A quick round-up of coverage of Jonathan Rieder's The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr., coinciding with the sad anniversary of Dr. King's assassination in Memphis. We've got reviews from the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, and a revealing interview with Rieder in Pine Magazine.
Listen to HUP author Susan O'Donovan discuss her latest book, Becoming Free in the Cotton South, on the University of Massachusetts-Lowell's Sunrise Radio station.
Justin E. H. Smith draws upon two HUP books--Ira Berlin's Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves and Cecil Brown's Stagolee Shot Billy--among others, in a new essay on "Race and Music in America," posted at 3 Quarks Daily.
HUP author Cecil Brown (Stagolee Shot Billy) in the San Francisco Chronicle on the "anti-sag" controversy shaking Louisiana towns to their very core. Several towns have passed resolutions decreeing fines for youth who choose to expose a bit more undergarment than the city councils would like. "If you expose some of your privates, the crack of your behind," one mayor said, you are guilty of "lewd behavior." For the record, we here at HUP take no position on the appropriateness of baggy pants--we leave it to you, the reader, to decide whether they are offensive or just plain fashionable.
Stagolee Shot Billy is a great little book--one of Esquire's Best Books of 2003--that tries to unravel the mystery behind the identity of "Stagolee," that incorrigable ruffian who has provided lyrical fodder for artists from the Isley Brothers to Ike and Tina Turner, James Brown, Taj Mahal, and countless others. Just who the heck was this guy? In the process of finding out, Brown chronicles the powerful influence of a legend bigger than literature, one whose transformation reflects changing views of black musical forms, and African Americans' altered attitudes toward black male identity, gender, and police brutality.
A new entry at the "The Page 99 Test," the blog that tests Ford Madox Ford's assertion that if you "open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you," applies the formula to Susan O'Donovan's Becoming Free in the Cotton South, a boldly argued work that focuses on a small place--the southwest corner of Georgia--in order to explicate a big question: how did black men and black women's experiences in slavery shape their lives in freedom?
The last author of ours to appear at "The Page 99 Test" was Jeremi Suri, author of Henry Kissinger and the American Century, who's just been interviewed by Marshal Zeringue for his "Author Interviews" blog.
Sudhir Venkatesh, author of Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, had an article in this week's Boston Globe "Ideas" section on gentrification here in our fair city:
If white-black conflicts are no longer the most salient, what are the main lines of enmity and alliance? Several social scientists are helping to make sense of the emerging landscape of race and politics in the contemporary American city, where the old social divisions have been reconfigured. Their work reveals that gentrification is still contested and economic development does not end up benefiting everyone, but predicting the winners and losers is getting harder. Minorities may be on the winning side more often than not.
Learn more about Off the Books or read an excerpt.
Check out the latest installment in the HUP podcast series, an interview with Sudhir Venkatesh, author of Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor.
DOWNLOAD THE PODCAST HERE (mp3 file)
Congratulations to Rebecca Scott, author of Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery, who last night accepted the 2006 Frederick Douglass Book Prize at a gala dinner in New York City. The prize is awarded for the best book on slavery or abolition, and comes with a $25,000 award, the largest in the field.
During his introduction of Scott, Yale professor David Blight pointed out something we hadn't realized. Since the Douglass Prize was introduced eight years ago, four of the eight winners have published their books with HUP. Beyond that, each of those four has worked with the same editor, Senior Executive Editor in History and Contemporary Affairs Joyce Seltzer. Not a bad run, if we do say so ourselves.
From Elisa New's enthusiastic review in The New Republic of Eric J. Sundquist's Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America:
Eric J. Sundquist's immense and serious book pays the closest attention ever given to the symbiosis and the alienation of Jews and African Americans in the aftermath of World War II, even as he traces the emergence of major works of Jewish and black literatures in this same period. The argument of Sundquist's magisterial book of 1993, To Wake the Nations, was that the most significant American achievements of the nineteenth century--Melville's, Twain's, Chestnutt's--were ineluctably engaged with the problem of the color line. Shifting his focus to post-Holocaust literature, Sundquist's new book reveals not only how much of the literature we will remember from the last half of the twentieth century is literature of America's "strangers"--blacks and Jews. He also reveals how the tragic alliance and the estrangement of these groups from each other emerged as late twentieth-century American literature's most haunting obsession.
Readers of this blog know that Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's In Praise of Athletic Beauty has been getting some good press lately. Given the book's title, it only seems fitting to mention it on the 65th birthday of one of the planet's supreme exponents of athletic grace and beauty--"The Greatest"--Muhammad Ali.
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