyll's new book Castles, Battles, and Bombs: How Economics Explains Military History was given a positive review by Geoffrey Blainey in the July/August edition of the Australian Book Review. Praising the book for its unique and insightful use of economic principles to explain military strategy throughout the ages Baliney writes:

Castles, Battles & Bombs offers insights about various periods of warfare. Some insights arise from the alertness of the authors… but other lessons in the book probably arise from their unusual technique. As economics is perhaps the most advanced of the social sciences, and as it is not frightened of making bold generalisations about human behaviour, some of its theories, the authors imply, should be applicable to military behaviour. Accordingly, they select six important episodes in warfare, five in western Europe and one in the United States, and then found a well-known economic theory or tool which might help to illuminate each episode.
In studying medieval warfare, and its emphasis on building defensive castles rather than equipping large armies, the authors invoke the principle of 'opportunity cost'. They point out that the castle had special advantages. It was a cheap way of guarding and controlling conquered enemy territory. Moreover, in an era of defensive warfare, a small force of men could defend it for a long period against a large army waiting outside the ditches and walls.…

The heavy British bombing of German cities in World War II persuaded the authors to consult another economic theory: 'diminishing marginal returns.' In the face of massive air raids, German railways and factories were surprisingly resilient, and Germany continued to make more and more aircraft. Moreover, contrary to predictions, the bombs did not weaken the German civilian morale, just as the earlier German bombing of London had not dinted British morale.…

Read the full review on the ABR website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Economics | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Wall Street Journal dances to the music of time

Few fictional works are as long, or as universally acclaimed, as Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. Originally published in twelve volumes over a thirty-year period, we republished them in 1995 in a lovely package of four books. Powell's epic literary tale of twentieth-century London continues to enthrall readers. Cynthia Crossen has an appreciative review in today's Wall Street Journal. From the review:

I have just finished the first two books in the 12-volume cycle, and I'm definitely going to read the rest. I've thrown in my lot, at least for the next few weeks, with Nicholas Jenkins, the narrator, and his well-born friends, lovers and enemies in England between 1914 and 1971.
Novels of manners are often dismissed as soap operas, aimed at women who cut their literary teeth on Jane Austen. Men don't live in the parlor; they go to war, or at least to work. But Mr. Powell, from his own experience, knew that men indeed live in the parlor, like it or not, and spend agonizing amounts of time trying to make sense out of other people's domestic behavior. Mr. Powell, wrote the English critic V. S. Pritchett, "revived the masculine traditions of English social comedy."

What elevates soap opera to the level of literature are the intelligence, sensitivity and comic eye of the author, especially how deeply he or she penetrates human character. Appearances are important, too, and Mr Powell is a puckish observer of the human form. "His hands were small and gnarled, with nails worn short and cracked, as if he spent his spare time digging with them down in the soil. Stringham had said that the nails of the saint who had hollowed out his own grave without tools might fairly have competed against Widmerpool's in a manicure contest."

Click on the first search result on Google News to read the full review, or find out more about the books on our website:

A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement

A Dance to the Music of Time: Second Movement

A Dance to the Music of Time: Third Movement

A Dance to the Music of Time: Fourth Movement

Archived in Literature | Reviews
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Two books in the TLS

The July 4 Times Literary Supplement ran an excellent review Evelyn Bloch-Dano's Madame Proust: A Biography—an engaging account of the life of Jeanne Wiel, mother to Marcel Proust, and as Bloch-Dano demonstrates, a decisive influence on the great writer's career. Touching on a myriad of ways in which Proust's mother helped to mold her son into one of the nineteenth-century's most famous novelists the review pays special attention to Proust's mother as a German Jew living in France just before the Dreyfus affair, which revealed the strong undercurrents of antisemitism and injustice that permeated French culture and greatly affected the role Jeanne took in protecting her son from the social pressures and prejudices of the day. Ingrid Wassenar writes for the TLS:

For Bloch-Dano the key to Jeanne is her status as an assimilated Jew. She is represented as a Third Republic Esther: "To save her people, Esther must hide her true origins without ever denying them." In the Old Testament, Esther treads a fine line between obeying the Persian King Ahasuerus and placating her Israelite uncle, Mordecai. In similar ways Jeanne Weil did not truly belong to herself.…
Madame Proust raises fascinating questions about the nature of maternal love and the degree to which motherhood necessitates self-effacement. As the author insists: "We have to admit that this supremely intelligent woman had no other ambition than the happiness of her loved ones. She wouldn't have conceived of her role as sacrificial, but let's hope there were some secondary benefits.…"

Read an excerpt from the book on our website.

In the same issue Paul Reitter continues on the theme of Judaism in Western culture with a review of Michael P. Steinberg's Judaism Musical and Unmusical. Steinberg's book argues that modernity gave rise to a Jewish consciousness that has increasingly distanced itself from the sacred in favor of worldliness and secularity—a trend contributed to by a who's who of Jewish composers and intellectuals including such figures as Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Charlotte Salomon, Arnaldo Momigliano, Leonard Bernstein, and Daniel Libeskind. From Reitter's review:

In 1934, Sigmund Freud, old, ailing, and painfully aware of the precariousness of the political situation in Austria, decided to write a book about Moses.… Completed in exile in Britain, Moses and Monotheism argues —doggedly and not very convincingly—that Moses was an Egyptian. Thus, at a time of unprecedented Jewish dispossession, we find Freud struggling mightily to take away Moses, too.… [But in] Steinberg's reading, Freud, by denying "his people" Moses, does nothing other than make his greatest gift to "the Jews."
The idea on which this interpretation rests is an organizing principle in Steinberg's book. What he admires and wants to track are certain modern Jewish "subjectivities," ones that for him emerged vividly in Central Europe and … involved "resisting" the ideology of origins, "loving history," and cultivating a reflective cosmopolitan "secularity.…"

Steinberg's "constellating of Jewishness…could well have a substantial impact on discussions of Central European Jewish culture, where, as he emphasizes, there is a pressing need for new conceptual life.

A posting about nothing

The July 7 edition of The New Yorker briefly but approvingly notes William Davies King's memoir of his lifelong obsession with ephemera, Collections of Nothing. The New Yorker praises the book for "the way King weaves his autobiography into the account of his collection, deftly demonstrating that the two stories are essentially one" and continues:

"I lost and found myself in remote topical aisles of scholarship-wreck," [King] says of his hours in Yale's library, reading the most obscure books he could find. His hard-won self-awareness gives his disclosures an intensity that will likely resonate with all readers, even those whose collections of nothing contain nothing at all.

Read the rest at The New Yorker website. Also read an excerpt from the book and an essay by King, “Nothing to Speak About.”

Collections of Nothing was also an object of much affection on Omnivoracious and the cover is “Most Coveted Cover #181” over at Readerville.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Literature | Reviews
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On the road to culture

Yet another positive review of Erin Hogan's Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West appeared in last Saturday's Chicago Tribune. Spiral Jetta is part travel essay and part art critique, but it's the former that Tribune reviewer Ann Fabian focuses on. With her own daughter getting ready to head to Marfa, Texas, "to seek her fortune as an intern at the late Donald Judd's minimalist art mecca," Fabian found the autobiographical side of Hogan's book most useful:

Marfa was one of the sites that lured Erin Hogan out of Chicago and off on her auto pilgrimage to the big art of the West. It seems to draw folks (like Hogan and my daughter) worn down by city life. I had to read the book.…
We learn about Hogan. She has been working in Chicago too long. She needs to get out of town. She needs to learn to be alone. She heads west in her trusty Volkswagen Jetta, crosses the plains and lands in Utah. She spends the next week looking for art there and in Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.… She talks to men in a bar, loses her wallet under a chair in a hotel lobby, pitches a tent in a windstorm, visits a roadside attraction, drinks beer with some guys and drives her Jetta on rutty dirt roads.…

Hogan's trip is more like what would happen to most of us if we drove around the West to look at art. Motels would be ordinary. Bar food would be lousy. But nothing awful would happen. We might take some notes and write them up. Someone like me might read them and reassure a daughter heading to Marfa that Donald Judd's polished aluminum boxes do not disappoint.

Check out the full review online at the Chicago Tribune website. Also read an excerpt from the book and an interview with the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biography | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two reviews in Times Higher Education

The June 19 Times Higher Education contains reviews of both Andrea Weiss's In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story and William Davies King's new book Collections of Nothing. Writing for THE Robert Gillett praises Weiss's biography of Erika and Klaus Mann for its insightful look inside the lives of writer Thomas Mann's two oldest children, revealing them to be serious artists in their own right, and their extraordinary yet tragic lives a bellwether for the era in which they lived.

And in the same issue reviewer Erika Marie Bsumek comments on the deep psychological self-exploration at the heart of King's Collections of Nothing. Bsumek writes:

Despite the title of this book, King has collected something—and a lot of it. He has collected 44 varieties of tuna-fish labels, 276 varieties of water-bottle labels, and an unstated number of candy wrappers, bacon boxes, cigar bands, luggage tags, envelope liners, cereal boxes and more.
All of these things are meaningful to King, for to him they represent the psychological physicality of his life. Emotionally raw and intellectually honest, Collections of Nothing is part memoir and part chronicle of the human impulse to acquire things. King's own impulse pushes beyond simple acquisition, for he sees value in the things that others overlook. His collecting impulse began, in his own words, with a pre-teen desire to fill up the emptiness in his life and to become "a collector/hero" worthy of his own story.

Read the King review, and read the review of In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain online at the THE website.

We also have an excerpt from Weiss's book on our website.

Archived in Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Richard Wright Centenary

This year is the 100th anniversary of the birth of African American author Richard Wright, whose famous novels Black Boy and Native Son redefined race relations in the 20th century. Appropriate to the occasion, the press released a new paperback edition of the authoritative biographical account of Wright's tumultuous life and literary career, Richard Wright: The Life and Times by Hazel Rowley. An illuminating article in the June 11 edition of the Times Literary Supplement references Rowley's book as it delivers a short biography of Wright, describing his rise and fall as one of the "stars" in the early twentieth century's "literary firmament," his complicated relationship to the civil rights movement, and the "hazards of his expatriation to France in the late 1940's." You can read the full article by James Campbell at the TLS Online. And then navigate here to find out more about Rowley's biography.

"The pocket-worlds of childhood"

In today's edition of the New York Sun Eric Ormsby reviews two new histories of children's literature including Seth Lerer's new book, Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter. In the review Ormsby praises Lerer for his ability to capture the special role the iconic books of childhood play in the lives of young readers. Ormsby writes:

In Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter Seth Lerer notes that the history of children's books is a study "of books as valued things, crafted and held, lived with and loved." This fundamental insight gives a human touch to what might otherwise have been a dusty foray into long forgotten hornbooks and primers. But Mr. Lerer, a philologist by training — and professor of English at Stanford — loves words, as well as the books made from them, and he is an impassioned reader. Whether he's discussing the grim New England Primer of 1727 or the decisive impact of Darwinism on late-19th-century children's fiction, he has a keen sense of what he nicely calls "the pocket-worlds of childhood.…" As Mr. Lerer says, "the adventures of the child go on in secret spaces: in the purses, pockets, tills, and palms of life." The most successful children's books are those which capture something of that childhood sense of secrecy.

Read the rest of the review online at the New York Sun website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

A map to the seamy corners of New York City

In last Saturday's edition of the Daily Telegraph Robert Douglas-Fairhurst reviewed The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York. In his review Douglas-Fairhurst gives a short overview of the social and historical significance of the "flash" papers—the nineteenth-century weeklies that covered and publicized New York City's extensive sexual underworld—touching on their appeal to readers in the UK and taking an amusing jab at one of the Telegraph's competitors:

"Flash" newspapers offered a titillating guide to the pleasures of urban life that had hitherto been spoken of only in hushed whispers: brothels, pornography, dog fights, playhouses, bare-knuckle boxing and more.
Crammed into a handful of closely printed pages was up-to-date gossip, sexual scandal, handy tips on how to avoid picking up a prostitute with a glass eye (the key, it seemed, was to avoid women wearing veils), and blustering attacks on anyone, such as immigrants or "sodomites", who might have threatened the developing group identity of these cocky young men about town.

By 1842, four rival publications in New York "squawked in competition" for their custom. Adventurous readers could use the Flash, the Whip, the Rake or the Libertine as a map to the seamy corners of a city that was often described, with pride and alarm, as "a modern Sodom.…"

The engagingly written introduction to this anthology argues plausibly that the flash press was the last occasion on which mainstream American journalism tried to titillate as well as entertain its readers.

For a British reader, the spectacle of writing that smacks its lips over the vices it claims to be disgusted by will seem far more familiar. It comes as no surprise, therefore, to discover that many of the most salacious stories printed in the flash press were taken from newspapers originally published in London.

Still, it is a nice historical coincidence that two of the New York papers from which the flash press evolved were called the Star and the Sun, just as it is fun to learn that one of the editors also started up a "frothy weekly with literary pretensions called the Sunday Times."

Read the full review on the Telegraph website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

The Messiah can wait

Jonathan Rosen, editorial director of Nextbook, wrote an appreciative review of Robert Pogue Harrison's Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition for the June 7 edition of the Wall Street Journal. Titled "Paradox Among the Petals," the review begins:

The rabbis of the Talmud counseled that if you are planting a tree and someone tells you that the Messiah has come, you should finish planting your tree and then go out to investigate. Robert Pogue Harrison implies something similar in his rich and beguiling Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Gardens, though they offer peace and repose, are islands of care, he writes, not a refuge from it. That is why they are important, since care is what makes us human.

This is the third book by Harrison that we have published and each has been a meditation on humanity and the natural world. As a professor of Italian literature, Harrison's work is steeped in classical and modern literature, but as the quote above suggests, he also draws deeply from the religious and philosophical traditions. His previous books include The Dominion of the Dead and Forests: The Shadow of Civilization.

Update June 11: Gardens was also reviewed in today's New York Sun by Eric Ormsby.

You may read an excerpt from Gardens.

Caretaking vs. consuming

San Francisco Chronicle reporter Susan Fornoff recently talked with Stanford University professor Robert Pogue Harrison about his new book, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Harrison uses gardens both literally and figuratively for a philosophical exploration from antiquity to the present, showing the connections between horticultural cultivation and the cultivation of the human mind. Fornoff's engaging article appeared today in the Chronicle and discusses gardening, the culture of consumption, and human happiness:

Harrison's … excursion through literature and history revealed a gardening ethic of care that the garden he tends at Stanford University—that of young minds, not plant seedlings—leads him to believe is in some jeopardy.
"This gardening ethic is very much in danger these days, where the emphasis on cultivation has given way to an emphasis on consumption," says Harrison, asserting that a Stanford student would be more inclined to inspect another's backyard on HGTV than to investigate one of the many campus gardens.

"We live in a kind of frenzy of consumerism which forgets that the true source of human happiness is not in the consuming but in the cultivation, in seeing something grow, or caring for something that is not yourself. And I don't know how much we teach the young this ethic of caring for something that is not yourself. Or even caring for things such as an object or a plant. Consumption and cultivation are at war with each other.

If I have any modest expectation for the book, it's just to try to help add to the awareness that consumerism is not a very promising formula for happiness."

The Chronicle article is illustrated with some photos of Kingscote Garden on the grounds of Stanford University, a secret treasure of a garden which Harrison imagines as "the quietly palpitating heart of the university."

Closer to home, Chicago Tribune critic Julia Keller describes herself as "completely besotted" by "this extraordinary, luminous book." Says Keller:

The author has a knack for elucidating complex thoughts with supple skill, so that you never feel lectured to or belittled. His book is sprinkled with references to classic literature, from the Bible to Homer's Odyssey to John Milton's Paradise Lost to Dante's Divine Comedy, but Harrison is such a wonderful teacher that even works you might not know so well go down easy, like the first swallow of chilled lemonade after a hot afternoon spent yanking weeds.

We also have an excerpt from the book.

The epic history of the AACM

The June issue of Downbeat Magazine is running a positive review of George Lewis's new book A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music—the definitive history of one of the most influential avant-garde jazz collectives in existence, the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Writing for Downbeat jazz critic Howard Mandel begins his review:

George Lewis's epic history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians sets a new standard for scholarly writing about the people who make Great Black Music, or any other kind. A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, interweaves interviews with 67 of Lewis's AACM colleagues, select journalistic reports and theoretical writings with the perspective of a trusted insider across a societal portrait worthy of Tolstoy. Lewis dramatizes the story of independent, underfinanced, determined, sophisticated artists from a working-class minority subculture struggling to launch an esthetic movement that emphasizes individuality, continuous exploration and personal development in a world that could hardly care less.

Downbeat magazine seems to be having some technical difficulties with their website, but for now you can read the full unedited version on Howard Mandel's blog Jazz Beyond Jazz.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

"A curiously fleshy moment in the history of New York publishing"

Yesterday the New York Times Sunday Book Review featured an excellent piece on Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz's The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York—a fascinating exhumation and examination of the weekly periodicals that covered and publicized nineteenth-century New York City's extensive sexual underworld. Novelist Nicholson Baker writes for NYTBR:

Cohen, Gilfoyle and a third writer, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz have together produced The Flash Press, the first book-length survey of this strange rock-pool of 1840s profligacy. Readers of Kurt Andersen's recent historical novel Heyday—and indeed everyone interested in knowing what New York City was like before the Civil War—will want to have a peek. The authors have managed to unearth and collate a remarkable amount of enriching detail about a curiously fleshy moment in the history of New York publishing.

Nicholson concludes his review:

Thanks to… the meticulous research of these three scholars, we once again have a way of looking through a tiny, smudged window into New York's long-past illicit life. Oh, and the drawing of the chambermaid and her warming pan is on Page 101.

Read the full review. NYT writer Jennifer Schuessler has a posting on the Paper Cuts blog about the book. We have three excerpts from the flash press on our website.

Financial speculation in the Dutch Golden Age

In a recent review in the May 24 National Post Ingrid D. Rowland praises Anne Goldgar's Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age for its revealing look at the speculative trading in tulip bulbs in seventeenth century Netherlands. As popular opinion has it, the Dutch obsession with tulips led to an unprecedented crash in the Dutch financial markets as demand for the bulbs waned. But as Rowland's review points out, Goldgar's new book reveals that "most of what we 'know' about tulip mania is pure fiction.…" and, in fact, the supposed crash of the Dutch tulip industry was more a social phenomenon than an economic one. Rowland writes:

Dutch tulip prices would have had to find their equilibrium: The heights they reached in 1636 were an experimental extreme. But two outside factors, as Goldgar shows convincingly, made the market's abrupt shifts in February, 1637, look like a cataclysm. The first was an outbreak of bubonic plague that erupted in 1636, bringing on its usual train of death and panic, but also an unusual number of wills whose provisions involved tulip bulbs and tulip transactions. The second was that the crash came in Carnival season, with its ritual rebellion against every kind of propriety. In a culture as carefully regulated as that of Holland, carnival craziness provided a crucial outlet for social tensions, but even when regulated by calendar and ceremony, the topsy-turvy carnival world was as disconcerting as a painting by Breughel or Bosch. In a plague year, those tensions and those discomfitures were all the greater, compounded by real fears that this time God's wrath would be implacable.
Tulips simply provided these long-standing aspects of the human condition with an irresistible symbol, just as the intangible evanescence of the Internet recently lent a certain suggestive aura to a similar quick shift in dot-com prices. The real problem, as this arresting book concludes, lies not in tulips, nor even in capitalism, but in ourselves—in the elusive but persistent ways in which we ascribe value to people, or things, or ideas.

Read the full review on the National Post website. Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Economics | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Looking again at Dorothea Lange

Sunday's Los Angeles Times ran a review of Anne Whiston Spirn's Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field. The Times online edition also includes a lovely portfolio of twenty Lange photographs from the book. Times reviewer Louis P. Masur explains what is different about Spirn's look at the Farm Security Administration work of Dorothea Lange:

Daring to Look is a hybrid work, part personal essay, part portfolio of photographs, part scholarly catalog of captions and negatives.… Spirn argues strenuously that Lange must be appreciated not solely for her portraits but for her landscapes as well, and that any consideration of Lange must take into account not only images but also words—the general notes and specific captions that the photographer wrote.
Spirn is right to refocus our attention on the landscape. Lange herself said she was trying in her work to tell the story "of a people in their relation to their institutions, to their fellowmen, and to the land." That landscape—of farms and signs, cut-overs and crossroads, buildings and shacks—traverses these photographs whether people are present or not. There are also the internal scenes of parlors and kitchens and stored goods. Many of Lange's photographs include doorways, the pathway between public and private, between physical and emotional landscapes.

Spirn will soon complete her own website for Daring to Look.

Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans

Charles Hirsch's new book Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans was reviewed yesterday in the Times-Picayune. Contributing writer Jason Berry begins by drawing a parallel between the early New Orleans jazz scene Hirsch brings to life in his book, and the city as we know it today:

The music we now call jazz flowered at the dawn of the last century, a time of grinding poverty and struggle for black people, as Charles Hersch writes in a provocative new history, Subversive Sounds.
A political scientist by training, Hersch illuminates how musicians of color drew from realities that few white people experienced in forging a form of dance music for people of both races. In that sense, Subversive Sounds is more than timely. The social realities of New Orleans today resemble the city in 1900: racial polarization beneath a blanket of poverty and uncertain leadership. A century ago tourism was in its infancy; today's "cultural economy" markets an urban identity shaped by African-American traditions that ran deepest in downriver wards that were wrecked in the flooding of 2005, areas where tour buses show visitors the wonder of our Pompeii on the Mississippi.

Read the full review at the Times-Picayune.

Two discourses on modern social identity

The May 8 edition of the Times Higher Education ran several noteworthy reviews of Chicago books including Scott Herring's Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg's The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860-1920.

Both books focus on the subject of social identification in the early twentieth century, the former delivering an insightful critique of American "slumming literature" and the gender stereotypes that the author claims the genre simultaneously acknowledged, yet undermined, while the latter gives an equally penetrating analysis of the re-making of Italian cultural identity in the wake of WWI.

Read Denis Flanery's review of Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History.

You can find Steven Gundle's review of The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860-1920 in the same issue.

A book published by Liverpool University Press, one of our distributed clients, was also reviewed in the May 8 THE. Read Martin Conreen's review of SK-INTERFACES: Exploding Borders in Art, Science and Technology.

"A Salacious Era of New York City Sleaze"

Writing for last Tuesday's Village Voice, none other than Tom Robbins has given Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz's new book, The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York an approving thumbs-up for its revealing look at New York City's "flash papers"—the nineteenth-century weeklies that covered and publicized New York's extensive sexual underworld. All but forgotten after the era's burgeoning censorship and obscenity laws shut them down, as Robbins notes, the author's recent discovery of a cache of these papers held by the American Antiquarian Society sheds new light on the magazines' lurid tales of libidinous lechery. Robbins writes:

Sex has always sold well. Most of us just assumed it took the likes of Larry Flynt, Al Goldstein, and the rest of that merry band of porn purveyors to finally get it openly on the newsstands. But now comes news that more than a century before them, an earlier breed of devilish publishers delighted readers with similar publications right here in New York.
That discovery was no small thrill for historians of American smut when they unearthed copies of long-forgotten sex rags that flared briefly in the early 1840s. These Dead Sea Scrolls of sleaze were discovered when Patricia Cline Cohen, one of a trio of authors of The Flash Press, was visiting the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1987: "On one memorable day, Dennis R. Laurie, reference specialist of newspapers and periodicals, asked her if she might like to see some uncataloged New York titles of a somewhat disreputable character."

Cohen tipped co-author Timothy J. Gilfoyle to her discovery for his own book on the history of prostitution in New York (City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialism of Sex, 1790-1920); Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz joined the team when another researcher whispered to her about some "racy primary sources."

Like Goldstein's Screw, the publishers chose titles that got right to the point: The Whip, The Rake, The Libertine, The Flash, and others with even shorter publishing lives. One of these, The New York Sporting Whip, offered a kind of mission statement: "Man is endowed by nature with passions that must be gratified," the newspaper asserted, "and no blame can be attached to him, who for that purpose occasionally seeks the woman of pleasure."

Read the rest of the review on the Village Voice website.

Early laurels weigh like lead

Writing in the May edition of The Atlantic, Christopher Hitchens delivers a knowing synopsis of Cyril Connolly's classic memoir Enemies of Promise, the new release of which is scheduled to hit bookstores later this month:

Like a centaur, or perhaps a bit more like a pantomime horse, Enemies of Promise divides into two halves: the critical and the autobiographical. In the first half, Connolly surveys the literary scenery of his day and employs as his scaffolding and Waste Land surrogate George Crabbe's bleak and sarcastic poem The Village. This, with its vividly negative bucolic imagery of "the blighted rye," "the blue Bugloss," "the slimy Mallow," and "the Charlock's shade," allows him a special taxonomy of weeds and thistles as well as of growth without roots.
In the second half, titled "A Georgian Boyhood," he gives a lavishly detailed account of his education between the ages of 8 and 18, and shows an extraordinary confidence in the likelihood that this narrative will not prove ephemeral. The best-known phrase from this section is his "theory of permanent adolescence" as a description of the marination process of the English upper class.…

"It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental and in the last analysis homosexual. Early laurels weigh like lead and of many of the boys whom I knew at Eton, I can say that their lives are over."

In the blistering prose that became Connolly's trademark, Enemies of Promise is a fascinating examination of high literature and high society from one the twentieth century's most influential and insightful critics.

Read the rest of the article on The Atlantic website.

Archived in Biography | Literature | Reviews
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Coastal cartography in context

Writing for the May 15th edition of Nature, reviewer Deborah Jean Warner gives a nice summary of Mark Monmonier's new book, Coast Lines: How Mapmakers Frame the World and Chart Environmental Change:

Mark Monmonier, professor of geography at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University in New York, seeks to inform the public about how cartography and society intersect. He wishes us to look closely at maps, to recognize which features are shown or missing, and understand why. In Coast Lines, he offers an assortment of eclectic and fascinating information about how coastlines have been defined, determined and depicted, focusing on the United States in the twentieth century.
Different maps and charts of the same coastal area show different cartographic coastlines. Monmonier calls our attention to four types, explaining that each is a human construct designed to serve a specific purpose, and the result of many observations and assumptions (the latter sometimes gaining the upper hand). One cartographic coastline is the high-water line visible from offshore. Another, introduced in the nineteenth century to aid safe navigation, is the low-water line. Two are more recent: storm surge lines are designed mainly for evacuation planning and flood insurance, and inundation lines describe the plausible effects of changing geological and meteorological conditions.

Read the rest of the review on the Nature website.

"Sporting news, theater gossip, humor, and not a little pornography"

Hugely popular in nineteenth century New York, "flash" papers—weeklies like the Flash and the Whip—capitalized on lurid tales of New York City's extensive sexual underworld. But, due in part to the evolution of obscenity laws and libel, their success was short lived and the papers themselves fell into obscurity. Now, as Chronicle of Higher Education reviewer Kacie Glenn notes, the authors of The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York have produced a comprehensive historical document of both the tumultuous history of the papers, and the culture that consumed them. Glenn writes:

The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York, written in association with the antiquarian society by Patricia Cline Cohen, a professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara; Timothy J. Gilfoyle, a professor of history at Loyola University Chicago; and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, a professor of American studies and history at Smith College, has two parts: a critical analysis of the papers' role in society and a collection of excerpts.
The average flash-press reader was both a man about town and a respectable citizen, and the authors aim to decode the texts in light of those conflicting identities. "Ambiguity and deceit" were the rule, they say, so that the weeklies simultaneously celebrated and condemned promiscuity and high-society romps. The Flash Press traces the papers' brief but turbulent run through the litigation and public outcry that eventually shut them down.…

Although the sporting weeklies were short-lived, First-Amendment victories for today's risqué periodicals suggest that the earlier papers were ahead of their time. As the authors of The Flash Press note, "Seen from the perspective of the early 21st century, the editors of the flash press certainly have the last laugh."

Archived in History | Law | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

An innovative blend of storytelling and scholarship

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.

Uses and abuses of iconic images

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.

Baboons in mind

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.

Review: Weiss, In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain

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
Posted by TXM at 01:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

How many Lee Siegels are there?

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
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Review: Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science

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
Posted by TXM at 07:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Custer and Native American Identity

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)

The monumental AACM

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.

Review: Weiss, In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain

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.

A Runyonesque tale of schemers and suckers

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.

Off the Grid

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
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Vicki Hearne in Poetry

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
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Review: Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book

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
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Review, Bliss: The Discovery of Insulin

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
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Review: Greeenberg, Science for Sale

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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.…

Citrus is a serious matter

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.

Sisimondo uses Pierre Laszlo's new book Citrus: A History to demonstrate her point:

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.

Review: Rector, The Executive Director of the Fallen World

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
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A cobwebby corner of Vichy France

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
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Histories of citrus and time

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.

Robert Pinsky on Elise Partridge

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
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Review: Owen, On the Nature of Limbs

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
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Designing a better ballot

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)

Backyard biology

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
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Review: Akerman and Karrow, Maps

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.

"Brigitte Bardot conquers America"

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.

From Chlorophyll to Carbon Dating

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
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Monkey Politics

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.

Found in translation

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)

Advances and abberations in earth science

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
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Two books in Nature

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)

Do psychic phenomena exist?

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 (1)

Fighting Espionage in Vichy France

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)

Maps to close the year

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)

A groovy pad in Bombay

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)

An embarrassing primate book

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)

The life under the snow

"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)

Terry Teachout on How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today

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 book last week. Teachout noted that "most contemporary productions of Greek tragedy are exercises in theatrical futility" and summed up Goldhill's contribution:

His approach is at once deeply informed by the best academic scholarship and no less deeply rooted in a commonsense understanding of what works on stage. The result is one of the most instructive and lucidly written books about theater to have been published in recent years. No one whose interest in drama is more than merely casual should pass it by.

Archived in Classics | Literature | Reviews
Posted by DB at 02:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Science and money

An interesting review of Daniel S. Greenberg's Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism is currently running in the January-February issue of the American Scientist. Reviewer Robert L. Geiger praises Greenberg's book for its lucid and balanced look at the influence of corporate funding on American academic institutions:

[In] Science for Sale, [Greenberg] ventures outside the Beltway to scrutinize the state of academic science and its supposed burgeoning ties with the corporate world. Although the somewhat fraught title would seem to place this work with an abundance of books condemning university ties with industry, Greenberg has provided a more nuanced analysis and offers some different conclusions.…
He begins with an iconoclastic portrayal of corporate-sponsored research. Far from dominating or corrupting universities, it has been a marginal and (since 2000) shrinking portion of the research they conduct. Academic research has great value for industry, but companies prefer to let the government pay for it. "Not many corporations are besieging universities to take their money," Greenberg says. "Eagerness for even more business is strongest on the university side of the relationship." Moreover, he sees little scope for industry to take advantage of this hunger: "In the current era of heightened sensitivity to abuse of academic integrity, the risk of public opprobrium for offending accepted values is substantial." Given the predominance Greenberg ascribes to self-interested behavior, it is not surprising that he frequently alludes to the fear of institutional embarrassment or individual ruin as the force driving ethical behavior. However, when he returns to this theme in his conclusion, he emphasizes the growing effectiveness of the systems now in place to police and punish scientific misconduct.

The review concludes:

Overall… Greenberg has provided an important assessment of the state of academic science. He finds that public doubts about the integrity of the research enterprise are probably overdone: "Science is in good shape, productive and socially beneficial," he says. "The negative elements," he believes, "pose a more complicated, less measurable story." But Greenberg's account makes it clear that those negative elements are concentrated in the biomedical borderlands, where vigilance in the enforcement of ethical standards is indeed called for.

Read the full review on the American Scientist website.

Review: Collins, Rethinking Expertise

Harry Collins and Robert Evans' Rethinking Expertise was given an interesting review last Friday by Matthew Reisz writing in the December 7 Times Higher Education Supplement. Praising the book Reisz writes:

The book offers a rich and detailed "periodic table" of expertise, ranging from the kind of beer-mat knowledge useful only in pub quizzes to the levels of skill that enable people to make a contribution to cutting-edge science. It considers wine buffs and art connoisseurs, hoaxers, journalists, and pseudoscientists. It looks at deep philosophical issues of "embodiment"—whether you need to move around in the world to acquire language or the jargon of a specialist field—that have major implications for the field of artificial intelligence and computer learning. It is full of case studies, anecdotes and intriguing experiments. But at its heart are questions arising out of the authors' work in the sociology of science and the challenges of scientifically literate public decision making.

A deep exploration of what it means to be an expert and the role expertise plays in our society Rethinking Expertise is essential reading for scientists, scholars, and policy makers alike.

Archived in Anthropology | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Review: Riskin, Genesis Redux

Jessica Riskin's Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life was recently given a great review by science fiction writer Greg Bear in Nature. Riskin's book collects seventeen essays from a conference of distinguished scholars in several fields who bring a historical perspective to this most contemporary of scientific topics. And as Bear notes in his review, the result is a particularly comprehensive treatment of the history of artificial life. Bear writes:

The strength of Genesis Redux lies in its scholarship and range of topics. Clockworks, mechanical toys and their influence on biological concepts are presented in fascinating detail. Joan Landes introduces us to the Hoffmanesque works of Jacques de Vaucanson's feminine flautist and (excreting) duck, and to the flayed, preserved and posed cadavers, the écorchés, of Jean-Honoré Fragonard: there is a dancing fetus and a very naked man staring in horror, jawbone in hand. Landes delivers a lively analysis of our reactions to the abject and uncanny, the frisson so beloved by fans of Dr Frankenstein.

The review continues:

Genesis Redux takes the time to shed light on areas I would not naturally consider, and thus enlightens and expands the topic. Its cautious perspective—the enthusiasms of the past considered in the sober light of history—provides a useful counterpoint to [other books on the subject].

See the rest of the article on the Nature website.

The locals are talking about Chicago under Glass

Mark Jacob and Richard Cahan's new book Chicago under Glass: Early Photographs from the Chicago Daily News seems to have caught the attention of the local papers recently. Already this month the book has received three separate reviews in the Chicago Sun-Times, Time Out Chicago, and the Chicago Suburban News. As Tom Cruze notes in the Sun-Times, in Chicago under Glass Jacob and Cahan have amassed a collection of the best photographs from the archives from the now defunct Chicago Daily News to document one of the most tumultuous and fascinating periods in Chicago history:

Chicago history circa 1901-30, with its triumphs, disasters and celebrities, comes alive through the lenses of Daily News photographers in this expansive treatment by former Sun-Timesmen Mark Jacob and Richard Cahan. The images, some 250 culled from more than 57000 recently put online (the original glass negatives reside at the Chicago History Museum), are bundled into themes easily explored by browsing history buffs. Probably the most fascinating photos here show familiar areas of Chicago that have changed throughout the years. Construction shots of Buckingham fountain and the Field Museum make the familiar seem fascinatingly strange.

And from the Chicago Suburban News.

The 250 photographs they chose for their resulting volume depict a gritty burg evolving through cultural upheavals and technological advances. Some of the buildings and vistas look vaguely familiar today, but the fashions and hairstyles surely don't. "We haven't been exposed to that many pictures from this era," Cahan said. "This is kind of an unknown period—I know that sounds funny—but also really the beginning of the modern age because of the car.

You can check out the rest of the Chicago Suburban News article online but you'll have to pick up a copy of the Sun-Times or the latest Time-Out magazine for the others. Also be sure to check out the Chicago History Museum's online archive of images from the Chicago Daily News.

Review: LePatner, Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets

Barry B. LePatner's Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets: How to Fix America's Trillion-Dollar Construction Industry is featured in today's Wall Street Journal business section. Reviewer James R. Hagerty uses LePatner's book to cite one possible benefit of the otherwise gloomy housing market crisis—weeding out the weaklings in the contracting businesses. Hagerty writes:

Every now and then, a major construction project is completed on time and on budget. Everyone is amazed.
Barry LePatner, a New York lawyer specializing in construction cases, thinks this exception should become the rule. Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets outlines his proposals for making that possible.

Mr. LePatner's swift kick to the construction industry comes when it is already down. Commercial construction is slowing, and house building is in a severe slump, partly caused by a glut of new homes erected by overly optimistic builders even before the subprime crisis made it harder to find qualified buyers. The downturn will apply the wrecking ball to many of the weaker construction companies. But that won't be enough, according to Mr. LePatner. He argues that the industry will become efficient only when its customers become savvier and more demanding.

His solutions involve, among other things, hiring experts who can monitor builders and who have financial incentives to prevent needless overruns. Tougher contracts should enforce fixed costs or, at least, severely limit the scope for escalation. And thorough background checks—looking for lawsuits, public complaints and financial troubles—may lower the chance of hiring dodgy engineers and construction teams.

Such steps would force out of business weak firms that can't deliver on their promises. The survivors, Mr. LePatner thinks, would be larger firms that are less reliant on subcontractors and are better able to train employees and invest in technology.

To find out more see the WSJ article (available for seven days free to non-subscribers) or navigate to www.brokenbuildings.com.

A. S. Eddington and the intersection of science and religion

The perceived conflicts between science and religion have dominated the media lately with controversies surrounding everything from intelligent design to stem cell research making headlines almost daily. But nowhere was this apparent contradiction more fully resolved than in the figure of A. S. Eddington (1882—1944), a pioneer in astrophysics, relativity, and the popularization of science, and a devout Quaker. Matthew Stanley's new book Practical Mystic: Religion, Science, and A. S. Eddington provides an in-depth study of how Eddington successfully incorporated both religious and scientific values into his life and work. In a recent edition of Nature magazine reviewer Owen Gingrich explains:

To analyse the relationship between science and society (including religion), Stanley examines the bridging function of what he calls "valence values". Like the bonding ring of electrons, these values facilitate the interaction between science and culture. Through the lens of these values, Stanley uses Eddington as a test case for exploring the interaction of science and religion in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century.
Unlike the natural theologians of the previous century, Eddington did not seek a harmonization between science and religion. He saw both as processes of seeking. As he reminded his audience at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, "A knowledge of nature is the great end of our work; but, if we cannot attain that, there is at least the struggle after knowledge, which is perhaps no less a thing." Eddington could have said the same of his religion.

Presenting a fascinating picture of Eddington's refreshingly liberal views on the intersection of religion and science Practical Mystic is a timely study of Eddington's brilliant life and work.

Philosophy on T.V.

Philosophy is perhaps the least visual of all the disciplines, yet as Tamara Chaplin reveals in her new book Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television, by the end of the twentieth century some of the most prominent postwar French philosophers of the day including Bachelard, Badiou, Foucault, Lyotard, and Lévy managed to appear on over 3500 televised programs. In the upcoming edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education Nina C. Ayoub describes one of the more memorable performances detailed in Chaplin's book:

When the psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan agreed to appear in 1974 on Un certain regard, he insisted in advance, outrageously, that he would not be addressing everyone, only the "nonidiots." Despite what many viewed as incomprehensible talk—"Was this linguistically tortured charlatanism, or inspired brilliance?," quips Ms. Chaplin—the show was highly entertaining. "You don't really have to understand him to appreciate his satanic humor and to be fascinated by the insolent spectacle. …," France Soir reported. "Lacan beats Jerry Lewis on his own ground," offered Le Figaro. It was good television.

Read the rest of the Chronicle piece on their website.

Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy

Two articles on Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites's No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy ran this month, both of which cite the book for its controversial look at some of the most influential images of the last century, and how such images have radically changed the political and social landscape of America. An article in the November 29 London Review of Books (only available to subscribers) begins with a critique of "one of the most reproduced photographs in American history"—Joe Rosenthal's image of U.S. troops struggling to raise an American flag on top of Mount Suribachi on the island of Iwo Jima. The LRB's David Simpson writes:

The Pulitzer-prize winning photo of the Suribachi Summit… was actually of a second flag-raising, staged with a larger flag after the fighting had died down. Literally speaking it was not so much a struggle against military odds as a struggle against gravity. This was known at the time, and was a sufficiently sensitive issue for both Time and Life to refrain from publishing it until it had become so ubiquitous as to be beyond complex questioning. That happened very fast. The photo became more or less instantly a leitmotif of American popular culture and a key item in the manufacture of consent by politicians and advertisers alike.…
Debates about the authenticity of photographs, especially war photographs, have been commonplace since at least the American Civil War. In No Caption Needed Robert Hariman and John Lucaites are less concerned with these debates than the ways in which iconic images have been used to propose and renegotiate various kinds of 'democratic citizenship' and 'civic identity.' Here original truths matter less than accumulated traditions or assumptions.… For these authors the Iwo Jima flag works because it is aesthetically compelling, … because it converts military into civic action, and because it effaces the personalities of the soldiers in the service of a common and anonymous effort. …

The review continues:

The authors think we have a 'need' for these iconic images, and often suggest that democracy is better for them. But it is a fine line (if there is a line) between the vigorous, deliberative debate conducted by empowered citizens… and the consumption of patriotic propaganda.

A feature in the Chronicle of Higher Education also focused on the author's take on the powerful yet complicated impact of iconic images on American culture. You can read the Chronicle piece online at their website, read an excerpt from the book, or navigate over to the authors' blog where they frequently post provocative critiques of notable images in contemporary photojournalism.

The Chicago Blog

Publicity news from the University of Chicago Press including news tips, press releases, reviews, and intelligent commentary.

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A Philosophical Exploration of Art and Humanity

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Changing history

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The definitive wildman

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North America's lost abundance

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A hilarious work of Minoan historiography

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Do animals have moral intelligence?

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The wild man in academe

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The story of seeds

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The definitive take on Bigfoot

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Rehabilitating intellectualism

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Maclean's strange artistry

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The perdurance of the Paris Opera

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The untold story of an influential African American intellectual

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Artistry of the Viet Cong

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TV as fine art

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Through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise—and now cyberspace

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Holiday wrap

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"Who knew Camus had something to say about gardens?"

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Defeat runs through it

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A lost magazine of the jazz age

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"Chic" Chicago

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A modern music missed by modern scholarship

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Ha Jin on creating Chinese culture

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The perfect writer

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