New Books Network

Throughout the centuries, in cultures around the world, people have played games.  But it has only been in the modern age, in the last 250 years or so, that people have competed in and watched sports.  Modern sports are distinct in practice and purpose from the ball games of Mayan Central America or the chaotic scrums of medieval European villages.  Historians have specified these traits and plumbed their origins, typically finding the hearth in England of the 18th and 19th centuries.  What was it about England that gave rise to modern sport?  Was it the emerging political liberty and notions of rights?  The freedom of men to join clubs and associations, or the expansion of the popular press?  Was it the decline of feudalism after the revolutionary events of the 1600s, or even the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, who posited that all of life is competition? Tony Collins points to all of these factors as significant for the birth of modern sport in England.  But at the root of all this, the fundamental driver of sport’s development, then as now, has been money. Tony’s book, Sport in Capitalist Society: A Short History (Routledge, 2013), shows how the drive for profit has been central to modern sport, in England and around the world, from the 18th-century gentlemen who instituted uniform rules for various competitions to ensure fairness for their betting, to the gentlemen of today who exchange billions in media contracts, franchise fees, and stadium deals.  The book is more than the work of a scholar who has spent two decades researching the history of sport.  Along with his colleagues at the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at DeMontfort University, Tony took part in the production of a BBC Radio 4 series on the history of British sport, to accompany the 2012 London Olympics.  As he explains in the interview, the three-year process of writing the series prompted much discussion among the center’s scholars and brought new clarity to his own interpretations.  There are few writers on sport who can move convincingly from one continent to another, but Tony does it with insight and eloquence.  His short history hits far above its weight.

Why does it seem like everyone in the atheist movement is white and male?  Are African-American women less interested in secularism?  In her book, Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels (Infidel Books, 2013), Dr. Sikivu Hutchinson critiques the mainstream atheist movement’s lack of diversity and uncovers some of the reasons why African-Americans seem so connected to religion.  She reveals that racism and social and economic disadvantage has led to a dearth of resources in black communities – a gap that churches often end up filling.  Though there is a strong tradition of African-American secular humanism, it has focused on social justice issues and the intersection of racism, classism, capitalism and religion, topics usually ignored by the media and the mainstream secular movement.  Dr. Hutchinson also criticizes the new atheism’s singular focus on science and reason to the detriment of social justice and anti-racist consciousness.  Sikivu’s blog can be found here. AUDIO INTERVIEW BELOW

Here at New Books in Psychoanalysis we are celebrating the Summer of Men! We continue our inquiry into the topic of masculinity in psychoanalytic thought as we converse with Robert Grossmark and Bruce Reis about Heterosexual Masculinities: Contemporary Perspectives from Psychoanalytic Gender Theory (Routledge, 2009). The book is devoted to rethinking notions of male heterosexuality from within a psychoanalytic standpoint. Often in the field we think of boys as becoming masculinized by repudiating their identification with their mothers and the female world. This collection of essays begs to differ; boys never give up those identifications and it may be to their benefit that they do not do so. This collection argues that straight guys have been, in a certain way, fall guys–the ones in which other, more marginalized identities, define themselves in opposition to. So what happens when the known quantity proves to be less knowable? This is some of the terrain taken up by this book. Also discussed here are the pre-oedipal father, as well as the fate of the father’s body and its erotic components, alongside a discussion considering the possibility of the development of interiority and inner genital space in men. In this interview, the authors explore the paradigm shifts afoot in the field and the ramifications for clinical work that are expectable as a result. The authors exude both seriousness and playfulness as regards their subject matter, making for a perfect August respite (for the analyst on hiatus) and for some pleasurable and moving listening for the rest of us.

Gregory Heller is the author of Ed Bacon: Planning, Politics, and the Building of Modern Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Heller is Senior Advisor at Econsult Solutions, Inc. in Philadelphia. Bacon’s vision and leadership on urban renewal helped to create the physical landscape of what Philadelphia is today. He was central to many of the public and private projects that recreated this modern city. But, as the book title suggests, Bacon’s legacy is more than just as a planner. Heller dubs Heller ‘the planner as policy entrepreneur’. In doing so, Heller’s biography of Bacon can be read as an extended case-study in the policy process and urban politics. Bacon’s deep belief in public participation resulted in a vision for planning that was profoundly democratic and a great departure from many of his contemporaries who were often dismissive or indifferent of public input.

What is a celebrity? And how has the definition of celebrity changed over the course of American history? Those questions are central to Charlene M. Boyer Lewis‘s book Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte: An American Aristocrat in the Early Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Patterson, a beautiful and brilliant young woman from Baltimore, married Jerome Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, when she was only eighteen. They were quickly divorced at the emperor’s insistence, but her story does not end there. As  Boyer Lewis shows, this strong-willed and opinionated woman created a cult of celebrity around herself, centered on her self-conscious adoption of aristocratic ways. Her story illuminates the ambivalence about aristocracy, the scope of women’s action, the nature of fame and celebrity, and the complexities of father-daughter relationships in the early American republic.

Whiteness studies has confirmed that race is a social construction, even for whites, and that the identity we understand as white is also a social invention. Those who benefit from this invention accrue privileges that others either must pay dearly to obtain or cannot have at all. But there are those who are willing to give up this privilege in the name of equality (white anti-racists) and those who ask ‘Why should we have to?’ (white nationalists). Of course this summary is a reduction. To get a fuller, more meaningful account of what drives anti-racists and white nationalists read Matthew W. Hughey‘s insightfully written book White Bound: Nationalists, Antiracists, and the Shared Meanings of Race (Stanford University Press, 2012). In it, he reveals that both groups appeal to many of the same discourses on race and also share some of the same underlying narratives. If both groups then ascribe to the same stories and beliefs, what’s the difference between the two and how can anti-racists help the struggle for civil rights and fight against discrimination if they hold white nationalist ideologies? And how can white nationalist serve the interests of white supremacy if they share liberal views? Or is it more complex? To find out listen to this lively exchange.

John Osburg’s new book explores the rise of elite networks of newly-rich entrepreneurs, managers of state enterprises, and government officials in Chengdu. Based on extensive fieldwork that included hosting a Chinese TV show and spending many evenings in KTV clubs with businessmen who were entertaining clients, partners, and state officials, Anxious Wealth: Money and Morality Among China’s New Rich (Stanford University Press, 2013) looks at the masculinization of private business and deal-making in modern China. Osburg also considers the challenges this masculinization has posed for women, including women entrepreneurs in Chengdu and the new class of women arising from a growing “beauty-economy.” The book argues that these phenomena are crucial for understanding economic inequality, gender discrimination, and many aspects of the political configuration as they emerged in the reform era and continue to characterize contemporary society. Osburg sheds new light on the importance of social networks and the hybrid business/pleasure nature of relationships in modern China by placing gender at the center of his ethnography. Enjoy!

Dana Gioia‘s deference to poetic tradition and artistic beauty is intolerable to those who taste the venom of ideology in every linguistic expression of experience. But what ideology is present in the poet’s response to having lost a child? More broadly, what ideology is at play when our bodies find pleasure in the music of words, what ideology is at play when form is not used to preserve some aristocratic sensibility, but to protect the self – poor or rich – from its own nature, and what ideology is present in a poetry that celebrates the act of reading by seeking common ground with the reader? Ideology is not at the root of Dana Gioia’s Pity the Beautiful (Graywolf Press, 2012). Instead, one discovers an uncanny humility, sadly so foreign to us in our Age of Boasting, an age that exists because we let others convince us we lack so much. But it isn’t that we lack so much, but that deep down we sense that this world is not quite our home; that there is another home hidden from us – a home poetry is best equipped to help us find. The poems in Pity the Beautiful are provoked into existence by a poet acutely aware of the mystery of creation and the suffering that often animates it. But he is equally aware of the gift that each of us are made to not only apprehend it, but to wrestle joyfully with. Dana Gioia’s poetry is a reflection of his wrestling, a wrestling he has faith we can recognize as our own.

Superstitions flourish in our world—think of the elaborate rituals of baseball players, or knocking wood to avoid tempting fate, or that bit of happiness (or relief) we might experience from finding a lucky (heads up only!) penny. Yet it is part of the mythology of modernity that ours is a “disenchanted” age (or at least so said German sociologist Max Weber in a famous 1918 lecture). Since the Enlightenment, there has been a tradition of invoking a superstitious Middle Ages as a supposed counterpoint to “our” own rationalized and intellectualized times (to paraphrase Weber). The Middle Ages was one of the historical entities against which European modernity in many senses constituted itself, and it continues popularly to be imagined as uniformly saturated with superstition. Yet as Michael D. Bailey’s latest book, Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe (Cornell University Press, 2013) shows, that age had its own, highly developed, intellectually rigorous and contentiously debated notions of what was superstitious in practice and in thought. In the book, Bailey looks at how university-based academics and clerics, using the systematizing methods of scholasticism, formulated ideas about what was superstitious over two centuries—between, roughly, 1300 and 1500. He offers us, in other words, a history of evolving ideas of superstition and of what was considered superstitious by the most learned men of that era. Much as the category of superstition has been used to establish and manage putative boundaries between modern and not, late medieval scholars and clerics debated superstition—locating it in practices as varied as learned astrology, necromancy, and everyday medicinal charms—to patrol the shifting boundaries both of legitimate science and of proper religion.

Why is it that the United States continues to enforce the death penalty when the rest of the Western world abolished its use a little over three decades ago? That question, along with many other equally important questions, is at the heart of Dr. David Garland’s recent book Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition (Harvard University Press, 2010). His provocative study highlights the uneven application of capital punishment America––a phenomenon widely discussed but rarely understood––and offers a succinct and thoughtful analysis of the historical roots of this contemporary problem. Comparing the modern form of state execution (lethal injection) with original, brutal, forms of state execution (pressing, dismemberment, burning, beheading), Garland dissects the sociocultural and political uses of capital punishment and how they changed over the centuries, evolving to meet the needs of a modern liberal democracy. These liberal adaptations, as Garland explains, forced executions from the public gallows into private rooms within prisons, created a mandatory legal procedure of “super due-process,” and sought to diminish cruel and unusual bodily harm to the offender. But have these adaptations nullified its original purposes? For instance, various studies have shown that the death penalty does not act a deterrent to criminals or serve retributive purposes to the victims and their families. Given these facts, what purposes does it serve, if any? Do these reasons justify retention of the practice? Listen in for more! Dr. Garland is Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Professor of Sociology at New York University. Peculiar Institution is the recipient of numerous awards including: 2012 Michael J. Hindelang Award (American Society of Criminology), 2012 Edwin H. Sutherland Award (American Society of Criminology), 2011 Barrington Moore Book Award (American Sociological Association), Co-Winner 2011 Mary Douglas Prize (American Sociological Association), A Times Literary Supplement Best Book of 2011, and the 2010 Association of American Publishers PROSE Award for Excellence.

James A. Milward’s new book offers a thoughtful and spirited history of the silk road for general readers. The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2013) is part of the Oxford “A Very Short Introduction” series. The book is organized into six chapters that each take a different thematic approach to narrating aspects of silk road history from 3000 BCE to the twenty-first century, collectively offering a kind of snapshot introduction to major conceptual approaches to world history writing. In the course of learning about the Xiongnu and the history of dumplings, then, the reader simultaneously gets a crash course in environmental, political, bio-cultural, technological, and artisanal historiographies. Millward has filled the pages of this concise and very readable text with evocative (and sometimes very funny) stories, vignettes, and objects from the historical routes of Central Eurasia, weaving together the histories of lutes, horses, and silkworms with a sensitive and critical reading of the modern historiography of the Eurasian steppe. Enjoy!

Ron Schmidt is the co-author (with Yvette M. Alex-Assensoh, Andrew L. Aoki, and Rodney Hero) of Newcomers, Outsiders, and Insiders: Immigrants and the American Racial Politics in the Early 21st Century (University of Michigan Press, 2013). Schmidt is professor of political science at California State University Long Beach. This is a big book that covers long and complex histories of numerous groups in the United States. The authors link the arrival and integration of Latino Americans and Asian Americans to evolving group identities and developing political institutions. They draw interesting comparisons between the legacies of the African American social movements of the Civil Rights era and immigrant protests in other ethnic communities. They conclude with a mixed assessment about where the US now stands in terms of immigrant politics. Gains have been made, but immigrants remain largely shut out of traditional forms of political representation and often lack entre into politics.

Two guys are watching Premier League highlights, when onto the TV screen comes Rory Delap, then with Stoke City, doing one of his renowned throw-ins from the touchline directly into the box. One guy, a native of the American Midwest who’d been raised on baseball, basketball, and hockey, is amazed by the throw and the havoc it creates in front of the opponent’s goal.  “Why don’t other teams do that?” he asks. The other guy, who grew up with soccer in Germany, explains that Delap is an unusual player, having been trained as a javelin thrower. “But can’t teams train a guy to make throws like that?” asks the first guy. “It’s not what you do unless you have to,” answers the second guy, who had played semi-pro soccer in his younger days. “Well, why not? It seems to work for them.” The former footballer is stymied for an answer.  All he can say is: “Because.” In most cases, a debate like this would have ended here, with the guy with superior sports credentials having the final word.  But these guys were Ivy League professors, who do research in behavioral social sciences.  Instead of accepting “because” as an explanation for soccer customs, they began to question the behavior of clubs, managers, and even players, and to research the real outcomes of their decisions. In their book The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Soccer Is Wrong (Penguin, 2013), these two guys, Chris Anderson and David Sally, offer the results of their investigations.  Using the wealth of data that is now available about what happens on the field, and drawing from current theories in the social sciences, they undermine many of the conventions of on-field strategy and club management.  Their book brings together colorful stories and telling statistics in an engaging and insightful dissection of contemporary soccer.  You’ll be surprised to learn that much of what you knew about soccer is indeed wrong.  And as Chris and Dave admit in the interview, so were they.

Social stability and justice requires that we live together according to rules.  And this in turn means that the rules must be enforced.  Accordingly, we sometimes see fit to punish those who break the rules.  Hence society features a broad system of institutions by which we punish.  But there is a deep and longstanding philosophical disagreement over what, precisely, punishment is for.  The standard views are easy to anticipate.  Some say that we punish in order to give offenders what they deserve.  Others claim that we punish in order to encourage others to obey the rules.  Still others see punishment as a process of rehabilitating offenders.  Recent theorists have attempted to combine these views in various ways.  The debates go on. In his new book, Punishment (Routledge, 2012), Thom Brooks reviews the leading debates concerning punishment and makes a compelling case for a distinctive theory of punishment called the “unified theory.”  Brooks contends that the unified theory can embrace several highly intuitive penal goals while avoiding the philosophical difficulties confronting each of the competing theories.

The stories of individual lives are endlessly complex, weaving together the contemporary events, the surrounding culture, and incorporating random factual odds and ends. This is one of the challenges of writing biography- one must become expert on so many things- and also one of the pleasures of reading it: the fact that a biography can reveal something not simply about another person, but also provide an in-depth glimpse into other worlds. Such is the case with Gayle K. Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite‘s Murder in the Metro: Laetitia Toureaux and the Cagoule in 1930s France (Louisiana State University Press, 2013) which, in the course of exploring a grisly unsolved murder, immerses the reader in the 1930s Paris underworld. In 1937, Laetitia Toureaux was discovered in the first class car of a Métro train with a 9-inch knife stuck in her neck. In Murder in the Métro, Brunelle and Finley-Croswhite untangle Toureaux’s complicated life—she was, at one time, simultaneously spying for the Italian government, the Paris police, and the French terrorist organization the Cagoule—in an effort to give a plausible explanation for how and why she might have died. However, their work extends beyond sleuthing; Murder in the Métro is a gripping story, but it’s also an effort to call scholarly attention to the use of terrorism during France’s Third Republic and, following World War II, the subsequent downplaying—even, at times, obfuscation—of such acts. Brunelle and Finley-Croswhite write that, in 1937, Toureaux’s life and death “offered a perfect tableau for the press to explore and expound upon the issues of gender and, to a lesser extent, class.” Today, she still acts as a tableau of sorts, her history merging with that of the Cagoule to provide a canvas from which scholars—with Brunelle and Finley-Croswhite leading the charge—can explore the nuances of the times in which she lived: a period marked by progress and innovation, but also violence and political unrest, all set against the clouds of a fast-approaching war.