"Kate Jackson is one of those special God-struck individuals with a consuming passion for snakes. She is not alone in this passion, but it is a rare phenomenon to have the passion combined with a dedication to rigorous scientific inquiry."
That from George Zug of the Smithsonian Institution, introducing Jackson on Sunday at the National Museum of Natural History. Jackson's book Mean and Lowly Things: Snakes, Science, and Survival in the Congo is out now from HUP.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer joined several leading legal scholars on Monday to discuss Einer Elhauge's new book Statutory Default Rules: How to Interpret Unclear Legislation, published this January by HUP. Elhuage's book gets at the thorny question of how judges can interpret statutes when the meaning of those statutes is unclear from the text of the legislation.
Donald Critchlow, author of The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History, spoke about his book last Thursday at The Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, who have put audio and video feeds of the lecture up on their website. If you missed it, see also the review of The Conservative Ascendancy that appeared in the November 18 issue of the New York Times Book Review.
A few weeks ago HUP and the Massachusetts Historical Society hosted a big to-do featuring prominent political couples reading selections from the correspondence of John and Abigail Adams as collected in the new book My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams.
WGBH was on hand to film the event, and they've now put audio and video up on their Forum website for your viewing pleasure. It was quite an entertaining night, so head over and check it out...
Boston-area readers take note--Greil Marcus, culture critic extraordinaire whose HUP books include Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, The Dustbin of History, Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession, In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-1992, and the forthcoming (2009) A New Literary History of America (he's the co-editor), will read from his latest book The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice at the Brookline Booksmith on Thursday December 6 at 7pm. The Booksmith is located at 279 Harvard Street in Brookline (map). A word to the wise--if you plan to go you should probably get there early.
DC area readers take note--Donald Critchlow, author of The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History, will be speaking at The Heritage Foundation's Lehrman Auditorium on December 6th at 12 noon. The subject of the lecture is the same as that of Critchlow's book, namely how the right wing of the Republican Party managed to build a movement that was to prove a driving force in American politics in recent times.
The lecture is free and open to the public, so if you are interested in hearing one of the top historians of American conservatism explain how the movement grew to become so popular, head down to the Heritage Foundation at 214 Massachusetts Ave NE in Washington DC (near Union Station, see map for details) at noon on the 6th.
Tomorrow night, November 16, HUP author and American philosopher extraordinaire Stanley Cavell will present a lecture at the Harvard Film Archive called "What is a Musical Epic?: Notes for reading O Brother, Where Art Thou?" Like Cavell, the Harvard Film Archive is a Cambridge institution, so if you're in the area, stop by for what is sure to be an entertaining night. Tickets are $10 (free for Harvard students), and the lecture will be preceeded by a screening of the film.
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My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams, our new edition of the correspondence between a pair of contenders for the nation's most famous husband-and-wife team, received a nice review in the New York Times Book Review on Sunday. Mary Beth Norton had the following to say about the dynamic duo:
From John’s salutation in the first letter — “Miss Adorable” — to the epilogue and his final signature in a letter to his son John Quincy about Abigail’s death — “your Aged and Afflicted Father” — the Adamses’ correspondence gives modern Americans an extraordinarily personal view of our country’s founding. Intermingled with comments on the great events of the day — the Battle of Bunker Hill, the vote for independence, the inauguration of Washington as president — are discussions of daily life, stories of neighbors and relatives, complaints about the high cost of living and laments over such family tragedies as a stillborn daughter and the deaths of parents.
And don't forget about the November 19th Faneuil Hall event, sponsored by HUP and the Massachusetts Historical Society, which we're calling "My Dearest Friend: An Evening with John and Abigail Adams." The event, which is free and open to the public, will feature readings from the letters by the following political luminaries:
Our host for the evening will be WCVB-TV 5's Mary Richardson. Should be a great time, and you are invited, so come down! Event starts at 7pm; Faneuil Hall is located in the heart of downtown Boston, near the Government Center T stop on the Green Line.
From the UCLA Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies:
“Thrice-Born Latinity”
Friday, November 2 - November 3, 2007After a first birth before the age of the Roman Kings, the Latin language has enjoyed many rebirths: one in the Carolingian era, another in the High Middle Ages, and a third in the Renaissance. In our own time, two extraordinary scholarly enterprises have renewed the vigor of Latinity: the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum (CTC) and the I Tatti Renaissance Library (ITRL), the first led by Professor Virginia Brown of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Toronto, the second by Professor James Hankins of Harvard University.
With the generous support of the Cassamarca Foundation, the UCLA Department of Italian and CMRS present a conference to discuss and celebrate the work of Professors Brown and Hankins. The program explores the implications for humanist scholarship of the CTC, the ITRL, and the texts and authors illuminated by them.
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Professor Hankins is the series editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library, a dual-language text series that aims to make available to a broad readership the most significant literary, historical, and philosophical works of the Italian Renaissance written in Latin. If you want to know more, the I Tatti series statement is a good place to start.
50 Years of Recuperation: The Situationist International 1957-1972
The 2007 Buell Lecture, by McKenzie Wark
Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture
6.30-8.30PM Wednesday 3rd October 2007
Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall, Columbia University, New York
The Situationist International (1957-1972) bequeathed many key concepts to us, including psychogeography, the dérive, unitary urbanism, and of course the society of the spectacle. It also spawned at least one major work of critical and utopian architecture in Constant's New Babylon. But rather than treat these as seductive historical curiosities, or as precursors to more "acceptable" notions, McKenzie Wark asks what might survive the recuperation of the Situationists and act as pointers to new practices. Rather than attempting to make an unbearable totality "sustainable," perhaps we might pick up the thread of those who dared to negate this world as a whole and imagine it anew.
McKenzie Wark is the author of Gamer Theory (2007) and A Hacker Manifesto (2004), both available from HUP.
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