New Books Network

The story of the rise of Jim Crow in Jacksonville, Florida is in many ways illustrative of the challenges facing newly emancipated African Americans throughout the South with local officials erecting barriers to black participation; blacks building institutions to overcome those obstacles; then Southern bigots using the reaction of blacks as justification for both the initial barriers and further draconian measures. This usually involved labeling black political action as in some way primitive, corrupt or unfairly self-interested. For example, many in the white establishment in Jacksonville resented that blacks voted for Republicans out of loyalty, yet they also attacked blacks for voting for ‘reform Democrats’ out of self -interest. So, the solution? Political education of some kind? Outreach perhaps? No, instead they implemented what was called the ‘Australian ballot’: a subway map style list of candidates with intersecting names and titles intended to either confuse or disqualify many black voters. This hostility to black political agency extended to all aspects of public life in Jacksonville, with each reaction forcing blacks further from power and from view. Robert Cassanello’s  To Render Invisible: Jim Crow and Public Life in New South Jacksonville (University Press of Florida, 2013) explores this dynamic in rich detail, helping further our understanding of the post Civil War but pre- Civil Rights era in the South. Robert was kind enough to speak with me. I hope you enjoy.

During the 1924-25 school year, John Scopes was filling in for the regular biology teacher at Rhea County Central High School in Dayton, Tennessee. The final exam was coming up, and he assigned reading from George W. Hunter’s 1914 textbook A Civic Biology to prepare students for the test. What followed has become one of the most well-known accounts in the history of science and one of the most famous trials of twentieth-century America. In Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Anti-Evolution Movement in American Schools (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Adam R. Shapiro urges us to look beyond the rubrics of “science” and “religion” to understand how the Scopes trial became such an important event in the histories of both.  The story begins with a pair of Pinkerton detectives spying on a pair of textbook salesmen in the Edwards Hotel in Jackson, Mississippi. Shapiro brings us from that hotel room into a series of classrooms, boardrooms, and courtrooms while exploring the battle over textbook reform in the twentieth-century US. Based on a close reading of high school curricular materials around the discipline of botany, with special attention to the emergence of “civic botany” as a pedagogical field, Shapiro’s book uses the debates over pedagogy, evolution, and the textbook industry to explore a number of issues that are of central importance to the history of science: the construction of authorship, the histories of reading practices, the co-emergence of economies and technologies, and the ways that urban and rural localities shape the nature of sciences and their publics. It is a gripping, moving, and enlightening story. Enjoy!

New Jersey. Home to Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi, Yo La Tango. . .and the Misfits, a hardcore metal horror rock band from Lodi. In This Music Leaves Stains: The Complete Story of the Misfits (Scarecrow Press, 2013), James Greene Jr. let’s us in on the career of the band and of the various people who have claimed membership within it. The focus, of course, is on the “classic” Walk Among Us version of the band consisting of Jerry Only (the member with the longest tenure in the band), his brother Doyle, Arthur Googy and, arguably the most famous member, Glenn Danzig. Greene’s story highlights the ongoing personal conflicts within the Misfits, conflicts that broke-up some versions of the band only to create new ones. Along the way, Danzig becomes a certified rock star with his eponymously-named band, Danzig, Jerry and Doyle continue on with the Misfits until a rift sends Doyle out of the band, with Jerry continuing on to this day with the Misfits band, music, and (significantly) iconography. James Greene Jr. is a freelance writer who has contribure to Crawdaddy!, Splitsider, and Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, among others. He is a graduate of the University of Central Florida.

George Brock approached his book about newspapers and journalism in the digital age unwilling to write another gloom-and-doom narrative about the death or decline of the industry. When he studied the historical development of journalism and current trends, he found the industry is what is always has been: volatile, evolving, and vital to society’s well being. Out of Print: Newspapers, Journalism and the Business of News in the Digital Age (Kogan Page, 2013) is an important look at the industrial, economic, and pragmatic realities of a shifting industry. Using modern case studies, including the phone-hacking scandal that brought down Great Britain’s News of the World, as well as historical research and recent data, Brock examines where journalism was, is and will be. Brock, head of City University London’s prestigious graduate school of journalism, has produced a work that transcends academia without sacrificing methodology or theory. “Because journalism lives on the frontier between democratic purposes and the commercial market,” Brock writes, “it is constantly being reorganized and renegotiated.”

Many fans store a vast collection of sports images in their brains.  With just a moment’s glance at a picture, even a slice of the picture, they can recognize the athletes, the season, the game, the particular play that the photographer captured.  I experienced this recently when one of my Facebook friends posted a new cover photo on his profile page, a classic shot from the golden age of American football.  Cropped down to fit on the page, only the upper corner of the original black-and-white photo was visible, showing a player in shoulder pads and helmet, looking down and raising his right fist, as if to punch downward.  I didn’t need to see the rest of the picture.  I knew it immediately: the photograph of Philadelphia Eagles linebacker Chuck Bednarik after he had just put a punishing hit on the New York Giants’ Frank Gifford in a game at Yankee Stadium.  Even though the photo had been taken eight years before I was born, and featured two teams—the Eagles and Giants—for which I have no affection, the image of this one play is lodged in my anterior cingulate cortex, able to be recalled in an instant. Our experience of sport is mediated through images.  Even when we have a ticket to the stadium, we spend more time watching the action on the giant screen than straining to see the distant figures on the field.  But in the vast blizzard of images—the online galleries, the double-page spreads, the video highlights—do any frames qualify as art?  Are there any sports photos that deserve a place in a museum, alongside, say, a Richard Avedon portrait or an Andy Warhol series? David Little thinks so.  The head of the photography department at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and a lifelong sports fan, David organized the 2012 exhibition “The Sports Show.”  The exhibition featured over 200 items, including photographs by Avedon and Warhol, the 1927 Buster Keaton film “College,” and the 2006 documentary “Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait.”  Over 150 of the images are reproduced in the exhibition catalogue The Sports Show: Athletics as Image and Spectacle (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), making the book an absorbing treasury of sports photography.  In our interview, David describes some of those images, explaining what makes them compelling, beautiful, and original—in short, works of art.  And we ask if it still possible to recognize these qualities in a sports photograph, in an age of jumbo screens and Instagram.

In our digital world, it does seem like paper is dying by inches.  Bookstores are going out of business, and more and more people get their news from the internet than from newspapers.   But how irrelevant has paper really become? As Ian Samson argues in his new book, Paper: An Elegy (Harper Collins, 2012), not only is paper still vital in our society, it pretty much dominates all our lives.  From advertising to currency, to board games and origami, paper still revolves around most business and leisure.  Even “post-paper” products, such as e-readers, imitate the aesthetics and feel of paper, mirroring it in spirit if not in product.  And how many of us have heard, “yes, I have an e-book reader, but I just really like the feel of a book in my hand”?  In this interview, Ian Samson tells us about the history of paper, its uses throughout time, and our love affair with the “ultimate man-made material.”

Few possibilities terrify parents more than the kidnapping of a child. Guilt, grief, helplessness, anger, and immobilizing fear mingle to create an emotional stew with a mix of ingredients that varies just enough from person to person to reveal the cracks in once-solid relationships, leaving individuals struggling alone—and often against each other. If the parents are, in addition, early twentieth-century missionaries in a great and ancient land hidden from them as much by their own cultural arrogance and misperceptions as by the unfamiliarity of the terrain, such a crisis raises additional questions: Has my God forsaken me? Have I sinned against Him? Is the husband I considered the master of my soul capable of guidance, or does he in fact require my assistance to find his way home? Virginia Pye in her luminous debut novel, River of Dust (Unbridled Books, 2013), explores these questions and more through the reactions of Grace Watson and her husband, the Reverend John Wesley Watson, to the abduction of their son by Mongolian nomads in northwest China in 1910. Grace and her husband are committed to their separate missions—he to converting the Chinese to Christianity, and she to supporting him. Yet the prejudices of their time and station bind them, even as their differing responses to the loss of Wesley drive them apart—until, in a dusty, drought-ridden land as barren as their lives have become, Grace finds the courage to change.

What exactly is genocide? Is there a fundamental difference between episodes of genocide and how we go about our daily life? Or can it be said that the roots of the modern world, or civilization itself, has the potential to produce genocide? If the latter is true, then what does is say about us and the society we have constructed for ourselves? Christopher Powell, in his illuminating new book Barbaric Civilization: A Critical Sociology of Genocide (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011) provides new insights into these and related questions. For Powell, the idea that genocide is something that happens when civilization fails, or is something that should be understood as fundamentally different or wholly alien or outside of our day-to-day life, is suspect. Rather, he links genocide and the human potential for atrocity to civilization itself. In other words, there are clues present in the modern world, as well as the modern state structure, that can help us better understand the process of genocide and what makes atrocities possible. To understand genocide as “bad” and civilization as “good”, according to Powell, continues to confuse the issue. If civilization can produce genocide, he argues, “then civilization is not the unmitigated good that we often take it for.” The resulting book is a theoretically sophisticated journey through a difficult, and all-too-frequently, misunderstood and controversial topic. Thanks for listening. You can find Christopher Powell’s blog here.

Popular Culture and New Media: The Politics of Circulation (Palgrave, 2013) is written by David Beer, a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at York University in the UK. He blogs here and tweets here. The book attempts to describe and analyse the impact of new media on culture and society, using a range of critical theoretical starting points. Its use of theory is especially important to such a fast moving topic. The book aims to have continued and longer term relevance to debates about culture, even as specific technologies come and go, as a result of its theoretical basis David’s book raises a series of challenges for a range of academic areas. Perhaps the most important is the impact of media communications on the sociology of culture. Sociological studies of culture have been slow to consider the impact of new media, as they have tended to focus on debates about the relationship between tastes and class or social status. Popular Culture and New Media argues that the architecture underlying the way many people access culture, from Amazon.com recommendations, through to the metadata tag associated with archiving new media users activity, profoundly shapes peoples relationship to culture. In order to critically engage with modern culture we must understand how cultural objects and artifacts circulate and the modes of that circulation. In addition, David’s book draws our attention to how culture is increasingly becoming a form of data whilst, at the same time, data is becoming culture. Attempts to track what is trending online, what people are interested in, is itself a cultural practice. The emergence of large scale data sources have provided new ways to produce cultural artifacts. Culture is data and data is culture. The book will be of interest to readers from across the social sciences, in particular communications studies, sociology and social theory. However it also speaks directly to what it is like to live and participate in modern culture. It will, therefore, be a good read for anyone interested in the mechanisms that allow contemporary cultural life to function.

There is a fascinating area of study of how communities around the world realized there was such a concept as organized crime. This topic is driven by social attitudes and, to an increasing degree, by media images such as the Godfather movies. Some criminal groups actually model their movie icons, with generational differences for those who saw the Godfather, or Scarface and now Sopranos. In Lush Life: Constructing Organized Crime in the UK (Oxford University Press, 2013), Dick Hobbs provides us with an analysis of how the image of organized crime grew and changed over time in the UK. As he points out, the types of crimes that are associated with organized crime have always existed, but the recognition of the concept is relatively new. It is driven in part by xenophobic attitudes to migrants and also by the need for government agencies to define the type of work they do. As you will hear in the interview, the same issues that apply in the UK are definitely present in Australia, and there are a number of authors who point to a similar phenomenon in the US. Hobbs has given us an ethnographic history of the social nature of these crimes in the UK. He points out that the crimes are a means of providing services that are accepted by the community but depending and how and by whom they are delivered, they can be classified as either a criminal plague or a social ecology. However, regardless of the academic goals of the book, Lush Life is a great read. I must admit to participating in one of Hobbs’ symptoms that supports the mythology of organized crime, namely, I really enjoyed reading about the characters and their ‘business’ practices. For those of you who are interested in researching this topic please listen to the end of the interview when I asked Dick for his suggestions on the best way to conduct studies in organized crime.

How could members of a movement committed to cosmopolitanism accommodate nationalism? How could men and women committed to non-resistance reconcile themselves to politics when the authority of even democratic polities depended ultimately upon the threat of force? How could activists committed to equality — the essence of democracy — deny that the democratic process produced policies that were manifestly unjust? Those are some of the main questions that animate W. Caleb McDaniel‘s important book The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Louisiana State University Press, 2013). The most deeply research study of the transatlantic networks of the radical antislavery movement to date, it raises questions about the tensions between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, peace and violence, and means and ends that continue to bedevil those struggling to achieve social justice.

One phenomenon of movies made of classic novels is that the movie often says a lot more about the time of its making than about the time of  the novel. And so Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is more a depiction of a 2012 idea of the 1920s than a realistic depiction of the ’20s themselves. But what of the ’20s? These years are, today, so coated in mythology that they’re hard to imagine as a real time in which real people lived. The myths surrounding Fitzgerald and his novel are equally entrenched, but Sarah Churchwell‘s Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of the Great Gatsby (Virago, 2013) goes a long way towards peeling back the layers that have accrued around all of this- the author, the novel and the time- to, in her words, “throw into relief aspects of the novel we no longer see.” Here, the world of the ’20s- a world that so often seems impossibly ephemeral- assumes solidity through small details: hem lengths, traffic signals, the brightness of the lights. Churchwell’s aim may, at first, seem nebulous- to capture what was in the air whilst Fitzgerald was writing the book, the atmosphere, the mood- but, in the end, it yields a surprisingly concrete portrayal of the writing process (a notoriously nebulous thing) and the origins of a masterpiece. Careless People isn’t the life of an individual. Rather, it’s the early life of a work- a strand of biography that continues to provide fresh ways of considering classic works, the people who wrote them, the times from which they sprung, what they might have meant then and what they might mean now.

Pretty much every day you can read an article–usually somewhat intemperate–about how women can or can’t “have it all.” Rarely, however, do you read anything about the way in which men try to balance work and family. The assumption seems to be that fathers either: a) don’t want to “balance” anything; or b) say they want to “balance” work and family but actually don’t, or don’t try very hard to bring it off. As Gayle Kaufman points out in her terrific new book Superdads: How Fathers Balance Work and Family in the 21st Century (NYU Press, 2013), both of these assumptions are, well, wrong. Most American fathers want to play an active role in their family’s lives, and particularly in the rearing of their children. They face the same challenge as their working wives: how to have rich working lives and nurture their families all at the same time. In Superdads, Kaufman tries to figure out how and to what extent they are finding a good “balance.” Her answers are sobering for those wishing to “have it all.” In the lives of most men, somethings got to give. Listen to the interview and find out what.

Presidents, you know, are people too. They read the newspaper (including the sports page and the funnies), settle in with books (yes, beach reading too), watch movies and TV (after all, they have a private theatre in the White House), and listen to music (“President Obama, what’s on your iPod?”). Ordinarily, we don’t pay a lot of attention to this sort of stuff, even in the White House. It can be funny in a “human interest story” sort of way,  but it’s rarely ever seen as important for understanding how our most important leaders lead. This neglect–or, rather, trivialization–of presidents’ popular cultural tastes, according to Tevi Troy, is a mistake. In his fascinating book What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted: 200 Years of Popular Culture in the White House (Regency, 2013), Tevi not only tell us about the reading, watching, and tweeting habits of our Commanders-in-chief, but also why it has mattered and continues to do so. Listen in.

Robert Horwitz is the author of America’s Right: Anti-Establishment Conservatism from Goldwater to the Tea Party (Polity, 2013). Horwitz is professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California San Diego. Over the last few months, we’ve heard from several authors discuss their books about neoliberalism and the Tea Party. Horwitz seeks to pull these movements together. He highlights the long history of paranoia in politics and the ways it influences the Tea Party today. He describes the ideological underpinnings of anti-establishment conservatism but also the institutions, people, and mechanisms through which the beliefs were spread. You can read a chapter here.