The cultural dynamics of speed outlined in new book from Duke

Egg-headed car lovers are lumped together with scholars of modernism, historians of technology, and “materialist critics” as the audience for The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism, by Enda Duffy. We’ll see if this book crosses over from an academic readership to say, readers of Car and Driver Magazine. Duffy illuminates speed as a logic for and genuine pleasure of modernity. That would be pedal-to-the-metal all the way. He draws on what he calls “adrenaline aesthetics” in such works as Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Ballard’s Crash, and even the cautionary consumerism of Ralph Nader. He doesn’t stop there. As a cutting edge social theorist and professor of English at UC - Santa Barbara, Duffy takes news stories, photography (think of the old-fashioned racecar images of Lartigue, and the classic Robert Frank picture of a couple speeding along in a convertible), advertising, movies, and safety media to provide a breakneck tour of speed and how it continues to define American culture.

Duffy looks at the marketing of cars and how their mass-production enabled masses of people to experience speed, and by extension know modernity: -- to feel modernity in their very bones. Speed became the chief thrill of leisure. Duke did a recent book called Mobility without Mayhem, by Jeremy Packer, and that book looked at America’s fear and fascination with driving in general, a cool cultural history of a phenomenon. Duffy’s book is different and equally valuable in that it takes on speed all by itself, and eloquently explains its political as well as cultural connotations. Speed explains who we are, where we are going (getting there fast), and the whys and wherefores of the sometimes reckless impulse to get a move on.

Gastronomy deconstructed through the naughty Victorians in quirky literary study coming from Ohio

Leave it to a gourmet chef, food writer, and general woman-about-town to write an unpredictable and fascinating study of Victorians and their alimentary behaviors as displayed in their literature. Here we have food, drink, drugs, and whatever they could stuff into their mouths. The book is Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, by Gwen Hyman, an assistant professor of humanities at Cooper Union in New York, and the co-author of a recent cookbook, Urban Italian: Simple Recipes and True Stories from a Life in Food. And it seems that those appetites were voracious indeed. The very act of eating, drinking and getting high, along with whatever else is left to the imagination, seems to be the very thing itself that makes a man a man in this world. And boys will be boys. Drawing on food history, theory, literary criticism, anthropology, economics, and social criticism, along with close readings of novels of the time, especially those of Jane Austen, Professor Hyman breaks it all down for endlessly uptight, gorging, anxious, and generally hot-and-bothered Victorian culture. In this world you really are what you eat.

You also have the monster metaphor, Count Dracula and his uncontrollable thirst for blood, and the men who obsessively hunt him down. There is the drawing room, the dining room, the opium den, and the cocaine lab as manifest sets where Victorian males act out their power and uneasiness. The act of consuming, or even starving himself, can be the hinges that make or break the nation. This is an innovative, thought-provoking, and meaningful social study of what it means to be Victorian, and offers an original thesis about the embodiment of power and how alimental behavior can make, unmake and even remake the man.

Harry Potter Lexicon to finally see the light of day

January 12, 2008 will be a faithful day for all champions of fair use in copyright law. This is the day RDR Books of Muskegon, MI will publish The Lexicon: An Unauthorized Guide to Harry Potter Fiction and Related Materials, by Steve Vander Ark ($24.95, paperback, ISBN 978-1-57143-174-5). RDR has been embroiled in a lawsuit over intellectual property rights with author J.K. Rowling and Warner Bros. Entertainment since October 2007. The Lexicon is an encyclopedic reference work that covers all seven novels in the Harry Potter series, and is based on a web site that was heavily used by Rowling and her publishers concerning all manner of things from the fictitious world of Harry Potter – http://www.hp-lexicon.org/

The decision by Judge Robert P. Patterson, Jr. to allow the book to press, with some minor changes and stipulations, is a triumph for the doctrine of fair use. It’s clear that over-zealous copyright holders can reek havoc on well-meaning chroniclers, as is the case outlined eloquently in the book Bound by Law? Tales from the Public Domain, a comic book primer on fair use doctrine for documentary filmmakers, by Keith Aoki, James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins. RDR also enlisted the lawyers at Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project to testify in their favor. The Patterson ruling will most certainly help authors of similar books in the future.

Brookings Institution Press chimes in creatively to help guide a new Obama administration and congress

Brookings is taking its place as a creative nerve center in Washington, with several important books coming out by key authors on issues of critical importance to the new leaders in Washington. Acting in Time on Energy Policy, edited by Kelly Sims Gallagher of the Harvard Kennedy School, comes out in May 2009. Gallagher gathers together her colleagues from the Kennedy School and they tackle important issues that pertain to energy policy – climate change, oil and security - and explain why acting in time, and not waiting until politics demands action, would make a huge positive difference. Obama made energy policy a cornerstone of his Presidential campaign, so this book will be a welcome addition to the ongoing debate about energy.

Plug-In Vehicles: What Role for Washington is edited by David B. Sandalow, an experienced expert on energy policy at Brookings, and comes out in February 2009. With the big three automakers scrambling for a bailout from lawmakers in Washington, the contributors to this timely volume discuss what can and should be done to advance the role of plug-in electric vehicles. It would seem that this book could be very influential, especially since it gathers experts from government, business, and academia. The other thing is that Obama comes from Illinois, a state with a powerful coal lobby. Obama talked about investing in clean coal technology in his Presidential campaign, and while it’s not clear just what clean coal involves beyond the flashy advertisements, it would seem that electric cars are the wave of the future, riding a wave of replacing electricity for oil products in the future.

Legislating the War on Terror: An Agenda for Reform is edited by Benjamin Wittes of Brookings, and will be published in July 09, at a critical time for new leaders in Washington: -- it is being published in cooperation with Hoover Institution and Georgetown Center on National Security and the Law. This book shows that the US desperately needs a new legal framework to fight terrorists. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the many controversial laws that were enacted as a reaction to that event under Bush, it’s clear that an entirely new statutory law is needed to govern this fight. Contributors to this essential book look to balance the need for security with the rule of law and constitutional rights of freedom. Restoring the Writ of Habeas Corpus for accused terrorists would be a good start. There are a whole host of issues discussed here, from improving interrogation laws to immigration to modernizing the Foreign Intelligence Act. Congress will have its hands full trying to sort out these challenging dilemmas as it tries to set new ground rules for the war on terrorists, and this thoughtful book should be a big help to them.

Finally, there is an eloquent book called Repairing Paradise: The Restoration of Nature in America’s National Parks, coming out in July 09 by William R Lowry, a prolific author and professor of political science at Washington University in St Louis. This book is a departure for Brookings because Lowry writes a highly personal and persuasive account about reversing the mistakes of the last eight years to preserve four National Parks: -- Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Everglades, and the Grand Canyon. Lowry has spent considerable time in these iconic American parks, in addition to making concrete and sensible policy recommendations for the good of nature and animals there, he also is a master prose stylist and makes a poetic case to restore the natural health and glory to some of the world’s most wondrous places.

Wire and Tower

Chicago fashioned itself over time and became a distinctive place as a result of its own unique history and various natural and unnatural forces at play. The city has a history deeply ingrained in its rebirth as a mighty industrial metropolis after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Rudyard Kipling came to Chicago and hated it … it was like taking a bite of raw wild onion and cringing. Eager for American experiences, Kipling the world-wise traveler, only saw greed and avarice there, from his 1891 book, American Notes:

“I know thy cunning and thy greed,Thy hard high lust and wilful deed,And all thy glory loves to tell of specious gifts material.”

I have struck a city—a real city—and they call it Chicago.
The other places do not count. San Francisco was a pleasure-resort as well as a city, and Salt Lake was a phenomenon.
This place is the first American city I have encountered. It holds rather more than a million of people with bodies, and stands on the same sort of soil as Calcutta. Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.

The sense of place can be overwhelming, and if you’re not prepared for its extreme conditions, or if you have never encountered it’s like before, Chicago can be like a slap in the face. Some things never change. The city grew up quickly out of the lakeside wilderness and became larger than life, a microcosm of the New World, America in all its guts and glory. Wave upon wave of immigrants made their way to Chicago and formed it into a mass of humanity and blood. The people made the town tick, as the poet Carl Sandburg so eloquently stated, "The people yes. The people will live on. The learning and blundering people will live on."

The landscape, Calcutta-like, is uncompromising and harsh, the four seasons reeking havoc with wind and rain, snow and ice, intense heat and humidity, subzero temperatures, and spectacular thunder and lightening storms. With a certain fearlessness and innovation, the people molded Chicago into a kind of urban jungle, a place of high and low culture, again recalling Calcutta, and used their 19th century innovations to transform the landscape into the international city we know today.

The water tanks that dot the urban terrain of commercial and factory buildings in Chicago hawk back to a different time and place. They were built to last, made from the finest clear-cut redwood and cypress boards. No imperfections were allowed, and each board was 18 feet straight and 2 ½ inches thick. As long as the tanks have water in them they will never rot.

-- Alternative introduction to Water Tanks of Chicago: A Vanishing Urban Legacy, by Larry W Green -- http://www.wickerparkpress.com/WToC.html


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Georgia to publish a different kind of bird book

Spirits of the Air: Birds and American Indians in the South is what you might well call “a passionate read.” Wonderfully illustrated in color, author Shepard Krech III, a professor of anthropology at Brown University, is a lifelong birder and naturalist. One reviewer has called this book “superbly researched and splendidly illustrated tour of Southeastern Indian ethno-ornithology.” – Raymond D. Fogelson, University of Chicago. Krech is the author of the previous book, The Ecological Indian (Norton, 1999), and here he explores bird mythology, and he examines the complex and immutable influences of birds on Native American culture and their unique worldview. It moves beyond mere identification and habitat to really seek out the many cultural connections between birds and native peoples.

Birds were clearly important as spiritual beings, and many natives’ donned feathers and plumage, and sought to evoke avian powers in their ceremonies and dances. Bird imagery is adorned on pottery, cravings, and jewelry. Birds also played a central role in ritual healing practices, folklore, religion, and even warfare. The winged creatures of the air clearly had a remarkable and lasting impact on Native American life in the South, and probably elsewhere, and what is being called the whole Indian-bird dynamic. It takes a distinguished ecological ethno-historian like Professor Krech to put it all together for readers in one dynamite package.

Chicago Neon Signs reviewed in Midwest Book Review

Chicago Neon Signs
Dan Zamudio
Wicker Park PressPO Box 5318, River Forest, IL 60305-5318, ISBN 9780978967628, $24.95, www.wickerparkpress.com

Once a ubiquitous feature of Chicago's landscape, the neon sign is gradually disappearing because of the deleterious impact of Illinois winters. The result of the harsh climate and the entropy of neglect, the neon signs of neighborhood businesses are decaying, fading, rusting, and manifesting empty spaces where colorful glass tubes used to be. Chicago librarian and artist Dan Zamudio photographed many of Chicago's neon signs with a camera called 'Diana', which is made of plastic (including the lens) and thus produces as slightly blurred focus that creates beautiful and memorably surreal images. In "Chicago Neon Signs", Zamudio has compiled sixty of these black-and-white photographic images that will prove to be enduring monuments to this once great commercial advertising art form to be found in every Chicago neighborhood but which is now, year by year and decade by decade, disappearing from the scene. "Chicago Neon Signs" is an original compilation which is highly recommended for personal, professional, community, and academic library Photography reference collections -- and would serve as an excellent template for similar photographic studies with respect to other American cities.

At Maxwell Street: Chicago’s Historic Marketplace Recalled in Words and Photographs

Tom Palazzolo approached me in late 2007 with the idea of turning his 1983 cinema
verité documentary, At Maxwell Street, into a book. We had just published Water Tanks of Chicago: A Vanishing Urban Legacy, by Larry W Green, and that book was striking a chord with people who had never noticed these aging wooden behemoths in their midst. Tom, like Larry, was a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In fact, I had taken Tom’s filmmaking class during the summer of 1977 at SAIC, so we had known each other for 30 years. One of Tom’s most remarkable films is called Caligari’s Cure
(http://www.facets.org/asticat?function=buyitem&catname=facets&catnum=/207), and I actually had a bit part in that movie.

Tom’s concept for the book was to approach his friends and acquaintances and get them to write about their experiences of the old Maxwell Street marketplace. He got veteran arts journalist Jack Helbig to write the introduction, and Lori Grove of the Maxwell Street Foundation, and coauthor of Chicago's Maxwell Street (IL) (Images of America) to write the foreword. The other contributors are the eminent painter Robert Guinan, the Sun-Times critic Bill Stamets, local merchant and wonderful prose stylist Lionel Bottari, poet John Platt, local artist Linda Platt, and an oral history from old-timer Leland “Sugar” Cain, Jr. A DVD of Tom’s original movie accompanies the book, along with a slide show of extra images with harmonica and guitar music, labeled Maxwell Street Blues by local musicians Little Jukela and Willie Poor Boy, recorded at Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap in Hyde Park.

For those who are not familiar with it, Maxwell Street is an avenue that runs E/W two blocks south of Roosevelt Road (12th St) and is intersected by the Dan Ryan expressway leading into downtown Chicago. The open-air marketplace started there around the turn of the 20th century, and was active up until 2000, even though it was undergoing painful urban renewal in the last 10 years of its existence. It is now under the auspices of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and is called University Village. The city kept moving the marketplace, and it got smaller and more insignificant with each displacement. I’m not sure exactly where it’s located now, but it was in the news this past week because the city was considering raising the vendor fees for selling at the marketplace, and people thought that would spell its ultimate demise.

The market on Maxwell Street was a unique and colorful place, where shoppers could get just about anything extremely cheaply. It was a photographer’s paradise, and this is where Tom and his wife Marcia cut their teeth as artists in the mid 1960s. The book also includes amazing photographs by Tom’s friend and fellow SAIC classmate, the painter Bernard Beckman. He has a keen interest in blues and gospel music, and there are many poignant photos in the book from Beckman of the street performers at Maxwell Street. The book as delayed because we kept adding and changing things right up to the last minute, even while the book was at press. We wanted the best book possible, and now that it’s finally published we feel like we accomplished putting together a great book.

Bob Sirott of WGN AM 720 radio called this book, “quite a nice little keepsake.” http://wgnradio.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=46757&Itemid=557 – I had a call yesterday from the painter Robert Guinan who loved the book, and lamented that there were no surviving pictures of Johnny Young, a pioneering blues artist who made Maxwell Street his main hangout, and who Guinan profiles in the book. Guinan told me he thought a book of this kind on Maxwell Street was long overdue. There are some good promotional things coming up for this book, an event at the Oak Park (IL) Public Library at 7 pm on December 18 where Tom and his wife Marcia will sign books and they will show the movie. Tom will appear on Ray Hanania’s Radio Chicagoland show WJJG AM 1530 on December 5 at 8:30 am. And, this is big, Tom will be live on WGN TV (channel 9 in Chicago, and nationally syndicated on cable TV) on the Midday News program on December 18 around 12:20 pm, where they will interview Tom about the book and show snippets from the movie.

Is the book business recession proof?

Alan Greenspan is in the news once again, his grizzled face increasingly haggard as he looks on with shock and awe at the tanking international economy. A recent cover image on the New Yorker magazine shows Wall Street traders bleeding from their eyeballs as the Angel of Death and Destruction holds up a broadsheet with the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeting straight down to Hell. There is finger pointing on both sides of the political aisle, as the fallout from irrational exuberance affects everyone. The upcoming presidential election offers two starkly different approaches to resuscitating the damaged economy, and columnist and Princeton professor Paul Krugman, this year's Nobel Memorial Prize Winner for Economics, tells us that the pain is only just beginning . . .

The book business, on the other hand, remains as quietly quirky as ever. In tough economic times, as publishers both large and small tighten their belts and rein in their advances to unknown authors who are not yet established with the reading public, one thing becomes abundantly clear: Commission reps, those feisty independent sales people who ply their trade in different territories throughout North America and beyond, offer incredibly good value for all publishers. Commission selling is fixed-cost. Commission reps pay their own expenses, including transportation, taxes, and insurance, and they only get paid when orders ship into their designated territory. Selling on commission is a time-honored practice, and if you take a look at the history of this noble profession you will see that it goes all the way back to eighteenth-century Europe as well as the North American colonies, where an intricate network of booksellers and travelers was established.

Independent reps bring more than good economics to the big table. Besides being resilient, cost effective, and an integral part of the operations of the book industry, independents can and often do freely speak their minds to good effect. This is an added value, and the self-directed rep can offer valuable advice to help publishers succeed in the marketplace. It's simple. If the publisher succeeds, the rep does, too. NAIPR reps are a talented bunch of folks, and in some cases have more than five decades of experience to draw upon. Because independent reps carry a mixed bag of publishers and go into a variety of accounts, this means they are flexible and can adapt to many situations. The durability of the relationship between publisher and independent rep counts for a lot as well: over time the rep develops into an expert on his publishers’ backlists, and the specific disciplines they publish. Booksellers rely on this breadth of knowledge in making their buying decisions. Everyone wins when you employ an independent rep.
So the answer to the question in the title of this piece is: YES! Publishers and booksellers can make good things and strong sales happen with a little help from their friends at NAIPR.

Missouri to publish a new collection of stories by Rudolph Fisher

Rudolph Fisher was a great writer. He wrote short stories that depicted life in Harlem in the 1920s and 30s, the so-called Jazz Age, with a rare sense of humor, grace and objectivity. He was also a true a renaissance man: -- a full-time doctor, musician, and orator, he also wrote two novels and a number of book reviews and scientific articles. One of the novels is a mystery, a favorite of mine published years ago by University of Michigan Press, called The Conjure Man Dies.

The University of Missouri Press anthology collects all of his short stories, and is called The City of Refuge: The Collected Stories of Rudolph Fisher. It’s edited with an introduction by John McCluskey, Jr., a professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. This is a new and expanded edition.

This definitive collection of stories by Fisher shows his remarkable range as a writer. It includes seven unpublished stories that take up such themes as martial infidelity and passing for black, and relate the further adventures Jinx and Bubber, characters that appeared in Fisher’s novels. In all Fisher offers vibrant tales of inner-city life, laced with humor from black folklore, and infused with music from Harlem’s many cabarets, speakeasies, and nightclubs. It offers a multifaceted portrait of Harlem that is unmatched in depth and range by Fisher’s contemporaries or successors, as the New York Times Book Review said, “one feels, smells, and tastes his Harlem; its people come alive and one cares about them.”

This book also includes a famous article Fisher wrote called “The Caucasian Storms Harlem,” which describes the craze for black music and dance. McCluskey’s introduction has been updated to include the new works, and places Fisher’s work and career in a broader context of American writing during the 1920s.

Hopefully this new edition will gain Fisher a wider readership, and enhance his stature as a major American writer. Booklist noted about Fisher’s work, it shows “the complexity of black urban life in its encounter with the dangers and delights of the city.”

Fall 2008 - Pick of the Lists

Fall 2008 - Pick of the Lists

Breaking the Spell of Binge-Eating Kortink, Paper, $18.95, ISBN 978-0-89733-577-5, October, Health/Self-Help, Academy Chicago

A runaway bestseller in Holand in 2006, this empowering book has now been translated from the Dutch. Kortink is a spiritual psychologist who has formulated a unique therapy for the effective treatment of binge-eating and an array of eating disorders.

Chicago Neon Signs Zamudio, Cloth, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-97869676-2-8, October, Photography, Wicker Park Press

Zamudio takes pictures of familiar and exotic neon signs throughout the city with a Diana, a toy camera made completely from plastic, including the lens. The photographs are striking images that will remind readers of a bygone era in an ever-changing urban environment.

Anatomy of a Trial: Public Loss, Lessons Learned from People Vs OJ Simpson Hayslett, Cloth, $29.95, November, History/Journalism, University of Missouri Press

A compelling insider’s account of the trial of the century: -- Hayslett was a media liaison who had unprecedented access during the trial. This is a page-turning narrative of the incredible events that took place in the courtroom.

Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, Religious Right and Culture Wars Lindlof, Cloth, $32.50, ISBN 978-0-8131-2517-6, August, Film/American History, University Press of Kentucky

The film version of The Last Temptation of Christ caused a storm of controversy when it appeared in 1988. Lindlof interviews all the principles involved in the release of the film, and shows how this key event became a tipping point in the ongoing culture wars. This is fascinating reading.

Intelligence Matters: CIA, FBI, Saudi Arabia, & the Failure of America’s War on Terror Graham, Paper, $17.95, ISBN 978-0-7006-1626-8, September, Current Affairs, University Press of Kansas

Senator Graham chaired the historic joint House-Senate inquiry into intelligence failures leading up to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This book tells a riveting tale and is an unflinching exposé of breakdowns, incompetence, and deceit at the highest levels of government.

Charles Darwin: Concise Story of Extraordinary Man Berra, Cloth, $19.95, ISBN 978-0-8018-9104-5, November, Biography, Johns Hopkins

2009 is the 200^th anniversary of Darwin’s birth (Feb 12), and this compact and heavily illustrated biography reveals the man behind the great scientist. This book digs deep to reveal Darwin the Man,

Cook’s Journey: Slow Food in the Heartland Friese, Paper, $26.95, ISBN 978-1-8881603-6-9, September, Cooking/Travel, Ice Cube Press

Iowa City chef embarks on a journey around the Midwest and chronicles a variety of Slow Food Movements. This includes micro-breweries in Ann Arbor and smoked trout from Lake Superior region. Readers will be amazed at the remarkable diversity of culinary offerings of the Midwest. This book is a delight.

Winter Sky: New and Selected Poems, 1968-2008 Barks, Cloth, $26.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-3237-6, November, Poetry, University of Georgia

Coleman Barks is well-known as the translator of 13^th century mystical poet Jalal Al-Din Rumi. Barks has reached a devoted and inspired worldwide audience with his translations of Rumi’s work. Here is a luminous collection of over 400 pages of Bark’s own playful poetry.

Gallery Ghost: Find the Ghost Who Paints the Most Nilsen, Cloth, $17.95, ISBN 978-1-59960-036-9. August, Children’s/Art, Birdcage Press

Something spooky is happening at the museum. At night the ghosts of 24 famous artists come out to play. Published in association with National Gallery in Washington, DC, it features 24 of their greatest masterpieces. This book will provide hours of fun for kids 7 and up, as they learn about each artist and their paintings through poems and stories.

Waters of Michigan Dempsey, Cloth, $29.95, ISBN 978-0870138300, April, Photography/Regional, Michigan State University Press

80 duotone illustrations present Michigan's greatest resource as seen through the lens of a camera.

Pittsburgh to Publish a Panorama of 19th Century Printed Views of the City

Historical print and antique map expert Christopher W. Lane has put together a stunning collection of reproductions of various views of the Pittsburgh, PA from books, magazines, illustrated newspapers, lithographs, and other types of material from the 19th century. A Panorama of Pittsburgh: Nineteenth-Century Printed Views offers 140 full-color illustrations, and is published in conjunction with the Frick Art and Historical Center in Pittsburgh. The book offers various views of Pittsburgh, from an idyllic little village on a confluence of rivers in 1817, to the Great Conflagration in April, 1845 where over 1,000 houses burned to the ground. We see the development of Pittsburgh as an industrial powerhouse and how this was depicted in everything from fine art to advertising materials.

2008 is the 250th anniversary of the founding of Pittsburgh in 1758. This book is a fitting tribute, and belongs on the shelf next to the classic book University of Pittsburgh Press published originally in 1990, Arthur G. Smith’s Pittsburgh Then and Now. Lane’s book is an instant classic as he provides visual and written examples of prints, and he has provided here the most comprehensive listing of depictions of Pittsburgh ever assembled.

Prometheus Books to publish rare Mark Twain collection

S.T. Joshi has done it again. He’s come up with an incredible collection of uncommon writings by Mark Twain in What Is Man? And Other Irreverent Essays. As an editor and literary sleuth Joshi, an independent scholar who has edited collections of great American writers such as H.L. Mencken and H.P. Lovecraft, among others, has weeded out key writings by Twain on religion. Reminiscent of the French Enlightenment writer Voltaire, Twain had an unbounded contempt for religious hypocrisy and obstructionism. He peppered his essays with a razor sharp satirical wit, and his writing is characteristically sardonic and humorous in these essays.

Many of the essays in this book have not been readily available before, and Joshi provides helpful annotations to explain various historical, literary and religious references. The main essay in the book is What Is Man? (1906), a long philosophical dialogue about the nature of religion, where Twain asserts that altruism does not exist, that every human action is the product of outside influences, and we help others primarily as a means to make ourselves comfortable. Twain condemns religious exclusivity, the dreadful treatment of animals by a supposedly moral human race, and what he calls the hypocritical Christian thirst for money. Twain pulls no punches here, as he did in the posthumous collection of his writings, Letters from the Earth.

Although Twain maintained until the end of his life that he believed in God, he expressed a deep skepticism toward such religious beliefs as “special Providence” (God’s interference in the affairs of individuals), the concept of hell, the religious basis of morality, and the divine inspiration of the Bible. He had serious concerns about central religious tenants, and it’s clear that these weighed on his mind for much of his life. Twain’s family was uncomfortable with some of his writings (for instance, Letters from the Earth was not published until 1962, well after his death in 1910), and editor Joshi and Prometheus Books have done readers a great service by bringing Twain’s obscure but lively philosophical writings on religion to a wider audience.

There are many surprises to be had in any Twain collection, he was an undisputed master of many styles of writing, and Joshi provides a comprehensive introduction that elucidates Twain’s shifting attitudes towards religion in general. What we have here is a true American original, Mark Twain, thought by many to be the Father of American Literature, taking a straight aim at the multifarious claims of religion – metaphysical, moral and political – and exposing what he saw as their fallacies and deliberate obscurantism.



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Tennessee revisits its Vernacular Architecture series with a powerhouse Victorian Studies book

Anna Vemer Andrzejewski is an assistant professor of art history at University of Wisconsin at Madison and she had written an unusual and innovative book about how surveillance played a key role in the building of prisons in 19th century America, and how this dynamic spilled over into the construction of post offices, factories, offices, and even houses. Building Power: Architecture and Surveillance in Victorian America shows how surveillance influenced a diverse array of the built environment in this country from roughly 1865 to 1918. She goes so far to say that surveillance not only motivated a range of common buildings but also was and is a defining practice of modernism.

French philosopher Michel Foucault is the author of Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, and the classic Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, and his ideas are what informs Andrzejewski’s arguments. Foucault wrote extensively about the idea of ever-present gaze and control, and the kind of insidious power that “reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives.” The argument is complex and way too multilayered to paraphrase here, to say nothing of the fact that it’s been translated from the French, but Foucault also goes back to English political philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s central idea of the Panopticon, that is, a building, as a prison, hospital, library, or the like, so arranged that all parts of the interior are visible from a single point.

Andrzejewski’s title and the very concept of Building Power is an interesting play on words, a reference to Foucault’s panoptic theory. Even so, she builds and expands on Foucault’s creative arguments and illustrates how diverse American spaces were built with close scrutiny in mind in Victorian America, and how this complicated landscape influenced all aspects of everyday life and the principles of modernism. The book is illustrated with 80 photographs, and, according to architectural historian Ken Breisch from the University of Southern California, Andrzejewski’s “comparative method is original and yields new insight into the widespread role of surveillance in American life.”

1968 Games in Mexico City are recalled in a new book

As the 2008 Olympic Games heat up in Beijing, China in August, it’s educational and extremely important to look back and see how other Olympic Games fared. That’s why the new book from Kevin B. Witherspoon is so important. It’s aptly named Before the Eyes of the World: Mexico and the 1968 Olympic Games. It reminds me how edgy countries can be when they take the international stage and host the games. In 1972 in Munich, the Germans botched security and allowed a disaster to ensue when Israeli athletes were held hostage and ultimately killed by a Palestinian terror group. The Germans did not know what to do, and even restarted the games in the face of a hostage crisis. Mexico in 1968 had its serious problems as well, and Witherspoon, a professor of history at Lander University in South Carolina, highlights the intersection of sports held on an international stage with the historical, political and social climate of 1968.

The “Mexican miracle” of the previous twenty years came to a screeching halt in Thatelolco, a neighborhood in Mexico City where riot policeman gunned down hundreds of peaceful student demonstrators in cold blood. These protests were part of an international student movement for peace and reform, and Mexico’s President at the time, Gustavo Diaz Ortiz, was determined to stop the protests at all costs. It gives pause to think if the government of China today might not stop at mass murder to allow the games to go on without a seeming hitch. Appearances can be deadly, and the desire for apparent normalcy in the games, and the idea of the splendor of the host country can reach proportions of sheer mania. Reading Witherspoon’s account of what happened in Mexico will offer valuable perspectives.

Racism took center stage in Mexico when award-winning American Olympic runners Tommie Smith (gold metal) and John Carlos (bronze metal) raised their black-gloved fists in the Black Power salute while on the Olympic stand. This gesture galvanized the Civil Rights movement and became a lasting symbol of struggle of African Americans for their freedom and self-determination. Smith poignantly recounts the backlash and death threats he received after the protest in his cool autobiography from Temple University Press called Silent Gesture, written with David Steele, a sports columnist for The Baltimore Sun. This simple act has become an iconic image in Olympic history.

Witherspoon recounts how the cold war between the USA and USSR was played out at the Mexico games, and various machinations that took place. There were protests over whether South Africa should be allowed to compete because of their policy of Apartheid. In addition to this, the pollution in China today that is reported to possibly threaten to mar the games and affect the athletes ability to perform, is recalled in the Mexico games because of the high elevation and thin air in Mexico City. The 1968 games were also the first to introduce drug testing of athletes. All in all, we have a fascinating history of the 1968 games, and Allen Guttman, sports history expert and professor of English at Amherst College, calls Witherspoon’s book, “one of the best books I have read on Olympic sports.”

Enjoy the games, but take an instructive look back with Witherspoon’s excellent history and come to know what transpired beforehand. The book is published by Northern Illinois University Press in De Kalb.

The vagaries of history come through loud and clear in two new books from Brookings

History is a tricky thing to ignore, and it tends to repeat itself under different guises. A poignant new book, just being issued in paperback from Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Brookings, distributor), is Savage Century: Back to Barbarism, by French global affairs expert Thérèse Delpech. The critics raved about this one, as Rolf Ekéus reminds us “contemporary leaders of the West {are} sleepwalking into the new century without any strategic concepts and suffering from collective historical amnesia.” Ekéus is a former UN official with experience in Iraq, and currently serves as a commissioner with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Delpech is a French academic, and director of strategic affairs with the French Atomic Energy Commission.

You might not expect a book that’s been described as philosophical, psychological, or even literary from a professor of International Relations, but this book vividly reminds us that clear warning signs were ignored, and the “civilized” world failed to prevent two world wars, the Holocaust, the Soviet death camps, the Cambodian killing fields, and a host of other atrocities that plagued the 20th century. Delpech warns that these things can easily happen again, and she describes various flashpoints throughout the world where violence and lawlessness could slip out of control. There’s a “fierce argument against repeating the mistakes that have led to our dire straits,” says Peter Brooks, professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University.

Continuing with Brookings French connection, we have a new book by Hubert Védrine, author of a previous book from Brookings called France in an Age of Globalization (2001), with Dominique Moïsi, translated from the French by Philip H. Gordon, a senior fellow at Brookings. The new book is called History Strikes Back: How States, Nations and Conflicts are Shaping the 21st Century. This is also translated by Gordon, and carries a foreword by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. It was a bestseller in France. Védrine offers an overview of world politics since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and he illustrates the pitfalls that the U.S. has experienced in their erroneous beliefs that with the collapse of the East bloc they had won a complete battle of history. Védrine thinks that the U.S. has been too bellicose in dealing with the world, and the Europeans have been too meek to overcome such daunting challenges as relations with emerging powers, managing runaway globalization, and dealing with the devastation of the environment. Nations still matter in Védrine’s brave new world, and this is a hyper-realistic look at the past, and it shows how Westerners have been misguided by illusions that globalization and free markets will ultimately make a better world for everybody. Leaders need a good tonic of history and common sense to fashion a better world, and Védrine lays out for Europeans what they can expect from the new U.S. Administration to come. He lays out his arguments with an acerbic wit and a French sensibility that will reward readers with a renewed sense of “Realpolitik.”

Two books that offer a much-needed historical perspective on presidential elections

Click here for an interesting report on a late-breaking development from the 2004 election in Ohio
http://www.velvetrevolution.us/electionstrikeforce/2008/07/ohio_attorney_files_motion_to.html

The presidential election in Ohio in 2004 is still very much in dispute, as the link above will attest. Electronic tabulations of votes are clearly wide open to manipulation and fraud, and this is one of the most under-reported stories in the country. The New York Times recently ran an editorial in its July 16 issue stressing the need for a paper trial in elections to verify votes (even these election receipts need to carefully checked, according the book, The Machinery of Democracy: Protecting Elections in an Electronic World, by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU, since hackers are becoming increasingly sophisticated). http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/16/opinion/16wed1.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=%22Check+That+Vote%22+&st=nyt&oref=slogin

Kansas is putting out two books by eminent historians as part of their series, American Presidential Elections. A recent book in this series, Electing FDR: The New Deal Campaign of 1932, by Donald A. Ritchie won the George Pendleton Prize. The forthcoming books have strong relevance to our time, and can be extremely instructive and enlightening reading as the campaign season for 2008 starts up in earnest after Labor Day. By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876, by Michael F. Holt, a professor of American History at University of Virginia, outlines this key election between the ultimate winner, Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican, and Samuel Tilden, a Democrat who actually won the popular vote (shades of the infamous 2000 election between Bush and Gore). In fact, the Hayes defeat of Tilden by one electoral vote was dubbed “the fraud of the century.” Professor Holt is a first-rate scholar of the period, having done previous books on the Whig Party, and the lead up to the American Civil War. He looks for answers to what exactly happened and why. He shows how the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives erred in the timing of admitting Colorado into the Union, when without its votes in the mix Tilden would have won. He notes there was a huge turnout in the election, as fears of a Confederate takeover of the government were successfully stoked by the Republicans. In fact, this election helped establish the label GOP for the Republicans, and the outcome was particularly notable as the Republicans were able to hold onto the presidency in the midst of a severe economic depression, after having lost the congressional elections of 1874. Professor Holt shows that the specter of the Civil War was still very much hovering over the American people, and he manages to convey the political mood of the country in that time, in what is being called “a masterly retelling of this controversial episode.”

Minority Victory: Gilded Age Politics and the Front Porch Election of 1888, by Charles W. Calhoun, a professor of History at East Carolina University, is another example of an incident where the ultimate winner won the election in the Electoral College, while losing the popular vote. This election was hotly contested, as Professor Calhoun outlines, in a horse race between incumbent President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, and his Republican challenger, Benjamin Harrison. It is said that Harrison was a firebrand campaigner, and could give a dozen riveting speeches on different subjects in a single day. The front porch campaign reference in the title of the book is to Harrison’s penchant for espousing his views almost daily from a front porch for visiting voters and reporters. Professor Calhoun notes that this campaign set an important precedent for future campaigns, leading up to the present day. It also shows how economics played a significant role in politics and in the election, and how Harrison as President adopted innovative new leadership strategies and governing techniques, including extensive travel, legislative intervention, and a focus on foreign affairs that would be a forerunner to modern times.

Harrison was the grandson of the 9th President William Henry Harrison, who died in office after only 31 days. He was what is called a “one term wonder,” as Cleveland came roaring back in the election of 1892 and recaptured the White House with the popular vote and the Electoral College counts. Another interesting thing about Harrison he is the subject of an enduring song from a cool Walt Disney movie from 1968 called The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band. That movie has an awesome soundtrack, with songs written by Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman, including the classic song, “Ten Feet Off the Ground.” There is a scene where competing Democrats and Republicans sing festive campaign songs in the heat of the 1888 election, even though this happens in the Dakota Territory which has yet to claim statehood. “Let’s Put It Over With Grover” is paired with “Oh, Benjamin Harrison,” which has the classic refrain, “Oh, Benjamin Harrison, you’re far beyond comparison …” For more information about this movie, click here
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063389/plotsummary

As the 2008 election intensifies between Democratic Senator Barack Obama and Republican Senator John McCain, it is instructive to go back and look at previous elections, even if it is through these two fascinating books, the ongoing controversy over the 2004 election that is making the news, or through an old Hollywood movie that teaches us various things about the past and entertains.

Lament for the White Haven Motor Lodge

I have been staying at the White Haven Inn in the greater Kansas City area for twenty years. I was checking out today and I told the proprietor I would see her when the snow flies next time around, and she told me nope, she had sold the place. This after 51 years in business and 4 generations of the same family running it: -- is someone going to keep it open, I asked her. She told me the buyers were going to knock it down. It’s really a shame because the place is an icon.

I once told another sales rep about how I always stay at the White Haven, and he replied, “Oh, Eric, you’re so old-school!” That’s what the place was, my friends, a real throwback to the 1950s. It features real keys with the room number etched in on a copper plate; walk-in closets; Rococo furniture and antique fixtures; leaded glass windows in every room; a grandiose neon sign in the front that belongs in a book about kitsch; free coffee and donuts in the morning for 5 cents; a swimming pool; a gazebo in the back courtyard; rooms of various sizes, but all the rooms were oversize; and the friendliest service you’ll ever expect to get anywhere. They know me by name, and all I had to do was call up and say I was coming, and they made me welcome with no credit numbers necessary.

Someone told me that the White Haven Inn was one of the original motels in the Kansas City area. The place is a compound with two sprawling buildings and two parking lots, located on Metcalf Avenue and 80th Street in the City of Overland Park, Kansas. A really fine location, on a main drag: -- some of the houses around the joint are built in the same style, and were clearly constructed at the same time. There’s a permanent sense to the place, and it shocked me that it was going to be knocked down. I lingered at breakfast this morning in the gazebo and wondered at how progress can sometimes be bad.

I’m sure the place is really hard to maintain. You don’t ever get a break, the proprietor told me. Christmas, New Year’s, Thanksgiving you are always on call; people staying all the time. She was looking forward to freedom, and she said the next time she sees me she wants it to be in a bar! But I’m going to miss this place, and after October 1, 2008 it’s going to be toast.

There was another place that I had less of a personal connection with, but I thought also had great character: the New Tower Inn on Dodge and 72nd Street in Omaha, NE. It was almost a village onto itself, and I remember the swimming pool was in a separate building in the front parking lot. The rooms had outside entrances going all along two sides, and there may have been other buildings on the grounds as well. There was also an incredibly long hallway with poor lighting, and you could reach the rooms from the inside in the winter. The breakfast place was funky, and it had some wonderfully eccentric neighborhood characters in there every morning. The motel was pretty rundown in spots, but had a real urban feel to it that I really appreciated.

The thing that was most memorable about the place was the bar called the Crystal Tree. It had the original crystal tree from the Hollywood set of the Julie Andrews Hour on ABC TV in 1972. I remember I really liked that show when I was in high school. It was a really cool place to have a drink late at night. It was delightfully cheesy, and it was located in its own building next to the pool. http://www.tv.com/the-julie-andrews-hour/show/6816/summary.html

I never used to make a reservation whenever I want to Omaha. The New Tower Inn was so huge they always had rooms, and I would show up at any hour and I was always accommodated there. One time I went and the place was razed! I remember it was during the day and I drove around and I just couldn’t believe it. They built another strip mall there. Just what the City of Omaha needed, another strip mall!

Texas is coming out with another great book from photographer Keith Carter

A Certain Alchemy is the name of Keith Carter’s new book. It has an introduction by Bill Wittliff, another renowned Texas photographer who founded the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University – San Marcos, and is the author of the recent bestselling book from University of Texas Press, A Book of Photographs from Lonesome Dove. There is also an afterword by Patricia Carter, Keith’s wife, who offers another perspective on his work. Carter has made himself a major name in fine art photography circles in the last twenty-odd years, and this new book will attest to his relentless creativity. Photography has to do with what is chosen to be inside the frame, what is left out of the frame, how the image is lighted, and what the perspective is, among other things. Carter has been called a “poet of the ordinary” and he has taken mundane happenings around his home in East Texas and made these seemingly everyday things look extraordinary. His photographs of animals are legendary, see the book he did with Texas in 2000 called Ezekiel’s Horse (Booklist called the book, “Majestic, intelligent, sculptural”), and here he does not disappoint readers. He expands his range of subjects and locations to put together a gallery of photographs that is haunting, arresting, and attempts to seeks out the profound hidden meanings of the real world.

You can view photographs by Carter and get some deep background on this key artist by going to his web site http://www.keithcarterphotographs.com/ -- a Keith Carter book is always entertaining to look at closely, and you never know quite what to expect from his camera. A Certain Alchemy is his tenth book, and here we see a visual artist at the absolute top of his game.

Minnesota to publish a book on radical Serbian filmmaker Dušan Makavejev

Lorraine Mortimer is a social science lecturer from Melbourne (La Trobe University), and she has written a critical assessment of the films of Makavejev, Terror and Joy: The Films of Dušan Makavejev. Amazingly, this is the first book-length critical study of this key Serbian filmmaker. The book spans his career from 1965 to 1994.

Man Is Not a Bird (1965) is an amazing film, his first feature, and the film "blends actuality with fiction in a manner so unselfconscious as to seem almost natural …” according to International Film Guide.

WR: Mysteries of an Organism (1971) is an offbeat, counter-cultural classic. Inspired by the writings and life of Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, the WR in the title, Makavejev describes it as "a black comedy, political circus, a fantasy on the fascism and communism of human bodies, the political life of human genitals, a proclamation of the pornographic essence of any system of authority and power over others...If you watch for more than five minutes, you become my accomplice." It’s interesting to note that Tuli Kupferberg, legendary beat poet and band leader of the 1960s group The FUGS, has a role in the film.

Sweet Movie (1974) helped establish Makavejev as “one of cinema's most controversial, original and exciting directors,” according to Facets Multimedia in Chicago. This is one hard-to-find movie, since it was banned in several countries, and helped get Makavejev exiled from Serbia for close to 15 years. Facets has several Makavejev films in their video collection, among which is an early experimental film called Innocence Unprotected (1968). This film is described by Facets as a “cinematic collage” that is “a funny and daring (in both content and form) mix of a wide variety of film footage--including documentary, narrative, agitprop, and various other bits and pieces of found footage.”

Any Makavejev film is going to be interesting to watch, especially the early ones. He did make an attempt at doing a Hollywood film. In Australia, he directed The Coca Cola Kid (1985), starring Eric Roberts and Greta Scacchi. That was a pretty entertaining film, his stab at doing a romantic comedy, but it ultimately failed at the box office.

Mortimer’s book is a groundbreaking look at seven of Makavejev’s films, and she puts his films in historical context with political upheavals such as World War II, the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the fall of communism. True to the spirit of Makavejev, Morimer takes what the publisher calls “a radically interdisciplinary approach” in her critical assessment of Makavejev’s work. Complete with 25 b/w photos, this should be one cool book.

For more information about Makavejev, along with an extensive interview with the director and lots more information, visit this web site http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/11/makavejev.html

Catholic University of America Press to publish a key 19th Century Spanish novel

Juan Valera’s The Illusions of Doctor Faustino (Las illusions del doctor Faustino) came out in 1875, and was considered to be one of the most important novels of its time in Spain. It was favorably compared to Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education (L’Education sentimentale) because of the negative affect of Romanticism on Faustino’s life. Valera had written a blockbuster the year before, Pepita Jiménez, and that book clearly established Valera as a writer of brilliant prose. This previous book deals realistically with the struggle between love and religion in an ardent young man who is studying for the priesthood, and who falls desperately in love with the title character, who is supposed to marry his widowed father. Valera takes it one step further with Doctor Faustino’s character, who seems to be unlucky in love at every turn, through no fault of his own. His love life is a series of nonstarters and missed opportunities, as he either scorns or is scorned by three different women in the course of his life. The story starts out in Andalusia, in Southern Spain, and then moves on to Madrid, where the denouement takes place and Faustino meets his sad end in a Romantic malaise.

This edition is deftly translated by Robert M. Fedorchek, a professor emeritus of Spanish at Fairfield University., with an introduction by Agnes Money, a professor of Spanish at Temple University. Fedorchek is a veteran translator, and he previously translated another Valera book for CUA Press in 2006, Juanita la Larga. According to an expert, Harriet S. Turner, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, “Fedorchek’s translation of Juanita la Larga captures the light, sinuous line of the original Spanish. In a masterly series of sleights of hand—transpositions, pauses, and ellipses—Fedorchek informs his translation with the wit, delicacy, and playfulness of Valera’s novel." It is evident that Fedorcheck does the same thing with The Illusions of Doctor Faustino, and allows English readers a rare opportunity to encounter a classic Spanish-language work.

Personal Struggles and Triumphs Can Make For Great Reading

Ohio University Press published a pioneering book in 1997 with Linda Spence’s Legacy: A Step-By-Step Guide to Writing Personal History. The book was designed to prod a story out of people about the different phases of their lives. The focus was on getting older people to talk about their experiences, and the end-result was a set of writing that was “mesmerizing and revelatory,” according to Booklist. A new book along the same lines is coming out from Ohio, it's called Catching Stories: A Practical Guide to Oral History. The book has five authors, all of whom are professional historians and researchers: -- Donna M. DeBlasio, director of the Center for Applied History at Youngstown State University; Charles F. Ganzert, a communications professor at Northern Michigan University; Davis M. Mould, a research dean at Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University; Stephen H. Paschen, an archivist and librarian at Kent State University; Howard L. Sacks, director of the Rural Life Center at Kenyon College. These experts tell readers with little or no experience how to plan and implement an oral history project. These are the kind of stories from everyday people that the media and certain history books tend to overlook. The guide is practical in that it tells readers everything thing they need to know, from recording devices, legal issues, and the interview process, that will assist readers in the important work of documenting memories, and in collecting the stories of community and family. This book should find a place on library shelves and in bookstores across the country.

University of Washington Press is all over the Map, and loving it from Seattle

From Coulee Dam to the Monterey coast, from the far-flung territories of Native American art to a quaint hillside garden in Seattle, from the frontlines in the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s to the origins of the Shan state in Myanmar, this university press continues a tradition of eclectic excellence in its seasonal book offerings.

There is an eerie Thai mystery, featuring the ace detective Father Ananda, in a book distributed for Silkworm Books called Killer Karma by Nick Wilgus, chief sub-editor for the “Outlook” section of the Bangkok Post. A grisly spectacle of ghostly heads bobbing on the surface of the sea attracts a crowd near Wat Phloi, a tiny monastery on the coast of Chanthaburi Province in central Thailand. Ananda, an urban monk and former Bangkok police officer, is sent to investigate. This becomes his most challenging case to date, and he is accompanied by Jak, a former temple boy, who assists the good Father in unraveling the case. Wilgus’ previous books include Adventures of Birdshit Foreigner under the pen name of Sulayman X. Previous books in the Father Ananda series are Mindfulness and Murder and Garden of Hell, both available from Silkworm through Washington. Booksellers and librarians should order up.

Towards the back of the Washington catalog for those readers with curiosity and perseverance there is a really interesting book distributed for UNSW Press (University of New South Wales Press in Australia). The F Word: How We Learned to Swear by Feminism by Jane Caro and Catherine Fox is a topical new book that addresses the crucial work/life balance that women face in Western society. They dispel the idea that the balancing act women go through as they juggle work and family is a no-win situation for them. In vivacious prose they offer practical suggestions for effectively combining work and social life with parenting and marriage for women. There are a range of women profiled here that provide readers with a big picture, and the book helps women in forgiving themselves, having fun and not giving up while holding it all together. The cover hangs its hat on a big lowercase F, along with a brassier, a frying pan, and a brief case. See the cover: http://www.unswpress.com.au/isbn/9780868408231.htm

Books from Washington referred to above are B Street: Notorious Playground of Coulee Dam by Lawney L. Reyes. This is Reyes’ memoir of growing up in the Depression-era in and around the town where the Grand Coulee Dam was built. The Reyes’ were a mixed-race family of a Indian mother and a Filipino father and they faced racism as white workers on the dam came after-hours to the bars and the brothels along B Street to let off steam after a grueling work day. Based on his own experience and those of his little sister, Luana, and from his mother’s diary and stories told to him by his parents and members of the Sin-Aikst tribe, this is a fascinating and important document about a way of life that was irrevocably changed forever when the Grand Coulee Dam was built.

In Shaping the Shoreline: Fisheries and Tourism on the Monterey Coast, Connie Y. Chiang, explores the history and development of this key town, which was the setting for John Steinbeck’s classic novel, Cannery Row. What makes this book distinctive is that this is an environmental history of a key region that pays as much attention to human interactions as it does changes in the natural world. She draws on such hot-button issues of race and class, and integrates it with how events in the outside world affected the town and overall region. Monterey began as a quaint seaside resort and developed into a fishing center, as Steinbeck wrote about it in Cannery Row, and then a world-class aquarium was built and this turned the town into a tourism powerhouse. This is being called “a compelling narrative” by Carol McKibben, author of Beyond Cannery Row, and by Richard White of Sanford University says this is “a revealing story of people of Monterey and the sea that gave them life.”

Judith Ostrowitz, the author of Privileging the Past: Reconstructing History in Northwest Coast Art (Washington, 1999), provides a close reading of the contemporary art of native tribes such as Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshain in her new book, Interventions: Native American Art for Far-Flung Territories. These artists cross borders and boundaries in more ways than one, and many are from Canadian First Nation groups, along with their native counterparts in the States. Among many key issues discussed in this thought-provoking book, Ostrowitz explores the impact of modernity on Indian art, and the extraordinary use of the Internet to establish an Indian territory there. This has to do with complex issues dealing with construction of self-identity, and a wacky update to what was previous known as Indian Country. Native American art is becoming more and more familiar to the mainstream art world, and Ostrowitz offers what is being called “an invaluable and timely contribution to the increasingly complex debates around Northwest Coast Native Art” (Charlotte Townsend-Gault, University of British Columbia). Janet Catherine Berlo of University of Rochester pegged it when she said Ostrowitz’s “first-rate” book “brings many intellectual worlds together.” “Interventions” appears to be an apt title for this ground-breaking book.

Streissguth Gardens is a hillside park in the City of Seattle that was founded by a couple who work at University of Washington there. Daniel Streissguth is a Architecture and Urban Planning professor, and his wife Ann is a professor in the School of Medicine, and an avid gardener. Together with their son Benjamin, the Streissguth family worked diligently over 40 years to convert a steep forested hillside in the heart of Seattle into a beautiful woodland garden with vistas of the city and lake. In an engaging narrative, In Love With a Hillside Garden, they discuss their philosophy of creating a green park in the middle of the city, and they describe the process in detail about how they achieved their dreams. There are 147 color illustrations in an oversize 7 x 10 format, with 128 pages in paperback. This beautiful book should travel well beyond the city limits of Seattle, and be a source of inspiration for readers in cities around the globe who would like to try this very thing.

There are several books published every year about the American civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s and the various things occurred during that tumultuous time period. The High Museum of Art in Atlanta is publishing a riveting photography book on the period called Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968 by Julian Cox, a curator at the museum. The introduction is by Charles Johnson, a professor at University of Washington, and Congressman John L. Lewis, a key civil rights leader at the time, provides the afterword. The 120 unforgettable images in the book are by many different photographers – photojournalists, artists, activists and amateurs. This book is a significant visual record of some of the key events that took place then, such as the Freedom Rides of 1961, the Birmingham hosings of 1963, and the Selma to Montgomery March of 1965. This is a fascinating collection of images that speaks directly to the struggle of another generation as they helped to change the nation for themselves and their children.

The Shan people in Myanmar (formerly Burma) are one of the largest and most influential ethnic groups in the country. They settled in the rugged eastern part of the country, the Shan Plateau in the first century, CE from their native China. Sai Aung Tun, a historian and native of the Shan, is writing a useful and fascinating history of the region and its people. History of the Shan State: From Its Origins to 1962, published by Silkworm Books, describes how the Shan dominated the political stage in the country for several years, and how they played an important part after World War II in gaining independence from the British and creating an autonomous state. Sai Aung Tun does a remarkable job of tracing the cultural and political history of the Shan from their immigrant origins to the constitutional crisis of 1962. He highlights the period of 1946 to 1962, and discusses the historic Second Pang Long Conference in 1947 where all nationalities in Myanmar agreed to work together for independence. He concludes with an account of the military coup in 1962. This book provides a sorely needed historical perspective on Myanmar, and will help readers gain a greater understanding and insight to current events unfolding there today.

Readers of all stripes are encouraged to get a hard copy of Washington’s Fall 2008 catalog, or go to their website http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/ to view some really cool books.

The Underground Railroad Comes to Vibrant Life in a New Book from Mississippi

Passage on the Underground Railroad is an arresting book of color photographs by Stephen Marc, a professor of art in the Herberger College of Art at Arizona State University. Click here for a sample of these remarkable photographs: http://herbergercollege.asu.edu/marc/montages.html -- some are montages and others are composites, and you can view samples of both on this cool website. Mississippi aptly describes Marc’s digital photographs as “thought-provoking, unconventional, and haunting.” Detailed captions and multilayered narrative photographs weave together various elements from the landscape of slavery. The freedom sites along the Underground Railroad are also depicted in this book, and there is an essay by Diane Miller, director of the Network to Freedom division of the National Park Service. There is also an interview with Marc by Carla Williams, editor of the journal exposure. An essay by Keith Griffler, a professor of African American Studies at SUNY - Buffalo, rounds out the book. The horror and historical drama of slavery is rendered powerfully in this book, as Marc embarked on a seven year journey photographing the route of runaway slaves. This is one photographer’s evocative interpretation of the history and places along the slave’s path to freedom. This book is a potent combination of photographic innovation and historical documentation.

Iowa Press Celebrates Its Very Own

In November 2008, University of Iowa Press is publishing two fascinating reprints by Iowa native sons. The first is Prairie City, Iowa: Three Seasons at Home by novelist/teacher Douglas Bauer. This was originally published in 1982 by the now defunct Iowa State University Press. The book is a memoir of returning home to Prairie City, a town East of Des Moines in central Iowa. Philip Lopate called this book “one of the finest books about place I know.” Bauer spent time in Des Moines working for Better Homes and Gardens, and then in Chicago working as an editor and writer for Playboy Magazine. In 1975 he returned home to work on his father’s farm and to mingle with people in his hometown. The reviews say it all, this book is a regional classic: -- according to Bill Bryson, “Kindly, shrewd and endlessly absorbing – this is as good as a book gets.” The Des Moines Sunday Register said, “Bauer’s book is, at least, the most brilliant report of an Iowa small town ever written …” This book is neither wistful nostalgia nor a harsh look at those who choose to stay on in a small town (so-called Stay Morons), but a unsentimental and loving account of life in a small Midwestern town. This could be a town anywhere.

John Madson is considered to be the father of the modern prairie restoration movement, and his book Out Home is a collection of essays on hunting, fishing and wildlife management, originally published in 1979. Iowa previously reprinted Madson’s brilliant book, Where the Sky Began: Land of the Tallgrass Prairie, called “a lovely little study” by the New York Times, and “instructive and entertaining” by the New Yorker, and now they are following up with this gem of a book. The essays herein were originally penned for such venues as Sports Afield, Outdoor Life, Audubon, and Guns and Ammo. Madson died in 1995, and the Kansas City Star said of his books, “Reading Madson is like reading some of his more illustrious and heady predecessors in the American experience … namely Emerson and Thoreau.” This is the first paperback edition of these ageless wilderness tales. All readers and writers of natural history need to take notice of this amazing book.

Message on the eve of Book Expo America, 2008

As we head into the Book Expo America convention in Los Angeles this week, recent press reports about the possible acquisition of Borders Group, Inc. by Barnes and Noble has fueled fires of speculation. If federal authorities allow the sale to go through, and if shareholders of both companies agree to it, the bookstore landscape in the United States could be forever altered. Is this ultimately a bad thing? It would not be as bad if BGI were to declare bankruptcy and effectively go out of business. In that event many publishers across the country would be inundated with returns from them, and BGI’s ability to return books is legion. So if there were to be a merger of B&N and BGI that would create one colossal account, and while this would be awkward, it would simply be another blip in the big box retail landscape, with bookstores joining hardware stores, drug stores, pet stores and grocery stores in having huge national retail brands.

This occurrence would actually be a good opportunity for smaller regional chains and independent store owners across the country. Big box retailers cannot be all things to all people, and the establishment of one giant bookstore chain across the country will have wide-ranging cultural repercussions. Given the idea that having a bookstore is the ultimate form of self-expression for people, bookstores of all kinds would be able to continue concentrating on customer service, reach out to local readers, and become important destinations in their communities. They could strengthen their core businesses while the two behemoths struggle with their acquisition and with pleasing their stock holders. The rising price of gasoline may be another factor for people to shop closer to where they live, and not getting into the car to motor to free-standing shopping centers, where many big box retailers have their locations.

The various fortunes of super-sized bookstores in the marketplace is always a fascinating thing to watch, but too much of a good thing can be counterproductive. A B&N-BGI amalgamation could easily backfire and cancel itself out. Meanwhile, the market for books in the United States would proceed abated.

Kentucky Press to publish Hollywood Under Seige

University Press of Kentucky is taking an interesting turn with its distinguished film studies list with the August 08 publication of Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, the Religious Right and the Culture Wars, by Thomas R. Lindlof, a professor of journalism at University of Kentucky. Lindlof explores the major controversy surrounding the release of the movie The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988, and how the Christian right in America galvanized itself around the issue of a single sex scene in the movie between Jesus of Nazareth and Mary Magdelene. Lindlof sees the moral outrage and publicity uproar surrounding the release of the film as a tipping point in the American culture wars.

The film was directed by Martin Scorsese, from a novel by Nikos Kazantzakis. In 1988 there were protests outside theaters where the film showed, and the film was actually banned in some countries. In Chicago the film played at the famous Biograph Theater on Lincoln Avenue, and my wife and I actually crossed a picket line to see the movie. The picket line had a young girl dressed up as a nun among the protestors, and this was so striking that this girl was featured on the from page of the Chicago Tribune the next day. The Jesus character was played by Wilhem Defoe and Mary Magdelene’s character was portrayed by Barbara Hershey. Everything was quiet during the performance, but when the sex scene between Jesus and Mary came on screen, you could hear the crowd on the street chanting “no, no, no!” The interplay between the film and the street crowd’s timed reaction to events on the screen made for a genuine surreal experience for moviegoers.

The ironic thing about this hullabaloo was that this film was a deeply religious, very personal interpretation of the Kazantzakis novel by director Martin Scorsese. Author Lindlof interviews all the key players involved with the film – Scorsese. Dafoe, screenwriter Paul Schrader, producers Jeffery Katzenberg and Michael Orvitz – and chronicles their many setbacks, from the production problems to the uproar over the release of the film, to the studio’s crisis control plan. Lindlof makes a very strong case that the controlled protests across the country by the Christian right over the release of this movie was the thing that solidified their political efforts, and has far-reaching consequences for today’s political landscape.

NAIPR Economic Message for 2008

“That-that don’t kill me, can only make me stronger ….”
-- Kayne West

Independent reps are the wave of the past, present and future. It’s possible to lose sight of this natural fact in times of economic chaos and the age-old Chinese curse about living in interesting times. There is a slippery slope which self-governing sales agencies can slide down, and more often-than-not they have to work harder just to get back to ground zero. The adversity creates tension and a degree of hopelessness, and I’m here to tell you that acute hardships always create hidden opportunities and build character, and while we may lose money in the short term and be required to cut-back, business can still be viewed as thriving in spite of harsh conditions. Reps are in a unique position to make things happen for themselves, and they need to realize how lucky they are because they control their own destiny and choices. Experience counts for the essential qualities here, and members of our organization know how to weather a storm, and even take special advantage of happenstance and apparent disorder.

Take a look at the history of our profession. We reps go way back to before the American Revolution, and our roots hark back to Europe in the 18th century where a complicated network of book peddlers was established, and the sale of books, maps, clocks, calico, and printed cloths were controlled by entire towns (see the excellent book on the subject: History of Pedlars in Europe by Laurence Fontaine, Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). Understand that we as independent reps have made ourselves indispensable in the world of publishing, and our contacts and ability to make deals is what makes commerce churn in the volatile world of publishing today. We have created NAIPR, an association that speaks with one voice, and yet is unique in and of itself because it is made up maverick characters and specialist human beings who know their own markets intimately and bring various strengths and talents to the big table. Furthermore, our members level the playing field for publishers large and small, for profit and nonprofit book producing organizations, who use our services as their sales and marketing arm. We have something tangible to contribute not only to commerce and the act of selling books to retailers and distributors of every stripe, but also to the broader culture as well. Our role as independent sales agents is time-tested and rock solid, and we are not going to let our publishers, booksellers, families and fellow travelers down as we carry on our core activities.

As President of NAIPR it is my job to try and bring members together and get them to see beyond fierce competition and bitter rivalries, and that we can all benefit from coming together as an organization to prosper. Our web site is a clearinghouse of information about the practicalities of selling on commission; our organization exhibits at Book Expo America and sponsors events and supports regional bookseller associations; we are revising the program of Frontlist-on-Floppy (FROF) to become available on CD ROM and be web-based to offer the most up-to-date information about new and forthcoming titles, that is edited by reps on the ground and is not available from any other source. We are open-minded and open-ended, and we request the honor of hearing from you about what your major concerns are. I have always been preoccupied by history and think we need to honor the key reps who came before us with an Independent Publishers Rep Hall of Fame at the New York Public Library. That is a dream of mine that probably won’t come true during my tenure as association President, but I want to make it clear that NAIPR fills an important place in the book business today, and it is crucial to realize that NAIPR can and will perform a critical functions in the book business of the future.

Eric Miller
President, NAIPR

Paperback verison of a masterful retelling of Icelandic Sagas

Saga: A Novel of Medieval Iceland
By Jeff Janoda

"As focused as Jane Austen, as macabre as Stephen King, Jeff Janoda traces out the hidden springs of power in the micro-society of an Icelandic fjord. He tells a tale of complex feud with all the fullness and detail of a modern novel, but leaves its violent and treacherous heroes as enigmatic as before. A brilliant blend of scholarship and insight."
-- Tom Shippey, author of The Road to Middle-Earth

“Debut novelist Janoda paints a richly textured portrait of Icelandic culture … a gripping recreation of an ancient genre.”
-- Kirkus Reviews


“This detail-rich novel is a retelling of a thirteenth-century Icelandic saga … does what good historical fiction is supposed to do: put a face on history that is recognizable to all.”
-- Brad Hopper, Booklist

Jeff Janoda brings us a masterful retelling of the ancient Saga of the People of Eyri, set in feudal Iceland “the Free State” of 965 AD. Saga tells the story of the savage rituals of feud and sacrifice brought by settlers from Norway, and their new competing beliefs in a democratic legal assembly and a code of restraint.

When Thorolf the Viking trades away his valuable lands to spite his son, Arnkel, the ruthless Norse chieftain vows to regain the land at all costs. Robbed of his rightful inheritance, Arnkel begins a venomous feud with his neighbors and with rival chieftain Snorri – a lawless dispute destined to end in betrayal and death.

Janoda’s characters are eloquently wrought, their passions and pagan beliefs brought to life in a tale over a thousand years old. He renders fantastical elements like spirits and elves as vividly as their human counterparts, illuminating the harshness of life in a society on the brink of modernity, yet isolated in the farthest reaches of the planet.

Medieval expert Tom Shippey says of this book, “Sagas look like novels superficially, in their size and layout and plain language, but making their narratives into novels is a trick which has proved beyond most who have tried it. Janoda’s Saga provides a model of how to do it: pick out the hidden currents, imagine how they would seem to peripheral characters, and as with all historical novels, load the narrative with period detail drawn from the scholars. No better saga adaptation has been yet written.”

June 08 Fiction/Fantasy Paperback $17.95 360 pp 5 ½ x 8 ½ ISBN 13: 978-0-89733-568-3 ISBN 10: 0-89733-568-6 Academy Chicago Publishers

Aacdemy Chicago to publish history of the Jews in Chicago

Avengers and Defenders
Glimpses of Chicago’s Jewish Past

By Walter Roth

The presence of Jews in Chicago goes back to 1841 with the arrival of four Jewish pioneers. Within five years the first synagogue in the city was a reality. Walter Roth, a scholar of Jewish history in the city, looks at the more colorful and little-known aspects of the rich history of Jews and their involvement in all aspects of city life.

In this compelling new collection of essays, Roth looks at trouble in the city – Jewish connections to the Haymarket Bomb tragedy, to the Peoria Street Riots of November 1949, to the Memorial Day Massacre of 1937, to the Iroquois Theater fire, and to the murder of Jake Lingle. In a section called Business in the City, Roth discusses Albert Lasker, the father of modern advertising, Ernest Byfield, founder of the Pump Room, William Paley, the head of CBS, Benjamin Rosenthal and the Chicago Mail Order Company, and the demise of the Foreman State Bank. There are sections on culture in the city (Meyer Levin and Isaac Rosenfeld), and science in the city (Leo Strauss, Martin D Kamen and Gunther Stent). Further sections deal with such subjects as the Mexican adventure of Paul Rothenberg, Shalom Schwartzbard, Julian Marx, and the Lovers of Zion.

“Walter Roth’s meticulous research brings alive in equal measure some of the best-known and least remembered, but fascinating, episodes in Chicago Jewish history. Roth clearly loves Chicago and its Jewish community.”
-- Michael Feldberg, Executive Director, American Jewish Historical Society

Walter Roth is an attorney and President of the Chicago Jewish Historical Society, and author of The Accidental Anarchist and the critically acclaimed Looking Backward: True Stories from Chicago’s Jewish Past, both available from Academy Chicago Publishers.

Academy Chicago to Publish Oral History of Belgium in WWII

Lost in the Fog
Memoir of a Bastard

By Rachel Van Meers as told to Daniel Chase

In 1943, shortly after her 13th birthday, Rachel Van Meers stood on a railway platform in German occupied Belgium waiting for a train that would take her and twenty other girls to a “State Camp for Rehabilitation and Labor” in Wertach, Germany.

I remember my Grandmother wore a black shawl. She told me, “I don’t think I’ll see you back in a month. You never know with the Germans. It can take you two weeks. It can take you three weeks. It can take maybe a year.”

Lost in the Fog is the courageous story of Van Meers, born in a home for unwed mothers in the city of Ghent, Belgium in 1930. Raised in a Flemish working-class district by her strict grandmother, two aunts, and three uncles, Van Meers recounts her struggles growing up “a bastard” in Belgium during the Great Depression. When the war breaks out, Belgium, abandoned by its king, was quickly swallowed up by Germany, and the people were left to fend for themselves against the overwhelming occupying forces, and shattering Allied air strikes. Van Meers was torn between her family’s continuing allegiance to Belgium and her mother, a radical social outcast, who became alienated from the family after she joined the S.S. When a violent argument erupts between Van Meers and her Nazi-sympathizing stepfather, she was sent to a child labor camp in Germany and later returned to witness Belgium turned on its head after the war. Now a strong spirited young woman, she refused to go the way of her mother, or give in to the brutal attacks of her ex-Nazi stepfather. She was eventually able to sustain her independence from her family and emigrate to America in 1961.

This is a rare and personal look at Belgium during one of its most significant periods of history. Van Meers tells her story in plain language with humor and honesty, and is based on hundreds of hours of taped interviews with Daniel Chase, a writer based in Oregon. Van Meers’s unique view of “a family not quite normal” in extraordinary times, her strong faith and refusal to back down in spite of abusive and degrading treatment, being labeled as a bastard at a time when this amounted to complete societal isolation, and her upbeat attitude and singular forms of expression are a joy and inspiration to read.

Rachel Van Meers achieved many milestones in her life. She’s been a maid, a hat check girl, an electronics assembler, and an assistant apartment manager in Belgium, Amsterdam, and in the United States. Now retired, she resides in Oregon and is the matriarch of her family. This is her first book.

Daniel Chase is a freelance writer and editor living in Oregon. He spent most of his youth writing stories with his sister. This is his first book.

IPM Adds Five New Publishers to its Distribution List

International Publishers Marketing (IPM – www.internationalpubmarket.com) out of Sterling, VA has bulked up its distribution offerings for Fall 2008. Dicmar Publishing is from Washington, D.C. and is known locally as the publisher of the lavish book, The Willard Hotel: An Illustrated History, by Richard Wallace Carr and Marie Pinak Carr, a husband and wife team. The Carr’s new project is Prepared Parent’s Operational Manuel: Sending Your Kids to College, where Marie writes this book with her three children, Katherine, Ann and Elizabeth. The book provides comprehensive information for parents getting ready to send their kids off to college. The series is going to expand with college-specific guides in a standardized format: -- guides to Boston University, Texas A&M University, Emory University, and Georgetown University. It’s my understanding that the Carr’s have first-hand experience sending their own kids to these schools.

Garnet Publishing is from England and they specialize in books about the Arab world. They are new to the US market, and they have a surprising depth of offerings. They have two books on Iran: -- Transit Tehran: Young Iran and Its Inspirations, edited by Malu Halasa and Mazier Bahari serves as an introduction to the vibrant artistic and cultural scene in the city: -- the anthology includes fiction, essays, journalism, photography, and rap lyrics. An Eye for Iran is by Kazem Hakimi, a photographer from Shiraz who relocated to London in 1974. This book of photographs is based on a visit he made to the cities of Isfahan, Shiraz, and Mashad in 2004. He documents the immediacy of movements from an Iranian way of life that could be lost forever.

Strokes International is a publisher of language study set that includes DVDs, audio CDs and CD ROMs, all in a high-quality slipcase package. The languages are German, Italian, Spanish, French, Chinese and Arabic. The product were developed by international language experts and are made for self-learners.

Double Storey is a South African publisher that is new to the US market. They have a beautiful book called African Trees: A Photographic Exploration, by Charles Bryant and Brita Lomba. The book is oversize and features gorgeous color photographs that feature trees not as disembodied objects but as living, breathing organisms located in exotic environments and locations throughout Africa. Another book that looks interesting is Spit or Swallow: A Guide for the Wine Virgin, by Jenny Ratciffe-Wright. This is an offbeat look at the mystique of wine and a guide to drinking and appreciating it for fun and pleasure. Wright-Ratcliffe was born into the wine industry, and her mother, Norma Ratcliffe, has the distinction of being South Africa’s first female wine maker.

30 ˚ South Publishers is also from South Africa and they publish a wide variety of books on South African culture, history, memoirs and travel. Manzovo: Place of the Elephants is by Gary Albyn and Craig Bone, a noted wildlife artist. There is a 110 verse poem that is illustrated with Bone’s breathtaking paintings, and it also includes a DVD of the recited poem by John Whiteley, a South African Shakespearean actor. This looks like quite a beautiful package. There are guidebooks to Swaziland, by David Fleminger and The Whale Trial, by Allan Davie, a guide to whale watching in South Africa. Both these books are 4 x 7 with color photographs, and 176 pages, and appear to be solid travel books.

IPM always seems to have intriguing books from its staple of client publishers. There is an early novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz, published by the American University Press in Cairo. AUC Press is Mahfouz’s primary publisher, and this book, Khan Al-Khalili, is translated from the Arabic by Tony Allen, It is billed as a modern Arabic novel, and it is set during the Second World War in Cairo’s bustling, historic KhanAl-Khalili neighborhood. A middle-class family, the Akifs, seek refuge from the ravages of war in the crowded alleyways, busy cafes, and ancient mosques of the Khan, feeling sure the German forces will never bomb such a famously religious part of the city. The story is a family saga played out against a deeply textured portrait of sights, sounds, smells and flavors of the city. This is an engaging and sensitive portrayal of a family at the crossroads of the old world and the new, as only Mafhouz could write it. .

Twilight Visions in Egypt’s Nile Delta, by Ann Parker is a collection of haunting duotone photographs of rural village in Egypt, all taken from the same vantage point. This is Parker’s second book on Egypt; the first one was an award-winning book from Smithsonian Institution Press in 1997, Hajj Paintings: Folk Art of the Great Pilgrimage. In the same way that Parker documented paintings from the Hajj that were painted on outside walls that were ultimately temporary and soon to be lost forever, she captures everyday events in a Nile Delta village crossroads where she patiently sits and waits for what photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson has called “the decisive moment” on the road in front of her, framed by two trees and curtained by hanging branches at sunset. Parker has succeeded in documenting the remains of a rich traditional village lifestyle, and the result is an extraordinary collection of one hundred sepia-toned images filled with the comings and goings of a procession of the village’s people, animals and vehicles.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my friend Jean Riescher Westcott’s new book she is publishing with her husband Sean Westcott, called Digitally Daunted: The Consumer’s Guide to Taking Control of the Technology in Your Life. Capitol Books in Washington, D.C. is the publisher here, and Jean is on staff at IPM. The book is a consumer’s guide par excellence, and is filled with practical information to help educate everyday folks about choosing, using, and maintaining a whole host of gadgets and gizmos. For those of us who are “daunted by specs,” this is a stress-free way to get the most out of technology ranging from computers, phone systems, televisions, cameras, and more.