Harvard University Press Blog

"I'm Trying to Answer the Same Questions as Karl Marx"

Last week at the annual Professional and Scholarly Publishing (PSP) conference in Washington, D.C., Harvard University Press accepted the R.R. Hawkins Award for Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The Hawkins—the highest honor given by the PSP Division of the Association of American Publishers—recognizes the most exceptional professional, reference or scholarly work of the year. The book’s editor, Ian Malcolm, accepted the award on behalf of Piketty and the Press, and used his acceptance speech as an occasion to highlight some of the many people involved in the book’s success. A chance to pat ourselves on the back, yes, but also an opportune moment to acknowledge the unseen efforts involved in the publication of any scholarly work, and to remember that even the most singularly stellar of studies relies on a wide network of actors to help it realize its potential to “inform democratic debate and focus attention on the right questions,” the contributions that Piketty identifies in Capital as the critical role of expert analysis.

The text of Malcolm’s speech is below.

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HUP Editor Ian Malcolm Accepting the R.R. Hawkins Award

Thank you, on behalf of the author and on behalf of Harvard University Press. It’s a huge honour for all of us who worked on the book to win an award chosen by our peers in publishing, and to win it against such extraordinary competition.

I’ve been asked to speak for 5 to 10 minutes on the making of the book and why it’s an important contribution to scholarly publishing.

One of the joys of this book is that it has sold well and been reviewed widely. Many of you will already know what it’s all about.

So, thank you. I’ll sit down now.

Or so I’d like to conclude. But I’ll say a few things.

First, I want to pay tribute to the author. When I first met Thomas Piketty on a routine acquisition trip, I asked what he was working on.

“I’m trying to answer the same questions as Karl Marx,” he said, “only with better data and a clearer theory.”

Normally, that sort of grand claim is a cue for a quick editorial exit.

“Good luck! I’ll send you the email of an editor at Oxford University Press.”

But this wasn’t a normal author. Thomas was already a star in the profession. He had started thinking hard about the history and dynamics of inequality 20 years ago.

Indexing the Age of Fracture

Daniel T. Rodgers, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University, has been named a winner of the 2012 Bancroft Prize for Age of Fracture, his exposition of the late-20th century dissolution of the ideas that had previously served to shape Americans’ understanding of the world. The Bancroft is one of the most distinguished academic awards in the field of history, and, says the book’s editor, Joyce Seltzer, for Rodgers it was well-deserved:

The very first time I read Dan’s manuscript, I knew it was very special. He managed to brilliantly characterize the last three decades of intellectual discourse in the U.S. so as to enable me to see it in a new and revealing light. By mapping out major ideas about the market, race, gender, political obligations, and social welfare, and demonstrating the shift from collective to fragmented perspectives and outlooks, Dan makes the radical changes taking place in our way of thinking provocatively clear. I began to see the transformation he explored everywhere—in the arts, sciences, and in our social and political relations and expectations. Age of Fracture is a wake-up call to all of us that we must pull together again for the greater welfare and future of our community and nation.

Accurately and coherently characterizing an era is a challenging endeavor, especially when one’s period of inquiry is so recent. In his Prologue, Rodgers quotes Stuart Hall on the naming of ages: “What is important are the significant breaks—where old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes.” Though the task is to focus on major ideological threads, rather than to catalogue an age’s every idea, one of the striking things about Age of Fracture is just how much ground Rodgers is able to cover in a book that comes in well under 400 pages.

Age of Fracture is certainly no pastiche, though, and it’s also not the sort of free associative cultural criticism that we’d associate with, say, Greil Marcus. Nevertheless, Rodgers makes his way from Jimmy Carter to Judith Butler, the Civil War to the Culture Wars, Game Theory to the Gay Rights Movement, Nietzsche to Noonan, Earl Warren to Alice Walker, Harriet Beecher Stowe to Howard Stern. He covers so much ground, in fact, that we thought we’d just be blunt about it and offer up the Index. Give it a skim or a scour below.

Feather-Capped and Back-Patted

We’ve begun this year with a number of nice honors for books we published in the last. Seems that 2011 was a particularly nice year for HUP biographies. One of them, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist, has been shortlisted for the 2011 Duff Cooper Prize, which celebrates the best in non-fiction writing. The winner will be announced at a party given at the French Embassy in London on Wednesday, February 29th. This welcome accolade joins many others for Douglas-Fairhurst’s unconventional look at Dickens, which was recognized as a favorite of 2011 by such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Telegraph.

We’re also proud to see another biography, Ezra F. Vogel’s Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, earning wide praise. Having already been named a highlight of 2011 by The Economist, Washington Post, and others, Vogel’s masterful look at China’s boldest strategist has also been named a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for biography. In what was an exceptional year for the category, Vogel’s book keeps great company among co-Finalists such as Manning Marable’s Malcolm X and John Lewis Gaddis’s take on George F. Kennan.

Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China has also been longlisted for the 2012 Lionel Gelber Prize, which celebrates the best non-fiction book on foreign affairs published in English. And joining Vogel on the Gelber longlist is Sean McMeekin’s The Russian Origins of the First World War, which boldly upends the conventional understanding of Russia’s part in the Great War. The Gelber list will be shortened in early February, and the winner of the $15,000 Prize will be announced on March 12th.

We’re also honored to note that Daniel Blatman’s The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide was named Co-Winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research, for which 2011 was the inaugural year. The Book Prize Committee praised The Death Marches as “an important, path breaking new study on a well-known yet largely unstudied part of the Holocaust,” and described the book as “masterly, a veritable tour de force, and truly a pioneering study and an example of outstanding scholarship.”

And we’d also like to note the awarding of the American Historical Association’s 2011 George Louis Beer Prize to David Ciarlo, for Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany. The award, given in recognition of outstanding historical writing on any phase of European international history since 1895, is open to any scholar who is a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. Ciarlo recently discussed his innovative visual history of the German colonial worldview with the folks at New Books in History, where you can listen to the conversation.

On our website, you can scroll through other recent awards for HUP books, and we’ve also collected the Book of the Year citations given to over two dozen HUP works released in 2011. We’re continually honored to be working with such talented scholars, and we’re very proud to see their wonderful work recognized so widely.

In Praise of Design, Regional Edition

As publishers, we keep company in various overlapping circles of the book business. One community with which we’ve had a long relationship is the Bookbuilders of Boston organization, which brings together people involved in book publishing and manufacturing throughout New England. Last night the group held its 54th annual New England Book Show, at which we were thrilled to see a number of our books recognized for their excellence in design and production.

In the category of illustrated general trade books, our annotated edition of Pride and Prejudice, and the relaunched Image of the Black in Western Art series were both highlighted for their overall design and production, from jacket to layout:

In the reference category, The Classical Tradition got a nod for its overall design:

 

The following were all recognized as outstanding jackets in the general trade category, including a “best in category” award to our old sheepish pal:

 

Carol Padden wins MacArthur Fellowship

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has just announced its list of 2010 MacArthur Fellows, who will each receive a “no strings attached” stipend of $500,000 over the next five years. We are proud to share the news that Sign Language Linguist Carol Padden is among the 23 winners of this so-called “Genius Award.” We have twice had the honor of publishing Dr. Padden’s work. In 1998 we published Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture, considered a path-breaking transformation of the then-nascent field of deaf history. Inside Deaf Culture followed in 2004 and was hailed as a fascinating inside look at the development of group identity among deaf people. You can visit the MacArthur Foundation’s site for a video in which Dr. Padden describes her work. Below, Elizabeth Knoll, HUP Senior Editor for the Behavioral Sciences, Education, and Law, explains the importance of Dr. Padden’s research and also recalls her initial meeting with Dr. Padden and her husband, Tom Humphries. 

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Nobody single-handedly, or single-bookedly, creates social change. But sometimes there are books that see and say what others have seen and are still not quite able to say. Deaf in America and Inside Deaf Culture are two of those books. In them, Carol Padden and her co-author and husband Tom Humphries argued compellingly that the deaf were not pitiable victims of a physical deficiency, limited by a disability. They are the heirs and creators of an historically rich culture, of communities, schools, clubs, theatre, and art. To be Deaf is not just to be deaf. 

What has been even more influential is Padden and Humphries’s powerfully made case for American Sign Language—that it’s not simply an enormous set of gesticulations, as many hearing people might vaguely assume, but a language as grammatically structured and complex as any spoken language. That linguists now study ASL, and high schools offer courses in ASL along with Spanish and French, shows the impact of Padden and Humphries’s work. 

What I particularly admire about Carol is the skill—and energy!—with which she acts as a translator and intermediary between the Deaf and hearing world. The first time I met her and Tom, she made our three-way conversation possible by simultaneously translating everything I said orally into ASL for Tom, and everything Tom said in ASL into spoken English for me, and going back and forth herself between ASL for Tom and English for me. It was an amazing performance, and all the more amazing because I knew that this was essentially what she had been doing every single day, for her whole adult life. Her books are for both the Deaf and hearing worlds, and have changed them both.

Two awards for The Jealousy of Trade

Istvan Hont's 2005 book Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective has won not one, but two prestigious awards in its field:

1) The J. David Greenstone Book Prize for the best book in history and politics in the past two calendar years, awarded by the American Political Science Association.

2) The Joseph J. Spengler Best Book Award for the best book in the history of economics, awarded by the History of Economics Society.

Our sincere congratulations go out to Professor Hont on winning these awards and for having produced such an extraordinary work.

2007 Independent Publisher Book Awards

Independent Publisher magazine has announced the winners of the 2007 Independent Publisher Book Awards. Read on to see which HUP books took home honors.

Taylor accepts Templeton Prize, meets with UK religious leaders

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor accepted the £800,000 Templeton Prize from the Duke of Edinburgh yesterday. Later, Taylor met with UK religious leaders of all stripes to discuss the relationship between spirituality and terrorism. Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks had the following to say about the newly-crowned prizewinner: "If there is such a thing as a saint in a secular age, he deserves that title."

Taylor's magnum opus, A Secular Age, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press.

Toasting Charles Taylor

On the occasion of Charles Taylor winning the Templeton Prize, we've reprinted below a toast given to Professor Taylor by his editor Lindsay Waters at a dinner in Taylor's honor the night before the announcement.

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I knew about the genius of Mr Templeton because of my interest in international business thanks to my father-in-law, an American who greatly admired Mr Templeton and who worked in Canada mining all his life, living there half a dozen years. Thanks to him I understood how great the fractures were dividing Canada, and it is thanks to Charles that I have come to appreciate the drive to preserve the Canadian union. When things fall apart, how can we possibly find that which will motivate people to set their sights higher and not let the drive to chaos that somehow rages in us all to take command? I met Charles and in 1989 published the second of his three great treatises, Sources of the Self, through the kind offices of one of his very best personal and professional friends, the late Sir Bernard Williams.  The first of the three great treatises was his Hegel, and the third is the book we will publish this fall at Harvard University Press, A Secular Age.

Templeton Prize update

A little more info on the Templeton Prize (see below) from the Los Angeles Times and the Independent (UK).