Columbia University Press

Welcome to our weekly roundup of the best posts from the blogs of academic publishers! As always, if you particularly enjoy something or think that we missed an important post, please let us know in the comments.

At Beacon Broadside, Carole Joffe discusses why the relationship between doctors and patients is so important, and why the “gotcha” filming of abortion clinic doctors undermines the possibility of such a relationship.

Are you a jazz fan? If so, you should listen to this podcast from the University of California Press Blog, in which John Goodman, author of Mingus Speaks, talks about his interviews with the great composer and performer Charles Mingus.

In the late 17th and early 18th century, cotton textiles and other “Eastern luxuries” were blamed for “corrupt[ing] the moral fibre of society” in Europe. Giorgio Riello tells the story of cotton in Early Modern England at This Side of the Pond, the blog of Cambridge University Press.

At the Florida Bookshelf, the blog of the University Press of Florida, Kathleen Kaska continues her account of the continuing battle to save the endangered whooping crane.

The seventeen-year life cycle of the cicada will come to a head this year when the ground temperature reaches 64 degrees Fahrenheit. Luckily, as May Berenbaum points out in a post on cicadas at the Harvard University Press Blog, “It’s not like these hordes of cicadas suck blood or zombify people.”

The JHU Press Blog had a couple of excellent posts this week. First, Sue Friedman discusses the consequences of patents on BRCA genes, with the future of BRCA testing in the balance in an ongoing Supreme Court case. Next, JHU Press manuscript editor Michele Callaghan asks whether “it matter[s] to anyone but editors and others who uphold the laws of grammar whether we use nouns or adjectives to describe people,” and answers firmly in the affirmative.

This week is National Transportation Week, and at the MIT Press blog, Joseph DiMento and Cliff Ellis argue that “we are at a critical point of major transportation diversification for some Americans.”

At the University of Minnesota Press, Rachel Hanel argues that “the death industry [has] taken firm hold and convinced Americans to let professionals handle the death and post-death process,” and that TV shows, Six Feet Under, for instance, help 21st-century America deal with “ideas about death that were common at the turn of the 20th century.”

Angelina Jolie recently wrote an op-ed in the NYTimes discussing her decision to undergo a double mastectomy to reduce her risk of breast cancer. At From the Square, the blog of NYU Press, Kelly E. Happe discusses Jolie’s decision and the BRCA testing process that led to it.

Read an excerpt from Breaking Chains: Slavery on Trial in the Oregon Territory, by R. Gregory Nokes, at the Oregon State University Press blog.

The DSM-5, the latest edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s manual of mental disorders, is scheduled to release next week, and it has already come under a great deal of criticism. This week, the OUPblog has been running a fascinating series of posts on the DSM series, the DSM-5 in particular, and the state of psychiatry in general.

Using the Wayne Brady-Bill Maher feud as a jumping-off point, Adia Harvey Wingfield discusses “black men who remain invisible” in a thoughtful and insightful post at North Philly Notes, the blog of Temple University Press.

Finally, at the Yale Press Log, Edward McCord makes the case for the intellectual as well as moral and practical value of the diversity of species and ecosystems on Earth.

Thanks again for reading this week’s roundup! Have a great weekend, and leave any thoughts in the comments!

Today, we will finish up our week featuring The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving, Michael M. Weinstein and Ralph M. Bradburd, with a post explaining what the Robin Hood Foundation is and how it attempts to address the problem of poverty in New York City. (Don’t forget to enter our Goodreads book giveaway for a chance to win a FREE copy!)

The Robin Hood Foundation finds, funds, and partners with programs that have proven they are an effective way to combat poverty in New York City. Robin Hood employs a rigorous system of metrics and third-party evaluation to ensure grantee accountability. The board pays all administrative and fundraising costs, so 100% of donations goes directly to helping New Yorkers in need build better lives. The foundation also works closely with grantees to help make them more effective, ensuring that they will assist even more people.

The Robin Hood Foundation is one of the premier poverty-fighting nonprofit organizations focused on combating poverty in New York. This aim leads the foundation to support more than 200 programs in the city, ranging from education reform to stable housing, from food availability to literacy, and from health insurance and healthcare availability to disaster relief.

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We were delighted and pleasantly surprised to see that James Franco, the actor, writer, and doctoral candidate (among other things), recently featured a photo of Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age by Kenneth Goldsmith on his website. Below the photo he simply wrote “Good,” which we’ll take as an endorsement!

This of course is the second celebrity sighting related to Uncreative Writing:

*We make no claims about the veracity or circumstances of this photograph!

This week our featured book is The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving, by Michael M. Weinstein and Ralph M. Bradburd, published by Columbia Business School Publishing, an imprint of Columbia University Press. Enter our Goodreads book giveaway for a chance to win a FREE copy!

Today, we have a couple of videos from the excellent Vimeo channel of the Robin Hood Foundation. In the first video, Michael Weinstein explains the Robin Hood Foundation approach, and in the second, he explains “benefit-cost ratios.”

Our Approach from Robin Hood on Vimeo.

Michael Weinstein Benefit-Cost Video from Robin Hood on Vimeo.

“So where did this idea come about that poems are the opposite of journalism, that poets do what reporters cannot, and vice versa?”—Stephen Burt

The following post by Stephen Burt was originally published on Nieman Reports. In the post Stephen Burt, author of The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence, explores how familiar stories are made fresh again by the way we put them into words:

The most famous statements about poetry and journalism hide an equation inside an opposition: “It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack// of what is found there” (William Carlos Williams). Or else they hide an opposition inside an equation: “Poetry is news that stays news” (Ezra Pound).

Reported stories, poets might have it, confine themselves to what’s going on right now, and then go away, replaced by other reportage. Journalism considers external, verifiable facts, which stay the same no matter who speaks about them, while poets consider the inward, the private, the potentially eternal, the claims which are different in each poet’s heart, mind or words. Jahan Ramazani, a critic at the University of Virginia, has written about how poets imitate, and use, and transform, the news: “By contrast with the seemingly passive mediation of current events by the reporter,” Ramazani explains, “the poet’s use of language and form must actively re-create … an imaginative event that recurs perpetually in the sustained present of poetry’s inventiveness.”

There is something to that opposition; otherwise, it would not persist as it does. And yet you can find poems that report news, or poems that react to news, from any period you care to name. Some of them even count as what we call “lyric,” the supposedly timeless or private kind of poetry that is sometimes opposed to the news: They embody strong feeling and they resemble song. Rudyard Kipling’s “Recessional,” whatever you think of its politics, is both a compressed songlike work, whose word choices embody complex feeling, and a comment on current events (Queen Victoria’s Jubilee). So are Williams’s own poems about Sacco and Vanzetti and about the death of FDR. So—often at a lower level of craft—are many short, songlike poems from the late 1960s about the war in Vietnam.

You can have—you can attempt to embody in verse, to compress, to make eloquent—feelings or complicated inward responses, responses that reveal your character, to almost anything: to a twig or a fallen leaf or a sexual overture but also to what we now call headline news. The form of the sonnet, so often associated with erotic love, has become so prominent in English in part because poets use it to react to the news: Milton in the English Civil War, Wordsworth on the fall of the Venetian Republic and the capture of Toussaint L’Overture, several now-forgotten Victorian poets on dispatches from the Crimean War, Gwendolyn Brooks on poverty, race, Chicago, and World War II. Many of the supposed oppositions between poems and news just dissolve on scrutiny: Poetry often reacts to public events; poetry can be pellucid (as in Louise Glück or Christina Rossetti) as well as opaque; and journalists can take on complicated ideas with specialized vocabulary (collateralized mortgage obligations, for example, or mitochondrial DNA).

So where did this idea come about that poems are the opposite of journalism, that poets do what reporters cannot, and vice versa?

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This week our featured book is The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving, by Michael M. Weinstein and Ralph M. Bradburd, published by Columbia Business School Publishing, an imprint of Columbia University Press. Enter our Goodreads book giveaway for a chance to win a FREE copy!

Today, we have a guest post from Michael Weinstein, in which he explains how The Robin Hood Foundation decides what to fund when there are so many important programs that need funding.

The Robin Hood Foundation and “Relentless Monetization”
Michael M. Weinstein

We philanthropists face gnarly decisions. To fight poverty, do we train chronically unemployed women to drive commercial trucks or instead pour money into pre-kindergarten programs for poor youngsters? Do we train male ex-offenders to serve as drug-abuse counselors for adolescent boys or fund charter schools? We can’t afford to do everything.

In The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving, Ralph Bradburd and I set forth a framework for making the right choices — spending philanthropic dollars with maximum impact.

Our framework, which we dub “relentless monetization,” uses the workhorse of modern economics, benefit-cost analysis, to help funders decide which grants to make. Spending dollars on programs with the highest benefit/cost ratios puts dollars where they do the most good. For example, taking dollars out of one project and spending them on a project whose benefit/cost ratio is twice as high amounts to raising and spending twice as many philanthropic dollars.

The framework does indeed bite hard. Here’s one of many examples.

At the Robin Hood Foundation, we once proudly funded what we saw as the best permanent supportive housing residence in the city. The grantee takes in homeless families, provides them excellent mental-health and other services, and keeps them safely, permanently housed. Using representative numbers, Robin Hood might have spent $300,000 a year to help house 60 families. We say this residence was best because none–not one–of its families returned to the streets. Case closed: great grant.

Or was it? Once our metric algorithms were in place and staff did the arithmetic, the benefit/cost calculation came in low—indeed, very low. Did we immediately pull the plug? No. Perhaps our algorithms were wrong and were missing key benefits. Perhaps our equations were right but our numbers were wrong. We did eventually pull the funding plug, but we did so only after two years of scrutiny. The answer was that permanent supportive housing is a frightfully expensive way to fight poverty. Here, Robin Hood would spend $300,000 a year to save the same 60 families year in and year out. We do that nowhere else. At our schools, the students in the sixth grade change each year. In our carpentry-training program, the trainees change each year. In our micro-lending programs, borrowers change each year.

Our point is not to criticize permanent supportive-housing programs. They pursue an inspiring and important mission. But for Robin Hood in particular, the strategy is not cost-effective. We can spend the $300,000 in other ways that lift significantly more poor New Yorkers out of poverty over any defined period.

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The following video is from Stephanie Hepburn’s recent talk at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Ethics to discuss her book, co-authored with Rita Simon, Human Trafficking Around the World: Hidden in Plain Sight :

This week our featured book is The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving, by Michael M. Weinstein and Ralph M. Bradburd, published by Columbia Business School Publishing, an imprint of Columbia University Press. Enter our Goodreads book giveaway for a chance to win a FREE copy!

Today, we have an excerpt from the first chapter of The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving: “An Overview of Relentless Monetization.”

The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving

Our weekly list of new titles:

Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity
Hartmut Rosa

Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with Donna Haraway
Margret Grebowicz and Helen Merrick

Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (Now available in paper)
Alison Griffiths

Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller
Kathleen Jones

Security Arabic
Mark Evans

Interested in Stephen Soderbergh? If so, Andrew deWaard and R. Colin Tait, the authors of The Cinema of Stephen Soderbergh, have created a web site devoted to news about the director.

Recently they’ve posted on:

* Soderbergh’s twitter novella (written under the twitter handle @bitchuation
* A recent interview with The Financial Times
* Soderbergh’s much talked-about and controversial State of the Cinema Address (which we’ve also posted below:)

“The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving is a must read for all ‘do-gooders,’ including the donors who give money and the nonprofits that spend it. The authors have a marvelous way of conveying complex concepts in simple English, including one of the best explanations of benefit-cost analysis that I have ever read. This book is a true gem.” — Sheldon Danziger, University of Michigan

This week our featured book is The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving, by Michael M. Weinstein and Ralph M. Bradburd, published by Columbia Business School Publishing, an imprint of Columbia University Press.

Throughout the week, we will be featuring the book and its authors on our blog as well as on our Twitter feed, and on our Facebook page.

We are also offering TWENTY FREE copies of The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving through a book giveaway at Goodreads. To enter our book giveaway, simply click here and follow the instructions for entering. The giveaway runs through May 27th, so enter today for your chance to win!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving

by Michael M. Weinstein

Giveaway ends May 27, 2013.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

“This is a great book for both non-profit funders and non-profit leaders. The book’s “relentless monetization” concept — if widely deployed — would dramatically boost the impact of the independent sector. Now let’s get right to work and act on this great advice.” — Mark Tercek, President and CEO of the Nature Conservancy

Welcome to our weekly roundup of the best posts from the blogs of academic publishers! As always, if you particularly enjoy something or think that we missed an important post, please let us know in the comments:

Snob Zones? The Beacon Broadside explains with a link to a fascinating interview with Lisa Prevost, author of Snob Zones: Fear, Prejudice, and Real Estate.

We tend to think of the Japanese and tea but Japanese and coffee, not so much. The University of California Press blog celebrates Merry White, author of Coffee Life in Japan and recipient of the Order of the Rising Sun an honor bestowed to her by the Government of Japan.

Apparently there is a film version of The Great Gatsby coming to a theater near all of us. With this in mind, This Side of the Pond, the blog of Cambridge University Press, delves back into the novel’s history to look at Trimalchio, an earlier version of The Great Gatsby.

The University of Chicago Press blog runs an excerpt from the new book, The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer , by Lisa Downing.

A surprising spate of interest in and articles about Paraguay is explored at the Duke University Press blog, publishers of The Paraguay Reader.

Though many of us here are fans of the New York Mets, we couldn’t help but enjoy the University of Georgia Press‘s recent post about their new book The Crackers: Early Days of Atlanta Baseball.

Is the financial crisis over? Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy are the authors of The Crisis of Neoliberalism, which is new in paperback this spring take stock of the movement toward “recovery” since their book’s original 2011 publication over at The Harvard University Press blog.

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“[Translators] are witnesses, with tales to tell. We are writers, with our own voices. Whenever we see literary culture distorted for political advantage, it matters very much that we speak.”—Maureen Freely, from “Misreading Orhan Pamuk”

In her essay “Misreading Orhan Pamuk,” from In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means, Maureen Freely discusses translating the works of Pamuk and how her role as translator changed after Pamuk became embroiled in a political controversy. In this excerpt, Freely considers the importance of the translator in contextualizing as well as defending the work of an author:

When Snow went out into the world, I again revised my job description. A translator did not just need to find the right words, stay in close conversation with the author, and run interference for him as the book made its way through the publication process. She also had to do everything she could to contextualize the book for readers who were not familiar with Turkey—not inside the text but outside it, in journals and newspapers, and at conferences, symposia, literature festivals, and a long sequence of very frustrating dinner parties. As I made the rounds, I was at first encouraged by those who said to me, “I knew nothing about Turkey until I read Snow, you know, but now I can see it’s a really fascinating country so I’d like to know more about it.” I thought the most important thing was that they were interested. Only good could come of that, I thought.

I was wrong.

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Earlier this week, Lawrence Friedman, author of The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet, appeared on The Leonard Lopate Show, to discuss the book and the life and legacy of Erich Fromm:

“Translation is, in a sense, the slowest possible reading. You’re watching the great writer build a story arc, and you’re watching sentence by sentence how that arc is being shaped. In that sense it slows down your reading and studying of an author.”—Susan Bernofsky

In a recent interview with Words Without Borders, Susan Bernofsky, coeditor with Esther Allen of In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means, discussed her own practice as a translator as well as a variety of other issues related to translation. Among other topics, Bernofsky talks about “stealth gloss,” whether or not to “domesticate” translations, whether it is better to translate a text by a dead or a living author, and what book she views as the “holy grail” of translation:

Here’s an excerpt from the interview (Shaun Randol (SR) is the interviewer for Words Without Borders. You can read the full interview here):

SR: Ultimately do you think translating makes one a better writer?

SB: Yes I do, because it makes you think consciously about how sentences are put together, about the actual techniques the writer used to make this sentence have this effect. Translating makes you really conscious of the richness of synonyms out there as well as sentence structure. I constantly hear from students about how translating has changed how they approach their own fiction.

Translation is, in a sense, the slowest possible reading. You’re watching the great writer build a story arc, and you’re watching sentence by sentence how that arc is being shaped. In that sense it slows down your reading and studying of an author.

SR: Would you prefer it if we all spoke one language?

SB: No, because we think differently in different languages. To take away the multiplicity of languages is to take away difference, and difference is interesting. It would be bland and boring if everyone spoke the same language. The literary output that we produce would also be much more monotonous.

SR: Does translation into English enhance English language supremacy or does it preserve language plurality by allowing writers to use their own languages?

SB: The latter. You already have the phenomenon of writers trying to write straight in English so as to have direct access to that global market, but I think that when we translate foreign literature we are creating interest in the foreign culture, thereby also the foreign language.

“To say of translation—as is so often said—that ‘the original meaning is always lost’ is to deny the history of literature and the ability of any text to be enriched by the new meanings that are engendered as it enters new contexts—that is, as it remains alive and is read anew.”—Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky

In their introduction to In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means, Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky explore the importance and complexities of translation in a world where English is becoming increasingly dominant. Below in an excerpt from their introduction, “A Culture of Translation”:

Today, the English-language translator occupies a particularly com­plex ethical position. To translate is to negotiate a fraught matrix of in­teractions. As a writer of the language of global power, the translator into English must remain ever aware of the power differential that tends to subsume cultural difference and subordinate it to a globally uniform, market-oriented monoculture. Weltliteratur is no longer (and may never have been) politically, culturally, or ethically neutral. At the same time, the failure to translate into English, the absence of translation, is clearly the most effective way of all to consolidate the global monoculture and exclude those who write and read in other languages from the far-reach­ing global conversation for which English is increasingly the vehicle.

Nevertheless, contemporary discussions of translation’s role— particularly in the English-speaking world—sometimes attest to a stance that barely differs from that of Dante’s Virgil, mourning for a lost prelapsarian oneness and concomitant frustration with the affliction of linguistic diversity. This attitude, as David Bellos observes, portrays translation as little more than “a compensatory strategy designed only to cope with a state of affairs that falls far short of the ideal.” All transla­tion, in this view, is invariably an inadequate substitute for an original text that can only be legitimately apprehended in the purity of its origi­nal language.

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“To fully grasp its essence, I had to plunge into its heart—then and only then could his writing burst into bloom.”—Haruki Murakami on translating The Great Gatsby

In the Translator’s Afterword, Haruki Murakami’s essay in In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means, the novelist discusses the challenges he confronted when translating The Great Gatsby into Japanese. The novel is one of Murakami’s favorite (and apparently it’s being made into a movie….)

To the best of my recollection, I was in my late thirties when I started telling people I was going to translate The Great Gatsby when I turned sixty. Having made that pronouncement, I then conducted my daily af­fairs as if I were moving toward that .xed point, so that much of what I did was pushed along by a kind of reverse calculation. Metaphorically speaking, I had placed Gatsby securely on my kamidana, the high shelf that serves as a household shrine to the Shinto gods, and then lived my life glancing up at it from time to time.

For some strange reason, however, it became harder and harder to wait till my sixtieth birthday. Restlessly, my eyes sought the book in the shrine more and more often until I finally had to give in. So, three years ahead of schedule, I sat down to work on this translation. Initially I told myself that I would just pick away at it in my spare time, but once I got going I found I couldn’t stop, and I finished the whole translation with unanticipated speed, in a single burst of energy. I was like the impatient child who can’t wait until his birthday to open his presents. This ten­dency to jump the gun never seems to change, no matter how old I get….

In the case of The Great Gatsby, I found that none of the translations I looked at satisfied me, regardless of their quality. Inevitably, I would think, This feels a bit (or a lot!) different from the Gatsby I know. I must has­ten to add that this reaction was personal, based on the image I carried in my mind, and had nothing at all to do with objective—or academic— critical assessments of the works at hand, such evaluations being beyond my power anyway. All I could do was scratch my head at how wide the gap was between “my Gatsby” and the impression I received from the translations—this again from a purely subjective perspective. I don’t nor­mally discuss my reactions to others’ work so frankly. But this is The Great Gatsby we are talking about, so I am willing to stick my neck out.

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Our weekly list of new titles:

Philosophical Temperaments: From Plato to Foucault
Peter Sloterdijk

The Metamorphoses of Fat: A History of Obesity
Georges Vigarello

Human Trafficking Around the World: Hidden in Plain Sight
Stephanie Hepburn and Rita J. Simon

The Cinema of Richard Linklater: Walk, Don’t Run
Rob Stone

The Therapist in Mourning: From the Faraway Nearby
Edited by Anne J. Adelman and Kerry L. Malawista

Art on Trial: Art Therapy in Capital Murder Cases
David E. Gussak

The Social Work Interview, Fifth Edition
Alfred Kadushin and Goldie Kadushin

Comedy and Cultural Critique in American Film
Ryan Bishop

Healing the Nation: Prisoners of War, Medicine, and Nationalism in Turkey, 1914–1939
Yucel Yanikdağ

European Court of Human Rights: Domestic Implementation, Legal Mobilization, and Policy Change
Edited by Dia Anagnostou

This week our featured book is In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means, Edited by Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky.

Throughout the week, we will be featuring the books and their editors on our blog as well as on our Twitter feed, and on our Facebook page.

We are also offering a FREE copy of In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means (For more on the book, you can read Haruki Murakami on translating The Great Gatsby.

To enter our Book Giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and preferred mailing address. We will randomly select one winner on May 10 at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

“The essays in In Translation, exploring both the larger, complex questions of translation’s role and function in the world of literature and the more detailed, word by word dilemmas faced by every translator, are consistently stimulating, engaging, and eye-opening, not to speak of eloquent and occasionally even dramatic and/or funny — I came away from reading them with a host of new ideas and insights. This collection is a valuable addition to any library of books on translation or literature in general.” — Lydia Davis

Welcome to our weekly roundup of the best posts from the blogs of academic publishers! As always, if you particularly enjoy something or think that we missed an important post, please let us know in the comments.

With the new movie version of The Great Gatsby coming out soon, This Side of the Pond, the blog of Cambridge University Press, has caught Fitzgerald Fever. They’ve collected a great playlist of Roaring Twenties tunes. Check it out if you’d like a fun University Press Roundup soundtrack!

Earlier this week, Jason Collins became the first openly gay athlete in major American professional sports. At From the Square, the NYU Press blog, Mark Neal, while acknowledging that Collins’ decision to come out publicly was a brave one, points out that “the attention that Jason Collins is getting is really about the need of our society to pat ourselves on the collective back for being open and tolerant enough to allow a veteran basketball player, close to the end of his career, to tell us that he is Black and Gay.”

A devastating fire recently broke out in a clothing factory in Bangladesh, killing over 100 workers. At Beacon Broadside, the blog of Beacon Press, David Bacon decries the system in which unsafe factories in developing countries continue to oppress their workers. The story of the Tazreen factory in particular is horrifying: “At Tazreen the owners didn’t build fire escapes. They’d locked the doors on the upper floors “to prevent theft,” trapping workers in the flames. At Rana Plaza, factory owners refused to evacuate the building after huge cracks appeared in the walls, even after safety engineers told them not to let workers inside.”

Sunday, May 5, will be the 200th birthday of Søren Kierkegaard, a towering figure in the history of philosophy and theology. At the OUPblog, Daphne Hampson looks at Kierkegaard’s legacy and asks how we should judge him in today’s world.

May 2 was the National Day of Prayer. At the University of Virginia Press blog, John Ragosta looks at the occasion from the point of view of Thomas Jefferson, in hopes of reconciling the “debate between those demanding its end in the name of separation of church and state, and others who will complain that government is censoring prayers in the name of political correctness.”

Graduation is fast approaching for most colleges, and at the AMACOM Books Blog, Rights and International Sales Associate Lynsey Major offers some great advice to new graduates and prospective publishing job hunters.

Speaking of publishing jobs, have you ever wondered what production staffs think about typos? If so, you’ll find your answer at the University of Toronto Press Blog, where Production Editor Beate Schwirtlich discusses the “age-old tyranny of the typo and the impact of digital technology on the search for the perfect book.”

At the University of Minnesota Press Blog, Shona Jackson, the author of a book on the Creoles in Guyana and the Caribbean, delves into her deeply personal relationship with the material she studies. Jackson was born in Guyana herself, and, as she explains in her post, her struggles with how she saw and defined her cultural identity helped to shape her scholarship.

In the Civil War, the US Military Telegraph (USMT) network was run by around 1200 operators and linemen, of whom around 200 were killed, wounded or captured. At the JHU Press Blog, David Hochfelder tells the little-known story of the USMT and the men who ran it.

The Harvard University Press Blog is continuing their ongoing series on 100 of the most significant HUP titles in honor of their centennial. This week, sales representative John Eklund looks back at the enormous success of Empire, the bestseller by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.

Finally, we’ll wrap things up this week with a guest post from the WLU Press blog. “Memoir, Ethics, and Shame: the reaction to Drunk Mom,” a post by Julie Rak, looks at the big business of memoirs today, and, in particular, what happens when a memoir is seen to go TOO far in telling truths about the memoirist’s life, using the reaction to Jowita Bydlowska’s tell-all memoir Drunk Mom as an example.

Thanks again for reading this week’s roundup! Have a great weekend, and leave any thoughts in the comments!