It's that time again: we accidentally left a printout near the copier on the 3rd of May 2010 (Goya reference not lost upon us!), only to find it still there this afternoon. With that melding of the Born-Oppenheimer Approximation in mind ("Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday born I was/Thursday's child"), let's again revisit the week that was:

**

The Times Higher Ed profiled Kenneth J. McNamara's The Star-Crossed Stone: The Secret Life, Myths, and History of a Fascinating Fossil. Their verdict? "A scholarly but highly accessible book, peppered with stories of the archaeologists responsible for excavating sites containing fossils" which "skillfully mingles anecdote with hard evidence."

**

Just days before the book was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, Susie Linfield's The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence was the subject of Jed Perl's thoughtful and challenging piece in the New Republic, where Perl commended Linfield's "natural appetite for photographic images" and her refusal "to be boxed in by any particular discipline or literary genre." What's all the fuss about? Excerpt here.

**

In the Guardian, Ann Fabian's The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America's Unburied Dead was featured in the Birdbooker Report as "an interesting story" that "takes readers on a darkly fascinating trip down a little-visited but surprisingly important byway of American history."

**

The just-released February/March 2011 issue of Bookforum includes reviews on two recent University of Chicago Press books: Rebecca Messbarger's The Lady Anatomist: The Life and Work of Anna Morandi Manzolini and James Attlee's Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight. Since both reviews are part of the print edition, you'll have to take our word for the praises below:

"Decaying corpses, flayed limbs, home laboratories—Rebecca Messbarger's new book has all the makings of a horror story. . . . Messbarger draws on her deep knowledge of the period as well as on a rich trove of archival materials to make a strong case for her subject's exceptional status as both artist and anatomist."

"For Attlee, the power of moonlight is not so much what it allows us to see as what it allows us to look away
from. . . . When we undermine the dominance of sight, we remember how to feel our way through the world and encounter a lost intuition."

**

Michael P. Jeffries, whose book Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip-Hop just made its debut, has a thoughtful piece up at the Atlantic entitled, "Is Barack Obama Really the Hip-Hop President?" With a nod to Young Jeezy, multiple subjectivity, and Dreams from My Father, Jeffries interrogates the "sloppy racial reasoning that fuels pop-cultural romanticism."

**

Annelise Riles, author of the forthcoming Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Finance Markets, made the front page of today's Huffington Post with a column offering an anthropologist's perspective on market reform. Like what you read? Check out her Collateral Knowledge blog here

**

Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred has a wonderfully nerdy piece up at Boing Boing on (echo? echo?) on the paranormal and popular culture. Arthur Koestler, Buddhist temples, the Johnson space station, superheroes, psychedelic tea, and a touch of sophistication, oh my!

**

Thomas DaCosta Kauffmann's Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting was reviewed in Toronto's National Post. The reviewer's verdict on Arcimboldo? "He was easily the oddest damn artist of the whole Renaissance." On the book? "Kaufmann, as a good historian, wants us to understand the Arcimboldo his contemporaries knew him."

**

And finally—Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses continues to ride the warp and weft of the World Wide Web. We've touched upon some of its successes here and can only add: if it was once the Summer of Hayek, can this mean that we've finally reached the Winter of Our Discontent?

**

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Reviews | UCP News
Posted by KAM at 04:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sometimes information clicks. Like the success of pink dresses on the red carpet outside of the Golden Globes (allow us—chagrin, we know—that cultural comparison), you can't anticipate how new scholarship, when produced, might take off and traffic through the usual spheres of commerce and the circuitry of Web 3.0. With that in mind, we couldn't be more fascinated by the explosive debut today (surprising findings in tow) of Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.

The Chronicle of Higher Education places the book in profile in a four-part (I II III IV) series ranging from commentary and news analysis to a more targeted study, including an excerpt from the book itself.

As the Chronicle summarizes:

In the new book, Mr. Arum and his coauthor—Josipa Roksa, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia—report on a study that has tracked a nationally representative sample of more than 2,000 students who entered 24 four-year colleges in the fall of 2005.

Three times in their college careers—in the fall of 2005, the spring of 2007, and the spring of 2009—the students were asked to take the Collegiate Learning Assessment, or CLA, a widely-used essay test that measures reasoning and writing skills. Thirty-six percent of the students saw no statistically significant gains in their CLA scores between their freshman and senior years.

And that is just the beginning of the book's bad news.

At the NYT's blog "The Choice," Jacques Steinberg's post, which synthesizes Arum and Roksa's research in light of findings from the National Survey of Student Engagement, has already received over 70 comments in just a few hours. In addition, USA Today opened their Education section with commentary on the book, offering the following lede:

Nearly half of the nation's undergraduates show almost no gains in learning in their first two years of college, in large part because colleges don't make academics a priority, a new report shows. Instructors tend to be more focused on their own faculty research than teaching younger students, who in turn are more tuned in to their social lives, according to the report, based on a book titled Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.

In a much trafficked post, Inside Higher Ed hones in on one of the book's key points: "The main culprit for lack of academic progress of students, according to the authors, is a lack of rigor." The Huffington Post continues in this vein:

The study, an unusually large-scale effort to track student learning over time, comes as the federal government, reformers and others argue that the US must produce more college graduates to remain competitive globally. But if students aren't learning much, that calls into question whether boosting graduation rates will provide that edge.

"It's not the case that giving out more credentials is going to make the US more economically competitive," Arum said in an interview. "It requires academic rigor. . . . You can't just get it through osmosis at these institutions."

But how do you know when a scholarly book has really gone viral? Two recent reviews from Vanity Fair and Gawker (respectively) place Academically Adrift's findings in a bit more vernacular light:

In a crushing exposé of the heretofore secret society known as "college," a recent book by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa reveals precisely what parents, grandparents, and anti-intellectual naysayers have long feared: university students spend nearly five times as much of their day in bed, playing Frisbee golf, and updating their Facebook statuses as they do attending class and studying.

**

To succeed in America, you must get a college degree. To get a college degree, you must go into a soul-crushing amount of debt. And what do you get for all that money? Not learning. College kids don't learn stuff.

No matter your thoughts on the particularities of what Arum and Roksa's findings truly reveal—who to blame, how to adjust, and what next to to further our core understanding—even the book's index presents a faceted take on the dynamics of undergraduate education ("e-mail correspondence, time spent on" and "student culture; and disengagement compact between faculty and students"). For more information on the book, check out its UCP page here.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Commentary | Education | Reviews
Posted by KAM at 02:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Oh, Thursday. It's ungodly early and we're transcribing mid-flight en route to the Modern Language Association's annual meeting. We already can't shake the strange combination of Brian Eno's "Thursday Afternoon" and a haunting recollection of the theme songs from late 1980s television programming—it must be the promise of Los Angeles. What does a Cat Paint photograph of the Rockies look like, you might wonder?

We're a little less pithy with the fog of latte brain, but there's a lot to report from late-arriving 2010 wrap-ups and more recent reviews, so with the usual nod to almost the end-of-the-week ennui, on we go:

Stephen Greenblatt's new collection of essays Shakespeare's Freedom saw its fair share of attention as we ushered in the new year. The Times Literary Supplement gets us started:

In Shakespeare's Freedom, however, Greenblatt engages in a more challenging and potentially rewarding exercise: to seek in Shakespeare's writings for reflections of the evolving thought processes of the dramatist's "formidable intelligence" in relation especially to the concept of freedom. It is good, at a time when there is a danger of seeing Shakespeare too exclusively as an entertainer, to find an acknowledgment of the intellectual powers that pervade his work, and Greenblatt brings his formidable critical expertise to bear on the writings.

The New Statesman nods to Greenblatt as "one of America's most elegant and inventive literary critics," and further acknowledges the "great pleasure" to be had in watching a contemporary master wax on a topic so broad as to encapsulate "beauty, hatred, authority, and autonomy."

Says the Financial Times, in a soundbite suitable to both author and subject:

The book's real lesson is Shakespeare's awareness of the human condition in all its complexity. He grappled with the absolutes of his age, yet his art appeals to timeless human concerns.

An excerpt from Shakespeare's Freedom is available at the book's University of Chicago Press page here.

**

In another December review, the Guardian commends Kenneth J. McNamara's The Star-Crossed Stone: The Secret Life, Myths, and History of a Fascinating Fossil (excerpt here):

McNamara's vision is even broader than that: using our knowledge of early habits of fossil collecting, he explores the evolution of the human mind itself, drawing striking conclusions about humanity's earliest appreciation of beauty and the first stirrings of artistic expression. Along the way, the fossil becomes a nexus through which we meet brilliant eccentrics and visionary archaeologists and develop new insights into topics as seemingly disparate as hieroglyphics, Beowulf, and even church organs.

**

The January-February issue of American Scientist devotes a lengthy feature profile to Andrew Pickering's The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future, profiling this original exploration of the lives and works of six key figures from the British cybernetics community, including Gregory Bateson and R. D. Laing, in a piece that challenges and engages the book's aims and ends.

**

On to the Society for Psychical Research! Jeffrey Kripal's Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred, his latest interdisciplinary foray into philosophy and religion, was recently reviewed in the December issue of the Times Higher Ed:

Kripal's goal is different; he wants to open readers' minds to the possibility that evidence for the supernatural may indicate that we need to rethink our basic beliefs about the nature of subjective and objective reality. What would our world look like if telepathy really existed? Or if the evidence for UFOs, or sightings of the Virgin Mary, was convincing enough to appear not as the delusions of the few but rather the reality for all of us?

**

Two University of Chicago Press books snuck into a couple of late-arriving Best of the Year and holiday gift-giving guides. Jonathan Yardley recapped his admiration for Harvey G. Cohen's masterful biography Duke Ellington's America in the Washington Post, while the Chicago Tribune's Julia Keller called out Ronald T. Merrill's Our Magnetic Earth: The Science of Geomagnetism as a "fascinating explanation of that mysterious force" perfect for "a self-described geek drawn to science books like an iron filling to a magnet."

**

And finally: Susie Linfield's The Cruel Radiance, a mesmerizing take on the photography of violence, was reviewed this past week in the Wall Street Journal, alongside a Q & A with the author. In both the book and the interview, Linfield examines the history of photography and its critics, which is briefly captured in one of her responses to the WSJ below:

Your book suggests that many photography critics don't really like the medium.

I think they care about photography and the effect they think it's having on the public. But they are certainly not fans in the way that Pauline Kael was with movies or Greil Marcus was with music. Their stance is being disapproving of how normal people use photography. Susan Sontag was very good at pointing out the ways in which photos can manipulate and fail to tell us the complete histories of events they document. But the valuable aspect of photography and the ways it calls up emotional reaction in us—I think all of that Sontag was oblivious to.

**

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Reviews
Posted by KAM at 02:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"And if I loved you Wednesday,
Well, what is that to you?
I do not love you Thursday—
So much is true."

We're back from our Thanksgiving sojourns and ready to set the cornucopias ablaze; first, though, we're busy using our Turing machine and Twitter algorithms to raise Anthony Powell from the dead. Have you downloaded your free copy of A Question of Upbringing yet?

[gratis ebook generator, c. 2010]

Susie Linfield's The Cruel Radiance was equally on fire this week, with a review appearing in the Washington Post, a Holiday Reading shoutout at Design Observer, an exchange between Linfield and Ian Crouch at the New Yorker, and a sweeping and thought-provoking profile of the book by Frances Richard at the Nation.

**

Andrew Piper, author of Dreaming in Books: The Making of Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age, appeared as part of a roundtable on the future of—yes, you're good—the book on the CBC. Listen to the podcast here. And don't forget to check out the book's amazing Appendix of not-quite-ready-for-primetime materials, Dreaming in Books: A Booklog.

**

John H. Evans's Contested Reproduction: Genetic Technologies, Religion, and Public Debate, which charts the claims made about reproductive genetic technologies (RGTs) by religious persons from across the political spectrum, has seen quite a bit of attention in a series of posts devoted to a range of issues Evans touches upon at the Read the Spirit blog.

**

The Financial Times compliments Harvey G. Cohen's masterful Duke Ellington's America, spurred by new releases of vintage Ellington by Mosaic Records.

**

Rorotoko, a terrific sleeper site for prescient author interviews and commentary, has a new one posted with Larry Bennett, author of The Third City: Chicago and American Urbanism.

**

Gina A. Ulysse (have a look at Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica here) offers a timely post on the Haitian presidential elections at the Ms. Magazine blog.

**

Do you like heartwarming things? You should read John Eklund's tribute to retiring University of Chicago Press sales rep, jazz aficionado, thoughtful raiser of eyebrows, and all around remarkable gentleman David Stimpson here.

**

And finally, we misdelivered a review copy to James Grehan, associate of the Journal of Middle East Studies, somewhere in Cambridge, MA. James, are you out there? We've almost lifted Powell!

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Commentary | Reviews
Posted by KAM at 04:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We often find ourselves comparing the nunneries of late sixteen- and early seventeenth-century Italy to a fairly volatile combination of The Craft and Moulin Rouge—just not publicly. So when the Economist took note of Craig Monson's Nuns Behaving Badly: Tales of Music, Magic, Art, and Arson in the Convents of Italy, we immediately put on our thinking habit and got to work. In the book, Monson resurrects forgotten tales and restores to life the long-silent voices of cloistered heroines, drawing attention to the predicament of modern religious women, whose "misbehavior"—seeking ordination as priests or refusing to give up their endowments to pay for others' wrongdoing in their own archdioceses—continues even today.

The Economist delights in the "too modest" Monson's tome, which "wears its learning with a smile" despite its serious milieu:

Convents in 16th- and 17th-century Italy were largely dumping-grounds for spare women: widows, discarded mistresses, converted prostitutes and, above all, the unmarried daughters of the nobility. Aristocratic families were loath to stump up dowries for more than one daughter. The rest were walled away. In Milan in the 1600s, three-quarters of the female nobility were cloistered. At the same time the church was cracking down on lax discipline, in nunneries as much as anywhere.

The result was a headache for the (male) authorities. With few genuinely spiritual nuns, convents were full of women finding ways round the rules through scheming and backbiting, through art or music or lesbian love and once, even, through torching their convent and escaping en masse. All this meant extra paperwork: complaints to the Vatican, petitions, investigations, and interrogations.

In tribute to the book, and in light of the fact that a title like Nuns Behaving Badly practically screams TOP FIVE or TEN (that might just be Kathy Najimy from Sister Act II, though), we've gone Gidget 2.0 and gleaned the archives for clips of our favorite righteous babes:

Sister Wendy Beckett: who hasn't screamed YES! at 3 AM when this ascetic's aesthetics air as a series of introductions to art history on late night public television?:

The Singing Nun, Jeanine Deckers (Soeur Sourire, or Sister Smile)—her tragic tale is definitely worth reading, if you're not familiar or haven't seen the 2009 or 1966 (starring Debbie Reynolds) biopics—everyone knows "Dominique" is the jam:

Nunsploitation was a popular film subgenre in 1970s Europe, especially in Italy, where Anita Ekberg behaves very badly in Giulio Berruti's infamous flick Killer Nun:

Agnes of God. VHS Trailer! Norman Jewison directs, Jane Fonda gives us a psychiatric star turn, and Anne Bancroft and Meg Tilly engage the sisterhood:

Finally, rounding out our list: remember when Pierre Batcheff bicycles down the street wearing a nun's habit in Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou? If only dream logic determined more of our fashion trends! Happy Friday:

Archived in Books for the News | Religion | Reviews
Posted by KAM at 03:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The new 16th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style has once again assured that Chicago is at the forefront of the publishing world, our advice and instructions fully up to date with the latest publishing practices—and sometimes even beyond, as this question posed to the the all-seeing, all-knowing CMOS Q&A demonstrates:

Q. Dear Chicago Manual of Style,
If, by using a time machine to go back in time, I've inadvertently changed the future, is there a way to make that clear with my verb tenses when I write my note of apology to the universe? For example, how do I refer to an event that happened in the recent past (Mars mission, Cubs' world championship), but, because I messed up the time stream in the more distant past, now didn't happen and won't ever happen? (This is purely hypothetical: I would never jeopardize all of history merely to save myself from a particularly unfortunate high school haircut.)

A. As it happens, because this question is so frequently asked, CMOS is currently developing the "temporal transitive" for the 17th edition of the Manual. In consultation with the linguists and physicists of the Chicago Hyper Tense Committee, led by Bryan Garner, our goal is to launch the conjugation by spring 2016. But take heart: according to the schedule, by the year 2016 the committee should have mastered the time-travel techniques necessary for their research, allowing them to travel back to 2010 and publish their results in advance of their happening. We should hear any day now, so please check back for updates.

Such forward thinking won't surprise anyone who reads the Observatory blog of the Design Observer: on Monday, Michael Erard, after spending time with the new edition, wrote, "If you were to send the 16th edition back to 2003, when the 15th edition came out, it would read like science fiction." The evidence?

Here's a taste. The words "electronic," "software," "technologies," "computing" and "website" all appear in the preface of the 16th, but the word "book" doesn't appear until the title of the first chapter, "Books and Journals," whose first section is titled "The parts of a book." (By contrast, the word "book" appears almost immediately in the 15th, on the sixth line of the preface.) Inside, there are 9 pages on electronic editing and only 3.5 for editing on paper. Words like "web," "electronic," "DOI," "metadata" and "digital" appear many more times in the 16th. And you simply couldn't predict from the 15th that you'd be talking about things that the 16th talks about. The glossary is a fascinating hybrid list, with words like "burst binding" and "castoff" next to "DRM" and "PNG." And there were no descriptions of any other intellectual property protections besides traditional copyright; now there are meaty paragraphs on the National Institute of Health's Public Access Policy, Creative Commons and other open source models. XML markup is presented as the most flexible, "most promising" means to deliver content in multiple formats, which is why there's an unapologetic appendix devoted to markup, mainly to XML.

Archived in Reference and Writing | Reviews
Posted by LTS at 09:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For those that know Mike Royko's Pulitzer Prize-winning columns, it might be difficult to guess that one of Chicago's "toughest-talking, hardest-working and hardest-drinking" newspapermen had a soft side, but as several recent reviews of Royko in Love: Mike's Letters to Carol note, his new book not only proves he did, but that it also provided the inspiration for some of his best writing. As Jane Christmas writes for the Canadian weekly Maclean's:

Mike Royko never shared his private life with his legion of newspaper readers, but they came to know him as a perceptive, chain-smoking, funny-but-fearless champion of the underclass, and a thorn in the side of the Chicago politicians he took delight in spearing. He became a celebrated syndicated columnist and a Pulitzer Prize winner, but the love letters written in 1954 to woo Carol, his childhood sweetheart, were likely the most important assignment of his life. He sure wrote like it was.

Crushed to learn of her engagement while Royko prepared for military service in Korea, Royko had thought his opportunity to woo Carol lost. But after returning stateside to serve at Blaine Air Force Base in Washington, he learned of her impending divorce. Mick soon began to woo Carol in a stream of letters that are as fervent as they are funny. And they won her heart.

Including his column "A November Farewell" written after Carol's sudden passing at the age of 44, Royko in Love takes reader's through the couple's dramatic courtship and marriage in an alternately joyous and tragic story of romance, where many might have least expected to find one.

For more read the review in Maclean's, or another that recently appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times. Also read our recent guest blog posting by David Royko, Mike's son and editor, on the occasion of his father's birthday.

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

Contemporary architecture has undergone some radical transformations alongside advancements in technology that allow architects and engineers to design and construct buildings that were impossible just a few years ago. Viewing the finished works—works like Daniel Liebeskind's Fredrick C. Hamilton building, or Frank Gehry's Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts—inevitably evokes questions about their construction. How were they built, and how do some of these precariously tilted structures remain standing? In his recent book Architecture Under Construction—a collection of eighty black and white images of some of our most unusual new buildings in the process of their construction—Guggenheim Award-winning photographer Stanley Greenberg explores the complex mystery and beauty of buildings before they receive their obscuring skin. Stephen Longmire writes for a recent article in the Chicago Reader:

By arriving before anyone else—except the builders, who are nowhere to be seen—Greenberg is able to study the guts of these iconic constructions. It's a matter of political principle for the New York-based photographer, whose two previous books, Invisible New York (1998) and Waterworks (2003), explore the seldom-seen infrastructure of his home town. "During the Bush years, everything was hidden," he told me in a recent interview. "I wanted to look beneath the surface."

Greenberg's photographs are a testament to the architect's craft, but they also show a world of vast computer-generated spaces for which the human body no longer appears to be a useful reference of scale. The buildings he explores resemble oversized architectural models, playthings for utopians and mad scientists. The roughness of the spaces reminds us that our civic life is always under construction, and more fragile than we may think. Consider what became of the boom that made these ambitious skeletons possible. "That was a moment in time," Greenberg says. "I couldn't make those pictures today."

Through September 6th you can also see some of Greenberg's original prints on display at in the new modern wing of the Art Institute, photographs of which, coincidentally, are also included in Greenberg's book. For a primer on Greenberg's work see this gallery of photographs from the book and read the complete Reader article online.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's unofficially here! Though the official publication date is set for the 31, the new Chicago Manual of Style, 16th Edition rolled in to our warehouses not long ago, and then began rolling right back out the door and into the waiting hands of wordsmiths across the globe. Meanwhile our IT department officially flips the switch on the updated Chicago Manual of Style Online later on this evening—the first ever simultaneous release of both a physical and digital edition of the CMOS. This is certainly a cause for celebration, but with the increasing popularity of the online experience, one might begin to ponder the future of the CMOS's physical incarnation. Will we ever see a day in which most editors opt for mouse clicks and full text searches over thumbing through tables of contents and indexes? Though obviously embracing the digital medium, the New Yorker's Book Bench blogger Eileen Reynolds writes:

Surely, someone must enjoy having the whole manual available at the click of of the mouse, but I'll stick with the book. After spending so many hours squinting at a screen, trawling for information on the Internet, any excuse to pull a hefty tome off the shelf is a welcome relief. Is there anything not contained in that sprawling index? Any question that cannot be answered in those 1,040 crisp pages?

Reading about online publishing in a giant book provides a strange tickle of pleasure; it's not unlike that moment of prurient curiosity one feels upon glimpsing a dirty word in Webster's dictionary. (If you must know, the glossary of the Chicago Manual contains entries for "hypertext," "web browser," and—yes—"Internet.") And this peculiar note about citations for blog comments is sure to bring a smile to any blogger's face:

There is no need to add pseud. after an apparently fictitious name of a commenter; if known, the identity can be given in the text or in the citation (in square brackets).

If only we could know what Strunk and White would have had to say about these strange times.

Read the full post at the Book Bench blog.

Also check out The Chicago Manual of Style Online for yourself as well as all the free content for writers and editors—no subscription necessary. Or read more about the 16th edition.

Archived in Reference and Writing | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's summer time and for many that means hitting the beach for sand, sun, and, perhaps, some seashell collecting? If the latter happens to be on your list of activities this summer, it would definitely behoove you to pick up a copy of M. G. Harasewych and Fabio Moretzsohn's new book The Book of Shells: A Life-Size Guide to Identifying and Classifying Six Hundred Seashells. Filled with hundreds of amazing color images of seashells from around the world along with an explanation of the shell's range, distribution, abundance, habitat, and operculum—the piece that protects the mollusk when it's in the shell—The Book of Shells is an essential accompaniment to any shell scouting adventure. But even if a trip to the seashore isn't on the agenda, as this sampling of images from the book featured in a recent review for the New York Times demonstrates, The Book of Shells posses the uncanny power to transport you there anyway.

Also, check out these sample pages from the book (PDF format, 1.7Mb)

Happy shell hunting!

Archived in Biology | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 09:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Telegraph recently ran a review of two new books on two of the greatest names in twentieth century jazz. In his review Ian Thomson sets Harvey G. Cohen's Duke Ellington's America alongside a new book on Thelonious Monk, both of which, Thomson argues, eloquently demonstrate how these "two giants of jazz … reinvented black American music." The review begins:

At a funeral in New Orleans in 1901, Joe "King" Oliver played a blues-drenched dirge on the trumpet. This was the new music they would soon call jazz. A century on, from the hothouse stomps of Duke Ellington to the angular doodlings of Thelonious Monk, jazz survives as an important musical voice of America.

Ellington was the first jazz composer of real distinction. No other bandleader so consistently redefined the sound and scope of jazz. As a classically trained pianist he fused the hot, syncopated sounds of Jazz Age Harlem with an element of dissonance to produce something unique: a dance music of trance-inducing charm, originality and attack.

Continue reading at the telegraph.co.uk and read this excerpt from Cohen's book.

Archived in Biography | Black Studies | History | Music | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A recent review of Martin Preib's The Wagon and Other Stories from the City for barnesandnoblereview.com begins by citing the some of the recent media coverage involving the Chicago Police Department—from the conviction of former commander Jon Burge "for lying about having tortured scores of suspects over a twenty-year period in the 1970s and '80s," to the recent death of officer Thomas Wortham IV, shot as a gang of thugs tried to steal his motorcycle, and, of course, the re-escalation of homicides in the city. The review continues:

Martin Preib's The Wagon and Other Stories from the City is a welcome, albeit at times maddening, effort to fashion a narrative that reflects the reality of this messy, yet vital American city. Preib has been a Chicago cop for eight years, but he's not defined by his police work. He greatly admires Walt Whitman and William Kennedy, writers who despite having seen the worst in mankind were (in the case of Kennedy, still is) capable of maintaining a faith—admittedly quivering at times—in the human spirit. Before his police work, Preib worked as a doorman at a downtown hotel, and there witnessed the grueling and often humiliating labor of those in the service industry. He soon became involved in an effort to take back the union from the corrupt old guard. Preib's been around. He knows writing—and he knows the city's darkest corners.

Preib is at his best when he's telling stories. He opens with a trenchant and at times hilarious recounting of his first job in the police department, driving a wagon that transported dead bodies. His observations are keen and fresh…

Continue reading the B&N review or read "Body Bags," a story from the book, and listen to a podcast.

Archived in Biography | Chicago | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New York Review of Books' NYR Blog has a review of Robert K. Elder's Last Words of the Executed, posted yesterday by NYRB contributor Charles Simic. In the review Simic reprints a few of the quotations from the soon to be executed prisoners featured in the book, but remarks:

Often more interesting than the final thoughts of some of these men and women are the short descriptions Elder provides of their backgrounds and the crimes they committed. Over the years, a few of them became the basis of novels and films, but there are plenty of others in the book that are just as tantalizing. Most likely, some of the executed were innocent, while others, who were guilty, had complicated and awful lives; one tends to feel sorry for them and wishes to know more about their stories. It's when it comes to true monsters, and there are plenty of them here, that even someone like me, who opposes capital punishment, begins to wonder if there ought to be an exception now and then.…

Navigate to the NYR Blog to read the full review.

Also, read these excerpts from the book.

Archived in Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last Sunday's Washington Post contains a rather interesting review of Martin Preib's new book, The Wagon and Other Stories from the City. As the Post's Jonathan Yardley notes, in the The Wagon Preib has drawn on his blue-collar working class experiences in the city of Chicago—from bouncer, to union reformer, to doorman, to his current job as a Chicago police officer—to produce a unique collection of gritty, insightful, authentic, and captivating tales. As the Post's Jonathan Yardley writes:

Preib's is a voice that has almost never been heard in American writing: not merely the voice of an ordinary policeman, which is rare enough, but the voice of someone whose working life has been spent in the service industry, "the place for muddled worldviews, unclear ambitions, blunted desires, and other people who just never got it, or thought they had it but didn't: the divorced, alcoholics, the new age philosophers, dopers, the indolent, the criminal." That's a stern view of the life in which Preib spent two decades—longer, if one considers the police force as part of the "service industry"—but it is tempered by a deep sympathy for the ways in which these invisible, or at best semi-visible, people are exploited and tossed aside by the system for which they labor. Preib is no sentimentalist—far from it—but he believes that "the distracted life of the service worker [is] the most authentic in the city."

Read the full review at the Washington Post website.

Also read a story: "Body Bags" and listen to a podcast.

Archived in Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two reviews of Robert K. Elder's new book Last Words of the Executed have appeared recently—one in the Chicago Tribune and the other in Chicago's Newcity magazine. Both reviews praise the book's author for his neutrality—Elder is a former staff writer for the Tribune—noting the book's broad appeal regardless of one's stance towards capital punishment. From the Tribune:

Those with no interest in using the book to make the case against capital punishment (or, for that matter, to justify the death penalty) should still find it worthwhile reading. I hesitate to use the word "entertaining" to describe the text. "Compelling" is more appropriate.

And from Newcity:

He's committed to neutrality here—just the facts, ma'am—to avoid "rubbernecking," and successfully keeps the spotlight on the last words of the convicted without erring into self-righteous coyness.

Read the reviews and see these excerpts from the book.

Archived in Biography | Law | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 02:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week's edition of Time Out Chicago is running a review of Robert K. Elder's new book Last Words of the Executed—a collection of the final words of inmates executed by the state. Some beg for forgiveness. Others claim innocence. At least three cheer for their favorite football teams. Documenting executions that range from 17th century women accused of witchcraft to some of the twentieth's most infamous serial killers, as the Time Out article notes, Elder's account remains surprisingly disinterested, asking only that readers listen closely to these voices that echo history. The result is a riveting, moving testament from the darkest corners of society.

Read the review.

Also see the author's webiste for the book.

Archived in Biography | History | Law | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Claude S. Fischer's Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character has received another positive review, this time in the May 24 edition of the Financial Times. The review begins:

Everyone likes to generalise about Americans, all 300m of them. But few are likely to be able to do so with the authority of Claude S. Fischer, professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

In Made in America, Fischer embarks on a vastly ambitious project: "to sketch how American culture and character changed—or did not change—over the course of the nation's history", from the colonial era until now.

That he does so in fewer than 250 pages (there are 200 pages of notes), and in a readable and entertaining way, is a formidable achievement. Fischer narrows his frame of reference by considering the American people's relationship with five basic aspects of life: physical security, material goods, social groups, public spaces and mental attitude. He concludes that, if anything, prosperity has enabled Americans to become more American, with more people aspiring to the prosperity and individual freedom that became socially and culturally embedded more than 300 years ago.

Read the rest of the review on the FT website or read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The June edition of ARTnews magazine contains a piece on artist Josiah McElheny and his obsession with the work of German novelist, poet, and artist, Paul Scheerbart. Through his many writings and drawings Scheerbart envisioned an electrified future, a world composed entirely of crystalline, colored glass—a vision which had a profound influence on many of his contemporaries in the worlds of art and architecture, including Walter Benjamin, Bruno Taut, and Walter Gropius.

As the ARTnews article notes, after discovering Scheerbart's work for himself, McElheny's work has been similarly influenced by the ideas of this nineteenth century visionary—not only inspiring McElheny's recent book, The Light Club: On Paul Scheerbart's "The Light Club of Batavia", but also a whole series of McElheny's other work, from film, to performances, to sculptures.

To find out more navigate to the article at the ARTnews magazine website .

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Modern technology allows architects and engineers to design and construct buildings that were impossible just a few years ago. At the same time, what lies underneath these surfaces is more mysterious than ever before. In Architecture under Construction, photographer Stanley Greenberg explores the anatomy and engineering of some of our most unusual new buildings, helping us to understand our own fascination with what makes buildings stand up, and what makes them fall down.

From a recent article on the book in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Shooting in black and white with a view camera, Greenberg approaches his subjects with what looks like naive—or architecturally unschooled—fascination. Part of his book's appeal lies in its recording of what must disappear to give buildings the structure and appearance they have.

Former San Francisco Museum of Modern Art curator of architecture and design Joseph Rosa, now director of the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, provides a foreword. But Greenberg's pictures by themselves make a powerful argument for city dwellers to enjoy their privileged view of architecture as a process, not merely a product.

Read the review at SFGate.com or see a gallery of photographs from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Environmental conservation and sustainable development are hallmarks of the modern green movement. But few people realize these concepts have been around for centuries. In fact, according to historian Harriet Ritvo, the environmental movement as we know it can be traced back to an unlikely place at an unlikely time: a bucolic reservoir in Victorian Britian.

This week's Science magazine reviews The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism, which "chronicles water-starved, late-19th-century Manchester's determination to convert tiny Thirlmere … into the world's largest reservoir." Ritvo's history brings to vivid life the colorful and strong-minded characters who populated both sides of the debate, revisiting notions of the natural promulgated by Romantic poets, recreationists, resource managers, and industrial developers to establish Thirlmere as the template for subsequent—and continuing—environmental struggles.

Deemed "a penetrating microstudy that mixes environmental, scientific, urban, and political history" by Science, The Dawn of Green investigates Victorian ideas about industry, development, and technology to shows how the lessons learned in the Lake District can inform and guide modern environmental and conservation campaigns.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by at 04:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lots of books consider the Enlightenment, but few earn such high marks as Dan Edelstein's The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution. In a recent review essay in the Nation, Samuel Moyn calls Edelstein's history "one of the most memorable and absorbing books on the era I have ever read." He goes on:

Edelstein argues that Enlightenment naturalism turned out to be a recipe for terrible wrongs. Edelstein wants to know how the Jacobins, whom he rightly credits with some of the most progressive and egalitarian aims any political movement has ever professed (notably the invention of social rights to work and education), ended up orchestrating a reign of terror. Against interpretations that simply blame circumstances, Edelstein too insists that ideas mattered. But the most provocative argument in his book is that the ideas that made the revolution spiral out of control were the cult of nature and the belief in natural rights.

A highly original work of historical analysis, political theory, literary criticism, and intellectual history, The Terror of Natural Right challenges, as Moyn notes, prevailing assumptions of the Terror to offer a new perspective on the Revolutionary period. Read more about the book or check out other titles on the period that call into question traditional ways of thinking about the Enlightenment.

Archived in History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by at 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Marshal Zeringue strikes again! Claude S. Fischer's Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character is featured this week on Zeringue's literary blog, the Page 99 Test. On the blog Zeringue asks authors to flip to page 99 of their books, summarize it, and then give a brief explanation of how it relates to the rest of the work.

One of the central arguments in Fischer's book is that American "voluntarism," or as Molly Worthen put it in a recent article for The New Republic, "an enthusiasm for community as long as membership is always by choice rather than obligation," has been, since the days of the first European colonists, one of the defining forces shaping American culture. Page 99 of Fischer's book takes up his discussion of this topic.

Click over to the Page 99 Test to read.

To read some pages other than page 99, see our excerpt.

Archived in History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New Republic's online review, The Book, posted an interesting critique of Claude S. Fischer's Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character yesterday, praising its provocative challenge to some of sociology's most entrenched preconceptions concerning contemporary American culture. As TNR's Molly Worthen writes:

Fischer's book is a fine exercise in quiet iconoclasm. His thesis—that over the past three centuries, economic growth and widening perimeters of social inclusion have enabled more people to share a uniquely American collective identity—may sound like heresy to many scholars. In most academic circles, one must avoid phrases like "American mainstream," "American exceptionalism," and "grand narrative" at all costs. These words have become code for a jingoistic history of privileged white men, the Anglo-Saxon haves who oppressed the multi-ethnic have-nots and tracked superpower footprints heedlessly across the globe. Since the 1960s, new social historians have asserted the primacy of "history from the bottom up" over the traditional tales of statesmen and generals, and have crusaded under the banner of hyphenated Americans and identity politics. They have condemned any attempt to chronicle a single history shared by all as a racist and classist illusion, a conservative maneuver in the culture wars.

Only a scholar with impeccable liberal credentials—a sociologist who has taught for nearly forty years at Berkeley and who co-authored a vociferous critique of The Bell Curve—could get away with what Claude Fischer has done. Made in America argues that there is indeed an American mainstream, that it is exceptional, and that over the past three centuries, it has thrived.…

Made In America is primarily the story of the white, native-born, Northern, Protestant middle class that, he argues, "lives and promulgates the distinctive and dominant character of the society"—a character shared, over time, by increasing numbers of Americans of all races, creeds, and income levels. "There is an American cultural center; its assimilative pull is powerful; and it is distinctive—or 'exceptional,'" Fischer writes. "The historical record speaks."

Read the complete article on The New Republic website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Duke Ellington's influence on the world of music is well documented, but less so his impact on race relations in twentieth century America. In his new biography, Duke Ellington's America, cultural historian Harvey G. Cohen shows how, as Ellington's music propelled him to international fame, he was able to harness his unique social status and artistic genius to influence issues of race, equality and religion. A recent article on Ellington in the New Yorker draws on Cohen's biography to offer a glimpse into Ellington's life and his strategies for manipulating American cultural attitudes towards race. In the article, Claudia Roth Pierpont paints a picture of Ellington as a man constantly struggling to maintain a broad appeal, (even in the American south where he occasionally played for segregated audiences), while making his music the front on which he waged war against the racism that inevitably shaped his compositions, performances, and his life.

Read it online at the New Yorker website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Biography | Black Studies | History | Music | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Michael Kammen's new book Digging Up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials offer an unconventional take on American cultural history, but who would have thought that in fact there exists an entire magazine devoted to a similar "examination of life through the lens of death?" In any case, we would have never guessed it, if not for this recent review of Kammen's book in the latest edition of Obit magazine.

The review begins:

We're constantly, reflexively, wishing for the dead to "rest in peace." It's almost a throwaway line, but also a benediction, meant literally and figuratively. Burial signals the end of life’s journey, life's struggle—a final repose for the secular, and a way station for those who believe that body and spirit will re-unite in an afterlife.

But the finality of burial itself is far from guaranteed. For the famous, the notorious, and sometimes even the obscure, interment may be just the first move in a protracted struggle over ownership, identification, reputation and history. Such contests are the subject of Michael Kammen's Digging up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials, which catalogues the surprisingly peripatetic fate of many of this country's most illustrious corpses.

Read the complete review on the Obit magazine website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Though Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen's new book Digging Up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials focuses it's attention on the deceased, his unique approach breathes life into the telling of American history. A recent review in the The Chronicle of Higher Education attaches some lively adjectives to Kammen's book like peculiar, morbid, and even funny, but as Kammen insists the book "'[adds] up to more than a miscellaneous lot of bizarre and lurid, but morbid and intensely interesting, anecdotes…' analyzing reburials helps us see important cultural trends, including the reputations of historical figures."

Taking us to the contested grave sites of such figures as Sitting Bull, John Paul Jones, Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel Boone, Jefferson Davis, and even Abraham Lincoln, Kammen explores how complicated interactions of regional pride, shifting reputations, and evolving burial practices led to public, often emotional battles over the final resting places of famous figures. Grave-robbing, skull-fondling, cases of mistaken identity, and the financial lures of cemetery tourism all come into play as Kammen delves deeply into this little-known—yet surprisingly persistent—aspect of American history.

Simultaneously insightful and interesting, masterly and macabre, Digging Up the Dead reminds us that the stories of American history don't always end when the key players pass on. Rather, the battle—over reputations, interpretations, and, last but far from least, possession of the remains themselves—is often just beginning.

For more read this excerpt or check out the forementioned article on the online edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education.

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

This week's edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education reviews Robert K. Elder's Last Words of the Executed—an oral history of American capital punishment, as heard from the gallows, the chair, and the gurney.

The Chronicle's Kacie Glenn begins her article:

In Last Words of the Executed, Robert K. Elder presents a collection of final statements delivered by people about to be put to death in America, from the prisoners in Salem, Mass., who were hung in 1692 for practicing witchcraft, to modern serial killers like John Wayne Gacy and Aileen Wuornos.

Elder, an adjunct lecturer in journalism at Northwestern University, searched newspapers, prison archives, and other sources. He refrains from advocating for or against capital punishment, instead noting patterns and shifts in the tenor of prisoners' last words. For example, when executions stopped being held before large crowds, prisoners became less likely to orate and more likely to speak directly to victims' families.

Continue reading at the Chronicle website.

Archived in Reviews
Posted by TXM at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Most of the books in The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe—a series from the Press that explores the role of women in early modern European culture—don't usually receive a whole lot of attention from non-academic reviewers. So it seems reasonable to take a minute to note when they do.

Benjamin Ivry has recently written a blog post about Don Harrán's translation of the poetry and prose of Sarra Copia Sulam in Jewish Poet and Intellectual in Seventeenth-Century Venice for the Forward magazine blog, The Arty Semite. In his post, Ivry frames the 17th C. Italian-Jewish luminary as the "Susan Sontag of the Venetian Ghetto," and cites her unique ability to overcome the dual obstacles of her gender, and her religion, to produce the body of work that established her as the first Italian-Jewish public literary figure in Europe.

Check it out online at The Arty Semite blog then take a look at some of the other titles in our OVIEME series featuring the fascinating poetry and prose of some of the best, though, less well known female voices of the early modern period.

Archived in Literature | Poetry | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As James Srodes writes in his recent review of Jews in Nazi Berlin for the Washington Times "all significant historical events—even the ghastly Holocaust—tend to flatten and diminish as time draws us away from the moment they occurred." Thus the importance of Beate Meyer, Hermann Simon, and Chana Schütz's archival portrait of Jewish life in the shadow of Nazi Germany—as Srodes writes, a book which "forcibly yanks us back with a fresh, close confrontation with what it was like to face the full horror of the Nazi state's extermination campaign—and to survive it."

Srodes continues:

This book chronicles the… harrowing story of what it was like to live in the heart of the Nazi beast and what one faced in the simple, instinctive struggle to stay alive, to protect one's loved ones, to bargain with and finally evade the Nazi killing machine. The book itself is a compilation of an exhaustive archival research project shared by two postwar institutions dedicated to gathering, preserving and making sense of the personal documents, photos, diaries, letters and government records of a once great Jewish community that had flourished in the capital of what was believed to be one of the most cultured, civilized nations of the world.

For more read the full review on the Washington Times website, or see this excerpt from the book (PDF format).

Archived in History | Religion | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Toronto's The Globe and Mail published a review of Adrian Johns's Piracy in Monday's edition of the paper. In the review Grace Westcott takes special note of Johns's unique approach to the history of intellectual property debates— a feat he accomplishes by focusing his narrative away from the victims of piracy, to the look more closely at the roles of the pirates themselves. As Westcott writes:

Why is Johns talking about a history of piracy, as opposed to a history of intellectual property law? According to him, the modern concept of intellectual property did not even exist prior to the mid-19th century, by which point, he says, there had already been 150 years of piracy. More pointedly, he argues that virtually all the central principles of intellectual property were developed in response to piratical acts. It is conflict over piracy, and the measures taken against it, he says, that forces society to define and defend, adapt or abandon, strongly held ideals of authorship, public discourse, science and dissemination of knowledge. Piracy is, from this perspective, central to the emergence of the modern information society.

Read it online at The Globe and Mail website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Law | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In a recent book review in last Saturday's Weekend Australian Roy Williams begins by acknowledging intellectual property disputes as one of he most pressing issue of the twenty-fist century. As Williams writes:

The laws of copyright, patents and related regimes are notoriously arcane; they are a mystery to most lawyers, let alone the public. Yet intellectual property is integral to some of the curliest issues of the early 21st century: the regulation of biotechnology, the digitisation of news and books, and freer access for the Third World to life-saving drugs, to name just three. To understand contemporary geopolitics, a working knowledge of intellectual property is mandatory.

Enter Adrian Johns's, Piracy: Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, offering readers the definitive historical account of every important IP dispute from the advent of print culture all the way to the present day, augmented by the unparalleled insights of its author.

Noting one particularly fascinating example Williams writes:

Especially compelling is the detailed account of the emergence of the modern notion of copyright. [Johns] analyses the central role played by London book traders of the 17th and 18th centuries. Based around Stationers Hall near St Paul's Cathedral, they made their living selling cheap reprints of books by local and foreign authors, and infuriated many influential people.

As Johns explains, foreigners were helpless to prevent their titles being exploited. Important local (English) authors and publishers were protected to some extent by a rudimentary royal licence system, but even that fell into abeyance during the internecine British wars of 1642-60 and in the generation following the Glorious Revolution of 1688. By the 1690s, it was open slather.…

Arguments and counter-arguments raged about the relative importance of untrammelled commerce, the open discussion of ideas and information in the public sphere, and due respect for the creative process.

Eventually, in 1710, the British parliament imposed a compromise by enacting the world's first copyright law. The principles were debated and refined in subsequent decades. The basic notion—now taken for granted—is that authors should be encouraged to create. They have no inherent proprietary rights in their work, but are granted a limited monopoly by government fiat. Crucially, the monopoly extends only to the mode of expression of their ideas, not the ideas themselves.

For more, continue reading on the Weekend Australian website, or read this excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Law | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Offering some fascinating insights on one of the most contentious issues in publishing right now, a review of Adrian John's Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates appeared in the January 21 edition of Abu Dhabi's The National. Reviewer Caleb Crain writes "by making words, music and images easy to copy and share, the internet may seem to have fractured trust between producers and consumers of culture around the world in a novel way. But in fact, producers and consumers have been in conflict for centuries." In his new book Johns offers a detailed account of this conflict, from the advent of print culture in the fifteenth century, to the reign of the Internet in the twenty-first.

In his review Crain briefly summarizes the history of intellectual property disputes detailed in Johns's book, and picks out a few details he finds most salient to current debates. From The National:

When literary property was abolished in Paris after 1789, cheaply printed, timely, derivative literature flushed everything else out of the marketplace—imagine the final triumph of the Huffington Post over the New York Times. Moralistic bullying failed when 19th-century American reprinters tried to agree not to pirate one another's piracies. Turning on consumers led to public relations disaster when the BBC hunted down illicit listeners in the 1920s, and again when Hollywood fought video tapes as home piracy in the 1980s. Unlike bullying and persecution, however, law has sometimes succeeded, especially when law has built on the conventions and courtesies that authors, publishers and readers have aspired to live up to among themselves. Yet some laws have proved so ambiguous that litigants have lost heart, gone bankrupt, or died before they could recover their rights.

In other words, Google's private negotiations with publishers and authors are an excellent start, but to ensure the future of copyright online, the people of the world, through their elected representatives, need to have a look for themselves. Intellectual property has been reconsidered and renegotiated with every new technology, and to hesitate to do so now, out of a timorous respect for earlier compromises, would be a failure of imagination.

Read the full review on The National website. The review's author Caleb Crain also posts opinion and criticism to his blog, Steamboats are Ruining Everything.

Also, read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Law | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to Wikipedia, recorded discoveries of bog bodies—human bodies which have been found remarkably preserved by the unique conditions of the sphagnum bogs in which they are found—go back as far as the 18th century. The mystery surrounding the significance of these bodies and the nature of their demise has for centuries provoked a macabre fascination in the public mind, but until the mid-twentieth century, no one even knew how long the bodies had lain in their muddy graves. As Philip Hoare notes in a recent book review in the Telegraph, it was not until Danish archaeologist PV Glob's 1969 book The Bog People, that many of these bodies were revealed to be human sacrifices dating back to the early iron age. As Hoare writes "sentenced to death for worldly crimes but slain to propitiate the terrible deities, they were strangled with leather nooses or were pinned face down with wooden struts to drown in the mud."

Hoare continues:

As a young girl in Copenhagen, Karin Sanders, [author of the new book on the subject Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination], was also a fan of Glob's book. But hers is a decidedly post-modern account, one which seeks to show how the bog bodies took their place in our culture, out of theirs, 'estranged from us even as they mirror us'. She deftly teases out the paradoxes: born of neither land nor water but something in between, the bodies are an uncanny link between the pagan beliefs that prompted their deaths and our own supposedly rational world.

Demonstrating the profound impact these discoveries have made on modern western society, Sanders shows how these eerily preserved remains came alive in art and science as material metaphors for such concepts as trauma, nostalgia, and identity. Sigmund Freud, Joseph Beuys, Serge Vandercam, Seamus Heaney, and other major figures have used them to reconsider fundamental philosophical, literary, aesthetic, and scientific concerns. Sanders contends that the power of bog bodies to provoke such a wide range of responses is rooted in their unique status as both archeological artifacts and human beings. They emerge as corporeal time capsules that transcend archaeology to challenge our assumptions about what we can know about the past.

To find out more read the complete review in the Telegraph.

Archived in Biology | History | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New Republic has just debuted its new online book reviews site, and in the midst of clicking around we were pleased to note that The Book as it's called, is featuring one of our titles amongst its inaugural reviews. In an article posted to the site last Wednesday, Harvard economist Edward L. Gleaser reviews Dominic A. Pacyga's Chicago: A Biography—a thoroughly detailed and uncommonly intimate portrait of the city and its inhabitants written by a native Chicagoan. In his piece Glaeser inventories a few of the main topics in the book including Chicago's rapid industrial growth in the early 20th century, the city's role in the invention of the skyscraper, and Pacyga's unique focus on the stories of the city's working class.

Navigate to TNR's The Book to read the full review and see a gallery of photographs from the book.

Archived in Chicago | History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 03:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Tribune's Julia Keller recently penned an article about a man who knows the city "like the back of his hand,"—and is one of its most prominent writers—Reginald Gibbons, whose evocative collection of writing about our fair city in Slow Trains Overhead: Chicago Poems and Stories comes out April 2010.

Though a native of Houston, Gibbons' new collection reveals that his muse is clearly the city of Chicago, where he has lived and taught for many years as a professor of English at Northwestern University. As Keller writes:

It was coming to Chicago—a place in which, to Gibbons' eye, the past and present commingle in rackety yet luminous profusion—that truly set fire to his imagination, he says. "I got such a powerful feeling in Chicago, a feeling I've never gotten in New York—the historical echo of the spaces downtown, the feeling that everyone who has ever worked here is still here. There's a profoundly good feeling of being connected with the generations."

And in Slow Trains Overhead Gibbons combines this connection to the city of Chicago with his inimitable command of language to capture what it's really like to live in this remarkable city. Embracing a striking variety of human experience—a chance encounter with a veteran on Belmont Avenue, the grimy majesty of the downtown El tracks, domestic violence in a North Side brownstone, the wide-eyed wonder of new arrivals at O'Hare, and much more—these new and selected poems and stories by Reginald Gibbons celebrate the heady mix of elation and despair that is city life. With Slow Trains Overhead, he has rendered a living portrait of Chicago as luminously detailed and powerful as those of Nelson Algren and Carl Sandburg.

Read more about Reginald Gibbons on the Tribune website.

Archived in Chicago | Poetry | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As Patricia Cohen recently wrote in the New York Times reviewing two new books on higher education, "champions of the market can turn up in the oddest places. At the same time that bankers and businessmen are acknowledging the downsides of unregulated capitalism, college and university reformers are urging the academy to more closely embrace the marketplace." And one of the reformers Cohen reviews is our author.

In Saving Alma Mater: A Rescue Plan for America's Public Universities James C. Garland draws on more than thirty years of experience as a professor, administrator, and university president to argue that a new compact between state government and public universities is needed to make these schools more affordable and financially secure. As Cohen writes:

Mr. Garland is concerned with putting public university systems on a solid financial footing. Although they educate 80 percent of the nation's college students, public institutions have seen their quality sapped by shrinking government aid, changing demographics and growing income inequality. In Saving Alma Mater, Mr. Garland argues that government should end subsidies altogether and allow supply and demand to rule. Let public universities compete for students and set their own tuitions. To ensure that poor students can afford to attend, legislatures should eliminate institutional financing and instead use that money for financial aid to individuals. In essence, he proposes a voucher system.…

Mr. Garland also wants to bring some market discipline to the culture of academia. While professors tend to be progressives, they are stubbornly conservative when it comes to change. Indeed, as Mr. Menand points out, early reformers argued that the only way to elevate excellence above profits in a capitalist society was by protecting the profession from the market's insistence on cash rewards.

The result, Mr. Garland maintains, is that professors are oblivious to the costs of complex procedures, drawn-out debates and layers of committees; appeals to increase efficiency and productivity are routinely scorned.

For more about Garland's take on financial reform in public universities read Cohen's complete review on the NYT website. Or check out the following links for a debate we hosted right here on the blog several weeks back when we invited Garland, and another of our authors, Gaye Tuchman—whose book Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University presents a formidable counterpoint—to dialogue on the issue.

Part 1

Part 2

Also read an excerpt from Garland's book and see the author's blog.

Archived in Economics | Education | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Heidi Stevens wrote about The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion in last Sunday's edition of the Chicago Tribune. Stevens quotes editor-in-chief Richard A. Shweder who handily sums up the book: "It's everything you ever wanted to know but never even thought to ask." Everything in this case being more than 500 articles in a 1,144-page book that was 10 years in the making.

Stevens also interviewed Mary Laur, senior project editor for reference books at the Press. A sidebar to the article notes five things learned from The Child, including this arresting fact: "Children in the U.S. are more likely to grow up with a pet than with both parents."

Sample pages, articles, and more is on our website for the book.

Archived in Reference and Writing | Reviews
Posted by DB at 01:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bookslut contributor Guy Cunningham has recently posted a review of Dietmar Elger's biographical account of one of the most important and influential artists of the post-war era, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting.

In his review, Cunningham notes how Richter's work strikes a profoundly ambivalent note somewhere between literal representation and the abstraction of concern to most of his modernist contemporaries, and takes special note of Elger's biography for its ability to duplicate this aspect of Richter's work in the telling of the artist's life. As Cunningham writes: "The great accomplishment of Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting is the way it captures [the] ambivalence, which runs throughout much of the artist's work.

This detachment emerged early in Richter's career, beginning with his 'photo' paintings—paintings based on and evocative of particular photographs—in the 1960s. As Elger explains, 'Working from a photo eliminates the artifice of form, color, composition… The intention is to give paintings the most unartistic, impersonal, and distanced character possible.…'"

Accordingly, Cunningham continues, "any details [in Elger's biography] that could influence our view of Richter's work are intentionally played down… in keeping with Richter's stated belief that 'Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures.'"

Offering readers a detailed yet disinterested look at Richter's artistic practice Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting promises to be the foundational portrait of this prolific artist for years to come.

Read the full text of the review on the Bookslut website.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jazz.com's Ted Panken recently posted an in-depth two-part interview with George E. Lewis, author of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. In the interview Panken and Lewis engage in a detailed dialogue on the history, theory, as well as practice of one of the most influential jazz collectives of the 20th century—The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.

From Panken's preface to the interview:

A Power Stronger Than Itself is a landmark work. The bedrock of the text is an exhaustively researched linear narrative history, constructed on over 90 interviews from which Lewis traces keen portraits of numerous members; AACM archival records; encyclopedic citations from contemporaneous literature, both from American and European sources; and vividly recounted personal experience.

Furthermore, Lewis contextualizes the musical production of AACM members—a short list of "first-wavers" includes such late 20th-century innovators as Muhal Richard Abrams, who stamped his character on the principles by which the AACM would operate; the founding members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago (Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Lester Bowie, Malachi Favors, and Don Moye); Anthony Braxton, Leo Smith, Leroy Jenkins, Henry Threadgil, Amina Claudine Myers, and John Stubblefield—within both the broader spectrum of experimental activity and the critical theory that surrounded it, expressing complex concepts with rigorous clarity and elegant prose.

Read both parts of the interview on the Jazz.com website, or for more about the book read this excerpt.

Archived in Black Studies | Chicago | History | Music | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Hecht was a reporter, a newspaper man in America's hottest crime city during American journalism's golden age." So begins Richard Rayner's review of the University of Chicago Press's republication of Ben Hecht's writing for the Chicago Daily News in A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago.

Though he is perhaps best known for his work in Hollywood as a screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, and novelist, Ben Hecht began his career on the gritty streets of Chicago, chronicling the city as a reporter with a knack for penetrating through the city's layers of dust and ice to capture a rarely seen vision of the life it contained, as Rayner writes:

"I have lived in other cities but been inside only one," Hecht said, and 1,001 Afternoons in Chicago, originally published in 1922 and recently re-issued in a gorgeous paperback facsimile of the first edition, records that intimacy.

"I ran everywhere in the city like a fly buzzing in the works of a clock," Hecht notes. He haunted "streets, studios, whore houses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, mad houses, fires, murders, banquets, and bookshops." He earned his early glamour as a brash poet of Chicago's underbelly.

And indeed from the story of a judge "trying to winkle out the story of a young prostitute on the stand," to the dark ruminations of an escaped convict, to the captains of industry, to immigrant day laborers, in 1,001 Afternoons in Chicago Hecht captures 1920s Chicago in all its furor, intensity, and absurdity.

Read Rayner's full review on the LA Times website.

Archived in Chicago | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While we might take for granted the notion that animal species can become extinct—and that, occasionally, humans are the direct cause—among the early pioneers of natural science, the idea that any link in the great chain of being could be broken took a while to sink in. As the Washington Times' Claire Hopley notes in a recent review of Mark V. Barrow Jr.'s Nature's Ghosts: Confronting Extinction From the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology:

18th- and early-19th-century scientists and thinkers believed that the world was created with a complete inventory of humans, animals, birds and vegetation, forming a chain of being.

The idea that a link in this chain could disappear undermined this fundamental concept. As Jefferson wrote, "Such is the economy of nature, that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken." He put the mammoth first in his list of American mammals because he expected that a living example would be discovered as explorers moved westward and encountered wildlife unknown in the east.

The existence of uncharted territories, not only in America but also in Africa and the South Pacific, fostered resistance to the idea of extinction. But as distant countries were explored it became clear that species were being wiped out.…

But as Barrow's new book demonstrates, as the idea of extinction gained credence so too did the idea of conservation, at first, among natural scientists who wished to preserve specimens for study, and later, among members of the public interested in preserving the beauty of the North American wildlife.

Delivering a sweeping, beautifully illustrated historical narrative of these efforts to preserve the natural world, Barrow's Nature's Ghosts takes readers on a journey from the early scientific discoveries that revealed the threat of extinction, to the pioneering conservation efforts of early naturalists like John James Audubon and John Muir.

With Nature's Ghosts Barrow offers an unprecedented view of what we've lost—and a stark reminder of the hard work of preservation still ahead.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Like other recent analyses of academic careers, Joseph Hermanowicz's Lives in Science: How Institutions Affect Academic Careers delivers some rather brutal news for all those wanna-be tenure track professors out there hoping to leave their mark on their discipline—it probably ain't gonna happen. As Beryl Lieff Benderly writes in a recent review of Hermanowicz's book for Science Career Magazine:

Many aspirants to research careers lack an accurate idea of where they're headed. In fact, Hermanowicz writes, accepting an unrealistically rosy image of one's future is a basic step on the road to becoming an academic scientist.

That image traditionally includes a pantheon of the greats of one's discipline, faith in the high intrinsic value of research, and belief that recognition by the scientific community is a valid measure of worth. This image also implies that, with talent and dedication, any young scientist has a chance of making a distinguished contribution.… [But] as the great majority of faculty members learn … the opportunity to do important science and gain major recognition only ever exists for a relative few—overwhelmingly those educated and employed at the most prestigious universities.

Yet, as Benderly points out, this certainly isn't the most surprising revelation Hermanowicz has to offer, instead, "what Hermanowicz's book adds is insight into the human lives behind these well-known processes.

Scientists at elite schools, he found, retain to the end of their careers their original dedication to research, the goal of pursuing eminence, and a belief in the essential fairness of the scientific reward system. In contrast, at pluralist and communitarian schools, most faculty members must accept that their early faith was misplaced and their dreams will never be realized. Some pluralists do succeed in attaining prominence, but most cannot. This early loss of faith has an advantage, Hermanowicz says: The painful task of coming to terms gives many of these individuals an impressive depth of humanity.

Elite faculty, on the other hand, generally perceive only at the end their careers—and to their intense disappointment—that decades of single-minded striving have not won a perch in the 'pantheon.' Only then begins their process of re-evaluation. Only after lives of great privilege and good fortune—the extent of which many never appreciate—do most begin to question the basic fairness of science's system of rewards."

To read the rest of Benderly's article navigate to the Science Career Magazine website.

Archived in Education | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Seemingly but one of the many placid bodies of water carved out of the glaciated rock that inhabits the heart of England's Lake District, the man-made Thirlmere—which since the late nineteenth century has been supplying water to the city of Manchester more than 160 km away—was once the focus of one of the first conflicts pitting industrial progress against a burgeoning conservation movement. In her new book, The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism, Harriet Ritvo offers the fascinating tale of Thirlmere's construction and the struggles to stop it, all while delivering an insightful analysis of how this conflict can inform modern environmental and conservation campaigns.

In a recent review of the book for The Independent, Emma Townshend writes:

Ritvo's account of this confrontation between industrial commerce and early environmentalism is clear and utterly readable. Thirlmere was the first modern conflict between these two camps, so difficult to reconcile. Ideas about natural beauty versus the need for modern utilities were discussed here in detail for the first time. But the consequent history of big-dam making has proved equally controversial—such as at Hetch Hetchy in the US, a parallel turn of the century project to bring water supplies to San Francisco by creating a dam in the centre of the new Yosemite National Park.

In our own decade, the Three Gorges project on the Yangtze took its place in the history books as the most destructive dam ever built in archaeological, cultural and human terms, having displaced some 1.24 million people from their homes and contributed to the extinction of the Yangtze River dolphin. Yet the project is also hailed in China for its formidable contribution to cutting greenhouse-gas emissions: in its first three years the dam has already generated enough electricity to cover a third of its building costs, and it provides significant winter flood protection to the provinces downstream, including several of China's biggest cities.

There are no easy answers, and the dam at Three Gorges demonstrates exactly why Ritvo's fascination with the conflict at Thirlmere remains relevant to us today.

For Townshend's complete article navigate to The Independent website.

Archived in Biology | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ever wondered about the techniques the pros use to produce such seemingly impossible images as the one above?
In a recent article for the Omaha World-Herald staff writer Rick Ruggles offers some insights into those used by Michael Forsberg, author of the new book Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild—a fascinating photographic journey through some of the last remaining natural landscapes of the Great Plains.

In his new book, Forsberg—whose work has also appeared in such publications as Audubon, National Geographic, Natural History, and National Wildlife—has captured a number of amazing images of natural landscapes and wildlife. But as the World-Herald article reveals, the intimacy with which Forsberg is able to approach his subject matter is, perhaps ironically, due to the fact that much of the time, he's not even there when the shutter opens. As Ruggles writes:

Wildlife photographers like Michael Forsberg, who just published the book Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild, now have the ability to capture close-ups of wary creatures that can hear or sniff out a person from hundreds of yards away.

Forsberg intended to deploy that strategy this bright-blue October day just west of the headquarters of the National Audubon Society's Rowe Sanctuary. The sanctuary is known as one of the finest spots from which to view the sandhill crane migration in March.

Forsberg, 43, looked for a place to assemble a "camera trap," which includes two small devices with an infrared beam running from one, the transmitter, to the other, the receiver. The photographer also sets out a camera and lights, or flashes.

A predator that steps through the invisible red beam triggers the camera, which in turn triggers the flashes. Forsberg can be far away, eating dinner with his wife and two daughters in Lincoln or photographing swans in the Sand Hills, when the image he covets is captured.

Continue reading about Forsberg's photographic techniques at the Omaha World-Herald or to preview some of its results, check out our online gallery of images from the book, and these sample pages in PDF format.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biology | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Before Freakonomics there was the Becker-Posner blog.

Started in 2004 by Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary S. Becker and renowned jurist and legal scholar Richard A. Posner, the Becker-Posner Blog was unique in the still-developing blogosphere of the mid-aughts in that it offered a reliable source of lively, thought-provoking commentary on current events, its pithy and profound weekly essays highlighting the value of economic reasoning when applied to unexpected topics. Now in their new book Uncommon Sense: Economic Insights, from Marriage to Terrorism Becker and Posner collect some of their best work from their blog, offering uncanny analyses on everything from gay marriage to proposed bans on trans fats.

Recently reviewer John Kay summarized their analysis of New York's 2006 trans fat ban for a review of the book in the Financial Times, detailing Becker's insightful economic critique of the issue and Posner's libertarian counterargument. In the end, as Kay notes, Becker and Posner may not deliver easy answers—especially when these two intellectual powerhouses go head to head on an issue—"but the book is like a series of tutorials from a good teacher, and the object of a good tutorial is not to tell the student the answers.… The objective is to equip the student to think more effectively about the quite different problems that he or she will face in everyday life. Tutorials with Becker and Posner," Kay writes, "would undoubtedly be very valuable experiences."

Read Kay's full review on the Financial Times website, or navigate over to the Becker-Posner Blog and check out some of the authors' most recent updates.

Archived in Economics | Law | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Chicago Tribune's cultural critic Julia Keller has yet another quotable review of a great new title from the University of Chicago Press. This time Keller offers an insightful critique of Philip Graham's new travel memoir documenting his year-long sojourn in Portugal with his family in The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon. Originally published as a series of dispatches that first appeared on the McSweeney's website as "Philip Graham Spends a Year in Lisbon," his new book is an expanded version of those essays that, as Keller writes, offers readers "the chance to travel alongside the Graham family as they explore a city, a language, a culture and, of course, themselves." Keller's review begins:

Ask me to peruse your vacation snapshots and I'll probably do so, but reluctantly, and not without an inward wince.

Ask me to listen to your vacation stories—or better yet, to read them—and I'll happily oblige.

Photos are simple and static and crudely bullying; they force you to see things from a single, inert perspective. Stories, though, are complex, supple and surprising. That's why The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon is so enchanting: It dances and sighs. It twitches and hums and stumbles and then rights itself, with a winsome smile. It's like a living thing, filled with desire and uncertainty and joy and regret.

Continue reading Keller's review on the Chicago Tribune website. Also read an excerpt and see the author's website.

Archived in Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As an article in the November London Review of Books points out, the term "honor killing" is relatively new to the western legal system, but in recent years it has increasingly come into play as cases of filicide in Middle Eastern immigrant communities—often motivated by inter-generational culture clashes over arranged marriages—become more common. To explore this topic the LRB article cites several recent books on the subject including Unni Wikan's In Honor of Fadime: Murder and Shame—the tragic tale of Kurdish emigre Fadime Sahindal, murdered in Uppsala, Sweden in 2002 by her father because of her relationship with a man outside of their community—a tragedy compunded by her efforts to avoid such a fate by bringing the issue to the public's attention. As Jacqueline Rose writes for the LRB:

Fadime is remarkable for the way she went public. She secured convictions against her father and brother for threatening to kill her, and then again against her brother for seriously assaulting her during a return visit to Uppsala: he was given a five-month prison sentence.…

Fadime's successes in court gave her every reason to believe that her boldness was paying off. A month before her father and brother were due to be sentenced, she appeared with Patrik on television; they talked about their love and the threats against them. Fadime sought publicity in the belief that it would save her life: 'Perhaps they won't dare to kill me now that so many people know who I am!' Two months before her death, in November 2001, she agreed, after first refusing, to address a seminar in the Swedish parliament organised by the Violence Against Women network. In front of an audience of 350, she described her turn to the mass media as her 'last chance'. She had hoped to create a public debate about the problems of girls from immigrant families. But she also recognised that what she called the 'media circus' had got out of control. Fadime had become a 'national celebrity'. For her sister Nebile, it was this that drove their father to violence, and made him sick (that he was sick would be the grounds for his defence).

There is… something contradictory in the idea that someone could 'go for celebrity status in an attempt to protect herself' (celebrity always contains a potential element of shame). But if this case is so powerful, and more than justifies the meticulous attention Wikan gives to it, it is because Fadime is also driven by another vision of social obligation. She is speaking for the invisible women of her community.… Each of these three books can be read as a form of devotion (Wikan's is literally written 'in honour' of her subject): they are at once tributes and campaigns. To write about honour killing is in the first instance simply to demand that these crimes be talked about and seen. Viewed in these terms, Fadime's self-exposure is a kind of sharing and an act of love: 'I gave voice, and lent face.'

For more read the complete article on the LRB website and read this excerpt from the book.

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

Last summer, the legendary Hyde Park Seminary Co-op Bookstores launched a new "web magazine" called The Front Table. Just like the stores themselves, the blog is eclectic, intellectual, and full of fascinating reads. One of our favorite features is "The Editors Speak," a semi-regular look behind the scenes at what goes into the making of a book.

The Press's editorial staff have contributed three times to the column, and, indeed, our own Rodney Powell inaugurated the series with his inside look at the genesis of Scorsese by Ebert. In the piece, Powell discusses his trepidation about contacting the great director, his admiration for the professionalism of the great critic, and his appreciation for the sometimes-overlooked contributions of our design staff. Executive Editor Christie Henry also wrote on her experience with Bigfoot—the book, not the imaginary beast. In her piece, she admits "the irony of a university press publishing a book on Bigfoot" but defends its very serious intentions.

Just this week, the Front Table published Mary Laur's reflections on the herculean task of compiling the monumental The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion. Ten years in the making and consisting of 570 articles, The Child is a logistical feat as well as a landmark resource for anyone who has, or once was, a child. After you read Laur's account, check out the website for the book, and get lost in the world of The Child. Also, see a video from the U of C News Office of Richard Shweder, editor-in-chief of The Child, talking about the book and the process of its creation.

Archived in Reviews
Posted by at 03:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An article in today's Omaha World-Herald begins by quoting photographer and author Michael Forsberg as he describes one one his initial experiences with the midwestern landscapes that inspired his newest book, Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild. The World-Herald's David Hendee writes:

Laid out prone in South Dakota's Badlands, wildlife photographer Michael Forsberg focused on burrowing owls in the prairie dog town far down the prairie.

During weeks spent hunkered in Dakota dirt, Forberg's aim shifted.

"I was amazed day after day at all the wildlife I saw," he said. "Not just the amount, but the diversity. Everything from dragon flies to pronghorn and a bunch in between. But I knew that people in cars screaming by off in the distance were looking over this landscape and thinking there wasn't anything there."

Forsberg set out to challenge the notion that the Great Plains is a place to drive through or fly over by revealing the region in ways rarely seen or thought about.

And with Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild Forsberg has accomplished just that. Revealing a midwestern landscape alien even to many of those who live in its midst, Forsberg's book demonstrates the surprisingly diverse natural communities that still exist on the Great Plains, despite their increasingly endangered status through several centuries of westward expansion and the rise of large scale industrial agricultural practices. Practices which continues to threaten some of the last strongholds of virgin prairie left in the U.S.

More than just pretty pictures, in his new book Forsberg has enlisted the help of former poet laureate Ted Kooser, writer-rancher Dan O'Brien, and geographer David Wishart to provide a foreword and essays complementing his stunning images of some of the last key habitats holding the plains ecosystem, and its arability, together. (For an interesting historical look at the consequences of human mismanagement of the Great Plains see Dorothea Lange's photographs of some of the first Dust Bowl migrants in Anne Whiston Spirn's recent book Daring to Look.) As Hendee writes:

Great Plains rivers have run dry. Aquifers have been mined. Wildlife populations have disappeared. Top soil has blown away. And native grassland continues to be turned under by plows.

"This is a working (farming) landscape and always will be," Forsberg said. "But we have choices to make about whether we want wildlife to have a seat at the table. If we don't value this natural heritage—and there will continue to be change if we don't value it—we could lose it altogether."

Read the full article on the Omaha World-Herald website. Also see a gallery of photographs and sample pages in PDF format (4.2Mb).

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biology | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tomorrow, the highly-anticipated big-screen collaboration between Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers, the feature film adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, opens in theaters across the country. Your correspondent has been eagerly awaiting the live action rumpus since the Arcade Fire-soundtracked trailer hit the web back in April, and now that the big day is nearly here, I thought I'd call on Press author Seth Lerer to see what he made of Max in the mutiplex. Lerer, the National Book Critics Circle award-winning author of Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter, offers here his thoughts on Sendak, Jewish literary tradition, Kafka, immigration and much, much more.

The year Where the Wild Things Are came out, I turned eight. In the long afternoons between the end of school and dinner, I would kill time along the quiet Brooklyn street on which we lived. Sometimes, I would find a stickball game, and in the waning light my friends and I would hit the ball and run between the cars. One day I hit it into our landlord's window, and his wife came out—a woman probably no older than I am now, but at the time, someone who seemed so ancient that she had a tail—shaking her fist and calling me a "Vilde chaya."

Continue reading "Max as Migrant" »

Archived in Reviews
Posted by at 01:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Several new reviews of Dominic Pacyga's Chicago: A Biography have popped up on the radar recently, one in the Chicago Sun-Times and another on Drexel University's online magazine The Smart Set. Both focus their attention on Pacyga's book for reversing the usual top-down approach to the telling of Chicago history, letting the stories of ordinary people narrate this "biographical" account of city life. Thomas Frisbie quotes Pacyga in his review for the Sun-Times:

"I try to look at everyday people as much as I can, at people in neighborhoods, how they build their community, how they survive, how they prosper or don't prosper," said Pacyga, who grew up in the Back of the Yards, attended De La Salle Institute and worked at the Union Stockyards when he was in college.

There are sections, for example, on "Ted Swigon’s Back of the Yards" and "Angeline Jackson's neighborhood." Swigon was an altar boy at St. John of God's Church and attended Quigley Preparatory Seminary before transferring to De La Salle. Jackson came from Mississippi to Chicago, eventually moving to Englewood.

"[Jackson's story] tells a lot about how that neighborhood went through racial change and how it went through physical change," Pacyga said. "She soon found herself living over an off-ramp of the Dan Ryan Expy. The Dan Ryan plowed right in front of her house."

And Jessa Crispin writes for The Smart Set:

When professor and Chicago historian Dominic A. Pacyga sat down to start his new history of the city, there was an overwhelming amount of material to work with. He decided not to write a chronological history of the city, something that could take up multiple volumes, but to treat Chicago as if it were a person—hence the title Chicago: A Biography. He focused on what he believes to be Chicago's defining characteristics, rather than its more flashier aspects. Some of the more sensational characters—the sociopaths like Leopold and Loeb, the gangsters like John Dillinger, the bisexual eccentrics like Frank Lloyd Wright—get either a cursory mention or none at all. His attention is taken up by what really does define the city: a fight for fairness for laborers, for the poor, and for children; capitalism and corruption run amok; the work produced and the people who do it.

The full text of both reviews can be found online. Also see a gallery of photographs from the book.

Archived in Chicago | History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Black holes are undoubtedly one of the all-time coolest phenomena in astrophysics. With his theory of relativity, Einstein initially predicted their existence as the inevitable result of gravitation on some of the more massive objects in the universe. But according to Fulvio Melia's new book Cracking the Einstein Code: Relativity and the Birth of Black Hole Physics, for more than four decades after the publication of Einstein's ideas, this phenomenon, along with the rest of Einstein's theory, remained a curious abstraction for most scientists who lacked the final set of equations that would allow them to empirically verify its principles.

Then came Roy Kerr, the twenty-nine-year-old Cambridge graduate who solved the great riddle in 1963, transforming Einstein's theory into an applicable description of how real objects in the universe actually behave—including black holes. As a recent review in the New Scientist notes:

The most intriguing application of Kerr's solution is in describing objects that are so massive and so dense that their gravitational field prevents even light from escaping. Einstein himself was skeptical that such "black holes" could exist in nature. Just as Kerr was developing his solution, however, the first compelling evidence for black holes was found. Today, black holes are thought to be commonplace, including the "supermassive" variety that lurk at the centre of most galaxies, and Kerr's solution has become a vital tool in astrophysics and cosmology.

Indeed, today more than 300 million supermassive black holes are suspected of anchoring their host galaxies across the cosmos, and the Kerr solution is what astronomers and astrophysicists use to describe much of their behavior.

Offering a detailed account of Kerr's great discovery Fulvio Melia's Cracking the Einstein Code: Relativity and the Birth of Black Hole Physics showcases of some of the most important science of the twentieth century.

For more check out the review in the New Scientist or read this excerpt from the book.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Mathematics and Physics | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For an excellent review of Randall Mann's newest book of poems, Breakfast with Thom Gunn, check out Miguel Murphy's piece in the current edition of Rain Taxi. Drawing from the work of it's titular namesake, Mann's new book grapples with dilemmas of the gay self embroiled in—and aroused by—a glittering, yet unforgiving, gay subculture that recalls the San Francisco Bay of the 1960's Gunn knew so well. And judging by Murphy's review, from its "metrical clarity" to its candid subject matter, Mann's work is indeed the well deserving inheritor of Gunn's poetic legacy.

Murphy writes for Rain Taxi:

This is the landscape of the beautiful—the transgressive, the godless, the gay—who, "tired / of the age of irony, everything / a gesture" must navigate the dangers of drugs, disease, and love…

Here, a generation post-Gunn, Mann exerts a similar difficult clarity about so-called "underworld" desires. He is not afraid to address the taboo with a frankness made palatable by strict metrical song.

Pick up a copy of Rain Taxi to read the full review or pick up a copy of Breakfast with Thom Gunn on the Press website.

Also see At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn—the first book-length study of Gunn's work bringing together some of the most important poet-critics from both sides of the Atlantic to assess his oeuvre, edited by Joshua Weiner.

Archived in Poetry | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Having produced some of the most powerful images of Depression-era rural America, including the now iconic Migrant Mother, Dorothea Lange's documentary photography for the Farm Security Administration offers a profound (and timely) record of the devastating effects of the Depression, as well as American's resilience in the face of hardship. But surprisingly, many of Lange's photographs for the FSA, (and arguably some of her best) have remained hidden from the public eye, consigned to archives where they have languished for years, rarely seen. Now, in Anne Whiston Spirn's recent Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field Lange's never-before-published photos and captions from her fieldwork in California, the Pacific Northwest, and North Carolina during 1939 can finally receive the exposure they merit.

Focusing on selections of photographs accompanied by field notes and citations strategically selected by Spirn, as a recent review in Bookforum notes, [Daring to Look] "presents a case study of Lange's artistic agility"—the juxtapositions of image and text allowing readers to experience a diversity of voices and points of view, dismissing what reviewer Jordan Bear calls the "maudlin sentimentality" sometimes ascribed to Lange's work.

And for a sampling of some of these images see this illustrated excerpt from the book. Read Jordan Bear's full review on the Bookforum website.

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

Leo "the Lip" Durocher began his five-decade career inauspiciously, riding the bench for the powerhouse 1928 Yankees, hitting so poorly that Babe Ruth nicknamed him "the All-American Out." But soon Durocher—who would become infamous for his cantankerousness, fighting moxie, and will to win—hit his stride taking the 1934 World Series with the "Gashouse Gang" Cardinals, turning the Brooklyn Dodgers around as player-manager five years later, and managing the New York Giants to their 1951 pennant win. But as Joe Distelheim notes in a recent review of Durocher's autobiography, Nice Guys Finish Last, not even "the Lip" could "swagger and tough talk" his way around The Curse of the Billy Goat. Distelheim writes:

Odds are good, dear reader, that I already was following the Cubs when your mother was born, so you'll understand that I took particular interest in the Chicago part of the chronology. Durocher had an easy act to follow; he took over in 1966 after a particularly fallow period even for the Cubs of that era. They were coming off an eighth-place finish and a failed five-year experiment with a "college of coaches" running things instead of a manager.

In the book, Durocher doesn't omit the oft-told story: He declared that the Cubs weren't an eighth-place team. Right. His first year, they finished 10th.

This was not a team without talent. It included future Hall of Famers Ernie Banks, Billy Williams and Fergie Jenkins (plus Durocher himself) and Hall shoulda-been Ron Santo. The trouble with the Cubs, though, Durocher writes, was all those home run hitters. In his view, Banks was too old, too hobbled, too admired by sports writers. Santo was too slow, too mouthy, too prone to fail in the clutch.

Banks, however, was and is regarded in Chicago as St. Francis is in Assisi. Santo was and is similarly adored. Durocher got no place with his bosses when he suggested trading them. So, he cooked up a deal for Williams, proposing to send him to the Orioles for a flock of Curt Blefarys. That didn't fly, either.

Even though burdened with these mediocrities, by Year Two of Durocher the Cubs were in the first division, primed for the 1969 pennant race that would become legendary for both the Collapsing Cubs and the Miracle Mets.

An entertaining account of the career of a man who presided over some of the most exciting wins, and disappointing losses of the 20th century, Leo Durocher's Nice Guys Finish Last brings the personalities and play-by-play of baseball's greatest era to vivid life.

For more read Distelheim's review in The Hard Ball Times or see another recent review of the book published in last week's Beachwood Reporter.

"Imagine getting behind-the-scenes reports from someone who absolutely doesn't care about stepping on toes. That's Nice Guys Finish Last." —Rick Kaempfer, Beachwood Reporter

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Biography | Chicago | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lawrence Rothfield's The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum offers a revealing look at the plundering of Iraq's cultural heritage during the Iraq war. Housing relics dating back to the dawn of human civilization some twelve thousand years ago, Iraq's National Museum as well as many important archeological sites were looted while, according to Rothfield, nearly everyone, including some of the highest ranking U.S. government officials, simply looked the other way. As Benjamin Moser writes his review for the September edition of Harper's magazine:

The destruction inevitable in wartime might have been mitigated if Iraq had not suffered the bad luck of being invaded by George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. One of the many low points of their low endeavor came when Rumsfeld (whose boundless self-regard was untethered to any reckonable aptitude) said that "stuff happens" in reply to early reports of widespread looting. "The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over and over and over," Rumsfeld scoffed, "and its the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it twenty times and you think 'M y goodness, were there that many vases?'"

This attitude, Rothfield shows, … even placed Rummy and his "war president" in unfavorable contrast with Saddam Hussein, who, during his invasion of Kuwait, took precautions to prevent the looting of the Kuwait Museum.… After Rumsfeld ignored repeated pleas to prevent the entirely foreseeable looting, disaster came: a full-scale destruction of countless monuments in the birthplace of civilization.

A powerful, infuriating chronicle of the disastrous conjunction of military adventure and cultural destruction, The Rape of Mesopotamia is essential reading for all concerned with the future of our past.

Pick up a copy of Harper's magazine to read the full review and in the meantime, read this excerpt from the book.

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

Chicago projects like Cabrini Green and the Robert Taylor Homes have gained national notoriety as some of the worst disasters in public housing since the federal programs that created them were born out of the wake of the Great Depression. Cabrini Green in particular stands out due to its immediate proximity to the upper-class Gold Coast neighborhood, the scar of poverty amongst Cabrini's residents made painfully visible against a backdrop of an otherwise wealthy urban center.

But with the eventual acknowledgment of the projects' failure and the subsequent tear-down of these two icons of failed policy, sociologists, government officials, and others have begun intensely scrutinizing the program's history in an attempt to find out what went wrong, and to prevent it from happening again. One of the latest additions to the canon of sociological studies focusing on the failure of Chicago's housing projects, D. Bradford Hunt's Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing challenges explanations that attribute the projects' decline primarily to racial discrimination and real estate interests, arguing that well-intentioned but misguided policy decisions—ranging from design choices to maintenance contracts—also paved the road to failure. As Elizabeth Taylor writes in a recent review of the book for the Chicago Tribune:

[Blueprint for Disaster] adds a new dimension to the debate by pointing to missed opportunities for the CHA to heed warning signs and change course and that policy choices at the local and federal level led to the demise of public housing. In an attempt to break new ground with his interpretation, Hunt locates the problems less with a poisonous mixture of political and real estate interests, governmental neglect and racism than the fact that there was no realistic financial plan for public housing and that residents were not engaged in the process.

Shedding new light on the unraveling of Chicago public housing, Hunt's Blueprint for Disaster is an urgent reminder of the havoc poorly conceived policy can wreak on our most vulnerable citizens.

Read the rest of the Tribune review or see another recently appearing in the Chi-town Daily News.

Archived in Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For some time now the movement to preserve natural habitats has gained in popularity as we begin to understand our species' limited capacity to thrive in isolation from the untold number of other organisms that make up the ecosystems in which we live. And with the clear and present danger posed by mass-extinctions, climate change, and the rapid depletion of natural resources, many long for a return to the abundance that the wilds of North America once offered. But while it is impossible to turn back the hands of time, with Steve Nicholls' recent book, Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery we can at least gain a clearer picture of what it was like, and perhaps the inspiration to repair the damage. As Marion Elizabeth Rodgers writes a recent review of the book for the Washington Times:

Paradise Found is one of the best books I have read in years. The book guides us easily through the North Atlantic, the East Coast, subtropical Caribbean, the West Coast, Baja California and the Great Plains, seamlessly blending firsthand accounts from historical journals, personal anecdotes and the latest scientific inquiry. Wildlife filmmaker and entomologist Steve Nicholls paints a picture of 500 years of people and nature, giving us a time machine tour of our continent's abundant past.

And what an abundance there was! Meadows full of ducks, forests filled with all kinds of berries and nuts—oaks, pecans and most plentiful of all, the American chestnut. Those forests were not the same as we know today. These were natural cathedrals, with green roofs arching 50 feet above one's head; giant trunks measured more than 20 feet in circumference. So many strawberries littered the ground that one naturalist noted his horse's hooves were being stained red with their juice. At the mouth of a river was an island filled with so many egrets that it looked as if it were blanketed with snow.…

Digging into the journals and diaries of explorers and settlers, [Nicholls] became convinced if more people knew the true vitality of nature, they would not only be awed, but be reminded of the sheer scale of our impact on the planet—and be spurred to repair the damage. Environmental awareness is not new, but as Mr. Nicholls states, "our mentality has been to preserve and isolate sections of nature, in national parks or wilderness areas, separate from the human world."

We city folk have grown so apart from nature that I wonder how many comprehend how much has been lost from our own backyards. Here in Georgetown, the cocoon where I live, neighbors shop at eco-friendly Whole Foods, yet, in apparent disconnect, chop down century-old trees and spray pesticides on their properties, replacing soil with cement and trees with clumps of liriope. Is it any wonder that the amount and variety of songbirds have steadily diminished, while the pesky mosquito remains?

This detached attitude is, in no small way, responsible for the scale of effects Mr. Nicholls outlines in his book. "The bottom line is that we are just one part of nature," he writes, and the sooner we become enlightened with that humbling realization, the sooner we can bring about a balance to our immediate environment and beyond.

Read the rest of the review on the Washington Times website. Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Biology | History | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a review of Joseph C. Hermanowicz's new book Lives in Science: How Institutions Affect Academic Careers for the current issue of Nature magazine, reviewer Rachael Ivy highlight's the book's surprising conclusions about the career paths of scientists (specifically physicists) at the nation's elite universities: many of them end up feeling like they've been conned. Ivy summarizes Hermanowicz's argument, writing that while physicists at less-prestigious universities learn early on how to console themselves with the probability that their contributions to the field will be marginal, those granted tenure at elite universities tend to remain optimistic about the level of prestige they can achieve in the course of their careers, that is, until their careers draw to a close. Ivy writes:

Those at less-prestigious universities, who were also more likely to have graduated from similar institutions, were generally satisfied because of the balance they ultimately achieved in their lives. Like other academics, they had once hoped to achieve scientific greatness, but quickly realized that such recognition would elude them. They dealt with disappointment about their career paths early on.

By contrast, physicists who got the early prize of an elite university job were satisfied with their careers—until the end. Then they were hit with the realization that the scientific recognition for which they had striven so long would now go to younger scientists. For the first time, this elite group's "expectations for their careers exceed reality" and their satisfaction was low.

Ivy's article concludes:

Lives in Science reveals that all scientists are socially conditioned to contribute substantially to the knowledge base and expect to receive recognition for it. But all must reconcile themselves to the shortcomings of the academic game. With research pressure growing in less-prestigious universities, and with limited resources, [the gap between expectations and reality] will remain with us. Its cure is to require graduate institutions to present a more realistic picture of what it means to be a scientist.

Read the full review on the Nature website.

Archived in Education | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A cold blooded, merciless, professional killer that would make even Superman soil his tights invaded this year's Comic-Con. As we've previously noted, the ruthless antihero of Donald Westlake aka Richard Stark's series of mystery novels, known only as Parker, is making his graphic novel debut in an adaptation of Stark's 1962 novel The Hunter, produced by illustrator Darwyn Cooke and San Diego book editor Scott Dunbier. As the Chicago Tribune's Geoff Boucher reports in his review of the novel for last Wednesday's paper:

[The] adaptation is already being hailed as a masterpiece by key tastemakers in the comics world, and last week it met the public as Cooke and Dunbier took it to Comic-Con International in San Diego, the massive pop-culture expo that is a sort of Cannes for capes or a Sundance for sci-fi.

And in a laudatory article on the new adaptation in today's New York Times contributor George Gene Gustines writes:

Mr. Cooke depicts his characters with such emotion and conveys so much with gesture and composition that, except for the specifics of the hijacking, you could almost follow the story by the images alone. And when the words and graphics are in harmony, the effect is deliciously brutal.

But according to Boucher's piece for the Tribune, Cooke's adaptation of Stark's novel is only part of a larger resurgence in "noir-minded projects" that includes a new imprint from DC comics called Vertigo Crime and has been drawing the attention of many in the movie industry as well. Many of Stark's novels have already been adapted for the big screen in the form of films like Point Blank and Payback but as Boucher writes, "Cooke's pen-and-ink Parker may well lead to a new round of Westlake curiosity in Hollywood."

We'll be waiting with bells on for news of a new Parker film while flipping through the illustrated pages of IDW Press's graphic adaptation of The Hunter, but for all those whose thirst for booty, blood, and vengeance isn't satiated with such a paltry offering from the many novels in Stark's classic Parker series, check out the press's paperback reissues, with three more scheduled for publication each season until the series is complete.

Also check out the blog of our publicity manager and in-house expert on all things Stark for a full week's worth of postings on the author's prolific oeuvre.

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

The University of Chicago Press, in addition to being the largest university press in the country, is committed to publishing books on the region we call home. This month, a number of our local titles have caught the fancy of our city's records of note. Here is a round-up of noteworthy notices and reviews:

— The city of Chicago is celebrating the centennial of the Burnham Plan, the 1909 urban-planning masterpiece that molded the city by the lake into the world-class metropolis it remains today. As part of the festivities, the Chicago Public Library selected our own Carl Smith's The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City for its One Book, One Chicago program. Two weeks ago, the Chicago Reader dedicated a special issue to Burnham's vision, playing the skeptic amid the boisterous pedestalization of Burham. The paper also included an essay from Bill Savage—who has contributed to a number of projects for the Press, including the new foreword to the 50th anniversary edition of Nelson Algren's Chicago: City on the Make and the introduction to the new Ben Hecht collection A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago, which Julia Keller praised in the Chicago Tribune earlier this month—in which he debunks the apocryphal maxim "Make no little plans" and suggests that, indeed, when it comes to city planning in the twenty-first century, we should think small.

— The August issue of Chicago magazine features selections from its annual "Best of" survey. The mag gives the Press a lot of love on page 97. First, in the category "Best New Chicago Book," our own Chicago 1890: The Skyscraper and the Modern City comes in first in its class.

"Skyscrapers are so commonplace today that it is nearly impossible to conjure a times when they didn't dominate the urban landscape. Yet that is exactly what Joan Merwood-Salisbury does, resurrecting an era when the future of this 'contentious building type…was far from assured.'"

On the same page, the mag gives a shout out to University of Chicago law professor and Press author Richard Posner, their choice for "Best Public Intellectual," who "writes books, article, and blog posts the way other people write grocery lists." In fact, Posner's next book, due out in November, is a collection of post from the popular Becker-Posner blog. Uncommon Sense gathers the most important and innovative entries from the blog, arranged by topic, along with updates and even reconsiderations when subsequent events have shed new light on a question. Whether it's Posner making the economic case for the legalization of gay marriage, Gary Becker arguing in favor of the sale of human organs for transplant, or even the pair of scholars vigorously disagreeing about the utility of collective punishment, with reference to Israel's battles with Hezbollah and Hamas, the writing is always clear, the interplay energetic, and the resulting discussion deeply informed and intellectually substantial.

— And finally, for you weather fans, tomorrow at 11:30, Jack Williams, author of The AMS Weather Book will be appearing in a segment with local weather legend Tom Skilling on the WGN Midday News. Tomorrow night, at 7:00 p.m., Jack will be a guest on Chicago Tonight on WTTW Channel 11.

Archived in Reviews
Posted by at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Freud, to Joyce, to Hilda Doolittle, and Robert Graves, many of the twentieth-century's most influential artists and intellectuals have, through their work, demonstrated an obsession with the roots of Western culture in ancient Minoan civilization. The source of this phenomenon, as Cathy Gere argues in her new book Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, can be traced in large part to British archaeologist Arthur Evans' coetaneous discovery of the palace of Knossos on Crete.

Beginning in the Spring of 1900 Evans engaged in an unprecedented project to not only unearth the ancient Minoan civilization, but to recreate it, commissioning a cadre of artists and architects like Piet de Jong, and Swiss artist Émile Gilliéron to reconstruct the city's ancient buildings out of reinforced concrete, and piece together sparse fragments of Minoan frescoes with artwork of their own. The result, as Mary Beard notes in her review of Gere's book for the August New York Review of Books, was a "radical blurring of the boundary between authentic Minoan artifact" and modern fakes.

Yet despite its historical inaccuracies, as Gere shows, Evans' work gained intense popularity amongst modern interpreters who found in his fanciful reconstruction at Crete, the ancient pagan precedents for their own visions of Western civilization. In her review Beard praises Gere's work for its insightful demonstration that as much as "twentieth-century culture, from Evans on, projected its own concerns onto Minoan archaeology," Minoan archaeology conversely influenced twentieth-century culture. And with Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, we now have a fascinating chronicle of this unprecedented confluence between the ancient and modern worlds—one which continues to shape western culture to the present day.

You can read Beard's full review at the New York Review of Books website, or read the introduction to the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Oh, but, grandmother, what a terrible big mouth you have," said Little Red Riding Hood.

—from the Brothers Grimm "Little Red Riding Hood"

In the fairy tale, Little Red Riding Hood is devoured by the Big Bad Wolf because she didn't fear him enough to flee; after all, she thought he was her sickly grandmother. In nature, similarly naïve creatures—such as unsuspecting elk living among reintroduced wolves in Yellowstone Park—fall prey to predators they have either forgotten, or never learned, to fear. Joel Berger is fascinated by this counterintuitive behavior. Why don't Little Red Riding Hood or the elks try to elude their predators? And what role does fear—or lack thereof—play in survival of both the ungulates of Yellowstone and other species across the globe? To answer these questions, Berger traveled the world studying predator-prey relationships across climates and continents.

The Better to Eat You With is the chronicle of his research. Reviewing the book in the July 17 Times Literary Supplement, Barbara J. King notes

Basing his work on fifteen years' research in punishing winterscapes from Yellowstone to the Russian Far East to Mongolia, Berger reports solid scientific information then goes beyond it in an extraordinary effort to understand animal fear and its role in survival and reproduction. The result is a luminous account of animal individuality and emotion.

King continues:

Thorny real-world questions about animal-human relationships punctuate the book.… The irony astounds: we humans evolved with the most sophisticated cultural transmission skills of any animal, yet too often we are overcome with unreason when it comes to sharing our space with other animals. The real message of The Better To Eat You With is this: as human populations expand, we must find ways to encourage human beings to coexist with other animals more effectively.

Whether battling bureaucracy in the statehouse or fighting subzero wind chills in the field, Berger puts himself in the middle of the action and The Better to Eat You With invites readers to join him there. The lessons he learns, both in the field and in the hearing rooms, will have lasting impact on the future of conservation, not to mention our understanding of animal behavior in the face of nature's big bad wolves.

For more on The Better to Eat You With, listen in as Berger drops in to chat with Bob Edwards about fear in the animals world.

Archived in Reviews
Posted by at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Consumerism has long been the target of political activism but as Lawrence B. Glickman demonstrates in his new book Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America it has been used as one of activism's most effective tools for far longer. In a review appearing in last Friday's Chicago Tribune, Eric Arnesen praises Gllickman's book for it's thoroughly researched demonstration of how Americans have used purchasing power to support causes and punish enemies throughout the Nation's history. From the Boston Tea Party to the slow food movement Glickman's book tracks American consumer activism across the centuries to show it as "'a consistent and long-standing element of American political culture,' extending back to the 18th Century." Eric Arnesen writes for the Tribune:

Over the years, a wide range of groups have turned to consumer activism to achieve their ends. Trade unionists engaged in boycotts of anti-labor employers; a half century before the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56, Southern African-Americans boycotted segregated transportation systems and, by the 1930s, launched numerous "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" campaigns. Top-down organizations such as Consumers Union and Consumers' Research offered expert advice in the realm of product testing and consumer education.

The Ku Klux Klan has boycotted Jewish and Catholic merchants; Evangelical Christians have boycotted firms deemed friendly to gays and lesbians, while gays and lesbians have boycotted firms contributing to anti-gay political measures.

Whether under the banner of an explicit consumers' movement or as members of organizations with other goals, activists across the political spectrum have deployed consumer tactics in an effort to achieve their ends.

Glickman's Buying Power is a sophisticated and, at times, dense genealogy of politicized consumption. It is also a rich, provocative, and—given the explosion of consumer activist campaigns in recent years—timely study whose insights into the successes, failures and meanings of consumer activism its practitioners would do well to consider.

Read the rest of the article.

Archived in Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In 1921 Ben Hecht began writing a column for the Chicago Daily News called "One Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago." In it, Hecht famously explored city life beyond the usual dry, factual, reportage; extracting, as his editor Henry Justin Smith once wrote, "the stuff of literature" from the grit and grime of Chicago's city streets. And though Hecht would eventually become better known as one of the most prolific Hollywood screenwriters of all time, his groundbreaking work for the Chicago Daily News still endears him to the city as well as demonstrates one of the greatest literary achievements of his career.

In an article appearing in yesterday's Chicago Tribune cultural critic Julia Keller sings the praises of Hecht's journalism and the Press's newly reprinted collection of his work in A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago, illustrated by Herman Rosse and with a new introduction by William Savage. Keller writes:

The columns in [A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago] are scruffy time capsules of an earlier Chicago, an era that is long gone but still recognizable to readers' imaginations. Michigan Avenue, Lake Michigan, street names such as Dearborn and Adams and LaSalle and Wabansia, places such as the Art Institute of Chicago—they're all here, sprinkled amid Hecht's nervous little haikus of urban life. He calls Chicago "a razzle-dazzle of dreams, tragedies, fantasies," and his tales capture gorgeous scraps of it, vivid vignettes starring businessmen and hobos and cops and socialites and janitors.…

Thanks to Hecht, the Chicago of 1922 and the Chicago of 2009 bump into each other, shake hands, exchange greetings. Then, this being Chicago, they go for a drink and talk about old times. New ones too.

Read the rest of the article at the online edition of the Chicago Tribune or navigate to the press website to find out more about the book.

Archived in Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New York Times City Room blog ran an article yesterday on a 19th century pastime that began as a morally transgressive practice of the urban upper class, but also played an important role in dramatically recasting the racial and sexual landscape of cities like New York and Chicago. "Slumming", as the practice was popularly known, invited "well-off white urban [dwellers] to explore black, Chinese, gay, or poor working-class communities" in search of a good time, and the unmatchable thrill of doing something disreputable. In the late 1800's upper class whites, sometimes accompanied by a local guide, would push their way into the living spaces residents in impoverished neighborhoods in a voyeuristic attempt to "see how the other half lived," reveling in the excitement of police raids, opium dens, and "gawking at prostitutes, gays, lesbians and cross-dressers." The City Room posting cites Chad Heap, author of Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940 as he explains how, in the course of the following decades, the practice of slumming evolved into a vital avenue for communication and appreciation across social, economic and cultural barriers that typified Jazz-Age America. From the City Room blog:

"In the late 19th century, American cities, especially New York, began to become more sizable and cities became more spatially socially divided, especially along race and class lines," Professor Heap said.

He pointed to the post-Civil War building boom of the Gilded Age, which allowed the upper middle class to escape from the morass of poverty downtown. Slumming brought them back: "As problematic as slumming can be as a voyeuristic sport, it's positive in the context of its period." It allowed white Americans to choose to socialize and intermingle with more marginal groups in their cabarets, bars, speakeasies and nightclubs.

The article continues:

Slumming crossed not only ethic and class lines lines, but sexual lines as well. "That is, a spectatorship of sexualized groups," Professor Heap said. He noted that people would go and gawk at prostitutes, gays, lesbians and cross-dressers. It allowed many in the upper middle class to explore sexual identities without the constraints of their own neighborhoods.

And indeed eclectic neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and Chicago's Bronzeville might not be what they are today if not for the mingling between different social and economic groups facilitated by the early phenomenon of slumming.

The article also notes a resurgence in the practice today. For example, for twenty bucks you can still get a tour of some of Chicago's disappearing projects (though one should note that the poverty is still alive and well in our fair city), and tours of Brazilian favelas seem to be gaining in popularity, as well as staged illegal border crossings in Mexico's Parque EcoAlberto. But as Heap notes, most people today engage in the same type of voyeurism today simply by turning on the TV (or going to the movies for that matter).

Continue reading the rest of the article on the NYT City Room blog or read the introduction to Heap's book to find out more about this fascinating phenomenon of 19th century urban American life whose effects are still felt powerfully today.

Update: The New Yorker also ran a short but positive blurb about Heap's book recently. You can find it online in the Books Briefly Noted section of the magazine.

Archived in Black Studies | History | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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)

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.

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 at 09:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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 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.

Archived in Biology | History | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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.

Archived in Biology | History | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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)

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)

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)

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 at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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)

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)

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.

Archived in History | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Archived in Biography | Black Studies | History | Literature | Philosophy | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 03:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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)

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)

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.

Archived in History | Music | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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 (3)

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.

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

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."

Archived in Biography | History | Literature | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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)

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
Posted by TXM at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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 at 03:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

Archived in History | Literature | Philosophy | Reviews
Posted by DB at 01:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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
Posted by TXM at 02:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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."

Archived in Art and Architecture | Film and Media | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Archived in Literature | Medieval and Renaissance | Poetry | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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
Posted by TXM at 02:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Archived in Economics | Politics and Current Events | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Archived in Anthropology | History | Literature | Philosophy | Religion | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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
Posted by TXM at 02:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History and Philosophy of Science | Psychology | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Chicago | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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
Posted by at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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)

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)

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.

Archived in Black Studies | Chicago | History | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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)

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)

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.

Archived in Film and Media | History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 02:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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
Posted by TXM at 09:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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)

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)

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.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Chicago | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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 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.

Also read an interview with the author.

Archived in Fiction | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Archived in Black Studies | Chicago | History | Music | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 09:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biography | Cartography and Geography | History | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Archived in Anthropology | Black Studies | Chicago | History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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)

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)

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.

Archived in Black Studies | Chicago | Economics | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Also read an excerpt.

Archived in Biography | Classics | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Archived in Gay and Lesbian | History | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Archived in Chicago | History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Cartography and Geography | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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
Posted by TXM at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday's Financial Times ran a positive review of Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips' psychoanalytic exploration of human intimacy in their new book,