Harvard University Press Blog

John Eklund, Book Person

Could our arms reach Milwaukee, one John Eklund would likely be bruised by back-pats, because we were thrilled to learn last week that he’s been named one of Publisher’s Weekly’s four finalists for Rep of the Year! Such recognition is a fine honor for a tireless advocate of university press publishing. And, though John’s likely to find our dwelling on this news silly, a few words are in order.

In an industry currently dizzy with its focus on ebooks and data, data, data, John is a capital-B, capital-P Book Person. He’s as invested in the health of the book business as anyone, but because of books and people, not because of profits or shareholders. He still believes strongly in the ability of books to explain the world around us. When he found himself appalled by the self-centeredness of American news coverage of recent events in Egypt, he rattled off a list of a dozen books to do the explaining that the media couldn’t or wouldn’t. When the headlines about Borders filing for bankruptcy focused on investors and bottom lines, John made us remember the 20,000 booksellers in line to lose their jobs. Books and people.

John has been representing the Harvard, Yale, and MIT presses since 1998. He came to work with us after spending many years as a buyer and bookseller for the landmark independent Schwartz chain in Milwaukee, and he’s carried that commitment to independent bookselling into his life as a rep. John understands publishing, bookselling, and reading as the delicate ecosystem that they together comprise, and he’s forever ready to remind us when we let ourselves forget. He posts “road reports and musings” to his blog, Paper Over Board, where his sharp eye and open mind show themselves time and again, like in this post from November, when a bowl of grapes on a restaurant table got him thinking about how booksellers build loyalty. John’s great at seeing something that works and drilling right down to why, as in this love letter to The Elliott Bay Book Company last summer. If you’re in the book business and you don’t read John’s blog, start now.

The sales rep’s fundamental role is to serve as an essential conduit between publishers and booksellers, but it’s not just a one-way transfer. Sure, John has to present to his accounts the hundreds of new books that HUP, Yale, and MIT have to offer each season across history, science, art, sociology, popular culture, politics, and the rest. But reps also have to send information in the other direction, reporting back to publishers on how new titles are being received, and also on trends and developments on the front lines. As much as we try to keep up with what’s out there, people in a publishing house are often trapped in our own little bubble. Reps provide us with critical contact with the booksellers who still know more about what and how people read than any algorithm can tell us.

A great rep like John, though, is so much more than a cable between parties. Repping has always been about relationships, and maybe never more than today. In an industry facing as much monumental change as publishing, those relationships and commitments can still be what pull you through. Somehow recently in publishing “legacy” has become a pejorative, and “traditional” seems now to be code for “dying.” John’s quick to spot and embrace innovation, but his respect for tradition and for relationships are what most stand out about him. He’s learned this business from people he’d say he’s been lucky to know, like Mark Gates, and David Stimpson. While John’s always eager to credit those he’s learned from throughout his career, here’s hoping he knows that these days he also does an awful lot of teaching.

Finally, in this winter when John’s been joining workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere who are standing up for their right to band together, it has to be said that his relationship with his colleagues makes him uneasy with this personal recognition. For years John has been partnered with Adena Siegel and Patricia Nelson in representing Harvard, Yale, and MIT, and their arrangement is unique. Just last week, all three took time out of their selling season to engage in a round robin of thoughtful emails about ideas for improving our catalog. John’s the first to say that it’s a group effort, and that it should be recognized as such.

Even so, John, please accept our congratulations. And when next we see you, and those back-pats fly, don’t say you weren’t warned.

(UPDATE: He won!!)

Robert Verchick on the America's Great Outdoors Initiative

Robert Verchick, author of Facing Catastophe: Environmental Action for a Post-Katrina World, recently completed a twelve month stint as the deputy associate administrator of the Office of Policy with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Last week he was at the White House to celebrate the announcement of President Obama’s conservation initiative, America’s Great Outdoors. Below, he highlights some of the initiative’s most promising recommendations.

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If you’ve ever visited the Great Smoky Mountains National Park—one of the most visited national parks in the United States—you have Horace Kephart and George Masa to thank. These two men, the first a travel writer, the second a landscape photographer from Osaka, Japan, each settled among those six-thousand foot peaks with intentions of starting a new life in the American wild. Unfortunately, the timber industry had gotten there first and was soon mowing down forests at the rate of 60 acres per day. Distressed by such calamity, Kephart and Masa organized a diverse grassroots campaign to raise millions of dollars to save the area. Fueled by church donations, high school fundraisers, and other activities, the campaign eventually enabled the federal government, through a public-private partnership, to set aside land for what would finally become by 1940 a protected, 814-square-mile expanse of America’s Great Outdoors.

On February 16, 2011, President Barack Obama invoked the memory of Kephart and Masa before a cheerful audience in the East Room of the White House, as he reported on his administration’s centerpiece conservation strategy known as the America’s Great Outdoors Initiative. I was there, squeezed between two-big shouldered men and surrounded by dozens of outdoor enthusiasts: ranchers, farmers, hunters, anglers, corporate executives, tribal representatives, backpackers, environmental activists, and two adorable grade school girls from the Washington area, wearing “Buddy Bison” T-shirts. I was not the only one to note the irony of celebrating the outdoors in an indoor venue (what, then, do you do with your cowboy hat?), but that point soon gave way to the just-released AGO Report which articulated for the first time the President’s strategy for a 21st century conservation and recreation agenda. (Disclosure: I recently served in the Obama Administration and contributed to the report.)

Open the executive summary to Chapter 1 and you learn that the most pressing challenge in the nation’s great outdoors is . . . Jobs! We need them! And fast! So the first recommendations center on streamlining federal career opportunities in nature conservancy and developing a Conservation Service Corps for young people interested in public lands and water restoration. Both fine ideas, particularly the second, which the President said would “encourage young people to put down the remote or the video games and get outside.” But the real meat comes in a later chapter on conservation and restoration.

More Memories of Daniel Bell

After Daniel Bell’s death late last month, Michael Aronson shared some of his memories of the man and their friendship. Below, HUP Executive Editor for the Humanities Lindsay Waters remembers Bell as a personal teacher who played a central role in shaping what Harvard University Press has become.

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I have lost in less than a year two great teachers whom I acquired since coming to the Harvard University Press. The first was Frank Kermode, whom I honored here a few months ago; the second is Dan Bell. Children think of teachers as adults, but I had trouble thinking of Dan as an adult, because he was always so feisty, always so filled with spunk, right to the end. He was not calm and reserved; he was always ready for an intellectual joust. He brought the feel of the lunch hall Alcove Number One of City College in New York City to ivied Harvard, to our Board of Syndics meetings, and to the many conversations we had around and between those. The Board is a rotating group of senior Harvard faculty that is the last hurdle that every HUP project must clear, and having Dan as a member made HUP’s then-Director Arthur Rosenthal feel at home. It ensured that no meeting would be dull, and that we attending would not be choked by ivy the way the laurel strangles Daphne creeping up her every limb. Arthur trusted Dan to protect the Harvard Press from “qvatch,” which is, as Dan told me, “a good Berliner term for which the only honest equivalent is crap.”

Dan was my adversary and my advocate on the Board. Arthur hired me to publish books like Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. When I came on board, I was able to link up with Helen Vendler at once because we both loved poetry most of all. But Dan was different. Dan hated intellectuals like Heidegger who supported Adolf Hitler. He had a feel for the “cultural contradictions of capitalism,” to state the name of one of his most powerful books, one I studied at Minnesota with my friend Schulte-Sasse. I said “feel,” and “feel” is an important word here, because however much his genius as a sociologist came from his ability to perceive and imagine empirical structures, he took that genius to a new level that subsumed (yes, yes, in a way best designated by the fancy but irresistible Hegelian term “aufhebung”) one structure into another. This feeling at its most vital and delicate is what Dan described as a certain ability to perceive the smallest changes in society on your fingertips. He had a German world for it: “fingerspitzengefühl.” What I am saying is that he was a romantic, even though he said he was a cultural conservative. In other words, he was riven by the very same contradictions he made central to his analysis of modern society. This is why we worked so well together despite our constant sparring. In wrestling with him, I was wrestling with my angel and I felt the presence of god not just in Dan but in the struggle itself, which is why it is so sad that it’s over. But let me tell you what good we wrought working with our colleagues here at the Press and on the Board of Syndics.

The distinguished German publisher Siegfried Unseld (head of Suhrkamp Verlag) came one day from Frankfurt to Cambridge to see Arthur and me to bring me a plan for a comprehensive but nonetheless selective edition of the writings of Walter Benjamin. The list of what Unseld thought needed to be in what would have to be a multi-volume work was extensive. My postmodernist friends, the ones who liked Heidegger, had introduced me to Benjamin. To gather firepower to win the Syndics discussion of the Benjamin, I turned to the then Harvard art historian T.J. Clark, and he wrote a great review of the plans for the edition. But when we got to the Syndics meeting I was overwhelmed by worry. How could the august Syndics approve the publication of volumes of a man whose dissertation at the University of Frankfurt was turned down? Who was this schlemiel Walter Benjamin, the little rag-picker? How could publishing thousands of pages of this slacker-dude’s essays and notebooks be grand enough for Harvard University Press? Before the meeting I’d done no lobbying of the Syndics. At the meeting an inevitable question arose: “OK, he sounds like an impressive critic and thinker, but why do we have to publish thousands of pages of his work?” And Dan answered without a pause: “Because he is a critic, and he’s not a theorist. If he were a theorist, he’d have presented his ideas systematically, and we could publish a well-chosen selection of his work that would represent his thinking beautifully, but he’s a critic, not a theorist, which means his ideas are scattered across all the pages of his work, and the only way to publish his work adequately is to publish hundreds and hundreds of pages of it so readers can see how his ideas emerge as he gets caught up in analyzing hundreds of concrete situations.” Arthur was convinced and the Board was convinced, and we have now published about three thousand pages of Benjamin’s writings, including an edition this spring of his Early Writings, 1910-1917. I could not have done it without Dan. Arthur would not have been convinced, nor would the Syndics have been. The trust between Arthur and Dan went way back. And they both trusted me already—I’d only been at the Press for two years when we solidified this plan—in ways that seem miraculous and beautiful to me still. We did this, and we did it right, working all together. And after Arthur departed, Bill Sisler and Aida Donald supported the meticulous editing of Maria Ascher and Howard Eiland, because they saw, as Aida told me, that we’d be judged forever as a Press if we screwed this job up. And if we did it right, we’d earn eternal glory.

A Textual History of The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray was published in 1890 in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, and its assault on repressive Victorianism was immediately controversial. Though appreciated by some, the novel provoked hostile reactions from many members of the British press. The outcry prompted Wilde to cut portions of the text when he later prepared it to be published as a book, but, in fact, the version originally published by Lippincott's had already been subject to censorship. Our new extensively illustrated annotated edition of the novel, edited by Nicholas Frankel, is the first edition to present Wilde’s original text. Below, Frankel explains the history of this version of the text, and outlines the developments in textual criticism that have finally led to its publication.

On Wednesday, February 23rd, Nicholas Frankel will be discussing The Picture of Dorian Gray as a guest on the Diane Rehm Show. (UPDATE:  You can listen to the episode here.)

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The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition is the first edition to restore “objectionable” material cut by Lippincott editor J. M. Stoddart, shortly before the novel’s appearance in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in June 1890. It constitutes the emended typescript Wilde had submitted to Lippincott & Co. for publication a few months earlier. When Wilde’s typescript of the novel arrived on Stoddart’s desk, he quickly determined that it contained “a number of things which an innocent woman would make an exception to,” as he explained to Craige Lippincott, while assuring his employer that The Picture of Dorian Gray would “not go into the Magazine unless it is proper that it shall.” He further guaranteed Lippincott that he would edit the novel to “make it acceptable to the most fastidious taste.”

The vast majority of Stoddart’s deletions were acts of censorship, bearing on sexual matters of both a homosexual and a heterosexual nature. Much of the material that Stoddart cut makes the homoerotic nature of Basil Hallward’s feelings for Dorian Gray more vivid and explicit than either of the two subsequent published versions, or else it accentuates elements of homosexuality in Dorian Gray’s own make-up. But some of Stoddart’s deletions bear on promiscuous or illicit heterosexuality too – Stoddart deleted references to Dorian’s female lovers as his “mistresses,” for instance -- suggesting that Stoddart was worried about the novel’s influence on women as well as men. Stoddart also deleted many passages that smacked of decadence more generally.

The first time Wilde saw these changes was when he opened his own copy of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. In my textual introduction to The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition, I explain why Wilde had neither the chance nor the authority to approve Stoddart’s edits before the novel’s appearance in Lippincott’s, as well as why, in the wake of public outcry against Wilde’s novel, it was impossible for him to restore the material cut by Stoddart. Indeed, when Wilde revised the novel for publication in book form in 1891, he set about cutting even more of the content the British press condemned as “vulgar,” “unclean,” “poisonous,” “discreditable,” and “a sham.”

The chief differences between the text Wilde submitted to Lippincott and published versions of the novel were made known in 1976 by John Espey, a Professor of English at UCLA, where Wilde’s emended typescript (on which the present edition is based) is housed. “It would be a relatively simple matter to restore the full text as Wilde submitted it to Stoddart,” Espey remarked. But Espey, a Modernist scholar, had little interest in undertaking such an edition himself. More importantly, the time was inauspicious. Textual scholars were then trained to believe that the final text of a literary work to have been published in its author’s lifetime was authoritative, representing the author’s final intentions. Oscar Wilde studies were still in an embryonic state, moreover, partly because of the stigma still surrounding Wilde on account of his homosexuality and Irishness. Scholarship about Wilde – especially scholarly editions of his writings – still lagged behind that about many other writers.

Military, Money, and Motives in Egypt

Nezar AlSayyad is Professor of Architecture and Urban History, and Chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He was raised in Cairo, and as a practicing architect has designed many buildings in the city. His Cairo: Histories of a City, forthcoming this spring, chronicles the many Cairos that have existed through the centuries, and the figures who have shaped them, including Hosni Mubarak. Below, in a piece co-written with Tara Graham, Publications Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Berkeley, AlSayyad identifies the powerful vested interests threatening this vulnerable moment of transition in Egypt.

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“Egypt has passed through a critical period in her recent history characterized by bribery, mischief, and the absence of governmental stability . . . Accordingly, we have undertaken to clean ourselves up and have appointed to command us men from within the army whom we trust in their ability, their character, and their patriotism. It is certain that all Egypt will meet this news with enthusiasm and will welcome it.”

The statement above could have been uttered in the recent past by some YouTube revolutionary or Facebook organizer, but Free Officer Anwar Sadat made this early morning rally call nearly six decades ago, on July 23rd in 1952, when the Egyptian military launched a coup to overthrow the king. A few years later, the new republic swore in its first president.

The Egyptian people have long referred to that day in July as their liberation day, and Tahrir (or Liberation) Square in downtown Cairo owes its name to this early military revolt. It is both appropriate and ironic that the square became the site of the more recent revolution resulting in the removal of President Hosni Mubarak from power. Tahrir Square has certainly earned its name.

Mubarak, who stubbornly stood his ground in three successive speeches delivered during the course of the recent uprising, never announced his own resignation. In the end, he was most likely exiled by his Armed Forces, to whom he supposedly delegated his authority as president. It seems history has just repeated itself, but this time with the military ousting a president, instead of a king.

Today, as pundits of all political persuasions engage in speculation about the future of Egypt, it is important to take a more tempered attitude toward the prospects. It is not yet clear whether the Egyptian uprising will be a Velvet Revolution, as many have hoped, or an Iranian-style Islamic Revolution, but it is clear that all has not devolved into a Tiananmen Square crackdown. At least, not yet.

The country’s future now depends on the actions of the Egyptian military over the course of the next few months. While the five communiqués issued by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces give reason for optimism, they don’t readily reveal the military’s true stance on matters. The army may not have intervened to silence the anti-Mubarak protesters, but it maintained the same passivity when pro-Mubarak thugs went on the attack. The rationale here is unclear, but it’s worth noting that the military has much more to lose in the current environment than it has to gain.

Show Us Your Loebs!

Earlier this year the Home & Garden section of the New York Times ran a story on books as interior design elements. The piece spotlighted a creator of decorative “book solutions” who helps clients fill their shelves with that certain je ne sais livre. Need 2,000 cream-colored leatherbound books to fill your library? There are specialists to help. Not so picky? Books-by-the-foot apparently account for 5% of sales at the Strand in New York.

The rise of these purely aesthetic bespoke libraries is perhaps a slightly unsettling comment on the book’s continued utility, or maybe it’s just a tad silly. But, hey, books are beautiful. We know that. A book collection’s varying colors, shapes, and sizes never fail to amount to a visually stunning collage that can also serve as a three-dimensional map of the collector’s intellectual path. But, as with the collection of 2,000 cream-colored leatherbound books for an equity manager’s “gentleman’s library,” sometimes uniformity can make an even more arresting visual statement than variety. We know that, too, thanks to the Loeb Classical Library, the 100th anniversary of which we’re celebrating this year. These little volumes of facing page translations enrobe Ancient Greek in green and Latin in red, setting a now iconic color palette for the classics.

It’s long been lore here that Martha Stewart herself is fond of decorating with Loeb volumes, particularly the reds. A couple of years back we also spotted the stack of Loeb volumes in this Pottery Barn ad: 

Beyond such decorative appointments, though, the Loebs also get pride of place in some beautiful libraries and bookstores the world over. They’re great and useful books, after all!

Here they are, with what also appears to be the I Tatti Renaissance Library, in Georgetown University’s Riggs Library, courtesy of a photo set compiled awhile back by Curious Expeditions:

Here they are, beautifully lit, in the newly created Lanier Theological Library in Houston:

Why Conservative Revolutions Fail

David T. Courtwright is Presidential Professor of History at the University of North Florida and author of No Right Turn: Conservative Politics in a Liberal America, in which he argues against the prevailing narrative of a conservative revolution in American politics since the mid-1960s. You can read an interview with Courtwright about the book at Rorotoko. Below, a day after President Obama released his budget for the 2012 fiscal year, Courtwright reflects on the continuing reluctance of the Republican Party to fight for fiscally meaningful cuts in entitlement and defense spending.

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The history of modern conservatism is the history of revolution deferred. Voters pummeled liberals in 1938, 1946, 1952, 1966, 1968, 1980, and 1994, just as they did in 2010. Yet no Republican beneficiary, not even Ronald Reagan, achieved conservatism’s central domestic aims. They never overturned the New Deal, or people’s growing reliance on government, or the liberalization of sexual mores and gender roles. They did achieve some victories on taxes and regulation, but they failed to do much for their most long-suffering constituency, the fiscal conservatives.

Consider national debt as a percentage of the gross domestic product. That figure declined under every Democratic president from Harry Truman through Bill Clinton. Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon managed the same feat. But every Republican president from Gerald Ford on left office with the debt percentage higher. Ford had to cope with recession for much of his brief presidency. Reagan and George W. Bush had no such excuse. They also enjoyed partial or complete GOP congressional control for six of their eight years. The spending problem went beyond entrenched Democrats.

In 1986 David Stockman, Reagan’s first budget director, published The Triumph of Politics, still the best memoir of conservative frustration. Politics triumphed because individuals wanted entitlement checks, corporations contracts, and congressmen pork. Reagan’s decision to cut taxes, spare entitlements, and take rearmament off the books simply made the situation worse. Instead of building a modest welfare state on the foundation of a regulated capitalist economy, as Franklin Roosevelt had done, Reagan wound up restoring a partially deregulated capitalism on the foundation of an enlarged defense and welfare state. Without sufficient revenue, Stockman knew, the arrangement could not last.

Tea-Party activists, burned by George W. Bush’s hypertrophied Reaganism, have pledged to hold Republicans accountable for deficit spending. But because they live in a two-party system, they cannot wring concessions by threatening to withdraw from coalitions, as their counterparts do in closely divided parliaments. So they have resorted to targeting big-government collaborators and backing primary challengers.

This Is What Democracy Looks Like

Now that President Hosni Mubarak has stepped down, Egypt can turn itself to the still highly uncertain question of what comes next. As we watch, and still scramble to make sense of this global spectacle, it’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect on some of the commentary and imagery of recent days.

The left and even much of the center in the U.S. have seemed universally to support the protesters and their aims. For many of these Americans with still inchoate understandings of Egypt’s dynamics, the recently enhanced role of the Egyptian military may have been difficult to assimilate. No matter one’s own political persuasion, a military force being welcomed, cheered, kissed by an enormous crowd of young protesters is not a familiar site, though there it was, yesterday, after the military’s first communiqué and apparent intervention. In such scenes we’re likely more inclined to fear for the protesters’ safety than to expect their elation. Certainly, many of the Americans expressing solidarity with the protesting Egyptians who were embracing their military are among those least likely to have such an affinity for our own. And yet, just as quickly as we were surprised, the military seemed to have backed away from any apparent plan to oust Mubarak, and now, in the hours following his abdication, the military’s intentions are still unclear.

Even still, this disconnect—this possibly jarring, nearly upside-down imagery of active young politcial dissidents actually physically embracing an independently empowered military—should serve as one indication of how little many of us really understand about the situation in Egypt. We’ve witnessed a massive political upswelling, one that we couldn't help but be moved by, and our commitment to the principle of democracy inspired many of us to feel strongly that if this many people thought that their leader should go immediately, then the man should take his leave.

If democracy is the goal, though, there are voices urging us to remember that Egypt is more than Tahrir Square. That point was the focus of a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by many-time HUP author Edward N. Luttwak on February 4th. “The Obama administration, like much of the world, is not reacting to the situation in Egypt—a mostly rural country populated by poor peasants,” he wrote. “It is reacting to the media spectacle in the center of Cairo, in which huge but largely middle-class crowds have gathered to demand President Hosni Mubarak’s removal.”

The piece continues:

Interestingly, the few journalists who speak colloquial Egyptian Arabic report that among the poor majority of the population—those who wear the traditional robe (djellaba) and depend on bread subsidized by the state—many still support Mr. Mubarak. They know that Egypt is the world’s largest importer of wheat, and that part of it is paid for by U.S. aid. While market prices have increased by 17% since last October, the rationed bread of the poor remains very cheap.

Perhaps the impoverished—a quarter of Egyptians live on less than $2 a day—fear that a government more modern than Mr. Mubarak’s paternalistic dictatorship will stop the current bread subsidy, or that a more Islamist government will not receive U.S. aid. Either way, many Egyptians have the prudence of the very poor. They cannot afford to take risks with the unknown—including a post-Mubarak government.

Now, we can place alongside the topsy-turvy imagery of protestors embracing soldiers the notion of the Wall Street Journal as defender of the impoverished, but Luttwak’s point here is sound. Though it doesn’t affect us in the U.S. nearly as much as it does others, food prices around the world are soaring, as noted by Paul Krugman, among others. Luttwak’s larger point was that a quick Mubarak exit would be too risky, and that the country should be given time to organize proper elections. This, like his noting of the impoverished, is on its face a reasoned gesture towards universal democracy. But much has changed in the week since he wrote, and had Mubarak not stepped down on his own the situation’s escalation may yet have overshadowed the traditionally cautious concern for what happens after foreign political transitions.

Marie Antoinette and the Machines

Not so long ago, a short video of a truly uncanny dulcimer-playing wind-up automaton made for Marie Antoinette in 1784 appeared online. The queen was no stranger to extravagance, we know, but why this machine, this wonderful human-like machine, which must have taxed the greatest artisans and mechanics of her time? What was its appeal? We asked Minsoo Kang, author of the newly published Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination. Watch the video below, and then scroll down for Minsoo Kang’s response.

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This video shows a demonstration of a beautiful dulcimer-playing automaton that was made by Peter Kintzing and David Roentgen in 1784, which was presented to Queen Marie Antoinette in the following year and purchased by her for the French Academy of Sciences. The object was not a simple doll with a musical device inside it, but a fully articulate construct that actually played a miniature dulcimer by striking its metal strings with tiny hammers. The wondrous automaton was one of many such intricately and exquisitely designed machines that mimicked living creatures during what I have designated as the period of the European “automaton craze” which began in 1738-39 with the appearance of works of Vaucanson and ended at the closing of the century with the performances of the chess-playing Turk of Wolfgang von Kempelen, which was a false automaton.

My book Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination looks at how intellectuals have utilized the self-moving, life-imitating machine as a symbol and a conceptual object from the time of ancient civilizations to the twentieth century. I look at the Enlightenment—when various notions of the human-being-as-machine and the machine-as-representation-of-the-human became ubiquitous in Western discourse—as the crucial period in the history of the automaton idea. For almost a century before the automaton craze, philosophers, scientists, and writers described the universe, the state, and the human body as machines, contributing to what the historian E. J. Dijksterhuis famously called the mechanization of the world picture. When later mechanics began to build and display actual automata with astoundingly complex mechanisms, they were seen as beautiful, wondrous, and rational representations of the entire worldview of the Enlightenment. It is for this reason that the automata were a success not just with everyday people who came to gape in awe at the wondrous machines but with intellectuals as well, as such luminaries as Voltaire, Diderot, La Mettrie, and Mercier commented on the objects as things eminently worthy of study (as reflected in the articles under “automaton” and “android” in the eighteenth-century Encylopédie).

Egypt: A Select Reading List

John Eklund represents Harvard University Press in the North- and Mid- wests, and blogs at Paper Over Board. Below, he condemns the self-absorption of American broadcast news coverage of the events in Egypt, and as an antidote offers a dozen books on the region from HUP and our colleagues at Yale University Press.

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Yet another international development that supposedly erupted out of nowhere. What a crazy, unpredictable world!

I don’t think the “out of nowhere” standard applies when traditional broadcast media haven’t done elementary reporting on a country for a decade or more. It only seems "out of nowhere" to us ignorant Americans, protected as we are from the dangerous journalism of Al Jazeera as we luxuriate in the freedom to watch Skins.

For some reason I turned on the NBC Nightly News yesterday, thinking I might get the latest on what’s happening in Egypt. Instead, it was the usual self-centered, US-centric blather: a screaming, cheesy slogan (Rage and Revolution!); a focus on one particular American woman who is afraid to leave her apartment; endless looping visuals of people clashing in the street with no context to really understand what’s happening; and, inevitably, the heroic anchormen, Brian and Lester.

The fact that journalists are apparently being targeted by the regime and these two empty media suits might be rattled becomes the focal point of the whole story. Forget Mubarak, will the anchormen and the old woman get out of Cairo alive? Yes, it might seem to be about the Egyptians but really, as always, it's about us! Would it be too much to ask for an interview with an Egyptian political scientist or two, who might actually give American viewers some informed background?

Thankfully, we still have books for that job. Even with the vast resources of the internet, books are still the undisputed go-to source when seemingly inexplicable world events pop up. There have been many worthy titles on the subject of Egypt and the region, the Islamic renaissance, and Middle East politics published over the past decade.

Here are a dozen from our presses that I heartily recommend. There are many more, so please check with your local bookseller for their recommendations. Spend thirty minutes with any of these and I guarantee more enlightenment than you’ll get from long hours enduring Brian Williams & Co.

 

A History of the Arab Peoples, Albert Hourani and Malise Ruthven (Harvard University Press)

Hailed in 1991 as the definitive history of Arab civilization, this panoramic masterpiece has been brought up to date with a new Afterword.

Cairo: Histories of a City, Nezar AlSayyad (HUP)

This loving forthcoming homage to Cairo as an urban space, and a history of the built environment—by a working Egyptian architect—now takes on added significance.

The Mind of Egypt: History & Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs, Jan Assman (HUP)

This sweeping 2003 history by the noted scholar is excellent deep background.