New Books Network

Free will is essential to our understanding of human nature. We are masters of our own fate. We chart our own course. We take our own road. In short, we decide what we are going to do.  There seems little doubt that free will is a reality. But how, psychologically and physiologically, does it work? How does free will arise out of what is essentially a biological machine? How do we decide? That’s the question at the center of A. David Redish‘s fascinating The Mind Within the Brain: How We Made Decisions and How Those Decisions Go Wrong (Oxford UP, 2013). His elegant answer is that on the neurological level, we have a number of discrete decision-making mechanisms. They range (though there is no real order or hierarchy) from completely unconscious and mechanical, as when experience a nerve reflex, to completely explicit and flexible, as when we deliberate about options and choose one. Especially interesting is David’s discussion of what happens when one of these decision-making mechanisms breaks and goes into “failure mode,” namely, the manifestation of common psychological problems such as consistent irrationality, addictive behaviors, and PTSD. Listen in to our fascinating discussion.

Filmmakers discovered in the early twentieth century that Americans would gladly pay to be scared to death. As the decades marched on, dismissive critics regularly wrote obituaries for the relentlessly popular horror genre, even as other kinds of films (Blaxploitation, anyone?) disappeared from theaters. David Konow, in Reel Terror: The Scary, Bloody, Gory, Hundred-Year History of Classic Horror Films (St. Martin’s Press, 2012), surveys the history of this much-maligned genre and explains why it refuses to die. As he demonstrates in one eminently readable chapter after another, it’s incredibly “fun” to be afraid. That simple fact helps explain why “the true fans of the genre couldn’t care less what the mainstream or the critics think about horror. It never kept them away from the theaters.” Like all good books, Reel Terror’s strengths stem from the talents of its author. Konow is possessed of a true encyclopedic knowledge of his subject matter and is a passionate advocate for horror. He’s also a dogged researcher, as evidenced by the dozens of original interviews he conducted with film directors, producers, and actors both obscure and famous. Ultimately, rabid fans of the genre who think they’ve heard all of the stories surrounding classics like Psycho, Night of the Living Dead and Jaws will find new insights in the pages of Reel Terror, and even those who have only a passing interest in such films will find themselves reconsidering their stance by the end of the book. David Konow is the author of Bang Your Head: The Rise and Fall of Heavy Metal and Schock-O-Rama: The Films of Al Adamson. He has written for dozens of publications and websites, including LA Weekly, Guitar World, Fangoria, and TGDaily.com. He lives in Southern California and can be reached via Facebook or email (konowd@pacbell.net) .

If you think about it, pretty much everything has a history insofar as everything exists in time. Historians, however, usually limit themselves to the history of humans and the things humans make. Occasionally, of course, they make forays into the history of animals, the environment and even the universe (see “Big History”), but these excursions are exceptions to the all-human rule. In Virus Hunt: The Search for the Origin of HIV (Oxford UP, 2013), Dorothy H. Crawford–a biologist–breaks new historiographical ground by tracing the history of a virus, namely HIV. She is, naturally, interested in the tragic human story of HIV and AIDS. But her focus is on the virus itself. Where and when, she asks, was HIV born? In what populations did it live before it jumped to humans? And, most importantly, where and when did it jump to humans? Using an array of sophisticated tools, a group of biologists-cum-detectives were able to give credible answers to these historical questions. Crawford tells their story.

Social cognition involves a small bundle of cognitive capacities and behaviors that enable us to communicate and get along with one another, a bundle that even our closest primate cousins don’t have, at least not to the same level of sophistication: pervasive collaboration, language, mind-reading and what Tadeusz Zawidzki, Associate Professor of Philosophy at The George Washington University, calls “mindshaping”. Mindshaping includes our capacities and dispositions to imitate, to be natural learners, and to conform to and enforce social norms, and in Mindshaping: A New Framework for Understanding Human Social Cognition (MIT Press, 2013), Zawidzki defends the idea that mind-shaping is the basic capacity from which the rest of social cognition evolves. Most researchers hold that mind-reading – our “theory of mind” – is the linch-pin of the rest: our ability to ascribe to one another mental states with propositional content is necessary for sophisticated language use and for mindshaping. Zawidzki argues, in contrast, that our ability to “homogenize” our minds via mindshaping is what makes sophisticated mind-reading and language possible. On his view, language didn’t evolve so that we could express thought; it evolved so that we could express our commitment to cooperative behavior. Zawidzki’s innovative approach centers on reinterpreting and extending Daniel Dennett’s intentional stance to explain the social-cognitive development of the species and of individuals.

Stella M. Rouse is the author of Latinos in the Legislative Process: Interests and Influence (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Rouse is assistant professor of political science at the University of Maryland and a research fellow at the Center for American Politics and Citizenship. Commentators lauded Latino voters in 2012, but it is Latino elected-officials that increasingly hold power at the national and state-levels. In 2009, 242 Latino served in state legislatures and 27 Latinos were in the House of Representatives. While these numbers are not proportionate to the size of the Latino population, they are record highs. Rouse links together this descriptive representation to the ways those Latino officials make policy and vote on issues important to Latinos, what she labels substantive representation. She finds that education, healthcare, and jobs were the top priorities for Latino legislators – immigration was named by only 8% of respondents. She concludes that “Immigration is important, but it is not at the forefront of priorities for either the Latino public or for Latino elites.” Rouse extends this analysis to the agenda setting and voting behavior of Latinos. She finds that Latino legislators are more likely to introduce Latino-interest legislation when the percentage of Latinos in the party is smaller. At the roll call stage of the legislative process, though, Latino legislators behave no differently than others. Overall, Rouse’s new book has a lot to offer scholars of Congress, agenda setting, and ethnic studies. Her analysis is timely and advances what we know about Latinos and politics.

Is truth in journalism the same as balance? Is fairness really fair to news consumers, or is fairness merely a code word used by journalists looking to get out of the line of fire? In his latest book, Informing the News: The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism (Vintage, 2013), Thomas E. Patterson gets at the heart of a journalism epidemic threatening the democratic process. Patterson is Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press and a faculty member at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Patterson calls for journalists to become experts in a subject, whether it’s foreign policy, economics, or other matters. Knowledge-based journalism will give journalists tools they need to go beyond the he-said/she-said reporting model and will allow for a level of analysis that better serves the American people. Invoking the observations and wisdom of Walter Lippmann, Informing the News is an important work intended for journalism scholars, journalists, journalism educators, and anyone with a vested interest in a democratic society.

Ask most educated people about the development of American slavery, and you’re likely to hear something about Virginia or, just maybe, South Carolina. In his far-reaching but concise and elegantly written new book A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Simon Newman takes us to the tiny Caribbean island of Barbados to trace the beginnings of African slavery in British America. The cotton slavery we know from the killing fields of Mississippi and Louisiana can be traced back to the sugar regimen that developed in Barbados. And that slavery, Newman shows, must be understood amidst the larger trajectory of bound labor in England and Scotland, and even in the British forts on Africa’s Gold Coast. A New World of Labor shows how the regime of bound servant labor — not the institution of West African slavery — provided the foundation for slavery as it developed in Britain’s New World plantation colonies.

MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke University Press, 2012) is a fascinating study of the MP3 as a historical, cultural, conceptual, and social phenomenon. In the course of an account of the MP3 that has surprising connections to telephony and the economics of perception, Jonathan Sterne usefully shifts our attention from media-in-general to a more specific focus on material formats, “the stuff beneath, beyond, and behind the boxes our media come in.” MP3 explores the process by which AT&T learned how to make money from the gaps in human hearing. By the 1980s, Sterne shows, engineers had developed methods for using what cannot be heard within the audible spectrum as the basis for a system of data compression for digital sound transmission. The same decade saw a subgroup of the International Organization for Standardization, the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), devise a standard for digital video and audio with the help of a series of tests that gauged listeners’ levels of sonic annoyance. Sterne shows how the MP3 format emerged out of these overlapping material and social contexts of perception, technics, and experimentation. There are cat pianos and cat telephones (not what you think!) here, as well as accounts of cybernetics and information theory, histories of the domestication of noise, considerations of the challenge of archiving digital mashups, and vignettes about Suzanne Vega and Tom’s Diner. It’s a wonderful book about an important part of our daily media landscape, and it was great fun to talk about it!

Henrietta Harrison’s new book is the work of a gifted storyteller. In its pages, the reader will find Boxers getting drunk on communion wine, wolf apparitions, people waking up from the dead, ballads about seasickness, and flying bicycles. You will also find a wonderfully rich account of three centuries of Chinese history. The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village (University of California Press, 2013) explores the modern history of a single Catholic town in Shanxi called Cave Gully by weaving together some of the most important tales and memories of its inhabitants. Through this very local story of lived religious practice, Harrison challenges dominant global histories of Christianity. In contrast to narratives that tell a story of a Christian religion that was alien to Chinese contexts and acculturated or adapted in order t o compensate for this incommensurability, Harrison’s book instead shows the significant commonalities between Christianity and Chinese religious culture and argues that the differences between Catholic practice and local folk religion have actually increased over the centuries. Each chapter of the book begins with a folktale told by the villagers of Cave Gully, following its themes and events through an archive of written sources. The chapters collectively explore a wide range of issues, including local/missionary relations, the challenges and opportunities posed by long-distance travel in the 19th century, the economics of global Christianity, local encounters with the Boxer Uprising, and much more. Harrison shows how people of Cave Gully gradually came to see themselves as part of a global organization, examining the consequences of this transformation within the town and well beyond it. In addition to all of this, it’s also a darn good story.

One of the most crowded sections  of the sports library is the one devoted to autobiographies and memoirs.  The shelves here are constantly adding new titles, by both legends and bit players.  For instance, the past week has brought the release of new memoirs by Manchester United midfielder Paul Scholes and Olympic rower Katherine Grainger, as well as books by Dave Hanson, one the Hanson brothers of the cult hockey film Slap Shot, and some guy named Ace Cacchiotti, the keeper of the film archive of old NFL games.  We also find in these stacks some of the most acclaimed sports books ever written, like Ken Dryden’s The Game, Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, and Beyond a Boundary by C.L.R. James, to name just a few.  Yes, sports memoirs can be tedious rehearsals of sports platitudes.  But, as we learn in this episode, there are quite a few that offer vivid perspectives and thoughtful reflections on the games we watch. In this special seminar episode of New Books in Sports we take a close look at sports memoirs.  We learn about the art of the fan memoir from Dave Roberts, author of the acclaimed books 32 Programmes and The Bromley Boys, and from John Harms, founder and editor of the Footy Almanac, a popular site for fan writing in Australia.  Literary scholar James Pipkin looks at the themes and literary devices common to the autobiographies of American athletes, while historian Robert Edelman tells us what he finds in the memoirs of sport stars from the old Soviet Union.  We get recommendations of favorite sports memoirs from Glasgow journalist Teddy Jamieson and historians of British sport Victoria Dawson and Daryl Leeworthy.  Meanwhile, Patrick Hruby of Sports on Earth tells us why he’s not a fan of athlete autobiographies.  We hear from Sharda Ugra, senior editor at ESPN Cricinfo, about her experiences as a ghostwriter.  And long-distance swimmer Lynne Cox talks about researching and writing her books, including her best-selling memoir Swimming to Antarctica. As with our other seminar episodes—on European football, the Olympics, and sports books for children—this is twice the length of a normal edition of New Books in Sports.  But with more smart guests, and more sharp insights, and more good books, it’s worth a listen.  Consider it a crash course in sports literature—packed into less time than the game of the week.

When I was growing up the only cooking show on TV I remember was Julia Child. I sometimes watched “The French Chef,” not so much to learn anything about cooking, but rather just to watch Julia. She was a hoot. When I saw the famous “Saturday Night Live” in 1978, I wasn’t sure which was funnier–Dan Aykroyd as Julia or Julia herself. Today, of course, cooking is very serious business on TV and the reason, of course, is the Food Network. It grew from virtually nothing twenty years ago to a massive cultural and economic force. It’s watched by millions and it makes millions more. It’s changed the way Americans (and many overseas) think about both food and television. It’s sky is full of stars. How’d that happen? In his remarkably well researched, wonderfully written and engrossingly told From Scratch: Inside the Food Network (Putnam, 2013), former New York Times reporter Allen Salkin  tells the–pardon the pun–saucy tale. Please listen in.

What do Barry Goldwater, Edward Abbey, and Henry David Thoreau have in common? On the surface, they would seem to be at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. As Brian Allen Drake shows, however, environmental concerns often brought together public figures with wildly different political orientations. Throughout his book, Loving Nature, Fearing the State: Environmentalism and Antigovernment Politics Before Reagan (University of Washington Press, 2013), Brian Allen Drake analyzes the complex relationship between modern conservatism and postwar environmentalism. Through a wide-ranging narrative that fuses together elements of political, intellectual, and cultural history, Drake illuminates the tense nature of a movement that sought to balance an aversion to centralized government power with a desire to protect America’s natural landscape. Brian Allen Drake is a lecturer in the University of Georgia History Department. His previous work has appeared in Environmental History, the Great Plains Quarterly, and the Georgia Historical Quarterly.

Brumaire. Ventôse. Germinal. Thermidor. There is nothing more evocative of the French Revolutionary imaginary than the names of the months of the republican calendar that became official in 1793 (the calendar was back-dated to 1792, or Year I). In The Calendar in Revolutionary France: Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture, Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Sanja Perovic explores the history and meanings of the republican calendar as a representation of the complexities of revolutionaries’ understandings of past, present, and future. As she examines the tensions between linear and cyclical visions of time during this pivotal period in French and world history, Perovic considers the calendar as both an object and an ideological project. The book is a history of the calendar itself and also a literary, intellectual, and political biography of Sylvain Maréchal, a revolutionary who played a pivotal role in the development of the new temporal order. Anyone who has ever wanted to know more about the massive cultural and political shifts of the French Revolution will be interested in reading this book. Perovic’s narrative and arguments speak to a wide range of scholarship on republican values and culture, as well as to the broader periodization and historiography of the French Revolution. At the same time, the book reaches further, reading the republican calendar as exemplary of the bigger picture of modern temporality, offering the reader much to think about in terms of the time structures and habits we use to understand our daily lives and our places in history.

We all know the song. “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…” And now, thankfully, we all know the controversy; celebrating a perpetrator of genocide might say a few unpleasant things about the country doing the celebrating. But there is something that most Americans don’t know: Europeans had visited the continent at least half a millennium before Columbus. Remembered  in two medieval tales known as the “Vinland sagas,” and in 1960 corroborated by a major archaeological discovery, Indigenous people–most likely the ancestors of today’s Wabanaki Confederacy, among others–encountered Norse Viking sailors sometime around 1,000 CE. This used to be common knowledge in the United States. In fact, at moments of heightened xenophobia, Anglo-Americans even celebrated America’s “Norse ancestry,” considering it a far purer lineage than the Italian Columbus. Such debates are just one of the collected national anxieties Annette Kolodny traces in her masterful new book, In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Angl0-American Anxiety of Discovery (Duke University Press, 2012). Combining her unparalleled expertise in literary criticism, close collaboration with Mi’kmaq, Passamaquody and Penobscot communities, and the consultation of innumerable sources, Kolodny deepens our understanding of the “Vinland sagas” and explores what’s at stake in national origin stories in a colonial world.

Our moral lives are shaped by a deep commitment to the moral equality of all persons.  This thought drives us to think, for example, that each person’s life is of equal moral importance, that each person is deserving of equal regard, that no one’s life is intrinsically more morally important than any other, and so on.  However, our lives are organized around what might be called special relationships – friendships, marriages, families, and such – and these relationships carry with them duties to show certain others special regard.  Indeed, we would find fault with a father who did not show a certain degree of partiality for his own child.  There seems to be a conflict.  In order to manage it, we need a clear account of the moral nature of duties and reasons of partiality. In his new book, Partiality (Princeton University Press, 2013), Simon Keller examines the leading accounts of partiality, and finds them lacking.  He develops an original view of partiality according to which our reasons and duties of partiality arise from the relationships that we share with others which permit us to respond properly to the value of individuals.