New Books Network

When I was an undergraduate, I was taught that merchants in early modern Western Europe were “proto-capitalists.” I was never quite sure what that meant. If it meant they traded property for money, yes. But that would make everyone who traded things for money over the past, say, 5,000 years, a “proto-capitalist.” If it meant that they thought of their property as capital to be used for maximizing profit, then no. As Martha C. Howell points out in her excellent Commerce Before Capitalism in Europe, 1300-1600 (Cambridge UP, 2010), early modern merchants–at least in the Low Countries–didn’t really think of their property as “capital” at all, and they certainly didn’t use it exclusively for the maximization of profit. Their idea of property was, according to Howell, as much medieval as modern. Essentially, they adapted received (medieval) categories of property to novel commercial conditions. The result was a unique hybrid of the old and new. In hindsight, their understanding of property might seem “proto-capitalist.” But really it was just the way they conceived of property.

Hugh C. Howey, author of the award-winning Molly Fyde Saga, is best known for his self-published and bestselling series Wool. This post apocalyptic tale of human survival within the infamous silos has taken the world by storm. The Wool Omnibus Edition (Simon & Schuster, 2012) won the Kindle Book Review’s 2012 Indie Book of the Year award, in addition to making the bestseller lists in both The New York Times and USA Today. In the two years since releasing a series he originally believed “no one would care about,” it’s been picked up by Simon & Schuster for Canadian and US distribution, and film rights sold to 20th Century Fox.  If you have yet to experience WOOL, it’s a recommended must read! In this interview with Michael Zummo, Hugh shares his approach to writing, his endeavors in self-publishing, the origins of the Wool series, along with what’s coming up.

Brian Sandberg‘s Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) significantly revises our understanding of early modern military culture and absolutism. By examining the frequent civil wars of the early seventeenth century in France, Sandberg demonstrates that the French nobility were neither merely resisting the spread of the absolutist state nor sitting idly by while modern economic and military forces swept them into obscurity. Rather, by examining the many local and regional conflicts of the era, Sandberg shows that the French nobles of the era were capable actors in a complex arena dominated by a culture of honor, sophisticated systems of credit, and dangerous civil conflicts.

Propositions are key players in philosophy of language and mind. Roughly speaking, they are abstract repositories of meaning and truth. More specifically, they are the semantic values of truth-evaluable sentences; they are the objects of belief, desire and other propositional attitudes; they are what we agree and disagree about in conversation, and they are what is communicated in successful discourse. By philosophical tradition, propositions have their truth values eternally; that is, they always include a reference to a time as a component, and if true, they are always true. The proposition expressed in English by the sentence It is raining in Malta is more completely expressed by something like It is raining in Malta at noon local time on May 4, 2013. This standard view is called eternalism. In her new book Transient Truths: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Propositions (Oxford University Press, 2012), Berit Brogaard, associate professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, calls this traditional view into question. Brogaard defends temporalism, the claim that some propositions do not have their truth values eternally – they lack a time-stamp. She argues instead that eternalists cannot adequately explain how we retain beliefs over time, how we modify beliefs, and how we agree and disagree over the span of an ordinary conversation, and she presents a new argument for temporalism from the phenomenology of conscious mental states. Her lucid and comprehensive discussion is a milestone in debates about our experience of time as expressed in natural language.

Andrew J. Taylor is the author of Congress: A Performance Appraisal (Westview Press, 2013). Taylor is professor of political science in the School of Public and International Affairs at North Carolina State University. His newest book examines the much maligned branch of government and offers some help. He takes the novel approach of establishing a series of benchmarks, as the federal government might about an intransigent agency, and then assesses the extent to which Congress meets those benchmarks. There are 37 benchmarks in total, some that Congress scores highly on – such as many elements of transparency and accessibility – while others – for example, effective policy making – Congress scores poorly. Taylor ends the book with offering recommendations about how to improve Congress through some familiar, but other novel changes. The book would make a great addition to an undergraduate survey of Congress or US political institutions.

Reporter Anne-Marie O’Connor uses the iconic gold portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer to engage us in the exciting cultural life of fin-de-siècle Vienna, where wealthy Jewish patrons supported the work of ground-breaking artists, lived in grand homes on the famous Ringstrasse, and thought life was good and they were valued as Austrians. With O’Connor’s background in art and her skills of investigative reporting, we come to know the people who turn the art world upside down during the last years of the Empire. Klimt, rock star artist of his era, is in great demand. Her family treasured his portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, and the Austrians came to regard it as their Mona Lisa. Adele Bloch-Bauer, as O’Connor explains, was different. This wealthy Jewish woman hosted “Red Saturdays” at home, salons in which she voiced her opinions on the issues of the day, eager to implement reforms to improve workers’ lives. O’Connor characterizes her as “an unfinished woman,” for she died at 43. Wishing to immortalize Klimt, she directed that the portraits and landscapes that she and her husband had in their home be given to the Austrian Gallery. But after Adele died, life changed for Jews in Vienna: in 1938, the Anschluss made Austria part of Nazi Germany. Hitler’s henchmen commandeered Adele’s home and helped themselves to paintings and other works of art. Her family survived, barely. When the war ended, Austria kept the Klimts. When the battle to recover the Klimt portrait resumed in Los Angles in the 1990s, O’Connor interviewed Maria Altmann, niece of Adele Bloch-Bauer, who spearheaded the family’s legal case. Working with Altmann was attorney Randol Schoenberg, grandson of the famed composer and passionate advocate in the battle to recover the painting. Listen to this interview for further details of The Lady in Gold and read the book to learn more.

Elaine Richardson recounts the Jamaican mother wit that her “mama dished out…in artless artful sayings” but that Richardson “tried to desperately dismiss” in her new literacy narrative. Yet, it is those sayings that undergird Richardson’s theorizing about African American and Jamaican identity, education, gender, literacy, and sexuality in her compelling autobiography. Exemplifying her mother’s West Indian saying about “ ’Shame chree dead’ (shame tree is the spirit of self-worth inside you. Shame chree dead is said when that spirit is broken)” (2), Richardson paints vivid, emotional word pictures about the ways that her home values collided with and ultimately helped her overcome a life as a street worker, drug abuser, and petty thief in the streets of Cleveland, Ohio. But what’s perhaps most stirring about Richardson’s story is that she never wanted to live nor tell any lies; so after obtaining her PhD and taking her first academic post she walks into the office of her supervisor and reports: “ ‘Terry, I’m a former prostitute and I used to be on drugs,’ I blurted out to my new boss who was the director of Academic Affairs. I am who I am. I never wanted to put on airs and make myself out to be someone who I wasn’t. I’m a girl from down the way, an ex-junkie, ex-ho, a baby mama, and I’m still just as good as anybody else on this planet” (239). Totally unphazed, he smiled and said, ‘well, shit, welcome to Minnesota. Half the population is in recovery’” (239). While Richardson isn’t advocating a mass confessional of the demons stored in the closets of academics, her truth telling and soul-baring are done for the betterment of others, of other girls who may be “caught up.” It is also what makes her book a marvelous achievement and a must read for all interested in education, literacy, and the life of African American girls and women.

Beverly Bossler’s new book will be required reading for anyone interested in women and gender in China’s history. Covering nearly five centuries of transformations, it also offers a fascinating rethinking of the histories of neo-Confucian thought, of commercialization, and of the family in China. Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity (Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2013) explores transformations in gender relations in China from the tenth through the fourteenth centuries by carefully considering courtesans, concubines, and faithful wives and widows, three categories of women that both intersected and mutually shaped one another. The book is divided into three main parts set in the Northern Song, Southern Song, and Yuan periods, respectively. Parts One through Three each consist of three chapters devoted to close studies of the three main categories of women discussed in the book. Bossler’s work is exhaustively researched, her argument carefully considered, and her narrative clearly structured, with most chapters giving special attention to the nature of the sources that make up her evidentiary base. In addition to offering macrohistorical views of the political, philosophical, literary, economic, and material consequences of the growth of commerce and expansion of an elite class from the Northern Song through the Yuan periods, each chapter also offers literary and historical snapshots of some of the individual women who populate the narrative. Bossler ultimately argues that the Song and Yuan periods “set the foundation for the gender order of Late Imperial China,” making her work important for those of us who study or otherwise simply enjoy reading and learning about later periods of Chinese history as well. It is an important and thoughtful book, and it was as much a pleasure to read Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity as it was to talk with Beverly about it. Enjoy!

In Little Stranger (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), Lisa Olstein’s poems are concerned with the tension between the public and the personal and how the former bullies its way into the latter. Olstein’s book is both provoked into existence and inspired by our contemporary moment. Its urgency makes sense when one sees Little Stranger as a book that is responding to the twilight of privacy, in which delivery systems of information are networks networking with other networks. Information ricochets into individual lives in a stream of binary extremes: on the one hand we have unprecedented access to knowledge, while on the other hand we sense the great proximity between ourselves and the authentic.  At times, one can feel trapped into making one of two extreme decisions: to retreat into social fantasy or devote one’s life to resisting a world that seeks to know our every move as if to empower us, when actually it often does the opposite. But the poems in Little Stranger reflect a more realistic picture of the reader. Olstein’s humility is her greatest quality because apathy, wherever it multiplies hopes to quiet us, and her poems simply do the hard work to make sense of those pressures, but on a personal level, with a voice we recognize as genuine. One of the most provocative features of contemporary life might be the dissolution of all boundaries, where formerly held categories of the physical now blur and lose their singular expression, making personal experience a hybrid of the personal and the political, a hybrid of the domestic and the civic, and a hybrid of the commercial and the familial. Olstein’s poetry seems particularly sensitive to the new remixes of daily life and her language reconciles this almost seamlessly (but also fights it at times with naturalistic vocabulary) by not so much accepting the new reality, but tolerating it long enough to integrate into her poetry a still recognizable language so that she may communicate with us, human to human, which gives her poems their moral force.

The advent of very powerful computers and the Internet have not “changed everything,” but it has created a new communications context within which almost everything we do will be somewhat changed. One of the “things we do” is governance, that is, the way we organize ourselves politically and, as a result of that organization, provide for the individual and public good. In his fascinating book  Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Governance Through Technology (Princeton UP, 2013), John O. McGinnis examines the promise and peril of advanced computation and Internet communications for our democracy. The former (promise), he says, is great if we think deeply about the impact of the new media on politics and public policy. He proposed that we take the bull by the horns and experiment with new technology so that governance can become both more democratic and more efficient. He suggests a number of ways in which the potential of the new media can be made to do just this. Listen in.

Scholars have pointed to various historical ingredients they see as necessary for the development of modern sport: political changes that allowed people to form associations, the rise of competitive capitalism, an emphasis on calculation and measurement, the advance of secularization.  But this attention to economic, social, and political factors has missed one important piece.  For games to have become modern, participants first had to think like moderns.  The peasant who had once celebrated seasonal festivals with some village game had to become an individual player—someone who wanted to beat his opponents, show off his prowess, and bask in the cheers. Historian Peter Hansen makes this point in his study of mountain climbing, The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2013).  Prior to the 1700s, mountain peaks had been the preserve of gods and kings, while their crags and caves had been the hiding places of demons and spirits.  Even the miners and shepherds who worked in the mountains for centuries did not climb to the summits.  Why would they bother?  According to Peter, the birth of the modern sport of mountaineering thus required a fundamental change in thinking.  People had to look up at a peak and want to reach it, just for the sake of being at the top, and they had to think of themselves as able to do it. Peter’s book is a sweeping account of the history of mountain climbing and its connections to modern culture, from the first attempts to scale the Alps in the 18th century to mountaineering in the current age of climate change.  He focuses on two episodes in that history: the first ascent of Mont Blanc in 1786 by Michel-Gabriel Paccard and Jacques Balmat, and the 1953 climb of Mount Everest by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.  As we learn in the interview, there are striking parallels between these two important chapters in mountaineering.  Above all, both feats tap into our fascination with high places and the solitary climber at the top.

The American Temperance Movement remains an interesting and important topic. Considering the various attitudes that influenced laws about alcohol sale and consumption of the past are often referred to when reviewing issues related to liquor legislation today. However, what may not be as readily considered is the role that interracial race relations affected and may still impact legislation today. In H. Paul Thomspon Jr.’s A Most Stirring and Significant Episode: Religion and the Rise and Fall of Prohibition in Black Atlanta, 1865-1887 (Northern Illinois University Press, 2012), we are given a front row seat to a 22 year period, from the end of slavery to the failure of Reconstruction, when blacks and whites in Atlanta, Georgia, were negotiating, wrangling and vying for various iterations of temperance, from prohibition to anti-prohibition. Thompson uncovers not only the role that race played in this period, but that religion and region (the North’s relationship to the South) played as well. This fascinating read is sure to capture the attention of any interested in religion, or region, or race, or prohibition during this fascinating and important period of history.

In her book, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Indiana University Press, 2010), Stacy Alaimo approaches the concepts of “science, environment, and self” in an extremely novel and inventive way. The central concept in Alaimo’s work is that of “trans-corporeality” which she describes as a way of theorizing the relationship between humanity and the world at large as not being clearly delineated and separate, but as fluid. As this relates specifically to nature and the environment, Alaimo’s intention is for the reader to reimagine questions of environmental ethics and environmental practices as not isolated issues but rather deeply personal as the environment and our material selves are bound up with one another in a deeply intimate manner. I found Alaimo’s central approach with “trans-corporeality,” theorizing the human as being “already in the world,” extremely refreshing when compared to the idea of human agency in postmodern studies. In this way, Alaimo provides an alternate framework for conceiving of human agency, and thus an “out” of sorts, a release, from the bounds of postmodernism’s isolated and castrated human agent. Alaimo calls this novel direction, “New Materialisms.” With this concept, Alaimo offers new insights into feminist thought and theory. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self is sure to appeal to many students and scholars of literary studies and critical theory.

“School was a place that devalued who we are as Indigenous people,” says Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua. These were institutions — at least since white settlers deposed the Indigenous government in the late 19th  century — that Native students “tolerated and survived…experienced more as a carceral space than a place of learning.” So she and her community decided to start their own. Founded in 1999, the Hālau Kū Māna (HKM) Public Charter School in Honolulu enacts a host of educational practices that Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua labels “sovereign pedagogies.” From the “land-based literacies” of their Papa Lo’i agricultural project to Olelo language classes, HKM signaled a “radical departure from the fences, walls, and bell schedules that kept young people cut off from their ‘aina and other storehouses of ancestral knowledge.” Now an associate professor of political science at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua tells the inspiring story of HKM in The Seeds We Planted: Portraits of a Native Hawaiian Charter School (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). No simple tale of triumph, Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua explores the tensions and contradictions of fostering sovereign education in a settler colonial context and appropriating elements of the neocolonial/neoliberal charter school movement for anti-colonial ends.

Over the last several months, I’ve had the pleasure to have a number of political scientists who study education policy on the podcast. Jesse Rhodes, Jeff Henig, and Sarah Reckhow have brought their new books that have focused mainly on the K-12 education system. Andrew Karch offers something different. Karch has written Early Start: Preschool Politics in the United States (University of Michigan Press, 2013), a deep narrative history and assessment of the policy development behind early childhood education policy. Karch is associate professor of political science at the University of Minnesota and has focused much of his research agenda on state policy and federalism. In his new book, he weaves together theories from the study of public policy with an intricate story of early childhood education. The tactical lessons advocates could learn from this book make it a must-read inside and outside of the academy. Ideas like venue shopping and coalition building animate many of the critical junctures studied in the book.