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.