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Books for the News

Supersizing Urban America

May 19, 2017

Here’s a clip from a recent Huffington Post interview with Chin Jou, author of Supersizing Urban America: How Inner Cities Got Fast Food with Government Help, after the jump. *** Your book begins with an excerpt from Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation discussing the role the SBA has played in the fast-food industry’s expansion. Why did this capture your curiosity? Why did you feel this was a story worth telling? I reread the Fast Food Nation excerpt in 2010. At the time, I was studying the history of obesity as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health, so obesity was on my mind a lot. The Fast Food Nation excerpt, which was about the federal government’s loan guarantees to fast-food franchises, struck me because it occurred to me that such policies may have inadvertently and indirectly contributed to the obesity epidemic ― an epidemic that the government was in the process of trying to reduce with initiatives like Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move.” The notion that the government may have indirectly contributed to the obesity epidemic was not a new idea ― Michael Pollan is perhaps most famously associated with promulgating the idea that agricultural subsidies for crops like corn and soy contribute to the relatively low . . .

Image sampler: Pollination Power

May 15, 2017

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Below follow just a few of the spectacular macrophotographic images culled from Heather Angel’s Pollination Power for a recent profile in the New York Times. Sourcing flora from more than twenty countries, Angel delivered a technically laborious, otherworldly portrait of one of nature’s more intimate processes. You can read more about the book here. Also this line: “Sometimes you see up to five solitary male bees sleeping in a flower,” Ms. Angel said. To read more about Pollination Power, click here. . . .

Colin Dickey on Hilda Kean’s The Great Cat and Dog Massacre

May 12, 2017

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Colin Dickey on Hilda Kean’s The Great Cat and Dog Massacre

After the jump: an excerpt from Colin Dickey’s review of Hilda Kean’s The Great Cat and Dog Massacre, at the Los Angeles Review of Books. *** Pets were like members of the family, and it is here that the real truth of the matter may emerge. In the run-up to the war, many parents spoke candidly of how they would poison their own children rather than force them to live under German occupation. “I have been collecting poisons for some time with guile and cunning,” one housewife reported to the social research project Mass-Observation. “I have sufficient to give self, husband and all the children a lethal dose. I can remember the last war. I don’t want to live through another, or the children either. I shan’t tell them, I shall just do it.” Her sentiment was echoed by numerous others in Britain that summer before the war. “I’d rather see my two boys dead,” a 45-year-old father said. “I’d poison them if I thought it was coming.” When war came, however, no mass murders of children took place. Instead, it appears, many people sublimated this impulse toward mercy killing by exercising it on their animals instead. The mass poisoning of children, . . .

Black branding in the Cappuccino City

May 10, 2017

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Derek Hyra’s Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City, not only offers up an contemporary ethnography of gentrification—DC’s Shaw/U Street district—but also concretizes how we talk about urban displacement in neoliberal late capitalism, centered around the concepts of the “gilded ghetto,” “living the wire,” and the “cappuccino city.” A cappuccino is basically a cup of coffee with (steamed) milk, but costs nearly double or triple the price, depending on whether or not the espresso bean is artisanal, or if the foam is sculpted into a the shape of a leaf or a heart. In Hyra’s cappuccino city, our black inner-city neighborhoods, under pressure from the gig economy, gutted social programs, and real estate investors luring white millennials, undergo enormous transformations and become racially “lighter” and more expensive by the year. You can listen to Hyra’s recent appearance on the Kojo Nnamdi Show here, or read an excerpt from a Washington Post profile after the jump. *** “Black branding” describes how developers and other mostly white business interests actively promoted Shaw’s historic black identity as a marketing strategy to attract white renters and buyers. Their success helped tip the neighborhood’s demographics from 70 percent black in 1970 to 30 percent in 2010. The Shaw/U Street area was an ideal candidate for . . .

Our free e-book for April: Doodling for Academics

May 5, 2017

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Our free e-book for April: Doodling for Academics

Our free e-book for April is a real doozy: an LOL takedown of neoliberal academia—complete with its sidelining of the humanities in favor of STEM program, its reliance on adjunct labor, and the bureaucratization of its day-to-day “management”—in the form of an adult coloring book. Already covered by the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Times Higher Ed (“I have difficulty imagining a group of philosophy professors sitting around together and coloring.”), and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Doodling for Academics pairs Julie Schumacher’s dry commentary on the life of a scholar with savvy illustrations by Lauren Nassef. You can download our free sampler here. You can also read more about the book after the jump, but in the meantime, here’s a profile on Schumacher, produced by PBS’s To the Point: *** To an outsider, working as a university professor might seem like a dream: summers off, a few hours of class each week, an exchange of ideas with brilliant colleagues, books and late afternoon lattes. . . . Who wouldn’t envy that life? But those in the trenches of academe are well acquainted with the professoriate’s dark underside: the hierarchies and pseudo-political power plays, the peculiar colleagues, the over-parented students, the stacks of essays that need to be graded ASAP. No one understands this world better than novelist . . .

The Fox in the Big House

May 3, 2017

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Smarty Pants—a new podcast from the folks at the American Scholar—debuted “The Fox in the Big House,” a brand new episode featuring Lee Dugatkin, who talks up his latest book How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog) by recounting the historical particularities behind a Cold War-era Soviet experiment that started with few dozen silver foxes from Siberian farms and then attempted to recreate the evolution of wolves into dogs in real time. Intrigue! Listen in here. To read more about How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog), click here. . . .

Microbes from Hell!

May 1, 2017

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From “Fungi to be with,” a recent joint review of Ed Yong’s I Contain Multitudes and Patrick Forterre’s Microbes from Hell in the TLS: Yong takes his readers to the forefront of microbial science by interviewing the relevant researchers, one of whom could have been Patrick Forterrre of the Institut Pasteur. The fact that Yong didn’t make it to Paris makes Forterre’s memoir, Microbes from Hell, read as a clean take on some of the same material, in particular the micro-organisms that have adapted to live in extreme environments. These “extremophiles” can cope with the high temperatures of hot springs and deep sea thermal vents, which are often also highly acidic or abound with sulphur. Others thrive in intensely salty places, or with amounts of radiation that were long thought to be inimical to life. Their adaptations and coexistence with their own viruses have much to tell us about life on earth and its history. To read more about Microbes from Hell, click here. . . .

Sara Goldrick-Rab: SXSWedu Keynote Address

April 28, 2017

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Sara Goldrick-Rab, whose Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream, made waves in almost every major venue dedicated to the high-stakes consequences of American higher education—from Inside Higher Ed to The Daily Show with Trevor Noah—recently delivered #PricedOut, her keynote address at the 2017 SXSWedu conference. Here’s the official description: One of the most sustained and vigorous public debates today is about the value and crucially, the price of college. But an unspoken, outdated assumption underlies all side of this debate: If a young person works hard enough, they’ll be able to get a college degree and be on the path to a good life. That’s simply not true says sociologist Goldrick-Rab, one of the leading voices on issues of higher education today. In her book and research, she shows why in damning detail. *** You can watch Goldrick-Rab’s talk in full above, or in the meantime, read more about Paying the Price, here. . . .

Crime Scenes: Donald Westlake on Screen

April 26, 2017

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Great news for fans of Donald E. Westlake—aka Richard Stark; aka Alan Marshall; aka, all the other pseudonyms—this May 12–14, the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, NY, is playing host to Crime Scenes, a 7-film series of the author’s screen adaptations, co-curated by Eric Hynes, David Schwartz, and our own Levi Stahl. Among the highlights are the O.G. Point Blank (May 12, accompanied by a conversation with Abby Westlake, Donald Westlake’s wife, and historian Luc Sante, moderated by LTS), Godard’s Made in the U.S.A. (May 14), and Anjelica Huston’s star turn in The Grifters (May 13). Here’s a more expansive description from MoMI (visit their site to view the complete schedule, here): Donald E. Westlake (1933–2008) was born in Brooklyn and grew up mostly in Albany. He claimed that the first word he learned to read was “police.” “Sometimes,” he wrote, “life really is banal.” As a young man, he moved to New York and learned how to write in large part by seeing how not to do it, assessing submissions at a literary agency that also encouraged amateurs to send in work to be critiqued for a fee. That led to him writing a few stories to spec for low-end magazines, then a stint churning . . .