Evelyn Ch'ien interviews Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) for the latest issue of Granta. Ch'ien, one of the first critics to address Diaz's work, is the author of Weird English (in which she devoted a chapter to Diaz's short story collection Drown) and the forthcoming The Edges of Language: Contours of Emotion in a Post-Symbolic Age.
Fascinating profile of photographer and HUP author Felice Frankel, whose On the Surface of Things: Images of the Extraordinary in Science, co-authored with George Whitesides, uses innovative photographic technology to find startling abstract beauty on the surfaces of objects all around us. Newsweek has called Frankel's work the kind that "makes you look, and look again."
Blog post and Flickr set of the abandoned Detroit Public Schools Book Depository from Sweet Juniper. Most books are headed for the dustbin at some point or another; in mid-80s Detroit they just got there a little faster.
The prolific Richard A. Posner is back with How Judges Think, a unique and, to orthodox legal thinkers, startling perspective on how judges and justices actually behave when they decide cases. See this piece from The Complete Review for an appraisal of Posner's latest.
Barry Gewen, on the New York Times Book Review's "Paper Cuts" blog:
It’s hardly news that religious sentiments emerge out of deeply felt emotions. It’s only our modern secularists and rationalists — like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Ayaan Hirsi Ali — who can claim to ground their lives wholly in the dictates of reason and scientific fact. Yet here comes the noted philosopher Charles Taylor, winner of the 2007 Templeton Prize, to tell the rationalists not to be smug. In his difficult, digressive, repetitious, exasperating and indispensable book “A Secular Age,” Taylor insists that the secularists operate out of a belief system of their own, just as believers do. They’ve merely exchanged one set of assumptions about the cosmos and the meaning of life for another.
Robert Paarlberg, in a recent Reason interview:
My students know just what kind of food system they want: a food system that isn’t based on industrial scale monoculture. They want instead small farms built around nature imitating polycultures. They don’t want chemical use; they certainly don’t want genetic engineering. They want slow food instead of fast food. They’ve got this image of what would be better than what we have now. And what they probably don’t realize is that Africa is an extreme version of that fantasy. If we were producing our own food that way, 60 percent of us would still be farming and would be earning a dollar a day, and a third of us would be malnourished. I’m trying to find some way to honor the rejection that my students have for some aspects of modern farming, but I don’t want them to fantasize about the exact opposite.
This and other dicey issues are tackled with grace by the author of Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa, out now from HUP. Paarlberg, an advocate of GMO seed varieties for African fams, takes this unpopular position because he believes that improvements in seed varieties and farming techniques are African farmers' ticket out of a low-yield agriculture that keeps most of them mired in hunger and poverty. He wrote Starved for Science in order to explain, in Reason editor Kerry Howley's words, just why "cutting edge farming technology is most feared where it is most needed." Also available online is a talk Paarlberg gave recently at the International Food Policy Research Institute, which works to find "sustainable solutions for ending hunger and poverty."
The New Yorker takes on John Mack's The Art of Small Things in its "Briefly Noted" section. Previously, Jeremy Axelrod had the following to say about Mack's work in a review in the New York Sun:
The pleasure of this encyclopedic book lies in the resonances Mr. Mack finds between his many historical anecdotes. Mr. Mack's roving, capacious sections are not organized within an academic thesis so much as they are arranged like a bouquet of flowers, in evocative rather than linear groupings. The book itself enacts a kind of miniaturization by surveying so many artifacts in one volume.
We suppose it was just a matter of time before "Web 2.0" caught up with die-hard dead tree adepts such as ourselves--hence Booklicker, "the free social networking site for book addicts." We haven't tried the site yet, but they appear to be shooting for a "racy" vibe, if the pic of a book lover tonguing what appears to be the Bantam Classics edition of Crime and Punishment (and for shame--don't they know about the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation??) is any indication. Anyway, if you're feeling smart and naughty, maybe go over there and give it a shot.
A plug for The Sixties Unplugged in the March 16 edition of the Boston Globe's "Shelf Life" column. The book's full title is The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade, and let's just say it's not your average wistful remembrance of the "glory days." Instead DeGroot aims to present a fuller portrait of those turbulent years, one that acknowledges the fact that the "Ballad of the Green Beret" outsold "Give Peace a Chance" and that the
Students for a Democratic Society were outnumbered by the crew-cut Young Americans
for Freedom.
In this Inside Higher Ed essay, HUP Executive Editor for the Humanities Lindsay Waters makes the case for essays, rather than books, becoming the standard of achievement by which young scholars are mentioned. Might sound odd coming from one of the top university press editors in the US, but take a look and it'll all start to make sense...
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