University of Chicago Press Books: New books

Demands of the Day

Paul Rabinow; Anthony Stavrianakis — Thu, 23 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Demands of the Day asks about the logical standards and forms that should guide ethical and experimental anthropology in the twenty-first century. Anthropologists Paul Rabinow and Anthony Stavrianakis do so by taking up Max Weber’s notion of the “demands of the day.” Just as the demand of the day for anthropology decades ago consisted of thinking about fieldwork, today, they argue, the demand is to examine what happens after, how the experiences of fieldwork are gathered, curated, narrated, and ultimately made available for an anthropological practice that moves beyond mere ethnographic description.

Rabinow and Stavrianakis draw on experiences from an innovative set of anthropological experiments that investigated how and whether the human and biological sciences could be brought into a mutually enriching relationship. Conceptualizing the anthropological and philosophic ramifications of these inquiries, they offer a bold challenge to contemporary anthropology to undertake a more rigorous examination of its own practices, blind spots, and capacities, in order to meet the demands of our day.

Planning the Home Front

Sarah Jo Peterson — Wed, 22 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Before Franklin Roosevelt declared December 7 to be a “date which will live in infamy”; before American soldiers landed on D-Day; before the B-17s, B-24s, and B-29s roared over Europe and Asia, there was Willow Run. Located twenty-five miles west of Detroit, the bomber plant at Willow Run and the community that grew up around it attracted tens of thousands of workers from across the United States during World War II. Together, they helped build the nation’s “Arsenal of Democracy,” but Willow Run also became the site of repeated political conflicts over how to build suburbia while mobilizing for total war.

In Planning the Home Front, Sarah Jo Peterson offers readers a portrait of the American people—industrialists and labor leaders, federal officials and municipal leaders, social reformers, industrial workers, and their families—that lays bare the foundations of community, the high costs of racism, and the tangled process of negotiation between New Deal visionaries and wartime planners. By tying the history of suburbanization to that of the home front, Peterson uncovers how the United States planned and built industrial regions in the pursuit of war, setting the stage for the suburban explosion that would change the American landscape when the war was won.

Literary Miniatures

Florence Noiville; Teresa Lavender Fagan — Wed, 22 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Selected from the pages of Le Monde, the interviews conducted by Florence Noiville are unequaled in literary journalism. In Literary Miniatures, Noiville captures the words and views of some of the best known writers of the twentieth century, engaging luminaries like Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, Aharon Appelfeld, and A. S. Byatt in revealing dialogue. In this collection, Noiville converses with Don DeLillo, reasons with Adolfo Bioy Casares, passes the time with Milan Kundera, and gently interrogates John Le Carré.

Fluent in many languages, Noiville conducted a number of these interviews in the subject’s native language, engaging these extraordinary writers on their own terms. Inimitably intimate, the interviews are a window through which readers can come to know the writers behind some of the greatest works of literature of the last one hundred years. Sure to delight lovers of literature and biography, this book is the perfect expression of the art of the interview and a priceless artifact for enthusiasts and scholars alike.

Demands of the Day

Paul Rabinow; Anthony Stavrianakis — Wed, 22 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Trying Biology

Adam R. Shapiro — Tue, 21 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In Trying Biology, Adam R. Shapiro convincingly dispels many conventional assumptions about the 1925 Scopes “monkey” trial. Most view it as an event driven primarily by a conflict between science and religion. Countering this, Shapiro shows the importance of timing: the Scopes trial occurred at a crucial moment in the history of biology textbook publishing, education reform in Tennessee, and progressive school reform across the country. He places the trial in this broad context—alongside American Protestant antievolution sentiment—and in doing so sheds new light on the trial and the historical relationship of science and religion in America.

For the first time we see how religious objections to evolution became a prevailing concern to the American textbook industry even before the Scopes trial began. Shapiro explores both the development of biology textbooks leading up to the trial and the ways in which the textbook industry created new books and presented them as “responses” to the trial. Today, the controversy continues over textbook warning labels, making Shapiro’s study—particularly as it plays out in one of America’s most famous trials—an original contribution to a timely discussion.

Out of Many, One

Ruth O'Brien; Thomas Byrne Edsall — Tue, 21 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Feared by conservatives and embraced by liberals when he entered the White House, Barack Obama has since been battered by criticism from both sides. In Out of Many, One, Ruth O’Brien explains why. We are accustomed to seeing politicians supporting either a minimalist state characterized by unfettered capitalism and individual rights or a relatively strong welfare state and regulatory capitalism. Obama, O’Brien argues, represents the values of a lesser-known third tradition in American political thought that defies the usual left-right categorization.

Bearing traces of Baruch Spinoza, John Dewey, and Saul Alinsky, Obama’s progressivism embraces the ideas of mutual reliance and collective responsibility, and adopts an interconnected view of the individual and the state. So, while Obama might emphasize difference, he rejects identity politics, which can create permanent minorities and diminish individual agency. Analyzing Obama’s major legislative victories—financial regulation, health care, and the stimulus package—O’Brien shows how they reflect a stakeholder society that neither regulates in the manner of the New Deal nor deregulates. Instead, Obama focuses on negotiated rule making and allows executive branch agencies to fill in the details when dealing with a deadlocked Congress. Similarly, his commitment to difference and his resistance to universal mandates underlies his reluctance to advocate for human rights as much as many on the Democratic left had hoped.

By establishing Obama within the context of a much longer and broader political tradition, this book sheds critical light on both the political and philosophical underpinnings of his presidency and a fundamental shift in American political thought.

Out of Many, One

Ruth O'Brien; Thomas Byrne Edsall — Tue, 21 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

What Soldiers Do

Mary Louise Roberts — Fri, 17 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

How do you convince men to charge across heavily mined beaches into deadly machine-gun fire? Do you appeal to their bonds with their fellow soldiers, their patriotism, their desire to end tyranny and mass murder? Certainly—but if you’re the US Army in 1944, you also try another tack: you dangle the lure of beautiful French women, waiting just on the other side of the wire, ready to reward their liberators in oh so many ways.

That’s not the picture of the Greatest Generation that we’ve been given, but it’s the one Mary Louise Roberts paints to devastating effect in What Soldiers Do. Drawing on an incredible range of sources, including news reports, propaganda and training materials, official planning documents, wartime diaries, and memoirs, Roberts tells the fascinating and troubling story of how the US military command systematically spread—and then exploited—the myth of French women as sexually experienced and available. The resulting chaos—ranging from flagrant public sex with prostitutes to outright rape and rampant venereal disease—horrified the war-weary and demoralized French population. The sexual predation, and the blithe response of the American military leadership, also caused serious friction between the two nations just as they were attempting to settle questions of long-term control over the liberated territories and the restoration of French sovereignty.

While never denying the achievement of D-Day, or the bravery of the soldiers who took part, What Soldiers Do reminds us that history is always more useful—and more interesting—when it is most honest, and when it goes beyond the burnished beauty of nostalgia to grapple with the real lives and real mistakes of the people who lived it.

Leo Strauss and the Rediscovery of Maimonides

Kenneth Hart Green — Thu, 16 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In Leo Strauss and the Rediscovery of Maimonides, Kenneth Hart Green explores the critical role played by Maimonides in shaping Leo Strauss’s thought. In uncovering the esoteric tradition employed in Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed, Strauss made the radical realization that other ancient and medieval philosophers might be concealing their true thoughts through literary artifice. Maimonides and al-Farabi, he saw, allowed their message to be altered by dogmatic considerations only to the extent required by moral and political imperatives and were in fact avid advocates for enlightenment. Strauss also revealed Maimonides’s potential relevance to contemporary concerns, especially his paradoxical conviction that one must confront the conflict between reason and revelation rather than resolve it.

An invaluable companion to Green’s comprehensive collection of Strauss’s writings on Maimonides, this volume shows how Strauss confronted the commonly accepted approaches to the medieval philosopher, resulting in both a new understanding of Maimonides and a new depth and direction for his own thought. It will be welcomed by anyone engaged with the work of either philosopher.

Nature and Nurture of Love

Marga Vicedo — Thu, 16 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

The notion that maternal care and love will determine a child’s emotional well-being and future personality has become ubiquitous. In countless stories and movies we find that the problems of the protagonists—anything from the fear of romantic commitment to serial killing—stem from their troubled relationships with their mothers during childhood. How did we come to hold these views about the determinant power of mother love over an individual’s emotional development? And what does this vision of mother love entail for children and mothers?

In The Nature and Nurture of Love, Marga Vicedo examines scientific views about children’s emotional needs and mother love from World War II until the 1970s, paying particular attention to John Bowlby’s ethological theory of attachment behavior. Vicedo tracks the development of Bowlby’s work as well as the interdisciplinary research that he used to support his theory, including Konrad Lorenz’s studies of imprinting in geese, Harry Harlow’s experiments with monkeys, and Mary Ainsworth’s observations of children and mothers in Uganda and the United States. Vicedo’s historical analysis reveals that important psychoanalysts and animal researchers opposed the project of turning emotions into biological instincts. Despite those criticisms, she argues that attachment theory was paramount in turning mother love into a biological need. This shift introduced a new justification for the prescriptive role of biology in human affairs and had profound—and negative—consequences for mothers and for the valuation of mother love.

Occupy

W. J. T. Mitchell; Bernard E. Harcourt; Michael Taussig — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Mic check! Mic check! Lacking amplification in Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street protestors addressed one another by repeating and echoing speeches throughout the crowd. In Occupy, W. J. T. Mitchell, Bernard E. Harcourt, and Michael Taussig take the protestors’ lead and perform their own resonant call-and-response, playing off of each other in three essays that engage the extraordinary Occupy movement that has swept across the world, examining everything from self-immolations in the Middle East to the G8 crackdown in Chicago to the many protest signs still visible worldwide.

“You break through the screen like Alice in Wonderland,” Taussig writes in the opening essay, “and now you can’t leave or do without it.” Following Taussig’s artful blend of participatory ethnography and poetic meditation on Zuccotti Park, political and legal scholar Harcourt examines the crucial difference between civil and political disobedience. He shows how by effecting the latter—by rejecting the very discourse and strategy of politics—Occupy Wall Street protestors enacted a radical new form of protest. Finally, media critic and theorist Mitchell surveys the global circulation of Occupy images across mass and social media and looks at contemporary works by artists such as Antony Gormley and how they engage the body politic, ultimately examining the use of empty space itself as a revolutionary monument.

Occupy stands not as a primer on or an authoritative account of 2011’s revolutions, but as a snapshot, a second draft of history, beyond journalism and the polemics of the moment—an occupation itself.

Restoring Justice

Edward H. Levi; Jack Fuller; Larry Kramer — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In the wake of Watergate, Gerald Ford appointed eminent lawyer and scholar Edward H. Levi to the post of attorney general—and thus gave him the onerous task of restoring legitimacy to a discredited Department of Justice. Levi was famously fair-minded and free of political baggage, and his inspired addresses during this tumultuous time were critical to rebuilding national trust. They reassured a tense and troubled nation that the Department of Justice would act in accordance with the principles underlying its name, operating as a nonpartisan organization under the strict rule of law.

For Restoring Justice, Jack Fuller has carefully chosen from among Levi’s speeches a selection that sets out the attorney general’s view of the considerable challenges he faced: restoring public confidence through discussion and acts of justice, combating the corrosive skepticism of the time, and ensuring that the executive branch would behave judicially. Also included are addresses and Congressional testimonies that speak to issues that were hotly debated at the time, including electronic surveillance, executive privilege, separation of powers, antitrust enforcement, and the guidelines governing the FBI—many of which remain relevant today.

Serving at an almost unprecedentedly difficult time, Levi was among the most admired attorney generals of the modern era. Published here for the first time, the speeches in Restoring Justice offer a superb sense of the man and his work.

Breakfast Book

Andrew Dalby — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

You’ve heard it from doctors, nutritionists, and your mom: breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It’s also one of the most diverse, varying greatly from family to family and region to region, even while individuals tend to eat the same thing every day. While Americans traditionally like to chow down on eggs, cereal, and doughnuts, the Japanese eat rice and miso soup, and New Zealanders enjoy porridge. But while we know bacon and sausage links belong alongside pancakes and waffles in the early morning hours, we don’t know how breakfast came to be. Taking a multifaceted approach to the story of the morning meal, The Breakfast Book collects narratives of breakfast in an attempt to pin down the mottled history of eating in the A.M.

In search of what people have thought and written—and tasted—about breakfast, Andrew Dalby traces the meal’s origins back to the Neolithic revolution. He follows the trail of toast crumbs from the ancient Near East and classical Greece to modern Europe and across the globe, rediscovering stories of breakfast in three thousand years of fiction, memoirs, and art. Using a multitude of entertaining breakfast facts, anecdotes, and images, he reveals why breakfast is so often the backdrop for unexpected meetings, why so many people eat breakfast out, and why this often silent meal is also so reassuring.

Featuring a selection of historic and contemporary breakfast recipes from around the world, The Breakfast Book is the first book to explore the history of this inimitable meal and will make an ideal morning companion to crumpets, deviled kidneys, and spanakopita alike.

'Avant-garde' Art Groups in China, 1979-1989

Paul Gladston — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

This book gives a critical account of four of the most significant avant-garde Chinese art groups and associations of the late 1970s and ’80s. It is made up largely of conversations conducted by the author with members of these organizations that provide insight into the circumstances of artistic production during the decade leading up to the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989. The conversations are supported by an extended introduction and other comprehensive notes that give a detailed overview of the historical circumstances under which the groups and associations developed.

Cinema Makers

Anna Schober — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

The Cinema Makers investigates how cinema spectators in southeastern and central European cities became cinema makers through such practices as squatting in existing cinema spaces, organizing cinema "events," writing about film, and making films themselves. Drawing on a corpus of interviews with cinema activists in Germany, Austria, and the former Yugoslavia, Anna Schober compares the activities and artistic productions they staged in cities such as Vienna, Cologne, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Ljubljana, Belgrade, Novi Sad, Subotica, Zagreb, and Sarajevo. The resulting study illuminates the differences and similarities in the development of political culture—and cinema’s role in that development—in European countries with pluralist-democratic, one-party socialist, and post-socialist traditions.

Poverty, Ethics and Justice

H. P. P. [Hennie] Lötter — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Poverty violates fundamental human values through its impact on individuals and on human environments, and it goes against the core values of democratic societies. Drawing on numerous scientific studies as well as his own experience witnessing the systematic poverty in his home country of South Africa, H. P. P. [Hennie] Lötter presents a holistic profile of poverty and its effects on human lives all the while accounting for the complexity of each individual case. He argues that shared ethical values must guide the planning and distribution of aid and that our society must reevaluate our notions of justice and reimagine the role of the state in order to enable collective human responsibility for poverty’s successful eradication.

Open Roads, Closed Borders

Michael Gott; Thibaut Schilt — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

This is the first collection of essays about French-language road movies, a particularly rich yet critically neglected cinematic category. These films, the contributors argue, offer important perspectives on contemporary French ideas about national identity, France’s former colonies, Europe, and the rest of the world. Taken together, the essays illustrate how travel and road motifs have enabled directors of various national origins and backgrounds to reimagine space and move beyond simple oppositions such as Islam and secularism, local and global, home and away, France and Africa, and East and West.

Ostrich

Edgar Williams — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Ostriches may not be able to fly, but they loom large in the bird kingdom. They are the world’s tallest and heaviest living birds, and they lay the largest eggs. With their long legs, ostriches are also fleet of foot, running up to 43 miles per hour, and formidable fighters—an ostrich kick can kill. But since the beginning of history, these extraordinary and outlandish birds have also been exploited by humans for their eggs, meat, skin, and feathers. In Ostrich, Edgar Williams provides a singular, comprehensive insight into the natural history, behavior, and habitat of this monumental bird.

Williams describes how the demand for ostrich feathers was so great during the Victorian era that vast fortunes were made from ostrich farming, particularly in South Africa and the United States. After fashions changed following World War I, farmers lost their fortunes, but the now domesticated ostrich found a new purpose—today, ostrich farmers produce plumes and leather for luxury markets, as well as meat for grocery stores. In addition to telling its, Williams reveals how the ostrich has been featured in culture, from its representations in cave paintings, medieval manuscripts, and the Bayeux tapestry to its use in advertising and cartoons. Featuring many striking illustrations, Ostrich will interest nature lovers, artists, and fashionistas alike.

Old Man's Guide to Health and Longer Life

John Hill — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Tho' vegetables may be thought innocent, there are many cases in which they prove hurtful.

Carrots are to be avoided, for no old stomach can digest them.

It isn’t fun getting old, but, as the joke has it, being old is better than the alternative. Most of us worry about getting older, and there is an endless supply of guides out there claiming to hold the tips that will ensure wellness and vitality during our golden years. But before Dr. Oz and protein shakes, aging men turned to physician John Hill and The Old Man’s Guide to Health and Longer Life.

First published in the mid-eighteenth century, The Old Man’s Guide to Health and Longer Life is a lifestyle guide to longevity and good health for old men. Written in an age when the majority of the population didn’t live to see their fortieth birthday, Hill’s book provides practical advice on diet, exercise, and lifestyle, including sleep and emotional health, as well as illuminating insight into the thinking on health and longevity in the mid-eighteenth century. Some of the more prescriptive advice has the hysterical tone expected from eighteenth-century guides and manuals—“The pine-apple, the most pleasant of all fruit, is the most dangerous.”—but more surprising is how full of genuinely good advice the book is and how much of it reads like modern-day health literature. This includes such insightful sayings as: “A warm bath and a glass of wine if you are having difficulty getting to sleep”; “Use medicines only as a last resort—address diet and lifestyle first to resolve illness”; and “Quiet, good humour, and complacency of temper will prevent half the diseases of old people; and cure many of the others.”

Full of both sage wisdom and what now seem ridiculous regimens, The Old Man’s Guide to Health and Longer Life will be the perfect gift for a man of more mature years.

Nanoart

Paul Thomas — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Examining art that intersects with science and seeks to make visible what cannot ordinarily be seen with the naked eye, provides thorough insight into new understandings of materiality and life. This book includes an extensive overview of the history of nanoart from the work of Umberto Boccioni right up to present-day artists. The author looks specifically at art inspired by nanotechnological research made possible by the Scanning Tunneling Microscope and Atomic Force Microscope in the 1980s, as well as the development of other instruments of nanotechnological experimentation. Nanoart is a sustained consideration of this fascinating artistic approach that challenge how we see and understand our world.

Environmental Law and Policy in Wales

Patrick Bishop; Mark Stallworthy — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Environmental Law and Policy in Wales addresses key law and policy issues that have arisen over the last several years in Wales in response to the changing climate. Editors Patrick Bishop and Mark Stallworthy bring together leading members of the Welsh environmental law academy to deliberate on the development of environmental protection legislation in Wales and its effect on sustainability in the near future and beyond.

Dark Company

Gert Loschütz; Samuel P. Willcocks — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

“Of course I had to end up here . . .”

Over ten rainy nights, Thomas, an ex-bargeman who used to be skipper of his own boat, walks the muddy fields of the landlocked German interior and remembers the events that lost him his home, his boat, and his livelihood: his apprenticeship in the cold halls of the Royal Naval College in London; the dangers of the mean streets and waterfront of New York in the 1970s, and Poland under martial law; Germany after the reunification, when for a year or so it seemed that the whole country drifted rudderless, drawn by the current of history to who knows where. In this novel from Gert Loschütz, Thomas remembers childhood, his first love, and the warnings of his grandfather: Beware the dark company! This mysterious band of men and women dressed in black cast a shadow over his story, as he wrestles with the secrets, the unplumbed depths of his soul, the hazards lurking below a seemingly placid surface, and throughout it all, the rain, falling night after night.

Dark Company is a superb example of a distinctly German tradition in weird fiction which claims its roots in Kafka and Herbert Rosendorfer.

David Gorlæus (1591-1612)

Christoph Lüthy — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

When David Gorlæus, a prospective theology student, passed away tragically at twenty-one years old, he left behind two highly innovative manuscripts, which were published posthumously in 1620 and 1651, respectively. As his identity was unknown, seventeenth-century readers understood him both as an anti-Aristotelian thinker and a precursor of Descartes. In contrast, by the twentieth century, historians depicted him as an atomist, natural scientist, and even a chemist. David Gorlæus (1591–1612) seeks to pull together what is known of this enigmatic figure. Combining multiple historical sources, Christoph Lüthy provides a narrative of Gorlæus’s life that casts light on his exceptional body of work and places it firmly at the intersection between philosophy, the nascent natural sciences, and theology.

“Christoph Lüthy is the first to tell the complete story of David Gorlæus and to reconstruct his image on the basis of all remaining sources. Showing in a convincing way that Gorlæus is one of the key figures in the renewal of atomistic philosophy in the seventeenth century and a major influence on many philosophers that are much better known, he leaves us with the melancholy picture of someone who died too young to become one of the heroes of the scientific revolution.”—Theo Verbeek, Utrecht University

Gorilla

Ted Gott; Kathryn Weir — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Since coming to international prominence in the mid-nineteenth century when English, French, and American scientists first encountered them, the gorilla’s physical resemblance to humans has struck a deep chord. Gorillas quickly came to dominate evolutionary debates and grew prevalent in literature, art, film, and popular culture—they are the focus of movies such as Congo and the inspiration for the video game character Donkey Kong and DC Comics super villain Gorilla Grodd. In Gorilla, Ted Grott and Kathryn Weir provide a compelling and unsettling account of our relationship with these highly intelligent animals as they fight extinction due to habitat destruction, commercial hunting, and disease.

Gott and Weir describe how early European observations of gorillas in their native Africa were the genesis of literary and artistic representations such as King Kong. At the same time, gorillas became symbolic of sexuality and subconscious, uncontrolled urges, and influenced theories of criminality. It was not until Dian Fossey’s research in the 1960s and 1970s that many misconceptions about the gorilla—especially their violence—were dispelled. A notable history of the gorilla’s influence on our culture and its plight at the hands of humans, Gorilla will appeal to any animal lover wanting to learn more about this noble creature and its uncertain future.

George Eliot and the Gothic Novel

Royce Mahawatte — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

George Eliot and the Gothic Novel tracks George Eliot’s reading of gothic and sensational literature and her responses to them in her own works. Royce Mahawatte focuses on the frightening, startling, and melodramatic elements of Eliot’s fiction, placing Eliot within a culture of mid-Victorian sensationalism and highlighting the connections between her and authors like Mary Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and Edward Bulwer Lytton. Mahawatte argues that suspenseful and popular tropes play a significant role in Eliot’s literary ethics and creativity and that our understanding of the author’s writing needs to be broadened to include her extensive and complex engagement with the gothic tradition.

Literary Lacan

Santanu Biswas — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

The relationship between literature and psychology is long and richly complex, and no more so than in the work of Jacques Lacan, the most controversial psychoanalyst since Freud. The Literary Lacan: From Literature to ‘Lituraterre’ and Beyond is dedicated to assessing Lacan’s significant contribution to literary studies and the contribution, in turn, of literature to Lacanian psychoanalysis.

The first essays in this collection provide close readings of Lacan’s literature-related work, specifically his work on Hamlet, his homage to Marguerite Duras and Lewis Carroll, his concept of Lituraterre, and his seminar on James Joyce. Other essays examine Lacan’s theories in conjunction with works of major writers such as Samuel Beckett. The book concludes with essays that investigate Lacan and literature more broadly, including the applicability of literature to psychoanalysis.

With well-known contributors including Slavoj Zizek, Jacques-Alain Miller, Russell Grigg and Ellie Ragland, this volume will appeal not only to specialists in literary and Lacanian theory but also to students and enthusiasts of the master and the literature that inspired him.

Local Portraiture

Carmen Pérez González — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

This thoughtfully and meticulously researched book explores the work of indigenous Iranian photographers and the way in which their photographs reflect their society and surroundings. In order to highlight how photography reflects local culture, Carmen Pérez González, a photographer herself, offers a comparative visual analysis of nineteenth-century Iranian photographs and paintings created during the same time period and in the same place in order to show that aesthetic preferences are rooted in the socio-cultural habits of artists. This lushly illustrated book is a testimony to the unique power and historical value of photographic portraits and their enduring power to capture local realities.

Louis I. Kahn - Silence and Light

Alessandro Vassella — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Louis I. Kahn (1901–74) was one of the foremost architects in America during the twentieth century. His notable buildings include the Yale Study Center; the Salk Institute in Pasadena, California; and the Exeter Library in Exeter, New Hampshire. On February 12, 1969, Kahn gave a lecture at the School of Architecture at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich. Entitled Silence and Light, the lecture explains Kah's spiritual understanding of architecture, which goes far deeper than simply constructing buildings. He also gives a remarkably prescient account of a belief in sustainable architecture that prefigures the twenty-first century’s focus on green technology. The lecture is represented in transcripts into five different languages (German, Italian, English, French, and Spanish), as well as an audio recording of Kahn giving the lecture in English included on CD. To complement the original text, the editor has included a preface written by Kahn’s close friend and fellow architect Balkrishna V. Doshi, as well as many of Kahn’s own images and drawings, some of which have never been published before.

Legend

Marie Bronsard; Sonia Alland — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In this strikingly original memoir, Marie Bronsard reweaves the history of her family—and the legend of her grandmother—leaving no stone unturned and no skeleton in the closet.

Egocentric and domineering, Bronsard’s grandmother was once a vibrant and sensual beauty. In Indochina at the end of the Second World War, she thrived in the social life of the French colony, but her young soldier husband sought a quieter existence, finding solace in the companionship of their adolescent daughter, Bronsard’s mother. The consequences of this choice reverberate throughout the family. But far from being an airing of grievance or dirty laundry, Bronsard’s memoir has the air of catharsis—here, the pain, secrets, and comic moments of Bronsard’s family are remembered with gentle humor, understanding, and affection. A wry irony tempers emotion, and it is in these pages that the author at last finds it possible to name the woman of the legend and perhaps bring her grandmother a measure of peace.

Memories from the Twentieth Century

Luigi Pintor; Gregory Elliot — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In these three short books—Servabo: A Fin De Siècle Memoir, Miss Kirchgessner, and The Medlar Tree, collected in one volume in English for the first time—Luigi Pinto retraces a life marked, often in spite of itself, by politics. At once intransigent and ironic, these autobiographical texts are written “to reorder in the imagination things that don’t add up in reality.”

From the idyll of his Sardinian childhood to the transformative experience of the anti-Fascist resistance, and from post-war militancy to the dismal regression of Italian culture, Pintor captures memories that are intensely personal and inseparable from political and intellectual experience. Episodes and observations recur across all three books, but the tropes of autobiography are insistently displaced. Sparse and evocative prose, borrowing from the aphorism and fable, struggles to give form to personal and political despair, while Pintor never relents on the attachments and convictions that shape a life.

Mutability

Andrea Brady — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

A chronicle of motherhood and infancy, Brady’s Mutability marks the excesses of attention and love in this unique relationship, the gradual unfurling of one person into two. In poems and prose, these scripts offer a “model of duplicity,” revealing how the beginnings of language, the spaces which open up through movement, the undeniable possibility of harm, and the unbearable intimacy between mother and child challenge the premise of individual autonomy. Seeking “a writing of honest particularity, not clean, in a form which would catch rather than cauterize this pouring,” Mutability brilliantly captures the experience of motherhood.

At the same time, Brady explores the child-space, a utopian place of discovery and adaptation, as an arena of risk, violence, possession, and privation. Carefully observing the consequences of “the beginning of all possibility, and the beginning of its finitude,” the book notes the child’s discovery of being a new person to “the discovery of an exit.” Brady’s unique and moving book celebrates and investigates life’s most essential relationship.

Monastic Wales

Janet Burton; Karen Stöber — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Monastic Wales brings together an interdisciplinary team of scholars, working in the areas of history, archaeology, literature, and material culture, to investigate the importance of medieval monasteries in the shaping of Welsh culture, politics, society, and economy. It demonstrates the importance of Welsh monasteries and nunneries, chronicling the many and diverse ways in which religious men and women and their communities contributed to the shaping of the equally diverse regions we now call Wales.

Medieval Dogs

Kathleen Walker-Meikle — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Perhaps at no other time in Western history have animals played such a dominant role in the visual and literary arts as they did during the Middle Ages. Animals were prevalent and essential in all aspects of medieval life, and as a result, they were employed by artists for a variety of purposes: to illustrate saint’s lives, populate farm scenes, act as characters in fables, and even crawl among the very letters forming the text. And while artists used a host of animals, both real and fantastic, for these purposes, one of the most popular animals was man’s best friend.

Dogs were as important to humans during the Middle Ages as they are today, and this new book celebrates that association through their appearance in medieval manuscripts. A follow-up book to Kathleen Walker-Meikle’s Medieval Cats, published by the British Library in 2011, Medieval Dogs presents a wealth of dog imagery from a variety of medieval sources and is peppered with fascinating facts about the medieval view of dogs and many stories of people and their pets in the Middle Ages.

Among the themes explored in the accompanying text are the roles of the medieval dog, dog breeds, dogs and saints, the names of dogs, canine faithfulness, veterinary care of dogs, dog feeding, the mourning of dogs and burial practices, and medieval poetry about dogs, with translations of some short poems included here. Medieval Dogs is sure to charm dog lovers and medievalists alike.

Mao's Golden Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution

Alfreda Murck — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In August 1968, the Pakistani foreign minister visited Beijing and presented Chairman Mao Zedong with a crate of mangoes as a diplomatic gesture. The next day, Mao sent the mangoes to the “Worker-Peasant Mao Zedong though Propaganda Teams,” who had been stationed at Quinghua University to put down warring factions of Red Guards ten days previously. The message of this gift was to dismiss the Student Red Guards, who had been leaders of the proletarian movement in China, and in their stead to install workers as the permanent guardians of China’s education system. During the following weeks, the mangoes were distributed to several factories, where they were treated as though they were religious relics. The golden mango was thus a powerful emblem of the power and respect accorded to the proletariat under Mao’s rule.

Mao’s Gold Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution is the catalog for an exhibition of the same title at the Museum Rietberg in Zürich, which explores the golden mangoes’ reverberations throughout Chinese culture for years to come. Included texts focus on the historical narrative of the golden mangoes’ rise to fame; first-person accounts of both students and factory workers; an examination the National Day Parade in 1968, which used the symbol of the mangoes prominently; a critical essay on the 1976 film The Song of the Mango; and an in-depth comparative study of working conditions in China from the late 1960s and today.

Female Gothic Histories

Diana Wallace — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Female Gothic Histories is an important new study of the ways in which women writers have used the gothic novel to symbolize and counter their exclusion from traditional historical narratives. Beginning with a detailed reading of Sophia Lee’s critically neglected The Recess, one of the earliest historical gothic fictions, Diana Wallace traces the development of this form from works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Vernon Lee, Daphne du Maurier, and the modern gothics of Victoria Holt, to the phenomenally popular novels of Sarah Waters.

Family Troubles?

Jane Ribbens McCarthy; Carol-Ann Hooper; Val Gillies — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

As the everyday lives of children and young people are increasingly understood as matters of public policy and concern, the question of how we can understand the difference between "normal" family troubles and troubled or troubling families has become more important. In this timely and thought-provoking book, a wide range of contributors address topics such as infant care, sibling conflict, divorce, disability, illness, substance abuse, violence, kinship care, and forced marriage, in an effort to explore how the concept of trouble features in normal families and how the concept of normal features in troubled families.

Quorum

William Fuller — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Quorum, the latest book from William Fuller, is a collection of vivid detours and deadpan visions arranged into forty-five sonnet-like poems. Employing an ear “that hears not what the eye / sees not, in detail,” the poet makes his rounds through a menagerie of abstract persons and personified abstractions, carefully feeding them “their weight in flowers,” to achieve the idiosyncratic consistency of a world transected by allusive filaments of “clouds that don’t exist.” Metaphysical wit freezes up the system and then gives it a liquidity. But “there’s a trace of something else that slips in,” which the poet seems at pains to not identify. If it’s not quite song, neither is it simply irony, nor is it a desire to exceed these, although all are required to make a quorum.

"Fuller’s work is engaging on a deep level like only the great works are. [D]efinitely one of the best books that I have come across lately and is one that should be on any reader’s shelf."—William Allegrezza on Watchword

Politics of Civil Society

Fred Powell — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In this fully revised edition of his groundbreaking book, Fred Powell looks behind “the mirror of power” to discover the real civil society—or Big Society—that lies beneath it. Articulating three forms of civil society—radical, liberal, and conservative—he examines a complex interplay between state and community, arguing that citizens contend for power via civil society. This is both a historic pursuit dating to antiquity and a contemporary democratic struggle between competing visions of modernity, the stakes of which are no less than “real” politics themselves as experienced by everyday citizens. The second edition includes a new concluding chapter on practical and policy implications.

Politics of Civil Society

Fred Powell — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Pop Goes the Avant-Garde

Rossella Ferrari — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Pop Goes the Avant-Garde: Experimental Theatre in Contemporary China is the first comprehensive review of the history and development of avant-garde drama and theater in the People’s Republic of China since 1976. Drawing on a range of critical perspectives in the fields of comparative literature, theater, performance, and culture studies, the book explores key artistic movements and phenomena that have emerged in China’s major cultural centers in the last several decades.

It surveys the work of China’s most influential dramatists, directors and performance groups, with a special focus on Beijing-based playwright, director and filmmaker Meng Jinghui—the former enfant terrible of Beijing theater, who is now one of Asia’s foremost theater personalities. Through an extensive critique of theories of modernism and the avant-garde, the author reassesses the meanings, functions and socio-historical significance of this work in non-Western contexts by proposing a new theoretical construct—the pop avant-garde—and exploring new ways to understand and conceptualize aesthetic practices beyond Euro-American cultures and critical discourses.

How Europe Shapes British Public Policy

Janice Morphet — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

How Europe Shapes British Public Policy examines how the European Union became a sectarian issue for citizens of the UK. It analyzes the effects of EU membership in the shaping of key areas, including trade and privatization, the single market, the environment, and the development and implementation of a devolved and decentralized governance. Discussing the ways UK citizens have grown politically disengaged as a result of EU political practices and policy making, it goes on to examine the implications this has had for the depoliticization of government and civil services.

International Garden Photographer of the Year

Philip Smith — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

The International Garden Photographer of the Year competition has blossomed into one of the premiere showcases for nature and landscape photography, receiving thousands of entries from both professional and amateur participants. The competition encourages photos that take fresh approaches to their subjects, pushing the boundaries of garden photography. New categories this year are Wildflower Landscapes and Wildlife in the Garden, joining others such as Beautiful Gardens, Greening the City, and a special Young Garden Photographer of the Year.

This eagerly anticipated sixth collection of finalists brings together an exceptional group of photos, ranging from a split-second shot of hummingbird wings to eerily beautiful x-rays of flowers. Photos spill across the pages, allowing readers to pore over every detail. And though the beauty of the images can speak for itself, each photo comes with descriptions that tell how the photographer caught each moment and what camera and settings were used. The collection reminds us that despite advances in technology, the people behind the cameras are still the true talent.

This year’s best photos will be shown in exhibitions across the world, with shows in New York City, London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Nuremburg, Lisbon, and more. With a winning combination of beautiful images and insight into the photographer’s process, this collection will be a welcome addition to the bookshelf of any gardener, nature lover, or photography enthusiast.

Illustrating Shakespeare

Peter Whitfield — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

For centuries, artists have been drawn to the plays of Shakespeare, translating his lines into brushstrokes and interpreting his characters and scenes in their own vision. From Henry Fuseli’s Macbeth Consulting the Vision of the Armed Head and William Blake’s Brutus and the Ghost of Caesar to Eugène Delacroix’s Othello and Desdemona and John Millais’s Ophelia, these works will forever influence our reception of the Bard.

In Illustrating Shakespeare, Peter Whitfield draws on an extraordinary array of historical evidence to chronicle the way artists have embraced Shakespeare over the years. Whitfield shows how some artists succeeded in capturing the psychological truth of the dramas, while others merely dressed them up to suit the taste of their time. In addition, he reveals how the history of Shakespearean art parallels that of theater production. The artistic tradition spawned by Shakespeare’s plays is extremely important to his legacy, making this gorgeous volume a must-read for scholars and fans alike.

Spoken Word: Short Stories Volume 2

The British Library — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Following the success of its first set of authors reading their own short stories, the British Library is proud to present a second volume featuring a further dozen stories. As before, the majority of the recordings take the form of historic broadcasts sourced from the BBC, to which a handful of rare live recordings have been added. The stories range from humorous anecdotes to more extended pieces investigating social issues, and the twelve authors include such prestigious names as Beryl Bainbridge, Julian Barnes, E. M. Forster, Alasdair Gray, W. Somerset Maugham, Sean O’Faolain, Harold Pinter, Alan Sillitoe, Osbert Sitwell, Rose Tremain, William Trevor, and Fay Weldon. All the recordings are being made available for the first time.

Ware's Victorian Dictionary of Slang and Phrase

J. Redding Ware — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Acutely aware of the changes affecting English at the end of the Victorian era, writer and journalist J. Redding Ware set out to record words and turns of phrase from all walks of life, from the curses in common use by sailors to the rhyming slang of the street and the jargon of the theater dandies. In doing so, he extended the lifespan of words like “air-hole,” “lally-gagging,” and “bow-wow mutton.”

First published in 1909 and reproduced here with a new introduction by Oxford English Dictionary editor John Simpson, Ware’s Victorian Dictionary of Slang and Phrase reflects the rich history of unofficial English. Many of the expressions are obsolete; one is not likely to have the misfortune of encountering a “parlour jumper.” Order a “shant of bivvy” at the pub and you’ll be met with a blank stare. But some of the entries reveal the origins of expressions still in use today, such as calling someone a “bad egg” to indicate that they are dishonest or of ill-repute. While showing the significant influence of American English on Victorian slang, the Dictionary also demonstrates how impressively innovative its speakers were.

A treasure trove of everyday language of the nineteenth century, this book has much to offer in terms of insight into the intriguing history of English and will be of interest to anyone with a passion for words.

Starlite Terrace

Patrick Roth; Krishna Winston — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In a rundown Los Angeles apartment building—the titular Starlite Terrace—Patrick Roth unfurls the tragic linked stories of Rex, Moss, Gary and June, four neighbors, in a sort of burlesque of the Hollywood modern. In each of their singular collisions with fame, Roth’s dark prose presages a universal and mythical fate of desperation.

In “The Man at Noah’s Window,” Rex shares the story of his father, a supposed hand double for Gary Cooper in High Noon. In “Eclipse of the Sun,” Moss, who lives in fear of the next holocaust, awaits a visit from the long-lost daughter he has tracked down. In “Rider on the Storm,” Gary, a rock drummer and born-again Christian, who “almost played” on the Turtles’ 60s-hit “Happy Together,” strives to find escape from his personal guilt. And in “The Woman in the Sea of Stars,” June, a former Hollywood studio secretary whose husband once cheated on her with Marilyn Monroe, makes the best of a disconnected life until she emerges reborn through ashes strewn in the illuminated swimming pool of the Starlite Terrace.

In each of these four tales of wanna-bes and almost-weres, Roth's L.A. portraits unfold in rare style, and, in Krishna Winston’s masterful translation, the hopeless, loveless perversion of an Ed Ruscha-inspired California becomes a compelling pageant of all-American grotesques that is not to be missed.

Spanish Civil War

Anindya Raychaudhuri — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

While the intricate relationship between history, memory, and representation is of central concern in contemporary society in general, it is perhaps more alive in Spain than in any other European country. The seventy-fifth anniversary of the Spanish Civil War has reignited interest in this field. The Spanish Civil War: Exhuming a Buried Past features cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research on the political, historical, cultural, and literary legacy of the Spanish Civil War by a mixture of new and leading scholars from Europe, North America, and New Zealand.

Reclaiming Individualism

Paul Spicker — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Reclaiming Individualism reviews the scope of individualist approaches to public policy, considering how they shape contemporary policy practices. It argues for a concept of individualism based on rights, human dignity, shared interests, and social protection, providing a thorough analysis and classification of individualism as applied to social and public policy. An important resource for those working or studying in these fields, it is a powerful restatement of some of the key values that led to the establishment of individualism as such a strong social force.

Marcel Proust

Adam Watt — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Marcel Proust (1871–1922) spent fourteen years creating In Search of Lost Time, his seven-volume magnum opus. He died when it was only half in print, unable to see it become one of the most important literary works of the twentieth century. Over eighty years later, the work still garners extraordinary levels of critical attention, and Proust’s habits, health, and sexual preferences still keep commentators and fans occupied. In this concise biography, Adam Watt explores the life of a writer whose every experience was stored, dissected, and redeployed within a vast fictional work.

After considering Proust’s earlier years of personal and aesthetic experiment, Watt provides an engaging account of two intertwined processes taking place against the vibrant backdrop of Belle Époque Paris and World War I: the progress of In Search of Lost Time and the simultaneous decline of its author. He demonstrates how Proust’s own periods of ill health and isolation reflected his narrator’s thoughts on desire, love, and loss, as well as his contemplation of beauty, memory, aging, and the possibility of happiness. Drawing on the author’s immense correspondence, the accounts of his contemporaries, and the insights of recent scholarship, Marcel Proust offers a rewarding new portrait of the novelist once described as “the most complicated man in Paris.”

Thresherphobe

Mark Halliday — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In his sixth collection, Mark Halliday continues to seek ways of using the smart playfulness of such poets as Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch to explore life’s emotional mysteries—both dire and hilarious—from the perpetual dissolving of our past to the perpetual frustration of our cravings for ego-triumph, for sublime connection with an erotically idealized Other, and for peace of spirit. Animated by belief in the possible truths to be reached in interpersonal speech, Halliday’s voice-driven poetry wants to find insight—or at least a stay against confusion—through personality without being trapped in personality. History will leave much of what we are on the threshing floor, Halliday notes, but in the meantime we do what we can; let posterity (if any!) say we rambled truly.

Collaborating Planner?

Ben Clifford; Mark Tewdwr-Jones — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

This book aims to understand how both specific planning and broader public sector reforms have been experienced and understood by chartered town planners working at local levels of authority across Great Britain. Each chapter outlines the reaction by professionals to reforms promoted by successive central and devolved governments over the last decade, before considering the broader issues of what this tells us about how modernization is rolled out by frontline public servants. This book fills a glaring gap in scholarship and makes ideal reading for students and researchers interested in the UK planning system.

Edward Pugh of Ruthin 1763-1813

John Barrell — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Born in Ruthin, Denbighshire, Edward Pugh (1763–1813) was a Welsh-speaking artist and writer who worked as a miniaturist in London, exhibiting frequently at the Royal Academy. But Pugh’s passion was the landscape, and he painted remarkable views of North Wales that not only captivate but also reveal the development of the Welsh economy and Welsh national consciousness. Pugh also wrote and illustrated a fascinating, informative, and humorous account of a tour of North Wales around 1800—one of the only travel books written at that time by someone who could actually converse with the inhabitants.

Edward Pugh of Ruthin 1763–1813 is the first book to consider the work of this nearly forgotten Welsh artist and writer in detail, linking the history of art in Wales with the social history of the country. John Barrell shows how Pugh’s pictures and writings portray rural life and social change in Wales during his lifetime, from the effects of the war with France on industry and poverty, to the need to develop and modernize the Welsh economy, to the power of the landowners. Almost all of the pictures and accounts we have today of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century North Wales were made by English artists and writers, and none of these, as Barrell demonstrates, can tell us about life in North Wales with the same depth and authenticity as does Pugh.

Up North

Douglas Scott Brookes — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

For everyone from school age to professional, there is no greater pleasure than the summer vacation, the chance to pack our suitcases and escape from workaday life and domestic chores; we look forward to it during the long slog and count down the days on our calendars. But the idea of travel for relaxation is actually a relatively modern concept. The construction of the vast American railroad network that made quick travel over long distances feasible combined with the rise of the middle class, which brought with it the time and money to afford travel, established the phenomenon of summer leisure touring in the late 1800s. As such, the word vacation came to mean not just a school holiday, but travel for pleasure. With the rise of leisure travel came the rise of the tourist destination, resort towns catering specifically to the needs and desires of this new kind of traveler.

Up North looks specifically at the history of two such resort communities on the shores of Lake Huron in Michigan. Like the Hamptons that lure New Yorkers and the Lake Michigan beaches that attract Chicagoans, the communities along Lake Huron were a hot spot of summer fun for thousands of St. Louisans. Focusing on the heyday of Lake Huron beaches between 1880 and 1950, Up North brings together local newspaper columns from the time and excerpts from letters and diaries to paint a vivid portrait of life at these summer resorts. Douglas Scott Brookes’s family vacationed along the Lake Huron Beaches for generations, and in this book he weaves together his family’s experiences with the larger story of the rise of vacationing in America. He examines why summer vacations became popular in the late 1800s, and he seeks to explain what kept tourists coming back, often to the same place year after year, establishing family traditions.

A fascinating perspective on the history of leisure travel in America, Up North celebrates our common need to get away from the humdrum, and it will be welcome reading for all of us daydreaming of crystalline lakeshores.

Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art

Vinzenz Hediger; Barbara Le Maitre; Julia Noordegraaf; Cosetta G. Saba — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

This vibrantly illustrated introduction to the emerging field of the preservation and presentation of media art brings together the contributions of authors from all over Europe and the United States. This volume can serve as a textbook for students in advanced degree programs in media art and museum studies, as well as an invaluable introduction for general readers. A potent combination of incisive scholarly articles and focused case studies, Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art offers a comprehensive overview of the history, theory, and practical skills of preserving media art.

Power to the People

Geoff Kaplan — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Though we think of the 1960s and the early ‘70s as a time of radical social, cultural, and political upheaval, we tend to picture the action as happening on campuses and in the streets. Yet the rise of the underground newspaper was equally daring and original. Thanks to advances in cheap offset printing, groups involved in antiwar, civil rights, and other social liberation issues began to spread their messages through provocatively designed newspapers and broadsheets. This vibrant new media was essential to the counterculture revolution as a whole—helping to motivate the masses and proliferate ideas. Power to the People presents more than 700 full-color images and excerpts from these astonishing publications, many of which have not been seen since they were first published almost fifty years ago.

From the psychedelic pages of the Oracle, Haight-Ashbury’s paper of choice, to the fiery editorials of the Black Panther Party Paper, these papers were remarkable for their editors’ fervent belief in freedom of expression and their DIY philosophy. They were also extraordinary for their graphic innovations. Experimental typography and wildly inventive layouts reflect an alternative media culture as much informed by the space age, television, and socialism as it was by the great trinity of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Assembled by renowned graphic designer Geoff Kaplan, Power to the People pays homage in its layout to the radical press. Beyond its unparalleled images, Power to the People includes essays by Gwen Allen, Bob Ostertag, and Fred Turner, as well as a series of recollections edited by Pamela M. Lee, all of which comment on the critical impact of the alternative press in the social and popular movements of those turbulent years. Power to the People treats the design practices of that moment as activism in its own right that offers a vehement challenge to the dominance of official media and a critical form of self-representation.

No other book surveys in such variety the highly innovative graphic design of the underground press, and certainly no other book captures the era with such an unmatched eye toward its aesthetic and look. Power to the People is not just a major compendium of art from the ’60s and ’70s—it showcases how the radical media graphically fashioned the image of a countercultural revolution that still resounds to this day.

Perú: Cerros de Kampankis

Nigel Pitman — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

The Kampankis mountains are a knife-thin ridge in northern Peru that rises 1,435 m above the surrounding Amazon lowlands. For three weeks, a group of researchers explored both the biological diversity and cultural values of the Cerros de Kampankis landscape, with the aim of promoting the long-term conservation of the area by the local Awajún and Wampis indigenous peoples. Field Museum and Peruvian scientists recorded over 1,700 species of plants, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, including 25 species that appear to be new to science. The report is presented in Spanish and English, and includes conservation recommendations, a technical report on the biological and social findings, appendices, and an executive summary in Wampis and Awajún.

Magnetic

Anne Bergeron; Beth Tuttle — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In this in-depth study of what makes a museum an organization successful, Anne Bergeron and Beth Tuttle look at so-called “magnetic” organizations, namely ones that combine a powerful internal alignment with a compelling vision so that they are able to attract critical resources, such as talented and committed employees, loyal audiences, engaged donors, powerful goodwill from the community at large, and the financial capital required to sustain programmatic excellence and growth. Magnetic: The Art and Science of Engagement analyzes six American museums: Children’s Museum in Pittsburgh; Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia; Conner Prairie Interactive History Park in Indiana; The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia; Natural Science Center of Greensboro in North Carolina; and Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Each of these has embraced a shift in ideology and set a new course that has enabled them to achieve a positive reputation and a fruitful engagement with the community. This philosophy of magnetism provides a model not only for museum administration but also for all types of organizations—from corporations to nonprofits—that wish to maximize their involvement with their customers and the wider public while strengthening their own organizational infrastructure.

Stuck in Place

Patrick Sharkey — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In the 1960s, many believed that the civil rights movement’s successes would foster a new era of racial equality in America. Four decades later, the degree of racial inequality has barely changed. To understand what went wrong, Patrick Sharkey argues that we have to understand what has happened to African American communities over the last several decades. In Stuck in Place, Sharkey describes how political decisions and social policies have led to severe disinvestment from black neighborhoods, persistent segregation, declining economic opportunities, and a growing link between African American communities and the criminal justice system.

As a result, neighborhood inequality that existed in the 1970s has been passed down to the current generation of African Americans. Some of the most persistent forms of racial inequality, such as gaps in income and test scores, can only be explained by considering the neighborhoods in which black and white families have lived over multiple generations. This multigenerational nature of neighborhood inequality also means that a new kind of urban policy is necessary for our nation’s cities. Sharkey argues for urban policies that have the potential to create transformative and sustained changes in urban communities and the families that live within them, and he outlines a durable urban policy agenda to move in that direction.

David Nash

Michelle Payne — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Over a forty-year span, a select group of trees has found new life beyond their natural ones as part of David Nash’s stunning sculptures. Using only materials that have met an organic end, Nash has shaped and scorched, chiseled and chopped to create fascinating and often epic sculptures. Thanks to a year-long residency at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the public had a unique chance to see Nash in action as he worked to create an evolving exhibition in one of the world’s greatest gardens.

Capturing all of this and more is the retrospective David Nash: A Natural Gallery. It serves as a visual interpretation of Nash’s work, both during his residency at the Gardens and his artistic career as a whole. The book chronicles the exhibits Nash created over his year at Kew, with rich photographs that show the works developing over time and their interplay with the changing seasonal background. Older works are also featured with explanations that detail Nash’s process, including where the source materials were found, what tools were used, and interpretations of the work. The book also includes essays that explore different facets of Nash’s art and practice, in which academics and critics offer their analysis of the methods used by Nash and his commitment to the environment, which he calls our “outer skin.” Together, the striking images and insightful analyses give readers a special glimpse of the creative processes as Nash creates his ethereal statements about humanity’s relationship with nature.

Rise of the Vampire

Erik Butler — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Before Bella and Edward; Stefan and Damon Salvatore; and Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, there was Lestat and Louis, The Lost Boys, and Buffy Summers. Before True Blood and Let the Right One In, there was Dark Shadows and Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. And then there is the most prominent of them all: Dracula, immortalized by Bram Stoker in 1897. Whether they’re evil, bloodsucking monsters or sparkling like diamonds in the sunlight, vampires have been capturing our imagination since their modest beginnings in the rustic fantasies of southeastern Europe in the early eighteenth century. Today, they’re everywhere, appearing even in movies in Japan and Korea and in reggae music in Jamaica and South Africa. Why have vampires gone viral in recent years?

In The Rise of the Vampire, Erik Butler seeks to explain our enduring fascination with the creatures of the night. Exploring why a being of humble origins has achieved success of such monstrous proportions, Butler considers the vampire in myth, literature, film, journalism, political cartoons, music, television, and video games. He describes how and why they have come to give expression to the darker side of human life—though vampires evoke age-old mystery, they also embody many of the uncertainties of the modern world. Butler also ponders the role global markets and digital technology have played in making vampires a worldwide phenomenon.

Whether you’re a fan of classic vampire tales or new additions to the mythology, The Rise of the Vampire is a fascinating look at our collective obsession with the undead.

Billion-Dollar Fish

Kevin M. Bailey — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Alaska pollock is everywhere. If you’re eating fish but you don’t know what kind it is, it’s almost certainly pollock. Prized for its generic fish taste, pollock masquerades as crab meat in california rolls and seafood salads, and it feeds millions as fish sticks in school cafeterias and Filet-O-Fish sandwiches at McDonald’s. That ubiquity has made pollock the most lucrative fish harvest in America—the fishery in the United States alone has an annual value of over one billion dollars. But even as the money rolls in, pollock is in trouble: in the last few years, the pollock population has declined by more than half, and some scientists are predicting the fishery’s eventual collapse.

In Billion-Dollar Fish, Kevin M. Bailey combines his years of firsthand pollock research with a remarkable talent for storytelling to offer the first natural history of Alaska pollock. Crucial to understanding the pollock fishery, he shows, is recognizing what aspects of its natural history make pollock so very desirable to fish, while at the same time making it resilient, yet highly vulnerable to overfishing. Bailey delves into the science, politics, and economics surrounding Alaska pollock in the Bering Sea, detailing the development of the fishery, the various political machinations that have led to its current management, and, perhaps most important, its impending demise. He approaches his subject from multiple angles, bringing in the perspectives of fishermen, politicians, environmentalists, and biologists, and drawing on revealing interviews with players who range from Greenpeace activists to fishing industry lawyers.

Seamlessly weaving the biology and ecology of pollock with the history and politics of the fishery, as well as Bailey’s own often raucous tales about life at sea, Billion-Dollar Fish is a book for every person interested in the troubled relationship between fish and humans, from the depths of the sea to the dinner plate.

Occupy

W. J. T. Mitchell; Bernard E. Harcourt; Michael Taussig — Tue, 14 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Attila

Giuseppe Verdi; Helen Greenwald; Temistocle Solera; Maria Piave — Tue, 14 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Verdi’s Attila, his ninth opera, had its premiere at Venice’s Teatro La Fenice in March 1846. Based on the German play Attila, King of the Huns, the libretto has its own storied history: as Verdi fell seriously ill before the work’s completion, the main librettist moved permanently to Madrid, leaving the last act of Attila only a sketch. It was then that Verdi called upon Francesco Maria Piave, the librettist for two of his earlier works, who at the composer’s behest scratched plans for a large choral finale and decided instead to concentrate on the dramatic roles of the protagonists.

In years since, Attila has become one of Verdi’s most popular and oft-staged early works. The composers’ inimitable vitality, soaring arcs of melody, grand choruses, and passion are here amply apparent. This critical edition, based on Verdi’s autograph full score preserved at the British Library, restores the opera’s original text and accurately reflects the composers’ colorful and elaborate musical setting, while Helen Greenwald’s masterful introduction discusses the opera’s origins, sources, and performance questions, and her critical commentary details editorial problems and their solutions.

Place That Matters Yet

Sara Byala — Mon, 13 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

A Place That Matters Yet unearths the little-known story of Johannesburg’s MuseumAfrica, a South African history museum that embodies one of the most dynamic and fraught stories of colonialism and postcolonialism, its life spanning the eras before, during, and after apartheid. Sara Byala, in examining this story, sheds new light not only on racism and its institutionalization in South Africa but also on the problems facing any museum that is charged with navigating colonial history from a postcolonial perspective.

Drawing on thirty years of personal letters and public writings by museum founder John Gubbins, Byala paints a picture of a uniquely progressive colonist, focusing on his philosophical notion of “three-dimensional thinking,” which aimed to transcend binaries and thus—quite explicitly—racism. Unfortunately, Gubbins died within weeks of the museum’s opening, and his hopes would go unrealized as the museum fell in line with emergent apartheid politics. Following the museum through this transformation and on to its 1994 reconfiguration as a post-apartheid institution, Byala showcases it as a rich—and problematic—archive of both material culture and the ideas that surround that culture, arguing for its continued importance in the establishment of a unified South Africa.

Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages

Eleanor Johnson — Sat, 11 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Literary scholars often avoid the category of the aesthetic in discussions of ethics, believing that purely aesthetic judgments can vitiate analyses of a literary work’s sociopolitical heft and meaning. In Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages, Eleanor Johnson reveals that aesthetics—the formal aspects of literary language that make it sense-perceptible—are indeed inextricable from ethics in the writing of medieval literature.

Johnson brings a keen formalist eye to bear on the prosimetric form: the mixing of prose with lyrical poetry. This form descends from the writings of the sixth-century Christian philosopher Boethius—specifically his famous prison text, Consolation of Philosophy—to the late medieval English tradition. Johnson argues that Boethius’s text had a broad influence not simply on the thematic and philosophical content of subsequent literary writing, but also on the specific aesthetic construction of several vernacular traditions. She demonstrates the underlying prosimetric structures in a variety of Middle English texts—including Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and portions of the Canterbury Tales, Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love, John Gower’s Confessio amantis, and Thomas Hoccleve’s autobiographical poetry—and asks how particular formal choices work, how they resonate with medieval literary-theoretical ideas, and how particular poems and prose works mediate the tricky business of modeling ethical transformation for a readership.

Arbitrary Rule

Mary Nyquist — Fri, 10 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Slavery appears as a figurative construct during the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, and again in the American and French revolutions, when radicals represent their treatment as a form of political slavery. What, if anything, does figurative, political slavery have to do with transatlantic slavery? In Arbitrary Rule, Mary Nyquist explores connections between political and chattel slavery by excavating the tradition of Western political thought that justifies actively opposing tyranny. She argues that as powerful rhetorical and conceptual constructs, Greco-Roman political liberty and slavery reemerge at the time of early modern Eurocolonial expansion; they help to create racialized “free” national identities and their “unfree” counterparts in non-European nations represented as inhabiting an earlier, privative age.

Arbitrary Rule is the first book to tackle political slavery’s discursive complexity, engaging Eurocolonialism, political philosophy, and literary studies, areas of study too often kept apart. Nyquist proceeds through analyses not only of texts that are canonical in political thought—by Aristotle, Cicero, Hobbes, and Locke—but also of literary works by Euripides, Buchanan, Vondel, Montaigne, and Milton, together with a variety of colonialist and political writings, with special emphasis on tracts written during the English revolution. She illustrates how “antityranny discourse,” which originated in democratic Athens, was adopted by republican Rome, and revived in early modern Western Europe, provided members of a “free” community with a means of protesting a threatened reduction of privileges or of consolidating a collective, political identity. Its semantic complexity, however, also enabled it to legitimize racialized enslavement and imperial expansion.

Throughout, Nyquist demonstrates how principles relating to political slavery and tyranny are bound up with a Roman jurisprudential doctrine that sanctions the power of life and death held by the slaveholder over slaves and, by extension, the state, its representatives, or its laws over its citizenry.

Scramble for the Amazon and the "Lost Paradise" of Euclides da Cunha

Susanna B. Hecht — Thu, 09 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

The fortunes of the late nineteenth century’s imperial and industrial powers depended on a single raw material—rubber—with only one source: the Amazon basin. And so began the scramble for the Amazon—a decades-long conflict that found Britain, France, Belgium, and the United States fighting with and against the new nations of Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil for the forest’s riches. In the midst of this struggle, Euclides da Cunha, engineer, journalist, geographer, political theorist, and one of Brazil’s most celebrated writers, led a survey expedition to the farthest reaches of the river, among the world’s most valuable, dangerous, and little-known landscapes.

The Scramble for the Amazon tells the story of da Cunha’s terrifying journey, the unfinished novel born from it, and the global strife that formed the backdrop for both. Haunted by his broken marriage, da Cunha trekked through a beautiful region thrown into chaos by guerrilla warfare, starving migrants, and native slavery. All the while, he worked on his masterpiece, a nationalist synthesis of geography, philosophy, biology, and journalism he named the Lost Paradise. Da Cunha intended his epic to unveil the Amazon’s explorers, spies, natives, and brutal geopolitics, but, as Susanna B. Hecht recounts, he never completed it—his wife’s lover shot him dead upon his return.

At once the biography of an extraordinary writer, a masterly chronicle of the social, political, and environmental history of the Amazon, and a superb translation of the remaining pieces of da Cunha’s project, The Scramble for the Amazon is a work of thrilling intellectual ambition.

These Kids

Kysa Nygreen — Tue, 07 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Few would deny that getting ahead is a legitimate goal of learning, but the phrase implies a cruel hierarchy: a student does not simply get ahead, but gets ahead of others. In These Kids, Kysa Nygreen turns a critical eye on this paradox. Offering the voices and viewpoints of students at a “last chance” high school in California, she tells the story of students who have, in fact, been left behind.

Detailing a youth-led participatory action research project that she coordinated, Nygreen uncovers deep barriers to educational success that are embedded within educational discourse itself. Struggling students internalize descriptions of themselves as “at risk,” “low achieving,” or “troubled”—and by adopting the very language of educators, they also adopt its constraints and presumption of failure. Showing how current educational discourse does not, ultimately, provide an adequate vision of change for students at the bottom of the educational hierarchy, she levies a powerful argument that social justice in education is impossible today precisely because of how we talk about it.

These Kids

Kysa Nygreen — Tue, 07 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Stung!

Lisa-ann Gershwin; Sylvia Earle — Tue, 07 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Our oceans are becoming increasingly inhospitable to life—growing toxicity and rising temperatures coupled with overfishing have led many marine species to the brink of collapse. And yet there is one creature that is thriving in this seasick environment: the beautiful, dangerous, and now incredibly numerous jellyfish. As foremost jellyfish expert Lisa-ann Gershwin describes in Stung!, the jellyfish population bloom is highly indicative of the tragic state of the world’s ocean waters, while also revealing the incredible tenacity of these remarkable creatures.

Recent documentaries about swarms of giant jellyfish invading Japanese fishing grounds and summertime headlines about armadas of stinging jellyfish in the Mediterranean and Chesapeake are only the beginning—jellyfish are truly taking over the oceans. Despite their often dazzling appearance, jellyfish are simple creatures with simple needs: namely, fewer predators and competitors, warmer waters to encourage rapid growth, and more places for their larvae to settle and grow. In general, oceans that are less favorable to fish are more favorable to jellyfish, and these are the very conditions that we are creating through mechanized trawling, habitat degradation, coastal construction, pollution, and climate change.

Despite their role as harbingers of marine destruction, jellyfish are truly enthralling creatures in their own right, and in Stung!, Gershwin tells stories of jellyfish both attractive and deadly while illuminating many interesting and unusual facts about their behaviors and environmental adaptations. She takes readers back to the Proterozoic era, when jellyfish were the top predator in the marine ecosystem—at a time when there were no fish, no mammals, and no turtles; and she explores the role jellies have as middlemen of destruction, moving swiftly into vulnerable ecosystems. The story of the jellyfish, as Gershwin makes clear, is also the story of the world’s oceans, and Stung! provides a unique and urgent look at their inseparable histories—and future.

Top Student, Top School?

Alexandria Walton Radford — Mon, 06 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Most of us think that valedictorians can write their own ticket. By reaching the top of their class they have proven their merit, so their next logical step should be to attend the nation’s very best universities. Yet in Top Student, Top School?, Alexandria Walton Radford reveals that many valedictorians do not enroll in prestigious institutions. Employing an original five-state study that surveyed nine hundred public high school valedictorians, she sets out to determine when and why valedictorians end up at less selective schools, showing that social class makes all the difference.

Radford traces valedictorians’ paths to college and presents damning evidence that high schools do not provide sufficient guidance on crucial factors affecting college selection, such as reputation, financial aid, and even the application process itself. Left in a bewildering environment of seemingly similar options, many students depend on their parents for assistance—and this allows social class to rear its head and have a profound impact on where students attend. Simply put, parents from less affluent backgrounds are far less informed about differences in colleges’ quality, the college application process, and financial aid options, which significantly limits their child’s chances of attending a competitive school, even when their child has already managed to become valedictorian.

Top Student, Top School? pinpoints an overlooked yet critical juncture in the education process, one that stands as a barrier to class mobility. By focusing solely on valedictorians, it shows that students’ paths diverge by social class even when they are similarly well-prepared academically, and this divergence is traceable to specific failures by society, failures that we can and should address.

Does Science Need a Global Language?

Scott L. Montgomery; David Crystal — Mon, 06 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In early 2012, the global scientific community erupted with news that the elusive Higgs boson had likely been found, providing potent validation for the Standard Model of how the universe works. Scientists from more than one hundred countries contributed to this discovery—proving, beyond any doubt, that a new era in science had arrived, an era of multinationalism and cooperative reach. Globalization, the Internet, and digital technology all play a role in making this new era possible, but something more fundamental is also at work. In all scientific endeavors lies the ancient drive for sharing ideas and knowledge, and now this can be accomplished in a single tongue—English. But is this a good thing?

In Does Science Need a Global Language?, Scott L. Montgomery seeks to answer this question by investigating the phenomenon of global English in science, how and why it came about, the forms in which it appears, what advantages and disadvantages it brings, and what its future might be. He also examines the consequences of a global tongue, considering especially emerging and developing nations, where research is still at a relatively early stage and English is not yet firmly established.

Throughout the book, he includes important insights from a broad range of perspectives in linguistics, history, education, geopolitics, and more. Each chapter includes striking and revealing anecdotes from the front-line experiences of today’s scientists, some of whom have struggled with the reality of global scientific English. He explores topics such as student mobility, publication trends, world Englishes, language endangerment, and second language learning, among many others. What he uncovers will challenge readers to rethink their assumptions about the direction of contemporary science, as well as its future.

Top Student, Top School?

Alexandria Walton Radford — Thu, 02 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Chicago Business and Industry

Janice L. Reiff — Wed, 01 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

From its humble beginnings as a fur-trading outpost, Chicago has become one of the foremost centers of world finance and trade. With its blue-collar work ethic and an economic history that extends into virtually every segment of American industry, it certainly lives up to its moniker as the City That Works.

Drawing on the award-winning Encyclopedia of Chicago, Janice L. Reiff has compiled a unique history of work in the Windy City. Beginning with an overview of the city’s commercial development, Chicago Business and Industry considers how key industries shaped—and were shaped by—both the local and global economies. The city’s phenomenal population growth, its proximity to water, and its development of railroads made Chicago one of the most productive markets for lumber and grain throughout the nineteenth century. The region’s once-booming steel industry, on the other hand, suffered a dramatic decline in the second half of the twentieth century, when already weakened demand met with increasing international competition. Chicago Business and Industry chronicles the Chicago region’s changing fortunes from its beginning.

Reiff has compiled and updated essays from the Encyclopedia covering the city’s most historically famous—and infamous—companies, from the Union Stock Yard to Montgomery Ward to the Board of Trade. The book concludes with a historical account of labor types and issues in the city, with attention to such topics as health-care workers, unemployment, and unionization. Today, Groupon and a host of other high-tech firms have led some experts to christen Chicago the Silicon Valley of the Midwest. Reiff’s new introduction takes account of these and other recent trends.

Engaging, accessible, and packed with fascinating facts, Chicago Business and Industry invites readers into the history and diversity of work in the city, helping them understand how Chicago became Chicago.

Marking Modern Times

Alexis McCrossen — Wed, 01 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

The public spaces and buildings of the United States are home to many thousands of timepieces—bells, time balls, and clock faces—that tower over urban streets, peek out from lobbies, and gleam in store windows. And in the streets and squares beneath them, men, women, and children wear wristwatches of all kinds. Americans have decorated their homes with clocks and included them in their poetry, sermons, stories, and songs. And as political instruments, social tools, and cultural symbols, these personal and public timekeepers have enjoyed a broad currency in art, life, and culture.

In Marking Modern Times, Alexis McCrossen relates how the American preoccupation with time led people from across social classes to acquire watches and clocks. While noting the difficulties in regulating and synchronizing so many timepieces, McCrossen expands our understanding of the development of modern time discipline, delving into the ways we have standardized time and describing how timekeepers have served as political, social, and cultural tools in a society that doesn’t merely value time, but regards access to time as a natural-born right, a privilege of being an American.

Longevity Seekers

Ted Anton — Wed, 01 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

People have searched for the fountain of youth everywhere from Bimini to St. Augustine. But for a steadfast group of scientists, the secret to a long life lies elsewhere: in the lowly lab worm. By suppressing the function of just a few key genes, these scientists were able to lengthen worms’ lifespans up to tenfold, while also controlling the onset of many of the physical problems that beset old age. As the global population ages, the potential impact of this discovery on society is vast—as is the potential for profit.

With The Longevity Seekers, science writer Ted Anton takes readers inside this tale that began with worms and branched out to snare innovative minds from California to Crete, investments from big biotech, and endorsements from TV personalities like Oprah and Dr. Oz. Some of the research was remarkable, such as the discovery of an enzyme in humans that stops cells from aging. And some, like an oft-cited study touting the compound resveratrol, found in red wine—proved highly controversial, igniting a science war over truth, credit, and potential profit. As the pace of discovery accelerated, so too did powerful personal rivalries and public fascination, driven by the hope that a longer, healthier life was right around the corner. Anton has spent years interviewing and working with the scientists at the frontier of longevity science, and this book offers a behind-the-scenes look at the state-of-the-art research and the impact it might have on global public health, society, and even our friends and family.

With spectacular science and an unforgettable cast of characters, The Longevity Seekers has all the elements of a great story and sheds light on discoveriesthat could fundamentally reshape human life.

Bitter Wormwood

Easterine Kire — Wed, 01 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Kohima, 2007. A young man has just been gunned down in cold blood—the latest casualty in the conflict that has brutalized the people of Nagaland, in the neglected northeastern corner of India. Rich in culture and history, Bitter Wormwood traces the story of one man’s life from 1937 until 2007, offering poignant insight into the human cost behind the political headlines of one of India’s most beautiful regions.

In a gripping story that brings to life the processes that propel social change and transform communities, Easterine Kire skillfully renders the small incidents of Mose’s childhood, his family, and the routines and rituals of traditional village life, painting an evocative picture of a peaceful way of life, now long-vanished. The coming of radio into Mose’s family house marks the beginning of the changes that will connect them to the wider world. They learn of partition, independence, a land called America. Mose and his friends become involved in the Naga struggle for independence, and are caught in a maelstrom of violence that ends up ripping communities apart.

Subject of Murder

Lisa Downing — Wed, 01 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

The subject of murder has always held a particular fascination for us. But, since at least the nineteenth century, we have seen the murderer as different from the ordinary citizen—a special individual, like an artist or a genius, who exists apart from the moral majority, a sovereign self who obeys only the destructive urge, sometimes even commanding cult followings. In contemporary culture, we continue to believe that there is something different and exceptional about killers, but is the murderer such a distinctive type? Are they degenerate beasts or supermen as they have been depicted on the page and the screen? Or are murderers something else entirely?

In The Subject of Murder, Lisa Downing explores the ways in which the figure of the murderer has been made to signify a specific kind of social subject in Western modernity. Drawing on the work of Foucault in her studies of the lives and crimes of killers in Europe and the United States, Downing interrogates the meanings of media and texts produced about and by murderers. Upending the usual treatment of murderers as isolated figures or exceptional individuals, Downing argues that they are ordinary people, reflections of our society at the intersections of gender, agency, desire, and violence.

Cairo to Constantinople

Sophie Gordon — Wed, 01 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In the spring of 1862, Queen Victoria commissioned the leading British photographer Francis Bedford to accompany her son and heir, the future King Edward VII, on an ambitious journey across the Middle East. This beautifully illustrated book traces their tour throughout Egypt, Palestine, Turkey, and Greece alongside excerpts from Prince Edward’s diary and other newly discovered archival material, published here for the first time.

Over the course of several months, Bedford produced more than two hundred negatives, including images of architecture and stunning landscapes, from a breathtaking view of the Garden of Gethsemane to shots of the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx. He was the first Christian granted permission to photograph sacred sites in Jerusalem. Bedford also captured many photographs of the people he encountered on the tour, both locals and members of the royal party.

Cairo to Constantinople is the first book to focus on the photographs taken during Prince Edward’s travels in the Middle East. Taken during a time of great change in the area, these extraordinary photographs will fascinate anyone with an interest in the history of the Middle East or in photography’s role in documenting civilization.

Disturbing Practices

Laura Doan — Wed, 01 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

For decades, the history of sexuality has been a multidisciplinary project serving competing agendas. Lesbian, gay, and queer scholars have produced powerful narratives by tracing the homosexual or queer subject as continuous or discontinuous. Yet organizing historical work around categories of identity as normal or abnormal often obscures how sexual matters were known or talked about in the past. Set against the backdrop of women’s work experiences, friendships, and communities during World War I, Disturbing Practices draws on a substantial body of new archival material to expose the roadblocks still present in current practices and imagine new alternatives.

In this landmark book, Laura Doan clarifies the ethical value and political purpose of identity history—and indeed its very capacity to give rise to innovative practices borne of sustained exchange between queer studies and critical history. Disturbing Practices insists on taking seriously the imperative to step outside the logic of identity to address questions as yet unasked about the modern sexual past.

Disturbing Practices

Laura Doan — Wed, 01 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Greek Tragedies 1

Mark Griffith; Glenn W. Most; David Grene; Richmond Lattimore — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Greek Tragedies, Volume I contains Aeschylus’s “Agamemnon,” translated by Richmond Lattimore; Aeschylus’s “Prometheus Bound,” translated by David Grene; Sophocles’s “Oedipus the King,” translated by David Grene; Sophocles’s “Antigone,” translated by Elizabeth Wyckoff; and Euripides’s “Hippolytus,” translated by David Grene.

Sixty years ago, the University of Chicago Press undertook a momentous project: a new translation of the Greek tragedies that would be the ultimate resource for teachers, students, and readers. They succeeded. Under the expert management of eminent classicists David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, those translations combined accuracy, poetic immediacy, and clarity of presentation to render the surviving masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in an English so lively and compelling that they remain the standard translations. Today, Chicago is taking pains to ensure that our Greek tragedies remain the leading English-language versions throughout the twenty-first century.

In this highly anticipated third edition, Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most have carefully updated the translations to bring them even closer to the ancient Greek while retaining the vibrancy for which our English versions are famous. This edition also includes brand-new translations of Euripides’ Medea, The Children of Heracles, Andromache, and Iphigenia among the Taurians, fragments of lost plays by Aeschylus, and the surviving portion of Sophocles’s satyr-drama The Trackers. New introductions for each play offer essential information about its first production, plot, and reception in antiquity and beyond. In addition, each volume includes an introduction to the life and work of its tragedian, as well as notes addressing textual uncertainties and a glossary of names and places mentioned in the plays.

In addition to the new content, the volumes have been reorganized both within and between volumes to reflect the most up-to-date scholarship on the order in which the plays were originally written. The result is a set of handsome paperbacks destined to introduce new generations of readers to these foundational works of Western drama, art, and life.

Power to Do Justice

Bradin Cormack — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

English law underwent rapid transformation in the sixteenth century, in response to the Reformation and also to heightened litigation and legal professionalization. As the common law became more comprehensive and systematic, the principle of jurisdiction came under particular strain. When the common law engaged with other court systems in England, when it encountered territories like Ireland and France, or when it confronted the ocean as a juridical space, the law revealed its qualities of ingenuity and improvisation. In other words, as Bradin Cormack argues, jurisdictional crisis made visible the law’s resemblance to the literary arts.
A Power to Do Justice shows how Renaissance writers engaged the practical and conceptual dynamics of jurisdiction, both as a subject for critical investigation and as a frame for articulating literature’s sense of itself. Reassessing the relation between English literature and law from More to Shakespeare, Cormack argues that where literary texts attend to jurisdiction, they dramatize how boundaries and limits are the very precondition of law’s power, even as they clarify the forms of intensification that make literary space a reality.

Tracking cultural responses to Renaissance jurisdictional thinking and legal centralization, A Power to Do Justice makes theoretical, literary-historical, and methodological contributions that set a new standard for law and the humanities and for the cultural history of early modern law and literature.

Political Tone

Roderick P. Hart; Jay P. Childers; Colene J. Lind — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

It’s not what you say, but how you say it. Solving problems with words is the essence of politics, and finding the right words for the moment can make or break a politician’s career. Yet very little has been said in political science about the elusive element of tone.

In Political Tone, Roderick P. Hart, Jay P. Childers, and Colene J. Lind analyze a range of texts—from speeches and debates to advertising and print and broadcast campaign coverage— using a sophisticated computer program, DICTION, that parses their content for semantic features like realism, commonality, and certainty, as well as references to religion, party, or patriotic terms. Beginning with a look at how societal forces like diversity and modernity manifest themselves as political tones in the contexts of particular leaders and events, the authors proceed to consider how individual leaders have used tone to convey their messages: How did Bill Clinton’s clever dexterity help him recover from the Monica Lewinsky scandal? How did Barack Obama draw on his experience as a talented community activist to overcome his inexperience as a national leader? And how does Sarah Palin’s wandering tone indicate that she trusts her listeners and is open to their ideas?

By focusing not on the substance of political arguments but on how they were phrased, Political Tone provides powerful and unexpected insights into American politics.

Political Tone

Roderick P. Hart; Jay P. Childers; Colene J. Lind — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

By focusing not on the substance of political arguments but on how they were phrased, Political Tone provides powerful and unexpected insights into American politics.

Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities

Maia Bloomfield Cucchiara — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Discuss real estate with any young family and the subject of schools is certain to come up—in fact, it will likely be a crucial factor in determining where that family lives. Not merely institutions of learning, schools have increasingly become a sign of a neighborhood’s vitality, and city planners have ever more explicitly promoted “good schools” as a means of attracting more affluent families to urban areas, a dynamic process that Maia Bloomfield Cucchiara critically examines in Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities.

Focusing on Philadelphia’s Center City Schools Initiative, she shows how education policy makes overt attempts to prevent, or at least slow, middle-class flight to the suburbs. Navigating complex ethical terrain, she balances the successes of such policies in strengthening urban schools and communities against the inherent social injustices they propagate—the further marginalization and disempowerment of lowerclass families. By asking what happens when affluent parents become “valued customers,” Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities uncovers a problematic relationship between public institutions and private markets, where the former are used to leverage the latter to effect urban transformations.

Women in the Club

Michele L. Swers — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, Democrats and Republicans were locked in a fierce battle for the female vote. Democrats charged Republicans with waging a “war on women,” while Republicans countered that Democratic policies actually undermined women’s rights. The women of the Senate wielded particular power, planning press conferences, appearing on political programs, and taking to the Senate floor over gender-related issues such as workplace equality and reproductive rights.

The first book to examine the impact of gender differences in the Senate, Women in the Club is an eye-opening exploration of how women are influencing policy and politics in this erstwhile male bastion of power. Gender, Michele L. Swers shows, is a fundamental factor for women in the Senate, interacting with both party affiliation and individual ideology to shape priorities on policy. Women, for example, are more active proponents of social welfare and women’s rights. But the effects of gender extend beyond mere policy preferences. Senators also develop their priorities with an eye to managing voter expectations about their expertise and advancing their party’s position on a given issue. The election of women in increasing numbers has also coincided with the evolution of the Senate as a highly partisan institution. The stark differences between the parties on issues pertaining to gender have meant that Democratic and Republican senators often assume very different roles as they reconcile their policy views on gender issues with the desire to act as members of partisan teams championing or defending their party’s record in an effort to reach various groups of voters.

Leo Strauss on Maimonides

Leo Strauss; Kenneth Hart Green — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Leo Strauss is widely recognized as one of the foremost interpreters of Maimonides. His studies of the medieval Jewish philosopher led to his rediscovery of esotericism and deepened his sense that the tension between reason and revelation was central to modern political thought. His writings throughout the twentieth century were chiefly responsible for restoring Maimonides as a philosophical thinker of the first rank. Yet, to appreciate the extent of Strauss’s contribution to the scholarship on Maimonides, one has traditionally had to seek out essays he published separately spanning almost fifty years.

With Leo Strauss on Maimonides, Kenneth Hart Green presents for the first time a comprehensive, annotated collection of Strauss’s writings on Maimonides, comprising sixteen essays, three of which appear in English for the first time. Green has also provided careful translations of materials that had originally been quoted in Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, German, and French; written an informative introduction highlighting the original contributions found in each essay; and brought references to out-of-print editions fully up to date. The result will become the standard edition of Strauss’s writings on Maimonides.

Gentleman Troubadours and Andean Pop Stars

Joshua Tucker — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Exploring Peru’s lively music industry and the studio producers, radio DJs, and program directors that drive it, Gentleman Troubadours and Andean Pop Stars is a fascinating account of the deliberate development of artistic taste. Focusing on popular huayno music and the ways it has been promoted to Peru’s emerging middle class, Joshua Tucker tells a complex story of identity making and the marketing forces entangled with it, providing crucial insights into the dynamics among art, class, and ethnicity that reach far beyond the Andes.

Tucker focuses on the music of Ayacucho, Peru, examining how media workers and intellectuals there transformed the city’s huayno music into the country’s most popular style. By marketing contemporary huayno against its traditional counterpart, these agents, Tucker argues, have paradoxically reinforced ethnic hierarchies at the same time that they have challenged them. Navigating between a burgeoning Andean bourgeoisie and a music industry eager to sell them symbols of newfound sophistication, Gentleman Troubadours and Andean Pop Stars is a deep account of the real people behind cultural change.

Gusto for Things

Renata Ago; Bradford Bouley; Corey Tazzara; Paula Findlen — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

We live in a material world—our homes are filled with things, from electronics to curios and hand-me-downs, that disclose as much about us and our aspirations as they do about current trends. But we are not the first: the early modern period was a time of expanding consumption, when objects began to play an important role in defining gender as well as social status. Gusto for Things reconstructs the material lives of seventeenth-century Romans, exploring new ways of thinking about the meaning of things as a historical phenomenon.

Through creative use of account books, inventories, wills, and other records, Renata Ago examines early modern attitudes toward possessions, asking what people did with their things, why they wrote about them, and how they passed objects on to their heirs. While some inhabitants of Rome were connoisseurs of the paintings, books, and curiosities that made the city famous, Ago shows that men and women of lesser means also filled their homes with a more modest array of goods. She also discovers the genealogies of certain categories of things—for instance, books went from being classed as luxury goods to a category all their own—and considers what that reveals about the early modern era. An animated investigation into the relationship between people and the things they buy, Gusto for Things paints an illuminating portrait of the meaning of objects in preindustrial Europe.

Women in the Club

Michele L. Swers — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Population Fluctuations in Rodents

Charles J. Krebs — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

How did rodent outbreaks in Germany help to end World War I? What caused the destructive outbreak of rodents in Oregon and California in the late 1950s, the large population outbreak of lemmings in Scandinavia in 2010, and the great abundance of field mice in Scotland in the spring of 2011? Population fluctuations, or outbreaks, of rodents constitute one of the classic problems of animal ecology, and in Population Fluctuations in Rodents, Charles J. Krebs sifts through the last eighty years of research to draw out exactly what we know about rodent outbreaks and what should be the agenda for future research.

Krebs has synthesized the research in this area, focusing mainly on the voles and lemmings of the Northern Hemisphere—his primary area of expertise—but also referring to the literature on rats and mice. He covers the patterns of changes in reproduction and mortality and the mechanisms that cause these changes—including predation, disease, food shortage, and social behavior—and discusses how landscapes can affect population changes, methodically presenting the hypotheses related to each topic before determining whether or not the data supports them. He ends on an expansive note, by turning his gaze outward and discussing how the research on rodent populations can apply to other terrestrial mammals. Geared toward advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and practicing ecologists interested in rodent population studies, this book will also appeal to researchers seeking to manage rodent populations and to understand outbreaks in both natural and urban settings—or, conversely, to protect endangered species.

Aeschylus II

Aeschylus; David Grene; Richmond Lattimore; Mark Griffith; Glenn W. Most — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Aeschylus II contains “The Oresteia,” translated by Richmond Lattimore, and fragments of “Proteus,” translated by Mark Griffith.

Aeschylus II

Aeschylus; David Grene; Richmond Lattimore; Mark Griffith; Glenn W. Most — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Aeschylus II contains “The Oresteia,” translated by Richmond Lattimore, and fragments of “Proteus,” translated by Mark Griffith.

Aeschylus I

Aeschylus; David Grene; Richmond Lattimore; Mark Griffith; Glenn W. Most — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Aeschylus I contains “The Persians,” translated by Seth Benardete; “The Seven Against Thebes,” translated by David Grene; “The Suppliant Maidens,” translated by Seth Benardete; and “Prometheus Bound,” translated by David Grene.

Aeschylus I

Aeschylus; David Grene; Richmond Lattimore; Mark Griffith; Glenn W. Most — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Euripides II