Columbia University Press

Personalized healthcare—or what the award-winning author Donna Dickenson calls “Me Medicine”—is radically transforming our longstanding “one-size-fits-all” model. Technologies such as direct-to-consumer genetic testing, pharmacogenetically developed therapies in cancer care, private umbilical cord blood banking, and neurocognitive enhancement claim to cater to an individual’s specific biological character. However, whatever is behind the rise of Me Medicine, is more than just science. So why is Me Medicine rapidly edging out We Medicine, and how has our commitment to our collective health suffered as a result?

These issues are explored in Me Medicine vs. We Medicine: Reclaiming Biotechnology for the Common Good, by Donna Dickenson. Throughout the week, we will be featuring TMe Medicine vs. We Medicine: Reclaiming Biotechnology for the Common Good. For more on the book you can also read an excerpt from the chapter A Reality Check for Personalized Medicine.

We are also offering a FREE copy of the book to a lucky winner.

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 June 21 at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

The declining middle-class, foreclosures, pharmaceutical companies behaving badly, the corporate misdeeds of Wal-Mart and Apple, are some of the stories that have been in the news in the past few months and are the ones that reveal the changing economic, political, and social aspects of our lives. These issues have been uncovered and analyzed by some of the excellent journalism and investigative reporting included in The Best Business Writing 2013, edited by Dean Starkman, Martha M. Hamilton, Ryan Chittum, and Felix Salmon

Throughout the week, we will be featuring The Best Business Writing 2013 Twitter feed, and on our Facebook page. For more on the book you can also read the Table of Contents and the Introduction by Dean Starkman.

We are also offering a FREE copy of the book to a lucky winner.

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 June 14 at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

This week our featured book is Philosophical Temperaments: From Plato to Foucault, by Peter Sloterdijk, translated by Thomas Dunlap with a foreword by Creston Davis. Throughout the week, we will be featuring the book and its author here on our blog as well as on our Twitter feed and our Facebook page.

We are also offering a FREE copy of Philosophical Temperaments. To enter our Book Giveaway, simply fill out the form below with your name and preferred mailing address. We will randomly select one winner on May 24th at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

“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

This week our featured book is Animal Oppression and Human Violence, by David A. Nibert. Throughout the week, we will be featuring the book and its author here on our blog as well as on our Twitter feed and our Facebook page.

We are also offering a FREE copy of Animal Oppression and Human Violence. To enter our Book Giveaway, simply fill out the form below with your name and preferred mailing address. We will randomly select one winner on April 19th at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

Our giveaway is now complete and the winners have been notified via email. Thanks to all who participated!

Columbia University Press has had the privilege of publishing two volumes of critical essays by the poet and critic William Logan, Our Savage Age: Poetry and the Civil Tongue and The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin. As a critic, Logan is perhaps best known for his sharp wit and his willingness to express dissatisfaction with a poet or a volume of poetry.

Last Friday, we posted a twelve-question quiz. We collected twelve quotes by Logan about twelve different poets, removed the poets’ names, and asked readers to guess which poet Logan was talking about in each. Here are the correct answers:

1. Maxine Kumin

2. Sylvia Plath

3. Anne Carson

4. Billy Collins

5. Robert Frost

6. Hart Crane

7. Ted Kooser

8. Robert Hass

9. Geoffrey Hill

10. Sharon Olds

11. Robert Pinsky

12. Elizabeth Spires

Thanks to all those who participated! We had an impressive number of people get all twelve answers! We’ll be randomly selecting our winner from that group and notifying that person via email.

This week our featured books are Sources of Tibetan Tradition, edited by Kurtis R. Schaeffer, Matthew T. Kapstein, and Gray Tuttle, and The Tibetan History Reader, Edited by Gray Tuttle and Kurtis R. Schaeffer.

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 BOTH Sourcebook of Tibetan Tradition and The Tibetan History Reader.

To enter our Book Giveaway, simply fill out the form below with your name and preferred mailing address. We will randomly select one winner on April 19th at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

Today is the final day of our week-long focus on poetry (today is also the final day of our National Poetry Month book giveaway; be sure to enter by 1 PM today for a chance to win six excellent volumes of poetry!), and we thought we would finish our poetry week with a fun quiz! Columbia University Press has had the privilege of publishing two volumes of critical essays by the poet and critic William Logan, Our Savage Age: Poetry and the Civil Tongue and The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin. As a critic, Logan is perhaps best known for his sharp wit and his willingness to express dissatisfaction with a poet or a volume of poetry.

We’ve collected twelve of Logan’s best one-liners (or, more accurately, several-liners) and removed the names of the poets, poems, and volumes of poetry mentioned there-in. How many names of the poets Logan discusses can you guess? Email your answers to lf2413@columbia.edu by 1 PM, Tuesday, April 16. We’ll grade the responses, and the entry with the most correct answers will win a copy of William Logan’s Our Savage Art and The Undiscovered Country! The contest is now closed.

Update: Check here for the answers to the quiz!
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This week we will be featuring some of our poetry and poetry criticism titles in conjunction with National Poetry Month

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

We are also offering a FREE “six-pack” of poetry reflecting the varied aspects of our list. The books include:

Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds
Edited by Billy Collins; Drawings by David Allen Sibley

The Classic Hundred Poems: All-Time Favorites
Edited by William Harmon

I Speak of the City: Poems of New York
Edited by Stephen Wolf

Words and the World: International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong
Edited by Gilbert Fong, Shelby Chan, Lucas Klein, and Bei Dao

Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown: Poems by Zen Monks of China
Translated by Charles Egan

City at the End of Time: Poems by Leung Ping-Kwan
Ping-Kwan Leung; Edited and Introduced by Esther M.K. Cheung

Tamil Love Poetry: The Five Hundred Short Poems of the Ainkurunuru
Translated and edited by Martha Ann Selby

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 Friday, April 12 at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

This week our featured book is Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939, by Thomas Doherty.

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

We are also offering a FREE copy of Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939

To enter our Book Giveaway, simply e-mail lf2413@columbia.edu with your name and preferred mailing address. We will randomly select one winner on April 5 at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

And, for more on the book, read the chapter Hollywood-Berlin-Hollywood.

One of our most exciting and active book series is Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture, edited by Slavoj Zizek, Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, and Jeffrey W. Robbins. Books in the series offer a close look at the intersection of religion, politics, and culture in the modern world by bringing the tools of philosophy and critical theory to the political implications of the religious turn.

Throughout this week, we will be hosting a number of posts and interviews from the editors and authors of the Insurrections series, and we will also feature the series on Twitter feed, and on our Facebook page.

We are also offering a FREE copy of THREE of the exciting books in the Insurrections series to the winner of our Book Giveaway: The Incident at Antioch/L’Incident D’Antioch, by Alain Badiou; Hermeneutic Communism, by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala; and Rage and Time, by Peter Sloterdijk.

To enter our Book Giveaway, simply e-mail lf2413@columbia.edu with your name and preferred mailing address. We will randomly select one winner on Friday, March 29, at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word! The book giveaway is now closed. Thanks to all who participated, and congratulations to the winner!

Our featured book this week is Satyajit Ray on Cinema by Satyajit Ray and Edited by Sandip Ray. (For more on the book here’s Ray on Godard and Antonioni.

Throughout this week we will highlight aspects of the book and Ray’s thoughts on films, directors, and his own work, as well as on our Twitter feed, and on our Facebook page. We are also offering a FREE copy of the book to the winner of our Book Giveaway.

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 Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

Our featured book this week is Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life by Michael Marder, with a foreword by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala.

Throughout this week we will highlight aspects of Marder’s work on plants here on the blog, as well as on our Twitter feed, and on our Facebook page. We are also offering a FREE copy of the book to the winner of our Book Giveaway.

To enter our Book Giveaway, simply e-mail lf2413@columbia.edu with your name and preferred mailing address. We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

This week Columbia University Press goes Badiou! Our featured books are The Incident at Antioch/L’Incident d’Antioche: A Tragedy in Three Acts / Tragédie en trois actes and Plato’s Republic by Alain Badiou, translated by Susan Spitzer with introductions by Kenneth Reinhard.

Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of Badiou’s life, works, and particularly The Incident at Antioch/L’Incident d’Antioche and Plato’s Republic, on our Twitter feed, and on our Facebook page. We are also offering a FREE copy of the book to the winner of our Book Giveaway.

To enter our Book Giveaway, simply e-mail lf2413@columbia.edu with your name and preferred mailing address. We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

This week Columbia University Press goes Bollywood! Our featured book is Bollywood: Gods, Glamour, and Gossip by Kush Varia.

Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of Bollywood: Gods, Glamour, and Gossip and Bollywood cinema here on our blog, on our Twitter feed, and on our Facebook page. We are also offering a FREE copy of the book to the winner of our Book Giveaway.

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 Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

“As a lifelong investigator, I have a deep belief that maintaining our research leadership in all facets of science is critical to our nation’s continued success as a forward-thinking civilization. Despite its great costs and high risks, space exploration is still a wholly worthwhile investment for America.”—Claude Piantadosi

Our featured book this week is Mankind Beyond Earth by Claude Piantadosi (remember to enter our Book Giveaway for the chance to win a FREE copy!)

In the following interview, Piantadosi outlines his book and makes a compelling case for manned space exploration in the twenty-first century.

Q: How does your book approach human space exploration?

Claude A. Piantadosi: Mankind Beyond Earth uses space exploration as a model to help guide the reader to a deeper understanding of why we explore and how important exploration is to our species. Space exploration, like past explorations of the oceans and the continents, is ultimately about people and about our ability to adapt. Space is in many ways our most challenging frontier, because the resources we have to advance space exploration are very limited, and they must be put to good use both to develop new technologies and to explore such a uniquely hostile environment. This requires deep scientific knowledge and careful planning, as well as patience, particularly where peoples’ lives are at stake.

Q: Why should we keep sending people into space when robots will do?

CAP: This is one of the most common questions I’m asked by physical scientists, who understand that the cost of a human space mission is at least ten times that of a comparable unmanned mission. The capabilities of robotic probes are increasing dramatically and most of our greatest discoveries in space have come from robotic missions, such as the Mars Rovers. However, the man versus machine tug-of-war creates a false dichotomy. There are roles for both types of missions to space, as my examination of the history of our space program in the book illustrates.

The ability to set the horizons for human and robotic missions in proportion and in tandem is important to our future success in space. A forward-thinking hypothetical is the use of remote mining technology to dig an underground space habitat, say into a hillside or crater rim on Mars. In talking to a couple of professors at the Colorado School of Mines, they think (and I agree) it would be preferable to have the “remote miner” fairly close to the excavation site, perhaps on the moon Deimos or in Mars orbit, instead of 50 million miles away on Earth, where a radio signal takes about four minutes each way and would be accessible to the excavator less than half of the time due to the daily rotations of the two planets on their axes.

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This week our featured book is Mankind Beyond Earth: The History, Science, and Future of Human Space Exploration by Claude Piantadosi.

Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of Mankind Beyond Earth here on our blog, as well as our Twitter feed, Pinterest page, and Facebook page.

You can also win a FREE copy of the book by entering our Book Giveaway on GoodReads. Good luck, and spread the word!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Mankind Beyond Earth The History Science and Future of Human

by Claude A. Piantadosi

Giveaway ends February 28, 2013.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

This week our featured book is The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet by Lawrence J. Friedman.

Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of The Lives of Erich Fromm here on our blog, on our Twitter feed, and on our Facebook page. We are also offering a FREE copy of the book to the winner of our Book Giveaway.

To enter our Book Giveaway, simply e-mail lf2413@columbia.edu with your name and preferred mailing address. We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

This week our featured book is Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo by Mark C. Taylor.

Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of Rewiring the Real here on our blog, our Twitter feed, and Facebook page. We are also offering a FREE copy of the book to the winner of our Book Giveaway.

To enter our Book Giveaway, simply e-mail lf2413@columbia.edu with your name and preferred mailing address. We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

This week our featured book and giveaway is How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces by Roland Barthes; translated by Kate Briggs

Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of How to Live on our blog, our Twitter feed, and Facebook page. We are also offering a FREE copy of the book to one winner.

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

For more on How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces, you can read an excerpt form the book.