Books for the News

Friday remainders

jacket image
Last Tuesday Under the Blue Light, the official blog for the Indiana Review, published a positive review of The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880—D. G. Myers’s recent book exploring more than a century of debate over how writing should be taught and whether it can or should be taught in the classroom.
The August 2007 issue of the Scientific American contains a brief review of Dorothy Cheney and Richard Seyfarth’s new book, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. The review takes note of the author’s unique project to go beyond a study of these primate’s complicated social organization to document and explore the intelligence that underlies it.
PopMatters, an energetic webzine for everything in the zeitgeist, features a nice piece on their books blog Re: Print about Angus McLaren’s new book Impotence: A Cultural History. Blog contributor Jason B. Jones gives a short overview of the book followed up by an interview with the author.
Finally, John Ibson, author of Picturing Men, recently wrote an article about the taboos surrounding American male intimacy and its cultural and social norms. First published in American Sexuality magazine, it was picked up by online alternative news source AlterNet where it’s been generating quite an interesting discussion.