Before porn was legal, there was Beate Uhse (1921-2001). Before there were iconic other javelin champions-turned-stunt pilots-turned-sex-shop-proprietors, there was Beate Uhse. And before there was Beate Uhse, there was an erotic underworld in Germany, rife with untrained abortionists, uneducated practitioners, and a whole lot of folks looking for guides to "marital hygiene." Basically, before there was Beate Uhse, there was Beate Uhse undone: a perfectly fertile breeding ground, if you will, for an assertively proto-feminist stock offering.

Elizabeth Heineman's Before Porn was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse, recently profiled by New Books in History (which resulted in the most downloaded interview in the site's existence), takes on the story of the former Luftwaffe pilot, war widow, and black marketer, ultimately placing the erotica entrepreneur at the forefront of Germany's socio-sexual revolution. Through Uhse's story, Heineman explores how one mail-order business (spearheaded by Uhse's self-penned guide to the rhythm method) battled restrictive legislation and conservative mores in order to bring consumers the new products demanded by a burgeoning liberal marketplace that was anxious for sexual self-help. If that doesn't quite tempt you enough into uncovering more of what's—well, under the covers—of the book, then Heineman's innovative reads of oral histories from a nation on the verge of a social, secular, and democratic revolution certainly should. It's an Horatio Alger tale with a twist of liberal morality; a rags-to-riches coming-of-age foray with a hint of sexy mail-order mystique; and an exhaustive scholarly debut helmed by a badass German ace once banned from the Flensburger tennis club due to "general concerns."

Doctor says you better have a look:

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | Sociology
Posted by KAM at 08:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The tale told in Wong Kar-Wai's 1994 film Chungking Express isn't particularly straightforward. In between the stop-motion jumps and alternative shots, the flick tells two stories: a cop with a jones for a lost love buys tins of pineapple that are due to expire the same day as his affection, while another cop. . . . Well, there's some mirroring with postdated boarding passes and a girl named Faye and California, the restaurant and the place and that kind of Dreamin' from the Mamas and the Papas song, and . . . uh, flight attendants and cousins . . . and. . . . Suffice to say it's perfectly complicated. The title of the film in Chinese literally translates to "Chungking Jungle," which refers to both its dense urban landscape and the Chungking Mansions in Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, Hong Kong, where much of the movie's first sequence is set. Like the film, the Chungking Mansions offer an idiosyncratic slice of life in our transnational capitalist society.

Curry shops, African record stands, clothing stalls, sari tailors, Nigerian exporters, Sub-Saharan internet cafes, Lahore Fast Food, barbershops, Bollywood video kiosks, guestrooms inhabited by 120 distinct nationalities (on any given day), porno stands, and even Indian whiskey distributors fight for turf among a 17-story tower block. But as a recent Wall Street Journal review of anthropologist Gordon Mathew's Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong points out, the notoriously shabby tenement is engaged in a culture as much about low-end globalism as it is about cheap sleep and squalid stories.

Visitors go to Chungking Mansions to buy consumer and trade goods that have been manufactured in mainland China, bringing them back to their home countries for resale at a higher price. The goods are bought from middlemen who work from one of the more than 100 tiny storefronts and stalls on the lower floors of the building. Some traders transport their goods home by pooling money and renting shipping containers, but many simply fill their luggage with wares.

In the production notes for Chungking Express, Kar-Wai speaks to his desire to use the Mansions as part of his set:

It is a legendary place where the relations between people are very complicated. It has always fascinated and intrigued me. It is also a permanent hotspot for the cops in Hong Kong because of the illegal traffic that takes place there. That mass-populated and hyperactive place is a great metaphor for the town herself.

The WSJ goes on to commend Ghetto at the Center of the World as "a first rate business book," and closes its review with a quote that further articulates the Mansions as a microcosm of capitalism's soft underbelly:

Mathews adds: "As a Pakistani said to me vis-à-vis Indians, 'I do not like them; they are not my friends. But I am here to make money, as they are here to make money. We cannot afford to fight.'"

Whither the West? You'll have to watch the movie to find out whether or not the cop(s) get(s) the girl(s).

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by KAM at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A review of Julia Lupton's Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life from a recent issue of the Time Higher Ed opened with a clip from Samuel Johnson on the Bard:

"There is," wrote Johnson in the magnificent preface to his edition of the plays," always an appeal open from criticism to nature." Shakespeare is true to life when he shows joy bumping up against sorrow and the sublime against the ridiculous.

The review went on to call into account Lupton's premise: that to "think with Shakespeare" was to learn about both politics and life, as well as to call into question how—with nods to Agamben and Arendt—Shakes might help us unravel a contemporary crisis or two.

The next afternoon, reading a piece by Rosemary Counter in the Globe and Mail on Carrie Pitzulo's Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy, we were reminded of Johnson's reference to the open appeal. Here, too, in a review that delved into the viability of Pitzluto's premise, was a question that posited the sublime with the ridiculous: can we "think with Playboy?"

In search of answers, Pitzulo begins with what we're all thinking: the centerefolds. While objectification comes straight to mind, Hefner believes playmates are "glorified" as a "friend and equal." And, to his credit, they're far from wanton libertines or nameless nudes: through interviews, the Playmates are often presented as educated, assertive, hard-working and individualist (also presented, however, are their measurements).

In the instance—and interest—of both works, however, the real question fielded by their authors seems to be the validity of a revisionist account, and how such a return in recent criticism might help us to explore the social constructs that these two monster narratives have imbued in our cultural consciousness.

Never the twain shall meet? How about a particularly dramatic revisiting of Harry Nilsson's ubiquitous ode to "The Desk" from Playboy After Dark? Not quite the quandary of Caliban's age or minority status, and isolated from the the question of whether Hef's notion of gender as a social construct and sexuality as a wide spectrum was ahead of its time, but still a moment when we might again use a mix of high and low culture to enter that shapeshifting space between politics and life:

Archived in Commentary | Literature | Sociology
Posted by KAM at 04:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Welcome back to TRAFFIC: Japan in Peril, an exchange of thoughts on the nation's future in light of the recent Pacific coast earthquake and the subsequent tsunami. This afternoon, we asked John Whittier Treat, professor of East Asian languages and literature at Yale University and acclaimed scholar of Japanese studies, and Margaret Morganroth Gullette, noted cultural critic, age activist, and award-winning journalist, to comment on Japan's current crisis and its links to the nation's past atomic experiences—and the uncertain future of its aging population.

TRAFFIC taps the expertise of leading figures from across the disciplines—whose prescient views on current events help to shape the way we interpret the world around us—on themes of contemporary global interest.

From John Whittier Treat, author of Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb:

On Fukushima and Japanese Rearmament

Japan's Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, with six reactors one of the largest in the world, is also one of the oldest. The Tokyo Electric Power Company began the process of building this plant in 1960, bringing it on line ten years later despite citizen concerns over placing reactors in known earthquake-prone zones (it is timely to note that our own Diablo Canyon nuclear facility in California was built to withstand a 7.5 magnitude earthquake; Japan's last Friday was 8.9). In fact, trouble began not long after Fukushima joined the grid: fire broke out in 1976, though news of it only reached the public thanks to a whistle-blower. Other accidents occurred in 1978, 1990 and 1998. Now, this past weekend, we know that some people in the plant have already died, others have received potentially lethal doses of radiation, increased numbers of residents are being evacuated, and doses of iodine are being readied for many others. Even if a meltdown of a nuclear core—or two—is averted, Fukushima has already joined the ranks of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl to comprise an unholy trinity of the world's worst nuclear power catastrophes to date.

Fukushima Prefecture, however, is not an analog to Pennsylvania or the Ukraine in all respects. Fukushima is Japan, where the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing act of World War Two exposed tens of thousands of Japanese to radioactivity that sometimes killed them in later years, sometimes left them pitifully enfeebled, and sometimes, they feared, altered the genes they passed on to their children and grandchildren. This makes what we elsewhere in the world are now witnessing as "news" a vivid memory for the Japanese as well as their present-tense event. Genpatsu 'nuclear power' immediately recalls the older word genbaku 'atomic bomb' with a surplus of history and horror that our English translations do not.

Last December, and in response to a perceived growing threat from its nuclear-armed near neighbors, the Japanese Diet voted across all party lines to move closer than it ever has towards abandoning its long-standing "nuclear allergy" when it doubled its defense budget. At the time, few voices at home were raised in protest. More than half a century had passed since August 6 and 9 that long hot summer of the Japanese Empire's defeat; the world had changed, Japan faced new enemies, and they do seem suddenly emboldened. Article 9 of Japan's postwar "peace constitution" notwithstanding, Japan's new arms-building program seemed destined to include, covertly if not openly, immeasurably improved descendants of the Little Boy and the Thin Man weapons used against them long ago.

But partisans for nuclear disarmament in Japan can hope that now, as their nation surely recovers from the devastation of the earthquake, the tidal waves, and the nuclear debacle of its power industry, the country's as-yet unique sensitivity to the power of the atom to do harm as well as good will revive, come center-stage again, make the Japanese government rethink the new path on which it has set out in an admittedly evermore militarized Northeast Asia. Fukushima already has its victims, and the number will likely grow if reports are true. But the live coverage on television and the internet of explosions in the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant may also usefully inspire the Japanese to reclaim their moral leadership in a world increasingly crowded with nuclear nations and declare: Here is a line we will not cross.

It is too early to tell what all the repercussions of this latest nuclear power accident will be. Japan, weakened economically after its infamous "Lost Decade," and ill served by a series of short-lived, anemic governments, now faces immense new hurdles. But among the challenges is an opportunity—to regain the higher ground in the ongoing international debate on the future of nuclear technology.

**

From Margaret Morganroth Gullette, author of Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America:

Japan in Peril

Everyone should have special compassion for elderly people in a catastrophe like this one in Japan. Emergency crews in Japan must recognize that older people need special protections.

One lesson that Americans did not learn from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, sadly, is that older people are the most vulnerable.

Of those who died right away, 64 percent were over sixty-five, in a city where beforehand a mere 12 percent were over that age. A full 78 percent were fifty and up. Katrina was one of the worst medical catastrophes for the aged in recent U.S. history. In the longer run, the hard fact is that thousands of people over fifty were given painfully less choice—about being evacuated or drowning; easing back to normal or fighting for every scrap of recovery; getting home fast or spending years in the alien diaspora.

As I say in Agewise, we could not learn that lesson because the press was mainly unconcerned about age or ageism.

Katrina was not an isolated incident. In Paris in the heat wave of 2003, it was also older people who died. In Paris "disparate impact of age" meant not old people's intrinsic frailty, but family abandonment and lack of communal resources like air-conditioning. After 9/11, our foremost gerontologist, the late Dr. Robert Butler, pointed out that in Manhattan pets were evacuated within twenty-four hours, while older shut-ins and the disabled waited for up to a week without electricity or food.

Adult children also behaved heroically in New Orleans. First responders in a boat offered to take a bedridden woman's family if they left her behind. The family refused. When a second boat approached, they prudently placed her in it first.

What I worry about is "triage" whenever there is scarcity. Younger people too suffer from hypothermia or dehydration but older people die sooner without appropriate treatment. Rescuers everywhere make unconscious decisions about who gets sought if missing, who receives warm blankets, radiation tests, or housing. Perhaps enough respect for elders survives to make that possible. Such emergencies are a gigantic implicit test of social values.

**

This concludes our series TRAFFIC: Japan in Peril—thank you for joining us. For additional information on John Whittier Treat's Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb, or Margaret Morganroth Gullette's Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America, please visit the University of Chicago Press's website here.

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | History | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by KAM at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For a dizzying number of reasons, privacy is a highly contested issue right now. In one high-profile case, last month a student at Rutgers University committed suicide after having his privacy publicly violated by his roommate. That incident led to a great deal of discussion on a range of issues from hate crimes and bullying to the question of whether a generation that has grown up with the Internet and social media will have a radically different approach to privacy than their elders. Of course, that remains to be seen, but in the meantime Christena Nippert-Eng is here to explain to us how privacy works in the here and now. Packed with stories that are funny and sad, familiar and strange, Islands of Privacy tours the myriad arenas where privacy battles are fought, lost, and won.

Nippert-Eng stopped by WBEZ's Eight Forty-Eight yesterday to talk about these issues, to respond to some brave Chicagoans willing to spill their secrets, and to take questions on everything from cyberstalking to the relief of confession. Head to WBEZ's newly redesigned site to listen.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Sociology
Posted by RH at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Wall Street Journal leaked a story this morning quickly picked up by the folks at Gawker about a warning McDonald's Corp. has issued to federal regulators: waive the U.S. health care overhaul's new premium requirement or else 30,000 hourly restaurant workers might find themselves without insurance.

The requirement in question? A "mini-med" plan clause that offers limited benefits to over 1.4 million American low-wage workers. More specifically, McDonald's is up in arms about the percentage of premiums that must be spent on worker benefits:

Last week, a senior McDonald's official informed the Department of Health and Human Services that the restaurant chain's insurer won't meet a 2011 requirement to spend at least 80% to 85% of its premium revenue on medical care.

McDonald's and trade groups say the percentage, called a medical loss ratio, is unrealistic for mini-med plans because of high administrative costs owing to frequent worker turnover, combined with relatively low spending on claims.

Democrats who drafted the health law wanted the requirement to prevent insurers from spending too much on executive salaries, marketing, and other costs that they said don't directly help patients.

The article goes on to mention dozens of other low wage-providing companies likely poised to cut or challenge limited benefit plans, including Home Depot, Inc., Disney Worldwide Services, CVS Caremark Corp., and Staples, Inc. For low-wage workers, those with "soft skills," as Jane L. Collins and Victoria Mayer term them in Both Hands Tied: Welfare Reform and the Race to the Bottom of the Low-Wage Labor Market, challenges like benefits cuts put their own lived experiences into dialogue with the structural and political forces that shape their lives.

Collins and Mayer dig deep and explore the struggle of working women to balance child care and wage-earning in poorly paying jobs with inflexible schedules—and what happens when these jobs failed them and they turned to the state for additional aid. Several interviews in the book take place at locally franchised McDonald's—and the stark and poignant portrait of how reform and low-wage incomes afflict poor, single-parent families isn't lost in light of the threat of cuts like these. For more information, check out Both Hands Tied or read more—like Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Carl Chancellor's op-ed about the book, "Working Poor, Two Words that Should Never Be Linked" at the Poverty in America site on change.org.

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | Sociology
Posted by KAM at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you want to get our attention here at the Chicago Blog, all you need to do is combine two of our favorite things—maps and urban sociology. Our love for maps is strong, and our interest in the social dynamics of cities, especially those of our hometown, is deep. So it's no surprise that today's infographic of the day from Fast Company caught our eye. That post presents Eric Fischer's finely detailed and rather beautiful maps depicting racial integration (or its lack) in many major American cities. Fischer was inspired by Bill Rankin's map of Chicago's racial makeup, which reveals that while the city continues to be highly segregated, some traditional ethnic enclaves are transforming. One such Chicago neighborhood—Andersonville and the area around the Argyle stop on the red line—is analyzed in detail in Japonica Brown-Saracino's A Neighborhood that Never Changes: Gentrification, Social Preservation, and the Search for Authenticity.

As Rankin notes, his map overturns the usual way of delineating areas of cities, where "neighborhoods are almost always drawn as perfectly bounded areas." That traditional approach can undermine our understanding of what's really happening in cities. The power of maps to change our perception of reality has been at the heart of cartographer Mark Monmonier's work for more than a decade, beginning with How to Lie with Maps and appearing most recently in No Dig, No Fly, No Go: How Maps Restrict and Control. A characteristically brilliant survey of restrictive mapping, Monmonier's new book takes a hard look at borders, concluding that mapped boundaries, however persuasive their appearance, are not always as permanent and impermeable as their cartographic lines might suggest.

Archived in Cartography and Geography | Commentary | Sociology
Posted by RH at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the wake of Mayor Daley's surprise announcement that he wouldn't be seeking a sixth term in office, a long-simmering dispute between the Chicago Police Department's rank and file and its leadership—specifically Superintendent Jody Weis—has erupted into a full-fledged public war of opinion. Even as Daley continued to vouch for his hand-picked superintendent last week, at least one prominent candidate for Daley's job said that he'd fire Weis if given the chance—and today the Fraternal Order of Police joined the fray, organizing a demonstration that criticized Weis for everything from his handling of police brutality cases to his decision to dress in uniform.

The CPD is far from alone: tensions between the rank and file and the departmental brass are common in big-city departments, where street-level officers often feel that they are misunderstood, underappreciated, and even undermined by those back at headquarters. For a fine-grained look at that fraught relationship, you can't do much better than Jennifer Hunt's new book Seven Shots: An NYPD Raid on a Terrorist Cell and Its Aftermath. Hunt recounts the dramatic story of a daring raid that foiled a bombing planned for the New York subway in 1997—and then she goes on to tell how, rather than being rewarded,the officers involved in the raid fell victim to departmental politics. Hunt has spent years working closely with cops in the field, and Seven Shots puts the reader firmly into their world, seeing nearly as many dangers coming at them from HQ as from the streets themselves. Novelist and former NYPD lieutenant Ed Dee says that Hunt, "understands cops," and calls the book"the most honest, accurate, and heartfelt look beneath the surface of the NYPD that I've ever read."

You can read the dramatic story of the raid itself here.

Archived in Sociology
Posted by LTS at 02:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While academic studies on the nature of beauty abound, this article in the New York Times takes note of some recent efforts by academics to uncover the nature of ugly. The NYT's Natalie Angier writes:

Let's not pussyfoot. They are, by our standards, ugly animals—maybe cute ugly, more often just ugly ugly. And though the science of ugliness lags behind investigations into the evolution of beauty and the metrics of a supermodel's face, a few researchers are taking a crack at understanding why we find certain animals unsightly even when they don't threaten us with venom or compete for our food.

Citing researchers like neuroscientist Nancy Kanwishwer, and evolutionary biologist Geoffery Miller, Angier shows how most of our ideas about the aesthetic appeal of animals are based on how closely their physical appearance conforms to, or deviates from, the physical appearance of healthy, attractive, human beings—an idea which cultural critic Wendy Steiner (also quoted in the NYT article) both draws from and complicates with her account of changing perceptions of beauty in her books, Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art, and The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art, the latter of which will be published later this fall.

In Venus in Exile Steiner documents modernism's rejection of conventional, representational forms of beauty in favor of the "separate sphere" of the abstract and surreal, and in The Real Real Thing, the convergence of these worlds as new media blurs the line between the virtual and the real—a convergence which Steiner argues offers new ways of thinking about beauty. But will it open up new doors for the star-nosed mole? Angier writes:

Classical beauty is easy, but a taste for the difficult, the unconventional, the ugly, has often been seen as a mark of sophistication, a passport into the rarefied world of the artistic vanguard. "Beauty can be present by its violation," Dr. Steiner said, and the pinwheel appendages of the star-nosed mole are the rosy fingers of dawn.

Read the full article at the NYT website.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News | Film and Media | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wisconsin Public Radio's To the Best of Our Knowledge aired a program last week on the theme of monsters, inviting several authors on the show whose books explore the important role they play in the Western imagination. Among them was Joshua Blu Buhs, author of Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend.

While Buhs doesn't believe in Bigfoot, as his book demonstrates, there's no denying Bigfoot mania. Tracing the wild and wooly story of America's favorite homegrown monster from the early nineteenth-century to the present, Buh's book offers more than a few interesting insights on what our fascination with this monster says about modern American culture.

You can catch the To the Best of Our Knowledge podcast on the WPR website or archived at this third party site. Also, find out more about Buhs' book on our website with this excerpt, and an interview with the author. Or stay right right here at the UCP blog to read our previous post featuring Buhs in dialogue with fellow UCP author Sigrid Schmalzer on Bigfoot and its Chinese analog, the yeren.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Huffington Post ran a short piece by Robert K. Elder, author of Last Words of the Executed talking about his new book and offering up a selection of some of the provocative "last words" from its pages. Check the Huffington Post website to read and post a comment, as well as check other reader's reactions to the controversial issues Elder's book raises.

Also see Elder's website for the book or read another selection of excerpts .

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | History | Law | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As the oil continues to gush into the waters off the southern US, we called on sociologist Lee Clarke to comment on the disaster response, or lack there of. Clarke's penned two books for the Press on the subject of catastrophes; the first, Mission Improbable: Using Fantasy Documents to Tame Disaster, considers the limits of organizational control in the face of disaster while the second, Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination, looks into how we think about the unthinkable. Here's what he had to say about the oil spill, and how the predictions in his book are, sadly, coming true.

"In the wake of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, people ask me if I'm going to write a book about it. I say I've already written two. The planning (really, the lack of planning) and the kinds of promises by BP and various government agents were the subjects of my 1999 book Mission Improbable. The failure to imagine the worst, and the offloading of the consequences of such failure, were the subjects of Worst Cases. My editor, Doug Mitchell, has said these books are 'evergreen,' by which he means that, sadly, events such as the Haiti earthquake, Katrina, and September 11, guarantee that my books are made timely again on a fairly regular basis. The BP debacle allows us to reconsider these arguments afresh.

Continue reading "Lee Clarke on the Disaster Response—or Lack Thereof—in the Gulf" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Sociology
Posted by at 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While most recent media coverage of the financial crisis focuses on the economic downturn's impact on the middle class, in an article which ran last month in The Nation Katha Pollitt asks: "But what about the people who already were poor before the crisis? Like women on welfare?"

To help her answer that question Pollitt cites Jane L. Collins and Victoria Mayer's new book on the subject Both Hands Tied: Welfare Reform and the Race to the Bottom in the Low-Wage Labor Market—an eye-opening account of how the welfare reforms of the past few decades have afflicted poor, single-parent families, ultimately eroding the participants' economic rights and affecting their ability to care for themselves and their children.

In the article Pollitt argues that if welfare reforms were failing economically impoverished single-parents before, the financial crisis has greatly amplified the socially devastating effects they've had on America's underclass. Read it online at The Nation website.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

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

And from Newcity:

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

Read the reviews and see these excerpts from the book.

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

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

Read the review.

Also see the author's webiste for the book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David E. Apter, professor emeritus of comparative political and social development at Yale University and author of many books on the political and social struggles of developing nations including The Politics of Modernization published by the Press in 1965, passed away last Tuesday at the age of 85.

According to this obituary in the New York Times:

[Apter's work draws] on social science and political theory and his own forays into impoverished lands, where he encountered peasants, politicians and sometimes terrorists.… In his travels, he interviewed colonial bureaucrats, nationalist leaders, generals, foot soldiers, tribal chiefs, trade unionists, farmers, fishermen and merchants in the bazaar.

"He was a tireless field worker, learning the fine grain of life out on the surfaces of the world where people actually live, and had a remarkable capacity to make broader theory out of it," Kai T. Erikson, a former president of the American Sociological Association, said in an interview.

"It's hard to pin him to the wall as a political scientist or a sociologist," Professor Erikson said. "He had huge influence in both fields, bringing them together as an inventor of interdisciplinarity—almost the coiner of the term."

David E. Apter is survived by his wife as well as his two children Andrew and Emily Apter, both of whom are leading academics in their fields have published several books with the Press.

Archived in Commentary | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the our post-9/11 world, inundated by video surveillance, and where joining Facebook has become almost obligatory, debate about an individual's right to privacy has begun to take center stage. While some argue that some loss of privacy is a small price to pay for our safety, and the benefits of staying connected online outweigh concerns over the use and abuse of personal information, others disagree.

Recently Christena Nippert-Eng, professor of sociology at the Illinois Institute of Technology and author of the forthcoming Islands of Privacy, made an appearance on Chicago Public Radio's Eight Forty-Eight in a panel discussion addressing the topic. Listen to the archived audio on the Chicago Public Radio website.

About the book:

In Islands of Privacy, Christena Nippert-Eng gives us an intimate view into the full range of ordinary people's sometimes extraordinary efforts to preserve the border between themselves and the rest of the world.

Packed with stories that are funny and sad, familiar and strange, Islands of Privacy tours the myriad arenas where privacy battles are fought, lost, and won. Nippert-Eng explores how we manage our secrets, our phone calls and e-mail, the perimeters of our homes, and our interactions with neighbors. She discovers that everybody practices the art of selectively concealing and disclosing information on a daily basis. This important balancing act governs a wide range of behaviors, from deciding whether to give our bosses our cell phone numbers to choosing what we carry in our wallets or purses. Violations of privacy and anxiety about how we grant it to each other also come under Nippert-Eng's microscope as she crafts a compelling argument that successfully managing privacy is critical for successfully maintaining our relationships with each other and our selves.

Roaming from the beach to the bank and from the bathroom to the bus, Nippert-Eng's keenly observed and vividly told book gives us the skinny on how we defend our shrinking islands of privacy in the vast ocean of accessibility that surrounds us.

Islands of Privacy will publish in September 2010.

Also see Nippert-Eng's previous book on a related topic Home and Work: Negotiating Boundaries through Everyday Life.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A New York state assemblyman has proposed a measure that would change the way people opt-in to organ donation. Richard Brodsky wants to introduce a "presumed consent" system, in which, as the New York Times explains, "people would have to indicate in official documents — their driver's licenses, most commonly — that they specifically don't want to donate organs. If the box is not checked, it is presumed the person wants to donate."

Over on the Room for Debate blog, the Times gathered a roundtable of experts on the subject of organ donation to weigh in on the proposed change. Keiran Healy, a Duke sociologist and author of Last Best Gifts:Altruism and the Market for Human Blood and Organs, published by the Press in 2006, suggested that the new law won't have the intended effect: "Support for donation was built up by publicizing the now familiar idea that organ donation is a unique, even sacred, sort of gift. A naive presumed consent proposal would run straight into this established understanding of donation." Healy goes on to say that countries like Spain and Italy, which already have presumed consent laws on the books, "do not outperform countries like the U.S. by any great margin." (Healy responds to critics of his position on Crooked Timber today.)

So if organ and blood donations remain an opt-in system, why do people make this ultimate altruistic gesture? And why do donors literally give of themselves for no reward so that the life of an individual—often anonymous—may be spared? Healy explores these questions and more in Last Best Gifts. Check out Virginia Postrel's 2007 review from the New York Times Book Review and more about the book here.

Archived in Books for the News | Sociology
Posted by at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since 1963, the Press has awarded the annual Gordon J. Laing Prize to the Chicago faculty author, editor, or translator whose book has brought the greatest distinction to the Press's list. This year, at a ceremony held at the International House on the University of Chicago campus, the prize honored U of C professor of music Martha Feldman for her book Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy.

Performed throughout Europe during the 1700s, Italian heroic opera, or opera seria, was the century's most significant musical art form, profoundly engaging such figures as Handel, Haydn, and Mozart. Opera and Sovereignty is the first book to address this genre as cultural history, arguing that eighteenth-century opera seria must be understood in light of the period's social and political upheavals.

Taking an anthropological approach to European music that's as bold as it is unusual, Martha Feldman traces Italian opera's shift from a mythical assertion of sovereignty, with its festive forms and rituals, to a dramatic vehicle that increasingly questioned absolute ideals. She situates these transformations against the backdrop of eighteenth-century Italian culture to show how opera seria both reflected and affected the struggles of rulers to maintain sovereignty in the face of a growing public sphere. In so doing, Feldman explains why the form had such great international success and how audience experiences of the period differed from ours today.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Music | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

New Yorkers may be left without anyone to hold the door this week if the union representing more than 30,000 workers in residential buildings calls for a strike. The proposed work stoppage—the first in nearly two decades—would begin at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, when the current contract expires. As the New York Times reports, the conflict between the doormen and the building owners is over benefits. While the base salary of the workers, which averages about $40,000 a year, isn't a problem, it's the coast of benefits, which the Times reports raise the total per employee to nearly $70,000, that has the two sides at a stalemate. The building owners have proposed measures to cut the cost of benefits, but the union will not agree to lower wages or the proposed move to 401(K) retirement plans in lieu of current pensions.

The looming strike threatens to disrupt one of the most quintessentially New York relationships—that between the tenant and the doorman. As A. G. Sulzberger wrote in the Times, New Yorkers are left worrying: "Who will safeguard my apartment as I sleep? Greet my children when they come home from school? Accept deliveries? Clean the hallways? Sort the mail? Operate the elevator? And who, for goodness sake, will let the cleaning lady in?" But doormen hold great positions of power, even when they are not threatening a walk-out. Doormen know what their tenants eat, what kind of movies they watch, whom they spend time with, whether they drink too much, and whether they have kinky sex. In other words, doormen know far more about tenants than tenants know about them.

But while doormen are unusually intimate with their tenants, they are also socially very distant. Sociologist Peter Bearman explores this fraught dynamic in his celebrated ethnography—which the New Yorker called "a marvel"—Doormen. Combining observation, interviews, and survey information, Doormen investigates the occupational role of doormen, the social ecosystem of the residential lobby, and the mundane features of highly consequential social exchanges between doormen and tenants. Bearman explains why doormen find their jobs both boring and stressful, why tenants feel anxious about how much of a Christmas bonus their neighbors give, and how everyday transactions small and large affect tenants' professional and informal relationships with doormen. In the daily life of the doorman resides the profound, and this book provides a brilliant account of how tenants and doormen interact within the complex world of the lobby.

Prepare for the strike by reading an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Sociology
Posted by at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

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

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

Gina Ulysse, author of Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica, has been quite busy in the wake of the earthquake in Haiti. Born in Pétionville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince, since her hometown's recent tragedy, Ulysse has been inundated with calls asking for her insights—as both a former resident and current scholar of Haiti—on the quake, its aftermath, and what it means for the future of one of the poorest and most embattled countries in the Western hemisphere. She has done numerous interviews and op-eds for NPR, the Huffington Post, and PRI's The World radio program with more to come. Click on the links to navigate to the articles—we'll update the page as more of Ulysse's commentary becomes available. In the meantime find out more about Ulysse's fascinating study of entrepreneurial women in the Caribbean isle in Downtown Ladies.

Update: As promised here are a couple more links to some of Ulysse's recent writing and commentary on Haiti:

From the January 11 edition of the Huffington Post, an article titled ""Avatar," Voodoo and White Spiritual Redemption"

From Duke University's Social Text journal — "Dehumanization & Fracture: Trauma at Home & Abroad"

And listen to this interview with Ulysse and Kate Ramsey, historian of Haiti and the Caribbean from Wisconsin Public Radio's Here On Earth: Radio Without Borders.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"What has most distinguished American responses to destruction over the past three centuries or so is a widespread conviction, born of beliefs and experience, that calamities are instruments of progress. In place of stoic resolve, many Americans (and certainly dominant American ideologies) embrace disasters as a means of escaping from the present into a better future."

Kevin Rozario is associate professor in the American Studies program at Smith College.

Also see Rozario's recent article on the Haitian earthquake for the Wall Street Journal or read an excerpt from The Culture of Calamity.

Archived in Commentary | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 02:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Kevin Rosario, author of The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America has written an insightful piece for the Wall Street Journal on Haiti's recent tragedy. Drawing on the topic of his book Rosario's article offers a brief historical account of how Western culture has interpreted similar disasters in the past and details the rise of what he calls a "dominant narrative of disasters as instruments of progress"—a narrative which, in light of recent calamities like Katrina and Haiti, Rosario notes might itself be starting to fall apart.

Navigate to the Wall Street Journal website to read the article, or for a more thorough examination of how disasters have played out in the Western consciousness pick up a copy of The Culture of Calamity, or read an excerpt.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Psychology | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An article on the NPR website on workplace diversity poses the question "should The Office be used in HR training?" And while anyone familiar with the show might find the question itself quite laughable, the article quotes Sheri Leonardo, senior vice president for human resources at Ogilvy Public Relations saying "as an HR person, I sometimes cringe… some of the stuff is so outlandish, politically incorrect, morally incorrect and everything else—but at the same time I say, 'God, I would love to take clips of this and use it for training, because it's so perfect.'"

Ogilvy argues that The Office, where the exaggerated insensitivity and ignorance of its characters serves as the basis for much of its humor, offers some entertaining insight into issues of workplace diversity and often employs scenarios that Ogilvy says are not too far from what people often encounter in the real world.

NPR quotes Jean Mavrelis, author with Thomas Kochman of a recent book on such issues, Corporate Tribalism: White Men/White Women and Cultural Diversity at Work, who shares Ogilvy's view that despite claims that we now live in a "post-racial America," workplace diversity is still a major issue. Mavrelis remarks: "You'd be surprised how many executives are sent to our diversity class to be 'sensitized' so they don't have to be fired." The article continues:

But if an office environment is too restrictive, Mavrelis says, that tension is often counterproductive.

"The worst climate for learning about diverse others," she said, "is one in which white males are afraid that someone will call the diversity hot line and end their careers if they make a 'mistake.'"

…

"It is [also] critical to create a climate where diversity 'mistakes' can be made and people can be learners," Mavrelis says.

That means that someone who has been accused of being insensitive, or even racist, should be ready to apologize—and to learn from the experience. The key is that people consider the impact words and deeds have on people with different social and cultural experiences from their own.

'We've been able to move people to a place where they go from taking cross-cultural communication breakdowns personally, to asking themselves, 'I wonder if something cultural is going on here,' which changes the conversations," Mavrelis said.

Still, anyone who might be tempted to use Office-style humor to bridge cultural barriers in the workplace ought to be very careful.

"Humor is the least effective way to build relationships at work, yet having a sense of humor is critical," she said.

"The episode of The Office where they celebrate 'Diversity Day' [see the clip below] is hysterical," Mavrelis said, "and shows how difficult it is to discuss diversity when people don't know what they don't know."

The best way for a white boss like Michael Scott to build cross-cultural relationships at work, Mavrelis says, is to help a diverse group of employees develop their careers.

"That builds trust, which in turn builds goodwill for when white folks do make the inevitable diversity blunders," she said.

Read the full article on the NPR website.

Archived in Books for the News | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Joshua Blu Buhs, author of Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend has a written an article for the Washington Post's Short Stack blog that makes an unlikely, but nevertheless illuminating comparison between the mythical creature that is the subject of his book, and another mythical figure more appropriate to the season: Santa Claus. As Buhs argues, "though comparatively domesticated, his rough edges hidden behind a great white beard and cherubic cheeks," as with Bigfoot, the myth of S. Claus has volumes to tell us about ourselves and the culture we inhabit.

As Buhs writes, "We tell stories about Santa Claus not because we believe in him, but because those stories convey messages we want shared—about generosity and pure love and respect for others. And that's why we tell stories about Bigfoot. Not only to argue for and against the existence of the Big Guy, but because through those stories we come to understand more about ourselves, our neighbors, and our place in this world."

Navigate to Buh's article on the Short Stack blog for more, or see this excerpt from his book, this interview, or Buhs in dialogue with Sigrid Schmalzer, author of The People's Peking Man, about the cultural significance of Bigfoot in contrast with his oriental analogue, the "yeren."

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Many of the nation's financial problems in the last few years have at least some of their roots in the mismanagement of personal finance. Some blame the fiscal hubris of consumers and speculators who bit off more than they could chew. Others blame industry, claiming that many corporations and lenders have made it a common practice to dupe consumers into making unwise investments—from mortgage brokers failing to inform their clients of the full terms of their loan repayment plans, to volatile interest rates and hidden fees on credit card debit. Yet others blame both—while a public consumer culture that encourages irresponsible spending may be partially to blame, the recession has also provided ample evidence on which to base a solid argument for increased consumer protection standards against predatory corporate practices as well.

In a recent article for the American Prospect, Larry Glickman author of Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America discusses Barak Obama's proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) and the history of government policy designed to protect the consumer. From the The Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906, to the Truth in Lending and Fair Labeling and Packaging Acts of the 70s, Glickman's article demonstrates how consumer protection legislation has inevitably provoked a strong reaction from the right but nevertheless enjoys a fair amount of public support once enacted, and according to Glickman, for good reason.

Read the article on the American Prospect website or find out more about Glickman's book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 03:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

WGN's Milton J. Rosenberg recently invited several guests on his radio talk show Extension 720 to discuss the press's recent publication of The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion—the definitive reference book for parents, social workers, researchers, educators, and others who work with children.

Listen in as editor-in-chief Richard A. Shweder, contributor Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon, and house editor Mary Laur, talk about their new book and field questions from callers on the WGN Extension 720 website.

Bringing together contemporary research on children and childhood from pediatrics, child psychology, childhood studies, education, sociology, history, law, anthropology, and other related areas, The Child contains more than 500 articles—all written by experts in their fields and overseen by a panel of distinguished editors led by anthropologist Richard A. Shweder—each providing a concise and accessible synopsis of the topic at hand. In addition to these topical essays, The Child also contains more than forty "Imagining Each Other" essays, which focus on the particular experiences of children in different cultures. Compiled by some of the most distinguished child development researchers in the world, The Child is an essential addition to the current knowledge on children and childhood.

To find out more navigate to this special website for the book featuring a full table of contents and several sample articles.

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | Education | Psychology | Reference and Writing | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sociologist and feminist scholar Alice S. Rossi passed away last Tuesday at her home in Northampton, Mass. A past president of the American Sociological Association and one of the founding members of the National Organization for Women, Rossi was an outspoken advocate for women inside and outside academe. Rossi both lived by and focused much of her scholarship on her progressive views "on the status of women in work, family, and sexual life." Her husband Peter H. Rossi, also a distinguished sociologist and author of Down and Out in America: The Origins of Homelessness, passed away in 2006.

From an article on Rossi appearing in today's New York Times:

Professor Rossi was best known for her studies of people's lives—those of women in particular—as they move from youth to age. She edited several books on the subject, including Gender and the Life Course (Aldine, 1985); Sexuality Across the Life Course (University of Chicago, 1994); and Caring and Doing for Others: Social Responsibility in the Domains of Family, Work and Community (University of Chicago, 2001).

One of her most influential feminist articles was Equality Between the Sexes: An Immodest Proposal. First presented in 1963 at a meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, it was published the next year in the academy's journal Daedalus.

In the article, Professor Rossi argued that for most women motherhood had become a full-time occupation, a state of affairs that hurt not only women but also the larger society in which they lived. For the well-being of both the women and the culture, she wrote, parity of the sexes is essential.

For more on Rossi's life and work, read the complete NYT article online, or listen to this fascinating dialogue between Rossi and her daughter for NPR's Morning Edition recorded in 2007.

Archived in Commentary | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

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

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

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

And Jessa Crispin writes for The Smart Set:

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

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

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

This week's Chicago Reader has an excellent piece on the failure of Chicago's infamous housing projects and D. Bradford Hunt's new book on the subject Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing. Hunt offers a fresh and insightful look at why the highrise buildings of the Chicago Housing Authority became dilapidated post-apocalyptic wastelands that are now largely demolished. The Reader's Deanna Isaacs writes:

Amid all the unemployment, poverty, and broken families, the institutional racism, political corruption, and bureaucratic incompetence, Hunt believes he's found a relatively simple answer to the question of what went wrong with public housing in Chicago: too many kids. Taking into account all the other influences, he says, that was the single most important factor. The decisions that put multibedroom apartments filled with youngsters into hard-to-access towers were the CHA's blueprint for disaster.

Hunt wants to make it clear that he doesn't blame "families for having lots of kids, or single mothers. The tenants are the victims here," he says. "They wanted what everyone wants: building maintenance, security, and decent schools for their kids—and they fought to make the buildings work." The devil is in "the policy choices." The projects became ungovernable because there weren't enough adults, he says. "This concentration of people under 21 years old was unprecedented in the urban experience."

Hunt argues that these misguided policy decisions—made on both the federal and municipal levels—engendered disorder that pushed out the working class and, consequently, the rents needed to maintain the buildings. The resulting combination of fiscal crisis, managerial incompetence, and social unrest plunged the CHA into a social quagmire in which it still struggles.

To find out more about Hunt's take on the failure of the Chicago projects pick up a copy of this week's Reader or find the article online here.

Archived in Books for the News | Chicago | History | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Last weekend Nevada's Black Rock Desert once again played host to the annual alternative community / neo-pagan festival known as the Burning Man. And since 2005 Katherine K. Chen author of Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event has been there, helping to organize efforts to safely and successfully execute the festival—which can attract upwards of 40,000 people—and organize its participants into a temporary alternative community where (according to the official Burning Man website) "transactions of value take place without money, advertising, or hype…" and "care emerges in place of structural service."

In her book, she draws on her own first-hand experiences of the Burning Man event and its unique community, to offer some fascinating insights into how the event's organizers have managed to pull it off. And beginning this week, she will also be offering her insights on the event as a new guest blogger at orgtheory.net. In her first post she demonstrates how analysis of such "unusual" cases of civic organization such as the Burning Man can be used to understand larger phenomena.

Navigate over to orgtheory.net to read.

Also, visit the author's own Enabling Creative Chaos blog.

Archived in Anthropology | Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Economics | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a posting for the Washington Post's Short Stack blog Lawrence B. Glickman, author of Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America weighs in on the recent calls for a Whole Foods boycott in protest of an article written by company executive John Mackey critical of Obama's health care reform program. With a large customer base of progressives ardently in support of reform, many feel betrayed by a company which they assumed would share their political and social agenda.

Glickman's article points out the long history of consumer activism in the United States and the influential role it sometimes plays in American politics (think Boston Tea Party), yet as Glickman writes:

Despite their frequency throughout U.S. history, boycotts have rarely achieved their intended goals.… In the early 1900's, African Americans in twenty-five Southern cities initiated boycotts of segregated streetcars. Most of these campaigns were short-lived, unsuccessful, and lost to history. Yet they marked an early step in the campaign against segregation, which culminated in large measure with another, successful effort—the most famous boycott in the history of the United States: the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and 1956. That movement not only ended Jim Crow transportation in that city but brought the Civil Rights campaign to the forefront of the nation's political agenda and moral consciousness.

Without the early failures, we might never have seen the later and celebrated successes.

Read the complete article on the Washington Post's Short Stack blog.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's that time of year again and the Chicago Jazz Festival is right around the corner. While Chicago's jazz scene is active year-round (check one of these calendars for some upcoming shows) the festival offers audiences a unique opportunity to see some of the best local talent playing together with some of the international stars of jazz. And whether performing hard-bop improvisations over standard tunes, or completely unrehearsed avant-garde jam sessions, Chicago jazz masters like Mwata Bowden or soon to be octogenarian Fred Anderson always make it seem easy, sparking awe in those of us who still remember struggling through "Basic Basie" in junior high band class. So how do they do it?

In Robert R. Faulkner and Howard S. Becker's new book "Do You Know … ?" the authors—both jazz musicians with decades of experience performing—present the view from the bandstand, revealing the array of skills necessary for working musicians to do their jobs. While learning songs from sheet music or by ear helps, the jobbing musician's lexicon is dauntingly massive: hundreds of thousands of tunes from jazz classics and pop standards to more exotic fare. Since it is impossible for anyone to memorize all of these songs, Faulkner and Becker show that musicians collectively negotiate and improvise their way to a successful performance. Players must explore each others' areas of expertise, develop an ability to fake their way through unfamiliar territory, and respond to the unpredictable demands of their audience—whether an unexpected gang of polka fanatics or a tipsy father of the bride with an obscure favorite song.

"Do You Know … ?" dishes out entertaining stories and sharp insights drawn from the authors' own experiences and observations as well as interviews with a range of musicians. Faulkner and Becker's vivid, detailed portrait of the musician at work holds valuable lessons for anyone who has to think on the spot or under a spotlight.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Also check out some of these other related books on jazz and jazz in Chicago:

A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music

The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism

Come In and Hear the Truth: Jazz and Race on 52nd Street

Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans

Archived in Chicago | Commentary | Music | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

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

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

Ivy's article concludes:

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

Read the full review on the Nature website.

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

Mary Pattillo, author of Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class and Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City was interviewed recently on Penn State Public Broadcasting's Conversations webcast speaking on the topic of her two books: the American black middle class. In the interview Pattillo talks about the history of the rise of the black middle class and the unique issues that middle class African American's face today in negotiating their place within their communities and in American society at large.

Navigate to the Penn State website to view the episode.

Also read this excerpt from Black on the Block and another from Black Picket Fences.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Black Studies | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 03:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At the start of NPR's Bastille Day-inspired story this morning about the music of the French Revolution, listeners were asked to "imagine it's the year 1789 and you are waking up in Paris. You might hear an angry mob outside your window, about to storm the Bastille prison." For those who wish to take this kind of mental journey back in time, Victoria Johnson's Backstage at the Revolution zooms in from the birds-eye view to the street level, where some of that mob is busy searching for weapons—at the Paris Opera.

The Opera, as Johnson tells it, began the Revolution at center stage when a part of the crowd on its way to the Bastille stopped at the opera house for the arms they thought would be stashed inside. The organization's official caterer, Charles Mangin, unlocked the doors and, as he later wrote, "armed the citizens of the District of St. Martin des Champs with halbards, pikes, and sabres belonging to the Opera."

The long story of the Opera's Revolutionary life neither begins nor ends, of course, on that fateful July 14. Johnson's cultural history explains how, despite its reputation for despotism and wasteful extravagance, the Opera survived the Revolution in large part because of its image as a unique icon of French culture.

As NPR's Miles Hoffman surmised in this morning's story, "the people who were in power were aristocrats or members of the upper middle class, and they didn't necessarily have an allergy to high culture. They co-opted classical music. They inspired, or directed, important composers of the time to write great ceremonial pieces for big outdoor celebrations. So music became, in a sense, a tool of the revolution."

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

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

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

The article continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

People who live in fear of airplane accidents, flu pandemics, and other such disasters are often cast as alarmist or paranoid, despite the painful fruition of their fears in such incidents as the crash of a Yemeni jet this morning into the Indian Ocean (the second major plane crash this month), the lethal explosion last night of a freight train in northern Italy, and the collision last week of two Washington, D.C., Metro trains.

In Worst Cases, Lee Clark confirms that such individuals are more reasonable and prescient than they're given credit for. Surveying the full range of possible catastrophes that animate and dominate the popular imagination—from toxic spills and terrorism to plane crashes and pandemics—he explores how the ubiquity of worst cases in everyday life has stripped them of some of their ability to shock us. Fear and dread, Clarke argues, have actually become too rare: only when the public has more substantial information and more credible warnings will it take worst cases as seriously as it should. A timely and necessary look into how we think about the unthinkable, Worst Cases is essential reading for anyone attuned to our current climate of threat and fear.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Film and Media | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

At the press conference he held yesterday to explain his now-infamous weekend jaunt to Argentina, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford seemed to be trying to say "that he screwed up, in the biggest possible way, because he lost his bearings. He lost his self-control. He was indulgent. He forgot that there were other humans in the world." That, at least, is how Slate's John Dickerson tried to explain what others described as Sanford's "rambling" and "strange" apology for the trip and the extramarital affair that prompted it.

Though the governor's behavior may indeed be unorthodox, the scandal itself is, of course, not. A quick survey of news from Italy to Japan to the UK reconfirms that he shares indulgent behavior and loss of self-control with politicians the world over.

While these kinds of antics are mostly painful and costly, the silver lining to their global reach is that they can offer a singularly revealing means of comparing cultures. Mark D. West uses just such a method in Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle, in which he organizes the seemingly random worlds of Japanese and American scandal to explore well-ingrained similarities and contrasts in law and society.

His study of scandals ranging from corporate fraud and baseball cheaters to political corruption and celebrity sexcapades approaches this inherently fascinating phenomenon from an entirely fresh angle. And it will be, if history is any guide, perennially timely.

Archived in Books for the News | Sociology
Posted by at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

Because I watched TV in the 1970s, I have an image of Bigfoot stamped on my brain like a paw print. He resembles Chewbacca (minus the bandolier) walking through a grainy forest, scowling over his shoulder at the camera. But your Bigfoot image might be different, because for a while the hairy hominid was everywhere, in B movies and liquor advertisements and docu- and mocumentaries. He also starred in some "real" footage taken in 1967. That one was actually a she, complete with pendulous breasts.

Why did this ginormous, nonexistent ape capture our collective imaginations for five decades, and what does our infatuation say about us? Joshua Blu Buhs, the author of a previous book, about fire ants, takes up these questions in Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Greenwich Village. Harlem. Bronzeville. Even in this freewheeling, globalized age, the names of these iconic neighborhoods still conjure up an atmosphere of glamour, excitement, and illicit thrills. But long before today’s teens or even yesterday’s beatniks wandered their streets, these neighborhoods exercised a powerful attraction for upright members of the middle class looking for dissipation and disreputable fun.

With Slumming, Chad Heap brings these early havens of hip to life, recreating the long-lost nightlife of early twentieth-century New York and Chicago. From jazz clubs and speakeasies to black-and-tan parties and cabarets, Heap packs Slumming with vivid scenes, fascinating characters, and wild anecdotes of a late-night life on the borders of the forbidden. And while he doesn’t ignore the role of exploitation and voyeurism in slumming—or the resistance it often provoked—he argues that the relatively uninhibited mingling it promoted across bounds of race and class helped to dramatically recast the racial and sexual landscape of burgeoning U.S. cities.

The unforgettable tale of an urban past that continues to resonate in our day, Slumming is a late-night treat for all urbanites and fans of the demi-monde.

Read the press release or read the introduction.

Archived in Black Studies | Gay and Lesbian | History | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“Some people are vengeful, calling for jail, public humiliation, or even revolution,” the New York Times reported in March, adding to innumerable accounts of outrage at the news that insurance giant A.I.G. planned to use millions of federal bailout dollars for employee bonuses. Punctuated by such anger, the economic crisis has shone a stark light on the growing chasm between America’s haves and have-nots. Striking a timely note of unity, Class War? reveals that both sides of this class divide actually agree to a surprising—and heartening—extent about what government should do to close it.

In fact, Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs argue that at every income level and across geographical and ideological lines, most Americans favor public intervention to narrow the gap between rich and poor and create equal economic opportunities for all. Drawing on more than 70 years of opinion studies, they show that majorities support not only higher minimum wages, improved public education, and greater access to healthcare, but also the use of taxation to fund such programs.

As lawmakers battle over how to heal our ailing economy, Class War? provides undeniable proof of the popular consensus their constituents have been building for decades: that our government must take aggressive action against the iniquity that plagues our nation.

Read the press release.

Archived in Politics and Current Events | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

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

[Buhs'] travels deep into the Himalayas where Bigfoot's Asian cousin, the Yeti, has been pursued. He describes how even seasoned mountaineers could be taken in by high-altitude conditions of sun and "sublimated" snow that can turn a fox print into a sprawling hominid-like track and explores the creature's appeal to the nonindigenous. "The Yeti was untouched by the materialism of modern life," he writes. Years after conquering Everest, Edmund Hillary led an expedition with a side goal of investigating the Yeti. He concluded that the beast was a myth. "Snowman melted," said The New York Times in 1961.

Yet even as Yeti stock went down, Bigfoot currency rose, and the focus turned to the Pacific Northwest. New reports of footprints in Bluff Creek, Calif., in 1958 sparked a furor that brought in such outsiders as Ivan Sanderson, a Scottish naturalist and Fortean, one of a group that investigated bizarre phenomena — "damned things," as the anomaly specialist Charles Fort (1874-1932) called them.

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

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

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

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

New in paperback!—Marked gives us our first real glimpse into the tremendous difficulties facing ex-offenders in the job market. Devah Pager matched up pairs of young men, randomly assigned them criminal records, then sent them on hundreds of real job searches throughout the city of Milwaukee. Her applicants were attractive, articulate, and capable—yet ex-offenders received less than half the callbacks of the equally qualified applicants without criminal backgrounds.

Young black men, meanwhile, paid a particularly high price: those with clean records fared no better in their job searches than white men just out of prison. Such shocking barriers to legitimate work, Pager contends, are an important reason that many ex-prisoners soon find themselves back in the realm of poverty, underground employment, and crime that led them to prison in the first place.

“Pager shows that ex-offenders, white or black, stand a very poor chance of getting a legitimate job.… Both informative and convincing.” —Library Journal

Read the press release or read an excerpt.

Archived in Black Studies | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 09:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

That belief in mythical animals is a product of social change is central to [Joshua Blu Buh's] Bigfoot, an exhaustive study of wild-man myth-making in the 20th century. Buhs's book starts out… suggesting that the Himalayan legend of the yeti became "folklore for an industrial age" because it meshed well with Britain's post-colonial concerns and drew on popular fascination with far-flung places.…

Buhs goes on to describe how the search for Bigfoot and Sasquatch was dominated by the concerns of white, working-class men. For this disenfranchised group the quest was a validation of their lifestyle, skills and knowledge, which they perceived as being threatened by mass media, formal education and popular culture. The hunters' desire to be accepted as scientific, while simultaneously disparaging the scientific establishment, makes for thought-provoking reading: there are obvious parallels with the attitudes of intelligent-design enthusiasts and climate change skeptics.

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

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

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

As President Obama begins the process of bringing America’s six-year occupation of Iraq to an end, it’s important that the public and the military alike learn from the mistakes that dogged the war from the start. Of all those errors, perhaps the most preventable—and irreparable—was the failure to protect Iraq’s unparalleled cultural heritage from the wholesale looting and destruction that followed the invasion and continues to this day.

With The Rape of Mesopotamia, Lawrence Rothfield offers a detailed, judicious account of the failures of planning, understanding, and initiative that led to the looting of the Iraq Museum and the incalculable loss to human culture that followed. Drawing on extensive interviews with soldiers, bureaucrats, war planners, archaeologists, and collectors, Rothfield reveals the breathtaking incompetence and inadequate planning—originating at the highest levels of the U.S. government—that left the troops on the ground unprepared for and unable to stop the looting they saw occurring all around them. At the same time, Rothfield shows, preservation advocates worldwide were insufficiently vocal about the risks the invasion posed to Iraq’s heritage, while the collectors who inhabit the shadowy worldwide market for illicit antiquities ensured the demand that the looters fulfilled.

Ultimately, Rothfield brings his story right to the present, arguing vehemently that the lessons of Iraq have largely been ignored—and that the same mistakes are liable to be repeated in future conflicts.

Read the press release.

Archived in Anthropology | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The California Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments today on Proposition 8, the successful ballot measure that amended the state's constitution to ban gay marriage. The Los Angeles Times reports that supporters of gay marriage "seek to overturn Proposition 8 by saying it isn't a constitutional amendment at all, but a constitutional revision that should have been required to go through a much more rigorous process to become law."

Whatever the court decides, it seems safe to predict that this is only one of many battles to come between two sides of an issue that—as the authors of The Politics of Same-Sex Marriage point out—has waxed and waned in the public sphere since the passing of the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act. In fact, same-sex couples filed suit Tuesday against the federal government over portions of the act. The suit is expected to take several years to make its way through the federal court system—which leaves a lot of time for reading up on the issue in the meantime.

The Politics of Same-Sex Marriage, a great place to start, brings together an esteemed list of scholars to explore all facets of this heated issue, including the ideologies and strategies on both sides of the argument, the public's response, the use of the issue in political campaigns, and how same-sex marriage fits into the broad context of policy cycles and windows of political opportunity.

And Same Sex, Different Politics brings an illuminating comparative approach to gay rights issues. It's the first book to compare results across struggles over laws governing military service, homosexual conduct, adoption, marriage and partner recognition, hate crimes, and civil rights. In each area, Gary Mucciaroni found, the gay rights movement's achievements depended both on Americans' perceptions of its demands and on the political venue in which the conflict plays out. Adoption policy, for example, generally takes shape in a decentralized system of courts that enables couples to target sympathetic judges, while fights for gay marriage generally culminate in legislation or ballot referenda—Proposition 8 comes to mind—against which it is easier to mount opposition.

Archived in Books for the News | Gay and Lesbian | Law | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by at 09:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

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

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

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

Shirley Hazzard, the noted Australian writer, lives in New York but has spent long stretches of time in a house on Capri. She counts herself as one of the few living Anglo-Americans with a lifelong crush on Naples, rather than the usual Italian cities: Florence, Rome or (as in my case) Venice. In Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples, she writes poetically about the lure of an intimate daily relationship with the architectural remains of Naples many rich historical epochs.…

She loves visiting other centuries, a lure that every history-hungry traveler will recognize, and beautifully describes the wonders strewn everywhere about the region. Her sense of the presence of past visitors like Augustus Caesar, Goethe, and Lord Byron should resonate with any lover of Italy.

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

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

George W. Bush has just left office in the midst of widespread public disapproval. But how will his presidency be viewed decades from now? It’s hard to know: the reputations of American presidents, including such recent ones as JFK and Richard Nixon, fluctuate remarkably in the years following their tenure. And as we prepare to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s bicentennial, it’s important to realize that even a figure as eminent as our sixteenth president is not immune to the vicissitudes of public memory. As Barry Schwartz reveals in Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era, in the years between his assassination and World War II, Abraham Lincoln became a sort of secular saint, held up as a model for all Americans. But, Schwartz explains, that was the apogee of Lincoln’s popularity; over the ensuing decades, changes in American culture inexorably diminished Lincoln’s standing. Disenchantment with government, a growing understanding of the plight of racial minorities, and a new focus on diversity all contributed to a climate in which no single figure, including Lincoln, could be comfortably held up as a symbol for all Americans—thus, even as the nation grew ever-closer to living the ideals for which he had served as a symbol, Lincoln himself faded into the background of American life.

But is there any way back from this post-heroic era? Even as we celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s bicentennial, can he still offer salient lessons for us? As America prepares to welcome a new president whose very election testifies to Lincoln’s achievement, Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era offers a thoughtful, measured look at how we’ve understood the man—and the nation he helped save.

Read the press release.

Also, read an excerpt.

Archived in Biography | History | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Anne Durkin Keating, author of Chicago Neighborhoods and Suburbs: A Historical Guide made an appearance recently on WTTW's Chicago Tonight. On the show Durkin joined host Phil Ponce to discuss all things concerning the urban demography and geography of Chicagoland including whether Obama's house is really in Hyde Park, how the Olympics might impact the South Side, and a 149 year old Methodist summer camp in Des Plains.

Check out the archived video online on the WTTW website.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Cartography and Geography | Chicago | History | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Chris Otter, author of The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910 is today's guest on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed. On the program Otter joins host Laurie Taylor and Lynda Nead, Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London, to discuss the political and social changes brought about in 19th century Britain by the use of gas lighting. Tune in at the Thinking Allowed website after the live broadcast, or find out more about Otter's book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Literature | Politics and Current Events | Psychology | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The December 10 edition of the Nation contains a fascinating article about the long and colorful history of New Orleans that enlists Shannon Lee Dawdy's new book Building the Devil's Empire: French Colonial New Orleans to help explain how New Orleans acquired it's "rogue character" and became the unique, multicultural city we know today. Joshua Jelly-Schapiro writes for the Nation:

Effectively abandoned by the French crown in 1731, the colony was governed from that time by local elites, its levee becoming a bustling free-for-all of traders peddling everything from Mississippi furs to Martinique sugar and Mexican ceramics and maize. New Orleans's reputation as a low swamp of race-mixing and sin was present from the start and—as Shannon Lee Dawdy shows in Building the Devil's Empire, her penetrating study of the colony's founding—cited frequently as the explanation for its "failure."

In French New Orleans, "smuggling not only helped fill the gaps of collapsed mercantilism," Dawdy writes, "it was the basis of the local political economy.…" Dawdy shows clearly how Nouvelle-Orléans—with its intra-American trade and tenuous ties to the metropole—became, by the 1740s, a self-consciously Creole place.… That Creole identity informed France's decision to let the estranged colony go, as Louis XV handed it off to his cousin Carlos III and Spain, who in 1768 encountered a Creole revolt—a sign that this "rogue colony" (Dawdy's phrase) would not be an easy rule.

Continue reading on the Nation's website.

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | History | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

In the waning days of the Bush administration, as venerable Wall Street firms collapsed, credit markets froze, stocks crashed, and economic indicators deteriorated, free market, antiregulatory Republicans found themselves with no choice but to partially nationalize the banking industry. It was a Shakespearean denouement for the conservative movement. For nearly thirty years, the right had dominated political debate on the strength of the simple argument that government was the problem and free markets the solution.…

[But] as Lawrence D. Brown and Lawrence R. Jacobs demonstrate in The Private Abuse of the Public Interest: Market Myths and Policy Muddles, the era of conservative dominance has wrought a cyclical pattern: first comes the fervent advocacy of market-based policy ideas, followed by their implementation, which causes damage that can [ironically] only be fixed by extensive governmental intervention.…

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

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

Read the full article on the Washington Monthly website.

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

The mapping of the human genome at the turn of the twenty-first century by the Human Genome Project was a scientific sensation. The media abounded with stories about our new knowledge of the building blocks of human life and the tremendous medical breakthroughs that were sure to follow—while other accounts put a darker spin on the achievement, warning of consequences from genetic discrimination to designer germs.

For the layman, the claims and counterclaims can be dizzying; it's hard to know just what the genomics revolution is likely to mean in our everyday lives. With Genomes and What to Make of Them, Barry Barnes and John Dupré cut through the confusion and offer a smart and straightforward account of what we know, what we can hope for, and what, if anything, we should fear. Opening with a brief history of genetics and genomics, from Mendel to Watson and Crick to Craig Venter, Genomes and What to Make of Them explains what genomics tells us about our evolutionary history and what it can reveal on the individual level, such as our risk of disease. Meanwhile, the authors argue, the dangers of genetic research—from biological warfare to a revived eugenics—are very real, and only a proactive government and a vigilant citizenry can ensure the full life-enhancing potential of this exciting new science. Engagingly written and up-to-date, Genomes and What to Make of Them is both a primer on current knowledge and a road map to an exciting future.

Read the press release. Also, listen to an interview with the author.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yet another rumor has surfaced about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's adoption plans. Whatever else one might want to say about them, at least the reports are timely: Saturday, November 15, is National Adoption Day (part of National Adoption Month). And unlike some commemorative days and months
(National Hamburger Month?!), National Adoption Day has serious goals and tangible results, including courtroom hearings (PDF) to finalize a projected 3,500 foster children's adoptions across the US.

All of this organized national support helps to create an environment far removed from that surrounding adoptions a century ago, when children were still transferred between households by a variety of unregulated private arrangements. What happened between then and the adoptions that will be finalized this Saturday? Few people (perhaps no people) know that history better than Ellen Herman, author of the brand new Kinship by Design: A History of Adoption in Modern America. The fullest account to date of modern adoption's history, this book traces the dramatic evolution of Americans' ideas about what constitutes a family.

As Herman puts it in a description of her wonderful Adoption History Project, history is an indispensable resource for understanding the personal, political, legal, social, scientific, and human dimensions of adoption's particular form of kinship. In the process of narrating this history, she offers as many insights about twentieth-century social welfare, statecraft, and science as she does about childhood, family, and private life.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Sociology
Posted by at 09:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

In his book, both social history and critical study, Lewis makes a claim that devotees of the AACM have long embraced but that is discomforting some composers and critics: The jazz-related collective, which emerged from black, working-class areas of Chicago in the 1960s, became one of the most significant artistic forces of the 20th century—yet histories of American musical experimentalism almost never say so.…

Lewis cites the historian Jon D. Cruz's observation that criticism of the new music as "just noise" recalled many slave owners' earlier obliviousness to the significations of slave songs. "Similarly," writes Lewis, "the noisy anger of the new musicians seemed strange, surprising, and unfathomable to many critics, along with the idea that blacks might actually have something to be angry about."

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

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

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

Also read an excerpt from the book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As San Franciscans prepare to vote next week on a measure that would decriminalize prostitution in their city, political rhetoric surrounding the issue is heating up. Whether Proposition K succeeds or fails, though, the timeless activities it addresses probably will continue to evolve in response to their changing context. Indeed, as Elizabeth Bernstein points out in Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex, postindustrial economic and cultural conditions are spawning rapid and unforeseen changes in commercialized sex. Bernstein explains how sex workers in cities such as San Francisco, Amsterdam, and Stockholm are increasingly paid to offer their clients an erotic experience rooted in the performance of authentic connection--a far cry from an expedient exchange of cash for sexual relations.

Dirty Money, a CNBC documentary scheduled to premier next week, cites Bernstein's insightful analysis in its exploration of the kind of high-end prostitution that made headlines earlier this year when former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was caught making arrangements to meet with a prostitute. CNBC's interviews with journalists and high-end sex workers dovetail with Bernstein's powerful argument that contemporary sex markets embody a cultural moment in which the boundaries between intimacy and commerce—and between public and private life—have been radically redrawn.

Archived in Books for the News | Sociology
Posted by at 02:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two of the ten camps that the U.S. government established to incarcerate over 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II weren’t out West; they were deep in the Jim Crow South. This sudden arrival of strangers who belonged on neither side of the color line has long been a lost chapter in the history of the war—until now.

Enter Concentration Camps on the Home Front, an incendiary, stirring depiction of life in the camps and its aftermath. John Howard breaks new ground with the first book to tell the story of the Southern camps; the first to reveal government efforts to convert inmates to Christianity; the first to explore prisoners’ acts of resistance and defiance; and the first to expose the calculated dispersal of the prisoners after the war, a move which aimed to prevent the creation of ethnic enclaves in both Northern cities and the Southern countryside.

Howard’s eye-opening account of one of modern American history’s most shameful episodes resonates with current debates over the government’s right to imprison without trial, racial profiling, and a host of other contemporary issues. But this disturbing story makes its greatest impact by bringing to light the widespread and irreversible damage the camps did to individuals, families, and communities.

Read the press release.

Archived in History | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Especially in an election year, we sort sort ourselves into distinct social groups. But exactly how do we make those choices, and what external factors might affect our decision making process? To find out more about the associating and polarizing power of politics, science writer John Horgan conducted a timely interview last week with David Berreby, author of Us and Them: The Science of Identity for bloggingheads.tv. In the interview Berreby discusses several issues particularly relevant to the upcoming elections including "reality and illusion in racial concepts" and "McCain's failure to exploit identity politics," among other topics.

Check out the complete interview at blogginheads.tv.

For more timely social commentary from an award winning science writer navigate to Berreby's blog at www.usthemblog.com.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

To mark HUD's birthday, we asked Derek Hyra, author of The New Urban Renewal: The Economic Transformation of Harlem and Bronzeville, to reflect on the future of urban development in the midst of the housing crisis:

September 9 marks the birthday of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which was established on this day in 1965. And HUD's headquarters, the Robert C. Weaver Federal Building, is approaching its fortieth anniversary. These milestones, though, probably won't be greeted with unqualified celebration. Once an embodiment of the Great Society's reforming spirit, HUD has developed such a reputation for inefficiency, corruption, and incompetence that one prominent urban scholar recently recommended dismantling the agency and tearing down the Weaver building. But HUD doesn't need to be razed. It needs to remodeled, rehabilitated, and reinvigorated with Presidential leadership and Congressional reform.

HUD and its affiliated local authorities have several critical responsibilities. The agency houses one million tenants in public housing and assists another 1.8 million households with rent subsidies. In addition to deploying $4 billion each year to cities and counties across the nation, HUD also houses the Federal Housing Administration, which provides federal guarantees on affordable mortgages.

As the HUD building enters its fifth decade, the agency has the potential, with adequate resources and support, to achieve where the private market has failed. This year's Housing and Economic Recovery Act gives the FHA authority to guarantee $300 billion in subprime loans and deploys an additional $4 billion in grants. This monumental housing act has reinvigorated HUD and might help pull the country out of its current credit crisis and keep nearly 400,000 families in their homes.

Additional reforms are needed in HUD's major programs. Public housing and the voucher program need to be retooled with effective strategies to maintain viable public housing and to prevent the concentration of vouchers recipients in declining communities. Increased oversight is also needed to ensure that local housing authorities effectively and appropriately spend housing and block grant resources.

So let's not foreclose on HUD. With proper reform and strategic funding, HUD has the potential to once again be a model, and remodeled, federal agency that assists the nation with its affordable housing and community development needs.

(See also an excerpt from Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City: The Life and Times of an Urban Reformer by Wendell E. Pritchett, a biography of the first secretary of HUD—as well as the first African American cabinet-level officer in the federal goverment.)

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | History | Sociology
Posted by at 05:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

Daring to Look is a collection of photographs, many of them previously unpublished, taken by Dorothea Lange, in 1939, for the Farm Security Administration. Though Lange's shots of Depression-era individuals and families are well known, many of her negatives of empty home interiors have spent the past decades in archives, until Anne Whiston Spirn, the editor of this volume, unearthed them. Like Lange's portraits, her interiors are gentle reflections of a quiet and stark way of life.

Though the book looks deceivingly like it's meant for a coffee table, Spirn's accompanying text reveals much more. It's so engrossing, in fact, that, had the book not been so heavy, I would have taken it to the park during my lunch break.

And from the THE:

This first presentation of Lange's 1939 photographs with their accompanying texts provides a very valuable scholarly resource. Spirn's personal contribution, for anyone interested in Lange, comes in the third and final section, which both brings us up to date and reflects upon history, as she photographs sites and descendants of Lange's 1939 subjects.

From her broad knowledge base and sympathetic understanding of the history of the locale, Spirn offers a rich study of past and present life and landscape.

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

Also see this illustrated excerpt from the book.

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

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

Hyra's most fundamental concern: As these neighborhoods come back economically, what will happen to their poor residents? Hyra notes that both Bronzeville and Harlem are "revitalizing without drastic racial changeover." In the last 10 years, Central Harlem's white population increased to 2% from 1.5%, and the white proportion in Bronzeville increased to 4% from 2.5%.

Yet while Hyra is very worried about the displacement of the poor, he argues that class antagonism is actually important to the redevelopment of formerly impoverished communities. Black middle-class values translate into effective political activity and organizations, including block clubs, planning boards and religiously affiliated community development corporations. The problem, as he sees it, is that the "coming home" of the black middle class will produce a neighborhood in which poor blacks are no longer welcome.

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

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

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

Most of us probably think we know how urban gentrification works: rich young whites move into poor, non-white areas and gobble up cheap real estate, eventually forcing longtime residents to move to more affordable but distant locales. Since the late 1990s, however, a surprising new pattern has emerged as a handful of poverty-stricken black neighborhoods have evolved into residential hotspots boasting high-income housing, destination dining, designer boutiques, and even bed-and-breakfasts—all while managing to stay black.

No two neighborhoods in the country exemplify this trend better than Harlem in New York City and Bronzeville in Chicago. In this groundbreaking book, Derek S. Hyra—a resident of both of these neighborhoods—moves from the streets to city hall to corporate boardrooms, tracing the web of factors at play in the remarkable revitalization of these two historic enclaves.

Read the press release.

Archived in Black Studies | Chicago | History | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 02:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

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

Read the review on the THE website.

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

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

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

Read the full review on the Financial Times website.

Archived in Literature | Philosophy | Politics and Current Events | Psychology | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John Kieswetter, the Cincinnati Enquirer's TV/Radio/Media reporter heralded the arrival of one of Cincinnati's favorite TV personalities, comedian and actor Tim Reid, with a nice post to his blog last Thursday. His posting touches on Reid's historic career in comedy, and details his recent itinerary, which brought him back to the city he once fictionally inhabited as radio DJ Venus Flytrap on the late 70's sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati. According to Keiswetter, Reid was scheduled to host the local Emmy Awards dinner and to throw out the first pitch at the Reds-Astros game. In his post Kieswetter remarks: "I bet he's surprised at how often he's recognized here, and how fondly so many of us remember 'WKRP.'"

But while most people recognize Reid from his hit TV show, fewer remember his earlier work in the pioneering stand-up act "Tim and Tom" with comedian Tom Dreesen—the first interracial comedy team in the history of show business. Now with Reid's forthcoming book, Tim and Tom: An American Comedy in Black and White, co-authored with Dreesen and Ron Rappaport, the fascinating story of this ground-breaking comedic duo is revealed—from their beginnings in the nightclubs of Chicago to to their acrimonious breakup after 5 hard years on the road.

The book is set to publish this September and Dreesen and Reid are scheduled to make quite a few appearances in support of the book's release. Navigate to the Tim and Tom book page to find out more about the book or to place an advance order. Also, see our author events page to find out more about the upcoming events.

Archived in Black Studies | Books for the News | Chicago | History | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Michael F. Robinson, author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture has written an interesting piece for the Space Review that draws on his cultural analysis of polar exploration in the nineteenth century to comment on NASA's recent space exploration initiatives. In the article, Robinson notes that sensationalism was often used to justify early polar expeditions rather than their scientific value, and argues that NASA's recent plans to send astronauts to Mars might be an analogous situation. Robinson writes:

A manned mission to Mars, if it happens, will be a dazzling event guaranteed to keep us glued to our televisions. But symbolism alone cannot carry the US space program forward. One hundred years ago, Americans faced the same dilemma on the Arctic frontier. In their relentless pursuit of the North Pole, explorers had abandoned science. After Robert Peary claimed the discovery of the North Pole in 1909, American scientists breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, scientific exploration of the Arctic could begin in earnest. Franz Boas, professor of anthropology at Columbia University, expressed the mood of scientists then, but he could have been expressing the opinion of many scientists now. "We must not forget that the explorer is not expected merely to travel from one point to another, but that we must expect him also to see and to observe things worth seeing."

Read the article on the Space Review website.

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

The July 31 edition of the London Review of Books has published several interesting articles focusing on two recent books, both of which offer some intriguing insights into the West's engagement with Middle Eastern Muslim cultures in the twentieth century.

As the LRB's Roxanne Varzi notes, Gillian Whitlock's Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit is a fascinating exploration of modern Middle Eastern autobiography, that demonstrates how the genre has been used in Western society as a window into an often inaccessible culture, but perhaps more often is appropriated and commodified by Western culture to serve its own interests. In her article Varzi focuses on the latter phenomenon writing:

"You shouldn't overlook the what Gillian Whitlock in Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit, calls the paratext: the liminal features that surround the text, not just the book's jacket and typeface but interviews with the author, reviews and commentaries. It is in transit, as commodities, that these narratives, which Whitlock calls 'veiled memoirs,' are shaped by and for the public. Whitlock reproduces an Audi ad that shows [Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran], outfitted in a cream suit, floating among shelves of books in a library (a library that contains no contemporary Iranian literature) above the words: 'Never let reality get in the way of imagination.' She is presented as the embodiment of imagination, and yet the 'reality' of contemporary Iran, which she claims to reveal to her audiences, is what provides her cultural capital.

Reading these memoirs, like watching bad reality television, gives the false sense that we are being told the 'truth' by the powerless at a time when those with the power to construct reality have limited our access to the facts.

The July 31LRB also contains an interesting piece by Megan Vaughn on Richard C. Keller's Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa—a book that explores the history of French psychology in North Africa and its complicated nature as both a progressive and innovative scientific endeavor, and as a means for furthering colonial goals.

Pick up a copy of this month's LRB to read the full reviews.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Literature | Psychology | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

Generically, [the "flash" papers] mostly seem to be saucily illustrated weeklies, ranging from titillating to soft porn, including simple woodcuts, more than 50 of which are reproduced here. Their distribution points (which included hawker-newsboys, saloons, oyster bars, barber shops, steamboats and theatres), sporting connections and maps and accounts of brothels suggest that most were aimed at a bachelor subculture. An exception is the Whip and Satirist, whose detailed woman's fashion column implies that it both sought female readers and employed women writers.

Commentary and excerpts support the authors' contention that the existence of this genre in antebellum New York establishes the city as cultural capital of the republic in low culture as well as high and indicates a dimension of this period and its press neglected in hegemonic accounts of this "Victorian" city.

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

Archived in History | Law | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The July 6 Boston Globe published an enlightening interview with Steven Shapin, Harvard professor of the History of Science and author of the forthcoming book The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation. In the interview Shapin discusses his book and its critique of conventional notions about the various motivations and incentives that drive scientific production. Instead, Shapin proposes a much more nuanced picture of of the scientific career and character. From the preface to the interview:

Testifying before congress in 1950, MIT president Karl Compton declared, of American scientists: "I don't know of any other group that has less interest in monetary gain."

That view of scientists might draw a few wry smiles around Kendall Square today. But it also represents a lingering 20th-century ideal: The scientist as a virtuous academic who pursues knowledge as an end in itself. In contrast to that ideal stands the wealth-seeking industrial scientist, a specialist who merely applies science to the problem of putting new products on the market.…

That's the wrong way to think about the whole scientific enterprise, says Steven Shapin.… Scientists, Shapin thinks, do not merely choose between virtue and riches, instead worrying more about where they can pursue their intellectual goals, and thus open up new scientific frontiers.

Thinking otherwise means we fail to understand the very people whose inventions in medicine or computer science are, Shapin writes, "making the worlds to come."

Read the interview on the Boston.com website.

Also see these other books by Steven Shapin previously published by the press:

A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England
The Scientific Revolution

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics | Education | History and Philosophy of Science | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 02:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Though it might have passed under most peoples' radar, today, June 25, is the 142nd anniversary of Custer's Last Stand—one of the most important, and bloodiest, battles of the U.S. conquest of Native American territories. Marking the occasion, Michael A. Elliott, author of Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer, has an editorial in today's Los Angeles Times on the battle and the high levels of patriotic sentiment expressed by many Native Americans today, despite their legendary legacy of resistance. From Elliott's article:

The command of about 600 men Custer led into battle in 1876 included about 35 American Indians, mostly Arikaras but also six Crow and a few Santee Sioux. Some of the Indian scouts would die alongside the 7th Cavalry at Little Bighorn. Others would ride away as the fighting began and spend the rest of their lives recounting what little they saw of the battle. What almost no one knows is that men from the same tribes that fought against Custer would, one year later, be riding alongside the U.S. Army as scouts in the campaign against the Nez Perce—or that the Indian scouts who served the Army in the 19th century became one of the precursors to the Army Special Forces, also known as Green Berets.

This history means that patriotism is rarely simple in the Indian country of the American Plains. American Indian communities have some of the highest rates of enlistment in the U.S. military, yet their leaders also defend the principle of tribal sovereignty—which holds that the tribes should enjoy political and economic autonomy. So at the same time that they are sending men and women to fight on behalf of the United States, many American Indian communities continue to claim their independence from it.

Continue reading at the LA Times website. We have an excerpt from Elliot's Custerology.

Also, this fall we will publish Norman Maclean's unfinished work on Custer and the Little Bighorn in The Norman Maclean Reader.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 04:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mary Pattillo, author of Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City was interviewed yesterday on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show to discuss the gentrification of urban African American communities.

Pattillo's book is an eye-opening sociological exploration of Chicago's North Kenwood–Oakland neighborhood and the community's embattled process of revitalization, where the often conflicting interests of the black middle-class, their less-fortunate neighbors, and the established centers of white economic and political power frame a dramatic tale of the transformation of black communities in the twenty-first century.

In the interview Pattillo touches on many of the issues discussed in her book and fields some interesting questions from WNYC listeners. Listen to the audio on the WNYC website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Black Studies | Chicago | History | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Derek S. Hyra, author of The New Urban Renewal: The Economic Transformation of Harlem and Bronzeville, was interviewed today on the BBC Radio 4 program Thinking Allowed. Host Laurie Taylor, on the ground in Harlem, interviewed Harlem residents and neighborhood leaders, as well as Hyra and other authors to understand both the history of Harlem and the "Second Harlem Renaissance" that is renewing and stressing the neighborhood.

Does gentrification bring upheaval or stability? Is change always good? Who are the winners and who are the losers?

The archived audio is available from the BBC.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Black Studies | Chicago | Sociology
Posted by DB at 04:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

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

Nicholson concludes his review:

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

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

Archived in History | Law | Literature | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Operation Homecoming is the result of a major initiative launched by the National Endowment for the Arts to bring distinguished writers to military bases to inspire U.S. soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, and their families to record their wartime experiences. Encouraged by such authors as Tom Clancy, Tobias Wolff, and Marilyn Nelson, American military personnel and their loved ones wrote candidly about what they saw, heard, and felt while in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as on the home front. These unflinching eyewitness accounts, private journals, short stories, and letters offer an intensely revealing look into extraordinary lives and are an unforgettable contribution to wartime literature.

Read the press release.

Archived in History | Press Releases | Psychology | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

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

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

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

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

Archived in Gay and Lesbian | History | Literature | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 02:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you think you've had your fill of malicious gossip, sex as a route to celebrity, and relentless sports and entertainment news, you might just be reading all about it two centuries too late. Under such headlines as "Whoredome in New York" and "Philadelphia Pimps of Fame," New York's 1840s flash papers served up with nonpareil style and irresistible wit all the news that wasn't fit to print about the city's underworld of brothels, wantons, unfortunate girls, and their all-too-eager customers. Ephemeral publications that also featured gossip about boxing, dog fighting, and the theater scene, the Rake, the Flash, the Whip, and the Libertine were must-reads for sporting men keen to learn about the city's leisure activities and erotic entertainments. Now, in The Flash Press, these papers are once again in print—this time taking the more discrete form of a book that looks under Victorian-era New York's buttoned-up surface to reveal the colorful (read: more interesting) characters teeming beneath.

Read the press release.

Archived in Film and Media | History | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Monday, May 26 is the official publication date of our paperback edition of Andrew Carroll's Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families. Through a series of eyewitness accounts, private journals, short stories, and letters, the book delivers a fascinating firsthand account of the lives of American servicemen and women in Iraq in their own words.

Operation Homecoming is also Oscar nominated documentary produced for PBS's America at a Crossroads. You can check out the movie trailer on YouTube or navigate to the America at a Crossroads website for local air times and additional media.

Find out more about the book here.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events | Psychology | Sociology
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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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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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Nicole P. Marwell, author of Bargaining for Brooklyn: Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City was recently interviewed on Brian Berger's blog Who Walk In Brooklyn. Berger—co-editor of New York Calling published by Reaktion Books and distributed by UCP—engages Marwell in a discussion of the author's experiences in Brooklyn's Williamsburg and Bushwick neighborhoods studying the social impact of the community based organizations she writes about in her book. From the preface to the interview:

Nicole gets deep into one of the most important & least glamorous aspects of understanding a city of the haves and the ain't-got-shit, the mysterious—to outsiders—world of "community based orgnanizations" (CBOs). In Brooklyn, the best known of these groups is probably ACORN, and even their notoriety is due more to Bertha Lewis' failed devil's bargain with Bruce Ratner on the so-called "Atlantic Yards" project than any of their other, less disputable initiatives.

Not all CBOs are alike, however, and because of this, Nicole spent years working with eight different groups in Williamsburg & Bushwick. Some were secular, some church-based. Both partook of a much less flashy but essential ground-level politics, a very far cry from that of the highly paid lobbyists whom an already-wealthy real estate racket uses to advance its profits at the least cost to themselves. It's been said, from La Lechonera de Coqui in Castle Hill to Angel's Lounge under the elevated BMT tracks on Broadway, that CBOs are born to lose. This may or may not be true; Berger & Marwell have their opinions but I suggest that we also remember the inspirational words of Bennie (Warren Oates) in Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia: "Nobody loses all the time." We shall see, Saltamonte, we shall see.

Read the interview on Berger's Who Walk in Brooklyn blog.

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

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

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

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

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Anthropology | Psychology | Reviews | Sociology
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Based on Eric Klinenberg's Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, a new play by Steven Simoncic looks at the 1995 heat wave that hit the city of Chicago with 106 degree temperatures and caused the deaths of over seven hundred people—one of the deadliest disasters in Chicago's history. Reviewing the play for the Chicago Sun-Times theater critic Heidi Weiss writes:

Mayor Daley is known to be an avid theatergoer. But it's unlikely that he, or City Council members, or a slew of officials from major city agencies who were on the job during the summer of 1995, will be stopping in at Pegasus Players in the coming weeks to catch Heat Wave. If they do, they will be subjected to a most uncomfortable two hours.

As for everyone else, this world premiere (produced with Live Bait Theater) will serve as a vivid reminder of a moment when (a decade before Hurricane Katrina) both municipal government and that far more diffuse thing that might be termed "the human safety net" failed miserably.

More about the play is available at the Pegasus players website. More about the book is at our website and in our interview with Eric Klinenberg.

Archived in Books for the News | Chicago | Film and Media | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
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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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Last Wednesday David Grazian, author of On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife was featured on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed with host Laurie Taylor. In the show Taylor and Grazian engage in a fascinating discussion about the various schemes and scams that the nightlife industry employs in order to separate customers from their money, as well as the scams perpetuated by the clientele themselves in their relentless search for sex, self-esteem, and status.

Listen to archived audio from the show on the BBC Radio 4 website.

Also, read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Psychology | Sociology
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Last Wednesday the Drug Law Blog authored by San Francisco attorney Alex Coolman ran an interesting interview with Doris Marie Provine, author of Unequal under Law: Race in the War on Drugs. The interview focuses on the topic of her book, exploring how issues of race have influenced American anti-drug efforts. Coolman prefaces the interview with some positive words about Provine's fascinating new book:

Professor Doris Marie Provine of Arizona State University's School of Justice & Social Inquiry is the author of a really interesting and challenging new book called Unequal Under Law: Race in the War on Drugs. I keep coming back to this book as a reference point for talking about some of the thorniest issues related to the intersection of race with American action—and inaction—on drug policy. These are issues that are so big and obvious that they're almost hard to recognize as issues. Unequal Under Law, however, does a really nice job of emphasizing that we are, in fact, making racial choices in drug policy—both consciously and unconsciously—that profoundly affect the lives of our fellow citizens.

Read the interview on the Drug Law Blog.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Law | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
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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 Chronicle of Higher Education is running an article by James M. Lang on the current state of undergraduate education titled "The Myth of First-Year Enlightenment." In the article Lang cites Tim Clydesdale's recent book, The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens after High School to explore modern students' reactions to their first introduction to academe:

You'll recognize this story: Intelligent but naïve high-school graduate heads off to college… [and] discovers how limited her worldview has been. Her consciousness is awakened. She emerges from her first year of college a changed human being, with more thoughtful views on religion, politics, and her own identity.

Our institutions… hawk the tale to prospective students and their parents on Web sites, in brochures, and on campus tours: You will come back from your first year a changed man or woman. You will be on the path to your new and more enlightened life. You will have had the best four years of your life.

Not so, according to Tim Clydesdale, an associate professor of sociology at the College of New Jersey, and author of The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens After High School.… "Most of the mainstream American teens I spoke with neither liberated themselves intellectually nor broadened themselves socially during their first year out," he writes. "What teens actually focus on during the first year out is this: daily life management."

In other words, freshmen spend most of their time and intellectual energy figuring out how to handle life without parental restraints and support: how to deal with money; negotiate newfound freedoms with sex, drugs, and alcohol; and determine how much time to devote to studying, working, and playing.

But what freshmen don't do during their first year of college comes as more of a (perhaps depressing) surprise: "Most American teens keep core identities in an 'identity lockbox' during their first year out and actively resist efforts to examine their self-understandings through classes or to engage their humanity through institutional efforts such as public lectures, the arts, or social activism."

Read the rest of the article on the Chronicle website.

Archived in Books for the News | Education | Philosophy | Religion | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

David Grazian's entertaining exploration of the bars of Philadelphia in On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife, continues to attract attention. Two new articles have recently been published featuring Grazian's new book—the first appeared in the January 18 Chronicle Review and includes some great praise for the book's revealing look at inner city nightlife:

Grazian's new book is, among other things, a long catalog of confidence games. Nightclub managers strain to persuade the world that their typical patrons are younger, less suburban, and more female than they actually are. For a secret payment of $500 per week, one Philadelphia publicist… will bring four attractive, well-connected friends to a club…

There are also the more-familiar kinds of interpersonal fraud: In bars like Tangerine, people sometimes lie about their ages, their names, their jobs, and their marital statuses. Women give out fake phone numbers to shake off obnoxious suitors. People feign a sexual interest in others in order to score free drinks, to make their lovers jealous, or simply to make the evening less boring.

"What's skillful about the book is that these are settings that people are familiar with, but often don't think very hard about," says Joshua Gamson, a professor of sociology at the University of San Francisco who specializes in commercial culture. "Grazian manages to make them seem new, without trying to oversell his analysis. The book has an appropriate level of seriousness and an appropriate amount of pleasure."

A lengthy review also appeared in the January 20 Toronto Star. Geoff Pevere writes for the Star:

Plunging into clubs, bars, strip-joints and restaurants, [Grazian] collects first-person testimonies from hustlers, horndogs, would-be makeout artists and dozens of variously candid members of Philadelphia's burgeoning night-life industry. While this serves the highly reader-friendly function of leavening his occasionally concrete prose with regular bursts of profane, party-down plain-spokenness, it also brings a welcome humanity to what might otherwise have been a clinical case study in the overall decline of contemporary civilization. And make no mistake: what happens in Philadelphia doesn't stay in Philadelphia. If there's one thing about the book which makes it resonate beyond those city limits, it's that the city he describes is any city where there's an "entertainment district" catering to the largely false promise of sex in the city.

Read an excerpt from the first chapter.

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | Psychology | Sociology
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Sunday's Toronto Star ran an interesting article on sociologist David Grazian's revealing portrait of Philadelphia's thriving club scene in On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife. Summarizing the book the Star's Ryan Bigge writes:

Although Grazian discusses the sophisticated public relations matrix that helps bring in customers, he's more interested in exploring the paradox that club goers allow themselves to be willingly hustled. Making a comparison to movies filled with computer-generated effects, Grazian suggests, "People are willing to suspend their disbelief in order to enjoy a thrilling lie."

Which means the tens of thousands of club goers—the actual number is the subject of considerable contention, but even the lowest two-night estimate is 40,000—that cram Toronto's entertainment district on Friday and Saturday nights, spending millions of dollars per year on drinks, are marks of their own making. Of course, just because the game is rigged, doesn't mean you can't enjoy yourself, as the eternal popularity of Las Vegas demonstrates.

Read the rest of the article on the Toronto Star website or read this excerpt from the first chapter of the book. The press's website also features an interview with Grazian about his previous book on a similar topic, Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs.

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events | Psychology | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The City Room blog on the New York Times website ran a guide to holiday tipping yesterday that draws much of its advice from Peter Bearman's Doormen—a book the NYT's Sewell Chan says contains one of "the most sophisticated discussion of holiday tipping City Room has encountered." Chan's article continues:

[Holiday tips and bonuses are] fraught with meaning. [The gesture] "is both a gift, a way of saying thanks, an obligation, and yet also a sign of expected reciprocal attention and an expression of social power," Professor Bearman writes. "These contradictory meanings make the bonus difficult to talk about, and tenants often squirm in their seats (or cognitively) as they try to describe just what it means."

Professor Bearman writes that the holiday bonus is most often construed in one of two ways. "On the one hand, the Christmas bonus is often represented as the acknowledgment of all of the assistance received during the past year," he notes, adding later, "On the other hand, the Christmas bonus is often represented as a pre-payment or down payment for the next year, an advance on the services to be received."

He distinguishes the bonus from a mere tip, a payment for services rendered. "Whereas tipping encodes the relationship too starkly as a service relationship, because the number of small favors is endless, the Christmas bonus symbolizes the value of all the little services over the past year." But it is also "a hedge for service in the coming year."

Our excerpt from the book discusses the Christmas bonus.

Update: Based on the large number of responses the NYT's City Room blog got from it's last article about holiday tipping they also published this follow-up based on their reader's comments.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Psychology | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 02:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

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

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

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

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

The Pulitzer-prize winning photo of the Suribachi Summit… was actually of a second flag-raising, staged with a larger flag after the fighting had died down. Literally speaking it was not so much a struggle against military odds as a struggle against gravity. This was known at the time, and was a sufficiently sensitive issue for both Time and Life to refrain from publishing it until it had become so ubiquitous as to be beyond complex questioning. That happened very fast. The photo became more or less instantly a leitmotif of American popular culture and a key item in the manufacture of consent by politicians and advertisers alike.…

Debates about the authenticity of photographs, especially war photographs, have been commonplace since at least the American Civil War. In No Caption Needed Robert Hariman and John Lucaites are less concerned with these debates than the ways in which iconic images have been used to propose and renegotiate various kinds of 'democratic citizenship' and 'civic identity.' Here original truths matter less than accumulated traditions or assumptions.… For these authors the Iwo Jima flag works because it is aesthetically compelling, … because it converts military into civic action, and because it effaces the personalities of the soldiers in the service of a common and anonymous effort. …

The review continues:

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

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

Archived in Art and Architecture | Film and Media | History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 08:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The situation in our surveillance state is such that the government can monitor many of our daily activities, using closed-circuit TV, global positioning systems, and a wide array of other sophisticated technologies—without warning, and at any time. But despite the growing public awareness of these intrusions, our post-9/11 environment of fear makes people reluctant to question them. Yet, as Christopher Slobogin explains in Privacy at Risk, these shocking violations of privacy are often perpetrated by those in positions of power.

This ground-breaking book argues that courts should prod legislatures into enacting more meaningful protection against government overreach by applying the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. Slobogin demonstrates how we can thus preserve rights guaranteed by the Constitution—without compromising the government’s ability to investigate criminal acts—in a book that will intrigue anyone concerned about privacy rights in the digital age.

Read the press release.

Archived in Law | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 04:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Caitlin Zaloom's Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London was recently given an interesting review in the November 1 London Review of Books. Writing for the LRB, Donald Mackenzie begins with a description of his own experiences on the trading floor of the Chicago Board of Trade in 2000—while they were still bustling with traders, runners, and clerks vying for bids:

At the Board of Trade, orders were still carried to the pits on pieces of paper by runners and clerks, and then shouted out by traders or 'flashed' to others in the pit using the hand signal language known as 'arb'—an abbreviation for arbitrage, the exploitation of discrepancies in prices.…

But as Mackenzie's article notes, at the turn of the millennium the digital age was already poised to radically transform the way that modern traders conduct business.

Chicago's open-outcry trading, a way of life stretching back to the grain futures pits of the 19th century, was on the brink of disappearing when I visited the Board of Trade in 1999 and 2000. There were already signs that technology was encroaching: headsets were increasingly used instead of runners to communicate between the pits and the booths where customer orders arrived, and a few traders carried hand-held computers. Since 2000, Chicago's pits have emptied, and those who still stand in them focus less on the people around them than they do on their computers, which are no longer an adjunct to trading but essential to it. Chicago remains central to the world's financial markets—its recent merger with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange has made the Board of Trade part of the world's largest exchange—but as the hub of electronic networks, not as a set of huge rooms crowded with bodies.

Despite the role it has played in shaping today's world, there are few observational studies of financial trading to compliment the thousands of econometric studies of price fluctuations. Zaloom's superb book is a double-site ethnography. She first worked as a runner on the Chicago Board of Trade, like any good anthropologist learning the local language — she's proficient in 'arb.' Then she moved to London, where open out-cry trading has now vanished, … and where she was trained in and then practiced the very different skills of an electronic trader.

A first-hand account of the changing face of the contemporary marketplace, Out of the Pits delivers an unprecedented exploration of how the digital age has transformed economic cultures and the craft of speculation.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Anthropology | Chicago | Economics | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 02:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On a hot summer day in 1876, George Armstrong Custer led the Seventh Cavalry to the most famous defeat in U.S. military history.The Seventh Cavalry lost more than half of the 400 men who rode into the Indian camp, and every soldier under Custer’s direct command was killed.

It’s easy to understand why this tremendous defeat shocked the American public at the time. But in Custerology, Michael A. Elliott tackles the question of why the battle retains such power for Americans today. Weaving vivid historical accounts of Custer at Little Bighorn with contemporary commemorations that range from battle reenactments to the unfinished Crazy Horse memorial, Elliott reveals a Custer and a West whose legacies are still vigorously contested. He takes readers to each of the important places of Custer’s life, from his Civil War home in Michigan to the site of his famous demise, to show how more than a century later, the legacy of Custer still haunts the American imagination.

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

Archived in History | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Caitlin Zaloom's most recent book, Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London, has factored into several articles this week about the world-wide transition from open-outcry trading to electronic, computer based trading—a transformation that she argues promises a radical change in the culture of the global marketplace.

Niko Koppel's piece in the New York Times cites Zaloom's comparative account of what two very different financial exchanges—the trading floors of Chicago's commodities markets where open-outcry trading has been a tradition since the mid-nineteenth century, and a shiny new digital dealing room in the City of London—to describe how this transition is affecting the marketplace. Koppel writes for the NYT:

Ms. Zaloom observed that, though pit traders were once the first to see bids and offers, electronic trading has leveled the playing field.

"The screens are anonymous," she said, "and that's part of the idea of having a more pure market, one that doesn't have the complications of flesh and blood."

Equal access to the markets has made trading more challenging for pit traders. "We're trading against machines" all over the world, said Jeffrey Levant, 53, who has been at the [Chicago Mercantile] Exchange for 29 years, and recently left the Nasdaq pit to learn electronic trading. "Sometimes it feels like we're John Henry going up against the steam hammer."

Zaloom also recently factored into a similar piece in the London Review of Books. The online version is available to subscribers.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | Economics | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fire is being beaten in southern California. The wind shifts, more firefighters and equipment are deployed, and the wildfires—after burning half a million acres and displacing about as many residents—are brought under control.

Different stories then emerge. Stories about causes and responses and lessons learned. Stories about heroic and despicable acts. Stories about those who fled their homes and those who fought the flames. "Firefighters are a particular breed," said California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection Battalion Chief Doug Lannon in a story in the Los Angeles Times. But what does that mean?

Burning to death is a hellish way to die. Yet every year men and women across the country risk their lives for low pay to fight wildfires. What motivates them to put their lives on the line and face heat so intense it can melt steel? Understanding the breed that is the wildfire firefighter is the point of Matthew Desmond's just-released book, On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters. Desmond lived and worked with a wildland fire crew for four seasons and delivers a vivid and sophisticated account of this high-risk work, immersing the reader in their dangerous world.

John Maclean, the author of an account of the Colorado South Canyon fire that killed fourteen firefighters in 1994, said:

Rich in gritty detail, Matthew Desmond's sociological study of a firecrew is a welcome addition to the literature of wildfire. His four years on a backcountry Forest Service crew provide authentic material—sometimes startlingly so—for his observations. If you want a look behind the flames to see what drives these people to come back year after blistering year then read this book.

(John Maclean is, of course, the son of Norman Maclean, who also knew much about fire and the death of those who fight it. Norman Maclean wrote Young Men and Fire, the modern classic that tells the story of the Mann Gulch fire of 1949.)

Read an excerpt from On the Fireline.

Archived in Books for the News | Sociology
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Michael A. Elliott's new book, Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer is a thought provoking exploration of the contemporary fascination with the Battle of Little Bighorn. From battle reenactments to the unfinished Crazy Horse memorial, for over a century the battle has captivated the American consciousness as one of the most significant defeats in U. S. military history. In a review published in last Sunday's Access Atlanta Steve Weinberg takes note of Elliott's book for its in-depth exploration of this phenomena. Weinberg writes:

Given all the military battles to study in world history, why does Little Bighorn, an 1876 military debacle in rural Montana, in which George Armstrong Custer, who commanded the Seventh Cavalry, lost his life along with about 200 soldiers, continue to fascinate more than 130 years later?… As Elliott phrases the matter in the absorbing Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer, Custer's death "has allowed non-Indian Americans to commemorate the defeat of the Seventh Cavalry as a glorious sacrifice for more than a century while at the same time giving Plains Indians the opportunity to extol a brave history of anti-colonial resistance."

The review continues:

The author is an approachable guide as he takes readers to battlefields where Custer fought American Indians, such as an 1868 foray into a Cheyenne and Arapaho village on the Washita River; to the Michigan town of Monroe that Custer called home after he moved there at age 10 with his married half-sister to achieve schooling better than what was available in his Ohio birthplace; to the Black Hills of South Dakota where Custer led an expedition that gave birth to a gold rush.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 09:44 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)

The online e-zine PopMatters is running an interesting review of Devah Pager's new book Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration. Like much of the other press this book has been receiving lately, the review focuses on Pager's revealing analysis of the links between the U. S. penal system and the deep rooted racial and economic inequalities in the U. S. job market. PopMatters reviewer Steve Horowitz writes:

Most Americans find the idea of serving two punishments for the one crime unfair, yet according to Princeton Professor of Sociology Devah Pager, this happens all the time. A person spends time in jail, and then suffers from the stigma of incarceration after being released.… This isn't news to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the justice system. However, Pager extends her analysis one step further through an experimental field study in metropolitan Milwaukee. She sends out pairs of young men with matched resumes on job searches for employment and makes some startling discoveries.

The Princeton professor shows that employers regularly exclude ex-offenders from consideration for entry-level, low-paying jobs, and provides strong evidence that the situation for young black men is significantly worse than for their white counterparts. Her study shows that white men who do not have a criminal record are more than twice as likely to be considered for a job as white men with ex-offender records. A white man with a criminal record has the same chance of being considered for a job as a black man without one. A black man without a record, or a white man with a criminal history, is three times more likely to be considered for a job than a black man with a criminal record.

Hrowitz concludes:

Much of what Pager says flies against the conventional belief these days that says that race is no longer a strong barrier against getting a job. She points out that most Americans no longer believe that ascribed characteristics, like race, hinder a person from employment. That may be true for middle-class and high-end jobs, but unfortunately, racism is still a problem on the low end of the pay scale, where most people with a record look for work.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Black Studies | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

“In 1970, President Nixon announced a massive war on crime. More prisons were built and more people incarcerated than ever before in U.S. history. With the media's portrayal of convicts as demons, the public attitude toward anyone who had ever been arrested became bleak and hostile. According to Pager [Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration], this attitude prevails today, particularly in the job market. Using scholarly research, field research in Milwaukee, and graphics, she shows that ex-offenders, white or black, stand a very poor chance of getting a legitimate job (though black men with clean records fared the same as whites just out of prison). As a result, many live in poverty or return to crime. Pager is not an activist clamoring for reform but instead presents her findings in a clearheaded manner, pointing out the societal consequences of the predicament and suggesting ways for change. Written for the general reader with a nod to the academic audience, the book is both informative and convincing. Highly recommended.”—Library Journal

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

Archived in Black Studies | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Boston Globe's Christopher Shea wrote an interesting piece for last Sunday's paper on America's growing prison system and its formative impact on American society. In his article, Shea details the revealing social experiment in Devah Pager's new book, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration, to show how the American penal system has become an "engine of inequality … actively [widening] the gap between the poor—especially poor black men—and everyone else." Shea continues:

In an ideal penal system, prisoners might exit the system having paid their debt to society and be more or less restored to their previous status as free men and women. But Pager's book demonstrates just how detached from reality that view is. She had four college students, two black and two white, pose as applicants for low-level jobs in Milwaukee.…

They used résumés that were nearly identical—high school degrees, steady progress from entry-level work to a supervisory position—except that in some cases the applicant had a drug conviction in his past… for which he served an 18-month sentence and then behaved perfectly on parole.…

In her field study, Pager found that her black applicants with criminal records got called for an interview—or to interview on the spot, as they applied in person—a mere 5 percent of the time. That compared with 14 percent for the black applicants without a criminal record. Meanwhile, the white applicants with a record were called back 17 percent of the time, compared with 34 percent for the white men lacking the blotch on their résumé. "Two strikes"—blackness and a record—"and you're out" is how Pager summarizes her findings.

Read the rest of the article on the Boston Globe website.
Read an excerpt from Pager's book.

Archived in Black Studies | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 09:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It is always interesting to see the kind of reception books about America receive overseas, which is why a recent review of Kevin Rozario's The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America in London's Daily Telegraph caught our eye. The book is a comprehensive survey of the various ways both natural and manmade disasters have shaped American culture, but reviewer Lucy Moore also devotes much of her article to Rozario's explanation of how America's rich and powerful have been able to exploit these disasters to meet their own ideological and economic ends. Moore writes:

As Rozario shows, the resilience and optimism with which Americans have traditionally met adversity have become increasingly susceptible throughout the 20th century and into the 21st to manipulation. All too often, disaster mitigation has been subordinate to the demands of development. From 1927 onwards in the Mississippi River basin, government relief acts have funded vast new areas of construction, often on wetlands which used to act as flood barriers. Flooding, when it inevitably reoccurs, is far more severe in areas where artificial defenses have been built. As Rozario observes, "if calamities enable progress, 'progress' itself often seems only to increase human vulnerability to increasingly severe calamities.…"

Most alarming of all, Rozario shows how neatly September 11 served President Bush's political agenda. A year before the bombing, the Project for the New American Century submitted a paper setting out its ambitions for preserving American "pre-eminence" abroad and consolidating Republican power at home. The starting point was war with Iraq, but the signatories—who included Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney and Jeb Bush—regretted that "absent some catastrophic and catalysing event," their aims might take many years to fulfill. Progress and catastrophe indeed.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Daniel Lazare has written a fascinating review of several books on America's growing prison crisis for Monday's edition of the Nation. According to Lazare, the U.S. prison system currently incarcerates about a quarter of the world's prisoners with "about 3.2 percent of the adult population under some form of criminal-justice supervision." And for African Americans, Lazare writes, "the numbers are even more astonishing. By the mid-1990s, 7 percent of black males were behind bars, while the rate of imprisonment for black males between the ages of 25 and 29 now stands at one in eight." But according to Lazare this is only half the problem; what happens after this large, racially disparate prison population is released to face the prospects of finding a job and living without crime? Lazare turns to Devah Pager's new book, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration for the answer:

In Marked, Devah Pager, who also teaches sociology at Princeton, uses a simple technique to show how mass incarceration has undone the small amount of racial progress achieved in the 1960s and '70s. Working with two pairs of male college students in Milwaukee, one white and the other black, she drilled them on how to present themselves and answer questions. Then, arming them with phony résumés, she sent them out to apply for entry-level jobs. The résumés were identical in all respects but one. Where one member of each team had nothing indicating a criminal record, the other's résumés showed an eighteen-month sentence for drugs.…

The results? The white applicant with a prison record was half as likely to be called back for a second interview as the white applicant without. But the black applicant without a criminal record was no more likely to be called back than the white applicant with a record, while the black applicant with a record was two-thirds less likely to be called back than the black applicant without. The black applicant with a record therefore wound up doubly penalized—as a black man and as an ex-con. With the chances of a call-back reduced to just 5 percent, the overall effect, Pager writes, was "almost total exclusion from this labor market.…" This is not only bad news for those arrested but bad news for those who have to foot the bill for their incarceration and for dealing with the social problems that labor-market exclusion on this scale helps generate."

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Black Studies | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Last Friday's Chronicle of Higher Education carried a nice piece on sociologist Gary Allen Fine's latest book, Authors of the Storm: Meteorologists and the Culture of Prediction. Reviewer Nina C. Ayoub delivers a concise synopsis of Fine's inside account of the cultural and social influences affecting the science of meteorology:

Combining theory with a shop-floor view, Mr. Fine describes how the forecasters do their "futurework," under a range of bureaucratic and time constraints. While machines abound, data are not simply registered and reported but interpreted and massaged. Meteorologists defend their job as a blend of art and science in which intuition may trump the best software. Or as one forecaster joked: "The real atmosphere has great difficulty simulating the modeled atmosphere, which has ruined a number of good forecasts."

Forecasting, he also shows, is a social process. No forecast is created anew. Instead, each shift looks at what it has "inherited," and issues of collegiality can shape whether predictions are changed, tweaked, or left alone, assuming no dramatic demands by the climate.…

Language is [also] a frequently contested issue, between, for example, a "partly sunny" optimist and a "partly cloudy" pessimist, or between forecasters who favor such evocative terms as sultry and blustery, and others who think even "fair" is too ambiguous.

Revealing the people and personalities behind the daily weather forecast, Fine's Authors of the Storm offers a valuable glimpse of a crucial profession.

Archived in Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 09:44 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
Posted by TXM at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Caitlin Zaloom, author of Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London, was featured yesterday on Chicago Public Radio's Eight Forty-Eight to discuss the merger of the Chicago Board of Trade with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange—a deal that many think is likely to secure Chicago's place as one of the world's most important centers for global derivatives trading. In her interview Zaloom goes beyond the numbers to discuss how the merger, and the revolution in the culture of trading it promises, will affect the world's financial markets and shape everyday life in the new global economy.

Listen to the archived audio on the Eight Forty-Eight website.

Read an excerpt from Zaloom's book.

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | Chicago | Economics | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 04:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Chicago Reader recently ran an insightful analysis of Mary Pattillo's new book, Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City. Reviewer Harold Henderson reflects on how Pattillo's participant-observer study of Chicago's North Kenwood—Oakland neighborhood reveals a tangled network of competing interests, even within the community itself, that if left unresolved make any predictions as to the future of the neighborhood and its inhabitants uncertain at best. Henderson writes:

Mayor Daley's brave new Chicago doesn't work for everyone. Eric Klinenberg tried to make this point five years ago with Heat Wave, his examination of who suffered and how during a 1995 natural disaster. Now Northwestern University sociologist Mary Pattillo nails it with Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City …

She traces North Kenwood—Oakland's fortunes from late-19th-century prosperity to 1970s poverty and back to relative prosperity, then focuses on the uneasy position of the growing population of middle-class black professionals, who often find themselves acting as brokers between "the Man" downtown and the "littlemen" back in the hood.…

After two decades of gentrification the neighborhood has three new schools, less public housing, less crime, and a booming real-estate market. But most of its low-income kids still attend the old, underachieving schools. Former residents of the demolished public-housing high-rises have seen their promised right of return demolished as well. And the new black bourgeoisie is as enthusiastic about stopping the old timers' sociable practice of boulevard barbecuing as it is about fighting crime. Through the lens of this neighborhood Pattillo depicts a city where liberty and justice for all is being transformed—ever so slowly, ever so reasonably—into order and tranquility for some.

Henderson concludes: “A century from now, when today's sociologists and journalists are dust and their books are too, those who want to understand what the hell happened to Chicago will be finding the answer in this one.”

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Black Studies | Chicago | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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)

George J. Borjas, professor of economics and history at Harvard University and author of the recently published Mexican Immigration to the United States, recently started a blog at http://borjas.typepad.com/the_borjas_blog/. With posts on everything from "rockonomics" to the political economy of immigration, Borjas's blog should be a first stop for anyone looking for insight into some of the nation's hottest issues, and especially immigration reform in the United States.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Sociology
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On May 1, Mexican immigrants took to the streets in cities across America to demand a living wage, greater access to health care, and an easier path to legal status. Meanwhile, cable news pundits and newspaper columnists breathlessly debated the implications of their growing numbers—they now account for over 28 percent of all foreign-born inhabitants of the United States. But despite the visibility of Mexican immigrants in the media, little is known about their real impact on American society. Why do Mexican immigrants gain citizenship and employment at a slower rate than non-Mexicans? Does their migration to the United States adversely affect the working conditions of lower-skilled workers already residing there? And how rapid is intergenerational mobility among Mexican immigrant families?

Data is needed to answer these questions and inform policymakers and concerned citizens alike about the reality behind the headlines. In Mexican Immigration to the United States, the world's foremost economists report startling new findings on an immigrant influx whose size and character will force us to rethink economic policy for decades to come. For anyone seeking to cut through the rhetoric—and understand the future of social conditions and economic opportunities in both countries—Mexican Immigration to the United States is essential reading.

Read the press release.

Archived in Economics | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Equal parts medical drama, political chronicle, and ringing polemic, Inclusion tells the story of the movement for a more inclusive approach to medical research, from the struggles of advocacy groups in the 1980s to force researchers to diversify their subject pools to the current model, under which drug companies make bold assertions that group differences in society are encoded in our biology. While Epstein appreciates the hope that more inclusive practices offer to traditionally underserved groups, he argues forcefully that these practices can overshadow far more important social inequities and will only make a real difference if tied to a broad-based effort to address health disparities.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last Monday Salon.com ran an in-depth review of Angus McLaren's new book Impotence: A Cultural History. Drawing from McLaren's work, reviewer Laura Miller walks through several centuries of male sexual failure and the various theories behind its causes and cures to explore its social impact throughout the history of western civilization. But according to Miller, it's what all this history has to teach us about our attitudes towards impotence today that make McLaren's book notable. Miller writes:

The final chapters of Impotence, covering the last 50 years of sexual liberation, feminism and Viagra, are the most interesting. McLaren's long historical view lends substance to his argument that our current, "enlightened" take on sex hasn't necessarily made things easier for the average guy. The idea that manliness consists of being able to sexually satisfy a woman—not merely penetrate and impregnate her—increased the pressure. So did the rise of sex therapy, with its notion of sex as a body of sophisticated techniques requiring planning and practice—sex as work, in effect. A mid-20th-century preoccupation with "simultaneous orgasm" as the pinnacle of marital love and a necessity for any truly happy couple set many couples up for disappointment and insecurity. With the advent of feminism, women who gained the ability to support themselves economically had one less reason to settle for a sexually unexciting spouse.

Viagra seemed to promise relief at last, but as McLaren points out, only half of the men who tried it ever bothered to refill their prescriptions. As reassuring as it was for intimacy-averse guys to be offered a purely mechanical solution to their sexual problems, many found it somehow still wasn't enough.…

"A flaccid penis," McLaren writes, can "give pleasure and result in orgasm"—surely a revelation to many. What it can't do, however, is fulfill the fantasy of ever-rigid, ever-aggressive, ever-dominant manhood. Until that changes, potency—and therefore impotence—will always be about a lot more than just getting it up.

Read a special feature drawn from the book: "Two Millennia of Impotence Cures".

Archived in History | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews | Sociology
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Author Mary Pattillo was featured Tuesday on Chicago Public Radio's daily news-radio talk show Eight Forty-Eight. Pattillo speaks with host Richard Steele about her new book Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City and the revitalization of Chicago's North Kenwood-Oakland neighborhood. Their conversation explores the problems facing this rapidly gentrifying black community to touch on broader issues of race and class in contemporary urban America. You can find archived audio of the show on the Chicago Public Radio website.

Pattillo will also be at 57th Street Books today at 7pm to read from her book. In the meantime, you can check out an excerpt on our website.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Events | Black Studies | Chicago | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The March 31 Boston Globe featured an article reviewing several new books about urban gentrification and its complex impact on the politics of race and class in contemporary urban America. These works together create, in the words of reviewer Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, "a more nuanced picture of gentrification."

Venkatesh praises Mary Pattillo, author of Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City, for her detailed examination of this issue through her first-hand account of conflict, cooperation, and community building in Chicago's North Kenwood-Oakland (NKO) neighborhood—a rapidly changing African American community on Chicago's South Side. From the review:

Pattillo eschews most norms of social scientific objectivity by taking up residence in NKO. She is a homeowner and secretary of a local neighborhood association with great influence over local development—not to mention a Northwestern University professor. …

Pattillo acknowledges her complicated role, as both interested party and analyst. But through her experience we see how complicated life can be for the black middle class.

In her neighborhood, Pattillo and other newly-arriving homeowners, many of whom find themselves sandwiched between empty lots and dilapidated, low-income housing projects, are caught between two motivations: the wish to live in an area with decent stores, well-maintained parks, and adequate city services; and the ethical pull of advocating on behalf of those poorer blacks who might be displaced if the neighborhood continues to gentrify.

Ultimately, Black on the Block argues that while these fissures have come to define the black community, the reality is that many African Americans choose participation over abdication and involvement over withdrawal—even when disagreements become bitter and acrimonious.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Black Studies | Chicago | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 08:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mary Pattillo is a Newsweek Woman of the 21st Century because of her critically acclaimed last book, Black Picket Fences, which changed forever the way many of us think about the black middleclass in America today. In Black on the Block, Pattillo returns to the South Side of Chicago to explore how class conflicts within the black community are dramatically changing the shape and terms of racial solidarity. Her focus is the work that more affluent members of the black community are doing to lift historically impoverished and dilapidated neighborhoods out of abject poverty—and the tensions that arise between poorer and middleclass blacks when they do so. Black on the Block explores the often heated battles between haves and have-nots, home owners and apartment dwellers, and newcomers and old timers as they clash over the political implications of gentrification and reaching out to white economic power bases.

Read the press release. We also have an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Black Studies | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 08:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the March 23rd issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, author Caitlin Zaloom has penned an interesting piece about the late Clifford Geertz, one of the world's leading cultural anthropologists, and a man she calls her intellectual "grandfather." In her article, Zaloom cites Geertz's groundbreaking studies in books such as Peddlers and Princes and Agricultural Involution as the foundation for her own new book, Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London.

Out of the Pits is a fascinating exploration of how the recent trend of online trading is effecting the culture of the marketplace. Zaloom's article states, "even though their publication preceded today's global economy by decades, Clifford Geertz's works on culture and economy can still help us understand the cultural import of the online evolution in the world's marketplace."

Here's a few links to the UCP website where you can find out more about the works of both of these groundbreaking figures in the field of anthropology:

Clifford Geertz by His Colleagues
Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia
The Religion of Java
Kinship in Bali
Peddlers and Princes

We also have an excerpt from Out of the Pits.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Chicago | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 09:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Author Caitlin Zaloom was recently featured on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed discussing her new book Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London. Host Laurie Taylor talks with Zaloom about the stock market's gradual transition from face-to-face exchanges made on the trading room floor to internet based trading and how this move into the digital realm effects the culture and business of global trade markets. You can listen to archived audio of the discussion on the BBC's Thinking Allowed website.

We also have an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Chicago | Economics | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 03:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author and Princeton University professor of religious studies, was featured on the Tavis Smiley Show last weekend discussing "how his new book, In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America, offers a starting point for examining the upcoming election season through the eyes of African Americans." You can listen to archived audio from the program online at the Tavis Smiley Show website.

With In a Shade of Blue Glaude, one of our nation's rising young African American intellectuals, makes an impassioned plea for black America to address its social problems by recourse to experience and with an eye set on the promise and potential of the future, rather than the fixed ideas and categories of the past. Heady, inspirational, and brimming with practical wisdom, this timely book is a remarkable work of political commentary on a scale rarely seen today. To follow its trajectory is to learn how African Americans arrived at this critical moment in their history and to envision where they might head in the twenty-first century.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Black Studies | Philosophy | Politics and Current Events | Religion | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 03:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A recent review by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas in the February 22 London Review of Books begins by noting the fact that "the dog/human bond, for all its importance, is one of the least examined relationships in Western culture." And indeed, though the attachment between dogs and their human companions plays an important role in the lives of millions of Americans, "dogs have never been considered an appropriate subject for serious scholarship."

Alice Kuzniar's new book Melancholia's Dog: Reflections on Our Animal Kinship promises to change that.

Moving beyond the stereotypes that confine discussion of the dog/human relationships to "lowbrow, popular media and arts," as LRB notes, "this is probably the first time that a scholar of Kuzniar's ability has shown the courage to tackle the deeper aspects of our relationships with dogs."

The review continues:

Our dogs are metaphors for ourselves, something that many of us may have long suspected, but because the idea had never been articulated, or not fully, perhaps we did not appreciate the fact. Or perhaps we didn't want to face it. Thanks to Alice Kuzniar we know it now.

Archived in Philosophy | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 07:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Virginia Postrel has taken a detour from her Atlantic Monthly column, "Commerce & Culture," to write an interesting review for yesterday's New York Times Book Review of Kieran Healy's recent work, Last Best Gifts: Altruism and the Market for Human Blood and Organs.

Healy's book is a sociological exploration of organ donation and the ethos of altruism that surrounds it—an ethos that the ever increasing demand for blood and organs threatens to extinguish. In recent years the increasing need for transplantation has supported the notion that donors might be supplemented or replaced by paid suppliers. However, Postrel writes, "even in the face of a critical shortage of organs, many leaders in the transplant field oppose any financial incentives for organ donors, including tax credits or payments toward funeral expenses." Last Best Gifts offers a fresh perspective on this ethical dilemma, examining the social organization of blood and organ donation in Europe and the United States to propose a balanced and nuanced solution that does justice to both sides of the argument. Postrel's review explains:

As an economic sociologist, Healy adds important dimensions to the intensifying debate over organ procurement. He reminds both advocates and opponents of markets that commercial transactions are embedded in social structures and as likely as any other exchanges to have social meaning. To succeed, incentives must show sensitivity to those meanings. A direct payment to a funeral home, for example, could honor a donor family's decision without making them seem to profit from their loved one's death. Or healthy adults could make binding contracts to be organ donors if they die in the right circumstances, with life insurance paid for by transplant centers, the government or a private foundation going to their heirs.

Essential reading for sociologists, donors, and medical professionals, Last Best Gifts explores the future of medical practice in the modern market.

Archived in Politics and Current Events | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In reviewing Blowing Hot and Cool: Jazz and its Critics for the December 17 issue of the Independent, jazz columnist Sholto Byrnes argues that "in the first century of jazz's existence, it's the critics who have articulated the arguments about where jazz is from, who it belongs to and where its boundaries lie. [The critics] have been its historians and its definers." And as the first academic exploration into the legacy of these critics and their powerful role in defining jazz, Byrnes' review acknowledges John Gennari's Blowin' Hot and Cool as an essential contribution to the history of the music. Byrnes writes:

[Blowin' Hot and Cool] is a valuable book, and a fascinating one, ranging from the the important role played by the critic John Hammond in promoting Benny Goodman and Bessie Smith in the 1930s, to the epic battles fought over the 'Young Lions' movement in the 1980's.

An original and comprehensive approach to jazz history, Gennari's book will be appreciated by anyone wanting to know more about how modern culture has come to see one of America's greatest musical traditions.

Read an excerpt along with a soundtrack the author outlined to go with the book.

Archived in Music | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Writing in the December/January issue of Bookforum Steven Levy recalls a magazine article penned over thirty years ago by Stewart Brand. Levy notes that Brand's article, published in Rolling Stone in 1972, was one of the first to bring the then-obscure world of computer hackers into public view. That legendary RS article, "Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums", is an example of how Brand, the impresario of the counterculture, was instrumental in transforming attitudes towards technology and shaping our digital culture. But the story behind Brand and the radical social transformation he nurtured has gone largely undocumented—until now. Levy writes:

Fred Turner, author of the sharply observed and painstakingly researched From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, has produced a lengthy argument that Brand's feat of bringing computer geeks into a magazine best known for rock-star journalism and gonzo attacks on Richard Nixon was just one step in a decades long crusade to transplant the ideals of the '60s from the dirt-flecked fields of the commune to the elysian fields of cyberspace. In Turner's meticulously detailed if somewhat slow-motion book, he postulates that Brand was an idealistic leader of a merry band of cybernetic pranksters who framed the concept of computers and the internet with a surprising twist: These one-time engines of government and big business had [transformed] into a social force associated with egalitarianism, personal empowerment, and the nurturing cocoon of community. Furthermore, says Turner, Brand's promotion of this concept actually helped turn at least some of it into reality.

Indeed, From Counterculture to Cyberculture is a fascinating exploration of how networked culture came to be.

Read the introduction and an excerpt.

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

In order to evade charges of racism, defenders of profiling point to actuarial data to bolster their claims that profiling is the most cost-effective way to fight crime, relying on the seeming logic of concentrating police resources on the people most likely to commit crime. Meanwhile anecdotal evidence—such as Al Gore being searched—serves to challenge the effectiveness of a purely random approach and nurtures the conventional wisdom that our security depends on targeting certain people. Yet, as Bernard Harcourt brilliantly argues in Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age, relying on profiling or other prediction tools can have the opposite effect—they can actually increase crime, depending on how targeted populations respond to intensified policing and the increased difficulties for certain groups, such as the recently paroled, to find jobs or pursue education. Harcourt's compelling analysis is required reading for anyone concerned with the effects of our society's increasing fixation on security, crime, and punishment.

Read the press release.

Archived in Law | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 02:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a recent review for Time Out Chicago Ruth Welte writes that Caitlin Zaloom's Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London "is half fascinating cultural portrait and half in-depth academic text.… but what emerges from the mix is a nuanced, bottom up picture of Chicago's economic importance in the world market, and how our city's working class swagger has shaped derivatives trading from the inception of the market."

But what is "working class swagger" really worth in the market of the new millennium where "floor traders are being phased out as online trading becomes the norm," and "the need to be seen" is no longer relevant? According to Welte, Zaloom's got the answer. Out of the Pits considers the implications of this sea change for everyone involved, from the traders and brokers on the floor of the former Chicago Board of Trade, to the market as a whole.

Documenting how Chicago is responding to the digital transition and how its traders are remaking themselves to compete in the contemporary marketplace, Out of the Pits is a must read for business buffs or anyone concerned about the future of the American marketplace.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Economics | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Point, a public radio program produced by WBUR in Boston, recently ran this hour-long segment featuring a discussion with Paul Lewis, author of Cracking Up: American Humor in a Time of Conflict. Debating and expanding on the topics of his book, Lewis engages Gideon Evans, a former Daily Show producer, and Jack Beatty, a senior editor at the Atlantic in a fascinating conversation about the ways humor is changing our cultural and political landscapes.

Lewis was also recently the featured guest on a short spot for the ABC Radio National show Saturday Extra. To find out why Cracking Up is generating so much attention pick up a copy for yourself!

Archived in Books for the News | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Recent Republican victories have been attributed to the voting strength of the religious right. Popular rhetoric has it that by appealing to the faith-based values of conservative Christians, the Republican party has been able to ride moral issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and stem-cell research to political power and glory. According to the opinions of the punditry it is this ever-growing demographic of "values voters" that clinched George W. Bush's win in 2004. However, in their new book The Truth about Conservative Christians: What They Think and What They Believe authors Michael Greeley and Andrew Hout argue otherwise. An article in the October 21 Economist applauds Greeley and Hout for brilliantly deconstructing some of the myths about the conservative Christian electorate, and revealing the factors that truly motivate their political decisions. From the Economist:

[Conservative Christians] actually make up a third of the population. Common sense would suggest that they do not think alike. Now two academics have found data to support common sense. In a new study, The Truth about Conservative Christians, Andrew Greeley and Michael Hout, two sociologists, explode some cherished myths…

The biggest myth of all is that conservative Christians are dyed-in-the-wool republicans. Mr. Bush certainly enjoyed a big lead (17%) among weekly churchgoers last election. But he enjoyed a bigger lead (19%) among married people with children; in a closely divided country you can slice the electorate into all sorts of groups that "delivered' the election.

Bill Clinton did significantly better among conservative Christians with below average incomes than either George Bush senior or Bob Dole. This year the Democrats could repeat his success. A Gallup poll conducted on October 6th-8th shows that among "white frequent churchgoers" the margin of support for Republicans over Democrats has shrunk from 22% in September to nothing today.

Want to know the real issues influencing the conservative vote in the upcoming elections? Read Greeley and Hout's The Truth about Conservative Christians. We also have an excerpt, "The Politics of Conservative Christianity in Black and White."

Archived in Books for the News | Religion | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John Brockman's Edge, a Web forum for some of today's most brilliant intellectual outsiders, currently features a long article on Stewart Brand, ‘60s counterculture, and Fred Turner's new book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Brand and the Whole Earth Network formed a group of artists and entrepreneurs who worked to bring together the disparate worlds of high technology and the flower power denizens of the ‘60s and ‘70s. The Edge article includes a fascinating ramble by Brockman on his personal friendship with Brand as well as an extended excerpt from the second chapter of Turner's book. John Brockman writes:

In 1983, Stewart Brand sent Dick Farson and Darryl Iconogle of the Western Behavioral Science Institute to see me in New York about a piece of conferencing software called the Onion, which was being used on a bulletin board system called EIES (Electronic Information Exchange System) and run by Murray Turoff. When I demurred, Stewart told me I could be a player or I could choose to sit out the biggest development of the decade. I chose to sit it out.

Stewart was right and wrong. It is the biggest development of the '90s, not the '80s. Inspired by EIES, in 1984 Stewart co founded The Well (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), a computer teleconference system for the San Francisco Bay Area, considered a bellwether of the genre.

Clearly, some of the interesting thinking about the Internet has its origins in ideas formulated by the artists of the '60s, which, wittingly or unwittingly, were carried forward by the enthusiastic young Lieutenant Brand. Considerations of form and content, context, community, and even the hacker ethic were all presaged in part by activities and discussions during that period.…

In the 1990s, the Los Angeles Times Magazine published a cover story: "Always two steps ahead of others … (he) is the least recognized, most influential thinker in America." The story was about Stewart Brand. The story was absolutely correct: Stewart Brand is the most influential thinker in America.

Read the rest of Brockman's fascinating piece, as well as an excerpt from Fred Turner's book at the Edge. Our own Web site features the book's introduction and an excerpt from chapter four.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Peter H. Rossi, distinguished sociologist and author, died Saturday at his home in Amherst, MA, where he was professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Massachusetts. In the 1980s Rossi carried out an extensive study of homelessness in Chicago, which formed the empirical basis of his groundbreaking work Down and Out in America: The Origins of Homelessness published by the University of Chicago Press in 1990. His study offered a powerful explanation of the causes of homelessness and documented the striking contrasts between the homeless of the 1950s and 1960s and the homeless population that emerged in the 1980s, which was younger and included more women, children, and minorities.

Rossi is also remembered among the University of Chicago community as former faculty member in the department of sociology and a former director of the National Opinion Research Center where his research ushered in a "golden age" of survey analysis.

Archived in Commentary | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Listen to Stephen Colbert's controversial performance at this year's White House Correspondents' Dinner, or take a look at recent Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, and you'll see that humor has become much more than a laughing matter. In fact, as Paul Lewis argues in Cracking Up, American humor has grown ever more purposeful and embattled over the past thirty years.

Covering topics that range from the revealing jokes of Jon Stewart to the deceiving one-liners of George W. Bush, and from the tongue-in-cheek sadism of Hanibal Lecter to the gentle humor of hospital clowns, Lewis shows that this purposeful comedy is both good and bad for Americans. In a culture that both enjoys and quarrels about jokes, it expresses our most nurturing and hurtful impulses, informs and misinforms us, and exposes as well as covers up the shortcomings of our leaders. In short, humor is delightful, relaxing, and distracting—and that's precisely why we must recognize that by freeing us from the constraints of logic and the restraints of conscience, jokes and jokers can do real harm.

Read the press release.

Archived in Film and Media | History | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 02:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City is the first book to fully explore Burnham's Plan, the defining document of American urban planning. As Smith relates, Burnham and his coauthor, Edward Bennett, were careful to leave no part of the city untouched. The Plan of Chicago called for an extensive greenbelt around Lake Michigan, recreational parks throughout the city's limits, a streamlined transportation system, and cultural amenities like the Field Museum of Natural History. Streets were widened, bridges constructed, and even the Chicago River itself was straightened. Smith takes a closer look at Burnham as well as his contemporaries at the Commercial Club of Chicago, showing how their influence shaped the city itself. The Plan, Smith reveals, embodied their belief in the humanizing—or dehumanizing—effects of one's environment. And at a time when everything essentially "American" was changing, The Plan suggested that human will could, in fact, change history.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Chicago | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 02:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"On first glance, back-to-the-land hippies and dot-com entrepeneurs might not seem much alike," begins the Publisher's Weekly review of Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, "but it turns out that they have a whole lot in common underneath those scraggly beards and goatees." The review continues:

Drawing a direct line from dog-eared copies of the Whole Earth Catalog to the slickly techno-libertarian Wired magazine, Stanford University communications professor Turner follows countercultural figures like Stewart Brand, who shaped the information revolution, according to their aspirations to break down the boundaries of individual experience and embrace a larger collective consciousness. … The book shows how the ride of the Merry Pranksters and LSD experimentation led to the early online discussion board Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (the WELL), and into the digital utopianism surrounding the hyperlinked World Wide Web. Turner offers a compelling genealogy of both the ideals and the disappointments of our digital world, one that is as important for scholars as it is illuminating for general readers.

Read the introduction and an excerpt from Chapter Four, "Taking the Whole Earth Digital."

Archi