The Chicago Blog

On May 9, 1961 Newton N. Minow addressed the National Association of Broadcasters in Washington, DC. President John F. Kennedy had recently appointed Minow to the chair of the Federal Communications Commission. To the assembled executives of broadcast television he said:

I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials—many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.

You can read the text and listen to the audio of that speech, which took the broadcasters to task for failing to serve the public interest even while they used the public airwaves.

Minow's positive contribution to public-spirited television was the creation of the presidential debates. With co-author Craig L. LaMay he recounts that story in Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future. See some memorable moments from the presidential debates and read an excerpt from the book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Archived in Art and Architecture | Film and Media | History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews | Sociology
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Each of the major candidates vying to be the next President of the United States—Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain—has cited Reinhold Niebuhr’s political philosophies as among their most profound influences. Written during the cold war era when America came of age as a world power, The Irony of American History is now back in print and more relevant than ever. Niebuhr’s masterpiece on the incongruity between personal ideals and political reality is both an indictment of American moral complacency and a warning against the arrogance of virtue. Impassioned, eloquent, and deeply perceptive, Niebuhr’s wisdom will cause readers across the political spectrum to rethink their assumptions about right and wrong, war and peace.

Read the press release.

Archived in History | Press Releases | Religion
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Today's New York Times is running a piece on author George E. Lewis's new book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music—the authoritative historical account of one of America's most influential avant-garde jazz collectives. Founded in 1965, many icons of the avant garde, musicians like Anthony Braxton and Leo Wadada Smith, have joined its ranks. And many of them continue to play as members of the collective today. The NYT article includes information on several upcoming events in NYC including a special book release concert happening next Friday (May 9th) at the Community Church of New York. From the NYT:

The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, [is] an organization that has fostered some of the most vital American avant-garde music of the last 40 years.

Though noncommercial, often pointedly conceptual and unabashedly arcane, this music has had a profound influence over the years on several generations of experimental musicians worldwide.

The scene plays out vividly in A Power Stronger Than Itself: The A.A.C.M. and Experimental Music, an important book by the trombonist-composer-scholar George Lewis due out from the University of Chicago Press this month. Reconstructing that inaugural meeting from audio tapes, Mr. Lewis conveys not only Mr. Abrams's aim but also the vigorous debate begun by his notion of "original music." (Whose music? How original?) From the start, its clear, the association expressed its firm ideals partly through collective discourse.

Next Friday night another sort of discourse will unfold at the Community Church of New York in Murray Hill, when the association convenes a panel discussion with a handful of its current members, including Mr. Lewis, the multireedist Henry Threadgill and the pianist and vocalist Amina Claudine Myers. The conversation will precede a concert featuring Mr. Lewis and Mr. Abrams in an improvising trio with the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith.

You can read the full article on the NYT website, or see an excerpt from the book. To find out more about the show navigate to the AACM's New York chapter website.

Archived in Black Studies | Books for the News | Chicago | History | Music
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New in Paperback—Piero Melograni here offers a wholly readable account of Mozart’s remarkable life and times. This masterful biography proceeds from the young Mozart’s earliest years as a wunderkind—the child prodigy who traveled with his family to perform concerts throughout Europe—to his formative years in Vienna, where he absorbed the artistic and intellectual spirit of the Enlightenment, to his deathbed, his unfinished Requiem, and the mystery that still surrounds his burial.

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt.

Archived in History | Music | Press Releases
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2008 marks the fortieth anniversary of a black mark on American history: the 1968 Democratic Convention and its notorious example of police brutality against demonstrators. The provocative Battleground Chicago offers a new perspective on this tragic event by revealing how-and why-the police attacked antiwar activists at the convention. Working from interviews with eighty former Chicago police officers who were on the scene, Frank Kusch uncovers the other side of the story of ’68, deepening our understanding of a turbulent decade.

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt.

Archived in Chicago | History | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
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Germany’s leading literary family during the 20th century was headed by Thomas Mann and composed of six talented children, the most accomplished of which were Erika and Klaus. Long obscured by the fame of their domineering father, Erika and Klaus were prominent writers and artists in their own right who led fascinating, unconventional lives that mirrored the tumult and chaos of their times. In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain is their story. Andrea Weiss’s remarkable biography chronicles Erika and Klaus’s equally remarkable lives. Openly gay during an era of secrecy and repression; defiantly anti-fascist during the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich; intimate friends with such luminaries as W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, André Gide, and Jean Cocteau; performance artists before the phrase had even been coined, In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain is rich in anecdote and eye-opening details, sending the reader spinning and tumbling into the minds of these two extraordinary but neglected literary figures.

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Gay and Lesbian | History | Literature | Press Releases
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John Louis Lucaites, author of No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy has posted an apropos commentary about the Earth Day themed cover image on today's Time Magazine to his No Caption Needed blog. Detailing a photoshopped version of Joe Rosenthal's iconic photograph of WWII troops on Iwo Jima's Mt. Suribachi raising a giant conifer in place of the flag, Lucaites makes the image an occasion to deliver some interesting commentary on the history of the original photograph's appropriation and the particularly fetishistic way that the Time Magazine editors have chosen to use it today. Lucaites writes:

By most accounts Joe Rosenthal's photograph of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima's Mt. Suribachi is the most reproduced photograph of all time—ever!…

Such reproductions have occurred not just in traditional print media, but on stamps (twice), commemorative plates, woodcuts, silk screens, coins, key chains, cigarette lighters, matchbook covers, beer steins, lunchboxes, hats, t-shirts, ties, calendars, comic books, credit cards, trading cards, post cards, and human skin, and in advertisements for everything from car insurance to condoms and strip joints.…

All of this is to say that on the face of things there is nothing particularly noteworthy about Time's appropriation of the image this week to frame and promote its "green" agenda in a special issue on the "War on Global Warming," … but my interest here is in mapping out how the particular appropriation of the original photograph coaches an attitude that seems to rely on tired and clichéd conceptions of American exceptionalism. Put simply, it is not just an appeal to be "green" (although it is that), but it also functions to translate the meaning of being "green" into a symbolic register that both defines environmentalism in terms of U.S. nationalism—"green is the new red, white, and blue"—and, more, makes something of an imperialistic fetish out of it.

Read the rest of Lucaites piece on the No Caption Needed blog, or read an excerpt from Lucaite's book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Film and Media | History | Politics and Current Events
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Tuesday's Los Angeles Times published a review of several recent books about the battle of Little Bighorn, George Armstrong Custer, and the deep impact that this most famous military defeat has had on America's cultural consciousness. Discussing Michael A. Elliott's Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer the Times' Allen Barra writes:

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

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

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

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

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Reviews | Sociology
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Newton N. Minow and Craig L. LeMay, authors of Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future were interviewed recently on The Biz, the blog of TVGuide editor Stephen Battaglio. In the interview Battaglio engages the authors in a discussion of the presidential debates as "one of the biggest TV attractions of the year" and their ever increasing ability to draw record ratings for broadcast television networks:

TVGuide.com: Your book points out how both Presidents Johnson and Nixon didn't want to debate their challengers…. Now it seems that it would be impossible for a presidential candidate to avoid it.
Minow: Young people who have grown up with presidential debates expect them. I don't think any candidate can escape it.
Lamay: Absolutely. Remember in 1992 when President George H.W. Bush [who balked at debating Bill Clinton and Ross Perot] was followed around on the campaign trail by the guy in the chicken suit? If you avoided a debate today, you'd have millions of virtual chickens [all over the Internet].

TVGuide.com: The first 2004 debate between President Bush and Sen. John Kerry set a record with 62.5 million viewers. Will a meeting between Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. Hillary Clinton top that?
Minow: I think it will, absolutely. It will be higher and the debates will be repeated and distributed in all kinds of new ways on the Internet. Every American will have a chance to see them.

You can read the full interview on The Biz.

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

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

Margasak's article continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Archived in Gay and Lesbian | History | Literature | Reviews
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According to the New York Times, yesterday evening marked a significant checkpoint in the War in Iraq when a roadside bomb exploded killing four more U.S. troops, bringing the total American death toll in Iraq to 4000. With no end in sight and casualties steadily rising, media outlets around the globe have used the 4,000th death as an opportunity to look back on the war and the many soldiers who have lost their lives there since 2003. But providing perhaps one of the most vivid and personal of these retrospectives, is NYT photojournalist and author Ashley Gilbertson's recent Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War. Documenting the conflict from the initial invasion, to Iraq's first national elections, Gilbertson's book tells candidly of his own experience photographing the war and of the lives of the soldiers fighting it.

To preview some of the images from the book navigate to the author's portfolio on the NYT website.

To hear more about the Gilbertson's experience in Iraq, you can navigate to the Press's special website for the book which features and exclusive half-hour interview with the author, or see this archived video from CSPAN's Book TV of Gilbertson's talk earlier this month at a Borders Books & Music in Vienna, Virginia.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
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An interview with Jan Golinsky author of British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment was posted yesterday to Benjamin Cohen and David Ng's science blog, the World's Fair. The interview begins with an interesting synopsis of the book and its unique contribution to both cultural history and the history of science. From the World's Fair:

WORLD'S FAIR: What do we have here? When you sent in the prospectus to Chicago, what did you tell them this would be about?

JAN GOLINSKI: The book explores beliefs about weather and climate in eighteenth-century Britain and its colonies. I argue that these beliefs reflect some of the important social and cultural changes of the period. People began to study the weather in a way that we recognize as more "scientific," but traditional attitudes also survived, even what we might call "superstitions." The tensions between scientific and traditional approaches seemed to me symptomatic of the age, and to some extent of modern attitudes to the natural environment in general.

WF: You're a premier historian of science, respected, influential, articulate, good-humored, don't worry, I'm going somewhere with this…namely, what does a book about the weather contribute to our understanding of the history of science?

JG: I think of it as a combination of history of science with cultural history. I didn't set out to trace the origins and growth of a science of weather, but to place scientific practices like record-keeping and the use of instruments in their cultural context. So, I suppose it contributes to the way we can understand science as a set of practices and beliefs that has developed in specific historical settings.

Read the rest of the interview on the World's Fair blog.

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

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

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Literature | Reviews
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Newton Minow is more responsible than any other individual for the televising of presidential debates—an oasis in what he famously termed “a vast wasteland.” From the creation of the Kennedy-Nixon debates to his current service on the Commission on Presidential Debates, he has worked to bring political discussion into the mass media. He is uniquely situated to write the just-released Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future, which he authored with journalism professor Craig L. LaMay.

Minow and LaMay reviewed the history of presidential debates in their book and from their comments we culled some of the memorable moments from past debates, supplemented with images and links to online videos where available. Nixon sweating, “I knew Jack Kennedy,” presidential scowls and more—review them and relive them.

We also have an excerpt about the first televised debate between Nixon and Kennedy.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
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Chicago 10, the innovative documentary that revisits the tumult of the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the Chicago 8/7 conspiracy trial of key antiwar activists a year later, opens Friday in select theaters. The film is directed by Brett Morgen and combines archival footage of the chaos of August 1968 with animated reenactments of scenes from the trial. Plus a soundtrack ranging from Black Sabbath and Steppenwolf to the Beastie Boys and Eminem.

Morgen has been quoted as saying that he "wanted to do the myth of Chicago rather than the history," and "if you want to know the history of what happened in Chicago so long ago, then read a book." Well, we think understanding history is pretty darn important and are happy to oblige.

Twenty years ago we published the most complete account of the events surrounding the 1968 DNC, David Farber's Chicago '68. That book is innovative itself, creating multiple perspectives reflecting both police and demonstrators. Farber shows the developing plans of the antiwar movement for protesting the war in Vietnam during the convention, as the shocks of 1968 shift the ground—the Tet offensive, President Lyndon Johnson's withdrawal from the re-election race, the assassination of Martin Luther King and subsequent riots in cities across the country, and the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

Next month we will release a paperback edition of Battleground Chicago: The Police and the 1968 Democratic National Convention by Frank Kusch. Battleground Chicago is essential for understanding what is completely absent in Chicago 10—any insight into the motivations, thoughts, and feelings of the individual policemen who were enforcing order on the streets of Chicago. (Or, as Mayor Richard J. Daley famously misstated it: "the policeman is there to preserve disorder.") Kusch interviewed eighty former Chicago police officers who were on the scene and uncovered the other side of the story of '68.

If you want to get a taste of 1968, go see Chicago 10. But if you want to understand 1968, read a book.

Update: We now have an excerpt from Battleground Chicago and an excerpt from Chicago '68.

Archived in Books for the News | Chicago | History
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In a review appearing in last Sunday's edition of the Toronto Star Christine Sisimondo begins:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
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In the most famous defeat in American military history Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer lost his life along with most of the rest of his 7th Cavalry at the now famous Battle of Little Bighorn, also known as Custer's Last Stand.

In the ensuing years the defeat has become a powerful symbol of America's bloody past, with everyone from tourists and historians to Native American activists attempting to interpret and explain the battle in the context of the multicultural present. In the March 6 New York Review of Books, Larry McMurtry reviews Michael A. Elliott's new book Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer and explores the complicated question of why the battle retains such power for Americans today. McMurtry writes:

Even as the sun set for Custer, dawn broke for the Custerologists—as Michael Elliott calls them—whose numbers now darken the sky. If you don't believe me, write yourself some life insurance, then head up to Hardin, Montana, toward the end of June, and you'll be able to take in not one but two reenactments of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, one sponsored by the town of Hardin itself (admission $16) and one put on by the powerful Crow family called the Real Birds (admission $12).

The Crow were scouts for Custer, and fought along with him. I attended the Crow sundance once, which might as well have been held in Harvard Yard, so thick were the white ethnologists on the ground. It would probably have been warmer in Harvard Yard too.

No one should think that because 130 years have passed since the battle the passions between tribes and within tribes have abated. Much of Michael Elliott's book is devoted to explaining that people who might have been expected to calm down in that length of time in fact haven't calmed down at all.

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

Also read an excerpt from the book.

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

Marschall writes of Citrus:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biology | Economics | History | Reviews
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Just in time for the opening of his exhibition at Melbourne's Obscura Gallery, the Australian paper The Age ran an article last Sunday on Ashley Gilbertson and his new book, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War. As the article notes, Gilbertson is himself an Australian native and got his first taste of professional journalism "documenting the lives of Kosovar refugees seeking temporary protection in Australia." The article continues:

The project sparked an interest in the plight of displaced people that led him to West Papua, Afghanistan and eventually Iraq, where he has spent a total of 18 months since 2002.

His early trips to the country were a hand-to-mouth existence, selling stories as he went, often depending on the goodwill of colleagues and strangers.

Towards the end of a trip in 2003 he picked up work for the New York Times. Since he returned from that trip, his work has been exclusively for the US newspaper.

His work while embedded with US marines during the 2004 Fallujah offensive made his name, earning him the prestigious Robert Capa Award for courageous photography from the US Overseas Press Club.

But his experiences have left scars. He watched as Lance Corporal William Miller, a soldier who was escorting him up the stairwell of a minaret, was shot dead by an insurgent. Running out of the mosque under insurgent fire, he wished to die. "I ran out into the street with the marines, hoping I would take a slug," he said.

Read more about Gilbertson's harrowing experiences in Iraq at The Age. Also check out the Obscura Gallery's web page for more information on his exhibition. Finally, see the Whiskey Tango Foxtrot website featuring a full half hour video interview with the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
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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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Kevin Rozario's The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America was one of several books in a review essay about America's complex relationship with disaster published in last Friday's Financial Times. Arguing that American's find disaster simultaneously terrifying and entertaining, the FT's Michael Skapinker uses Rozario's book to help explain this social paradox, especially in terms of the way this conflicted attitude is reflected in the media. Skapinker writes:

Kevin Rozario, who teaches American studies at Smith College, Massachusetts, writes astutely about disaster, particularly its relationship with entertainment. As he notes in The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America, the link predates the modern movie industry.

A few months after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the subsequent fires, Lucile Garrett went with her parents to see a re-enactment of the event at a theatre in Minneapolis. "On the stage," she recalled, "was a miniature reproduction of San Francisco, on the night of the fire … Then suddenly we were favoured with a great rumbling! The hills on which the city was built shook and tottered! … Finally the hills cracked open, the tottering buildings fell, and the whole city burst into flames. It continued to burn for some minutes and at last they lowered the curtain on the glorious blaze."

Like the events of September 11 almost a century later, the terrible filmic quality of disasters is often inescapable. Anthony Lane, the New Yorker critic, wrote in the immediate aftermath of 9/11: "Of course you could argue that last Tuesday was an instant dismissal of the fantastic—that people gazed up into the sky and immediately told themselves that this was the real thing. Yet all the evidence suggests the contrary; it was the television commentators as well as those on the ground who resorted to a phrase book culled from the cinema: 'It was like a movie', 'It was like Independence Day.' 'It was like Die Hard.' 'No, Die Hard 2.'

Read the rest of the article on the FT website.

Also, read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Books for the News | Film and Media | History | Sociology
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The California Literary Review, an online magazine, is running a great selection of photographs from Ashley Gilbertson's recently published Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War. The photos are accompanied by a short essay by the author discussing how he wound up on assignment with the New York Times covering the battle of Falluja—one of the fiercest battles of the conflict:

In March 2004, four American contractors were ambushed in the center of Falluja, a city forty-three miles west of Baghdad. They were dragged from their cars, beaten, and their bodies burnt.… Back in Iraq, furious Marine generals who were supposedly in control of Falluja promised swift vengeance and on April 4 attacked the city with everything they had. Hundreds of Iraqis were killed in a week of intense urban combat.…

My rotation had finished and I was at the bureau packing to leave the country when a scramble ensued to get someone from the paper to cover the battle from the frontlines. Times higher-ups contacted generals and politicians, and eventually we were given two… slots, one of them mine. I repacked my bags, this time including body armor and equipment I needed to file my photos under battle conditions. A few hours Later I boarded an aircraft bound for the dusty Camp Falluja five miles east of the city.

You can find the rest of the article and the accompanying photos online at the California Literary Review website. Also see the website for the book featuring a fascinating video interview with the author discussing his experiences as a war photographer in Iraq.

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

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

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

See a collection of unusual maps from the book.

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

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

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

The review concludes:

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

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

Read the rest of the review on the THE website.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Film and Media | History | Reviews
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Bradford Edwards, the artist whose astonishing collection of Vietnam-era Zippo lighters is featured in Vietnam Zippos: American Soldiers' Engravings and Stories (1965-1973), was interviewed yesterday on All Things Considered by NPR's senior Asian correspondent Michael Sullivan. In the interview, which took place on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, Sullivan explored Edwards unique fascination with these relics of war:

Edwards insists he's not a "Vietnam Zippohead."

"I'm not a Zippo collector. I'm not somebody into the Zippo, per se," he says.…

"I'm not into it because, really, of the war or because of memorabilia or because of any real, I would say, direct historical aspect. I'm in it for the artistic sensibility and the direct emotional expression that you see via text or images," he says.

Edwards calls the Zippos left behind "pure art without ambition"—personal narratives that capture the mixed emotions of a confusing time and place.

Navigate to the NPR website to view photographs of Edwards and displays of Zippos, plus the archived audio and transcript of the interview.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History
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Bloomberg.com is running an interesting review of a selection of the many recently published books on the war in Iraq. In the review, Charles Taylor notes the "unexpected treasure" that is the U. S. Army's Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World War II—a small book originally published in 1942 designed to help American soldiers adapt to Iraqi culture, but that perhaps has more relevance today than it did over sixty years ago. Taylor writes:

This small guide for U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq during the Second World War—containing a map of the country, a glossary of useful Arabic phrases and instructions on what to expect and how to act—is the unexpected treasure of the lot. Brief, sensible, written in the kind of clear English that used to be common in American life, the book speaks of a time when thought was given to preparing soldiers for what they would face culturally as well as militarily, and when the importance of the mission was not assumed to grant soldiers the right to swagger like conquerors.

The new foreword by Lieutenant Colonel John A. Nagl sounds both appreciative and rueful, written in the voice of a man who wonders how we ever became embroiled in such a foul-up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The review continues:

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

See the rest of the article on the Nature website.

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

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

And from the Chicago Suburban News.

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

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

Archived in Art and Architecture | Chicago | History | Reviews
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The New York Times Book Review ran a piece about Sherry Buchanan's new book Vietnam Zippos: American Soldiers' Engravings and Stories in last Sunday's holiday books wrap up. Placing Buchanan's book on his list of new art and design books for the season, reviewer Steven Heller writes:

For grunts fighting the Vietnam War, statements of patriotism and protest found an outlet… on metal Zippo lighters. Vietnam Zippos, illustrated with objects from the collection of the artist Bradford Edwards, documents what the author, Sherry Buchanan, calls "amulets and talismans bringing the keeper invulnerability, good luck and protection against evil." Sadly, these personalized mementos also served as last testaments for many who were killed in action.

An extensive published record exists for documents and relics from the Vietnam War, yet this book, well designed and photographed by Misha Anikst, offers a rare personal dimension. The mottoes on these lighters, like "When I die I will go to heaven because I spent my time in hell," provide candid insight into what these soldiers thought of the war.

Read the rest of the review on the NYTBR website.

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

To analyse the relationship between science and society (including religion), Stanley examines the bridging function of what he calls "valence values". Like the bonding ring of electrons, these values facilitate the interaction between science and culture. Through the lens of these values, Stanley uses Eddington as a test case for exploring the interaction of science and religion in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century.

Unlike the natural theologians of the previous century, Eddington did not seek a harmonization between science and religion. He saw both as processes of seeking. As he reminded his audience at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, "A knowledge of nature is the great end of our work; but, if we cannot attain that, there is at least the struggle after knowledge, which is perhaps no less a thing." Eddington could have said the same of his religion.

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

Archived in History | History and Philosophy of Science | Religion | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

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

Read the rest of the Chronicle piece on their website.

Archived in Film and Media | History | Philosophy | Reviews