Superbly insightful commentary on the Olympic torch relay fracas from Geremie Barmé, author of The Forbidden City, the latest offering in HUP's Wonders of the World Series. Barmé, an expert in 20th century Chinese intellectual and cultural history, puts the protests and the Chinese reaction to them in context with a level of detail you just won't get from the newspapers.
We were excited to see Kate Merkel-Hess' thoughtful review of Beijing Time over at The China Beat. In her opinion, the book touches on issues of authenticity (and its less authentic counterpart) that are being more or less ignored in mainstream media treatment of China leading up to the Beijing Olympics. Is there a "real" China that's being covered up by the relentless governmental PR push ahead of the Games? Can we even justify applying the concept of "authenticity" to China in the way that we're used to doing in the West? Well, it's complicated, and Beijing Time authors Dutton, Lo, and Wu are here to guide us into the Beijing that a native sees--the Beijing of vanishing hutongs, a city built along cosmological lines as old as China itself.
From the book:
This is a city haunted by memories of greatness, extending from dynastic times, through the creation of New China in 1949, to the status as a postmodern global hub that is central to its identity today. Architecturally and spatially, Beijing incorporates many different layers and times, acknowledged and unacknowledged. While it continues to grow and to experience spectacular refashionings today, Beijing is also a museum, capturing centuries of Chinese nationhood.
Starting from here, the authors unpeel the layers of a city whose astonishing transformation in recent years threatens to obliterate all that came before it, revealing a mish-mash of buildings, ideas, objects, and sentiments that combine to form something more than the sum of their parts--a Beijing that no news story can hope to capture.
As the Olympics draw nearer, athletes are increasingly worried about the effects of Beijing's notorious air pollution on their performance in the upcoming Games. Some have considered resorting to unusual training methods such as training behind a running bus, all in an effort to acclimate one's self to pollutants and thus gain that competitive edge Olympic athletes crave (note--doctors advise that running behind a bus is not an effective way to prepare for physical exertion in a polluted environment).
Anyone who has paid attention to the news coverage of the Beijing Games will surely have realized that they're a lot more than "games"--there are real social and political stakes here, especially so considering that we are dealing with a nation as controversial as China has become. And so HUP is preparing to make its own contribution to what is sure to be a growing Olympics frenzy during the coming months, but of course we are doing it in our own inimitable way--measured, scholarly, incisive, with no fluff. Xu Guoqi's Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008 is the first book in English to take a look at what sports has meant to China and how sport has served as a catalyst for major social change in that country over the last century. Everyone knows about "ping-pong diplomacy," but did you ever step back and think to yourself--"well why ping pong?" Xu, with the aid of newly-released archival sources, is here to answer these questions. In doing so, he articulates articulates a fresh and surprising perspective on China as an international sport superpower as well as a new "sick man of East Asia." Of all the books you're going to see on China in the coming months, Olympic Dreams is likely to be one of the most original, with an argument that will outlast the more ephemeral manifestations of media frenzy that will go as fast as they came.
A new article in Technology Review profiles Norman Borlaug, "green revolutionary" and co-author, with former US President Jimmy Carter, of the Foreword to Robert Paarlberg's Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa, which details how poor African farmers are denied access to productive technologies by Western government's and NGOs intent on keeping the GMO bogeyman out of the hands of the people who might need it most. Starved for Science will be out in March 2008, but this subject isn't going anywhere, as this recent Des Moines Register article quoting Dr. Paarlberg indicates.
Or so says leading French paper Le Monde in its recent profile of "hacker guru" Ken Wark--"Certains voient en lui 'le Karl Marx du XXIe siècle.' Heady stuff indeed. Wark's Gamer Theory is out now from HUP.
Well, we were. The New York Times Business section recently took on Stephen Mihm's A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States, a book that "takes us back to the screwball days between the American Revolution and the Civil War, when the dollar did not exist."
HUP author David Kirp (Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education and the newly-released The Sandbox Investment: The Preschool Movement and Kids-First Politics) makes a compelling case for preschool in this Newsweek.com interview. The tagline?--"The states are spending more and more money to educate children before they start kindergarten. But one expert warns that not all programs are created equal."
Or so says the editorial board at the Los Angles Times, in their "We wish ..." article for 2008:
We wish ... That the current and incoming national security advisor and secretaries of State, Defense and Homeland Security read Michael Levi's "On Nuclear Terrorism" and make it a top priority to ensure that everything that can be done to foil a nuclear attack by terrorists is being done.
We here at HUP wish exactly the same thing!
Happy New Year, everyone.
Following up on last week's post about the Slovakian uranium story, Council on Foreign Relations Fellow and On Nuclear Terrorism author Michael Levi has an op-ed in today's Washington Times encouraging us to get our heads out of the clouds (literally, in the case of the "Star Wars" nuclear defense system) and take simple, concrete steps--"mundane approaches" like training for police and border patrols--that in his estimation actually have a better chance of success than flashy gadgets:
These experiences suggest a different approach to embedding nuclear detection into a broader counterterrorism scheme. A smart strategy would put people at its core while equipping them with tools to enhance their effectiveness on nuclear plots. Instead of focusing mainly on exotic systems that would scan everything that moves through ports, it would emphasize at least as much providing customs officials basic tools to investigate those vehicles whose drivers behave peculiarly. Rather than try to blanket vast stretches of remote border with long-range radiation sensors, such a strategy could give Border Patrol officers simple and robust instruments they could use to examine individuals caught by traditional means.
Also, don't miss the discussion of Levi's book this week over at TPM Book Club. In Levi's first post, he delivers a witty synopsis of why he wrote On Nuclear Terrorism:
To understand how to confront nuclear terrorism, we need to get inside as many nuclear plots as we can. There's only one catch: no real-world terrorist attempt at a nuclear attack has ever gotten very far. Without reality to anchor us, we tend to conjure fantastic terrorist schemes, obsess over worst-case scenarios, and demand perfect defenses. That distorts our thinking about how to defend against nuclear terrorism. My book is a guide to kicking that habit.
On Nuclear Terrorism is available now from HUP.
The Guardian Weekend section informs us of a new warehouse being built in West Yorkshire on behalf of the British Library, whose national collection currently eats up about 12.5 kilometers of shelf space each year:
The warehouse is extraordinary because, unlike all those monstrous Tesco and Amazon depositories that litter the fringes of the motorways of the Midlands, it is being meticulously constructed to house things that no one wants. When it is complete next year, this warehouse will be state-of-the-art, containing 262 linear kilometres of high-density, fully automated storage in a low-oxygen environment. It will house books, journals and magazines that many of us have forgotten about or have never heard of in the first place.
You can get pretty much anything you want from the British Library--indeed, it is "statutorily obliged" to house one copy of everything that's published in the UK. So far the count is up to "13 million books, 920,000 journal and newspaper titles, 57 million patents, three million sound recordings, not to mention publications that exist only in cyberspace."
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