Columbia University Press

Welcome to our weekly roundup of the best posts from the blogs of academic publishers! We hope you have a happy Memorial Day and an enjoyable long weekend! As always, if you particularly enjoy something or think that we missed an important post, please let us know in the comments.

This Sunday, Arrested Development makes its long-awaited return to the small screen, and in preparation for this momentous occasion, the OUPblog has an excellent post by Mark Peters comparing the use of language in AD to other well-known television comedies: 30 Rock, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

NYC mayoral candidate Christine Quinn has been the subject of a great deal of media scrutiny recently, and at From the Square, the blog of NYU Press, Margaret S. Williams argues that Quinn’s public treatment highlights the way that female candidates for political office still face a “double-bind.” Williams claims that “Female candidates need to seem tough, but not too tough …. Female candidates need to appear to represent women, but not too much …. And, above all, the female candidate needs to be well-dressed.”

In a fascinating post at the University of Minnesota Press blog, science writer Dorion Sagan discusses the differing views, differing approaches to science, and differing legacies of his parents, astronomer Carl Sagan and biologist Lynn Margulis.

The DSM-5 comes out later this week, and at the Harvard University Press Blog, Liah Greenfeld weighs in on the controversy surrounding this latest edition of the DSM. Greenfeld claims that the DSM-5 “is just an expression of the increasing confusion in the mental health community … in regard to the nature of the human mental processes—or the mind—altogether.”

Prompted by a recent string of apparently homophobic violence in New York City, and in particular by the murder of Mark Carson, Jay Michaelson has a guest post on Beacon Broadside discussing how the growing acceptance of gay marriage, while a step towards legal equality, may be masking deeper prejudices against the LGBT community.

Janis Joplin grew up in Port Arthur, but her relationship with the Texas town was “complicated.” In a fascinating excerpt from History Along the Way at the Texas A&M Press blog, Dan Utley and Cynthia Beeman look at the complex history between Port Arthur and its most famous citizen.

What lessons can today’s leaders take from one of history’s most famous explorers? At the Yale Press Log, Patrick J. Murphy and Ray W. Coye look at how Magellan used his single-mindedness to quell mutinies and deal with calamities on his voyage around the world, and explain how, despite his flaws, he can serve as an example for leaders today.

May 22 is National Maritime Day, and at the MIT Press blog, Larrie Ferreiro has a guest post looking at the current state of trade by sea. He points out that marine freight carriers are more energy-efficient and safer than either truck or rail transport, and that the US “has the industrial and engineering skills to expand the national maritime infrastructure” to better utilize intranational sea-transport possibilities.

The UNC Press Blog has an excerpt this week from Emily Clark’s American Quadroon, a look at how “the antebellum mixed-race free woman of color has long operated as a metaphor for New Orleans” in American literature.

Finally, This Side of the Pond, the blog of Cambridge University Press, challenges you to put your knowledge of cotton and the history of its cultivation and use to the test in “Cotton: The Quiz!”

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

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. Be sure to enter our book giveaway by Friday for a chance to win a FREE copy! Today is the final day of the book giveaway, so we are featuring the final essay in Philosophical Temperaments in which Sloterdijk discusses the life, work, and legacy of French thinker Michel Foucault.

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. Be sure to enter our book giveaway by Friday for a chance to win a FREE copy! Today, we have an excerpt from Sloterdijk’s look at Soren Kierkegaard. The 200th anniversary of Kierkegaard’s birth was May 5th, 2013.

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. Be sure to enter our book giveaway by Friday for a chance to win a FREE copy! Today, we have an excerpt from Sloterdijk’s look at Plato, one of the most important thinkers in the Western philosophical tradition.

"Philosophical Temperaments: From Plato to Foucault," by Peter Sloterdijk

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. Be sure to enter our book giveaway by Friday for a chance to win a FREE copy! Today, we have an excerpt from the foreword to our English translation of Philosophical Temperaments, “Analyzing Philosophy’s Temperamental Symptom,” by Creston Davis.

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.

“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 we are featuring the Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture series, edited by Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Jeffrey Robbins, and Slavoj Zizek. Remember to enter our Book Giveaway to win FREE copies of The Incident at Antioch by Alain Badiou, Rage and Time by Peter Sloterdijk, and Hermeneutic Communism by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala. Also check out Insurrections on Pinterest!

Today, we have a guest post from Professor Clayton Crockett, in which he discusses how the series began, and where it may be going in the future.

1. In the Beginning

The idea for a book series that became Insurrections began in Philadelphia in December 2005 at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion. Creston Davis was telling me that a Christian publisher approached him about editing a book series with Slavoj Žižek, and he asked if I was interested in participating in such a series. I told him that I was currently working with Jeff Robbins on a series for a small publisher in Colorado, so what if we both came on board? Creston set up a breakfast with Jeff and I and Slavoj to talk about this possibility. We quickly realized that any book series we could co-edit would exceed traditional theological boundaries, and so we brainstormed about potential publishers. Jeff had just submitted a book he was editing to Columbia University Press, on the recommendation of Santiago Zabala. This book, published as After the Death of God, featured John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, and it became the first book in the series. We contacted Wendy Lochner and she encouraged us, asking to see a proposal. This series proposal was approved in summer 2006 at the same editorial board meeting that approved the book manuscript After the Death of God. Even though having four co-editors seemed a bit unconventional and perhaps even unwieldy, in practice it has worked incredibly well because we all trust each other, and have a great working relationship with Wendy and Christine Dunbar (and previously Christine Mortlock).

2. A Body of Work

As of this writing, we have published 16 titles in the series, and we are extremely proud of all of our books, not only in themselves but in terms of the kinds of interconnections they make and the kinds of energies they unleash together. We seem to have a friendly rivalry with Amy Allen’s great series “New Directions in Critical Theory,” that started around the same time and has published about the same number of titles. We share some overlapping theoretical interests but of course Insurrections is more explicitly focused on issues and questions of religion. We have published works by and featuring major European philosophers, including Slavoj Žižek, Gianni Vattimo, Alain Badiou, Catherine Malabou, and Peter Sloterdijk. We have published major American philosophers of religion such as John D. Caputo and Richard Kearney, and we have published religious theorists engaging important postcolonial themes like Arvind Mandair and Ananda Abeysekara. It’s about creating an intersection around religion as a void or an empty space where themes of Continental philosophy, political theology and critical theory converge and amplify each other, opening up new ways of thinking about religion and politics understood in broad terms. Later this spring, we have three more books appearing in the series: a translation of Jacob Taubes, To Carl Schmitt, with an introduction by New Zealand scholar of religion Mike Grimshaw; a translation of another book by Peter Sloterdijk, Philosophical Temperaments: From Plato to Foucault, with an introduction by Creston Davis; and a book co-authored by Catherine Malabou and Adrian Johnston on Self and Emotional Life. Finally, we have books forthcoming by Ward Blanton, Katerina Kolozova and Tyler Roberts, as well as translations of books by Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri and François Laruelle.

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The most recent issue of Barron’s features Howard Marks, author of The Most Important Thing Illuminated: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor. The book is an update of his his best-selling The Most Important Thing but the new edition includes comments, insights, and counterpoints of four renowned investors and investment educators: Christopher C. Davis (Davis Funds), Joel Greenblatt (Gotham Capital), Paul Johnson (Nicusa Capital), and Seth A. Klarman (Baupost Group), as well as a foreword by Bruce Greenwald.

The article discusses the three commentators’ respect for Marks’s investment strategy and philosophy as well as remarkable success and that of his fund Oaktree Capital Management. The company consistently has high scores, prompting Warren Buffett to praise Marks’s famous memos to investors as must-reads. In 2007, Marks sensed the dangers of the sub-prime mortgage market and invested and prepared accordingly, providing his clients with another solid return amid the chaos in the wake of the financial collapse in 2008.

Marks grew up in Rego Park, Queens, the son of an accountant, whose investment philosophy was borne not only from his experience on Wall Street and his MBA from the University of Chicago but also his interest in Japanese culture:

Marks was particularly struck by the Buddhist concept of mujo, which holds that life and human affairs are a ceaseless process of transience and change to which the wise adjust. “Isn’t this the essence of investing?” he asked in one of his memos.

His experience investing for Citicorp in the 1970s provided for a crystallization of what is crucial for investing:

Perhaps most trenchant in Marks’ investing philosophy is his insight into investor behavior. Investors, in his opinion, tend to be lazy and superficial in their investment decisions, embracing rosy scenarios when optimism reigns and end-of-the-world despond when markets sink. Classic manic-depression, in other words, and not the wisdom of crowds. These swings cause markets to move in a pendulum motion around fair value, rather than in the linear direction most observers assume. That means investors must be astute, both in determining fair value and judging the amplitude of each emotional wave.

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Congratulations to Ross Melnick author of American Showman: Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry, 1908-1935 for receiving the 2013 “Book of the Year” Award from the Theatre Historical Society of America.

For more on the book: An interview with Ross Melnick; Ross Melnick on how Roxy changed the movie industry; and the birth of Radio City Music Hall

“It was clear to most New Yorkers that Koch had a deep abiding love for his city. That reputation, that started when he was in public office, was solidified because he stayed in the public eye. He would exert political power, but it always seemed to be because he wanted to continue helping New York.”—Jonathan Soffer

Never is a biographer’s perspective more relevant (or sought after) than when their subject is finally laid to rest. Since the passing of larger-than-life former NYC mayor Ed Koch on Friday, Jonathan Soffer, author of Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City, has been a central voice in the debate on what shape Koch’s legacy should take. In the following post, we bring you an amalgamation of Soffer’s latest commentary on Koch, one that highlights the author’s argument that the “King of New York” will be a man of many legacies.

A Legacy of Free (and Colorful) Speech

Koch was sometimes honest about his politics to a fault. I think, more than any other reason, he lost his chances for re-election to a fourth term when he said that Jews would have to be crazy to vote for Jesse Jackson. He could not be deterred from saying things that were just excruciating. But paradoxically, it gave him a reputation for honesty.

~ From Soffer’s interview with TIME Magazine, for more click here.

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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. Remember to enter our Book Giveaway to win a FREE copy of Rewiring the Real. Today, the last day of our giveaway and blog promotion for Rewiring the Real, we have a special interview between Mark C. Taylor and one of the authors featured in Rewiring the Real, Mark Danielewski. In this interview, Professor Taylor and Danielewski discuss the influence of film and technology on House of Leaves. The entire interview can be found on the CUP website.

Mark Taylor: All right, let’s talk a little bit about various kinds of technologies and your work. Film obviously pervades your work in a variety of ways. Indeed, House of Leaves is modeled, among many other things, on a horror film, in certain ways. Only Revolutions is something like a road movie through American history. You grew up with a filmmaker as a father. You studied film at USC. Can you talk a little bit about the intersection of film in your writing and how film has shaped the way you think about writing?

M. Danielewski: I was raised by parents who made sure that we were watching movies in our basement. My father would bring home 16 mm prints of films by Kubrick, Welles, Ford and Sturges. I would have to change the reels.

Between reels, there was a discussion about what the movie was about. Some of my friends, who thought they were just there for movie night, would suddenly hear my father’s voice asking, “What is the political angle of this shot?”

My father would talk about choices – of color, costume, angles, camera movement, how a scene was constructed, the grammar of crossing the line or not crossing the line, the kind of equipment used. So, I was very fortunate to internalize that.

I’m always a little hesitant about terms like “experimental” and “avant-garde,” because I feel like so much of what I’m doing is built on what so many profound visualists were already doing. I mean, I’m not the first one to move text around.

But I think one little addition that I’ve been steadily working on is applying to text the grammatical laws of how we see things, in a very specific and limited way. So, there’s a way of leading the eye to a certain place, and then when you change the shot – or the page – if the eye is continuing to where it expects to continue, it’s actually kind of relaxing and pleasing.

But for action scenes, or scenes that have more intensity – you can think of A Touch of Evil at the very end where Heston is following Orson Welles – the camera angles are all over the place, but the eye is specifically being led to different corners of the frame, so that when the sequence is then cut, the eye has to travel from the right side – the upper right corner to the lower left corner.

So immediately, there’s that sense of searching for where the thread is continuing. By applying that to text and to the page, it could actually intensify the emotional experience of the reader.

A simple example is in the labyrinth chapter of House of Leaves. It intentionally slows you down. It confuses you. It disorients you. Then the following chapter has only a few sentences per page, and suddenly, you’re reading 100 pages. No matter who you are, there’s something very satisfying about reading 100 pages in a few minutes

With Only Revolutions, it very much uses light the way James Turrell uses light. It’s about seeing even if there are very few vocabulary words that are even part of the family of seeing. Colors, with the exception of two, are not present – the word “seeing” is not present. The way the world is perceived through the eye is not there . . . So that particular book floats somewhere between light and music.

Mark Taylor: I want to come back to this whole issue of design, which is crucial in this, but there’s another question on various technologies. Film’s not the only technology that’s important for you in many ways. I mean, House of Leaves began, and continues, online. It’s a text that involves not only a house that’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, but it isn’t contained between the covers, as it were. Your new work – we’ll talk about that more later – you’ve described as modeled as something like a TV series. One might say that part of what you’re exploring is what it means to write and read in an age of electronic reproduction, in certain ways. That you are really asking questions about the ways in which these visual technologies transform the ways in which we read and write. Is that something that’s self-consciously in your mind as you –

M. Danielewski: Well, everything transforms us, right? My father said something that was very important, and it was one of those early lessons I’ve held onto, and I see no reason to deviate from it, which is – imagine first, then find the technology that helps you embody that imaginative moment.

So I always start with wandering in my head. I start with a pencil and paper. I start scribbling. I start toying with different things, using my hands, whatever it is. And only then do I start to conceive of the software, the technology, that can be used to tell that story.

[…]

Mark Taylor: Can you talk a little bit about – because that’s an exceptional process, when you look at the complexity and the subtlety of a lot of this design work. So, you delivered to them, more or less, copy-ready text?

M. Danielewski: Yes. And it’s a cycle. While I’m conceiving something, I’m also educating myself on what, for example, CS6 or other various technologies can do. So, of course, that’s going to cycle back into my imagination and begin to influence me in certain ways.

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. Remember to enter our Book Giveaway to win a FREE copy of Rewiring the Real.

In Rewiring the Real, Professor Taylor examines four novels–William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, Richard Powers’s Plowing the Dark, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, and Don DeLillo’s Underworld–in order to reveal the similarities of the roles of religion and technology in modern culture. Check out our new Pinterest board focusing on Professor Taylor’s work, and on Rewiring the Real in particular, to learn more! Over the next few days, we’ll be adding more quotes from *Rewiring the Real*, so Like our board to keep up!

Here’s a couple of quick excerpts from *Rewiring the Real* on *House of Leaves* and *Underworld*:

“HOW Danielewski writes is as intriguing as WHAT he writes. Freely mixing high and low culture, he weaves together literary theory, architectural theory, film theory, philosophy, theology, psychoanalysis, modern and postmodern art and literature, detective fiction, and punk rock to create a book that baffles as much as it dazzles.” — Mark C. Taylor, Rewiring the Real

“What DeLillo understood before most others was that the Cold War–even the balance of terror–had been a stabilizing arrangement. The dissolution of the Soviet Union did not insure a secure world governed by one superpower but ushered in a radically unstable world in which power is decentralized, distributed, and dispersed in ways that make it much harder to identify, contain, and control individuals and states and nonstate agents.” — Mark C. Taylor, Rewiring the Real

Welcome to our weekly roundup of the best posts from the blogs of academic publishers! We hope you are all staying nice and warm in this cold snap. As always, if you particularly enjoy something or think that we missed an important post, please let us know in the comments.

Tuesday marked the 40th anniversary of the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court Decision. A couple of academic blogs had excellent posts in honor of the occasion. First of all, the UNC Press Blog has a post from Marc Stein in which he breaks down and discusses five of the most significant myths about the contents and meanings of the decision. At Beacon Broadside, Carole Joffe discusses initial feelings about the decisions and then examines the “rapid rise of an anti-abortion movement after the Roe decision.”

The sad death of Aaron Swartz has raised questions about “the doggedness with which federal prosecutors were pursuing [Swartz],” as well as questions about the morality of copyright law in research. This week, the Harvard University Press Blog takes a look at the nature of prosecutorial discretion through the lens of Swartz’s case.

Publishing a book is almost always a long process, particularly in the world of academic publishing where peer review is a crucial part of the publishing system. However, at the JHU Press Blog, JHU Press editorial director Greg Britton tells the story of a recent JHU Press book that was deemed important and timely enough to be published as an “instant book.” Coming from the Johns Hopkins Summit on Reducing Gun Violence in America, the book, Reducing Gun Violence in America, had to be published in a mere fourteen days!

At the OUPblog, Karen Schiltz asks a frightening question that many parents around the country are forced to confront in the wake of the recent tragic school shootings: “Could my child be responsible for the next tragedy?” In her sobering post, Schiltz addresses problems with the diagnoses of mental conditions in children and offers advice on how best to seek help for a child.

The University of California Press Blog has a post in memory of former UC Press director James H. Clark, who passed away last week. Clark led the UC Press for twenty five years, and had been in the publishing industry since 1960.

The use of art in determining and defining who was and who was not a Nazi perpetrator after World War II is a fascinating and complicated subject, and it’s the topic of a guest post by Paul B. Jaskot at the University of Minnesota Press Blog. Jaskot believes that the role of art history in “highlighting the political function of art and architecture” is an important one.

Tonight is the debut of the latest film featuring the “master heister” Parker. Yesterday, the Chicago Blog, the blog of the University of Chicago Press, ran an article delving into the fascinating and somewhat checkered past of Parker films. More importantly, they provide a handy list of ways to avoid being robbed by Parker. Best piece of advice: “Don’t have anything he wants. We recommend possessing only books. He’s not much of a reader, that Parker.”

Today is Virginia Woolf’s birthday! In honor of the occasion, the MIT Press blog has an excerpt from Rosalind Krauss’s work on modernism, The Optical Unconscious. Naturally, the excerpt focuses on Woolf, and, in particular, on her thoughts on Roger Fry and chess.

In the election in November, thousands of people were willing to wait in line out of a sense of civic duty to vote. At From the Square, the blog of NYU Press, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson asks why people are willing to wait so proudly for their chance to vote in an election but not so willing to wait for their chance to serve in the judicial system on a jury.

Finally, we’ll wrap things up this week with a post from the University of Virginia Press blog in which Jeffrey Greene examines the strange and interesting life of oysters as a suggestive artistic symbol in the paintings of the 16th and 17th century Dutch masters. Interestingly enough, Greene finds that these painted oysters “don’t look anything like the ones my father, brother, and I collected and ate during the years I grew up in New England, nor do they look like the most common oysters in France, a country famed since Roman times as Europe’s greatest oyster producer. Clearly, the seventh-century oysters in the paintings were rounder and flatter than the typical creuses, oysters with a cupped shell that are consumed worldwide.”

Well, that will do it for this week! We hope that you enjoyed this edition of our UP Roundup. As always, please post any thoughts in the comments. Thanks for reading!

Hamline University Law Professor Jonathan Kahn has become a prominent critical voice in the last decade on the controversial injection of racial discourse into American medical practice (particularly in the realm of genetically tailored drugs). In the following post, he gives us a helpful overview of BiDil, an FDA-approved drug that has in many ways become the face of this issue.

The story of BiDil begins in the 1980s when a group of researchers hypothesized that combining hydralazine and isosorbide dinitrate together might be an effective treatment for heart failure. They conducted two small, federally supported clinical trials and concluded that, indeed, the drugs did work – for everybody. At this point race was not a part of the picture. In 1989, the researchers obtained a patent on the use of the two drugs together – soon to be named “BiDil” – to treat heart failure. Again, there was no mention of race in this first patent. Patent in hand, they licensed the rights to a small pharmaceutical company, which took the necessary steps to bring the drug to the FDA for approval. In 1997, the FDA denied approval, citing inadequate statistical support from the data in the first two, small trials. Importantly, many cardiologists on the advisory committee stated clearly that they believed BiDil worked, but that they could not recommend approval because of the regulatory criteria for statistical significance in the data. The FDA said it believed the drug was approvable if a properly designed follow-up clinical trial were conducted.

Clinical trials, however, cost a lot of money. At this point the small pharmaceutical company dropped BiDil and it seemed dead in the water. By now, nearly half of the twenty year life of the first patent had elapsed. A follow up trial and return to the FDA for approval might take several more years, effectively eating up almost the entire value of the patent. It was here that race entered the picture for the first time. The researchers broke out the original data by race and argued that the BiDil combination seemed to work particularly well in the 49 African Americans place on the BiDil combination drugs in the first trial. So well, in fact, that they filed for a new race-specific patent based on using the drugs only in African Americans. This patent was granted in 2000, effectively extending monopoly control over the drug by thirteen years, until 2020. This patent was then licensed to NitroMed, which conducted the new race-specific trial that provided the basis for the FDA approval in 2005.

In order for the race-specific patent to pay off, NitroMed had to get a race-specific label approved by the FDA. If the FDA approved BiDil for use in the general population regardless of race then any pharmaceutical company would be able to market BiDil after the original patent expired in 2007. In my book, Race in a Bottle, I argue that these legal and commercial considerations drove the framing of BiDil as a racial drug – shaping which questions got asked and how the answers were interpreted and presented to the public. It is in exploring these intersections of law, commerce and science that the story of BiDil illuminates the complexities of how and why race is being used in biomedical research, practice and drug development.

Look for more posts about Kahn’s new book, Race in a Bottle, this week on the Columbia University Press blog!

This week our featured book and giveaway is Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age by Jonathan Kahn.

Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of Race in a Bottle 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 lf2413@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!

Stay tuned all week to learn more about this excellent new title from Columbia University Press!

Welcome to our weekly roundup of the best posts from the blogs of academic publishers! The election is over, and, understandably, this week many of the blogs on our list are looking back at the election process or looking forward to President Obama’s second term. As always, if you particularly enjoy something or think that we missed an important post, please let us know in the comments.

First of all, a quick reminder: University Press Week is NEXT WEEK! We are very excited to be participating in the UP Week Blog Tour, and we hope you will join us and all the other academic presses around the country in celebrating the value that scholarly publishing adds to the public life of America. Join the conversation and keep up with the events on Twitter via #UPWeek.

An unfortunate consequence of the end of the election season is that we won’t get any more insightful posts from the Princeton University Press blog’s Election 101 series. The PUP blog has a number of posts looking back at the election this week, notably a wrap-up by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen looking back at the importance of “ground war” aspects of the campaigns, particularly in actually getting people out to vote.

Superstorm Sandy is widely seen as an important force in the presidential election. In an interesting snapshot of pre-election analysis, both the OUPblog and the Florida Bookshelf (the blog of the University Press of Florida, which we have just (belatedly) added to our UP Roundup blogroll) ran posts on Election Day discussing the impact of Sandy on the vote. At the OUPblog, Elvin Lim asked which candidate benefited most from the storm. At the Florida Bookshelf, David K. Twigg argued that Sandy’s biggest impact could be in voter turnout.

Another excellent election series that we are sad to see end is the MIT Press blog’s Election Tuesday series. In the concluding article of the series, posted on Election Day, Peter Wenz wonders whether the “sane center” be successful in elections, or whether increased extremism on the Right and Left will continue to be the order of the day in politics.

From the Square, the blog of NYU Press, also ran a post looking back on the lessons learned from the campaign season. Michael Serazio’s post is especially interesting given that it was published immediately before Election Day, and given that it focuses on the presidential campaigns from a marketing perspective rather than a political one.

Now that President Obama has been elected, Bill Ayers, writing for Beacon Broadside, thinks that the time has come for the federal government to take a good hard look at the educational reform system in place. Speaking to the president directly, Ayers urges Obama to “resist these policies and reject the dominant metaphor [of education as business] as wrong in the sense of inaccurate as well as wrong in the sense of immoral.”

Of course, there were a number of important issues voted on at the state level as well as the federal level this Election Day. At the University of Minnesota Press Blog, Amy Stone discusses the “huge victory for same-sex marriage at the ballot box” and offers three reasons why all four contested ballot measures on same-sex marriage went the way the LGBT activists hoped they would.

The Fisher case at the Supreme court, in which affirmative action policies at the University of Texas are being challenged, is still ongoing, and at Voices in Education, the Blog of Harvard Education Publishing, Michael J. Feuer discusses the “‘catch-22′ that could spell the end of affirmative action.” This “catch-22″ is that “using numerical targets is illegal, but not using them might make the admissions process appear unacceptably vague or unfair.”

On Election Day, rather than focusing on the much-analyzed 2012 election, the Chicago Blog, the blog of the University of Chicago Press, chose to look back at the life and work of Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams, a scholar and suffragettte in the Progressive Era. In an excerpt from Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy, Louise W. Knight explains ” how Addams’s experience with the Pullman Strike in 1894 led her to question—and later, so eloquently articulate—the dangers of moral absolutism to democratic citizenship.”

At the Indiana University Press blog, Martin Krieger has an interesting guest post about his reasons for writing his book Doing Physics, and his hopes for and worries about the finished product. I wonder how many academic authors find this sentiment to be true: “When I am writing I always have one of my teachers in the back of my mind. My worry will be that they will find out that what I am saying is wrong, or that I made a mistake.”

Finally, we’ll wrap things up with a post about the Civil War (the actual historical one, not the potential one that Donald Trump advocated via Twitter on Tuesday night). At the JHU Press Blog, guest poster Adam Mendelsohn takes a look at the Civil War from a unique angle: from the perspective of American Jewish history. He speaks about the importance of avoiding “any self-congratulatory celebration of Jewish contribution to the war,” focusing instead on the “fascinating and revealing complexities of Jewish life during a period of profound tumult and change in American history.”

We hope that you enjoyed this week’s installment. As always, please post any thoughts in the comments. Thanks for reading! And be sure to join us next week for our celebration of University Press Week!

The latest Room for Debate series in the New York Times features a number of scholars and writers discussing what it is, exactly, that makes protests effective. Erica Chenoweth, assistant professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and a researcher at the Peace Research Institute of Oslo and coauthor of Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, contributed “Creative Nonviolence Can Defeat Repression,” an article addressing the techniques that have made protests most effective in toppling repressive regimes throughout history.

Chenoweth begins her article with an explanation of what regimes (even repressive ones) need to control in order to stay in power:

Every repressive regime depends on various pillars of support — business elites, security forces, state media, educational elites and bureaucrats. When resistance campaigns impose significant costs on these groups, people begin to question their long-term interests.

Chenoweth identifies the three most important ways that protests can remove the support of these “pillars”:
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This week we are highlighting Daniel McCool’s River Republic: The Fall and Rise of America’s Rivers. Today, the last day of our giveaway, we’d like to share a guest post written by McCool on the river restoration projects around America. And remember that before 1 PM today you can enter our book giveaway for a chance to win a FREE copy of River Republic.

Less than a year ago a massive blast of turbid water, sediment, and debris exploded from the base of Condit Dam on the White Salmon River. At about the same time, heavy equipment began chewing away the concrete walls of Elwha and Glines Canyon Dams, both on the Elwha River in Washington. As I write this the Elwha and White Salmon Rivers are undergoing an amazing transformation.

What is going on here? Is this some form of anti-dam monkey-wrenching, or the work of crazed terrorists? No, it’s just a very dramatic introduction to a new era in river policy in the U. S. According to the river preservation group, American Rivers, 888 dams have been removed, including 60 just last year. And dam removal is just one form of river restoration; literally hundreds of other river restoration projects all across America are transforming, not only the physicality of rivers, but our relationship with rivers. For two hundred years we dammed, diverted, and polluted our rivers. There are over 79,000 dams in the U. S. Some rivers never reach their delta and simply turn to dust. And many rivers are tainted with a toxic stew that represents a significant health threat. Now, communities are un-doing the damage and reclaiming their rivers. We are beginning to realize that rivers are a tremendous asset, especially if they are healthy and free-flowing, desirable as habitat for fish and wildlife, and attractive to people for recreation. It is a new day for America and its watercourses.

The White Salmon River, the Elwha River, and hundreds of others are now experiencing a Phoenix-like rebirth. It will require our utmost ingenuity as we figure out how to bring these rivers back to life–how to restore fish runs, riparian lands, reservoir sites, and water quality. In effect, it is a grand experiment in natural resurrection. What a privilege it is to observe this remarkable stage in our country’s history.