Not Just Books Books
The University of Chicago Press Bette Davis Black and White
Book SynopsisBette Davis’s career becomes a vehicle for a deep examination of American race relations.Trade Review"A prescient book about white people who mean well but fall short . . . There is no other book in which the author takes herself as the object of reception study and, in so doing, exposes the lived aspect of the US race and class divide. The reader who is initially drawn to this book because of a fascination with stardom will find a deeply insightful, impeccably researched study of American culture."--Jane Gaines, author of Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? "A unique take on the work of Bette Davis, Bette Davis Black and White is important not only for extending an understanding of the actor's racial politics, attitudes and practices, but also for raising the profile of several important, but largely unknown, Black supporting actors. This book will appeal strongly to scholars of race, twentieth-century American history, film audiences, and fan studies."--Martin Shingler, author of Star Studies: A Critical GuideTable of ContentsHistorical Note Chapter 1 Introduction: Black and White Chapter 2 Little Foxes and Little Brown Wrens Chapter 3 The Poetics of Color in Jezebel Chapter 4 Melodramas of Blood in In This Our Life Chapter 5 The Whiteness of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Chapter 6 Bette Davis Black and White Acknowledgments Notes Index
£19.95
The University of Chicago Press Thinking like a Parrot Perspectives from the
Book SynopsisTrade Review"This fascinating and meticulously researched book explores the astonishing levels of cognition and intelligence of wild parrots, especially in the context of their complex social lives. . . . Under [Bond and Diamond's] expert guidance, we meet brilliant keas, cheeky sulphur-crested cockatoos, affable crimson-fronted parakeets, dazzling rainbow lorikeets, adaptable rose-ringed parakeets, and adorable kakapos. . . . This book is filled with intriguing information, some of it new or unfamiliar to those who know parrots best. . . . Engaging and wonderfully-written. . . . Over the years, I have read almost every book about parrots published in the English language, and this is, hands down, the best parrot book published in the past ten years, and certainly one of the best ever published. This succinct and erudite summary of the latest scientific research into these birds’ natural history, biology, ecology, and evolution is most unusual because it will be read and cherished by ornithologists and scientists as well as non-specialists, and by parrot breeders, behaviorists, and owners alike for years to come, and will appeal to anyone who wishes to learn more about how parrots view the world." -- GrrlScientist * Forbes *"There have been numerous books written about these remarkably brainy but especially endangered birds. This is one of the very best. The authors have studied the lives of wild parrots for over thirty years. Their groundbreaking research into the social behavior, ecology, and intelligence of a wide range of parrot species greatly augments the knowledge obtained from studies of captive birds, and plays an important part in helping conservationists understand how best to save them. This is both a beautifully written survey that anyone can appreciate and a serious reference work." * BBC Wildlife *"Parrots are birds that are familiar to all, famed for their beauty, their ability to mimic and talk, and for their emotional bonds with humans. Most books about parrots are either field guides to all the species or books on captive care. Here ecologists Bond and Diamond focus instead on the minds and behavior of parrots in the wild, drawing together years of their own field work and that of scores of other researchers; the massive bibliography alone is worth the price of the book. Divided into six sections, this inquiry into wild parrots examines their evolution, their behavior, their sociability, their cognition, the lives of the few parrot species that have expanded their ranges, and, finally, the conservation of parrots, the majority of which are threatened by human-caused environmental change. Throughout, Bond and Diamond intersperse tales of their own research on New Zealand’s parrots with studies of other parrot species around the world, illuminating the adaptability and intelligence of these gorgeous birds even in the face of environmental stress. Parrots are very sophisticated animals! . . . Give this very readable compendium to bird-loving and nature-intrigued teens." * Booklist *"Thinking like a Parrot describes the behavior, cognition, ecology, and conservation of wild parrots and includes a number of appendixes, an extensive list of references, and a beautiful set of color plates. The book does not discuss parrots as though they were small humans but, instead, is a well-considered attempt to explain parrot behavior in terms of parrot ecology and evolution. . . . I highly recommend Thinking like a Parrot to anyone interested in birds, animal cognition, and conservation and management." * BioScience *"Bond and Diamond take on the immense task of elucidating aspects of parrot evolution, ecology, and behavior that have largely remained inaccessible, endeavoring to fill a gaping niche of priceless information and insight about these charismatic organisms. A collection of informative essays preceded by vivid vignettes of recollected experiences with wild parrots, Thinking like a Parrot takes its readers down a logical path of immersion into the reality that parrots face. . . . Bond and Diamond have taken on a very ambitious task in Thinking like a Parrot, shouldering the heavy responsibility of bringing so many commonly unknown aspects of parrots to light and in charming detail. The book is a fabulous read, with excellent starting points to enable readers to delve deeper into topics concerning the lives of wild parrots. Even as bird experts, we discovered many fascinating new details. It is a welcome, necessary, and appreciated body of work; even long-time parrot owners and enthusiasts would be well served to read this book." * Current Biology *"Under the 'thinking' rubric are chapters on the evolution of brain and sensory systems; various models of behavior, social relationships and communication, adaptive flexibility or lack (hence range expansions and contractions); and something called 'intelligence.' Parrots have it and outperform corvids (crows, jays, ravens), the next 'smartest' bird group. Anyone who has cohabited with parrots (they are more companions than pets) knows about their 'smarts,' dealing with novelties, persistence, and long-term memory. This book focuses on lessons from wild parrots: from both authors’ studies of parrots on several continents and from the literature. This is a far-ranging work, clearly written and extensively referenced and generally makes interesting reading. Even an experienced parrot biologist will say, 'I didn’t know they could do that.'" * Choice *“The minds of wild parrots brim with intelligence, and their lives with clever, flexible, and exuberant behavior. This fascinating book takes us into their universe to discover not just how these birds live, but how they think, ‘talk,’ and feel. You’ll be amazed by the surprises—the slang of kākās, the playful gangs of galahs, the ingenious adaptability of rose-ringed parakeets.” -- Jennifer Ackerman, author of "The Genius of Birds"“Parrots have unusually large brains, surprisingly flexible learning and intelligence, amazing mimetic abilities, and rich, complicated social interactions. What evolutionary pressures have shaped these traits? In this entertaining and well-written book, Bond and Diamond offer a vivid portrait of the lives of parrots, keas, and macaws. It is a scientifically up-to-date tour de force, easily accessible to scientists and non-scientists alike, that elegantly summarizes the birds’ history, biology, and spread throughout the world—not to mention their complex relations with humans, who have for centuries selectively bred them for their wits and personalities.” -- Robert M. Seyfarth, University of Pennsylvania, coauthor of "The Social Origins of Language" and "Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind"“Although parrots have shared our hearts and hearths for hundreds of years, our understanding of their natural behavior has remained shrouded in mystery—until now. As parrots are notoriously difficult to study in the wild, the soap opera of their existence has remained unclear. In Thinking like a Parrot, Bond and Diamond have looked behind the curtain to reveal that parrots possess minds and behavior as complex and intriguing as any creatures in the animal kingdom. This is an exceptional guide for anyone who wants to discover more about how this stunning group of birds think about the world. As we continue to destroy the diverse habitats that wild parrots call home, it’s become apparent that we need to learn all we can about them before it’s too late. Parrots are so much more than the chatty, funny trickster companions that we know and love. This is the perfect guide to learning their secrets.” -- Nathan J. Emery, Queen Mary University of London,author of "Bird Brain: An Exploration of Avian Intelligence"“There is indeed something special about parrots. Bond and Diamond have captured beautifully the essence of both the extreme complexity and sophistication of the wild birds and our complex relationship with them. Thinking like a Parrot nails the most difficult aspect by managing to explain, without getting bogged down, the high levels of cognition and intelligence of parrots, especially in context of their complex social lives. Totally original and engagingly written.” -- Robert Heinsohn, Australian National University, coeditor of "Boom and Bust: Bird Stories for a Dry Country"Table of ContentsPrefacePart One: Origins 1. Rainbow Lorikeet 2. Evolution 3. Brain and Sensory SystemsPart Two: Behavior 4. Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo 5. Expression and Response 6. PlayPart Three: Sociality 7. Crimson-Fronted Parakeet 8. Relationships 9. Vocal CommunicationPart Four: Cognition 10. Kākā 11. Cognition in the Wild 12. IntelligencePart Five: Disruption 13. Rose-Ringed Parakeet 14. ExpansionPart Six: Conservation 15. Kākāpo 16. Contraction and CollapsePart Seven: Parrots and People 17. Captain Flint Meets Polynesia Acknowledgments Appendix A. Common and Scientific Names of Parrot Species Mentioned in the Text Appendix B. Analysis Methods for Brain Volume and Body Mass in Parrots and Corvids Appendix C. Comparisons of Form and Frequency of Play Behavior in Keas, Kākās, and Kākāpōs Appendix D. Kea Social Network Analysis Appendix E. Kea Vocalizations Appendix F. Kākā Vocalizations and Dialect Methods Appendix G. Conservation Status of Parrot Species Mentioned in the Text Notes References Index
£22.80
The University of Chicago Press The Digital Factory The Human Labor of
Book SynopsisTrade Review"The Digital Factory is an important contribution to the discussion of digital labor. But it also makes clear that researchers must now address the next task at hand: how to turn these bad jobs into good jobs." * Science *"Altenried's insights into the rapidly changing relationship between technological change, digitization and global work are breathtaking. The Digital Factory develops a deeper knowledge of the terrain, both social and physical, on which present and future labor disputes willy-nilly have to be fought. Continuing, expanding and diversifying this endeavor is and will remain an enormous undertaking. Books of similar intellectual thoroughness and comparable political depth are badly needed." * Kritisch-Lesen *"In this extensively researched volume, Altenreid uses interviews with workers in this complex digital economy to deftly link the hidden human labor behind automation and algorithms to the Taylorist factories of the Industrial Age. Covering everything from the complex interactions between humans and automation at Amazon’s distribution centers to World of Warcraft gold farmers in China and the unseen human labor behind Facebook and Google algorithms, The Digital Factory gives readers who may not be as familiar with Taylorism and its relationship to the complex landscape of the digital factory age a solid foundation on the topic." * Choice *"Altenried takes readers on an amazing tour into the contemporary mutations of what Marx famously called 'the hidden abode of production.' What looms behind the magic of algorithms, artificial intelligence, and automation is a world of heterogeneous labor regimes, exploitation, and struggles. The Digital Factory is a landmark contribution to the study of contemporary capitalism, a must-read for scholars and activists." -- Sandro Mezzadra, University of Bologna"From the warehouse to the multiplayer game, content moderation to people-as-a-service, Altenried unearths the shifting stakes, geographies, and experiences of digital labor. The Digital Factory offers no solace to purveyors of data and automation fantasies. By exposing how the power of machines entangles living knowledge, intelligence and subjectivity, this remarkable book offers resources for changing the worlds of work and technology alike." -- Brett Neilson, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sidney University"In this ground-breaking book, Altenried shows us that, far from marking the end of the factory era the digital age is spreading the factory model of centralized control of vulnerable labor beyond its walls, extending into every corner of the global economy. Drawing on vivid first-hand observations, he spotlights the experiences of workers carrying out the hidden tasks that keep the information economy going, from the hidden housework of the Internet to the delivery of parcels under the panoptic surveillance of the algorithm." -- Ursula Huws, University of HertfordshireTable of ContentsOne Workers Leaving the Factory: Introduction Two The Global Factory: Logistics Three The Factory of Play: Gaming Four The Distributed Factory: Crowdwork Five The Hidden Factory: Social Media Six The Platform as Factory: Conclusion Seven The Contagious Factory: Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index
£24.00
The University of Chicago Press Democratic Swarms Ancient Comedy and the
Book SynopsisTrade Review“This is a fascinating book. Truly kick-ass. It is high time that something astounding be done with Greek comedy. Democratic Swarms bursts with original readings, approaching familiar plays with incantations that tease out a possible world that has remained just beyond reach. DuBois nails the key concerns of today’s society and demonstrates how the afterlife of Greek comedy has seeded a wide range of modern discourses, providing a framework that can liberate comedy from the fetters that have been holding it down.” -- David Roselli, Scripps College“DuBois’s brilliant Democratic Swarms resists the long-standing dominance of tragedy in the analysis of ancient drama, reorienting us toward the comic chorus in order to rethink ancient literary production and politics both past and present. DuBois revisits assumptions about the centrality of character and dramatic plot—which privilege the individual—instead bringing much-needed attention to the ‘swarms’ of different creatures, the force of the animal and hybrid figures, and the collective in producing spectacle, laughter, ‘free’ speech, and action. She shows how ancient choruses and comic utopias can stir conversations on identity, democracy, voting, violence, power.” -- Andromache Karanika, University of California, Irvine“This book made me stand up and cheer. Beautifully written and full of insightful readings, Democratic Swarms finds duBois still raising the flag of freedom, like Marianne, and trampling on the shackles of Aristotelian poetics. She shows what comedy and its swarming choruses did that Greek tragedy did not do: mock the powerful, spread visions of the equal distribution of wealth, and present Athens whole, as a polyvocal buzz of conflicting voices. Democratic Swarms upholds the pertinence of comedy for today, enabling a politics that goes beyond the tragic individual. DuBois’s critique eviscerates current antidemocratic rhetoric and sees the swarm rise again in Occupy and Black Lives Matter.” -- Amy Richlin, University of California, Los AngelesTable of ContentsPreface Introduction Chapter 1: The Tragic Individual: The Tyranny of Oedipus and Antigone Chapter 2: The Swarm Chapter 3: Chorus Chapter 4: Utopias Chapter 5: Parrhesia: Saying It All Chapter 6: Democracy, Communalism, Communism Chapter 7: Epilogue: The Politics of the Present Acknowledgments Notes Selected Bibliography Index
£34.20
The University of Chicago Press Making Mexican Chicago From Postwar Settlement
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Amezcua provides critical insights into how Mexicans and Mexican Americans fought for inclusion—residentially, politically, economically, and culturally—in the Windy City . . . The history that Amezcua tells in Making Mexican Chicago is both inspiring and agonizing." * The Nation *"A compelling and disturbing book. . . Telling details and a skillfully constructed narrative bring alive Mexican efforts to create a refuge." * Kirkus Reviews *“Making Mexican Chicago is a superb analysis of race, property, and political power, with careful attention to the ways communities galvanize power across the twentieth century. Amezcua artfully exposes the ways that Mexicans and Mexican-Americans articulated their needs in a hostile and racist city through a variety of strategies—from coalition building to embracing capitalism to radical refusal. Amezcua makes visible how Chicago stood at the center of the transnational histories of Mexican migration and labor, the US immigration enforcement apparatuses, and the identification of Mexican-Americans as both the problem and solution during periods of change in urban centers. An outstanding contribution to urban history.” * Marcia Chatelain, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America *“Before Pilsen welcomed gallery spaces and Little Village became La Villita, the city’s Mexican population fought to make their voices heard and for places to live. Amezcua chronicles this decades-long struggle in his compelling Making Mexican Chicago. . . Throughout this history, Amezcua highlights myriad personalities and their transformations." * Chicago Reader *“In his new book, Making Mexican Chicago, Amezcua documents an extended story of political engagement and cultural distinctiveness. He draws connections between two struggles against different forms of displacement that have targeted the local Mexican community since the 1950s.” * Chicago Tribune *"Highly recommended. . . Amezcua provides a passionate in-depth analysis." * Choice *"Making Mexican Chicago explores the spatial precarity experienced by the largest Latinx demographic in the city—ethnic Mexicans. Amezcua argues that although they were victims of containment by restrictionist neighbors, businesses, and government officials, Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans were placemakers who developed their surroundings with their belonging in mind. Additionally, Amezcua notes that in articulating the Mexican urban experience, we can revisit our understanding of the rise of modern conservatism in the United States. . . . By centering the ethnic Mexican experience within the history of Chicago, Amezcua places the fight over neighborhoods, segregation, and property rights in a multiracial context." * The Metropole *“The story of the American city and its urban transformation is often told from the top down and within a black-white binary. With sophistication and care, Amezcua upends this narrative, surfacing the previously untold story of how Latinos shaped Chicago’s urban landscape and offering keen insights on culture, from beauty pageants to punk. After reading this book, we will wonder how we ever could have overlooked the role of Latinos in white flight, the rise of conservatism, and gentrification.” * Natalia Molina, author of How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts *“How did Chicago become one of the largest Mexican cities in the United States? In this fresh account of immigration, real estate, community organization, and politics, Amezcua moves beyond a simple narrative of repression and resistance and shows how Mexicans—as victims of discrimination but also as property owners, landlords, and grassroots activists—remade the city.” * Thomas J. Sugrue, coauthor of Neoliberal Cities: The Remaking of Postwar Urban America *“A superb addition to the growing body of work on the history of Latinx Chicago. Amezcua offers a nuanced story of the politics of place and space, using the history of housing, displacement, and urban renewal to explore broader patterns of urban change and the evolving strategies of a marginalized group in gaining access to power.” * Lorrin Thomas, author of Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in New York City *"This carefully documented historical study follows the ups and downs of twentieth-century Chicago as it shifted from a thriving powerhouse to a post-industrial city, as told through the saga of generations of Mexican labourers recruited to work in the packing houses and the steel industry... While there is no dearth of historical scholarship focusing on the Windy City, this book’s major contributions lie in the breadth and depth of Amezcua’s story-telling." * Ethnic and Racial Studies *“Bristling with original insights, big questions, and inspiring characters, Making Mexican Chicago demonstrates the importance of placing Mexicans and Mexican Americans at the center of US history to understand broader phenomenon including industrial unionism, white flight, and urban renewal. Amezcua replaces longstanding stereotypes with facts to illuminate a rich narrative of Mexican American unionists, businesswomen, and political leaders who endeavored to improve life in Chicago for everyone. Making Mexican Chicago is destined to be a classic in modern American history.” * Paul Ortiz, author of An African American and Latinx History of the United States *“Making Mexican Chicago provides a foundational approach to the ever-growing field of Latinx Urbanism that analyzes the Latinx community not as a monolith in American society, but as a changing and dynamic force in urban environments like the Windy City.” * NACLA Report on the Americas *"Amezcua chronicles the 20th-century struggle of Mexicans/Mexican Americans to win a place in Chicago’s economic and political structure. . . . an excellent read. . ." * Urban Studies *"Amezcua’s Making Mexican Chicago provides an extensive interpersonal look at the brown lives that have come to shape the legacy of the white city." -- Jojo Galvan Mora * Journal of American Ethnic History (JAEH) *"Making Mexican Chicago is a critical contribution to the historiography of ethnic Mexican urban settlement in the second half of the 20th century." * LABOUR / LE TRAVAIL *Table of Contents1 Crafting Capital 2 Deportation and Demolition 3 From the Jungle to Las Yardas 4 Making a Brown Bungalow Belt 5 Renaissance and Revolt 6 Flipping Colonias Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes
£30.00
The University of Chicago Press The Perfect Fit
Book SynopsisThe Perfect Fit shows us how globalization works through the many people and places involved in making women's shoes. We know a lot about how clothing and shoes are made cheaply, but very little about the process when they are made beautifully. In The Perfect Fit, Claudio E. Benzecry looks at the craft that goes into designing shoes for women in the US market, revealing that this creative process takes place on a global scale. Based on unprecedented behind-the-scenes access, The Perfect Fit offers an ethnographic window into the day-to-day life of designers, fit models, and technicians as they put together samples and prototypes, showing how expert work is a complement to and a necessary condition for factory exploitation. Benzecry looks at the decisions and constraints behind how shoes are designed and developed, from initial inspiration to the mundane work of making sure a size seven stays constant. In doing so, he also fosters an original understanding of how globalization worTrade Review"The Perfect Fit is a strong contribution to the literature on creative work, globalization, and the production of knowledge. And one, I think, that is well worth the read." * International Sociology *"The Perfect Fit will be an excellent piece of global ethnography of work and global production. While the author classifies The Perfect Fit as materiality-centered cultural sociology, it goes beyond particular disciplinary boundaries, encompassing at least labor studies, economy sociology, cultural sociology, and industrial sociology." * Social Forces *"Hand in hand with a sociology of culture focused on the material, which dialogues with the social studies of science and technology, the sociology of knowledge, and a look at the global embodied in concrete processes and in areas of 'friction,' The Perfect Fit shows us a provocative look at two issues dear to capitalism: the logic of commodities and the problem of creativity." * Papeles de Trabajo *"The Perfect Fit is a brilliant ethnography of the global economy that focuses on the shoe. It is a sweeping but intimate portrait of commodity chains, in which shoes inhabit ecologies of aesthetic judgment and material practice that span the world. The shoe serves in this book as primary informant and guide, leading both Benzecry and the reader through regimes of material creativity and social destruction. It provides shocking insight into the anxiety, ambition and anguish at the heart of globalization." -- Chandra Mukerji, University of California, San Diego"Individuation and standardization; the local and the global; matters of subjective taste and matters of objective measurement; the things you probably don’t care much about and the thing-makers that care so much about your taste. Benzecry treats each of these evident oppositions within the same frame, and he puts globalization on the firmest of footings." -- Steven Shapin, author of 'The Scientific Life and A Social History of Truth'"Sometimes it only takes a change of perspective to see the world afresh. And this is what The Perfect Fit offers. Looking at globalization from the humble point of view of the right feet of shoe models in China, Benzecry masterfully reveals the myriad of actors, miniscule transactions and daily practices required to make global scale fit into a shoe. Through a riveting ethnographic description of how shoes are put together, the book reveals the invisible threads binding the fates of designers in New York, small shoe shops in Italy, and abandoned factories in Brazil. The result is not merely a book about how shoes are done, but also a powerful and timely reflection about the many lives, hopes, and spaces that are caught up, as well as left behind, in the process." -- Fernando Domínguez Rubio, author of 'Still Life Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum'Table of ContentsPreface: The Frailty of Commodity Chains Chapter 1: From Head to Toe Part 1: From the Designer’s Point of View Chapter 2: From “the Global” to “the Girl” Chapter 3: When Is a Shoe a Shoe? Part 2: Feet and Fit Chapter 4: The World at Her Fit: Scale-Making, Uniqueness, and Standardization Chapter 5: Cinderella on the Pearl River Delta: Who Has the Power to Translate? Part 3: The Global in the Rearview Mirror Interlude: A Landscape of Factories Chapter 6: The Ruins and Rubble of Novo Hamburgo: Skill and Melancholia in a Global Shoe Town Conclusion: What Did We Learn about Globalization by Looking at Shoes? Coda: Shoe Is a Gipsy Business Acknowledgments Notes References Index
£29.45
The University of Chicago Press Joy of the Worm Suicide and Pleasure in Early
Book SynopsisTrade Review“The lucidity of Daniel’s razor-sharp prose is surpassed only by the boldness and sensitivity of his thought. Joy of the Worm resists the easy logic of secularization, whereby classical valorization and Christian condemnation of self-killing sequentially give way to a modern understanding of suicide as a cry for help. Instead, Daniel attunes us to materialist understandings and aesthetic representations of self-destruction in which cruelty and tenderness, sorrow and mirth, ugliness and beauty mingle conceptually and tonally. Daniel’s meticulous and humane readings attune us to a complex affective and social landscape surrounding suicide.” * Melissa E. Sanchez, University of Pennsylvania *“What happens if we take seriously the failed seriousness of literary scenes of self-killing? ‘Joy within death’ is the ambit of Daniel’s revelatory book, which gathers instances on both sides of Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (1643)—the work that debuted the word ‘suicide’—to show this ‘contrary aesthetic tendency’ accreting generic force. By reckoning with the levity that animates the choice not to bear what must be borne, Joy of the Worm offers a brilliant and necessary meditation on the resources early modernity furnishes for finding pleasure in an age of destruction and setting down the burden of false hope.” * Ellen MacKay, University of Chicago *“Joy of the Worm is a brilliant, deeply thoughtful, conceptually agile, ethically serious, and surprisingly funny work. Before the emergence of suicide as the pathologized act we currently understand it to be, self-killing enabled a wider set of affective and aesthetic responses. Alert to the difficulty of this topic, Daniel moves deftly back and forth between our twenty-first-century present and the early modern past so that we can understand our own assumptions for what they are: historically contingent ways of framing and perhaps diminishing a fundamental human possibility.” * Timothy M. Harrison, author of 'Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England' *"The book is rich with references to literary critics, philosophers, and thinkers both ancient and modern; present-day thinking about suicide; and aspects of current popular culture but is always accessible and easy to follow. Undergraduates will find the sections on Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra especially enlightening. . . . Highly recommended." * Choice *"This monograph is of value to students and teachers of early modern literature and culture, yet no review can adequately encapsulate the experience of reading it. Like the joy of the worm, the book itself evades the expected experience of its genre (the academic monograph) and instead offers—less dramatically than self-killing but with notable acuity—the indulgence of playful prose and the invitation to ponder life and death with indecorous delight. Many of its findings enlighten us about living as much as about dying." * Review of English Studies *"Drawing on intellectual and literary history, Daniel explores how voluntary death - distinguishing between suicide and self-killing - in literature goes beyond tragedy." * Renaissance and Reformation *"It is a testament to the sheer brilliance of Drew Daniel’s new book—and by 'brilliance' I mean not only its impressive intelligence but also the delightful sparkle of its prose—that I found myself, while reading it, frequently giggling with glee over his meditations on the topic of [suicide] . . . Above all else — even beyond the persuasiveness of its arguments and sharp-eyed close readings — the enjoyment the book generates stems largely from the wit and eloquence of its writing." * Modern Philology *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Renaissance Self-Finishing Chapter 1 Failed Seriousness in the Old Arcadia and Gallathea Chapter 2 Slapstick and Synapothanumenon in Antony and Cleopatra Chapter 3 Trolling Decorum in Hamlet and Timon of Athens Chapter 4 The Open Window in Biathanatos Interlude Inventing Suicide in Religio Medici Chapter 5 A Cartoon about Suicide Prevention in Paradise Lost Chapter 6 Smiling at Daggers in Cato, a Tragedy Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Index
£63.00
The University of Chicago Press What Is Regeneration
Book SynopsisTrade Review"From hydras to humans, this short book by two marine biologists explores the peculiar process of regeneration. . . . So here is the problem: if the mechanisms of regeneration can’t be distinguished from those of growth and development, what is to stop everything ceaselessly regenerating? What dictates the process of regrowth and why does it happen only in some tissues, in some species and only some of the time? Maienschein and MacCord argue that, to fully understand this, we need to see regeneration as a window into the world of biology in general, and the complex feedback loops that decide what grows, divides and dies, where and when. Far from being an interesting curio, then, studying regeneration can tell us much about life in general, from a cellular level right up to the level of ecosystems, and inform everything from regenerative therapies using stem cells to ecosystem protection and recovery. Seen through this lens, regeneration is a far bigger subject than it might at first seem." -- Simon Ings * New Scientist *"The most thought-provoking and enjoyable book I've read in years. I thoroughly recommend it to all who want to exercise their grey matter, to think differently and without horizons." * Marine Biologist *"In their new book What Is Regeneration?, Prof. Jane Maienschein and Dr.Kate MacCord present an introduction to what is presently known about biological regeneration. Approaching their subject from both the history and philosophy of science, as well as from practical biology, and ranging from micro through macro levels in their explanations, the authors present the 'nuts and bolts' of regeneration." * The Well-Read Naturalist *"Maienschein and MacCord adopt a systems-based approach to explore the logic of regeneration and consider the shift in the meaning of the term regeneration over time. . . . This book lays the groundwork for a projected series, with the intention of helping a wide audience—ranging from scholars to policy makers and including general readers—gain a new understanding of regeneration as a process characteristic of all living systems." * Choice *“The book shows exceptional strengths and represents a unique approach that is not only beneficial for a wide audience, but also is needed to face current challenges to humanity and global ecological developments. An essential contribution.” -- Hanna Lucia Worliczek, University of Vienna, Austria“A truly thought-provoking book, meant not only for students and scientists, but also politicians and laypersons.” -- Eric Röttinger, Institute for Research on Cancer and Aging, Université Côte d’Azur, France
£16.00
The University of Chicago Press What Proust Heard
Book SynopsisMichael Lucey offers a linguistic anthropological analysis of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. What happens when we talk? This deceptively simple question is central to Marcel Proust's monumental novel In Search of Lost Time. Both Proust's narrator and the novel that houses him devote considerable energy to investigating not just what people are saying or doing when they talk, but also what happens socioculturally through their use of language. Proust, in other words, is interested in what linguistic anthropologists call language-in-use. Michael Lucey elucidates Proust's approach to language-in-use in a number of ways: principally in relation to linguistic anthropology, but also in relation to speech act theory, and to Pierre Bourdieu's sociology. The book also includes an interlude after each of its chapters that contextualizes Proust's social-scientific practice of novel writing in relation to that of a number of other novelists, earlier and later, and from several different tTrade Review“What Proust Heard is the work of a scholar at the peak of his powers. Lucey offers an entirely new reading of Proust. This book helps us understand what novels—particularly Proust’s extraordinary novel of novels—can do to register and create social worlds. The result is a new genre of literary criticism that helps us understand how and why we experience reading (of all things) as a conversation outside our own heads.” * Virginia Jackson, University of California, Irvine *“Michael Lucey, an essayist esteemed for ground-breaking work on Balzac, Gide, Proust, and Colette, has opened up the world of literary criticism once again, this time through a rigorous investigation of the field of linguistic anthropology. That in itself is news. But the real achievement here is the way his synthesis of the two fields enables him to analyze the use of conversation in fiction, in authors with very different styles and intentions: Proust, Sarraute, and brilliantly, Rachel Cusk. I’ll never read or hear any of them the same way again.” * Alice Kaplan, Yale University *“From the formal patterns of Vinteuil’s musical compositions to the cries of the Paris street traders, what Proust heard and what with him the reader of A la recherche du temps perdu encounters, is one of the richest sound worlds of fiction since Rabelais. Above all there are the multiple registers of human speech, to the analysis of which Michel Lucey brings the conceptual tools of sociology and anthropology in the elaboration of what he calls an ‘ethnography of talk’. His account is a veritable tour de force in its mix of theoretical sophistication and close-up auditory attentiveness. It is a major contribution to our understanding of Proust’s great novel and more generally of the functioning of the novel as a literary genre. It is, in short, indispensable listening matter.” * Christopher Prendergast, University of Cambridge *"It is this Proust—the listener more than the dreamer—who interests Michael Lucey. The Proust Lucey evokes in What Proust Heard is a certain type of listener, someone who attends not only to words but also to how words function in particular interactions — what Lucey calls 'language-in-use.'" * Los Angeles Review of Books *"Readers of What Proust Heard will not only learn many fine-grained, incisive ways of speaking about speaking - social indexicality, meta-pragmatics, register shibboleths, footing - but stand to reconceive what it means to speak - 'the work that talk does' - both in novels and in the world." * L'Esprit Créateur *Table of ContentsOn Citations Introduction 1 Proust the Linguistic Anthropologist Interlude: Talk in Balzac and Eliot 2 Idiotic Speech (Acts?) and the Form of In Search of Lost Time Interlude: Harmonizing Habitus in Woolf 3 Proust and Bourdieu: Distinction and Form Interlude: Indexical Force in Sarraute and Cusk Conclusion: Animation and Statistics Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index
£31.00
The University of Chicago Press Pure Adulteration
Book SynopsisBenjamin R. Cohen uses the pure food crusades at the turn of the twentieth century to provide a captivating window onto the origins of manufactured foods in the United States. In the latter nineteenth century, extraordinary changes in food and agriculture gave rise to new tensions in the ways people understood, obtained, trusted, and ate their food. This was the Era of Adulteration, and its concerns have carried forward to today: How could you tell the food you bought was the food you thought you bought? Could something manufactured still be pure? Is it okay to manipulate nature far enough to produce new foods but not so far that you question its safety and health? How do you know where the line is? And who decides? In Pure Adulteration, Benjamin R. Cohen uses the pure food crusades to provide a captivating window onto the origins of manufactured foods and the perceived problems they wrought. Cohen follows farmers, manufacturers, grocers, hucksters, housewives, politicians, and sciTrade Review"As Benjamin R. Cohen notes in his thoughtful book Pure Adulteration, it is difficult to find a time or a place in history that lacks purveyors of food and drink attempting to cheat their unsuspecting customers. [Cohen] brings up the age-old problem of adulteration as essential context for his more recent case study of the underlying issues. . . . [He asks] a range of provocative and intriguing questions about U.S. food systems. What, for example, does this fight for food purity tell us about the changing nature of the country; its shifting culture, commerce, and politics; and its emerging scientific power?" * Science *"Well-written and deftly crafted. . . . Cohen’s book is a compelling read that combines colourful characters and fascinating geographies of commodities and cultures with important philosophical and intellectual discussions over what constitutes food or fraud. This book is a timely one as debates over food regulation and standards likely will dominate future trade talks between the US, Britain and other territories across the world." * Ambix *"Cohen is a historian and engineer, and his book is erudite and whimsical, richly documented with vintage advertisements and production statistics. . . . [He] walks us through a formative moment." * Literary Review of Canada *"Good food writing makes you think about what you eat in a different way. Good food history helps explain how and why we eat what we eat now. The fact that Benjamin Cohen can accomplish both of these tasks simultaneously is a considerable achievement. . . . Pure Adulteration masterfully explains the complicated early days of a movement that is more relevant to today's times than ever before." * Agricultural History *"Pure Adulteration does a great job of explaining the complicated interrelationships of various industries (like cottonseed with wheat and pork) and the ways that new food products affected international trade. . . . The work is perhaps at its most intriguing when it reveals the many ways foods and racial prejudice have been interconnected. . . . Made enjoyable by Cohen’s gentle, witty voice and crystal-clear writing style. Illuminating and enjoyable." * Culinary Historians of Canada *"Cohen explains how the ideal of purity and the sin of adulteration came to shape which foods Americans viewed as acceptable and which as unacceptable at a time when they had decreasing control over how food was produced. . . . Cohen’s thoughtful argument is made stronger by his cogent writing as well as numerous illustrations. His writing is clear and precise, striking an enjoyable balance between the formal and the informal. It has become common for historians to make more use of the first person to give readers entrée into a complex narrative, but not everyone weaves together the different tones with the skill that Cohen does." * H-Soz-Kult *" 'Trusting food meant trusting people.' This truth, as well as many of the anxieties of America’s Gilded Age chronicled by Benjamin R. Cohen in Pure Adulteration, resonates strongly in the twenty-first century. Indeed, it is remarkable how little ideological, and psychological, distance has been covered. . . . Cohen depicts a cat-and-mouse game between ever-adapting adulterers and 'pure food' crusaders, which set the tone for our current labyrinth of regulation. . . . The products have changed, but the moral handwringing and naturalistic nostalgia continue." * Times Literary Supplement *"Cohen offers a fresh take on familiar tales of food fraud and its detection. . . . Pure Adulteration is a breezy read. Cohen draws upon colorful anecdotes and characters to make the story of food adulteration entertaining and compelling. He also makes excellent use of visual evidence to reinforce his vivid storytelling, including maps of commodity flows and political cartoons. . . . Pure Adulteration analyzes the pure food crusades on food fraud but lets the reader decide if they leave a bitter taste in the mouth." * Environmental History *"Engaging and accessible . . . this work will likely find an audience among general readers as well as those studying American history or food science. . . . Recommended. All readers." * CHOICE *"Never have analytical chemists had a quirkier and more entertaining chronicler. This is not dry organizational history. . . . Like the nineteenth-century foods it explicates, Pure Adulteration satisfies precisely because it recombines familiar ingredients—in this case, cultural, economic, and intellectual history—in a novel form. It is genuinely good history by any measure." * Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era *"A much-needed fresh take on the era of adulteration. . . . Cohen’s work sits alongside other recent works that unpack notions of purity showing us that even in scientific contexts the 'pure' is always a complex and shifting composite of culture, morality, and power. . . . Using digital maps to trace production and trade, Cohen also adds to the growing work at the intersection of food studies and environmental history, which help us to see the consumer side of food systems as fundamentally connected to labor, agriculture, advertising, and science. . . . Cohen seamlessly weaves his historical analysis together with personal anecdotes and fascinating insights, making this book a fun and exciting read. It is an approachable book for undergraduate students or general readers, but will also offer compelling insights for scholars of the nineteenth-century U.S. interested in food, environment, consumerism, and regulatory policy." * Food, Culture & Society *"There is little to criticize in terms of Cohen's research and reach into the relevant scholarly literature. . . . The work engages with and gives cultural structure to questions that persist to this day. Pure Adulteration deserves a wide audience, consisting of both scholars and the general public alike, and will reward them for the effort." * Journal of American History *"Cohen has assembled a compelling set of stories, recounting the deeds of food charlatans and chemists of various stripes, and uses these stories to open up his serious exploration of the place of food in modernity’s radical reorientation of relations with nature. It’s a work of revelation, uncovering the many hidden ingredients that have gone into the foods we consume." -- Douglas C. Sackman, author of Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden"A richly detailed, intellectually sophisticated account of the conflicts at the core of our personal and social identities. Cohen wears his learning lightly and knows how to tell a good story, so the book is a pleasure to read as well as a fresh and illuminating perspective on a central theme in American cultural history." -- Jackson Lears, author of Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920"What makes some foods pure and real and others not? Cohen traces the colorful history—and geography—of this question. Timely and engaging, Pure Adulteration shows that industrialization changed not just where food comes from but also where and to whom we look for reasons to trust it." -- Susanne Freidberg, author of Fresh: A Perishable History"Cohen’s important book corrects standard narratives of adulteration and regulation, which tend to give outsized credit to Harvey Wiley and The Jungle. He demonstrates persuasively that American ideas about ‘purity’ changed enormously over the time period he considers, moving from an experiential and primarily agricultural concept to a consumer-oriented standard whose ultimate arbiter was laboratory analysis." -- Helen Zoe Veit, Michigan State University"Pure Adulteration is a significant contribution to the field of food and nutrition history. This monograph is an important read for anyone interested in the cultural history of the Gilded Age or the cultural history of industrial food production more broadly. The themes and evidence Cohen employs allows readers to consider the complexities of how cultural ideas of morality, gender, race, national identity, and humanity’s relationship to the environment all shaped the era of adulteration in America." * Social History *Table of ContentsTable of Maps Prologue 1: The Appearance of Being Earnest Part I: The Culture of Adulteration 2: Surfaces and Interiors 3: Household, Grocer, and Trust Part II: The Geography of Adulteration 4: Margarine in a Dairy World 5: Oil without Olives and Lard without Hogs 6: Glucose in the Empire of Sugar Part III: The Analysis of Adulteration 7: Analysis as Border Patrol 8: Food and the Government Chemist Epilogue: The Persistence of Adulteration Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index
£22.80
The University of Chicago Press The Voice of the Rural Music Poetry and
Book SynopsisTrade Review“This is a fascinating and entirely original piece of work. I know of no work in the field that deals in such depth with how critically important music from the home country is to the lives of migrant workers from the Middle East. Ciucci offers us a detailed and fascinating investigation of the multiple ways in which this musical tradition carries meaning for these migrants.” -- Ted Swedenburg, author of Memories of Revolt: The 1936-39 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past“Voicing the Rural is more than a book about North African migration to Europe. With one foot firmly in the vast, phosphate-rich plains region of central Morocco and the other planted in the “urbanized countryside” of central Italy, Alessandra Ciucci vividly explores how Moroccan migrant men use earthy fragments of sung colloquial poetry to open paths between the rural lives they have left in North Africa and the other kinds of rural lives they are creating in Europe.” -- Jonathan Glasser, author of The Lost Paradise: Andalusi Music in Urban North Africa"By maintaining geography, nationalism, race, gender, class, labor exploitation, culture preservation, and loss of the music and voice traditions of the Moroccan old country within the frame, Ciucci paves a new way of understanding the anthropology of work as a distinct realm of scholarship. The book’s social and linguistic perspectives on the psychology of trauma and the persistent musical habits inherent to migration are novel lenses through which one can view agrarian labor anthropologically. Indeed, Ciucci describes for anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and migrant laborers a way to, together, hold knowledge and build understanding across cultures." * Society for the Anthropology of Work *Table of ContentsList of Figures and Tables Note on Names and Transliteration Introduction 1 The Engendering and the Othering of l-ʿarubi and l-ʿarubiya in Morocco 2 The Voyage: Voicing l-ʿarubiya in the Crossing 3 Spectral Guests, Marocchini, and “Real Men” 4 Longing (ḥnin), Intimacy (rasi rasək), and Belonging (intima): Voicing l-ʿarubiya Conclusion: Returns Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index
£74.10
The University of Chicago Press Partial Stories Maternal Death from Six Angles
Book SynopsisTrade Review“A well-written, compelling, dynamic narrative that broadens and complicates readers’ understanding of the contributing causes and impacts of maternal mortality. . . . Highly recommended.” * Choice *“Partial Stories offers a new narrative about maternal death in Africa by undermining ‘the notion that any of the single stories we already think we know is definitive.’ . . . The care Wendland put into thinking about how to tell the stories she shares is evident throughout.” * Medical Anthropology Quarterly *“I really enjoyed reading this book. . . . It’s a book that, to me, speaks to the reader’s humanity at least as much as it speaks to their intellect.” * New Books Network *"Written by an ethnographer and obstetrician, this wide-ranging and comprehensive book offers a much more nuanced picture of maternal deaths and maternal health than much of the literature on critical global health can do—and it does so out of a commitment and an expertise, yet also a humility and curiosity that is often lacking in critical global health scholarship. It fills an important gap." -- Ruth Jane Prince, University of Oslo"At last maternal mortality, that raging topic in obstetric, global health, and epidemiology circles, receives the sophisticated, complex, qualitative, and nuanced treatment it has long deserved. By emphasizing partialities and sharing stories, this anthropology offers up an important set of diagnostics about why so many poor, black, African women still die in pregnancy and childbirth, and how these death scenes unfold and what they conceal." -- Nancy Rose Hunt, author of A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the CongoTable of ContentsIntroductionBonnex Kaunda: “There are too many goings-on these days.” 1 Dangerous ModernitiesAgnesi Kunjirima: “You can make your pregnancy safe.” 2 Knowing BodiesLillian Siska: “I help them right here at home.” 3 Ambivalent TechnologiesChimwemwe Bruce: “Changes, yes, but no development.” 4 Abundant ScarcityRhoda Nantongwe: “By the time she comes to the hospital, it is too late.” 5 Countless AccountingsDyna Ng’ong’ola and Kettie Pensulo: “Women in this community are very much concerned.” 6 Fragile Authority Conclusion Glossary of Chichewa Terms Key People and Places Abbreviations Acknowledgments References Notes Index
£26.60
The University of Chicago Press Living in the Future Utopianism and the Long
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement links several cohorts of twentieth-century utopian radicals who worked to build a world they envisioned in the midst of one they lamented. . . Wolcott demonstrates a coherence of vision across civil rights efforts where historians have more often seen fracture and rupture... It is a history of coherent, deeply rooted and ideologically cohesive dissent - and a plea for its continuation." * The Journal of Southern History *“In this beautifully written, deeply researched, and groundbreaking study of black utopian activist movements, Wolcott recovers the forgotten histories that inspired the Civil Rights Movement. She gives extraordinary texture to the work of utopia on the ground and shows how utopia isn’t just a good theory, but a real, attainable, and necessary practice that can energize all those who care about the future and repairing our world. This astonishing book will forever change how we think about utopia and the struggle for democracy, both in the United States and across the globe.” * Alex Zamalin, author of Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism *“I could not stop reading this fascinating, surprising, and inspiring book. Sweeping in scope while still richly detailed, Living in the Future deserves to become a foundational text in our understanding of the long Civil Rights Movement. While famous figures like Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. emerge in a new light, these pages are full of lesser-known activists who dreamed of a better world and then fought to build it. Their stories are rich and moving—and full of lessons for all those who wish to achieve peace and justice in our world today.” * Nico Slate, author of The Prism of Race: W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and the Colored World of Cedric Dover *"Wolcott effectively pulls previously siloed fields of study together by consulting an array of primary sources, researching in archives that house the records of the labor movement, Black culture, and both urban and rural histories. . . . As Living in the Future proves, utopianism had a major impact on the civil rights movement because activists had learned from and trained each other for decades before the 1950s." * H-Nationalism *"Wolcott’s juxtaposition of labor and religious histories with well-known civil rights activists... will encourage historians in all these fields to be in more direct conversation with one another. As Living in the Future proves, utopianism had a major impact on the civil rights movement because activists had learned from and trained each other for decades before the 1950s." * H-Net Reviews *"It is generally acknowledged that the 'classical' civil rights movement—the protest movement that began with the Montgomery bus boycott and faded away after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.—drew considerable strength from pre-existing ideas and organizations. . . . But the origin story that has found most favor among historians finds the roots of the 'classical' movement in the left-wing activism of the New Deal era, with the Communist Party and the Congress of Industrial Organizations leading the way. . . . This elegantly written study offers a different perspective. In emphasizing the importance of the Marxist-influenced Left, Victoria Wolcott contends, too many historians have overlooked or belittled the significance of 'utopian socialists and radical pacifists' . . . The conclusions of this splendid study are persuasive. The radical nonviolence that guided the civil rights movement 'grew out of relatively small groups of activists committed to utopian interracialism.' And far from being a milquetoast ideology that posed no challenge to the capitalist order, the utopianism espoused by these groups, and bequeathed to the civil rights movement, sought both racial equality and economic justice." * Society for US Intellectual History *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations, Table, and Map Introduction 1 Chapter 1 The Workers Chapter 2 The Cooperators Chapter 3 The Divinites Chapter 4 The Fellowshippers Chapter 5 The Pacifists Afterword Acknowledgments Notes Index
£22.80
The University of Chicago Press Atmospheres of Projection
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Bruno's aim is to liberate projection from the functional conception attributed to it within the history and theory of the arts, so as to investigate and enhance its potentialities . . . Addressing the question of projection constitutes, now more than ever, a way to reflect on the relationship between the capacity of media to construct environments and the medial character of the natural elements themselves. . . . It is a way to reflect critically and ecocritically on the environment considered as a 'projective' and 'relational' space. . . . Reading Atmospheres of Projection is an exciting journey that most of all pushes us to come to terms with an archaeology of light and water.” * Fata Morgana (translated from Italian) *"Monumental . . . as theoretically ambitious as it is historically and artistically expansive. . . . In a world modified by projection, Bruno vitally centers the aesthetic creation and transmission of atmospheres, generating new ways to think about the political valence of spectatorship within artistic spaces in a post-cinematic era. . . . Through nuanced and inquisitive case studies, highlighted by evocative descriptions of each artist’s ambient, atmospheric work, Bruno’s volume serves as its own site of intellectual transmission. . . . Atmospheres of Projection is a call to attunement: in a world of omnipresent projection, of inescapable screens, Bruno guides her readers to become more observant of the ambience, sensation, and empathy generated by these atmospheres and worlds." * Film Quarterly *"For over three decades, [Bruno's] critical thinking has been characterized by sophistication, rigor and originality, placing her among the leading world academics exploring intersections between visual arts, art history, architecture, film, and visual culture studies.. . . Her latest book, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media, considers the interrelations between projection, atmosphere, and environment, binding art to the ecology of ambiance." * Significação: Revista de Cultura Audiovisual *"In [Bruno's] new book Atmospheres of Projection, she considers the interrelations of projection, atmosphere, and environment, reclaiming the concept of 'projection' as a positive creative force." * Harvard Gazette *"Bruno proposes to rehabilitate the concept of projection by tracing a new genealogy that may overcome the restricted definition produced by postmodernism. . . . To project is to throw forth, to transform, to draw, to plan, to move forward. Existing long before the cinematograph and surviving the transformations of this medium in the digital era, projection is too pervasive to be forgotten." * BOMB Magazine *"Absorbing and, frankly, quite unforgettable . . . Bruno goes deep into history, philosophy, science and (contemporary) art to re-think and rejuvenate ‘projection’ by reconnecting it to its origins in alchemy, magnetism, cartography, and architecture. What she brings back from her archeological expedition is a dynamic, wide ranging and most of all humane re-description of projective practices. Projection, Bruno shows, is a supreme technique to overcome walls, borders and defensiveness. . . . Atmospheres of Projection is like a space ship taking us on a journey through the expansive universe of the arts of projection and screening." * Division/Review *"Bruno’s Atmospheres of Projection conducts a virtuoso excursion through the poetics and phantasmatics of the projective imagination. Moving with mercurial fleetness and animation across alchemy, geometry, mathematics, psychoanalysis, architecture, and ecological thought, Bruno reveals how projection is bound, not to the sharply defined planes and angles of perspective thinking, but to the dispersive permeations of environments and milieux. Her scintillating and fine-spun readings of the atmospheric architectures of artists, designers and filmmakers show how irresistibly the locked, locative relations of the ‘at’ or the ‘on’ give way to the shifting dispositions of the ‘through’, the ‘between’ and the ‘amidst’.” -- Steven Connor, University of Cambridge“In this exhilarating book, Bruno asks not only ‘What is an atmosphere?’ or ‘Toward what ends has the concept of atmosphere been put?,’ but also ‘What do atmospheres do?’ What comes to light is how these ethereal, powerful clouds act upon and with us, carrying affect, enabling artistry, enacting creativity, inflecting mood. Atmospheres project, as that verb too is radically refigured: Bruno lets it float beyond a psychoanalytic frame to become an activity of crossing boundaries between self and other, subject and object. Atmospheres of Projection is lyrical and learned, provocative and inviting — and makes a significant contribution to materialist philosophies, to film theory, to art criticism and aesthetics, and to anyone who breathes in the atmospheres of our time.” -- Jane Bennett, Johns Hopkins University“Bruno’s extraordinary book is a capital redefinition of the boundaries between art, reality and ecology. We are used to thinking of art as a representation of the real: an immaterial duplication of it that transforms matter into image. This book shows us that art is always atmospheric projection: transporting the real out of its proper place that image with the world instead of separating it from it. To make art is always to traverse the cosmos, to make atmosphere with it. Art, then, is the first form of ecological construction of the world.” -- Emanuele Coccia, École des Hautes Études en Sciences SocialesTable of ContentsProjection and Atmosphere: An Introduction, in Medias Res The Cultural Atmosphere of Projection 1 The Ambiance of Projection: An Environmental Archaeology of Mediality 2 Sites of Transmission: Psychic Transformation and Relationality 3 Atmospheres of Transduction: Relatedness and Sympathy Environmentality: The Art of Projection 4 Projective Climates in Art: The Screen as Environmental Medium 5 Alchemic Milieus: Diana Thater’s Phantasmagoric Habitats 6 The Nature of Scale: Jesper Just’s Mareoramic Environments 7 The Thickness of Projection: Cristina Iglesias’s Weathered Screen Casts 8 Elemental Empathy: Chantal Akerman’s Psychic Atmospheres 9 Atmospheric Screening: Rosa Barba and Performative Projection 10 Fluid Ecology: Giorgio Andreotta Calò and Liquid Screens 11 Environmental Projection: Robert Irwin and Nebular Atmospheres Acknowledgments Notes Index
£34.20
The University of Chicago Press Proceed to Check Out
Book SynopsisTrade Review"There are few poets right now capable of capturing the ever-extending, doubling back, reaching, twisting, self-contradictory, fluttering flux of consciousness with as much conviction, poignancy, aching humor, and formal excitement as Alan Shapiro-what happens in his sentences are a marvel of this ancient living technology we call poetry. Whether in crafty prose or tighter verse, mind and language are always in dynamic play in his new book, as he grapples with the most immediate and difficult binding forces of love, hope, vulnerability, intimacy, and the darker ones of shame, regret, anger, ignorance, and desire: poem after poem, the balance is struck by formally achieving the interplay between intuitions of freedom and acknowledgments of constraint and impossibility. With the sharp insight and spoken vigor of a novelist drawn to dramatic ironies and with concentrated lyric energy and lift, Shapiro's artistry reaffirms poetry's central and enduring role in our private and social lives, not for its visionary fictions, but for its infinitely rich realities about who we are to ourselves and to each other." -- Joshua Weiner, author of Berlin Notebook: Where Are the Refugees? "No contemporary poet offers greater largesse of intelligence, emotion, and invention than Shapiro. Every sentence and every line of Proceed to Check Out sparkles-with formal precision and imaginative openness, social conscience and psychological savvy, hilarity and fatalism, unsparing skepticism and unstinting sympathy. Few movies or novels render contemporary life with the high-res vivacity of these poems, and yet Shapiro stays true to his lyric gift, his skill for carving art from the twists and turns of the individual voice confronting mortality. Shapiro is a genius." -- Peter Campion, author of One Summer Evening at the FallsTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ONE Holding Cell Zoom Reunion in Heaven The Periodic Table Space Blanket The Great Closer Uncle Hy Pumice Sugar Shack Money TWO Recurring Dreams THREE The Net Wedding Tent Divorce Party Bonfire Ding Dong, the Bells Are Gonna Chime What the End Was Like Opportunity Indifference From the Hallway Animal Crackers An Arrangement Backward Now I Lay Me FOUR Letters Holocene At the Museum of Life and Science Ten Statements of Not Knowing Art According to Curly Ten Thoughts on Trauma and Catharsis Pastime Hazel Gravity and Grace Hole in One Tree on Mountain The Old Age of Oliver Death of Alan Ghost Story
£14.40
The University of Chicago Press From the Seashore to the Seafloor An Illustrated
Book SynopsisTrade Review“Look closely, dear people. Look with sympathy and fascination and awe. Look upon these majesties of marine life, read about them, learn something about them—and be grateful you were born on the blue planet. . . . The minds and the eyes of these two journeying women will take you places you haven’t been.” * David Quammen *"From the Seashore to the Seafloor . . . takes its readers on a watercolor illustrated journey between its title locations of the northeastern Pacific Ocean, blending into its narrative explanations of some of the creatures and systems to be found along the way with exhortations to conserve them." * The Well-read Naturalist *"From the Seashore to the Seafloor is a gem. . . Reflecting the scientific experiences of Dr. Voight, an expert in mollusks who has taken eight dives in the deep-sea Alvin submersible, each chapter focuses on a different marine ecosystem. . . Almost every page is graced with Macnamara’s carefully observed and lively, brilliantly colorful illustrations. . . From the Seashore to the Seafloor is a lovely and very informative work that would be welcome in any scientist’s or artist’s library." * American Biology Teacher *
£19.00
The University of Chicago Press Sound Writing Experimental Modernism and the
Book SynopsisTrade Review"What broader lessons does Sound Writing hold? As I have said, Wilke counters familiar stories about the disruptiveness of modernisms with an account of continuity, showing how sound poets looked back to Romanticism, amongst other things. But the passion of his study is perhaps to show that one needn’t choose between the two, because rupture and continuity are united by a dialectic." * American Literary History *"Along with studying 'multiple avant-garde strategies for reducing poetry to its most elemental conditions in vocal sound production,' Wilke also carefully explores scientific approaches to the production of vocal sound in order to demonstrate how poets 'appropriat[ed] scientific-experimental concepts and techniques.'" * Modern Philology *"A singular achievement for German studies and literary studies at large, Wilke’s important work also makes meaningful and original interventions in Media Studies, Art history, sound studies, linguistic anthropology, and history of science and technology." * Germanic Review *"The book is an important addition to other studies developed at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung that engage with science and literature and is of relevance to cultural studies, sound studies, modernist, and avant-garde studies alike." * German Quarterly *“This excellently researched and lucidly written study will make a substantive contribution to modern literary studies. Through wonderful formulations and analyses, Wilke illuminates fascinating technical innovations in sound writing and links them to poetic engagement and practices. This is in every respect a delightful and important contribution to modern literary and cultural studies.” -- Johanna Drucker, author of Inventing the Alphabet“Sound Writing presents a new understanding of what is often called the ‘nonsense poetry’ of the early twentieth-century avant-garde and its intellectual background, as well as its echoes in later avant-gardes. In telling this story, Wilke draws on underexplored sources and draws out new causal lines. With Language Poetry, translingualism, collage, conceptual writing, and artificial intelligence on our minds, the topic of the book cannot be ignored, and Wilke’s contribution is sure to be widely read and discussed.” -- Haun Saussy, author of Are We Comparing Yet?Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Voice Figures: Visible Sound and the Poetics of Articulation (1787–1965) Oaoa, or The Eidophonetic Poem Vibrating Disks and Primary Letters Photographing Speech 2. Toward a Science of Verse: Speech Movements, Graphic Inscription, and the Study of Poetry (1871–1915) Writing of the Mouth “The Art of Reading Curves” Symbolic Sounds 3. Mama—Papa—Dada: Poetic Expression at the Threshold of Language (1916–1947) Remaking Verse in the Vocal Tract From Babble to Gesture to Word (and Back) E dada: Reading Graphic Articulations Birdsong in Translation 4. Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations: Experimental Modernism in a Technical Age (1947–1967) “Visible Speech” between Body and Bits Rearticulating Poetic Experimentation Beyond Lineality, or The Expansion of Writing Acknowledgments Bibliography Index
£68.00
The University of Chicago Press Sound Writing Experimental Modernism and the
Book SynopsisTrade Review"What broader lessons does Sound Writing hold? As I have said, Wilke counters familiar stories about the disruptiveness of modernisms with an account of continuity, showing how sound poets looked back to Romanticism, amongst other things. But the passion of his study is perhaps to show that one needn’t choose between the two, because rupture and continuity are united by a dialectic." * American Literary History *"Along with studying 'multiple avant-garde strategies for reducing poetry to its most elemental conditions in vocal sound production,' Wilke also carefully explores scientific approaches to the production of vocal sound in order to demonstrate how poets 'appropriat[ed] scientific-experimental concepts and techniques.'" * Modern Philology *"A singular achievement for German studies and literary studies at large, Wilke’s important work also makes meaningful and original interventions in Media Studies, Art history, sound studies, linguistic anthropology, and history of science and technology." * Germanic Review *"The book is an important addition to other studies developed at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung that engage with science and literature and is of relevance to cultural studies, sound studies, modernist, and avant-garde studies alike." * German Quarterly *“This excellently researched and lucidly written study will make a substantive contribution to modern literary studies. Through wonderful formulations and analyses, Wilke illuminates fascinating technical innovations in sound writing and links them to poetic engagement and practices. This is in every respect a delightful and important contribution to modern literary and cultural studies.” -- Johanna Drucker, author of Inventing the Alphabet“Sound Writing presents a new understanding of what is often called the ‘nonsense poetry’ of the early twentieth-century avant-garde and its intellectual background, as well as its echoes in later avant-gardes. In telling this story, Wilke draws on underexplored sources and draws out new causal lines. With Language Poetry, translingualism, collage, conceptual writing, and artificial intelligence on our minds, the topic of the book cannot be ignored, and Wilke’s contribution is sure to be widely read and discussed.” -- Haun Saussy, author of Are We Comparing Yet?Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Voice Figures: Visible Sound and the Poetics of Articulation (1787–1965) Oaoa, or The Eidophonetic Poem Vibrating Disks and Primary Letters Photographing Speech 2. Toward a Science of Verse: Speech Movements, Graphic Inscription, and the Study of Poetry (1871–1915) Writing of the Mouth “The Art of Reading Curves” Symbolic Sounds 3. Mama—Papa—Dada: Poetic Expression at the Threshold of Language (1916–1947) Remaking Verse in the Vocal Tract From Babble to Gesture to Word (and Back) E dada: Reading Graphic Articulations Birdsong in Translation 4. Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations: Experimental Modernism in a Technical Age (1947–1967) “Visible Speech” between Body and Bits Rearticulating Poetic Experimentation Beyond Lineality, or The Expansion of Writing Acknowledgments Bibliography Index
£26.60
The University of Chicago Press The Lookout Man
Book SynopsisTrade Review"[Dischell's] poems are painterly and cinematic—they can be movies that are improvisational and beautifully clear. But don’t let that fool you. His poems show us how we construct ourselves and our affections with language and images of ourselves and others, an imaginative spirit that is also an investigative spirit." * StorySouth *“Dischell offers lines as odes to the world in which we live and of the world we too quickly forget. Within these poems there’s a haunting nostalgia wrestled into the present moment; yet, the deeper we delve, the past appears as clearly as a ‘lake at dawn / When the wind is still.’ These poems not only hold wisdom but they also hold ‘lives once so real and fragrant’ that all one can do is pour a glass of wine and read on with an open heart.” -- A. Van Jordan, author of The Cineaste“A sumptuous melancholy suffuses the poems in Dischell’s outstanding collection. Like the wind itself, Dischell voyages ‘across the wide seas . . .’ bringing us the great and small of human existence—cities, politics, battleships, baked apples, polka-dot sheets, and above all, our human selves, vulnerable to loss and the ravages of time.” -- Ellen Bass, author of Indigo“Dischell is the American heir to the European poets, Szymborska, Tranströmer, and Salamun with his wit, loving skepticism, and ever-present sense of the tragic. With poems that evoke Dischell’s Litvak heritage, and the unforgiving American experience of assimilation, in The Lookout Man, Dischell reminds us of the essential gift of dedicated endurance. This tender, very human book is haunted by time, and attentive to the fragile, fleeting things of the world and the heart. And yet, while Dischell chronicles this heartbreak of the daily, like Zagajewski, in the end he keeps casting ‘lines that believe in the future’ and it is the unexpected gold of life that shines through.” -- Ellen Hinsey, author of The Illegal Age"With a haunting nostalgia that wrestles the past into the present, Stuart Dischell’s The Lookout Man is wise and reminiscent of the best of Frost and Auden. Dichell’s poems bring readers elegies and odes written to honor life and history: men of the early twentieth century navigating a new language, ships at sea forgotten by those who live inland, evolutionary progress, brave young women who use their bodies as instruments of change. Contemporary and contemplative, combining chaos with quiet, The Lookout Man is a collection that places Dischell among poetic greats like Serhiy Zhadan and Patrick Phillips." * Colorado Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ONE Lines of the Prodigal The Foreigner Inside the Statue Coda (Broken, He Saw Himself at Last) Lines about Ships at Sea Lines about Mountains Lines about Rivers, Then the Sea Lines about the Snow Lines about the Wind Lines above the Tree Line Lines of Evolutionary Progress Lines at the End of the Year TWO The Work Zone Taint Lines in the Outage The Arcade, 1962 White Horse Pike Action in the Pacific Lines about Emptiness Time Was the Rider Lines of the Elderly Orphan Lines along the Shore The Last Days on Ocean Lane Meeting My Parents for a Weekend in New York, 1988 Lines on the Invention of Shoes Lines in the Backyard Lines about Her For Hubert Desmarest For Oksana Shachko THREE The Streets of the Capital Lines on a Train to the Alps Cities of the Blue Coast In a Corner of the Sky Lines in Regard to a Morning Swim The Measurement of Words Lines of the Mirage After the Exhibition The Enchanted Bells Stormy Tuesdays Window Peeping into the Garden of Eden Lines along a Wild Place Notes, Elegiac
£14.40
The University of Chicago Press Sincerely Held American Secularism and Its
Book SynopsisTrade Review"McCrary casts this complex subject in a new light. Readers will gain valuable insights into the politics of religion in America." * Publisher's Weekly *"McCrary argues that the American legal system has impoverished our idea of religion by equating it with 'sincerely held belief.' In so doing, it has stripped religion of its communal elements. . . This is an essential text for understanding the current struggles over religious freedom." * The Christian Century *"Comprehensive, thought-provoking . . . We should take note of McCrary’s call to interrogate this current legal framework and deconstruct, or at the very least, reexamine, our understanding of religious freedom." * Church & State Magazine / Americans United *"A detailed, but entertaining critical introduction to religion and the First Amendment in the United States . . . highly recommended." * Nova Religio *“Clear and compelling . . . this book is important reading for anyone seeking an understanding of the problems of religious freedom . . . a fascinating contribution to scholarship on secularism in the United States.” * American Religion *"Such an interesting book. A book that really is hard to characterize. It's about religion and law in the US. It's about the history of the sincerity test. It's about secularism and what it means or doesn't mean to be a secular person in what is supposed to be a secular country." * Straight White American Jesus *"A clever, well-crafted account of American secularism, religion, and sincerity. . . McCrary’s writing is a delight to read (as are his many 'sincere' footnotes), and students and scholars from a range of disciplines will find this book to be a highly engaging text, one that is challenging in the best of ways." * Reading Religion *"A sweeping, fascinating and engaging account of how American secularism created the ‘character of the sincere believer’ and cast ‘sincerely held religious belief’ as constitutive of religion in law and the standard by which certain practices are rejected ‘as not truly religious.’ . . . The book may well become indispensable. . . A rich, engrossing, fresh and enlivening addition to the field.” * Journal for the Academic Study of Religion *"Scholars of church and state likely will find the [history of the sincerity test] compelling, as it works through the details of specific court cases to show how 'the sincere believer is an identity, a protected class whose rights are to be secured and defended.'" * Journal of Church and State *"Charles McCrary’s brilliant Sincerely Held shows the declining fortunes of truth and the steadily appreciating value of sincerity to be sides of a single American coin. As the acceptable face of religion under secular law, sincerity severs belief from veracity, hedges it with protections, and exempts it from democratic accountability. McCrary’s genealogy of sincerity moves deftly among con artists, purveyors and suppressors of vice, war resisters, and conscientious objectors to secular law to show sincerely held belief to be a technology of racial governance and an engine of state violence. Remarkably, he excavates from the same history the radical possibility that sincerely held belief might yet be summoned to advance good-faith engagement across differences rather than shut it down. A book of uncommon intelligence, daring, grace, and verve, Sincerely Held is cultural criticism a secular age deserves." -- Tracy Fessenden, Arizona State University"Anyone interested in the politics of U.S. religion must grab a copy of Sincerely Held. Over eight chapters populated with con artists, credulous dupes, earnest petitioners, conscientious objectors, indignant inmates, principled paper-pushers, and discriminating judges, McCrary sketches the multifaceted and mercurial figure of the true believer. And just as the legal category of sincerely held belief imagines a world of external guises and hidden truths, McCrary skillfully balances his main text with illuminating discursive footnotes that both perform and subvert the practices of disclosure he so ably describes. Others have written convincingly about the form of secularism, but McCrary captures its irregularly beating heart." -- Jolyon Thomas, University of Pennsylvania"McCrary’s incisive study of secularism and the secular brings to life the paradoxes of religion and law in the U.S. His colorful characters come from literature, legal proceedings, and even bureaucratic forms to illuminate how sincerity became a legal category and what that means for law’s imagination of religion." -- Sarah Imhoff, Indiana University, BloomingtonThis is a riveting cultural history of that strange and peculiarly American character: the “sincere religious believer.” Indeed, one of the many strengths of this fascinating and utterly persuasive book, is the way Charles McCrary defamiliarizes the secular obviousness of both “sincere believers” and “sincerely held religious beliefs.” Braiding together 19th-century worries over con-men and charlatans with a series of 20th-century legal cases that sought to distinguish the religious from the not-religious, McCrary demonstrates the secular state’s increasing reliance on sincerity—ascertaining it, measuring it—as a way to sort true from false (including the religiously false). In so doing, McCrary reveals religious sincerity’s crucial role in both secular governance and racial formation. At a time when sincerely held religious beliefs are increasingly invoked by Christian conservatives to justify limits on women’s reproductive freedom and LGBTQ+ equality, Sincerely Held is bracing and urgent reading. -- Ann Pellegrini, New York University
£64.60
The University of Chicago Press Metropolitan Museum Journal 2021
Book Synopsis
£39.60
The University of Chicago Press Musical Migration and Imperial New York
Book SynopsisThrough archival work and storytelling, Musical Migration and Imperial New York revises many inherited narratives about experimental music and art in postwar New York. From the urban street level of music clubs and arts institutions to the world-making routes of global migration and exchange, this book redraws the map of experimental art to reveal the imperial dynamics and citizenship struggles that continue to shape music in the United States. Beginning with the material conditions of power that structured the cityscape of New York in the early Cold War years, Brigid Cohen looks at a wide range of artistic practices (concert music, electronic music, jazz, performance art) and actors (Edgard Varèse, Charles Mingus, Yoko Ono, and Fluxus founder George Maciunas) as they experimented with new modes of creativity. Cohen links them with other migrant creators vital to the city's postwar culture boom, creators whose stories have seldom been told (Halim El-Dabh, Michiko Toyama, VladimirTrade Review“This is a field-changing book. Cohen calls to account many legends about experimental music in New York and strips away the heroic storytelling of the past to reveal uncomfortable truths about the racial and imperial underpinnings of modern music in the United States. In Cohen’s study, hard-to-find and fragmentary sources are brought to light in ways that change what we know. The readings of music and sound are deeply illuminating, sometimes breathtaking, in their revelations and in their surprising connections with biographical detail.” * Danielle Fosler-Lussier, Ohio State University *“In Musical Migration and Imperial New York, we witness a scholar working at the height of her powers. Through this expansive and novel history, we watch fascinating yet understudied actors play out their imperialist and technological fantasies on an urban landscape marked by racial and gendered differences. After reckoning with Cohen’s reenvisioning, scholars of twentieth-century music, art, and urban life will have to rethink the New York City they thought they knew.” * Ryan Dohoney, Northwestern University *“Conventional approaches to experimental music tend to overemphasize the idea of ‘musical genius’ and often lead to problematic exceptionalist narratives. In Musical Migration and Imperial New York, Cohen sidesteps this problem by focusing on the ways in which experimental artists as aesthetically and ideologically varied as Charles Mingus, Vladimir Ussachevsky, or Yoko Ono mediated conversations about belonging at the intersection of external geopolitical power plays and internal assimilation. Cohen’s acutely tuned ear and brilliant prose guide us through the rich and thrilling experience of listening to the physiognomic overtones of citizenship, migration, and empire-building as they shaped the development of experimental art and music scenes in Cold War New York City.” * Alejandro L. Madrid, Cornell University *"Cohen masterfully marshals alternative sources including rare tapes, interviews and interpretations of official recordings. The result is a work of scholarship that not only pays long overdue attention to artists like Toyama and El-Dabh but changes the terms by which we encounter major figures like Mingus and Ono." * The Wire *"Cohen, a professor in NYU’s Department of Music, illuminates the contributions of these artists—many of them underappreciated—through the venues where their creations were displayed, performed, and composed. Some of these sites have similar purposes today, while others offer only architectural whispers of the history made there more than a half century ago." * NYU News *"In Musical Migration and Imperial New York, Cohen demonstrates the ways in which musical actors have negotiated their entanglements with power—power of the political elite, to be sure, but also the soft power of those working behind the scenes to finance, create, preserve, and subvert artistic movements in the shadow of the United States’ rapidly expanding empire. . . I believe this text will be embraced by scholars of contemporary/experimental/avant-garde music and will also be of great interest to anyone curious about migration, imperialism, Cold War politics, totalitarianism, performance art, postwar technology, or citizenship. In short, this densely woven and comprehensively researched book is a welcome addition to our field and to those of our cross-disciplinary collaborators." * Journal of American Musicology Society *"Chance encounters, indeterminacy, dissonance, electronic sounds and non-western tunings: any and all of these are distinctive sonic markers of the twentieth-century American experimental musical tradition. However, as Brigid Cohen persuasively argues in her new book, baked into this so-called 'new music' were traces of a Cold War politics of empire distinct to the United States and, even more specifically, to New York City. . . . The effect is revelatory, placing the book in dialogue not just with new studies of ethnicity and experimental music but with histories of the mind sciences and the wartime development of area studies as well." * Gotham Center for New York City History *Table of ContentsList of Figures Introduction: A Recent History of Music, Citizenship, and American Empire 1. Third Space, Scene of Subjection: Mingus and Varèse at Greenwich House 2. Cold War Acropolis I: Ussachevsky, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the CPEMC 3. Cold War Acropolis II: Toyama and El-Dabh at the CPEMC 4. A Counter-Discourse of Orientalism: Ono in Opera 5. The Haunting of Empires: Maciunas, Fluxus, and the Bloodlands 6. Concluding Thoughts Acknowledgments Notes Archival Sources Bibliography Index
£41.80
The University of Chicago Press Why the American Century
Book SynopsisA fresh account of early American religious history that argues for a new understanding of ritual. In the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, there was an awkward persistence of sovereign rituals, vestiges of a monarchical past that were not easy to shed. In Awkward Rituals, Dana Logan focuses our attention on these performances, revealing the ways in which governance in the early republic was characterized by white Protestants reenacting the hierarchical authority of a seemingly rejected king. With her unique focus on embodied action, rather than the more common focus on discourse or law, Logan makes an original contribution to debates about the relative completeness of America's Revolution. Awkward Rituals theorizes an under-examined form of action: rituals that do not feel natural even if they sometimes feel good. This account challenges common notions of ritual as a force that binds society and synthesizes the self. Ranging from Freemason initiations to evangelical societies to missionaries posing as sailors, Logan shows how white Protestants promoted a class-based society while simultaneously trumpeting egalitarianism. She thus redescribes ritual as a box to check, a chore to complete, an embarrassing display of theatrical verve. In Awkward Rituals, Logan emphasizes how ritual distinctively captures what does not change through revolution. Trade Review“The white Protestants who shaped US middle-class culture in the early nineteenth century saw themselves as enlightened reformers. . . . [but] Logan shows these people could also be confused, ambivalent, embarrassed characters, half-alienated from the very social roles they assigned to themselves, uncomfortable in the costumes they put on and the gestures they performed. Despite their fantasies of rapture, much of their experience was boring. They went through the motions dissociating and cringing. Logan is a smart, skilled analyst of [their] awkwardness.” * American Religion *“A book that says, in a lively and stylish way, that many of the things we think we know about ritual are wrong. Logan argues that there is no ritualized body or regime of ritual discipline. Nor does ritual resemble practice or disciplined action, as others have theorized those concepts. Instead, Logan offers a new frame: ritual is awkward. It is more like theater, especially when the acting is bad. . . . Awkward Rituals is a useful and challenging book for the study of religion broadly construed.” * Method and Theory in the Study of Religion *"Awkward Rituals challenges readers to rethink their assumptions about rituals as sincere, productive, and cohesive. . . . For those of us concerned with objects, bodies, spaces, and sensations, this book is an example of how we can generatively engage with the ambiguity and contradictions of the material world." * Material Religion *"A helpful reminder that rituals did not resolve all contradictions, all tensions in expressions of solidarity or sympathy—and did not necessarily feel normal or comfortable." * Journal of the Early Republic *“Logan’s strikingly creative reimagining of power, publics, and governance brilliantly illustrates how corporate bodies of all sorts drew upon religiously-scented ritual performances of authority in choreographing the uncomfortable, sometimes embarrassing, and always awkward dance of civility in the early Republic. This is a fascinating and exciting recasting of interpretive categories familiar to historians of nineteenth-century religion, a bold intervention yielding important lessons not just about American religious history but equally about the study of religion.” -- John Corrigan, Florida State University“How do you behave as if you are in authority when you have done away with kings? In her truly brilliant study of "sovereign rituals" in America from 1790 to 1850, Dana W. Logan has found the answer: awkwardly. Initiating a brother Mason, reading the minutes, raising the flag, and ordering the housework highlight some of the graceless quotidian performances that created the sensation of coherent authority even in its absence. Awkward Rituals is not only fun to read, it is essential across the disciplines.” -- Joseph Roach, Yale UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction 1 Uncomfortable Rites in Early Republican Freemasonry 2 Conventional Behavior in the American Bible Society 3 Involuntary Association in the American Seamen’s Friend Society 4 The Head and the Hands in Catharine Beecher’s Domesticity Epilogue Awkward Ritual, Once More with Feeling Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index
£58.50
The University of Chicago Press Outside Literary Studies Black Criticism and the
Book SynopsisTrade Review"A sobering analysis of the limited political potential of today’s English departments. . . Hines’s interest lies in the political and economic circumstances that have shaped methodologies for literary study. Hines and Guillory agree that the English department has never not been in the midst of an unfolding crisis: for Hines, this is a matter of the ordinary but deepening devastating crisis of racial capitalism." * Public Books *"Hines, the associate director of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College, explores in this astute critical work the rarely discussed challenges to the New Criticism movement faced by Black writers and scholars of the mid-20th century. . . . Perfect for scholars and students, this provides invaluable insight into the racial dynamics of mid-century literary criticism." * Publishers Weekly *“Outside Literary Studies deftly weaves literary, cultural, and political history together in a refreshing and provocative reinterpretation of postwar literary criticism. Hines carefully reconstructs the arguments that Black critics, poets, and writers advanced in order to challenge the dominant hold of New Criticism, and he shows how the legacy of those arguments led to the development of alternative pedagogical models for the modern university. The result is a book that is timely, deeply engaged, and illuminating.” * Jesse McCarthy, Harvard University *“This indispensable book beautifully shows that Black left writers developed a critique of the state and of the ruling literary conventions within the academy for how they abetted anti-Black violence. In doing so, Hines demonstrates that the history of the Black literary left must be understood as a critique of disciplinarity rather than a complement to it.” * Roderick A. Ferguson, Yale University *“Outside Literary Studies offers inside knowledge of two warring twentieth-century institutions: the political economy of the New Criticism and the educational agencies of Black radical writing. With blunt, concrete detail, Hines demonstrates how the odd couple of Southern Agrarianism and US federal surveillance showered practical criticism on the likes of Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, and Melvin Tolson—and how such figures pioneered a newer left criticism, both racial and formal, in response.” * William J. Maxwell, Washington University in St. Louis *"Hines’s collection of interrelated essays describes the emergence of a lively, creative, alternative model of class and race conscious education featuring Black literary figures and social critics who thrived in mid-20th century community-based cooperatives. . . Aimed primarily at scholars of education and those interested in literary movements, this book is clearly argued. . . and will prove useful for those exploring the flowering of Black creativity in the mid-20th century." * Choice *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. New Criticism and the Object of American Democracy 2. Melvin B. Tolson’s Belated Bomb 3. Tactical Criticism 4. Culture as a Powerful Weapon Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Archives and Collections Consulted Bibliography Index
£19.80
The University of Chicago Press Emergency
Book SynopsisNine short essays exploring the K'iche' Maya story of creation, the Popol Vuh. Written during the lockdown in Chicago in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, these essays consider the Popol Vuh as a work that was also written during a time of feverish social, political, and epidemiological crisis as Spanish missionaries and colonial military deepened their conquest of indigenous peoples and cultures in Mesoamerica. What separates the Popol Vuh from many other creation texts is the disposition of the gods engaged in creation. Whereas the book of Genesis is declarative in telling the story of the world's creation, the Popol Vuh is interrogative and analytical: the gods, for example, question whether people actually need to be created, given the many perfect animals they have already placed on earth. Emergency uses the historical emergency of the Popol Vuh to frame the ongoing emergencies of colonialism that have surfaced all too clearly in the global health crisis of COVID-19. In Trade Review"A work concerned with multiplicity. . . . Garcia’s Emergency is a reorientation, a shift in perspective, while recognizing there is no such thing as a return to originality nor to a specific origin point. What if origin is a weaving, a constant wearing of stories and timetables, perpetual changes and cyclical advantages?" * Cleveland Review of Books *“Garcia contributes a penetrating and eloquent exposition of a unique document of the indigenous Americas. He shows how the Popol Vuh extends our understanding of oppression and ecological ruin in our time.” -- Alphonso Lingis, author of Irrevocable: A Philosophy of Mortality“In this brilliant exegesis, Garcia reveals the Popol Vuh as a living document, a dialogical story of creation crafted in conditions of colonial emergency, which still bears urgent relevance today. Consisting of a series of short and lyrical essays on a wide range of topics, Emergency is a thought-provoking commentary essential for anyone who engages with this foundational text.” -- Claudia Brittenham, author of The Murals of Cacaxtla: The Power of Painting in Ancient Central Mexico“I would like to believe that the exquisite tapestry of this book, which weaves together history, myth, philosophical reflection, and literary criticism, heralds a new era of poetic scholarship in the humanities (‘poetic’ in Vico’s sense). We are in need of this kind of imaginative reanimation of our academic vocation.” -- Robert Pogue Harrison, author of Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our AgeTable of ContentsBirds Wealth Caves Television Demons Migrations Love The Sun Mormons Afterword References Index
£57.00
The University of Chicago Press Complacency
Book SynopsisA critical reflection on complacency and its role in the decline of classics in the academy. In response to philosopher Simon Blackburn's portrayal of complacency as a vice that impairs university study at its core, John T. Hamilton examines the history of complacency in classics and its implications for our contemporary moment. The subjects, philosophies, and literatures of ancient Greece and Rome were once treated as the foundation of learning, with everything else devolving from them. Hamilton investigates what this model of superiority, derived from the golden age of the classical tradition, shares with the current hegemony of mathematics and the natural sciences. He considers how the qualitative methods of classics relate to the quantitative positivism of big data, statistical reasoning, and presumably neutral abstraction, which often dismiss humanist subjectivity, legitimize self-sufficiency, and promote a fresh brand of academic complacency. In acknowledging the reduced Trade Review"With a fast-paced text in thirteen pithy chapters, brief endnotes, and an index nominum, John T. Hamilton’s Complacency will inspire classicists to reconsider their attitude towards their work and the place of their field in academia." * Bryn Mawr Classical Review *“Hamilton has given us an extended essay on the theme of complacency, taking as his starting-point an opinion piece from 2009 by the philosopher Simon Blackburn, which characterizes it as one of the deadly ‘sins’ of the academy. He draws on etymology and wordplay to explore the imagery and resonances of complacency in different historical contexts from antiquity to the present, not simply in its familiar associations of (self-)satisfaction, but, strikingly, in the imagery of ‘flatness’ that Hamilton explores in novel and thought-provoking ways. Readers will be diverted and challenged in turn, and all should come away with fresh perspectives on this topic.” -- Duncan Kennedy, University of Bristol“Hamilton’s investigation of ambivalence in the long conceptual history of complacency sparkles. This nimble critique targets the blindnesses of classicism—justifying empire, flattening difference through universalism, any form of domination promising ease—wherever they are found, in science, business, higher education, or the discipline of classics itself. The solution is nevertheless ancient: to search, relentlessly and with love, for understanding and self-knowledge in all their contingent particularity.” -- Michèle Lowrie, The University of Chicago“This beautiful book details a vision for the future of the humanities. It is not a plan, but a call to avoid the easy route, to stay attentive, to keep our eyes and ears open. This is a vital message from one of today’s most important voices.” -- Sean Gurd, The University of Texas at Austin"This is a tract for the times, addressing the identity crisis in our subject with a stirring call to philological arms ... A challenging, exhilarating and thought-provoking little book which wears its heart on its philological sleeve and pulls no punches either in argument or in style." * Classics for All *Table of ContentsThe Wolf on the Plain Sin in the Academy Colonial Planning Propositional Surfaces Classical Platforms Philology as Ancilla Facultatum Philological Investigations Pleasingly FlatPlatea The War on Complacency The Golden Age Institutions The Humanities Notes Works Cited Index
£64.60
The University of Chicago Press The Connected Iron Age
Book SynopsisTrade Review"This well-produced volume succeeds in its stated goal of emphasizing the complexity of cultural exchange in the Early Iron Age Eastern Mediterranean. It also admirably fulfills the aim of drawing attention to often-overlooked regions: as a reader who works largely in the Aegean and was trained in a Classics department, I found the discussions of Egypt, the Black Sea, and Phrygia particularly valuable." * Bryn Mawr Classical Review *"This is an interesting volume with engaging discussions on various modes of connectivity. The chapters are well written, supported by some good illustrative material, and effectively address the four themes set out in the introductory chapter, leaving the best to last." * Antiquity *“This volume is essential reading for anyone studying ancient Mediterranean societies and their development. It is an important and timely manifestation of new thinking and innovative approaches to the complex world of the early first millennium BCE and its cross-cultural connections.” -- Lin Foxhall, Rathbone Professor of Ancient History and Classical Archaeology, University of Liverpool“The Connected Iron Age is a solid and worthwhile collection that brings an original focus on the East Mediterranean to the burgeoning literature on connectivity.” -- Peter van Dommelen, Joukowsky Family Professor in Archaeology, Brown University“This volume is an up-to-date synthesis of interregional networks during the early first millennium in the Mediterranean from Iberia in the west to the Levantine coast and the Black Sea in the east. It explores a range of recent theoretical approaches regarding economic, social, and cultural connectivity and offers new and vigorous directions to the study of Mediterranean interactions and cultural contacts of the period.” -- Irene Lemos, University of OxfordTable of ContentsList of Figures Preface Chapter 1 Interregional Interaction in the Eastern Mediterranean during the Iron Age James F. Osborne and Jonathan M. Hall Chapter 2 Phoenicians and the Iron Age Mediterranean: A Response to Phoenicoskepticism Carolina López-Ruiz Chapter 3 Mediterranean Interconnections beyond the City: Rural Consumption and Trade in Archaic Cyprus Catherine Kearns Chapter 4 Connectivity, Style, and Decorated Metal Bowls in the Iron Age Mediterranean Marian H. Feldman Chapter 5 Close Encounters of the Lasting Kind: Greeks, Phoenicians, and Others in the Iron Age Mediterranean Sarah P. Morris Chapter 6 The Mediterranean and the Black Sea in the Early First Millennium BCE: Greeks, Phoenicians, Phrygians, and Lydians Susan Sherratt Chapter 7 Greeks, Phoenicians, Phrygians, Trojans, and Other Creatures in the Aegean: Connections, Interactions, Misconceptions John K. Papadopoulos Chapter 8 Anatolia, the Aegean, and the Neo-Assyrian Empire: Material Connections Ann C. Gunter Chapter 9 Egypt and the Mediterranean in the Early Iron Age Brian Muhs Chapter 10 Globalizing the Mediterranean’s Iron Age Tamar Hodos Chapter 11 Six Provocations in Search of a Pretext Michael Dietler Contributors Index
£34.20
The University of Chicago Press Street Scriptures Between God and HipHop
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Nava introduces an intervention into the excesses and shortcomings of two of the major theological movements of the 20th century: Latin American liberation theology and Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theology of beauty, the via pulchritudinis. He notes how liberation theology underdetermined beauty as a suspicious distraction from social justice, while the theology of beauty, in liturgy and beyond, overdetermined beauty through a fixed cultural lens. . . . This erudition and range make the book’s most compelling case for itself." * America Magazine *"Nava explores the connections between religion and hip-hop, revealing the overlooked theological roots of the genre and its potential to change the world." * US Catholic Magazine, "What We're Reading" *“Using examples from current hip-hop artists, as well as popular artists from the past, Nava passionately describes the blending of religion, politics, culture, and aesthetics in hip-hop music.” * Reading Religion *"A stylistically playful yet materially serious examination of public theologies done from and for the margins. Any courses focusing on the intersection of 'faith/theology' and 'culture' would benefit from Nava’s work." * Religious Studies Review *"With this majestic study, Nava reclaims ‘the streets’ as a living, breathing text, through which black and brown youth transmute everyday terror into spiritual beauty and hurl truth on the doorsteps of power. By placing academic theology and urban hip-hop culture side by side, Nava’s work has the potential to usher both into a more liberating future.” -- Onaje X. O. Woodbine, author of 'Black Gods of the Asphalt: Religion, Hip-Hop, and Street Basketball'“Nava’s writing pulses with passion—electric, vivid, joyful, and oh so readable. By immersing the reader in the music, Nava offers the most compelling lens available on exactly how hip-hop created a moral aesthetic that moves people to change the world. Street Scriptures is social criticism of the highest order.” -- Jonathon Kahn, author of 'Divine Discontent: The Religious Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois'“In this compelling work, Nava reads the radically subversive ‘street scriptures’ of hip-hop as a distinctive form of urban liberation theology. This elegantly argued book by a scholar and activist is an important contribution to the study of urban religion and of ‘religion’ itself in one of its most powerful and challenging contemporary instantiations.” -- Robert Orsi, author of 'History and Presence'
£20.90
The University of Chicago Press Local Interests
Book SynopsisA policy-focused approach to understanding the role of interest groups in US municipal governments. Local politics in the United States once seemed tranquil compared to the divisiveness and dysfunction of the country's national politics. Those days have passed. As multiple wide-ranging crises have thrust America's local governments into the spotlight, they have also exposed policy failures and systemic problems that have mounted for years. While issues such as policing and the cost of housing are debated nationally, much of the policymaking surrounding these issues occurs locally. In Local Interests, Sarah F. Anzia explores how local governmentsand the interest groups that try to influence themcreate the policies that drive the national conversation: policing, economic development, housing, and challenges of taxing and spending. Anzia examines local interest groups in terms of the specific policies they pursue, including how these groups get active in politics and what impact they hTrade Review"This innovative book studies the influence of interest groups on the workings of city governments in the US....This book is a needed corrective to studies on political interest groups and reinforces the importance of local elections to the national electoral process." * Choice *"Anzia convincingly and provocatively shows that local governments are a better arena to study interest groups than federal ones...this is a highly innovative and impactful must-read." * Mobilization *"Do interest groups promote democracy by representing the views of their constituents before government, or do they distort democracy because such representation is skewed in favor of those with great resources? In her important and ambitious new book, Anzia addresses this question squarely, offering a new approach to measuring the impact of interest groups....Local Interests is a resolutely statistical work, as Anzia harnesses the power of her large database to map out the interaction between lobbies and city governments." * Perspectives on Politics *"Local Interests enters a realm of politics that, while dynamic and contested, operates differently from the partisan and ideological frames that are second nature to most Americans. By unveiling the distinctive character of local political life and the interest groups that shape it, Anzia has made a major contribution." * City Journal *"Local Interests shows that there is a gold mine of promising interest group research to be had that focuses on America’s cities and counties....Local Interests lends academic rigor to this common knowledge and pushes forward a promising new school of thought centered on interest groups among public policy researchers." * Interest Groups & Advocacy *"An incredibly important, field changing book. Anzia offers a completely novel description of what goes on in modern city politics. She effectively counters the (persistent) belief that local government activity is apolitical, custodial, or issueless by showing that groups have identifiable interests in local policy outcomes, and that they actively work to achieve those goals. Anzia is a gifted writer and an even more gifted thinker; she offers deep insights in every chapter." -- Jessica Trounstine, University of California, Merced"Local Interests will be the definitive account of interest group influence in local government. The book is original and sound, assessing the relationships between the strength of business, labor, and other groups and public policy choices—from hot topics like police body cameras to less salient but critical areas like business tax incentives." -- Matt Grossmann, Michigan State UniversityTable of ContentsChapter 1. Interest Groups and Public Policy in US Local Government Chapter 2. The Policy-Focused Approach to Studying Interest Groups Chapter 3. How Active Are Interest Groups in Local Politics? Chapter 4. What Kinds of Interest Groups Are Most Active? Chapter 5. Political Parties in Local Politics Chapter 6. Influence: Issues, Approach, and Expectations Chapter 7. Business and Growth Chapter 8. Unions, Public Safety, and Local Government Spending Chapter 9. Interest Group Influence in Local Elections Chapter 10. Local Interests and Power Acknowledgments Notes Index
£79.80
The University of Chicago Press Beyond Positivism Behaviorism and
Book SynopsisTrade Review"A compact discussion of some crucial issues economists should be contemplating." * The Enlightened Economist *"Beyond Positivism [presents] a criticism and reshaping of economic thought that departs from neoinstitutionalism and other non-'humanomical' movements, promoting the ethics of liberalism as the ideal foundation for an adequate economic science." * Journal of Economic Literature *“The manuscript is a collection of writings for various forums, many reviews of others and many replies to critics. One unifying theme is a critique of neoinstitutional economics. But yet another theme is a defense of the bourgeois trilogy against its critics. This book is well worth a read.” -- Richard Langlois, University of Connecticut“This new book deepens the continuing conversation in Humanomics. It’s essentially about discovering Adam Smith and resuming a path that McCloskey has so magnificently helped to reinvigorate in the last half century.” -- Vernon Smith, Chapman University and 2002 Nobel Laureate in EconomicsTable of ContentsIntroduction The Argument in Brief Part I. Economics Is in Scientific Trouble Chapter 1. An Antique, Unethical, and Badly Measured Behaviorism Doesn’t Yield Good Economic Science or Good Politics Chapter 2. Economics Needs to Get Serious about Measuring the Economy Chapter 3. The Number of Unmeasured “Imperfections” Is Embarrassingly Long Chapter 4. Historical Economics Can Measure Them, Showing Them to Be Small Chapter 5. The Worst of Orthodox Positivism Lacks Ethics and Measurement Part II. Neoinstitutionalism Shares in the Troubles Chapter 6. Even the Best of Neoinstitutionalism Lacks Measurement Chapter 7. And “Culture,” or Mistaken History, Will Not Repair It Chapter 8. That Is, Neoinstitutionalism, Like the Rest of Behavioral Positivism, Fails as History and as Economics Chapter 9. As It Fails in Logic and in Philosophy Chapter 10. Neoinstitutionalism, in Short, Is Not a Scientific Success Part III. Humanomics Can Save the Science Chapter 11. But It’s Been Hard for Positivists to Understand Humanomics Chapter 12. Yet We Can Get a Humanomics Chapter 13. And Although We Can’t Save Private Max U Chapter 14. We Can Save an Ethical Humanomics Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Index
£24.00
University of Chicago Press Firebrands
Book Synopsis
£22.80
The University of Chicago Press Dangerous Children On Seven Novels and a Story
Book SynopsisTrade Review"An original spin on literary criticism." * Publishers Weekly *“In his absorbing short study . . . Gross offers an extraordinary account of a certain form of uncanny childhood.” * Times Literary Supplement *"Lovely and completely idiosyncratic . . . [Gross] ruminates upon eight very strange fictional children, ranging from Lewis Carroll’s Alice to Nabokov’s Lolita. Read alongside one another, they . . . allow us to see things anew: silence and speech, subjecthood and objecthood, sense and nonsense. Gross’s thinking is subtle and stylish.'" * Commonweal *“An original—and fruitful—approach to literary criticism.” * Irish Times *“A series of startling insights and evocations, Dangerous Children reveals just how uncanny and enigmatic children can be. In eight really quite brilliantly subtle chapters Gross shows us, improbably, that we have never really been curious enough about childhood.” -- Adam Phillips, author of On Getting Better“This exhilarating, risk-taking study draws together children figured in disparate writers and transfigures our reading of them. Lewis Carroll and Kafka, Elizabeth Bowen and Richard Hughes, Nabokov and Henry James, Collodi and Barrie, all generate dangerous children who live between play and death. Gross brilliantly conveys their mystery.” -- Gillian Beer, author of Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll“Gross doesn’t call his children dangerous for nothing. From Carroll’s Alice to Collodi’s Pinocchio and Nabokov’s Lolita, they are all fictional and therefore cannot die. They are also especially well equipped, in this subtle analysis, to suffer and explore the dangers of innocence entangled in knowledge. As the text reminds us, it was very clear to the heroine of What Maisie Knew that she was not supposed to know things. The book is a wonderful read on many accounts, not least because its apparently pastoral topic becomes so eerie.” -- Michael Wood, author of Yeats and ViolenceTable of ContentsPrologue Alice Pinocchio Maisie Peter Odradek Emily Portia Lolita Coda Acknowledgments Notes Readings Index
£20.90
University of Chicago Press Everyones Business
Book Synopsis
£26.60
The University of Chicago Press Nonprofit Neighborhoods
Book SynopsisAn exploration of how and why American city governments delegated the responsibility for solving urban inequality to the nonprofit sector. Nonprofits serving a range of municipal and cultural needs are now so ubiquitous in US cities, it can be difficult to envision a time when they were more limited in number, size, and influence. Turning back the clock, however, uncovers both an illuminating story of how the nonprofit sector became such a dominant force in American society, as well as a troubling one of why this growth occurred alongside persistent poverty and widening inequality. Claire Dunning's book connects these two stories in histories of race, democracy, and capitalism, revealing how the federal government funded and deputized nonprofits to help individuals in need, and in so doing avoided addressing the structural inequities that necessitated such action in the first place. Nonprofit Neighborhoods begins after World War II, when suburbanization, segregation, and deindustTrade Review“Illuminating. . . Dunning compels us to consider how promises of grassroots empowerment ended up maintaining the racialized and economic boundaries that imbricate the urban poor. . . . [She] leaves us with the dispiriting conclusion that the enlarged role of nonprofits has failed to mitigate and has even worsened urban inequality." * The Baffler *"Bold, powerful. . . [Dunning's] sober, carefully researched, and elegantly crafted book provides a salutary complication of the Tocquevillian myth that still colors much conventional thinking about the US nonprofit sector: that there is an easy and clearly intelligible congruence between democratic vitality in the United States and the nation’s rich associational life. It is difficult to read Nonprofit Neighborhoods without one’s faith in that congruence being permanently shaken." * Stanford Social Innovation Review *"Nonprofit Neighborhoods adds great value to the long-ongoing discussion and healthy debate about the best way to think of the relationship between civil society and the state. . . Dunning’s book generally and convincingly concludes that publicly funding locally based nonprofit groups to implement policy has, in the end, failed to achieve a more-inclusive government, to reduce urban poverty and inequality, and to dismantle racism." * Philanthropy Daily *"The lessons that Nonprofit Neighborhoods offers on missed opportunity after missed opportunity seem particularly valuable and relevant today." * Philanthropy News Digest *"Dunning’s history helps us see how the federal government’s administrative structure for anti-poverty programs—theorized by social science–driven philanthropists and established by public policymakers—ultimately served to perpetuate urban poverty." * Public Books *“Nonprofit Neighborhoods takes us to the frontlines of the government and philanthropic grantsmanship, municipal power brokering, and street-level protest that brought an evolving, multi-layered infrastructure of “public-private partnership” to Boston’s working-class communities of color starting in the 1960s—promising to resolve problems of poverty with improved social services in the face of widening structural divides. Persuasively argued and analytically nuanced, it tracks the continuities as well as the gradually unfolding transformations in urban policy, politics, and governance that link the social democratic aspirations of Great Society liberalism to the social austerity of our neoliberal age. Dunning provides important insights to all engaged in struggles against inequality—as scholars, policy advocates, practitioners, and activists.” * Alice O’Connor, University of California, Santa Barbara *“Nonprofit Neighborhoods is a revelation. Through a rich archival study of urban renewal in Boston, Dunning elegantly reconstructs how public projects came to be organized around grants and funding competitions. Decentralization and community participation were enhanced, but key decisions remained in the hands of city officials, foundation officers, and increasingly private lenders. The result is an eye-opening analysis of how policy reform transformed democratic governance.” * Elisabeth S. Clemens, University of Chicago *“Nonprofit Neighborhoods is a timely and original account of how the federal government has delegated urban policymaking, social service provision, and anti-poverty efforts to the private sector. This eye-opening book explains the proliferation of urban nonprofits —a distinctive feature of the American welfare state—and offers a sobering critique of the limitations of neighborhood-based solutions to persistent urban inequality.” * Thomas J. Sugrue, New York University *“Nonprofit Neighborhoods makes a paradigm-shifting contribution to the urban and policy history of the second half of the twentieth century. In her important interrogation into the nature of public-private partnerships, Dunning provides important insight into the changing nature of state power and the persistence of structural inequality. Lucidly written and deeply researched, this is an excellent book, poised to recast several scholarly fields.” * Lily Geismer, Claremont McKenna College *“Among the many intesting questions about the history of America’s cities, there are a few democracy-consequential questions whose answers literally define the future. In Nonprofit Neighborhoods, Dunning asks and answers morally uneasy and politically impolite questions such as: Why has the concentration of nonprofits in Black communities perpetuated not alleviated inequality? and How have these nonprofit neighborhoods become ‘spaces of inclusion and exclusion’? With precision, clarity, and subtly, Dunning tells a story of government and private power exerted upon and even undermining nonprofit neighborhoods. This sweeping history is a compelling cartography of power, cities, and race as well as a hopeful map for what America might be—if we but learned from the past.” * Cornell William Brooks, Harvard University *"An exceptional piece of scholarship. . . . scholars have long appreciated the fact that social welfare policy is implemented on the ground by formal nonprofit organizations. Nonprofits have, in turn, become institutionalized as providers of social services. However, Dunning breaks new ground by showing how these taken-for-granted arrangements developed over time, how a diverse group of institutions played a role in cementing them, and what the consequences have been for residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods." * Social Service Review *"Claire Dunning’s book, Nonprofit Neighborhoods, presents a thoughtful critique of the ability of neighborhood nonprofit organizations to address entrenched problems of racism, poverty, and inequality. Using Boston as the focus, Dunning brings a keen scholarly eye to that city’s various urban revitalization and community development initiatives, both locally initiated and funded through an array of federal programs. The book presents a thorough, well-written, and detailed descriptive history of Boston’s efforts, starting in the 1960s, that created a robust group of neighborhood nonprofit organizations." * Journal of Urban Affairs *"This case study of Boston and its environs focuses on a city often ranked among the 10 most segregated in the US. Dunning notes that nonprofit and community organizations have made significant efforts to ameliorate substandard housing in areas predominantly inhabited by Black and brown minorities . . . Recommended." * Choice *Table of ContentsList of Figures Introduction. Neighborhood Nonprofits Chapter 1. The City Chapter 2. The Grantees Chapter 3. The Residents Chapter 4. The Bureaucrats Chapter 5. The Lenders Chapter 6. The Partners Chapter 7. The Coalitions Conclusion. Nonprofit Neighborhoods Acknowledgments Abbreviations Found in Notes Notes Index
£22.80
The University of Chicago Press Knowledge Flows in a Global Age
Book SynopsisA transnational approach to understanding and analyzing knowledge circulation. The contributors to this collection focus on what happens to knowledge and know-how at national borders. Rather than treating it as flowing like currents across them, or diffusing out from center to periphery, they stress the human intervention that shapes how knowledge is processed, mobilized, and repurposed in transnational transactions to serve diverse interests, constraints, and environments. The chapters consider both what knowledge travels and how it travels across borders of varying permeability that impede or facilitate its movement. They look closely at a variety of platforms and objects of knowledge, from tangible commoditieslike hybrid wheat seeds, penicillin, Robusta coffee, naval weaponry, seed banks, satellites and high-performance computersto the more conceptual apparatuses of plant phenotype data and statistics. Moreover, this volume decenters the Global North, tracking how knowledge movesTrade Review“Over the past decade, Krige has positioned himself as one of the foremost scholars investigating the seemingly simple yet, in truth, incredibly intricate and complicated issue of how and why knowledge moves around. Whereas his previous work focused on the power, utility and impact of scientific networks during the twentieth century, particularly in the nuclear field, Krige has now moved into the even broader field of knowledge mobility itself. . . . Similar to its predecessor, [Knowledge Flows in a Global Age] once again challenges us to rethink our taken-for-granted assumptions of how and why knowledge moves around, and what factors prevent it from doing so (or, more directly, what factors may deny the designation of knowledge in the first place). It is, for this reason, a richly stimulating collection the significance of which, true to its transnational outlook, transgresses standard disciplinary assumptions, disrupts interpretive frameworks and asks us to reconsider our own roles as academics in these processes.” * Annals of Science *“The volume shows clearly that the very idea of ‘progress’ is wrought with tension, where some actors are constricted by the liberal contractual framework and are expected to generate profits, while others seek to establish asymmetric relations in the contest for the military and technoscientific superiority. Knowledge Flows in a Global Age reads as a compendium of the complexities of transnational knowledge transfer questioning the notion of effortless globalization. It does important work that will certainly be useful for a wide range of scholarship.” * H-Diplo *"Krige and his collaborators have assembled a powerful array of studies that reconfigure conventional narratives about how knowledge flows. Divided among historical case studies related in some way or another to national and economic security, on the one hand, and agricultural exchanges, on the other, the volume avoids the usual binaries of Global North and Global South—or of guns and butter—emphasizing the efforts to block, shape, or redirect the flow of knowledge. The cast of characters and the variety of regions is massively expanded, to excellent effect." -- Michael D. Gordin, Princeton University“For too long, ‘global’ histories of science have envisioned an antiquated hydraulic mechanism, pumping out authorized knowledge from northern laboratories to southern deserts. At last, this book reveals instead the densely and intricately reticulated worldwide networks transmitting the concepts and practices of modern science. Abandoning the imperial optic for such multi-sited transnational perspectives makes global science look truly different and far more compelling." -- Warwick Anderson, University of Sydney"An excellent, absorbing, and refreshingly revisionist collection of cutting-edge studies by eminent scholars in the transnational history of modern science and technology, organized and edited by a pioneer in the field. Integrating enlightening empirical examinations with penetrating analyses, the volume illuminates brilliantly forces that both propelled and blocked knowledge flow across national borders." -- Zuoyue Wang, California State Polytechnic UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction Writing the Transnational History of Knowledge Flows in a Global Age John Krige Chapter 1 Knowledge, State Power, and the Invention of International Science Jessica Wang Part I: Regulating Transnational Knowledge Flows Chapter 2 Harnessing Invention: The British Admiralty and the Political Economy of Knowledge in the World War I Era Katherine C. Epstein Chapter 3 Culture Diplomacy: Penicillin and the Problem of Anglo-American Knowledge Sharing in World War II Michael A. Falcone Chapter 4 Dangerous Calculations: The Origins of the US High-Performance Computer Export Safeguards Regime, 1968–1974 Mario Daniels Chapter 5 Regulating the Transnational Flow of Intangible Knowledge of Space Launchers between the United States and China in the Clinton Era John Krige Part II: Facilitating Transnational Knowledge Flows Chapter 6 Beyond Borlaug’s Shadow: Mexican Seeds and the Narratives of the Green Revolution Gabriela Soto Laveaga Chapter 7 Moving Coffee from the Cloud Forests of Colonial Angola to the Breakfast Tables of Main Street America, 1940–1961 Maria Gago Chapter 8 Statistics and Emancipation from New Deal America to Guerrilla Warfare in Guinea-Bissau Tiago Saraiva Chapter 9 Security versus Sovereignty in a Palestinian Seed Bank Courtney Fullilove Chapter 10 How Data Cross Borders: Globalizing Plant Knowledge through Transnational Data Management and Its Epistemic Economy Sabina Leonelli Conclusion Decentering the Global North John Krige Acknowledgments Contributors Index
£102.60
The University of Chicago Press Downriver Into the Future of Water in the West
Book SynopsisTrade Review"[A] strength of Downriver is Hansman’s ability to make complex and historically fraught water issues understandable. It can take years of engagement to fully comprehend many of the topics she discusses, such as tribal water rights. But Hansman’s writing is clear and succinct, and she has done a great deal of research. As someone who has spent the better part of a decade thinking about Colorado River governance, I was impressed by the book. Hansman exceeded my expectations. Her descriptions and discussions of western water topics are so useful and accurate that they make an excellent starting point for anyone wanting to learn more about these issues." * American Scientist *“Heather Hansman’s new book is a must-read for anyone who loves rivers or is concerned about the future of the West . . . The river carries Hansman through Wyoming ranches, natural-gas fields, cities, and national parks, and she finds that seemingly everyone wants a piece of its pie. So she follows her curiosity, learning where the water goes—and who’s fighting over what.” * Outside *"In an energizing mix of travelogue and investigative journalism, Hansman, a raft guide and environmental reporter, provides a straightforward elucidation of the mind-bogglingly complicated subject of water rights in the American West. . . . Travel enthusiasts will appreciate Hansman’s descriptions of her rafting exploits, love of wildlife, and admiration for the power of water, while policy advocates will mull over her thought-provoking insight into the West’s water conundrum." * Publishers Weekly *"Hansman delivers a worthy updating of a core library containing such works as Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert and Philip Fradkin's A River No More. An insightful look into the unsustainability of western waterways." * Kirkus *"Whether you're a westerner or not, you'll be caught up in the hustle and flow of this universal story, one that has rippling effects on our entire country." * Shape *"Hansman’s new book Downriver: Into the Future of Water in the West explores the water emergency with remarkable calm and even-handedness." * New Republic *"Heather Hansman wants her readers to connect the dots between water use, natural resources, and human impact" * Sunset Magazine *"[Downriver] is a blend of personal narrative, water policy research and on-the-ground reporting in the rural West. It’s about her growing comfort with solitude, the technicalities that define a water right, and the people she met along the way. But it’s also a testament to how recreation can serve as a door to learning and an opportunity to engage with big issues that paddlers—and all outdoorspeople, including climbers, skiers, hikers, surfers—tend to be passionate about." * Uncommon Path (REI Blog) *"Downriver should be required reading for everyone who enjoys this podcast—it strikes the perfect balance of being entertaining and educational while examining all sides of the many issues facing the West’s water supply. There are few topics in the West as divisive and emotional as water, and in her book, Heather provides a balanced overview of all the issues, delving deep into the substance of water-related arguments, without crossing over into the mind-numbing jargon that defines most water-related writing." * Mountain & Prairie *"Hansman is willing to interrogate her own assumptions, to speak to people with differing views, and to allow western water issues to become more complicated, not less, as she moves down the river. She explores the sticky parts of western water policy, just as she explore the less-loved sections of the Green." -- Melissa Sevigny, author of Mythical River: Chasing the Mirage of New Water in the American Southwest"Downriver contains [Hansman's] commentary on the state of the river, sprinkled with useful information on the laws that control the river, federal water regulations, and studies that address contemporary issues such as endangered species and climate change." * Journal of Arizona History *"Heather Hansman's time as a rafting guide piqued her interest and her journey on the river, along 730 miles of water from Wyoming, Colorado and Utah. It is so wonderfully written you'll forget you're reading non-fiction." * The Colorado Sun *Table of ContentsOn the River702 cfsFarms686 cfsThe Law of the River Growing a Crop of Humans in the Desert All Those People Have to EatCities2,790 cfsThe Only Watering Hole in the Whole County Flowing Uphill to Money Whose Rights?Dams6,940 cfsClaiming and Reclamation After the Dam Protect the Green River at All Cost The Map of What’s NextFish9,080 cfsLarval Triggers Humans Are a Species, Too What’s the Point of a Wild River? One Big Fish TankRecreation9,180 cfsThrough the Gates What Is It Worth? We Save What We Love and We Love What We KnowFuture Risks10,600 cfsEnergy and Power Water Is Where the Fight Is Climate Change Is Water ChangeFuture Plans6,820 cfsThis Land Is Your Land You Can’t Just Sell Out to a City Getting Comfortable with RiskConfluence3,220 cfs Timeline Acknowledgments Notes Index
£12.00
The University of Chicago Press The Bonds of Inequality
Book SynopsisIndebtedness, like inequality, has become a ubiquitous condition in the United States. Yet few have probed American cities' dependence on municipal debt or how the terms of municipal finance structure racial privileges, entrench spatial neglect, elide democratic input, and distribute wealth and power. In this passionate and deeply researched book, Destin Jenkins shows in vivid detail how, beyond the borrowing decisions of American cities and beneath their quotidian infrastructure, there lurks a world of politics and finance that is rarely seen, let alone understood. Focusing on San Francisco, The Bonds of Inequality offers a singular view of the postwar city, one where the dynamics that drove its creation encompassed not only local politicians but also banks, credit rating firms, insurance companies, and the national municipal bond market. Moving between the local and the national, The Bonds of Inequality uncovers how racial inequalities in San Francisco were intrinsically tied to mTrade Review “This is a provocative book. . . . Jenkins has done a remarkable job of historical excavation.” * Bloomberg News *"The Bonds of Inequality goes a long way toward revealing the role of financial markets in the making of urban inequality. . . . Jenkins’s work gives us an opportunity to ask not only how public policy and private markets were related but also how the bond and real estate markets worked together. . . . Government, Jenkins contends in his innovative book, only made urban inequality with the help of capital markets." * The Nation *“Jenkins offers a fine-grained look at [San Francisco]’s engagement with the muni bond market from the 1940s to the 1980s and at how the demands of that market affected the investments the city could make in its infrastructure and people.” -- David Marcus * The Deal *"It joins a new canon of academic books analyzing what is broadly termed racial capitalism, Race for Profit by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Bankers and Empire by Peter James Hudson being two other notable examples. . . .While The Bonds of Inequality is not a history of radicalism, I found its methodology radical in itself. The deliberate way that Jenkins draws a web of the exact syndicates, companies, commissions, and lawyers that make up the municipal bond market reminded me of power mapping. There is something empowering in the way Jenkins picks apart the archives of Bank of America and other bondsmen." * Rampant Magazine *"Field-altering. . . . Jenkins unveils the shadow city. . . The book proceeds from a seemingly simple question: How did municipal governments pay for their colossal and racially differentiated investments in infrastructure and social services during the postwar era? The answer, it turns out, requires taking a jackhammer to the political, economic, social, and material foundations of the city, a task that Jenkins performs with fiery conviction and bulls-eye precision." * Reviews in American History *"A detailed history of debt politics in a single case city: San Francisco. . . . Jenkins joins the growing ranks of scholars fixing a racial-politics lens on the transition from Keynesianism to neoliberalism in the United States." * Metropolitics *”Brilliant and pathbreaking. . . The genius of Bonds is its insistence on carefully demonstrating that ”federal failure is also the bankers’ story.”. . . The book clearly shows that the municipal bond sector’s hold on cities has grown only more toxic and suffocating as prolonged fiscal distress has become the default setting of American politics.” * The Law & Political Economy Project *"Astonishing. . . By delving into the intricacies of municipal financing—bond markets, rating agencies, bankers, comptrollers, analysts, accountants—Jenkins has produced a fascinating study of a highly technical subject. What is more, he has also raised important questions about the power dynamics of U.S. cities, and about who possesses the ultimate power to reshape cities and control the form of urban societies." * Places Journal *"Recommended." * Choice *"Jenkins unearths an often stunning and truly unique history of the American city. He has delivered a critical addition to our understanding of urban inequality with which scholars of cities, urban planning, infrastructure, and development will need to contend for many years to come. . . . Histories of public housing, education, infrastructure, city planning, and urban political economy will no longer be complete without reckoning with Jenkins’s powerful work." * Planning Perspectives *"The Bonds of Inequality: Debt, and the Making of the American City (University of Chicago Press, 2021)... is a detailed and damning account of how bond finance structures racial privilege in San Francisco and beyond." * Public Books *“Many histories describe capitalism as a destructive phenomenon; the rare few take us into the guts of the system. Jenkins exposes the arteries and muscle, the bloodstreams that deliver money and credit to create racial capitalism. In a brilliant and tragic account, he reveals how bond finance—and the people who make it happen—extracts wealth and reconfigures governance, breaking urban communities on the very promise meant to rescue them: liberal investment in the public welfare.” * Christine Desan, author of Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism *“Tracing the relationships between bondholders, banks, and municipal debt from the New Deal to the 1980s, The Bonds of Inequality provides an essential new layer to the history of racial capitalism. In a moment when unprecedented numbers of Americans are in debt and cities across the country continue to file for bankruptcy, this brilliant book could not be more timely.” * Elizabeth Hinton, author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America *“Through a forensic inquest into the archives of the twentieth-century bond market, Jenkins unravels the intricate and entangled social, cultural, and political-economic worlds of urban money and credit, demonstrating in astonishing detail how financiers and technocrats came to triumph over citizens, how cities bent to the rule of lenders, and how the life of debt took precedence over the good of democratic society. Written with eloquence, clarity, and quiet, smoldering fury, The Bonds of Inequality is a critical and timely intervention into the political economy of cities and the history of capitalism. Its lessons are as important for the Bay Area as for the rest of the indebted world.” * Peter James Hudson, author of Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean *“In this pathbreaking book, Jenkins makes two crucial interventions. He gives municipal finance a much-needed history, and—even more important—he opens up a new framework for understanding persistent racial inequality in American cities. Through rigorous research and sophisticated analysis, The Bonds of Inequality literally follows the money, tracing the connections between race, urban economic development, and capitalism.” * Thomas J. Sugrue, author of Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race *“With The Bonds of Inequality, Jenkins delivers a sophisticated and important book. In uncovering previously hidden relationships between democracy and power, he powerfully explains the impact of debt service on municipal budgets, and follows this impact over time. His original view of urban governance combines a historian’s perspective with a refreshed moral compass. The impact of this original book, as a unique contribution to scholarship, is enormous.” * Alison Isenberg, author of Designing San Francisco: Art, Land and Urban Renewal in the City by the Bay *“The Bonds of Inequality is a brilliantly conceived and executed book about the politics, culture, and economics of municipal finance, centered on the postwar history of San Francisco. Jenkins breaks new ground by re-situating the history of post-World War II urban development in the financing networks that literally made possible the construction of urban infrastructure. Drawing on a wonderful range of little-used or newly discovered sources, his book is a remarkable accomplishment.” * Kimberly Phillips-Fein, author of Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics *"Jenkins details the mostly hidden or forgotten history of the municipal bond market and its role in perpetuating systemic racial inequality." * Next City *Table of ContentsList of Figures and Tables List of Abbreviations IntroductionPart I: Rule of Experts 1. Management 2. Fraternity 3. PlaygroundPart II: The Paradox of Debt 4. Shelter 5. Crunch 6. Revolt 7. FailurePart III: Supremacy 8. Eclipse 9. Pinched Epilogue Acknowledgments NotesIndex
£19.00
The University of Chicago Press Quantum Legacies Dispatches from an Uncertain
Book SynopsisTrade Review"A masterpiece of historical analysis. . . . Skillfully written and a pleasure to read." * Nature * "A work of coherence, accessibility, and rhetorical power not generally found in [these] volumes. . . . Kaiser has woven together a unique, compelling, and kaleidoscopic portrait of the quantum revolution and its implications. He doesn't hide from the messiness of science but embraces the challenge of understanding its underlying human and social conditions." -- Jose G. Perillan * Physics Today * "Quantum Legacies does not disappoint. . . . It is a breath of fresh air to see physics writing like this: lucid and friendly, sober and thoughtful, and willing to trust the reader's engagement and intelligence rather than demanding the former and underestimating the latter. . . . Superb popular science. . . . It is hard for me to imagine any physicist who wouldn't enjoy the fine cloth from which it is cut, nor the pleasing effect it makes." -- Philip Ball * Physics World * "Engrossing. . . . Leave[s] us with a richer picture of physics as a lived activity." * Los Angeles Review of Books * "Most history books written for the wider public favor a narrower understanding of science. David Kaiser's work is a welcomed exception. . . . [He] gives a witty and insightful overview of the development of modern physics. . . . An engrossing read that will give specialists and nonspecialists alike a deeper understanding of how phenom ena as diverse as geopolitics and eastern mysticism have shaped physics in the past century." * Science * "An ambitious collection of essays that merges [Kaiser's] two scholarly identities. . . . A wide-ranging anthology." -- Melinda Baldwin * Physics Today * "From Einstein to Heisenberg, Schroedinger to Hawking, Kaiser humanises the people and by extension their ideas, all the while making connections between the inner world of the academic quantum theory community and the outer world of global events. This sociopolitical standpoint is a key factor in making the technical science relevant to the non-expert reader. . . . In this collection of highly entertaining essays, he finds the perfect line between scientific scholarship and telling a good story." * Engineering & Technology * "All together it paints a very compelling picture of how strategic decisions at the public policy level shaped the way physicists have gone about studying the universe. . . . It's a good story well told." * Forbes * "Captivating. . . . You can really get the sense of the quantum mechanical impact on various and disparate fields ranging from cosmology to the early foundations of quantum mechanics, the history of quantum mechanics, all the way up through popular culture, weaving its way through how physics pedagogy and even scientific STEM pedagogy is taught to this very day. . . . It's exhaustively researched and referenced. . . . I want people to buy every single copy." -- Brian Keating * Into the Impossible * "The book paints intimate portraits of some incredible luminaries . . . . Kaiser is an incredible ambassador for physics and its history." -- Matthew Jordan * New Books in Science, Technology, and Society * "Fantastically readable. Anybody interested in either science or history on a professional or a popular level should read it. It's a fantastic introduction to the way you can think about science in all sorts of different interdisciplinary, humanistic ways. It's really a huge amount of fun." -- Matthew Stanley * What the If? * "It's [Kaiser's] careful analysis of physics's sociological aspects that makes Quantum Legacies a delightful read. . . . This is the kind of material that you won't find in other books on the history and philosophy of physics." -- Ash Jogalekar * The Curious Wavefunction * "This interesting anthology on selected topics from the rich history of quantum mechanics, especially during its glory days, will engross any reader who has even a modest acquaintance with quantum theory." * Choice, 2020 Outstanding Academic Title * "Full of striking statistics, commentary, and lovely analogies and metaphors. . . . These are engaging, though-provoking, fun-to-read essays that are compact enough that one can get through several in an evening. They will make you consider familiar physical concepts in new ways. All readers will come away richer in their knowledge of the people and circumstances behind how physics arrived at where it is. You will enjoy this book." * American Journal of Physics * "The book not only gives an insight into the development of quantum theory and the lives of the scientists involved, it also explores the complexities of funding, political and sociological considerations, and the influence of the Cold War. . . . [It] provides useful background for physics educators and deserves a place in school science libraries." * Physics Education * "Kaiser-writing in prose that sometimes soars, often intrigues, and always informs-gives us here a remarkable set of vignettes about major developments in physics and cosmology of the past century. His vignettes beautifully integrate science with human history and with insightful descriptions of outsized personalities. This book will be enjoyable and enlightening for a diverse readership: from complete novices in science, to students of science and history, and to professional scientists and historians." -- Kip Thorne, Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, California Institute of Technology, and 2017 Nobel Laureate in Physics "Physicists are people! They have insecurities, love lives, monetary concerns, and political opinions, all while striving to uncover the fundamental workings of reality. Kaiser spins engaging tales that both explain fascinating aspects of physics in a lucid way and illuminate the human beings who worked to discover them." -- Sean Carroll, author of Something Deeply Hidden "Have you ever wondered why Schroedinger chose such a morbid illustration of quantum physics as a half-dead cat? Want to know how an alleged Soviet spy escaped capture and went on to shake up particle physics? Can you guess what propelled The Tao of Physics to bestseller status? If questions like these spark your curiosity, this book is for you. I can imagine no better guide for an insider's tour of twentieth-century physics than Kaiser. These witty vignettes beautifully illustrate what Kaiser calls the 'doubleness' of scientific research, its ability to bequeath enduring insights while reflecting the quirks and foibles of historical circumstances." -- Deborah R. Coen, author of Climate in Motion "Explaining physics is easier than explaining physicists. In Quantum Legacies, Kaiser succeeds at both." -- George Dyson, author of Turing's Cathedral "What is extraordinary about Kaiser as a writer (and what makes his essays so much fun to read) is not only his ability to animate the range of personalities in these pages, from Einstein to Heisenberg, Schroedinger to Hawking, but also the way he brings the same humanizing impulse to their mind-bending ideas. His talent for uncovering connections between otherworldly ideas and the social and political worlds in which they take shape makes him a simply spellbinding guide to the mysteries of the universe." -- Nell Freudenberger, author of Lost and Wanted "Kaiser is a master writer, and this is some of his finest work. An extraordinary combination of technical science, rich history, and telling anecdote, Quantum Legacies is cutting-edge scholarship rendered in a style equal to any popular science writing. When a non-academic asks me 'what is the history of science?' I will give them this book." -- Matthew Stanley, author of Einstein's War: How Relativity Triumphed amid the Vicious Nationalism of World War I "Friendships and rivalries, the demands of war, the limits of technology . . . these are among the rich universe of forces that conflict and conspire to bring us what we usually gloss over as the inevitable march of scientific progress. Kaiser's book provides a wonderful glimpse behind the curtain into the messier-but far more human-truth of the matter. Beautifully written and extraordinarily well researched, the book makes a profound point about the sociopolitical nature of science that all readers-from physics buffs and historians to students and laypeople-need to hear." -- Amanda Gefter, author of Trespassing on Einstein's LawnTable of ContentsForeword Alan Lightman Introduction Quanta 1 All Quantum, No Solace 2 Life-and-Death: When Nature Refuses to Select 3 Operation: Neutrino 4 Quantum Theory by Starlight Calculating 5 From Blackboards to Bombs 6 Boiling Electrons 7 Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics 8 Training Quantum Mechanics 9 Zen and the Art of Textbook Publishing Matter 10 Pipe Dreams 11 Something for Nothing 12 Higgs Hunting 13 When Fields Collide Cosmos 14 Guess Who's Coming to Dinner 15 Gaga for Gravitation 16 The Other Evolution Wars 17 No More Lonely Hearts 18 Learning from Gravitational Waves 19 A Farewell to Stephen Hawking Acknowledgments Abbreviations Notes Index
£15.20
The University of Chicago Press Sound Experiments The Music of the AACM
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewPaul Steinbeck’s magisterial Sound Experiments [is] a look at the AACM through “a set of ten compositions, improvisations, and recordings.” Sound Experiments contains many transcriptions and technical descriptions, but Steinbeck is a fluid writer and there are stories to tell. -- Sasha Frere-Jones * Bookforum *"In this erudite but lively account, Steinbeck presents the first in-depth study of the AACM’s musicians and music as he traces the evolution of the group's innovative work over many decades. . . . An important addition to the jazz bookshelf." * Booklist *"[Steinbeck] gives a good account of the cultural, social, political, and economic contexts from which the music emerged, and is keenly aware of the racialised gatekeeping which has all too often kept AACM composers from getting their due. . . . Ultimately, the reader comes away with a greater appreciation of the AACM's achievements: Great Black Music, from Ancient to the Future." * The Wire *"Musical analysis dominates the text, but Steinbeck’s thoughtful writing makes the descriptions work on several levels: for a student, or anyone interested in learning about how the music works; for a non-musician who may breeze past the score excerpts but dig into the plain-speak breakdowns; or the attentive fan who can relate the structures discussed to stage dynamics they have witnessed." * New York City Jazz Record *"The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians has achieved worldwide recognition for its approaches to notated composition, improvisation, technology, and intermedia. Steinbeck’s extensive historical and methodological analysis of a wide range of AACM musical practices makes this book indispensable to an understanding of the leading role of Afrodiasporic experimentalism in the past, present, and future of new music." -- George Lewis"I really appreciate Paul Steinbeck’s scholarship in putting together Sound Experiments. I have always found him to be an engaging writer. I enjoy how he wrote about my compositions on my album Sound, as well as the different iterations of my composition Nonaah. He really dug deep!" -- Roscoe Mitchell"Steinbeck has written an excellent analysis of the works of composers-performers from the AACM. A clear and concise investigative text, it looks into many aspects involved in creating a work of musical art. His writing is creative and has an expressive use of language. I recommend his book to everyone." -- Wadada Leo Smith"One of the most significant avant-garde collectives of the twentieth century, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) remains a powerful force in the early 21st century. In Paul Steinbeck, the AACM has found a chronicler and scholar of passion, erudition, and discipline, the very qualities that have made it such an enduring institution." -- Adam Shatz"Rather than a tour through AACM history, Sound Experiments serves as a deep dive into six of the organization’s seminal albums across the decades, which makes listening to the music while reading a whole new kind of experience. Be it Abrams’s ambitious Levels and Degrees of Light from 1968 or Mitchell’s 1977 solo-concert album Nonaah… Steinbeck makes an authoritative guide." * The Slowdown *"Before analyzing each work, Steinbeck traces its genesis in a detailed monograph, illustrating the context in which it was born and the biography of the protagonists. (...) The result is a seminal work on the AACM, the first of its kind." -- Angelo Leonardi * AllAboutJazz.com *"Steinbeck provides some musical notations and deeper analysis of the sounds from his perspective as a musicologist – very illuminating to us, as we tend to have much more of a visceral response to these records." * Dusty Groove *"Paul Steinbeck, Sound Experiments: The Music of the AACM (Chicago) — Musician and Washington University, St. Louis music professor Steinbeck provides a stimulating history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) founded on Chicago’s South Side in 1965. He offers in-depth explorations of innovative performances by members of the organization, from Anthony Braxton’s Composition 76 to Wadada Leo Smith’s The Freedom Summers and Nicole Mitchell’s Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds. He demonstrates the ways these pieces contributed singular approaches to notation, instrumentation, and musical form, creating fresh sounds to contemporary music." -- Henry Carrigan * The Journal of Roots Music No Depression *“A Seminary Coop Notable Book of the Year” * / *“A Seminary Coop Notable Book of the Year” * / *"Paul Steinbeck, Sound Experiments: The Music of the AACM (Chicago) — Musician and Washington University, St. Louis music professor Steinbeck provides a stimulating history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) founded on Chicago’s South Side in 1965. He offers in-depth explorations of innovative performances by members of the organization, from Anthony Braxton’s Composition 76 to Wadada Leo Smith’s The Freedom Summers and Nicole Mitchell’s Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds. He demonstrates the ways these pieces contributed singular approaches to notation, instrumentation, and musical form, creating fresh sounds to contemporary music." -- Henry Carrigan * The Journal of Roots Music No Depression *“Essential reading for anyone interested in jazz and creative music. Steinbeck continues the ongoing task of situating the work of the AACM within the history of experimental music and composition, while always making clear the myriad ways that this music sets itself apart.” * Musicworks *"The music of the AACM is certainly some of the most artistically challenging music ever recorded. Sound Experiments is therefore an invaluable companion for those looking to dip their toes into this fascinating discography, as well as a rich source of information for those looking to dive more deeply into the depths of musical analysis." -- Tom Spargo * All About Jazz *"Not only does this book provide a wonderful addition to jazz scholarship, but Steinbeck has demonstrated that these artists should be talked about right along with other leading figures of the avant-garde music scenes in the 1960s and beyond. This book could prove useful to many researchers outside of the jazz realm, such as composers, performers of experimental music, musicologists, and general fans of experimental music." * Music Reference Services Quarterly *"Not only does this book provide a wonderful addition to jazz scholarship, but Steinbeck has demonstrated that these artists should be talked about right along with other leading figures of the avant-garde music scenes in the 1960s and beyond. This book could prove useful to many researchers outside of the jazz realm, such as composers, performers of experimental music, musicologists, and general fans of experimental music." * Music Reference Services Quarterly *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1 Roscoe Mitchell, Sound :: Muhal Richard Abrams, Levels and Degrees of Light 2 Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah 3 Anthony Braxton, Composition 76 4 Air, Air Time 5 George Lewis, Voyager 6 Fred Anderson, Volume Two 7 AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, At Umbria Jazz 2009 8 Wadada Leo Smith, Ten Freedom Summers 9 Nicole Mitchell, Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds Conclusion Notes Recordings References Index
£24.70
The University of Chicago Press Misconceiving Merit Paradoxes of Excellence and
Book SynopsisTrade Review“This well-written, persuasive, and important book analyzes an important paradox: why is an institution focused on merit-based evaluation so unsuccessful at promoting meritocracy? It will be read widely by those studying gender and racial inequalities in higher education and STEM.” -- Joya Misra, University of Massachusetts Amherst“Extremely well-written, and their findings ring painfully true. The authors are very compelling in pointing out the many inconsistencies that otherwise smart people don’t or won’t see. All faculty interested in promoting diversity will engage with this insightful and compelling scholarship.” -- Cathy Nagler, University of Chicago"The meticulous attention to detail and argument these authors show is essential for potentially disrupting the habitual deflections about the objectivity of scientific merit. This book is required reading for academic administrators, leaders of STEM equity programs, and STEM department chairs. Highly recommended." * Choice *"This is an important book that deserves attention beyond the context of U.S.-based STEM academia it studies. It is especially impressive for the work it does to substantiate through its empirical research how biased ideas take hold and operate in professional cultures." * Science and Engineering Ethics *"Misconceiving Merit is a must-read for researchers, students, and academic administrators interested in transforming STEM professions and institutions of higher education in ways that equitably attract, reward, and retain scientists in academia." * Social Forces *"Researchers will likely see their own experiences in the book’s rich descriptions of the priorities and pressures of a competitive academic environment. These descriptions, paired with ample quotes from interviewees, make for compelling reading, painting a portrait of STEM faculty who work all the time, are highly engaged with their work, struggle to balance personal and professional obligations, and feel that they are always behind and never enough." * Science *Table of ContentsList of Tables and Figures 1 Misperceiving Merit, Excellence, and Devotion in Academic STEM 2 The Cultural Construction of Merit in Academic STEM 3 The Work Devotion Schema and Its Consequences 4 Mismeasuring Merit: The Schema of Scientific Excellence as a Yardstick of Merit 5 Defending the Schema of Scientific Excellence, Defending Inequality 6 The Moralization of Merit: Consequences for Scientists and Science Acknowledgments Appendix Notes References
£20.90
University of Chicago Press The Internal Colony Race and the American
Book Synopsis
£30.40
The University of Chicago Press The End of the World
Book SynopsisThe first English translation of a classic work of twentieth-century anthropology and philosophy. A philosopher, historian of religions, and anthropologist, Ernesto de Martino (19081965) produced a body of work that prefigured many ideas and concerns that would later come to animate anthropology. In his writing, we can see the roots of ethnopsychiatry and medical anthropology, discussions of reflexivity and the role of the ethnographer, considerations of social inequality and hegemony from a Gramscian perspective, and an anticipation of the discipline's existential turn. We also find an attentiveness to hope and possibility, despite the gloomy title of his posthumously published book La fine del mondo, or The End of the World. Examining apocalypse as an individual as well as a cultural phenomenon, treating subjects both classic and contemporary and both European and non-Western, ranging across ethnography, history, literature, psychiatry, and philosophy, de Martino probes how we reTrade Review“De Martino was well ahead of his time. Since his death we have witnessed the rise of medical anthropology, reflexivity, ethnographic film, ethnomusicology, and phenomenology. The time is now ripe for this translation of La fine del mondo to appear.” * Charles Stewart, University College London *Table of Contents Translator’s Preface Introduction Overture 1: Will There Be a World Tomorrow? 1: Mundus 2: Psychopathological Apocalypses 3: The Drama of Christian Apocalypse 4: Apocalypse and Decolonization 5: The Apocalypse of the West 6: Anthropology and Marxism 7: Anthropology and Philosophy Glossary Notes References Index
£26.60
University of Chicago Press The Legacy of the Enlightenment
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£37.02
The University of Chicago Press Rachmaninoff and His World The Bard Music
Book SynopsisTable of ContentsIntroduction Philip Ross Bullock Permissions and Credits Acknowledgments Note on Transliteration and Dating MOSCOW AND MODERNITY Reading the Popular Pessimist: Thought, Feeling, and Dance in Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Narrative Peter Franklin Sergei Rachmaninoff and Moscow Musical Life Rebecca Mitchell Love Triumphant: Rachmaninoff’s Eros, the Silver Age, and the Middlebrow Marina Frolova-Walker Rachmaninoff and the “Vocalise”: Word and Music in the Russian Silver Age Philip Ross Bullock THREE OPERAS Tchaikovsky’s Echoes, Chaliapin’s Sobs: Aleko, Rachmaninoff, and the Contemporary Emily Frey Rachmaninoff’s Miserly Knight (On Money, Honor, and the Means to Create) Caryl Emerson Burning for You: Rachmaninoff’s Francesca da Rimini Simon Morrison NEW WORLDS Rachmaninoff and the Celebrity Interview: A Selection of Documents from the American Press Selected and Edited by Philip Ross Bullock The Eighteenth Variation Steve Swayne “One of the Outstanding Musical Events of All Time”: The Philadelphia Orchestra’s 1939 Rachmaninoff Cycle Christopher H. Gibbs “The Case of Rachmaninoff”: The Music of a White Emigré in the USSR Marina Raku, translated by Jonathan Walker Aesthetic Ambition and Popular Taste: The Divergent Paths of Paderewski, Busoni, and Rachmaninoff Leon Botstein Index Notes on the Contributors
£84.00
The University of Chicago Press Spiritual Moderns
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Doss’s clear and cogent prose, accented by crisp illustrations of key works and supported by extensive research, make this distinctly focused and illuminating study an essential choice for art history collections." -- Carolyn Mulac * Booklist *"Spiritual Moderns bravely retells the story of modern art, fraught as it may be, with a more honest look at how religion shaped it. . . . Through a series of four case studies, along with an intro and conclusion, Doss exposes how earlier historians of modern art have downplayed religion as a key ingredient in some of modern art’s most heralded breakthroughs. . . . [Doss's] strength as a historian shines bright." * Hyperallergic *Named one of The Best Art Books of 2023 * Hyperallergic *"Doss reclaims American modernism’s religious element...Spiritual Moderns casts new light on the history of American art." -- William J. Schultz * Christian Century *“Doss successfully demonstrates that the story of American modernism is not as secular as it is often presumed to be, and shows without telling that art criticism and history that disregard religion are necessarily shallower than a discourse open to religious thinking and concerns.” * The Brooklyn Rail *"Spiritual Moderns investigates how four 20th-century American modernist artists integrated their non-mainstream religious beliefs and commitments into their work. . . . Doss provides artist bios and helpful descriptions of the main characteristics and practices of their religious traditions. . . . The book presents convincing cultural history that brings religious influences forward. . . Recommended." * Choice *"Erika Doss presents a convincing challenge to the prevailing omission of religion in the story of twentieth-century modernist art in the United States. . . . an exemplary model." * Panorama *“Through detailed accounts of the life and work of four twentieth-century American artists, Doss works to unseat the notion that modern art and religion, or spirituality more generally, are incompatible and separate. She compellingly demonstrates how the significance of religion and spirituality in artistic practice has been suppressed and disavowed, or, alternatively, has contributed to an artist’s lesser status within the art-historical literature. In each thoroughly researched and lucidly written chapter, she illuminates the importance of religion and spirituality for these artists and in so doing deepens our understanding of their work.” -- Rachael Z. DeLue, Christopher Binyon Sarofim ’86 Professor in American Art, Princeton University“Spiritual Moderns is an apt extension of Doss’s rigorous art-historical scholarship, and there is a great need for this study. As Doss persuasively argues, it is time that the field of modern American art history recognized the singular importance of religion and spirituality within the production and reception of twentieth-century American art. The canonical figures Doss considers engaged deeply with their respective religious traditions while challenging conventional orthodoxies and crafting unique images of transcendence. Doss offers a compelling revisionist account of modern American art history and the cultural work that religion and spirituality performed, historically and aesthetically.” -- Marcia Brennan, Carolyn and Fred McManis Professor of Humanities, Rice UniversityTable of ContentsList of Figures Chapter 1. Spiritual Moderns: Twentieth-Century American Artists and Religion Chapter 2. Joseph Cornell and Christian Science: “White Magic” Modernism and the Metaphysics of Ephemera Chapter 3. Mark Tobey and Bahá’í: “White Writing” and Spiritual Calligraphy Chapter 4. Agnes Pelton and Occulture: Spiritual Seeking and Visionary Modernism Chapter 5. Andy Warhol and Catholicism: Pop Art’s “Spiritual Side” Chapter 6. Spiritual Moderns: Culture War Controversies and Enduring Themes Acknowledgments Notes Index
£26.60
University of Chicago Press Sunk Cost Whos to Blame for the Nations Broken
Book Synopsis
£20.90
The University of Chicago Press The Tragic Science
Book SynopsisA forceful critique of the social science that has ruledand damagedthe modern world. The practice of economics, as economists will tell you, is a powerful force for good. Economists are the guardians of the world's economies and financial systems. The applications of economic theory can alleviate poverty, reduce disease, and promote sustainability. While this narrative has been successfully propagated by economists, it belies a more challenging truth: economic interventions, including those economists deem successful, also cause harm. Sometimes the harm is manageable and short-lived. But just as often the harm is deep, enduring, and even irreparable. And too often the harm falls on those least able to survive it. In The Tragic Science, George F. DeMartino says what economists have too long repressed: that economists do great harm even as they aspire to do good. Economist-induced harm, DeMartino shows, results in part from economists' irreparable ignorancefrom the fact that they know faTrade Review"In The Tragic Science, George DeMartino offers both epistemic and ethical objections to economic analysis, especially insofar as it influences public policy....DeMartino puts a bright spotlight on what he describes as the 'irreparable ignorance' of economists, who often have to deal with what is unknown and unknowable." * Cass R. Sunstein, The New York Review of Books *"With its reductive view of human nature, economics was called 'the dismal science' in the nineteenth century. Economist George DeMartino prefers 'tragic science,' because so many adherents have been willing to ignore harm in pursuit of growth. 'Their calling validated the imposition of whatever harms were necessary.…to get the job done,' he concludes. Such hubris has been tempered by global financial disasters and climate change, but the profession still requires major reform, he trenchantly argues." * Nature *"In economics, the pressure to create theoretical models and empirical tests that are rigorous yet tractable often leaves a lot to be desired in the actual interpretation of the work. This is a common problem in the social sciences, but it is especially important in economics, DeMartino argues, because of the field's influence on individual behavior and public policy. Good research can indeed provide important insight and evidence, but economists can do a lot of harm when models are flawed, data are suspect, and values are skewed in assessing economic outcomes. DeMartino suggests that the latter issue is critical, because it can have consequences that either are unintended or bypass the calibration of the intended, 'desirable' outcomes....A fascinating, confrontational read. Highly recommended." * Choice *"The Tragic Science [explores] the complexity and severity of economic harm, highlighting the problematic presumptions about harm that underlie economists’ practice in the area of policy assessment and advocacy....[and considers] how economists can endorse social betterment when they cannot know the future impacts of the policies they propose." * Journal of Economic Literature *"Economics may be the science of trade-offs, yet economists are too ready to sweep under the rug the ethical trade-offs their practice entails. As DeMartino argues, these trade-offs arise both because economists claim more knowledge than they actually possess and because their preferred policies often cause irreparable harm for some people. DeMartino lays out a profoundly challenging agenda for economists—one for which there are no simple remedies yet must be confronted nevertheless." -- Dani Rodrik, coauthor of Combating Inequality: Rethinking Government's Role"DeMartino sounds the alarm on how much damage economists can do out of paternalism and hubris. He issues a clarion call for economists to embrace ethical principles that oblige them to consider the harm they may do." -- William Easterly, author of The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor"This thoughtful dissection of the moral hubris of economics reveals simplistic and self-serving assumptions. Rather than offering some magical cure, it points to the need for greater ethical engagement with the often perilous practices of economic policy." -- Nancy Folbre, author of The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems: An Intersectional Political EconomyTable of ContentsPreface Part I: The Tragic Science Chapter 1. The Tragedy of Economics Chapter 2. Economic Paternalism, Heroic Economics Chapter 3. Harm’s Complexity Part II: The Origins of Econogenic Harm Chapter 4. The Unevenness of Econogenic Impact Chapter 5. The Specter of Irreparable Ignorance Chapter 6. Counterfactual Fictions in Economic Explanation and Harm Assessment Part III: Economic Moral Geometry Chapter 7. Managing Harm via Economic Moral Geometry Chapter 8. Moral Geometry: An Assessment Chapter 9. Beyond Moral Geometry: Interests, Social Harm, Capabilities Part IV: Confronting Econogenic Harm Responsibly Chapter 10. Economic Harm Profile Analysis Chapter 11. Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty Chapter 12. Conclusion: From Reckless to Responsible Economics Acknowledgments Notes References Index
£26.60
The University of Chicago Press Osiris Volume 37
Book SynopsisTable of ContentsTranslating Medicine, ca. 800–1900: Articulations and Disarticulations Tara Alberts, Sietske Fransen, and Elaine LeongTranslation and the Making of a Medical Archive: The Case of the Islamic Translation Movement Ahmed RagabUnveiling Nature: Liu Zhi’s Translation of Arabo-Persian Physiology in Early Modern China Dror WeilNew World Drugs and the Archive of Practice: Translating Nicolás Monardes in Early Modern Europe Alisha RankinWhen the Tallamys Met John French: Translating, Printing, and Reading The Art of Distillation Elaine LeongVernacular Languages and Invisible Labor in Ṭibb Shireen HamzaWhere There’s Smoke, There’s Fire: Pyric Technologies and African Pipes in the Early Modern World Benjamin BreenTranslating the Inner Landscape: Anatomical Bricolage in Early Modern Japan Daniel TrambaioloCasting Blood Circulations: Translatability and Braiding Sciences in Colonial Bengal Projit Bihari MukharjiFemale Authority in Translation: Medieval Catalan Texts on Women’s Health Montserrat Cabré[Un]Muffled Histories: Translating Bodily Practices in the Early Modern Caribbean Pablo F. GómezTranslating Surgery and Alchemy between Seventeenth-Century Europe and Siam Tara Alberts“Use Me as Your Test!”: Patients, Practitioners, and the Commensurability of Virtue Hansun HsiungNotes on Contributors Index
£28.00