Columbia University Press

This past weekend, Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, author of Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective, talked about the malaise in the post-1967 Arab world on ABC radio.

Kassab argues that geopolitical events coupled with the failure of the post-colonial Arab state have led to the malaise that pervades the Arab world. The Arab state, characterized by nationalism, repression, and censorship contributed to political disfranchisement and social disintegration in the Arab world and the collapse of the middle class as a viable force in Arab society. While there were glimmers of hope in 2005 with popular movements in Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria, unhappiness still seems to be dominant in Arab society.

On the program, Kassab suggests that the Arab world needs a new internal dialogue and narrative that reexamines its past while avoiding only seeing itself in relation to the West. She believes that this is a process that several Arab intellectuals have been engaged in but they need to be listened to more carefully.

The program paired Kassab with Vali Nasr, of the Fletcher School at Tufts, who argues that the Muslim world needs to engage more fully with the global economy to improve. Citing the examples of Turkey and Dubai, Nasr believes that the growth of a middle class can lead to a more balanced and open society.

For more on Kassab’s Contemporary Arab Thought, you can read an excerpt from the book or listen to a talk by the author.

In The Great Recession of 2008 and the Sordid Historiography of the Great Depression, an article just published on the History News Network, Robert E. Wright, editor of Bailouts: Public Money, Profit, argues that policymakers’ and scholars’ misinterpretations of the Great Depression have led to bad choices in responding to economic crises.

More precisely, scholars have “present[ed] the public and policymakers with two contrasting views of the Depression, one that blames markets and another that points an accusing finger at the government.” In addressing the current economic crisis, Wright suggests that the “bipolar view” of the Depression, has led to a:

hodgepodge of policies, many slathered with pork, instead of policies based on a reasoned analysis of causes and cures. The U.S. economy has begun to recover, but no sooner or faster than it might have with a much smaller but more carefully focused intervention. The cost of dodging dodgy claims of an impending repeat of the Depression is itself depressing: the federal budget deficit and national debt have greatly deteriorated, fear of a bout of 1970s-style inflation or worse is growing, and the moral hazard created by the bailouts and another long period of low interest rates seem destined to puff up yet another volatile asset bubble. The bailouts got us out of the woods but perhaps by beckoning us into a much larger and more menacing forest.

Wright believes that neither markets not government is to blame but the ways in which they interact and their entanglements. Understanding this and pursuing a more balanced approach to the crisis of 2008 “would have been more measured and precise.” Wright concludes:

Some intervention was needed to shore up bank balance sheets and prevent a deadly decline of the money supply. The dire pronouncements of government officials and the costly, scattergun approach to the bailout, however, ranged from unhelpful to outright counterproductive.

Complex events like financial crises have complex causes. With careful study and an eye to both market and government failures, those causes can be ascertained, explicated, and used to guide future financial system regulations and bailout policies. If and when we will learn those lessons, however, remains to be seen.

In a recent essay for Rorotoko, Gary Francione writes about his book Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation.

His essay explains his rejection of conventional animal welfare reform and his belief in the abolitionist theory of animal rights. Francione argues “that we cannot justify using animals as human resources, irrespective of whether our treatment is ‘humane’” and that animals should not be kept as chattel or property.

Francione also suggests that we suffer from a kind of “moral schizophrenia” when it comes to nonhuman animals. In one of the more provocative portions of his essay, he writes:

Our moral thinking about animals is confused to the point of being delusional. We say that we regard as morally wrong the imposition of “unnecessary” suffering and death on animals. Whatever the finer points about the meaning of necessity, if it means anything at all in this context, it must mean that we cannot justify imposing suffering and death on animals for reasons of mere pleasure, amusement, or convenience. We excoriated Michael Vick for participating in dog fighting because the dogs suffered and died only because Vick and his friends derived pleasure from this activity. But how is Vick any different from those of us who eat meat and animal products?

We kill and eat approximately 56 billion animals annually, not including fish. There is no doubt that the overwhelming majority—almost all—of these animals have absolutely horrible lives and deaths and are treated in ways that clearly and undisputedly constitute torture. The animal you ate for dinner last night—even if raised in the most “humane” or in “free-range” circumstances—was treated as badly if not worse than Michael Vick’s dogs.

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Toyota and its massive recall has been very much in the news lately but what can be learned from their experience? This is the question that Edward D. Hess takes up in a recent piece in Forbes, entitled Bigger Is Not Always Better: What the Toyota shutdown can teach us about growth.

Hess, who is the author of the forthcoming Smart Growth: Building an Enduring Business by Managing the Risks of Growth, argues that what Toyota learned, put simply, is that “growth can be good and growth can be bad.” More precisely as Toyota grew they failed “to analyze, identify, and manage the risks of high growth” which led to a systemic problem as well as the more obvious gas pedal problem.

Countering the conventional wisdom of “grow or die,” Hess calls for companies to be driven by “smart growth.” Hess explains:

Smart growth rejects the assumptions that all growth is good and that bigger is always better. It appears that Toyota did not understand that growth is bad if it creates material risks that are not properly managed. Growth can stress people, processes and quality controls. It can lead to bad management decisions. It can even dilute one’s culture, customer value proposition and brand.

Hess suggests that CEO’s perform a “Growth Risk Audit,” which “tailored to the unique goals and operations of a particular company, forces management to think about how opportunities as well as risks can be managed to achieve smart growth. Management teams then have to be measured and rewarded as much for managing the risks of growth as they are for generating growth.”

Hess concludes by writing:

Toyota will certainly recover, but the effects of mismanaged growth are likely to linger. Toyota’s unfortunate breakdown should serve as a wake-up call for every CEO. It’s time to reject the old mental models about growth and replace them with more realistic, empirically based growth concepts that promote the building of enduring companies. Growth is a complex change process that is dependent upon the behaviors of individuals, who like markets do not always act efficiently or rationally. Growth can be good, but it also can be harmful if the risks of growth are not properly managed. Business leaders need to recognize that.

The following is an interview with Jack Sanders and Katie Terezakis, coeditors of the new edition of György Lukács’s, Soul and Form.

Q: Why publish a new edition of Lukács’s early essays now?

Jack Sanders and Katie Terezakis: Lukács first published the Hungarian version of Soul and Form in 1910, so this is its centennial. In the hundred years since the first edition, consider how vastly the world has changed; even Lukács’s own thinking went though profound transformation after penning these essays. Yet the essays still speak to us powerfully: of the difficulty of meaningful communication and the forms though which it can be achieved, of the need to criticize forms of authority without taking on the mantle of authoritarianism, of the sort of suffering that characterizes human alienation and of its honest assessment. In other words, these essays engage ideas that continue to trouble and encourage us, not merely as topics in aesthetic or political theory, but as matters of binding human concern. In a way, one wants to insist that these essays are searching, evocative, and often downright beautiful, simply in themselves. Yet Lukács also addresses a diverse set of thinkers, including his favorite author-heroes, among them Plato, Novalis, Kierkegaard, and Stephan George. And as he does, Lukács inaugurates a unique approach to aesthetics and literary criticism. From the perspective of our distance from that inauguration, we can appreciate where the thought presented here indicates a serious challenge to well-known readings of Lukács as well as to common approaches of our contemporary literary criticism. So, for us personally, when we began rereading these essays we were struck by the perspective they allowed on Lukács’s thinking and on subsequent developments in criticism as well as by their contemporary relevance.

Q: Did you bring anything new to this edition?  

JS and KT: Yes, beyond updating the language and adding scholarly references, we included an additional essay-dialogue, “On Poverty of Spirit,” written at about the same time as the others and bearing a vital relationship to them. Judith Butler contributed the book’s introduction, which situates Soul and Form among Lukács’s other works as well as contemporary movements in criticism and draws out the internal dynamics of the essays. Butler analyzes the historical, expressive character of literary forms according to Lukács and probes the conditions of their emergence. She also evaluates the transition these essays chart, from Lukács’s early romanticism to his version of realism, and she connects Lukács’s furor over the social conditions that suppress expressive capacity with similar appraisals of the young Marx. Perhaps most vitally, Butler’s introduction provides an incisive account of Lukács’s vision of form as the index by which historical life, in all its complexity, becomes distilled and known. We’ve also added an afterword, written by Katie Terezakis. It connects Lukács’s early account of form with his appropriation of elements of Kantianism, then looks forward at the morphology of the concept of form as it develops in Lukács’s work, in the work of his Budapest School students and in theory and criticism after him.

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R. Glenn Hubbard continues his discussion of The Aid Trap: Hard Truths About Ending Poverty. He was recently invited by The Economist to discuss ways in which a new Marshall Plan can help revitalize the economy of Africa and poor nations throughout the world. You can also read the chapter, Chase the Devil: Details for a Marshall Model.

Jerelle Kraus, author of All the Art That’s Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn’t): Inside The New York Times Op-Ed Page, recently appeared on the legendary local cable show hosted by Harold Channer.

Below is the full interview and you can also browse inside the book.

Recently, Jane Smith, the author of the second edition of Islam in America sat down with Paul Harvey of Religion in American History to discuss the book.

The second edition explores some of the changes that have occurred since 9/11, including shifting views of Islam in America and “the many ways in which Muslims have moved from the private to the public arena in America as they have tried to show that Islam is not a religion of violence.” She also discusses how Muslims have adapted their religion to American life. Despite the majority of Muslims living peacefully as Americans, Smith does worry that “that America itself has become a breeding ground for certain kinds of violent expressions of Islam” and that is “a development that should not be ignored.”

One of the final questions, Paul Harvey asks is about the future of Islam in America. Smith responds:

Most indicators are that Islam will continue to grow in American soil, though not at the rate sometimes projected. Factors such as immigration, revitalization of urban communities, and conversion will certainly play a role. Demonization of Islam most probably will continue as a result of many different factors, including the politics of fear. But I don’t see that fear-mongering will threaten the continued existence, and growth, of the religion here. Efforts currently being put forth by many American Muslims to demonstrate their commitment to being full members of American society, with pride in their country, are paying off in terms of greater understanding and acceptance of the faith despite isolated threats. Americans in general struggle with what it means to be a multi-faith society, and Muslims struggle to define what a distinctive American Islam might really look like. But it seems clear that Islam is here to stay, and that “Blessed Ramadan” will probably come to sound as familiar as “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Hanukkah.”

Kelly Oliver author of Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human recently discussed her book on Rorotoko.

Oliver stresses the importance of animals in Western philosophy “to make the case that humans are special.” Oliver begins:

Philosophers have argued that humans are so unique that they have transcended their animality and become something entirely other. In this book, I show how the animals “bite back” and betray the very service into which they have been corralled in the name of humanity. Our concepts of the human, of kinship, of language, and even of human rights are borne on the backs of animals, whose importance to philosophy goes unacknowledged. Philosophers unthinkingly use animals to develop their theories of the human subject and human nature.

Later Oliver discusses how her book expands upon and moves beyond conventional discussions of animal rights and welfare:

I move away from the framework of animal rights because the history of this discourse and the notion of rights are bought at the expense of animals. We need to do more than merely expand our concept of rights to include some animals. Rather, we need to rethink what it means to be animal and what it means to be human. We need to acknowledge how our conception of ourselves as superior to animals is dependent upon those very animals that we disavow.

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The Chronicle Review recently featured Mark C. Taylor highlighting his new philosophical memoir Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living and his provocative views about academia’s status quo.

In his article Eric Banks, calls Taylor’s memoir of his near-death experience “earnest” and “at times painfully honest.” Banks writes:

“Much in Field Notes is an examination of how those [personal] roots unexpectedly inflect his reading and his teaching; it leads him to theologically and philosophically rich discussions on the meaning of place and placelessness, pleasure and money, survival, autoimmunity, cancer, and the body…. The book is a jigsaw of coincidences and late thoughts—a strategy on Taylor’s part to reach an audience he hadn’t attempted to write for previously but for whom he feels he has much to say about the relation between philosophy and theology to the everyday business of living. ‘The reason certain things are interesting to me is that they help me deal with life,’ he says. ‘In that sense, the pedagogical value of these ideas is to deal with life as it comes up. The issues in Field Notes are issues and questions everyone has to ask. The challenge to the writer and teacher is to give people resources to deal with those issues when they arise.’”

The article also examines some of the controversial positions Taylor has taken in regards to tenure, disciplinary structures, peer review and other cornerstones of academia. In his much-discussed and much-debated New York Times op-ed, Taylor called graduate education “the Detroit of higher learning.” Banks writes:

“Arts and humanities are in great trouble, [Taylor] argues, because the patronage system is breaking down and programs will have no way of paying their own way. Rather than call for a new system of patronage, though, Taylor turns cavalier about the future of scholarship. ‘Knowledge for knowledge’s sake’ is fine if somebody else is paying the bills,’ he says, while claiming that 80 percent ‘of ’so-called scholarship’ is a drag on a system that has become a bubble waiting to pop. ‘You have graduate students finishing their education $100,000, $150,000 in debt, with no prospects for a job. Debt is a problem on the institutional level, the student level, and the parental level.”

Interest and discussion has already begun about the just-released memoir My Life with the Taliban, by Abdul Salam Zaeef. In the book, Zaeef recounts his early life in Afghanistan, joining the Jihad against the Soviet Union in 1983, helping to form the Taliban in 1994, and his time with the organization, which included serving as the ambassador to Pakistan.

In his article in the New York Review of Books, Ahmed Rashid writes, that “we have a book that for the first time places readers at the heart of the Taliban’s way of thinking.”

The book was also just reviewed in the Telegraph which writes:

[Zaeef] has written a fascinating account of his own remarkable life which gives real insight into why the Taliban was formed, what motivates it, and what it is now trying to achieve. It is what he has to say about hopes of ending the current war, however, that will be of most interest to the spooks and diplomats in Kabul, Washington and London; they will have been hoping that Mullah Zaeef would point the way towards a negotiated end to the fighting. But he does not, and what he has to say suggests that ending the bloodshed could prove extremely difficult, if possible at all.

Finally, the editors of the book Felix Kuehn and Alex Strick van Linschoten will be touring the UK and the US in the coming weeks. Click here for a schedule of upcoming events.

This Sunday the New York Jets have a chance to return to the Super Bowl for the first time since 1969. On the other hand, they can also add another loss to a series of disappointments in their long history.

Here are some highlights and lowlights from the Jets 50-year history as adapted from the recently published The Greater New York Sports Chronology, by Jeffrey Kroessler:

1960: Wearing blue-and-gold uniforms, the Titans [as the Jets were originally called] took the field on a rainy September 11 before 10,200 at the Polo Grounds and beat the Buffalo Bills, 27-3.

1963: On March 28, Sonny Werblin [and others] … bought the Titans for $1 million. On April 15, they renamed the team the Jets and hired Weeb Ewbank as general manager and head coach. The new green-and-white uniforms matched the colors of Hess’s gas stations.

1966: Jets quarterback Joe Namath passed for 2,200 yards and 18 touchdowns and was voted the AFL’s Rookie of the Year.

1968: On November 17, the Jets were leading the Raiders 32-29, with 1 minute, 5 seconds remaining when NBC-TV cut away from the game to broadcast Heidi, as scheduled at 7:00 pm. Oakland proceeded to score 14 points for a 43-32 victory, but none of the viewing public saw the finish. Fans’ complaints flooded the NBC switchboard until the circuits blew.

1969: On January 12, after brashly guaranteeing victory—”We’re going to win Sunday. I guarantee it” — quarterback Joe Namath led the underdog Jets to a 16-7 win over the powerhouse Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III.

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As reported in yesterday’s New York Times, the Italian-born Jesuit priest, Matteo Ricci, who died in 1610 is once again back in the news.

The New York Times article reviews the current exhibition at the Library of Congress of Matteo Ricci’s map of the world commissioned in 1602 by the court of Emperor Wanli. Ricci, who was the first Westerner admitted to Peking, created a map which was, according to the Times, “the first to have combined information from both eastern and western cartography. It is also the oldest surviving map to have given the Chinese a larger vision of the earth.”

In addition to the display of this historic map, Ricci’s resurgence continues with the recent publication of On Friendship: One Hundred Maxims for a Chinese Prince, translated by Timothy Billings. The book, which was a late Ming best seller and is now translated into English for the first time, distills the best ideas on friendship from Renaissance Latin texts into one hundred pure and provocative Chinese maxims.

You can browse the book but here is just a small sampling of maxims from On Friendship:

“Before making friends, we should scrutinize. After making friends, we should trust.”

“The value of a friendship lies in the intentions of those who make it. In this day and age, how many have befriended one another strictly for their virtue?”

“If we tolerate the vices of a friend, then those vices become our own vices.”

“If one has many intimate friends, then one has no intimate friends.”

“The honorable man makes friends with difficulty; the petty man makes friends with ease. What comes together with difficulty comes apart with difficulty; what comes together with ease comes apart with ease.”

The following is an interview with Dorothy N. Gamble, Clinical Associate Professor Emerita at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill School of Social Work and Marie Weil, Berg-Beach Distinguished Professor of Community Practice at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill School of Social Work. They are the authors of Community Practice Skills: Local to Global Perspectives

Question: What is “community practice” and who actually does it?

Dorothy N. Gamble and Marie Weil: Community practice is the work of building the capacities of community members and community institutions to help them collectively take action to improve their quality of life.  The community may be a local geographic place, part of an extended region, a local or national interest group, or even a global group working for improved social, economic, and environmental conditions.  People who do community practice can be local community leaders, social workers, public health workers, agricultural and home extension workers, community educators, people working in microfinance and village banking, or a variety of other positions. Community practice involves a variety of facilitative activities to help community members and community institutions in their efforts to improve their social, economic and environmental well-being.

There are examples of efforts to build community capacity all over the world.  Building community capacity and community networks in Kenya, for example, has resulted in the planting of thirty million trees. Wangari Maathai who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 started this community work in Kenya more than thirty years ago. She used the need to replant trees as the entry point for community work that would focus people on self-determination, equity, environmental conservation, justice, and poverty education. Her Greenbelt Movement was so successful that community networks now care for six thousand tree nurseries across Kenya and have begun to organize community groups with the same focus in neighboring countries.

Village banking and microcredit are examples of organizing local groups, mostly women, to increase household income. Members of those groups who generally start small businesses have no collateral and therefore no access to credit in traditional banks. Village banking, which started decades ago in Bangladesh through Grameen Bank and BRAC and in Peru through FINCA, has assisted many low-wealth families on every continent in the world to increase their household income. These programs, which organize small groups of borrowers based on trust, usually provide guidance for small businesses, help the groups to learn good planning and management practices, and sometimes engage with groups as they build community infrastructure such as schools, health clinics, knitting cooperatives, cheese-making cooperatives, bakeries, roof tile factories, and other institutions that contribute to community well-being.

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On Sunday, Terry Castle, editor of The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall, was featured in always-entertaining Q & A included in the Sunday New York Times Magazine.

In addition to being the author of several other books, Castle is also a contributor to the recently published The Scandal of Susan Sontag (mentioned in our last blog post as well).

In her essay, “Some Notes on ‘Notes on Camp,’” Castle recounts an incident in which Sontag eviscerates someone for praising “Notes on Camp” at a Stanford cocktail party in 1995. Castle describes how Sontag reacted to this praise:

Nostrils flaring, Sontag instantly fixes him with a basilisk stare. How can he say such a dumb thing? She has no interest in discussing this essay and never will. He should never have brought it up. He is behind the times, intellectually dead. Hasn’t he read any of her other works? Doesn’t he keep up? As she slips down a dark tunnel or rage … the rest of us watch, horrified and transfixed.

Castle goes on to suggest that Sontag came to resent being seen as obsessed with camp and that she might have felt that it revealed too much about her own erotic orientation and its “symbolic registration of fierce emotions.” Castle concludes the essay, writing:

[Sontag] resented being seen as obsessed with camp—fixed in people’s mind as camp’s philosopher—because her essay was in the end more about exorcism than endorsement. Like the lifelong pleasure she took in chastising other people for what she saw as their moral and intellectual defects, the contempt she felt for the essay later in life grew, I think, out of a great well of self-critical feeling. Something was unbearable and at the deepest level she blamed herself.

The quote from Wayne Koestenbaum comes from his essay in the recently published volume The Scandal of Susan Sontag. Tomorrow, January 16th would have been Sontag’s 77th birthday, so we thought it appropriate to highlight the book and Sontag herself.

Later in his essay Koestenbaum writes:

Transference: in the early 1990s, the night before I gave a lecture on Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, I dreamed that she reclined, wearing a pink miniskirt, on her living-room couch. I’ve had dozens of Sontag dreams, in which she represents intellectuality’s phantasmagoria, prose’s succulence, quality’s fearsomeness, and aphorism’s bite.

It is hard to imagine another intellectual or novelist inspiring such a dream and it speaks to the distinctive hold that Sontag has on her readers. This kind of fascination is reflected in the other essays in the book, including those by Terry Castle, E. Ann Kaplan, Jay Prosser, and Nancy K. Miller.

For more on Sontag here are clips from her appearances on “Charlie Rose”:

“This is a critical moment for the United States and the Obama administration to demonstrate that the lessons of our government’s shameful response to Katrina have truly been learned.”—Steven Cohen, “Haiti Is a Critical Test for the Obama Administration.”

Steven Cohen, author of Understanding Environmental Policy and executive director of The Earth Institute, recently contributed to Huffington Post on the responsibility of the United States and the Obama administration to help in Haiti in wake of the earthquake.

Cohen argues that the United States and the military should take the lead in relief efforts to help the people of Haiti and to demonstrate “American ideals, values, confidence, and capacity.” Obama himself, Cohen suggests, should visit Haiti as soon it safe enough to do so.

Natural disasters are going to be more common in the future and it is imperative for nations to work together in the future. Cohen writes:

There is a broader lesson to be taken from this disaster for both the United States and what we sometimes optimistically call the “community of nations.” As the world becomes more crowded and urbanized, the impact of natural disasters will only grow. It is not that we are seeing more hurricanes, earthquakes and floods than we used to, but rather that more people are in harm’s way than ever before. The lesson here is that we must build a global network of emergency response capacity that is far greater than the one we have now. When there are half a dozen major natural disasters in a year, they should no longer be defined as emergencies, but as periodic and almost predictable events. A larger amount of resources must be devoted to this critical governmental function, both here and throughout the world.

To find out how to help Haiti you can visit the Red Cross or the Web sites of other charities.

Frederic Reamer, co-author of Teens In Crisis: How the Industry Serving Struggling Teens Helps and Hurts Our Kids was tapped to be the blogger on adolescent issues for the recently aired PBS TV series This Emotional Life.

The series aired in January in three parts that explored improving our social relationships, learning to cope with depression and anxiety, and becoming more positive, resilient individuals. Each episode weaves together the compelling personal stories of ordinary people and the latest scientific research

In his last post Reamer discusses the seven most common mistakes to avoid when selecting a program or school.

1. Picking a Program Quickly and Impulsively
2. Selecting a Program Primarily on the Basis of Cost
3. Selecting a Program That is Not Designed to Meet the Teenager’s Needs
4. Selecting a Program Whose Methods Are Not Grounded in Sound Research
5. Sending a Child to a Residential Program for the Wrong Reasons
6. Avoiding Out-of-Home Placement When It Is the Right Option
7. Selecting a Program because It Is Close to Home

For the full blog posting and an explanation of these seven mistakes click here.

With the recent publication of The Portable Cixous, we are re-posting an interview with Cixous in which she discusses how the concept of intellectual has been masculinized, the idea of universalism, and more (see below).

For those interested in a distillation of her work and a collection of her most important writings, The Portable Cixous includes essays on the feminine, Algeria and Germany, love and the other, the animal, Derrida, and the theater. (Click here for the table of contents and here for more works by Cixous.)

The following is an interview with John Holmes the author of the recently published Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution.

Question: There has been a lot written and said about Darwin recently, but Darwin’s Bards is the only book about Darwin and poetry. It is not an obvious conjunction — what is the link?

John Holmes: Poets have been responding to Darwin and his ideas ever since The Origin of Species was first published a hundred and fifty years ago. If you look back to the 1860s, you’ll find powerful poems responding to Darwin by some of the best poets of the time—Tennyson, Browning, Hardy, George Meredith too, although he is less well-known today.

Q: So your book is a study of how these Victorian poets responded to Darwin?

JH: Only partly. I look at many more recent poets too, both Brits like Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn and Americans like Robert Frost, Robinson Jeffers and Edna St Vincent Millay. Many of the poets I write about are still alive and writing today.

Q: Do you work through, then, looking at how each of these poets responded to Darwinism in their own generation?

JH: No. I am interested in the historical development of Darwinism and the poetry that goes alongside it, but I am mainly concerned with how that poetry can help us to come to terms with Darwinism today.

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