Books for the News

Artificial Darkness in the TLS: A Mystical Abyss

March 29, 2017
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Artificial Darkness in the TLS: A Mystical Abyss

The full  TLS review of Noam Elcott’s Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media follows below—for those behind the Times (or a paywall)—after the jump. *** In the Festival Theatre in Bayreuth, built in 1876 for Richard Wagner to stage his music dramas, darkness was carefully manufactured and controlled. In earlier theatres, the audience was as much a spectacle as the play, and lighting was balanced so that you could see the dignitaries in attendance as clearly as the performers. But Wagner, with his windowless cathedral, intended the audience to disappear entirely so that spectators would project all their attention to the stage. The orchestra was hidden behind a hood in a pit, referred to as the “mystical abyss,” which created a clear division between a blacked-out reality and the ideal world of the artwork. For Noam M. Elcott, in his compelling study of early cinema and avant-garde performance, it was a new mode of seeing to which all the deliberate darknesses of our contemporary cinemas is indebted. Elcott was a student of Jonathan Crary, the author of the seminal Techniques of the Observer (1990), a book that examined how—for René Descartes and John Locke in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the camera . . .

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Chip Colwell on the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act

March 27, 2017
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Chip Colwell on the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act

Chip Colwell, author of Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture, recently penned an op-ed for the Denver Post on the stakes surrounding NAGPRA legislation; an excerpt follows below. *** When Congress passed NAGPRA, Colorado museums, like many across the country, struggled to grapple with the law’s implications. How much money would it cost to comply with the law’s mandates to inventory collections and send notices to, and consult with, tribes? Would Native Americans claim everything as sacred? What criteria should be used to evaluate claims? Would museums become empty shells? The 1990s was a learning period for both museum and tribal officials. But soon all parties were benefiting. As David Bailey, a curator at the Museum of Western Colorado, once explained after returning a vest and dress to the Northern Ute tribe, important pieces left the museum but the process built new relationships. He explained that instead of fighting the claim he “would rather have a dialogue and exchange with living Indians to gain their respect and insight into our collections.” By 2012, of $31 million allocated in federal NAGPRA grants, Colorado museums had secured more than 16 percent of it. Museums ranging from those on the . . .

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[The] Boystown: Jason Orne’s new ethnography

March 24, 2017
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[The] Boystown: Jason Orne’s new ethnography

Aimee Levitt reviewed Jason’s Orne new ethnography Boystown: Sex and Community in Chicago for the Chicago Reader; an excerpt follows below. *** We should be past the need for “gayborhoods,” as Amin Ghaziani argued in his influential 2014 book There Goes the Gayborhood. Don’t areas like Boystown, fun as they are, only remind us of the bad old days? Nope, they’re still necessary, sociologist Jason Orne argues in his new book, also called Boystown, and for one very important reason: sex. What distinguishes Boystown from Wrigleyville or Logan Square or any other gentrifying neighborhood with good nightlife is its sense of what Orne calls “sexy community,” defined as “a network of people, bound together through sexual intimacy.” He believes that open sexuality should be embraced and encouraged: straight people should be adopting queer habits, not the other way around. “By shedding its queer elements,” he writes, “Boystown trades sexuality for normalcy. It trades queer sexual connection for legal equality.” In other words, it would be a damned shame if the men of Boystown stopped hooking up on the dance floor or disappearing into certain basements for sex. And it’s hard to do those things when you’re surrounded by gawking tourists and straight women . . .

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Lincoln’s Constitution: An Excerpt

March 22, 2017
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Lincoln’s Constitution: An Excerpt

Our free e-book for March is Daniel Farber’s Lincoln’s Constitution. If the title alone doesn’t grab you (and it should: download your copy here), then here’s an excerpt from an interview with the author, which evidences why Lincoln’s relationship to the Constitution—during a time of previously unprecedented national turmoil—matters more now than ever. *** Question: The Civil War raised a multitude of constitutional issues, and we only have space to touch on a few of them here. Nor is there space, unfortunately, for the detailed discussions that so richly inform the book. With those caveats in mind, how about starting with the state versus federal power issue? Secession may be a dead issue constitutionally, but state sovereignty is a live disagreement, resurfacing recently in the Supreme Court when it narrowly stuck down an Arkansas law mandating term limits for its federal representatives. What was Lincoln’s view of state sovereignty? Why is the issue still with us? Why wasn’t the state sovereignty issue settled by the Civil War conflict? Daniel Farber: The Gettysburg Address is very revealing. Lincoln dated the birth of the nation to “four score and seven years ago.” If you do the arithmetic, that’s not the framing of the Constitution; . . .

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Bronzeville: Recommended reading for a new podcast

March 20, 2017
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Bronzeville: Recommended reading for a new podcast

Josh Olson’s new 10-part podcast Bronzeville, which stars Laurence Fishburne, Larenz Tate, and Tika Sumpter, chronicles the lives of players in the illegal lottery that swept the African American community in the 1940s before the game was taken over by the mob. If that’s not enticing enough, here’s a list of some recommended background reading on the city, then and now; how it become one of America’s most iconic black neighborhoods; and why its redevelopment—in which the middle class benefits as lower-income residents are pushed out—continues to matter, now more than ever. *** Derek S. Hyra’s The New Urban Renewal: The Economic Transformation of Harlem and Bronzeville explores the shared metamorphosis of these formerly notorious urban ghettos into two of our most iconic black communities, as the pressure of late-capitalist gentrification and a complicated web of factors—local, national, and global—shaped their remarkable revitalization. St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton’s Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, based on research conducted by Works Progress Administration field workers, is a sweeping historical and sociological account of the people of Chicago’s South Side from the 1840s through the 1930s, as path-breaking today as it was when it was first published in 1945. Diane Grams’s Producing Local . . .

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#ReadUPScience: Monkeytalk(ing)

March 15, 2017
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#ReadUPScience: Monkeytalk(ing)

Check out an excerpt from a recent review of Julia Fischer’s Monkeytalk: Inside the Worlds and Minds of Primates, at Science News, after the jump. *** “Fischer catapulted into a career chasing down monkeys in 1993. While still in college, she monitored captive Barbary macaques. That led to fieldwork among wild macaques in Morocco. In macaque communities, females hold central roles because young males move to other groups to mate. Members of closely related, cooperative female clans gain an edge in competing for status with male newcomers. Still, adult males typically outrank females. Fischer describes how the monkeys strategically alternate between attacking and forging alliances. After forging her own key scientific alliances, Fischer moved on to study baboons in Africa, where she entered the bureaucratic jungle. Obtaining papers for a car in Senegal, for instance, took Fischer several days. She first had to shop for a snazzy outfit to impress male paper-pushers, she says. Fischer and her local guide then shuttled from one government official to another until a well-timed phone call from a local police chief to a key bureaucrat finally produced the forms. Monkeys get the job done using their own brand of intelligence, Fischer writes. Macaques and baboons navigate their home . . .

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#ReadUPScience: A Digital Menagerie from The Paper Zoo

March 13, 2017
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#ReadUPScience: A Digital Menagerie from The Paper Zoo

American Scientist explores several centuries-worth of zoology on paper at the British Library in a review + “digital menagerie” from The Paper Zoo, an excerpt from which follows below. *** Historian Charlotte Sleigh’s book The Paper Zoo, which taps into the British Museum’s rich collection to explore and contextualize five centuries of zoological illustration (our sampler), leads one to conclude that the refrain’s origin can be traced back to 1659. Johann Amos Comenius’s elementary reader Orbis sensualium pictus (“The Visible World in Pictures”), Sleigh explains, “is commonly regarded as the first picture book for children.” By combining didactic text with illustrations Comenius had, with the stroke of a printing press, invented multimedia instruction. His petite depictions of animals, each appearing alongside a letter of the alphabet meant to represent the sound the animal makes, are clear and endearing without being especially cute. It’s easy to see how they would capture a child’s interest and, as Sleigh observes, ease memorization: Presenting the image of an animal next to a letter whose sound replicates the creature’s hooting, braying, growling, or hissing was an instructional breakthrough. In addition to their utility in the classroom, Sleigh notes, zoological illustrations helped far-flung naturalists keep up with discoveries made in . . .

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Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot on shifting parent-child relationships

March 10, 2017
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Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot on shifting parent-child relationships

Below follows an excerpt from a recent piece by MacArthur Award–winning sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot at Psychology Today, drawn from her work in Growing Each Other Up: When Our Children Become Our Teachers. *** A couple of years later after a huge blow up with my daughter about something that neither of us could even remember or name afterwards—at one of those moments when Bateson’s generous perspective had long since worn off—I called a close friend and told him that I was “at the end of my rope.” I had no more energy, no more fight in me. I wanted to throw in the towel and admit defeat. His response: “You are nowhere near the end of your rope.” And, of course, he was right. Just as Bateson was helping me see that my daughter was teaching me about the world; so too my friend was helping me acknowledge that our sometimes-tortured mother-daughter relationship was offering me the chance to know myself in new ways; that I was developing new capacities; stretching my emotional reserve and repertoire, becoming more patient and forgiving. I was learning a new kind of composure and restraint. I began to understand how important it was to be selective about . . .

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Herb Childress on the path from first-generation college student to scholar

March 6, 2017
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Herb Childress on the path from first-generation college student to scholar

An excerpt from Herb Childress, author of The PhDictionary: A Glossary of Things You Don’t Know (But Should) about Doctoral and Faculty Life, from his recent Inside Higher Ed piece, “The Confessions—and Confusions—of a First-Generation Scholar,” follows below. *** I graduated with my undergraduate degree in 1989, at the age of 31. Had I come from a college family, I’d have finished my Ph.D. by the time I was 31. Had I come from an academic family, I’d have had half a chance of being tenured at 31. But it was OK. I had a bachelor’s degree in architecture and a deep longing to be adopted into the community of scholars. I knew what the holy land felt like. I knew where I wanted to live. But it was truly an immigration, an exchange of one citizenship for another. As I went on through my graduate education, I became a class traitor: a source of pride, confusion, envy and intimidation among family and neighbors who once had been natural allies. My family understood that I wanted to become a “college teacher,” but not why studying teenagers’ parking lot hangouts or bedroom personalization was related to architecture. I have come from a culture in . . .

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Alexandra Chasin on the history of the drug war

March 3, 2017
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Alexandra Chasin on the history of the drug war

Below follows an excerpt from “Our Aggressive ‘War on Drugs’ Is Not Actually about Drugs,” by Alexandra Chasin, author of Assassin of Youth: A Kaleidoscopic History of Harry J. Anslinger’s War on Drugs, at Alternet. *** Trump inherits a very old war on drugs in the United States, one with prisons almost as overpopulated as Duterte’s detention centers, where the “insanity” of the “purely repressive approach,” “counterproductive and cruel,” is the law and practice of the land. This war on drugs goes back before Nixon’s famous declaration and the Rockefeller Drug Laws of the 1970s.  Our national commitment to drug prohibition goes back almost as far as our commitment to alcohol prohibition, a thirteen-year disaster that dramatized all the perils of a strategy of suppression but somehow did not persuade us not to use the same one with narcotics.  With the installation of Harry J. Anslinger as Commissioner of the newly established Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1930, the federal government began a campaign of drug prohibition which, during his three decades in office, in making into federal law. So why, if it only took us thirteen years to prove that alcohol prohibition was both costly and ineffective, have we failed to . . .

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