Harvard University Press Publicity Blog

Buy our books, says Esquire

We publish great books. But don't take our word for it--take Esquire's. From their latest "75 Things Every Man Should Master" feature:

No. 29--Understand quantum physics well enough that he can accept that a quarter might, at some point, pass straight through the table when dropped.

Sometimes the laws of physics aren't laws at all. Read The Quantum World: Quantum Physics for Everyone, by Kenneth W. Ford.

We agree wholeheartedly. More on Ford's book here at the main HUP site.

The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America

As a follow-up to Friday's post on American Catholicism, Katherine A. Powers of the Boston Globe has reviewed O'Toole's book, calling it "a penetrating, deftly worked summary of organizational and liturgical developments, formal and informal, in the American Catholic Church with emphasis on the role and influence of the laity." The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America is out now from HUP.

MLK as a verbal artist

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.

Joseph Schumpeter Revisited

In this week's Chronicle Review, J. Bradford DeLong adds his voice to those calling for the rehabilitation of Joseph Schumpeter, in a review of Thomas McCraw's book Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction. "Perhaps this next century will give Schumpeter's work its proper place as the power of innovation to transform, create, enrich, and destroy makes itself manifest globally," says DeLong, whose economics blog Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal is one of the top destinations on the web for those interested in how economics intersects with our daily lives.

God's not in it, not anymore

Aziz Huq reviews Charles Taylor's A Secular Age for the American Prospect website:

In an idiosyncratic blend of the philosophical, the historical, and the speculative, Taylor describes the shift from a world brim-full with spirits and magic to a world where divinity is absent. His account resists the idea that the rise of secularism is a process of subtraction, of loss, and of disenchantment. Rather, Taylor describes secularity's birth as the migration of ideas, subtle changes in those ideas, and the opening of new possibilities. If Taylor's communitarian scholarship celebrated historical and social rootedness, A Secular Age is an encomium to the sheer happenstance of how those circumstances arose.

||| Read an excerpt from A Secular Age.

A Secular Age, reviewed, again

Two new reviews of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, one in the Los Angeles Times and the other in the Vancouver Sun.

A Secular Age, reviewed

...in the New York Sun:

At a time when hardly a week passes without the publication of a new anti-religious tract, Mr. Taylor's "A Secular Age" (Harvard University Press, 776 pages, $39.95) is a salutary and sophisticated defense of how life was lived before the daring views of a tiny secular elite inspired mass indifference, and how it might be lived in the future. There are even faint signs that our contemporaries are beginning to pose the question from the old Peggy Lee song: "Is that all there is?"

||| Learn more about A Secular Age.

Guernica and Total War

Jeffrey Burke reviews Ian Patterson's Guernica and Total War for Bloomberg News in a piece entitled "Guernica, Dresden, Baghdad: How Bombing Civilians Got Popular." The bombing of the Basque town in 1937, as we all know, marks the first airborne attack on civilians, as immortalized in Picasso's famous painting of the destruction. The consequences of this development, as Patterson shows, have been nothing less than transformational in terms of how we understand war in the modern age.

Kissinger--the unlikely icon

David Greenberg reviews Henry Kissinger and the American Century, Jeremi Suri's "bold" offering in the Kissinger re-evaluation genre, in yesterday's Washington Post Book World:

With his gravelly Germanic mumble, horn-rimmed glasses, cold-blooded espousal of realpolitik, and a head that Oriana Fallaci likened to that of a sheep, Kissinger has become a most improbable American icon. Like his equally complex and controversial benefactor, Richard Nixon, he has generated reams of chitchat, psychobabble and lore, from his 383-page undergraduate thesis to his rumored liaisons with starlets. (One favorite tale: when thanked by an admirer for "saving the world," Kissinger replied: "You're welcome.") If only for his Strangelovean presence in American culture, he warrants explication.

||| More on Henry Kissinger and the American Century.

The Case for Pre-K

Sara Mead in the American Prospect on what progressives can learn from David Kirp's The Sandbox Investment: The Preschool Movement and Kids-First Politics:

For those interested in children's and education issues, it's a valuable primer on this significant but relatively new movement. It also serves a larger purpose, providing a guidebook for other progressive causes which could learn a lot both from the pre-kindergarten movement's improbable effectiveness in advancing its progressive aims -- even in states, such as Texas and Oklahoma, not known to harbor much affection for government programs -- and the challenges it faces.

More on The Sandbox Investment: The Preschool Movement and Kids-First Politics.