The Chicago Blog

Scott McLemee interviewed Neil Gross yesterday for his "Intellectual Affairs" column at Inside Higher Ed. Gross is the author of Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher and he discusses his new book as a work in the sociology of ideas, not just biography and intellectual history. What's the cash value of doing that? Gross explains:

My goal in this book was not simply to write a biography of Rorty, but also to make a theoretical contribution to the sociology of ideas. Surprising as it might sound to some, the leading figures in this area today—to my mind Pierre Bourdieu and Randall Collins—have tended to depict intellectuals as strategic actors who develop their ideas and make career plans and choices with an eye toward accumulating intellectual status and prestige. That kind of depiction naturally raises the ire of those who see intellectual pursuits as more lofty endeavors….

I argue that intellectuals do in fact behave strategically much of the time, but that another important factor influencing their lines of activity is the specific "intellectual self-concept" to which they come to cleave. By this I mean the highly specific narratives of intellectual selfhood that knowledge producers may carry around with them—narratives that characterize them as intellectuals of such and such a type.

In Rorty's case, one of the intellectual self-concepts that came to be terribly important to him was that of a "leftist American patriot." I argue that intellectual self-concepts, thus understood, are important in at least two respects: they may influence the kinds of strategic choices thinkers make (for example, shaping the nature of professional ambition), and they may also directly influence lines of intellectual activity. The growing salience to Rorty of his self-understood identity as a leftist American patriot, for example, was one of the factors that led him back toward pragmatism in the late 1970s and beyond.

Navigate to Insidehighered.com to read the rest of the interview. Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Philosophy | Sociology
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Last Sunday David Shulman author of Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine was interviewed on the CBC's Sunday Edition. Focusing on Shulman's experiences as a member of Ta'ayush—a peace group working to end violence in the West Bank—Shulman recounts the extreme injustices suffered by Israelis and Palestinians as they struggle to survive in an environment of constant violence and upheaval.

You can listen to the complete interview online at the "Sunday Edition" web page. Also read an excerpt from Shulman's book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

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

Read the press release.

Archived in Biography | Black Studies | History | Literature | Press Releases
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"The Art of Lee Miller" is a major retrospective of works by and about the artist curated by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The exhibition has now come stateside; it opened a week ago at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in July.

A lengthy critical essay by Judith Thurman was in the January 21 New Yorker, while a nicely illustrated article was in the February 4 issue of Newsweek. Like Carolyn Burke's biography Lee Miller: A Life which we recently released in paperback, the articles deliver a fascinating look at the life and artistry of Miller. She dominated the world of high fashion in the late 1920s, modeling for magazines like Vogue and Vanity Fair, and then became a respected photographer herself, leaving an indelible mark on the worlds of fine art photography and photojournalism. Writing for the New Yorker, Thurman details the pivotal turn in Miller's career from art object to artist:

If one is to believe the story, Condé Nast noticed her crossing the street just in time to pull her from the path of an oncoming vehicle, and this fortuitous collision led to an interview with Edna Chase, Vogue's editor in chief.… She was soon posing for Steichen, Arnold Genthe, and Nickolas Muray, the leading photographers of the day.…

In 1929, with several lovers fighting for the honor of seeing her off, and café society sad to lose its star playgirl, Miller sailed for Europe with the ambition "to enter photography by the back end.…" She planned to do some modeling for George Hoyningen-Huene at Paris Vogue while she apprenticed with Man Ray, a leader of the avant-garde and master of many genres—painting, photography, sculpture, and graphic art.…

Under Man Ray's tutelage, Miller mastered the use of the Graflex camera, with glass plates, and then the Rolleiflex; studio lighting setups; cropping and retouching, improvisation with the viewfinder; and his techniques for developing.

The article goes on to detail Miller's extraordinary, but tumultuous life, and speaks in detail about her groundbreaking work as one of the first female war correspondents during WWII. A theme which the Newsweek article picks up as well:

After she moved [to] London in 1939, she began her most important photography. The cockeyed perspective she'd absorbed from the surrealists served her well in the arresting, absurdist images she captured during the Blitz: a crushed Remington typewriter; a male mannequin standing incongruously in a heap of curbside rubble.… She rode into Germany with the U.S. Army, starkly documenting the corpses and the ovens of Buchenwald and Dachau—and zooming in, almost poetically, on a dead SS guard floating in a canal. She also shot Hitler's apartment in Munich—then got in his tub for her first bath in weeks, a moment caught on film by [Life photographer Dave] Scherman. Her combat boots on the bathmat are still caked with the mud of Dachau from earlier in the day.

The most thorough exploration of Miller's life and career can be found in Burke's 400-plus page biography Lee Miller: A Life. We have an extended excerpt from the book, dealing with Miller's experiences covering the War in France—from the Allied invasion of Normandy to the German surrender.

A slide show is online at the New Yorker.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biography | Books for the News
Posted by TXM at 03:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

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

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

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

Read an excerpt from the book.

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

David Shulman's Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine is currently being featured in a review for the December 6 issue of the New York Review of Books. A human rights activist and member of the peace group Ta'ayush, Shulman is an active participant in the group's efforts to address the conflict between Israel and Palestine through non-violent means. With Dark Hope Shulman aims to further the revolutionary humanitarian goals of the organization through a first hand account of his work with the group bringing aid, rebuilding houses, and engaging in Ghandian acts of civil disobedience. Detailing Shulman's unique approach to political activism. Israeli scholar Avishai Margalit writes for the NYRB:

Shulman attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.… His linguistic and cultural interests were mainly focused on South India. In 1987, when he was thirty-seven, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. He has published many translations of Indian poetry. Shulman's language in his diary is fresh and uncontaminated by the lazy clichés often used to describe the conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. By temperament and calling, Shulman is a scholar, not a politician. Recalling Auden's lines on Yeats, we may say that mad Israel hurt him into politics.

Into what sort of politics, one may ask. Shulman's work on India and its culture suggests that his politics—if this is the term—would draw on Gandhi's example. He writes, "We follow the classical tradition of civil disobedience, in the footsteps of Gandhi, Thoreau, and Martin Luther King.…"

Shulman advocates a Gandhian approach on moral grounds and perhaps also on practical grounds, and a large number of his activities would have pleased the Mahatma. But in my opinion he is trying to do something that can be accurately seen as part of the nonviolent struggle to alleviate the burdens of the occupation but is also different from it. Shulman is a moral witness…he makes an effort to observe and report on suffering arising from evil conduct. He may take risks in doing so, but he has a moral purpose: to expose the evil done by a regime that tries to cover up its immoral deeds. A moral witness acts with a sense of hope: that there is, or will be, a moral community for which his or her testimony matters.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Biography | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 09:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Kirin Narayan's new book My Family and Other Saints is the author's captivating memoir of growing up in a culturally diverse household in India. With an American mother eagerly attempting to adopt an Indian lifestyle and an Indian father who is skeptical of it, Narayan's memoir focuses on her family's attempt to find peace of mind even while torn between the often conflicting ideologies of east and west. Narayan's story revolves around her brother's decision to quit school and leave home to seek enlightenment with a guru. As a recent review in Shelf Awareness notes, Narayan "sees this event (which bemused rather than alarmed her family) as setting the entire family in a slow-forward motion along their own spiritual journeys."

The review continues:

She describes the next few years with fine impressionistic prose, weaving together her parent's disintegrating marriage, her father's descent into alcoholism and her brother's departure for the U.S. with visits to ashrams, friendhips with gurus and tales from her paternal grandmother, Ba, who was regularly visited by Hindu dieties.… Some of their stories end sadly or without resolution ("Who knows why I became a drunkard?" her father asks at the end of his life), but Narayan, a cultural anthropologist, finds the wonder and joy in her family's journey and presents it to us with insight and grace.

Read the rest of the review online or see an excerpt from the book.

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

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

Read the press release.

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

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

Read the press release.

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

Author Richard Halpern was featured last Friday on NPR's On the Media to discuss the myth of American innocence, and the various cultural forces that contribute to its production. Halpern recently spoke at a New York University symposium on the subject—“Shocked! Shocked!! Just How Many Times Can a Country Lose Its Innocence?”—and is the author of a book on a man he claims is one of the most prolific manufacturers of American naïeveté, Norman Rockwell. In Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence, Halpern argues that Rockwell's art, even as it actively works to create a sentimental American style of innocence, in fact, frequently teems with perverse acts of voyeurism and desire. Listen in as Halpern debunks Rockwell and the American innocence industry online at the NPR website.

Read an excerpt from Halpern's book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 09:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

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

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

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

The online literary magazine Bookslut is running a nice review of Evelyn Bloch-Dano's forthcoming book, Madame Proust: A Biography. The mother of one of the nineteenth century's most important novelists, Jeanne Weil Proust was a profound influence on her son's life and writing. But as Bookslut reviewer Aysha Somasundaram notes, Bloch-Dano's new book goes beyond the typical focus of most biographies to deliver a thorough account of the social and cultural milieu in which Proust's masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, was written. Somasundaram writes:

Meticulously researched, Madame Proust offers a socio-cultural portrait of French and Jewish culture and how each intersected in Proust's lifetime. It not only explores Anti-Semitism, assimilation and naturalization of Jewish French Nationals and the Dreyfus affair but also ably recreates the bourgeois milieu, familial and cultural context and the physical lay-out of the Paris in which Marcel Proust lived. Marcel Proust was the product of an arranged marriage between an affluent Jewish mother and upwardly mobile Catholic father.…

Bloch-Dano's biography offers a sensitive, delicate evocation of the relationship Proust would describe as his life's "only purpose, its only sweetness, its only love, its only consolation." Madame Proust is a well-conceived and insightful tribute to a woman who lived quietly and whose ambitions and hopes centered fixedly on her family's well-being and her son's fulfillment.

Read an excerpt, "The Goodnight Kiss".

The official publication date for Madame Proust: A Biography is October 1 of this year.

Archived in Biography | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Would you rather chair your university department or manage an amateur softball team? Edwin Amenta, NYU professor of sociology and author of Professor Baseball: Searching for Redemption and the Perfect Lineup on the Softball Diamonds of Central Park, was pretty sure he'd enjoy the softball team a lot more. In an interesting piece of commentary for the careers section of the Chronicle of Higher Education Amenta relates how he was passed over for departmental chair but then was given the opportunity to spend the summer as manager of the Performing Arts Softball League. But as it turns out Amenta got a little more than he bargained for. Amenta writes:

Near the end of the season, I realized that not only was managing not that much fun, it was not greatly different from being a department chair.

Both jobs provide an undercurrent of excitement, with little crises to attend to all the time. Sometimes there are important general managerial decisions to make—like deciding which players or faculty members to recruit.

But the rest of the work is extensive and thankless. It takes great effort to get teammates and colleagues to do things they should volunteer for, like practicing or serving on committees. Teammates want always to play their favorite positions the way colleagues like to teach their favorite classes.

To improve the team or curriculum requires making a few people angry, while the majority who benefit will barely notice. Winning or success in hiring new faculty members—all that is to be expected and brings little praise. Losing or failing in hiring brings blame.

Navigate to the Chronicle's website to read the rest of Amenta's article or read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Sociology
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Last Saturday's Chicago Tribune ran a great piece on David Grene's recently published memoir Of Farming and Classics—a wonderfully original account of the author's double life as a preeminent professor of classics at the University of Chicago and hard-working, old-fashioned farmer in rural Illinois and Ireland. Staff reporter Ron Grossman writes for the Tribune's Books section:

David Grene could easily be described with the cliché "last of a breed," but he was also the first of his kind. Or, at least, the first in a long time.

In 1937 he came to the University of Chicago to teach classics and, a few years later, bought a farm near Lemont. It wasn't a hobby farm. Working the land himself, Grene disdained tractors in favor of horses, often coming to class with manure-caked boots. He later farmed in his native Ireland.

His personal style reincarnated that of the Roman aristocrats, with their love of the soil and taste for good books. Greek literature traces to Hesiod's Works and Days, with its anticipation of The Old Farmer's Almanac, a poetic tour of the agricultural year. Plantation owners in the antebellum South could often conjugate Latin verbs, but in the 20th Century, the study of ancient languages, once the centerpiece of a liberal education, precipitously declined. With Grene's death in 2002, the scholar-farmer probably entered the history books forever.

Fortunately for Clio, the Muse of history, Grene's memoirs have just been published. Of Farming & Classics delightfully recounts an era before corporate agriculture did in the family farm and pettifogging professionalism insulated the ivory tower from the larger world.

Read the rest of the article on the Tribune's website.

We also featured several excerpts from Grene's book previously on this blog:

Dublin Theatre in the 1920s and '30s
Learning Greek and Latin in Dublin Schools
Honors Classics at Trinity College

Archived in Biography | Classics | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John Sugden recently reviewed Edwin Amenta's memoir of amateur sport, Professor Baseball: Searching for Redemption and the Perfect Lineup on the Softball Diamonds of Central Park for the June 8 Times Higher Education Supplement. A British academic periodical might seem like an unlikely prospect for a book about a thoroughly American game, but Sugden swings for the fences:

One hot and humid summer when Professor Edwin Amenta should have been hard at work at home or in his office in the sociology department of New York University—finishing up his book on pensions organizations in Depression-era America—"Eddy" could be found roaming the recreational spaces of Central Park indulging in the very serious business of playing softball.…

At one level, Professor Baseball is a straightforward diary of Amenta's successes and failures over one summer season in the several teams on which he plays and the one of which he is player-manager. At another, the book is a narrative account of one person's lived-through obsession. It is a coming-of-middle-age tale of a fortysomething man, with fatherhood imminent, trying to come to terms with changing fortunes in his professional and personal life. Above all, it is about his forlorn and ultimately doomed quest for redemption.…

The academic community might have had to wait a little longer for Amenta's quantitative study of pension funds in depression-era America because of it, but I for one found Professor Baseball a more than worthwhile diversion.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Biography | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

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

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

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

Archived in Biography | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
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This week's edition of Nature has quite a positive review of Charles Thorpe's new book, Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect. Catherine Westphall writes for Nature:

Does the world really need yet another book about J. Robert Oppenheimer? … Amazingly, Charles Thorpe's Oppenheimer still manages to provide a fascinating new perspective. …

What's new here is a precise and compelling description of how Oppenheimer's Los Alamos persona was forged by wartime circumstances and the Los Alamos community. To succeed in its grim mission, Los Alamos needed a certain type of leader, and Oppenheimer nimbly fit himself to the role, becoming the intellectual, moral, and social center of gravity for the constellation of scientific and engineering problem-solving. Thorpe argues that just as Oppenheimer created Los Alamos, so Los Alamos created, or at least reconfigured, Oppenheimer.

Westphall's review concludes: "Thorpe's book provides the best perspective yet for understanding Oppenheimer's Los Alamos years, which were critical, after all, not only to his life but, for better or worse, the history of mankind."

Archived in Biography | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week, the Times Literary Supplement ran a review of David Grene's posthumous memoir, Of Farming and Classics. Weaving together Grene's life as a professor of classics at the University of Chicago with his alter ego as a farmer in Ireland and in Illinois, Of Farming and Classics delivers a refreshing and intelligent take on classical scholarship in the twentieth century. TLS reviewer Edith Hall seems to agree when she writes:

David Grene's experience of Irish, British, Austrian and American Classics across the whole period from the 1920s until 2002 makes this slim, deftly written, posthumously published volume an illuminating read for every classical scholar engaged with the current quest for the subject's roots, and the excavation of the way that it has evolved over the past century and a half. But Grene's memoir is made really memorable by his "other", bucolic voice; for his account of twentieth-century Classics runs in tandem with his memories of his other profession, as a dairy farmer in Illinois and subsequently in Wicklow and Cavan in Ireland.…

Belonging to two social worlds gives him an unusually keen eye for the precise nuances of social class and the ways in which they are defined and displayed. [For example,] looking at the effects of the British Empire on both farming and Classics produces a sophisticated reading of some aspects of both professions.… He [also] sees parallels between the mental attitudes and skills required of a satisfactory and personally satisfied small farmer and a university teacher: "some degree of intellectual discrimination and willingness to disregard the attraction of being like most other people". He draws a few inspiring connections: for example, his charming account of how the myth of the centaur emerged from the magical synergy between a sensitive horse and a skilled rider. When talking of his own ecstasy in ploughing an Irish furrow with a team of horses, he alludes to passages in Hesiod and Aeschylus before drawing attention to what he perceives as the contentment of the ploughman in Breughel's famous painting of the fall of Icarus.

We previously posted three excerpts from Grene's book to this blog including "Dublin Theatre in the 1920s and '30s", "Learning Greek and Latin in Dublin Schools" and "Honors Classics at Trinity College."

Archived in Biography | Classics | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Robert Fulford wrote an article in Canada's National Post on Fuad I. Kuri and his posthumously published memoir An Invitation to Laughter: A Lebanese Anthropologist in the Arab World. A Christian Lebanese, Khuri offers in his unusual autobiography both an insider's and an outsider's perspective on life in Lebanon, often fraught with contradictions, and of course, laughter.

Khuri entertains and informs with clever insights into such issues as the mentality of Arabs toward women, eating habits of the Arab world, the impact of Islam on West Africa, and the extravagant lifestyles of wealthy Arabs as Fulford writes in the Post:

Laughter is not the first sound that comes to mind when someone mentions Arabia. As Khuri wrote, "In Arab culture, laughing loudly in public demeans one's character." … [But] Khuri was not an ordinary Arab, or an ordinary anthropologist. Laughter was frequently his response to the societies he studied. He investigated African villagers and other traditional subjects, but he loved studying prosperous societies.… Khuri, it's clear, loved to follow the rather over-assertive habits of rich Arabs who wanted to display their wealth. He mentions an Arab who asked that Harrods department store in London be closed so that his wife could shop in private. (Michael Jackson did him one better by closing Tokyo Disneyland for a day of fun with his entourage.) Khuri knew of Arabs using mink coats as bathrobes. When he took a ride on a private plane he discovered that even the toilet handle was gold.

A profound appreciation for humor in the study of cultures is a distinctive theme of An Invitation to Laughter, and one that makes this book a must read for anyone interested in the culture of the Middle East and the discipline of anthropology

Archived in Anthropology | Biography | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 03:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

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

Read the press release.

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

John Patrick Diggins, author of Eugene O'Neill's America: Desire under Democracy—a fascinating biography of the preeminent American playwright Eugene O'Neill—recently published an essay adapted from his book in the May 4 Chronicle of Higher Education. Commenting on the broad applicability of O'Neill's plays to virtually all aspects of modern American life, Diggins writes:

O'Neill merits appreciation beyond the conventional categories of politics, the aesthetic criteria of dramaturgy, or the neurotic symptoms of psychology. Ideas pervade O'Neill's plays, and not only ideas central to drama like irony, pathos, and tragedy.… He considered fortuitous contingencies and unintended consequences; sympathy and pity; falls caused by pride or jealousy; social and political philosophy involving class, religion, gender, race, marriage and family, power and freedom, and money and status.

And as a recent review in the Library Journal notes, it is just this appreciation of the diverse thematic content in O'Neill's work that sets Diggins's biography apart.

Biographers have published dozens of books on Eugene O'Neill over the last 50 years in an attempt to explain the complexities of America's 20th-century 'master playwright.' What makes Diggins's thoroughly researched effort particularly effective is his use of political, philosophical, social, psychological, and religious themes in his discussion of O'Neill's life and plays in the context of a dynamic American society.… Diggins generously illustrates each theme with multiple examples from O'Neill's plays and correspondences. Particularly insightful are his comparisons of O'Neill's work with that of other great writers on the theme of American democracy, including Alexis de Tocqueville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Abraham Lincoln. This book offers the reader a lot to think about, regarding O'Neill's life and work but also American society at large.

Painting a richly detailed portrait of the playwright's life and work, Eugene O'Neill's America offers a striking view of America's greatest playwright—and an insightful picture of America itself.

Archived in Biography | History | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

Read the press release.

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

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

Read the press release.

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

Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, author of the recent Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers, recently penned an interesting article for OpenDemocracy.org discussing Clint Eastwood's Oscar-winning film Letters from Iwo Jima. Eastwood's cinematic exploration of a pivotal battle of World War II, says Ohnuki-Tierney (and others), parallels the objective of her recent book in trying to "undo the demonization of Japanese soldiers that was propagated by the American mass media during and after the Pacific war of 1941-45." And in fact, Eastwood's film not only shares a common objective with Ohnuki-Tierney's book, but also the means of accomplishing that objective. Both the movie and the book focus on the writings of Japanese soldiers during the war as a vehicle through which to arrive at a deeper understanding of who these soldiers were. Ohnuki-Tierney writes:

Clint Eastwood's film Letters from Iwo Jima begins and ends sixty years after the end of the war it depicts. At the start, a team of Japanese investigators is searching for whatever may have been left by Japanese soldiers holed up on Iwo Jima, part of a group of Pacific islands around 1,000 kilometres south of Tokyo. The team finds a large sack buried where the soldiers had made their last headquarters. The closing scene of the film shows hundreds of letters and postcards the soldiers wrote to their families and friends but were never sent spilling out of this sack.

The letters symbolize the frail thread of humanity that these soldiers, facing imminent death and trapped in a war their country soon lost, managed to hold onto.

Likewise, Ohnuki-Tierney's own work focuses on a collection of diaries and letters by the tokkotai (kamikaze pilots) in order to confront the various myths and stereotypes surrounding these tragic figures, and seek out "the humanity behind the brutality of war." Taken in tandem, both of these new works prove to be indispensable corrections to the history of Japan and World War II. Read the preface to the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | History
Posted by TXM at 07:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the death of conductor Arturo Toscanini, WFMT's Critical Thinking with Andrew Patner will feature a two part conversation with Harvey Sachs, editor of The Letters of Arturo Toscanini, which we recently published in paperback. The first show airs on February 26 at 10:00 pm central time and the second on March 5 at the same time. If you're in the Chicago area be sure to catch the show, if you're not, WFMT offers streaming audio, but you'll have to subscribe to listen.

Fifty years after his death, Arturo Toscanini is still considered one of the greatest conductors in history, and probably the most influential. His letters, expertly collected, translated, and edited in The Letters of Arturo Toscanini, will give readers a new depth of insight into his life and work. As Sachs puts it, they "reveal above all else a man whose psychological perceptions in general and self-knowledge in particular were much more acute than most people have thought likely." They are sure to enthrall anyone interested in learning more about one of the great lives of the twentieth century.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Music
Posted by TXM at 02:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)