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   <title>The Chicago Blog: May 2008 Archives</title>

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                     <h2 class="date-header">May 30, 2008</h2>
                     <a id="a001135"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1135">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">Another Palestinian-American scholar struggles for tenure at Columbia</h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/225511.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226509587.jpeg" align="right" height="210" width="150" alt="jacket image" style="padding-laft:10px"></a>We have <a href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/04/14/tenure_as_a_fact_on_the_ground.html">previously noted</a> the tenure battle of Nadia Abu El-Haj, who was granted tenure by Barnard last November after a contentious public dispute. Another Columbia professor&mdash;and Chicago author&mdash;Joseph A. Massad, has been in the grips of a similar tenure controversy for more than a year. Massad is an associate professor of Arab politics in Columbia's  department of Middle East and Asian languages and culture and the author most recently of <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/225511.ctl"><em>Desiring Arabs</em></a>, a study of the representation of sexuality in the Arab world.</p>

<p>Departments of Middle Eastern studies are flash points of controversy at a number of universities and nowhere have the flashes ignited more careers than at Columbia, where off-campus and alumni groups have joined in the discussion. <em>The Chronicle of Higher Education</em> has <a href="http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/05/2974n.htm">an article</a> about Massad's case that gives more details about the controversy as well as contextualizes the conflict in terms of a larger debate "over what constitutes academic freedom" and "whether outside groups should have influence in academic decisions." <br />
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 01:05 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/30/palestinian_american_scholar_struggles_for_tenure.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <a id="a001128"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1128">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">Press Release: US Army, <em>Instructions for American Servicemen in France during World War II</em></h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/251772.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226841724.jpeg" align="right" height="188" width="150" style="padding-left:10px" alt="jacket image"></a></p>

<p>As thousands of G.I.'s fought their way through fierce German resistance along the coast of Normandy on D-Day, they carried in their packs an illustrated pamphlet that told them what they'd find&mdash;and what would be expected of them&mdash;once they had secured their beachholds and begun the liberation of France. </p>

<p>Created by the U.S. War Department under conditions of the highest secrecy&mdash;then lying forgotten in archives for decades after the war&mdash;<a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/251772.ctl"><em>Instructions for American Servicemen in France during World War II</em></a>, presented here in a facsimile edition, is a compact trove of information and reassurance. Written in a comfortable, conversational tone, the book is equal parts propaganda piece, cultural handbook, and travel guide. Though its central aim is to dispel any notions about French weakness&mdash;and simultaneously to highlight the nation's historical importance as an ally&mdash;from our historical vantage it is the manual’s portrayal of French culture that is the most fascinating: "French beer is flatter and more slippery than our beer but the French like it, when they can get it;" "the neighborhood French caf&eacute; is the most French thing in all France;" "French hotel bills are complicated." For soldiers reading Instructions in 1944, a long road lay ahead&mdash;but with each confident description of the once and future life of various French provinces, it's easy to imagine that end seeming just a tiny bit closer. </p>

<p>Read the <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/News/0805atkinsonprs.html">press release</a>.</p>
                              
                              <p class="entry-footer">

Archived in <a href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/subjects/history/">History
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 11:38 AM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/30/press_release_us_army_instruct.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <h2 class="date-header">May 29, 2008</h2>
                     <a id="a001134"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1134">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">Financial speculation in the Dutch Golden Age</h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/227141.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226301259.jpeg" align="right" height="213" width="150" style="padding-left:10px" alt="jacket image"></a></p>

<p>In <a href="http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=537064&p=3">a recent review</a> in the May 24 <em>National Post</em> Ingrid D. Rowland praises Anne Goldgar's <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/227141.ctl"><em>Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age</em></a> for its revealing look at the speculative trading in tulip bulbs in seventeenth century Netherlands. As popular opinion has it, the Dutch obsession with tulips led to an unprecedented crash in the Dutch financial markets as demand for the bulbs waned. But as Rowland's review points out, Goldgar's new book reveals that "most of what we 'know' about tulip mania is pure fiction.&hellip;" and,  in fact, the supposed crash of the Dutch tulip industry was more a social phenomenon than an economic one. Rowland writes:</p>

<blockquote>Dutch tulip prices would have had to find their equilibrium: The heights they reached in 1636 were an experimental extreme. But two outside factors, as Goldgar shows convincingly, made the market's abrupt shifts in February, 1637, look like a cataclysm. The first was an outbreak of bubonic plague that erupted in 1636, bringing on its usual train of death and panic, but also an unusual number of wills whose provisions involved tulip bulbs and tulip transactions. The second was that the crash came in Carnival season, with its ritual rebellion against every kind of propriety. In a culture as carefully regulated as that of Holland, carnival craziness provided a crucial outlet for social tensions, but even when regulated by calendar and ceremony, the topsy-turvy carnival world was as disconcerting as a painting by Breughel or Bosch. In a plague year, those tensions and those discomfitures were all the greater, compounded by real fears that this time God's wrath would be implacable.

<p>Tulips simply provided these long-standing aspects of the human condition with an irresistible symbol, just as the intangible evanescence of the Internet recently lent a certain suggestive aura to a similar quick shift in dot-com prices. The real problem, as this arresting book concludes, lies not in tulips, nor even in capitalism, but in ourselves&mdash;in the elusive but persistent ways in which we ascribe value to people, or things, or ideas.</blockquote></p>

<p>Read the full review on the <a href="http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=537064&p=3"><em>National Post</em> website</a>. Also read <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/301259.html">an excerpt</a> from the book.</p>
                              
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Archived in <a href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/subjects/economics/">Economics
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 01:55 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/29/financial_speculation_in_the_d_1.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <h2 class="date-header">May 28, 2008</h2>
                     <a id="a001133"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1133">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">Looking again at Dorothea Lange</h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/263882.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226769844.jpeg" align="right" height="187" width="150" style="padding-left:10px" alt="jacket image"></a>Sunday's <em>Los Angeles Times</em> ran <a href="http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-bk-masur25-2008may25,0,1701678.story">a review</a> of Anne Whiston Spirn's <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/263882.ctl"><em>Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field</em></a>. The <em>Times</em> online edition also includes a <a href="http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-bk-0525-masur-pg,0,6347844.photogallery">lovely portfolio of twenty</a> Lange photographs from the book. <em>Times</em> reviewer Louis P. Masur explains what is different about Spirn's look at the Farm Security Administration work of Dorothea Lange:</p>

<blockquote><em>Daring to Look</em> is a hybrid work, part personal essay, part portfolio of photographs, part scholarly catalog of captions and negatives.&hellip; Spirn argues strenuously that Lange must be appreciated not solely for her portraits but for her landscapes as well, and that any consideration of Lange must take into account not only images but also words&mdash;the general notes and specific captions that the photographer wrote.

<p>Spirn is right to refocus our attention on the landscape. Lange herself said she was trying in her work to tell the story "of a people in their relation to their institutions, to their fellowmen, and to the land." That landscape&mdash;of farms and signs, cut-overs and crossroads, buildings and shacks&mdash;traverses these photographs whether people are present or not. There are also the internal scenes of parlors and kitchens and stored goods. Many of Lange's photographs include doorways, the pathway between public and private, between physical and emotional landscapes.</blockquote></p>

<p>Spirn will soon complete her own <a href="http://www.daringtolook.com/">website</a> for <em>Daring to Look</em>.</p>
                              
                              <p class="entry-footer">

Archived in <a href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/subjects/art_and_architecture/">Art and Architecture
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 02:54 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/28/looking_again_at_dorothea_lange.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <h2 class="date-header">May 27, 2008</h2>
                     <a id="a001131"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1131">
                        <h3 class="entry-header"><em>Instructions for American Servicemen in France</em></h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/251772.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226841724.jpeg" align="right" height="188" width="150" style="padding-left:10px" alt="jacket image"></a></p>

<p>Reflecting on an appropriate topic for Memorial Day, journalist, historian, and best selling author <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Atkinson">Rick Atkinson</a> was interviewed on NPR's <em>Weekend Edition</em> last Saturday to discuss the forthcoming re-publication of the U.S. Army's <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/251772.ctl"><em>Instructions for American Servicemen in France during World War II</em></a>&mdash;a guidebook originally issued by the War Department in 1944 to give Allied soldiers invading France "a general idea of the country concerned, to serve as a guide to behavior in relation to the civil population, and to contain a suitable, concise vocabulary." In the interview Atkinson&mdash;who wrote the new foreword to the UCP edition&mdash;joins host Scott Simon to discuss some of the fascinating insights into the U.S. campaign in France the book has to offer. </p>

<p>Listen to archived audio of the interview on the <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90801435&ft=1&f=1012">NPR website</a>. </p>

<p>Also <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/841724.html">read Atkinson's introduction</a> to the book.</p>
                              
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Archived in <a href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/author_essays_interviews_and_excerpts/">Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 12:21 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/27/instructions_for_american_serv.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <a id="a001127"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1127">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">Press Release: Carroll, <em>Operation Homecoming</em></h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/281400.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226094991.jpeg" align="right" height="222" width="150" style="padding-left:10px" alt="jacket image"></a></p>

<p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/281400.ctl"><em>Operation Homecoming</em></a> is the result of a major initiative launched by the National Endowment for the Arts to bring distinguished writers to military bases to inspire U.S. soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, and their families to record their wartime experiences. Encouraged by such authors as Tom Clancy, Tobias Wolff, and Marilyn Nelson, American military personnel and their loved ones wrote candidly about what they saw, heard, and felt while in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as on the home front. These unflinching eyewitness accounts, private journals, short stories, and letters offer an intensely revealing look into extraordinary lives and are an unforgettable contribution to wartime literature.</p>

<p>Read the <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/News/0805carrollprs.html">press release</a>.</p>
                              
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Archived in <a href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/subjects/history/">History
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 12:11 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/27/press_release_carroll_operatio_1.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <a id="a001129"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1129">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">Press Release: Meiselas, <em>Kurdistan</em></h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/231150.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226519272.jpeg" align="right" height="207" width="150" style="padding-left:10px" alt="jacket image"></a></p>

<p>Kurdistan was erased from world maps after World War I, when the victorious powers carved up the Middle East, leaving the Kurds without a homeland. Today the Kurds, who live on the land that straddles the borders of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, are by far the largest ethnic group in the world without a state.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/231150.ctl"><em>Kurdistan</em></a> is a visual history of a people and a place who have otherwise been denied a national archive. Since its first publication in 1997, Meiselas's lavish compendium of photographs and documents has become a crucial repository of memory for the Kurdish community both in exile and at home. This new edition appears at a time when the world's attention has once again been drawn to the lands of this little-understood but historically consequential people.</p>

<p>Read the <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/News/0805meiselasprs.html">press release</a>.</p>
                              
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Archived in <a href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/publicity/press_releases/">Press Releases
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 12:00 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/27/press_release_meiselas_kurdist.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <h2 class="date-header">May 23, 2008</h2>
                     <a id="a001130"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1130">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">Digital book burning</h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://search.live.com/books/"><img src="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/images/lsbooks.jpeg" " align="right" width="150" height="145" alt="LSB" /></a>Microsoft announced today that it would end <a href="http://search.live.com/books/">Live Search Books</a>, just eighteen months after the program was officially launched. Live Search Books, similar to <a href="http://">Google Book Search</a>, collaborated with publishers and libraries to make book content searchable and viewable online. However Live Search Books differed in that it included books currently in copyright only if granted permission by the publisher. Google Book Search digitizes books from libraries irrespective of their copyright status, the subject of an <a href="http://aaupnet.org/aboutup/issues/gprint.html">ongoing lawsuit</a>.</p>

<p>The <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/05/23/book-search-winding-down.aspx">announcement </a>from Microsoft held few clues as to why they were pulling the plug. Perhaps the revenue generated by book content didn't fit in with strategic changes that followed the collapse of talks with Yahoo. The announcement said in part: "This past Wednesday we announced our strategy to focus on verticals with high commercial intent, such as travel, and offer users cash back on their purchases from our advertisers." It's difficult to see the majority of books published, much less the books that we produce, fitting into "verticals with high commercial intent." </p>

<p>The University of Chicago Press supported the Live Search Books program by providing more than a thousand books to Microsoft in digital form for inclusion in the program. </p>

<p>It's worth noting that even after more than five years of development and digitization, Google Book Search  is still classified as a beta project. Making book content available on the web is, now more than ever, just a work in progress.<br />
</p>
                              
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by DB at 02:59 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/23/digital_book_burning.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <h2 class="date-header">May 22, 2008</h2>
                     <a id="a001126"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1126">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans</h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/249298.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226328676.jpeg" align="right" height="208" width="150" style="padding-left:10px" alt="jacket image"></a>Charles Hirsch's new book <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/249298.ctl"><em>Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans</em></a> was <a href="http://www.nola.com/timespic/stories/index.ssf?/base/living-1/1211347282313410.xml&coll=1">reviewed yesterday in</a> the <em>Times-Picayune</em>. Contributing writer Jason Berry begins by drawing a parallel between the early New Orleans jazz scene Hirsch brings to life in his book, and the city as we know it today:</p>

<blockquote>The music we now call jazz flowered at the dawn of the last century, a time of grinding poverty and struggle for black people, as Charles Hersch writes in a provocative new history, <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/249298.ctl"><em>Subversive Sounds</em></a>.

<p>A political scientist by training, Hersch illuminates how musicians of color drew from realities that few white people experienced in forging a form of dance music for people of both races. In that sense, <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/249298.ctl"><em>Subversive Sounds</em></a> is more than timely. The social realities of New Orleans today resemble the city in 1900: racial polarization beneath a blanket of poverty and uncertain leadership. A century ago tourism was in its infancy; today's "cultural economy" markets an urban identity shaped by African-American traditions that ran deepest in downriver wards that were wrecked in the flooding of 2005, areas where tour buses show visitors the wonder of our Pompeii on the Mississippi.</blockquote></p>

<p>Read the <a href="http://www.nola.com/timespic/stories/index.ssf?/base/living-1/1211347282313410.xml&coll=1">full review at</a> the <em>Times-Picayune</em>.</p>
                              
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 01:19 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/22/post_15.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <h2 class="date-header">May 21, 2008</h2>
                     <a id="a001125"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1125">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">Jim Boyd on <em>When the Press Fails</em></h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/217066.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226042848.jpeg" align="right" height="216" width="150" style="padding-left:10px" alt="jacket image"></a></p>

<p>Jim Boyd, the former deputy editorial page editor at the <em>Star Tribune</em> in Minneapolis has written <a href="http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/08-1NRspring/index.html">an interesting piece</a> on W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston's <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/217066.ctl"><em>When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina</em></a> for the Spring 2008 issue of the <em>Nieman Report</em>. Using his own personal experiences to comment on the author's claims that the American news media&mdash;especially during the Bush presidency&mdash;has become increasingly susceptible to White House spin Boyd writes: </p>

<blockquote>It is the central thesis of <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/217066.ctl"><em>When the Press Fails</em></a> that the press has become excessively deferential to political power in Washington and has forfeited its (occasional) role as independent watchdog of government. The rule of the press road in Washington now is to run every story through the filter of political power and, unless another strong actor (say, Congress) raises a stink, the press will dutifully report whatever the administration says, without challenge. When you add into the mix an administration that admits to no requirement that it be truthful and straight&mdash;indeed, quite the reverse&mdash;we have the embarrassing story of press failure to challenge the deceitful case for war in Iraq.</blockquote>

<p>But as Boyd points out, the press's obeisance to governmental authority may be less a reaction to heavy-handed politicians, as to the major news media corporations' focus on making profits:</p>

<blockquote>The most pernicious influence is the fiduciary obligation that owners of our highly concentrated media believe they owe to shareholders.&hellip; As deputy editorial page editor at the <em>Star Tribune</em> in Minneapolis, I was the principal writer on Iraq for the newspaper's editorial page. We broke with Bush on Iraq when he broke with the United Nations. We became increasingly strident and began to draw national attention and a national Web audience. We suffered for it; our corporate masters strongly disapproved of our behavior; they wanted us flying well under the radar screen.&hellip; Apparently the prevailing wisdom in corporate media boardrooms is that workers&mdash;even when they are journalists&mdash;don't serve shareholders well by making waves. We make nice, which dovetails powerfully with the inclination to defer to power.</blockquote>

<p>Navigate to the <a href="http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/08-1NRspring/p85-boyd.html">Nieman Foundation's website</a> to read the full article online.</p>

<p>Also <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/042848.html">read an excerpt</a> from the book.</p>
                              
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 03:00 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/21/jim_boyd_on_when_the_press_fai.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <h2 class="date-header">May 20, 2008</h2>
                     <a id="a001124"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1124">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">Two discourses on modern social identity</h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/233057.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226327914.jpeg" align="right" height="219" width="150" style="padding-left:10px" alt="jacket image"></a>The May 8 edition of the <em>Times Higher Education</em> ran several noteworthy reviews of Chicago books including Scott Herring's <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/233057.ctl"><em>Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History</em></a> and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg's <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/240057.ctl"><em>The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860-1920</em></a>. </p>

<p>Both books focus on the subject of social identification in the early twentieth century, the former delivering an insightful critique of American "slumming literature" and the gender stereotypes that the author claims the genre simultaneously acknowledged, yet undermined, while the latter gives an equally penetrating analysis of the re-making of Italian cultural identity in the wake of WWI.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/240057.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226774480.jpeg" align="left" height="206" width="150" style="padding-right:10px" alt="jacket image"></a>Read <a href="http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=401814&sectioncode=26">Denis Flanery's review</a> of <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/233057.ctl"><em>Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History</em></a>.</p>

<p>You can find <a href="http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=401812&c=1">Steven Gundle's review</a> of <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/240057.ctl"><em>The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860-1920</em></a> in the same issue.</p>

<p>A book published by Liverpool University Press, one of our distributed clients, was also reviewed in the May 8 <em>THE</em>. Read <a href="http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=401813&sectioncode=26">Martin Conreen's review</a> of <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/281021.ctl"><em>SK-INTERFACES: Exploding Borders in Art, Science and Technology</em></a>.</p>
                              
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 02:27 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/20/post_14.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <h2 class="date-header">May 19, 2008</h2>
                     <a id="a001122"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1122">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">"A Salacious Era of New York City Sleaze"</h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/216890.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226112343.jpeg" align="right" height="225" width="150" align="right" style="padding-left:10px"></a></p>

<p>Writing for last Tuesday's <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/books/0820,the-flash-press-unearths-a-pleasingly-salacious-era-of-new-york-city-sleaze,440896,10.html"><em>Village Voice</em></a>, none other than Tom Robbins has given Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz's new book, <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/216890.ctl"><em>The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York</em></a> an approving thumbs-up for its revealing look at New York City's "flash papers"&mdash;the nineteenth-century weeklies that covered and publicized New York's extensive sexual underworld. All but forgotten after the era's burgeoning censorship and obscenity laws shut them down, as Robbins notes, the author's recent discovery of a cache of these papers held by the American Antiquarian Society sheds new light on the magazines' lurid tales of libidinous lechery. Robbins writes:</p>

<blockquote>Sex has always sold well. Most of us just assumed it took the likes of Larry Flynt, Al Goldstein, and the rest of that merry band of porn purveyors to finally get it openly on the newsstands. But now comes news that more than a century before them, an earlier breed of devilish publishers delighted readers with similar publications right here in New York.

<p>That discovery was no small thrill for historians of American smut when they unearthed copies of long-forgotten sex rags that flared briefly in the early 1840s. These Dead Sea Scrolls of sleaze were discovered when Patricia Cline Cohen, one of a trio of authors of <em>The Flash Press</em>, was visiting the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1987: "On one memorable day, Dennis R. Laurie, reference specialist of newspapers and periodicals, asked her if she might like to see some uncataloged New York titles of a somewhat disreputable character."</p>

<p>Cohen tipped co-author Timothy J. Gilfoyle to her discovery for his own book on the history of prostitution in New York (<em>City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialism of Sex, 1790-1920</em>); Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz joined the team when another researcher whispered to her about some "racy primary sources."</p>

<p>Like Goldstein's <em>Screw</em>, the publishers chose titles that got right to the point: <em>The Whip</em>, <em>The Rake</em>, <em>The Libertine</em>, <em>The Flash</em>, and others with even shorter publishing lives. One of these, <em>The New York Sporting Whip</em>, offered a kind of mission statement: "Man is endowed by nature with passions that must be gratified," the newspaper asserted, "and no blame can be attached to him, who for that purpose occasionally seeks the woman of pleasure."</blockquote></p>

<p>Read the rest of the review on the <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/books/0820,the-flash-press-unearths-a-pleasingly-salacious-era-of-new-york-city-sleaze,440896,10.html"><em>Village Voice</em> website</a>.</p>
                              
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 01:56 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/19/a_salacious_era_of_new_york_ci_1.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <a id="a001121"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1121">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">Google's laser beam</h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=first+laser"><img src="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/images/googlelaser08.gif" align="right" width="250" height="92" alt="google laser logo.gif" /></a>Forty-eight years ago last Friday, Theodore Maiman demonstrated the first laser at the Hughes Research Laboratory in California. We could have written a blog post about that. Turns out we didn't have to. Last Friday Google had a special logo to mark the anniversary. A click on the logo executed <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=first+laser">a web search for "first laser"</a> and the first search result was <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/284158_townes.html">a book excerpt</a> we created five years ago for <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/15851.ctl"><em>A Century of Nature: Twenty-One Discoveries that Changed Science and the World</em></a>. </p>

<p>The ensuing traffic was incredible. Our website had almost half a million visitors last Friday, more than 25 times the traffic of the previous Friday. The uptick in traffic actually began about 6pm CDT on Thursday, as the clock turned to Friday in the Far East, and continued into the first few hours of Saturday. A "Google day" appears to last about 44 hours. </p>

<p>Numbers like this are, of course, a testament to the worldwide reach and popularity of Google. They also testify to the boundless extent of human curiosity. <br />
</p>
                              
                              <p class="entry-footer">

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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by DB at 08:18 AM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/19/googles_laser_beam.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <h2 class="date-header">May 16, 2008</h2>
                     <a id="a001120"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1120">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">Early laurels weigh like lead</h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/281392.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226115047.jpeg" align="right" height="229" width="150" style="padding-left:10px" alt="jacket image"></a>Writing in the <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200805/hitchens-connolly">May edition</a> of <em>The Atlantic</em>, Christopher Hitchens delivers a knowing synopsis of Cyril Connolly's classic memoir <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/281392.ctl"><em>Enemies of Promise</em></a>, the new release of which is scheduled to hit bookstores later this month:</p>

<blockquote>Like a centaur, or perhaps a bit more like a pantomime horse, <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200805/hitchens-connolly"><em>Enemies of Promise</em></a> divides into two halves: the critical and the autobiographical. In the first half, Connolly surveys the literary scenery of his day and employs as his scaffolding and <em>Waste Land</em> surrogate George Crabbe's bleak and sarcastic poem <em>The Village</em>. This, with its vividly negative bucolic imagery of "the blighted rye," "the blue Bugloss," "the slimy Mallow," and "the Charlock's shade," allows him a special taxonomy of weeds and thistles as well as of growth without roots.

<p>In the second half, titled "A Georgian Boyhood," he gives a lavishly detailed account of his education between the ages of 8 and 18, and shows an extraordinary confidence in the likeli­hood that this narrative will not prove ephemeral. The best-known phrase from this section is his "theory of permanent adolescence" as a description of the marination process of the English upper class.&hellip; </p>

<p>"It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental and in the last analysis homosexual. Early laurels weigh like lead and of many of the boys whom I knew at Eton, I can say that their lives are over."</blockquote></p>

<p>In the blistering prose that became Connolly's trademark, <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/281392.ctl"><em>Enemies of Promise</em></a> is a fascinating examination of high literature and high society from one the twentieth century's most influential and insightful critics.</p>

<p>Read the rest of the article on <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200805/hitchens-connolly"><em>The Atlantic</em> website</a>.</p>
                              
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 02:36 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/16/early_laurels_weigh_like_lead.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <h2 class="date-header">May 15, 2008</h2>
                     <a id="a001116"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1116">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">Coastal cartography in context</h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/270037.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226534039.jpeg" align="right" height="208" width="150" style="padding-left:10px" alt="jacket image"></a></p>

<p>Writing for the May 15th edition of <em>Nature</em>, reviewer Deborah Jean Warner gives a nice summary of Mark Monmonier's new book, <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/270037.ctl"><em>Coast Lines: How Mapmakers Frame the World and Chart Environmental Change</em></a>:</p>

<blockquote>Mark Monmonier, professor of geography at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University in New York, seeks to inform the public about how cartography and society intersect. He wishes us to look closely at maps, to recognize which features are shown or missing, and understand why. In <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/270037.ctl"><em>Coast Lines</em></a>, he offers an assortment of eclectic and fascinating information about how coastlines have been defined, determined and depicted, focusing on the United States in the twentieth century.

<p>Different maps and charts of the same coastal area show different cartographic coastlines. Monmonier calls our attention to four types, explaining that each is a human construct designed to serve a specific purpose, and the result of many observations and assumptions (the latter sometimes gaining the upper hand). One cartographic coastline is the high-water line visible from offshore. Another, introduced in the nineteenth century to aid safe navigation, is the low-water line. Two are more recent: storm surge lines are designed mainly for evacuation planning and flood insurance, and inundation lines describe the plausible effects of changing geological and meteorological conditions.</blockquote></p>

<p>Read the rest of the review on the <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7193/full/453285a.html"><em>Nature</em> website</a>.</p>
                              
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 02:38 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/15/coastal_cartography_in_context.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <a id="a001119"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1119">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">Press Release: King, <em>Collections of Nothing</em></h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/277754.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226437002.jpeg" align="right" height="225" width="150" style="padding-left:10px" alt="jacket image"></a></p>

<p>William Davies King makes no bones about it: he's odd. And his collections are odder: loops of wire, skeleton keys, seafood tins, water bottle labels, envelope liners, strips of masking tape, canceled credit cards, boulders&mdash;and that's just for starters. You might call it junk, but to King, it's a very special sort of nothing. Suffice it to say, no one on earth has a garage quite like his.</p>

<p>King's unusual collections reflect his belief in the intrinsic value of the discarded, unwanted, and ephemeral&mdash;but as he makes clear in <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/277754.ctl"><em>Collections of Nothing</em></a>, the urge that drives his hoarding is not all that different from that which leads a more typical person to prize uncanceled stamps or pristine sets of baseball cards. Both an affecting memoir and an idiosyncratic examination of the desire to accumulate, <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/277754.ctl"><em>Collections of Nothing</em></a> takes us deep inside the soul of the solitary collector. King's life story is deftly interleaved with his insightful meditations on the nature of the acquisitive mind; the result is a book that defies categorization, a unique hybrid that will speak to anyone who has ever found himself bitten by the collecting bug.</p>

<p>Read the <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/News/0805kingprs.html">press release</a>.</p>
                              
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 02:12 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/15/press_release_king_collections.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <a id="a001117"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1117">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">Press Release: Cohen, Gilfoyle, and Horowitz, <em>The Flash Press</em></h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/216890.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226112343.jpeg" align="right" height="225" width="150" style="padding-left:10px" alt="jacket image"></a></p>

<p>If you think you've had your fill of malicious gossip, sex as a route to celebrity, and relentless sports and entertainment news, you might just be reading all about it two centuries too late. Under such headlines as "Whoredome in New York" and "Philadelphia Pimps of Fame," New York's 1840s flash papers served up with nonpareil style and irresistible wit all the news that wasn't fit to print about the city's underworld of brothels, wantons, unfortunate girls, and their all-too-eager customers. Ephemeral publications that also featured gossip about boxing, dog fighting, and the theater scene, the <em>Rake</em>, the <em>Flash</em>, the <em>Whip</em>, and the <em>Libertine</em> were must-reads for sporting men keen to learn about the city's leisure activities and erotic entertainments. Now, in <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/216890.ctl"><em>The Flash Press</em></a>, these papers are once again in print&mdash;this time taking the more discrete form of a book that looks under Victorian-era New York's buttoned-up surface to reveal the colorful (read: more interesting) characters teeming beneath.</p>

<p>Read the <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/News/0805cohenprs.html">press release</a>.</p>
                              
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 01:34 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/15/press_release_cohen_gilfoyle_a_1.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <h2 class="date-header">May 14, 2008</h2>
                     <a id="a001115"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1115">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">The wartime experience in their own words</h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/281400.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226094991.jpeg" align="right" height="222" width="150" style="padding-left:10px" alt=jacket image"></a></p>

<p>Monday, May 26 is the official publication date of our paperback edition of Andrew Carroll's <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/281400.ctl"><em>Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families</em></a>. Through a series of eyewitness accounts, private journals, short stories, and letters, the book delivers a fascinating firsthand account of the lives of American servicemen and women in Iraq in their own words. </p>

<p><em>Operation Homecoming</em> is also <a href="http://www.oscar.com/nominees/?pn=detail&nominee=Operation%20Homecoming:%20Writing%20the%20Wartime%20Experience%20-%20Documentary%20Feature%20Nominee">Oscar nominated</a> <a href="http://www.pbs.org/weta/crossroads/about/show_operation_homecoming.html">documentary</a> produced for PBS's <em>America at a Crossroads</em>. You can check out the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdPoYz_Z2Us">movie trailer</a> on YouTube or navigate to the <a href="http://www.pbs.org/weta/crossroads/about/show_operation_homecoming.html"><em>America at a Crossroads</em></a> website for local air times and additional media. </p>

<p>Find out more about the book <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/281400.ctl">here</a>.</p>
                              
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 01:30 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/14/the_wartime_experience_in_thei_1.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <a id="a001114"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1114">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">Press Release: Spirn, <em>Daring to Look</em></h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/263882.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226769844.jpeg" align="right" height="187" width="150" style="padding-left:10px" alt="jacket image"></a></p>

<p>Despite the ubiquity of Dorothea Lange's photographs, a surprisingly large number of them have languished in archives, more or less unseen, for decades. With <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/263882.ctl"><em>Daring to Look</em></a>, Anne Whiston Spirn brings nearly 200 of those photos to light, revealing new facets of Lange's celebrated achievement.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/263882.ctl"><em>Daring to Look</em></a> is far more than just a book of photos, however. Spirn presents the images&mdash;taken in 1939 in California, North Carolina, and the Pacific Northwest&mdash;alongside Lange's own field notes and captions, which the photographer considered to be an essential component of her attempt to document the hardscrabble lives of her subjects. Spirn joins that work to an insightful account of Lange's life, as well as a fascinating look at the current state of many of the locations Lange shot. Spirn's own photographs of those towns and farms reflect the changes&mdash;and the surprising continuity&mdash;over decades, carrying Lange's documentary project into a new century.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/263882.ctl"><em>Daring to Look</em></a> brings to life a crucial moment in American history&mdash;and illuminates a missing period in the life of one of America's greatest artists.</p>

<p>Read the <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/News/0805spirnprs.html">press release</a>.</p>
                              
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 12:20 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/14/press_release_spirn_daring_to_2.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <a id="a001111"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1111">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">Press Release: Lewis, <em>A Power Stronger Than Itself</em></h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/236682.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226476957.jpeg" align="right" height="210" width="150" alt="jacket image" style=padding-left:10px></a></p>

<p>Founded in 1965 and still active today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is an American institution with an international reputation. From its working-class roots on the South Side of Chicago, the AACM went on to forge an extensive legacy of cultural and social experimentation, crossing both musical and racial boundaries. The success of individual members and ensembles from Muhal Richard Abrams, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Anthony Braxton to Douglas Ewart, the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, and Nicole Mitchell has been matched by the enormous international influence of the collective itself in inspiring a generation of musical experimentalists.</p>

<p>George E. Lewis, who joined the collective as a teenager in 1971, establishes the full importance and vitality of the AACM with this communal history, written with a symphonic sweep that draws on a cross-generational chorus of voices and a rich collection of rare images.</p>

<p>Read the <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/News/0805lewisprs.html">press release</a>. </p>

<p>Also, read <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/476957.html">an excerpt</a> from the book.</p>
                              
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 12:12 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/14/press_release_lewis_a_power_st.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <h2 class="date-header">May 13, 2008</h2>
                     <a id="a001108"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1108">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">Audio: Gabriela Mistral's mad poems</h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/259081.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226531908.jpeg" align="right" height="233" width="150" style="padding-left:10px" alt="jacket image"></a>Gabriela Mistral was the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1945. <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/259081.ctl"><em>Madwomen: The &ldquo;Locas mujeres&rdquo; Poems of Gabriela Mistral</em></a> is the first appearance in English of all twenty-six poems of the &ldquo;Locas mujeres&rdquo; series, including those left unpublished at her death.</p>

<p>Randall Couch edited and translated <em>Madwomen</em> and he recently <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/calendar/0408.html#24">gave a reading</a> of seven poems from the book (together with a reading of the Spanish texts) at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania.  The complete one-hour reading can be <a href="http://media.sas.upenn.edu/writershouse/Couch-Randall_and_Vicens-Nury_Madwomen-Gabriela-Mistral_KWH-UPenn_04-24-08.mp3">downloaded</a> from the Writers House site.</p>
                              
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by DB at 02:49 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/13/audio_gabriela_mistrals_mad_po.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <h2 class="date-header">May 12, 2008</h2>
                     <a id="a001107"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1107">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">"Sporting news, theater gossip, humor, and not a little pornography"</h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/216890.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226112343.jpeg" align="right" height="225" width="150" style="padding-left:10px" alt="jacket image"></a></p>

<p>Hugely popular in nineteenth century New York, "flash" papers&mdash;weeklies like the <em>Flash</em> and the <em>Whip</em>&mdash;capitalized on lurid tales of New York City's extensive sexual underworld. But, due in part to the evolution of obscenity laws and libel, their success was short lived and the papers themselves fell into obscurity. Now, as <em>Chronicle of Higher Education</em> reviewer <a href="http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i35/35b02101.htm">Kacie Glenn notes</a>, the authors of <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/216890.ctl"><em>The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York</em></a> have produced a comprehensive historical document of both the tumultuous history of the papers, and the culture that consumed them. Glenn writes:</p>

<blockquote><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/216890.ctl"><em>The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York</em></a>, written in association with the antiquarian society by Patricia Cline Cohen, a professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara; Timothy J. Gilfoyle, a professor of history at Loyola University Chicago; and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, a professor of American studies and history at Smith College, has two parts: a critical analysis of the papers' role in society and a collection of excerpts.

<p>The average flash-press reader was both a man about town and a respectable citizen, and the authors aim to decode the texts in light of those conflicting identities. "Ambiguity and deceit" were the rule, they say, so that the weeklies simultaneously celebrated and condemned promiscuity and high-society romps. <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/216890.ctl"><em>The Flash Press</em></a> traces the papers' brief but turbulent run through the litigation and public outcry that eventually shut them down.&hellip;</p>

<p>Although the sporting weeklies were short-lived, First-Amendment victories for today's risqu&eacute; periodicals suggest that the earlier papers were ahead of their time. As the authors of <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/216890.ctl"><em>The Flash Press</em></a> note, "Seen from the perspective of the early 21st century, the editors of the flash press certainly have the last laugh."</blockquote></p>
                              
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 01:47 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/12/sporting_news_theater_gossip_h_1.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <h2 class="date-header">May 09, 2008</h2>
                     <a id="a001106"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1106">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">The vast wasteland of 1961</h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><img alt="ssminnow.jpeg" src="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/images/ssminnow.jpeg" width="150" height="112"  align="right" style="padding-left:10px" />On May 9, 1961 Newton N. Minow addressed the National Association of Broadcasters in  Washington, DC. President John F. Kennedy had recently appointed Minow to the chair of the Federal Communications Commission. To the assembled executives of broadcast television he said:</p>

<blockquote>I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

<p>You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials&mdash;many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.</blockquote></p>

<p>You can <a href="http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/newtonminow.htm">read the text and listen to the audio</a> of that speech, which took the broadcasters to task for failing to serve the public interest even while they used the public airwaves. </p>

<p>Minow's positive contribution to public-spirited television was the creation of the presidential debates. With co-author Craig L. LaMay he recounts that story in <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/265282.ctl"><em>Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future</em></a>. See some <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/530413.html">memorable moments from the presidential debates</a> and <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/530413_intro.html">read an excerpt</a> from the book. <br />
</p>
                              
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by DB at 02:51 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/09/the_vast_wasteland_of_1961.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <a id="a001105"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1105">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">Friday remainders</h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presswide/pressphoto4.jpeg" align="right" height="95" width="149" alt="jacket image" style="padding-left:10px"></p>

<p>First off, warmest congratulations to Philip Gossett, whose lovely book <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/176176.ctl"><em>Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera</em></a> was recently awarded the press's Laing Prize. Gossett's book is a fascinating account of how opera comes to the stage, filled with his personal experiences and suffused with his towering and tonic passion for music. In awarding the prize University President Robert Zimmer called Gossett's book "a vivid example of the difference that humanities scholarship can make to the arts with which it is allied." See more about the prize on the U of C <a href="http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/080501/gossett.shtml">News Office website</a>. To find out more about the book <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/304825.html">read this excerpt</a>.</p>

<p>If you're in the New York area tonight you have the chance to catch some of the original pioneers of avant-garde jazz at the Community Church of New York, 40 East 35th Street. The show doubles as a book release party for author, professor, and trombonist George E. Lewis's <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/236682.ctl"><em>A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music</em></a>&mdash;the definitive history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Navigate to the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/09/arts/music/09jazz.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=music&adxnnlx=1210346507-tXnpWsL74dRI/rHg1khNvA"><em>New York Times</em> jazz listings</a> for more details about the show. To learn more about the book read <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/476957.html">this excerpt</a>, or see <a href="http://www.timeout.com/newyork/articles/music/29299/collective-conscious">Hank Shteamer's article</a> in the current issue of <em>Time Out New York</em>. Shteamer also has a transcript of the interview he used for the <em>TONY</em> piece on <a href="http://darkforcesswing.blogspot.com/2008/05/in-full-aacm-edition-abrams-and-lewis.html">his blog</a>.</p>

<p>The remarks of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright were echoed into a cacophony in the mass media, but now that the noise has subsided, more thoughtful conversations about race can perhaps take place. Katherine Cramer Walsh has studied conversations about politics and race for years and is the author of <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/225477.ctl"><em>Talking about Race: Community Dialogues and the Politics of Difference</em></a>. She participated in NPR's <em>Talk of the Nation</em> and discussed the Wright phenomenon and the current state of the dialogue on race in America. Listen to the <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90280905">archived audio here</a>.</p>

<p>Another interesting discussion of race and politics in America appeared on PBS's <em>NewsHour</em> last Wednesday. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, co-author of <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/265365.ctl"><em>Presidents Creating the Presidency: Deeds Done in Words</em></a>&mdash;the definitive book on presidential rhetoric for more than a decade&mdash;spoke with host Jefferey Brown about the rhetoric surrounding the issue of race in the 2008 campaign. See the <a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/jan-june08/race_05-07.html">streaming video here</a>.</p>

<p>The <a href="http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/05/our-fate-in-forests/">Britannica blog</a> is running a piece on <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/7566.ctl"><em>Forests: The Shadow of Civilization</em></a>, Robert Pogue Harrison's wide-ranging exploration of the place of forests in Western culture, from the epic of Gilgamesh, to the recent ecological dilemmas that confront us. Harrison turned a similar eye to horticulture in his newest book, <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/276279.ctl"><em>Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition</em></a>. Read <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/317892.html">an excerpt</a> on the UCP website.</p>

<p>Finally, Andrea Weiss's new book <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/256797.ctl"><em>In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story</em></a> was given <a href="http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23617024-5003900,00.html">a positive assessment</a> by literary critic Kathy Hunt for the May 3 edition of the <em>Australian</em>. Recounting the lives of writer Thomas Mann's two eldest children, Erika and Klaus, Weiss's book sheds light on these two fascinating figures and their adventures traveling through the literary, artistic, and political haute couture of the early twentieth century as well as details their tumultuous relationship with their famous father. Read the article on the <a href="http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23617024-5003900,00.html"><a href="http://"><em>Australian</em> website</a></a> and read <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/886725.html">an excerpt</a> from the book.</p>
                              
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 02:25 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/09/friday_remainders_9.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <h2 class="date-header">May 08, 2008</h2>
                     <a id="a001104"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1104">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">The self-concept of Richard Rorty</h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/275645.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226309903.jpeg" align="right" height="215" width="150" style="padding-left:10px" alt="jacket image"></a>Scott McLemee <a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/05/07/mclemee">interviewed Neil Gross</a> yesterday for his "Intellectual Affairs" column at <em>Inside Higher Ed</em>. Gross is the author of <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/275645.ctl"><em>Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher</em></a> and he discusses his new book as a work in the sociology of ideas, not just biography and intellectual history. What's the cash value of doing that? Gross explains: </p>

<blockquote>My goal in this book was not simply to write a biography of Rorty, but also to make a theoretical contribution to the sociology of ideas. Surprising as it might sound to some, the leading figures in this area today&mdash;to my mind Pierre Bourdieu and Randall Collins&mdash;have tended to depict intellectuals as strategic actors who develop their ideas and make career plans and choices with an eye toward accumulating intellectual status and prestige. That kind of depiction naturally raises the ire of those who see intellectual pursuits as more lofty endeavors&hellip;.

<p>I argue that intellectuals do in fact behave strategically much of the time, but that another important factor influencing their lines of activity is the specific "intellectual self-concept" to which they come to cleave. By this I mean the highly specific narratives of intellectual selfhood that knowledge producers may carry around with them&mdash;narratives that characterize them as intellectuals of such and such a type.</p>

<p>In Rorty's case, one of the intellectual self-concepts that came to be terribly important to him was that of a "leftist American patriot." I argue that intellectual self-concepts, thus understood, are important in at least two respects: they may influence the kinds of strategic choices thinkers make (for example, shaping the nature of professional ambition), and they may also directly influence lines of intellectual activity. The growing salience to Rorty of his self-understood identity as a leftist American patriot, for example, was one of the factors that led him back toward pragmatism in the late 1970s and beyond.</blockquote></p>

<p>Navigate to <a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/05/07/mclemee">Insidehighered.com</a> to read  the rest of the interview. Also read <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/309903.html">an excerpt</a> from the book.</p>
                              
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 01:50 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/08/the_self_concept_of_rorty.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <h2 class="date-header">May 07, 2008</h2>
                     <a id="a001102"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1102">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">An innovative blend of storytelling and scholarship</h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/244350.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226680590.jpeg" align="right" height="225" width="150" alt="jacket image" style="padding-left:10px"></a></p>

<p>In a recent review posted to the <a href="http://www.bookslut.com/features/2008_05_012787.php">Bookslut</a> website, Barbara J. King praises anthropologist Richard Price's most recent book <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/244350.ctl"><em>Travels with Tooy: History, Memory, and the African American Imagination</em></a> for its unique ethnographic account of the author's encounter with the enigmatic subject of Tooy&mdash;a priest, philosopher, and healer living in a shantytown on the outskirts of Cayenne, French Guiana. Commending the book for drawing not only on Price's ethnographic and archival research, but also on Tooy's teachings, songs, and stories, King writes:</p>

<blockquote>The book glows with knowledge, Tooy's as much as Rich's, as Rich is the first to say; he writes of Tooy with love, as a friend, but also with respect, calling him "a fellow intellectual.&hellip;"

<p>The complexity of Rich's analysis sits side by side with the complexity of Tooy's time-and-space travel. As I close the book (and begin to listen to <a href="http://www.richandsally.net/work1.htm">Tooy's voice at Rich's website</a> ), I know that I grasp only a small fraction of what Tooy knows. It's a good feeling, in a peculiar way; after all, that's what inhabiting an unfamiliar reality will do for a person&mdash;teach her what she doesn't know, and how to learn something more.</blockquote></p>

<p>Read the article at <a href="http://www.bookslut.com/features/2008_05_012787.php"> Bookslut</a>. Also listen to a selection of <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/price/">archived sound files</a> to accompany the book.</p>
                              
                              <p class="entry-footer">

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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 02:54 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/07/post_13.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <h2 class="date-header">May 06, 2008</h2>
                     <a id="a001101"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1101">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">Has a Svengali mesmerized the Pentagon?</h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/263154.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226841519.jpeg" align="right" height="225" width="150" alt="jacket image" style="padding-left:10px"></a>The war in Iraq is more than five years old and even though the end is not in sight, the lessons of the war are already being debated within the military.

<p>National Public Radio <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90200038">has a story</a> this morning about the sharpening disagreement in the US Army over how great a role counterinsurgency tactics should play. The story is prompted by an internal Pentagon report that suggests the Army is excessively focused on counterinsurgency training and neglecting conventional force capabilities such as field artillery. The report asserts that 90 percent of artillery units are "unqualified to fire artillery accurately."</p>

<p>We have of course paid a <a href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2007/07/27/iraq_new_books_new_strategies_1.html">great deal </a>of <a href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2007/06/14/nagl_on_the_world_1.html">attention</a> in <a href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2007/08/25/video_of_nagl_interview_on_the.html">this space</a> to the rise of counterinsurgency doctrine within the military, since our publication in book form of the <em><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/263154.ctl">Counterinsurgency Field Manual.</a></em> Not only is it interesting to see some Army strategists question whether the pendulum has swung too far in the COIN direction, but some of the commentary would seem to implicate our own role in bringing the COIN manual to a wider audience.</p>

<p>NPR reporter Guy Raz quotes a recent lecture by Gian Gentile, chairman of the history department at West Point:</p>

<blockquote>Gentile, who served two tours in Iraq, is perhaps the most outspoken internal critic of what he calls the Army's dangerous obsession with counterinsurgency.<br><br>"The high public profile of the new counterinsurgency manual, combined with the perception that its use and practice with the surge in Iraq has lowered the violence, I think has had a Svengali effect on us," Gentile said during the lecture. "It's almost like we have a secret recipe for success now involving counterinsurgency and irregular war."</blockquote>

<p>A five year war would, on the face of it, go quite a ways toward proving that no "secret recipe for success" has been found. But then counterinsurgency is always <a href="http://icasualties.org/oif/">messy</a> and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/03/18/world/middleeast/20080319_IRAQWAR_TIMELINE.html#tab1">slow</a>. </p>

<p>Listen to the <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=90200038&m=90213903">audio of the NPR story</a>. The discussion will undoubtedly continue at the <a href="http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2008/05/army-focus-on-counterinsurgenc/">Small Wars Journal blog</a>.<br />
</p>
                              
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by DB at 12:07 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/06/has_a_svengali_mesmerized_the.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <h2 class="date-header">May 05, 2008</h2>
                     <a id="a001100"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1100">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">Uses and abuses of iconic images</h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/217024.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226316062.jpeg" align="right" height="218" width="150" style="padding-left:10px" alt="jacket image"></a></p>

<p>In the current edition of the <em>American Interest</em>, reviewer James Rosen delivers a positive assessment of Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites' recent book, <a href="http://"><em>No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy</em></a>.  Praising the book for its thorough treatment of nine case studies involving some of the most influential images of the twentieth century, Rosen writes:</p>

<blockquote>[<em>No Caption Needed</em>] is a penetrating and provocative analysis of the way certain popular photographs, whether produced by professionals or amateurs, acquire the power to change public policy and with it the course of history.&hellip; The author's analytical achievement is enabled by an extraordinary feat of research and reporting. They have unearthed hidden facts, from both the backstory and the aftermath, surrounding each of their nine chosen photographs.&hellip; 

<p>[But] almost as compelling&hellip; are the stories of their subsequent appropriation. <em>No Caption Needed</em> details the uses and abuses of these nine iconic photographs by propagandists and peddlers of all kinds, with results that prove alternately haunting, playful, predictable, mercenary, dishonest and sometimes just plain twisted.&hellip;</blockquote></p>

<p>Pick up a copy of the <em>American Interest</em> to read the rest of the review.<br />
Also see the authors' <a href="http://www.nocaptionneeded.com/">No Caption Needed blog</a> and read <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/316062.html">an excerpt</a> from the book.</p>
                              
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 10:59 AM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/05/uses_and_abuses_of_the_icons_o.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <a id="a001095"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1095">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">Press Release: Niebuhr, <em>The Irony of American History</em></h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/285412.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226583983.jpeg" align="right" height="241" width="150" style="padding-left:10px" alt="jacket image"></a></p>

<p>Each of the major candidates vying to be the next President of the United States&mdash;Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain&mdash;has cited Reinhold Niebuhr&rsquo;s political philosophies as among their most profound influences. Written during the cold war era when America came of age as a world power, <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/285412.ctl"><em>The Irony of American History</em></a> is now back in print and more relevant than ever. Niebuhr&rsquo;s masterpiece on the incongruity between personal ideals and political reality is both an indictment of American moral complacency and a warning against the arrogance of virtue. Impassioned, eloquent, and deeply perceptive, Niebuhr&rsquo;s wisdom will cause readers across the political spectrum to rethink their assumptions about right and wrong, war and peace.</p>

<p>Read the <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/News/0805Niebuhrprs.html">press release</a>.</p>
                              
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 10:39 AM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/05/press_release_niebuhr_the_iron.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <a id="a001096"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1096">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">Press Release: Wikan, <em>In Honor of Fadime</em></h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/248480.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226896861.jpeg" align="right" height="215" width="150" alt="jacket image" style="padding-left:10px"></a></p>

<p>According to Human Rights Watch, honor killings are acts of murder committed by men against female family members who are believed to have brought shame upon their family. A woman can be targeted as such for refusing to enter an arranged marriage, for being the victim of a sexual assault, for seeking a divorce&mdash;even from an abusive husband&mdash;or for even allegedly committing adultery. The mere perception that a woman has behaved in a way that dishonors her family is sufficient to trigger an attack on her life. And that&rsquo;s tragically far too often the case. The United Nations estimates that at least 5,000 women each year fall victim to honor killings.</p>

<p>In this unflinching exploration, Unni Wikan places this heinous phenomenon beneath the lens of one case study, the notorious murder of Fadime Sahindal. For choosing a lover outside of her Kurdish community, Fadime was brutally shot and killed by her father at point blank range in front of her mother and younger sister. Wikan uses this murder and the sensational trial that followed to upset our pat assumptions about honor killings and to bring the factors that inspire them into clearer focus.</p>

<p>Here Wikan argues that these killings are too frequently linked to Islam: honor killings have been reported to take place among Christians as well as Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and even Buddhists. These are not crimes motivated by religious zealotry; nor are they crimes of passion or jealousy; rather, these are acts motivated by fear, for a family shamed brings even greater shame onto its community, and faces intense scrutiny and ostracization until honor is restored. Only until the cultural forces driving such tribalism wane will honor killings begin to cease.</p>

<p>But ultimately, this heartbreaking story belongs to Fadime. This is a tragic portrait of one brave woman who as soon as her life became endangered used her plight as a platform to increase awareness about these abhorrent crimes, exposing their shocking prevalence (and in some nations acceptance) before a stunned Western world.</p>

<p>Read the <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/News/0805wikanprs.html">press release</a>.</p>
                              
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 10:21 AM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/05/press_release_wikan_in_honor_o.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <h2 class="date-header">May 02, 2008</h2>
                     <a id="a001099"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1099">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">The collective history of the AACM</h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/236682.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226476957.jpeg" align="right" height="210" width="150" style="padding-left:10px" alt="jacket image"></a></p>

<p>Today's <em>New York Times</em> is running <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/02/arts/music/02aacm.html?ref=music">a piece</a> on author George E. Lewis's new book, <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/236682.ctl"><em>A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music</em></a>&mdash;the authoritative historical account of one of America's most influential avant-garde jazz collectives. Founded in 1965, many icons of the avant garde, musicians like Anthony Braxton and Leo Wadada Smith, have joined its ranks. And many of them continue to play as members of the collective today. The <em>NYT</em> article includes information on several upcoming events in NYC including a special <a href="http://aacm-newyork.com/News.html">book release concert</a> happening next Friday (May 9th) at the Community Church of New York. From the <em>NYT</em>:</p>

<blockquote>The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, [is] an organization that has fostered some of the most vital American avant-garde music of the last 40 years.

<p>Though noncommercial, often pointedly conceptual and unabashedly arcane, this music has had a profound influence over the years on several generations of experimental musicians worldwide.</p>

<p>The scene plays out vividly in <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/236682.ctl"><em>A Power Stronger Than Itself: The A.A.C.M. and Experimental Music</em></a>, an important book by the trombonist-composer-scholar George Lewis due out from the University of Chicago Press this month. Reconstructing that inaugural meeting from audio tapes, Mr. Lewis conveys not only Mr. Abrams's aim but also the vigorous debate begun by his notion of "original music." (Whose music? How original?) From the start, its clear, the association expressed its firm ideals partly through collective discourse.</p>

<p>Next Friday night another sort of discourse will unfold at the Community Church of New York in Murray Hill, when the association convenes a panel discussion with a handful of its current members, including Mr. Lewis, the multireedist Henry Threadgill and the pianist and vocalist Amina Claudine Myers. The conversation will precede a concert featuring Mr. Lewis and Mr. Abrams in an improvising trio with the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. </blockquote></p>

<p>You can read the full article on the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/02/arts/music/02aacm.html?ref=music"><em>NYT</em> website</a>, or see <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/476957.html">an excerpt from the book</a>. To find out more about the show navigate to the <a href="aacm-newyork.com">AACM's New York chapter</a> website.</p>
                              
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 11:54 AM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/02/the_collective_history_of_the.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <a id="a001097"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1097">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">Press Release: Rosenberg, <em>The Hollow Hope</em></h3>
                        <div class="entry-content">
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/282126.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226726717.jpeg" align="right" height="224" width="150" style="padding-left:10px" alt="jacket image"></a></p>

<p>Soon after <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/282126.ctl"><em>The Hollow Hope&rsquo;s</em></a> initial publication, a reviewer declared that &ldquo;one may not always agree with Rosenberg&rsquo;s book, but it will be impossible to ignore it. It should set the terms of the debate about the role of the Supreme Court during the last decade of the twentieth century.&rdquo; Having fulfilled all of this promise and then some during nearly two decades of intense argument over its conclusions, <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/282126.ctl"><em>The Hollow Hope</em></a> now returns&mdash;substantially expanded and updated&mdash;to chart the course of twenty-first century debate about whether courts can spur political and social reform.</p>

<p>With new chapters that respond to his critics and address the courts&rsquo; role in the struggle for same-sex marriage rights, Gerald Rosenberg emphatically reasserts his powerful contention that it&rsquo;s nearly impossible to generate significant reforms through litigation. The reason? American courts are ineffective and relatively weak&mdash;far from the uniquely powerful sources for change they&rsquo;re often portrayed as. Rosenberg supports this claim by documenting the direct and secondary effects of key court decisions&mdash;particularly Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade. Further illuminating these cases, as well as the ongoing fight for same-sex marriage rights, he also marshals impressive evidence to overturn the common assumption that even unsuccessful litigation can advance a cause by raising its profile.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/282126.ctl"><em>The Hollow Hope</em></a> has indisputably vindicated another reviewer&rsquo;s prediction that it would &ldquo;fundamentally reshape how we see the courts and what questions we ask about them.&rdquo; As legal battles over hot-button social issues stretch on, the new <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/282126.ctl"><em>Hollow Hope</em></a> is poised to reignite the landmark debate sparked by its first incarnation.</p>

<p>Read the <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/News/0805rosenbergprs.html">press release</a>.</p>
                              
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 09:22 AM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/02/press_release_rosenberg_the_ho.html">Permalink</a>
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                     <h2 class="date-header">May 01, 2008</h2>
                     <a id="a001098"></a>
                     <div class="entry" id="entry-1098">
                        <h3 class="entry-header">Baboons in mind</h3>
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                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/225832.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226102436.jpeg" align="right" height="216" width="150" style="padding-left:10px" alt="jacket image"></a></p>

<p>Writing for the May 15 <em>New York Review of Books</em> A.C. Grayling begins his review of several books on primatology with a brief retrospective of the work of Dr. Jane Goodall. Along with several of her contemporaries&mdash;Grayling cites paleoanthropologist Louis Leaky, and zoologist Dian Fossey among others&mdash;Goodall's research on primate's social behavior helped to shed light on the connections between humanity and our nearest living ancestors. And since her groundbreaking study at Tanzania's Gombe National Park, many other scientists have continued in the same vein, gaining further insights into primates social lives and, in turn, giving us new and deeper insights into our own. As a worthy example Grayling cites Robert M. Seyfarth and Dorothy L. Cheney's most recent book <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/225832.ctl"><em>Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind</em></a>. Grayling writes:</p>

<blockquote><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/225832.ctl"><em>Baboon Metaphysics</em></a>, by Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, shows how far ethology has come since Jane Goodall's early years at Gombe. An account of Cheney's and Seyfarth's field research into the social interactions of baboons, this is an impressive story, not just because of the care that went into the observations and experiments they record, but also in the philosophical sophistication of their thinking about the mental life of baboons.

<p>Cheney and Seyfarth cite a remark from one of Darwin's notebooks as the starting point for their work: "He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke." By "baboon" Darwin undoubtedly meant the language, or at least the system of communication, of baboons, and by "metaphysics" he did not mean quite what this word now denotes (namely, inquiry into the fundamental nature of reality) but philosophy in general&mdash;especially ethics and the nature and sources of knowledge.&hellip; Reconstructing the intention of Darwin's remark, we see what he had in mind: now that religious explanations will no longer do, the significance and value of things human must be understood by placing mankind squarely in nature, and learning as much as possible from mankind's closest relatives about how we came to be what we are. Thus understood, Darwinian metaphysics is sociobiology as applied to human beings.</p>

<p>For Cheney and Seyfarth the implication of Darwin's dictum is that ethological study of monkeys and apes can yield clues to the nature of the mind.&hellip;</blockquote></p>

<p>The review ends on a provocative note: </p>

<blockquote>One thing is clear: whereas human self-importance once placed human beings outside nature, everything that has followed from research of the kind done by Jane Goodall and Cheney and Seyfarth makes it impossible to think in such terms any longer. This point should by now be a mere commonplace; yet there are many millions of people whose faith-based ways of viewing the world lead them to think otherwise.</blockquote>

<p>Read the rest of the review on the <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21371"><em>New York Review of Books</em></a> website.</p>

<p>Also read <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/102436.html">an excerpt</a> from the book.</p>
                              
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 04:12 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/01/from_baboons_to_bataille.html">Permalink</a>
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                        <h3 class="entry-header">Press Release: Campbell and Jamieson, <em>Presidents Creating the Presidency</em></h3>
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                              <p><a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/265365.ctl"><img src="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Images/Chicago/9780226092218.jpeg" align="right" height="215" width="150" style="padding-left:10px" alt="jacket image"></a></p>

<p>Former President Bill Clinton said earlier this year that the choice facing 2008 Democratic primary voters is not &ldquo;change versus experience,&rdquo; but rather &ldquo;words versus deeds, talk versus action, rhetoric versus reality.&rdquo; No matter who becomes the next President, though, he or she will continue the long presidential tradition of acting through words to increase and sustain the powers of the executive branch. When it comes to shaping the highest office in the land, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson reveal, deeds are done in words, and rhetoric can change reality.</p>

<p>In <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/265365.ctl"><em>Presidents Creating the Presidency</em></a>, Campbell and Jamieson expand and recast their classic <em>Deeds Done in Words</em> for the YouTube era, revealing how our media-saturated age has transformed the continuously evolving rhetorical strategies that increase or deplete political capital by enhancing presidential authority or ceding it to other branches. Covering chief executives from George Washington to George W. Bush, the authors add new analyses of signing statements and national eulogies to their explorations of inaugural addresses, veto messages, and war rhetoric, among other genres of presidential oratory. For two centuries, these rhetorical acts have succeeded brilliantly and failed miserably at satisfying the demands of audience, occasion, and institution. Illuminating the reasons behind each outcome, Campbell and Jamieson draw an authoritative picture of how presidents have used rhetoric to shape the presidency&mdash;and how they continue to re-create it.</p>

<p>Read the <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/News/0805campbellprs.html">press release</a>.</p>
                              
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                                 <span class="post-footers">Posted by TXM at 01:18 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/05/01/press_release_campbell_and_jam_1.html">Permalink</a>
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