Harvard University Press Blog

Broken

Chaos reigned in the Congress yesterday, as negotiations on the bailout bill descended into what is called in internet terms an "epic fail." Writing in today's Washington Post, Paul Light, federal government guru and author of A Government Ill Executed: The Decline of the Federal Service and How to Reverse It, offers ten concrete prescriptions for officials who may wish to build a genuinely accountable bureaucracy capable of managing a bailout effort that can, in Light's words, "withstand the inevitable firestorm of political pressure that will surround it."

Here and there ...

... on this lovely grey Monday:

• Among eight "must-reads" from Fortune magazine is Walter Friedman's Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America, coming in at ... number one!

• HUP editor Lindsay Waters' ideas on slow-reading and the publish-or-perish academic culture form the basis for an interesting edition of "Brainstorm" over at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

While we're at it, have you visited HUP on Facebook? Friend us now and you could be the 200th "fan," it seems!

From Rhode Island to Baghdad

Many moons ago we posted about Saad Eskander and the Baghdad Library. Mr. Eskander, you may remember, kept a diary of his efforts to keep the library going under the most arduous conditions imaginable--for his efforts he was named Archivist of the Year by the Scone Foundation, and as of this writing he keeps going (see his special report on the library's progress, delivered in March).

In an effort to help contribute to the resurgence of scholarship in Iraq, HUP has joined with our colleagues at MIT Press and Yale University Press to donate 5,700 books to Iraqi university libraries. The volumes left our shared warehouse in Rhode Island a couple days ago and are on their way overseas, where they'll be used to help restock university libraries devastated by the fighting in that country. Iraqi librarians were invited to select titles old and new--textbooks, monographs, you-name-it--and we boxed them up and shipped them out, with logistical assistance from The Sabre Foundation, working on a grant from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. It's our hope that the donation can give a boost, however small, to the institutions charged with providing raw material for the inquiries of intellectually-minded Iraqis during the years to come.

Attn: Princetonites

Especially the cool ones ... Big Walter Benjamin event coming up October 3-4 at Princeton. Details follow.

WHAT: Image Necessities: A Symposium on the Media-Theoretical Writings of Walter Benjamin

WHEN: October 3-4, 2008

WHERE: Princeton University, 106 McCormick Hall

WHO: Cream of the crop of Benjamin scholars, including the editors of The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media and general keepers of the flame.

Click the flier below for full schedule of events.

More Benjamin coverage on the HUP Publicity Blog:

• A Stroll through Walter Benjamin's Berlin (architecture content!)
• Walter Benjamin's archive published (archival content!)
• Walter-Benjamin-Platz (photo post!)
• Another side of Walter Benjamin (drug post!)
• Walter Benjamin in The Nation (Baudelaire content!)
• A mere simulacrum of friendship :( (Gawker content!)
• A shattering of tradition (thought-provoking quotation content!)

HUP, nu-metal, and you

Cover of Thomas Dumm's Loneliness as a Way of Life, out now from HUP:

Cover of "The Illusion of Progress," the latest offering from Springfield, Massachusetts' own favorite nu-metallers Staind:

Can't say we quite planned that, but there you are. Unlike Staind, whose "parent-friendly grunge-flavoured soft rock," according to Britain's New Musical Express, "makes Creed sound like GG Allin," (ouch), Thomas Dumm will not be accused of soft-pedaling. Loneliness as a Way of Life is no self-help book, but rather an unflinching look at the defining condition of our time, a book that encourages us not to glibly wish our loneliness away but to inhabit it in a way that allows it to actually enrich our experience. We've been trying to encourage Dumm to pen a sort of crunchy soft-rock ballad that we can release on CD to give away with copies of the book, but thus far without success--seems we will have to settle for his altogether remarkable insight into what makes our modern condition, well, "modern."

We knew him when...

...he was just a wee author with a manuscript and a prayer, hoping to make his mark in this crazy world we call book publishing. Just kidding--Andrew Bacevich has never been a lightweight (lightweights don't make Lieutenant Colonel, we suspect), and now that he's on the bestseller list, we figured we'd remind everyone of his first book, published with none other than Harvard University Press, purveyor of the finest serious non-fiction, which smartly challenged the notion that the United States had failed to devise a replacement for containment as a basis for foreign policy.

American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy, a critical interpretation of American statecraft during the 1990s, was a surprise hit that launched Bacevich on his current skyward trajectory. Reviewers called it "an intelligent, elegantly written, highly convincing polemic," "an immensely thoughtful book," and all other sorts of nice things. Thus we are proud to say that yes, Andrew Bacevich, we knew you when!

"A deeply felt..."

"...beautifully written account of a personality about whom we cannot know enough."

So says George Sim Johnston, writing in today's Wall Street Journal, of Peter Martin's Samuel Johnson: A Biography.

||| Read an excerpt from the book.

You are invited

Come on down ... you're the next contestant on ... just kidding, come on down to the Harvard Museum of Natural History this Thursday at 6pm to see Scott Edwards, Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Curator of Ornithology in Harvard’s MCZ, and Leslie Morris, Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts at Harvard’s Houghton Library, discuss the origin and scientific significance of John James Audubon’s early drawings. Edwards and Morris are among the principal contributors (along with Audubon's biographer Richard Rhodes) to Audubon: Early Drawings, which collects the naturalist's crucial early work in a full-color, large-format (11"x14") volume. Extra bonus for those who choose to attend--the speakers have decided to bring some of the Audubon originals with them, which will be on public display during the lecture. Normally this stuff is locked away in the Houghton Library, so this is your chance people!

To get an idea of what's in the book, take a look at the slide show we've set up--just a few of the 116 portraits contained in the published volume.

The young and the restless

Youth is disagreeable time, for it is neither possible then nor prudent to be productive in any sense whatsoever. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Actually, Friedrich Nietzsche, Randall Stephens is proving you wrong, since he's been selected as one of America's "Top Young Historians" by History News Network. Stephens, the author of The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South--"the most fluent and authoritative synthesis of a complex and controversial subject," says The Atlantic--is also working on a new book for HUP, editing a volume for University of South Carolina Press, one for Columbia University Press, while juggling a couple more book ideas and a teaching schedule. Stephens, a native of Olathe, Kansas, perhaps makes an unlikely historian--the oldest thing he can remember in his hometown is "a Baskin Robbins on the main drag that was built in the mid-1970s."

Election HQ

Did you ever think that maybe you wanted info on the campaign issues beyond the traditional "he-said, she-said," "lipstick on a pig" media coverage? Good, because we've created an HUP Election HQ as a resource for those of you looking to make sense of:

• THE PROCESS
• THE CANDIDATES
• DOMESTIC ISSUES
• FOREIGN POLICY
• RACE & RELIGION
• GOVERNING
• THE HISTORY

Between this and The Daily Show, you oughta have the whole election thing pretty much covered, no?